Lord of Ultima Tools Part 3: LoU BoS Tools

See Part 1 for instructions on how to install LoU BoS and Part 2 for information about the Summary component of LoU BoS. The rest of this post assumes that you already have BoS installed.

BoS Tools are a series of tools that can be accessed via a drop down menu that appears when you click on the button at the top right of your Lord of Ultima game.

Rise of Isengard: Southern Dunland

Since my last post about LOTRO's most recent expansion, Rise of Isengard, I've covered most of the southern part of Dunland, that is, Starkmoor, Dunbog, Carreglyn and Gravenwood, as well as finishing the new epic quests that were released as part of the expansion (Volume III, Book 4). That earned me about 4 levels (from the start of 69 to almost 73).

Lord of Ultima Tools Part 2: LoU BoS Summary

Continued from Part 1

LoU BoS is by far the most complex of the LoU add-ons. It basically consists of lots of different tools, so you can use just one part of it without bothering about the rest of it. Some of the tools are more useful than others, and some of them are only really useful if you don't have ministers.

Unlike LoU Tweak, which adds buttons and information all over the place, LoU BoS only adds two buttons, "Summary" and "BOS Tools", and another little section, all circled in red below:

Lord of Ultima Tools Part 1: Script Installation and LoU Tweak

There are lots of tools out there to help with Lord of Ultima, and some of them become almost indispensable as your empire grows. But some of the most useful of them are quite complex to use. So here is a guide to the basics.

Countdown to NaNoWriMo: Resources

NaNoWriMo can be done with nothing more than a pen and a big stack of paper (although unless you're planning to sit there and count 50k words by hand you probably want to use a computer, and to officially win you'll need a computer with an internet connection at the very end). But there are a multitude of other resources out there that can help you along the way.

Countdown to NaNoWriMo: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

It's now just 9 days until NaNoWriMo begins for 2011. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month. The national part is a bit of a misnomer, since it's been international for a long time, but the rest of it is pretty self-explanatory - it involves writing a novel in a month, specifically in November.

Rise of Isengard: Northern Dunland

Rise of Isengard has been out for a few weeks now so I thought I'd share my thoughts on it so far.

First, a bit of background. I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online since launch and I played regularly for the first couple of years. I moved to Sydney around the time I hit the original level cap of 50, and since most of my kinmates were also on the east coast it was easy for me to group up for end-game content. Around the time Siege of Mirkwood came out I moved back to Perth, which made the timezones more difficult. And a large chunk of the kin moved to a more raid-oriented kin, which didn't really interest me. So while I still played regularly, it was mostly solo.

Last year I was in the beta for Free to Play, and I tested a lot. I ran a few characters through the new introduction. I did every new solo quest in Enedwaith, as well as grinding out rep and deeds. It was a lot of fun, but by the time the content launched on live I didn't feel like doing it all again, so I pretty much just ran through the epic on my main. Since then, I've played intermittently, mainly on my alts. But I've decided to return to regular play with Rise of Isengard.

Pottermore

Pottermore has been in Beta for a while now, but public opening is fast approaching, so here are some of my thoughts on the experience.

Like many other Potter fans, on the 31st of July I sat hitting refresh on the Pottermore site until my chance to find the magical quill came. I was lucky enough to only have to wait a week or so before I was allowed access to the site.

CFS Diagnostic Criteria and Me

For the last couple of years I've been working on the assumption that I have chronic fatigue syndrome, and I thought my doctor was too. But this week I found out that my doctor has just been stringing me along, and she actually thinks my primary diagnosis is depression.

So, do I actually have chronic fatigue syndrome according to the official criteria? Well that question is made much more complex by the fact that there is no one agreed upon set of criteria, and in fact the major criteria in use are vastly different. The three major sets of criteria used currently are the Oxford criteria, the Fukuda (or CDC) definition and the Canadian guidelines.

Lord of Ultima: The Path to Earldom

I have a bit of an obsession with starting on new worlds on LoU, so I thought I'd recount my first week on my newest server, World 40. This is a quasi-guide to the first week, although I make no claims that my technique is the best.

Update: I did have graphs in this post, but I seem to have lost them at some point. I don't the text is quite as interesting without the graphs, but I'll leave it up anyway.

Rise of Isengard

It's now less than 2 months until LOTRO's next expansion, Rise of Isengard comes out, as announced back in June. I've tried to gather as much information as I can about what we can expect.

Three new regions will be added in the expansion -- Dunland, Gap of Rohan and Nan Curunir (which will include Isengard). Dunland will be located directly south of Enedwaith, with the other two areas accessible from Dunland. TheKhazadGuard has a nice map of the areas the new regions may cover.

There will be over 300 quests in the new areas, including new epic quests. The epic quests will allow you to choose between two paths to get from Enedwaith to Dunland, which will then join up again in Dunland.

There will also be a new 24-man raid which involves fighting a dragon called Draigoch.

Lion

So Wednesday was the big day for the release of OS X Lion. Along with (I'm sure) many other people, I haunted twitter for word that it was out, then spent a couple of frustrating minutes hitting reload on the App store, then the Up-to-date page, then the Apple online store, before I could get my code and start downloading (that was just me being impatient though; if I'd just waited five minutes everything would have gone perfectly smoothly). The download only took about an hour and a half, much less than I'd anticipated, so I was able to install before I went to bed on Wednesday night, although not much else. Everything went nicely on top of my existing Snow Leopard install.

There are a bunch of changes to the visual appearance of the operating system and key applications, but none of them have really jumped out at me. I'm not getting excited about them, but I'm not upset about them either.

I'm liking the new gestures in Lion and I'm glad now that I went for the Magic Trackpad. I have all the options turned on except tap to click, which has always annoyed me, since I have a tendency to hit the trackpad and then change my mind, resulting in a lot of accidental clicks. I love three finger drag though, saves a lot of the wear on my finger that concerned me initially about the trackpad. Discovered also that you can start the drag with three fingers and then reduce to only one finger to take advantage of the whole width of the trackpad. I still mess up occasionally with the natural scroll direction, but I'm adjusting to it very quickly and in the long term I think it will reduce the number of mistakes when switching between the computer and the iPad. The thumb and three finger gestures sounded awkward, but actually doing them seems pretty natural. My only complaint is that 4 finger swipe switches between full-screen apps but not between spaces.

On that note, it's taking me a bit to adjust to the new Mission Control and I'm not sure that it's an improvement over the old Expose + Spaces system. On earlier OSes I tended to have a lot of spaces and not many windows in each space, so I mainly used the Spaces functionality and not the Expose functionality. Combining them into Mission Control makes it more difficult to switch between spaces and remember which space a particular window is in because the spaces are now in a straight line. I'm wondering whether it's worth reorganising my system to better suit Mission Control, especially since I'm now on a bigger screen so the motivation to reduce the amount of stuff in one space is reduced.

My favourite feature of Lion is definitely the autosave. Combined with a new backup drive that is actually big enough to backup my whole hard-drive, I feel much more confident about my data (I'm pretty bad about remembering to save). It also reduces the number of dialog boxes I have to deal with if I need to restart for an update.

I was a bit sceptical about the auto-correct features being brought over from the iPad and the iPhone because of the notoriously bad corrects that it makes there, but it seems much better on the computer. I suspect it's due to the kind of typos that I make on the computer compared to the ones I make on the iPad - when I'm using a regular keyboard I'm more likely to transpose the order of letters, which auto-correct does a good job of fixing, whereas on the iPad I'm more likely to hit the wrong letter, or skip a letter all together, which generally makes it less obvious what word I was aiming for.

Overall I feel like Lion offers more for a new computer user, or at least a new Mac user, than it does for someone upgrading from Snow Leopard, since it requires some changes to the way you use your computer in order to fully utilise all the new features. If I'd had to pay for the upgrade, I might not have bothered, except that I'm sure future versions of some apps will have Lion as a minimum requirement.

Dance with Dragons

After a busy week, I finally got around to finishing reading A Dance with Dragons this weekend.

After all the anticipation, I was a little disappointed. The printed book was over 1000 pages, but not a great deal actually happened. In that way it reminded me a little of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix (maybe it's something about the fifth book in a series of seven?). While the questions left hanging from A Feast for Crows regarding who was dead and who was alive were answered, nothing else was really answered or resolved. Things started to move right at the end of the book, but it seemed to be only so that there could be a new set of cliffhangers. I guess I just have to hope that the next book is better (and doesn't take too long to come out).

The rest of this post is going to be chock full of spoilers so stay away if you haven't read the book.

Wicked

Last night my parents and I went to see Wicked at Burswood. This was my second time seeing it; my first time was in Sydney in 2009.

It was even better than I remembered - I think most of my memories have been superseded by listening to the CD a few hundred times, so I'd forgotten about a lot of the funny dialogue that goes in between.

I know a lot of people aren't fans of the Wicked music, but I love it. Even though it does lose something by not having the choreography, I still love listening to the music.

After I saw Wicked the first time, I bought the novel by Gregory Maguire, but I found it very disappointing. It's a lot darker than the musical, without any of the humour that really makes the musical, and there are significant divergences in the plot. It's actually quite a literary book - makes me even more impressed that someone was able to look at it and get the idea for a brilliant musical out of it.

Overall I was very impressed by the Australian cast - for the most part it was the same as the group I saw in Sydney, but where it differed I think both alternatives were equally strong. Although Bert Newton got a lot of cheers I think he brought down the overall quality of the performance - he can't really sing at a Broadway musical level. I'm also not sure if his voice was still recovering from his bout of pneumonia; it sounded hoarse on some of the low notes and the speech pathologist in me was yelling that he shouldn't singing if his voice sounded like that.

On the whole it was a wonderful night. I hope that someone produces a DVD of Wicked at some point so that I can watch it over and over to my heart's content :)

Initial Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that the final Harry Potter movie came out on Wednesday (well, here in Australia at least; for some reason we got it ahead of the US and UK). So my sister and I (and Hedwig) trotted off to the midnight screening.

My very brief review is that it was awesome and I want to watch it again :)

I know that while I was watching the movie there were things that I wanted to blog about. Of course, by the time the movie had finished I had no idea what they were, and sleeping on it has made my recall worse, not better, so I will probably have more to say another time, but for now here are some thoughts I had on the movie.

Warning: Spoilers for book and movie abound.

My New iMac

My new iMac arrived today, a little earlier than expected (total time from order to delivery at my door was 5 days, including the weekend). So I've spent the last few hours setting it up and trying it out.

First impression: wow, it's fast! Granted, I'm upgrading from a 5-year old model, and in the last few months (since my original iMac's hard drive went), I've been using a 5-year old MacBook with orange juice in its innards, but still, massive improvements. No more waiting for apps to load, no more horrid beach balls. I've even noticed improvements in webpage responses - a problem that I'd attributed to our internet connection but clearly was due to my system really not being up for the challenge.

I was running Snow Leopard on the old computer so no surprises as far as the operating system goes. I'll qualify for Apple's free Up-To-Date Program once Lion comes up, so there'll be a new learning curve.

I already had a full keyboard from my old iMac, so I got the mini keyboard (similar to a laptop keyboard) for this one. The space saved on the desk is nice, and I don't use most of the extra keys on a full keyboard anyway, but I may miss the forward delete key. I figure I'd rather have two different keyboards than two similar ones, and I can always switch them around further down the track.

I ummed and ahed for a while on the Magic Mouse vs. Magic Trackpad decision. I eventually decided to go for the trackpad on the grounds that Lion is going to use even more gestures than Snow Leopard does, so the trackpad will let me try out all the funky new moves. Plus, I'm used to using my iPad/iPhone, and using a trackpad on a laptop, and I do have an old-style Apple Mouse I can fall back on if I need to. I'm still not sure that I made the right choice - using the trackpad all the time feels a little wearing on my fingertips, but I'll see whether I adjust as I use it a bit more.

Now I face the overwhelming task of moving all my data over to the new computer. I have the files on my MacBook to copy, plus the Time Machine backup of my old iMac, frequently containing different versions of the same file (although sometimes the MacBook is more up to date and sometimes the backup is more up to date). Still not sure what the best way to tackle it all is, but I guess I'll get there eventually.

Awaiting A Dance with Dragons

After almost six years, the wait is nearly over. Well, to be honest my wait has only been about 18 months, and that has been long enough, so I can only imagine what it has been like for those people who've been reading A Song of Ice and Fire from the start. But for all of us, A Dance with Dragons finally comes out on Tuesday.

I re-read the first 4 books a few months ago, but even when I was reading I had trouble keeping track of who everyone was and where they were up to. The fact that A Dance with Dragons runs mostly concurrently with A Feast for Crows is going to make things even more confusing for me. So I'm going to make myself a little cheat sheet. Maybe it will be useful for someone else.

Note: Major spoilers for the first 4 books. Minor spoilers for A Dance with Dragons (mainly with regards to who has POV). Information that I couldn't remember off the top of my head is from A Wiki of Ice and Fire, but any mistakes are mine.

Glitch

The other game I've become addicted to lately is Glitch. It's a browser-based (Flash) non-violent MMORPG with a quirky sense of humour. It's still in Beta but due to open 'Summer 2011' which I hope means soon (while it's still in Beta it's only up for a few days at a time; we're in the middle of 10-day downtime which is going ever-so-slowly. My only fear about launch and constant up-time is that I might never get anything else done...).

My little Glitchling is called Snowdrop (what a surprise). She's level 26, lives in a biggish house in Kajuu with a pig called Glorious (I caught a pig that someone else named and haven't bothered to rename it yet). Her best skills are in cooking and cocktail making but she dabbles in a bit of everything. She likes working on projects but tends to be eternally broke as a result.

If you play, send me a friend request and say hello :)

Lord of Ultima

My earliest memories of Ultima are seeing my brother and sister playing on the family's communal computer. All that I really remember of it was the gargoyles, so it must have been Ultima 6. By the time they moved on to Ultima 7 I was taking part too (where taking part meant sitting and watching, and occasionally taking notes). I remember thinking that Ultima 7 was an impressive game because it came on 7 floppy disks. When I was a little older, the early Ultima games were rereleased, so we played those too. I even played a bit of Ultima 6 by myself, but then I managed to kill the talking mouse and decided that I preferred computer games as a spectator sport.

Eventually I got into the swing of playing computer games by myself, but by then Ultima had moved past the isometric style that I'd grown up with and seemed to be require a level of coordination that I just don't possess :)

And then last year we discovered Lord of Ultima. I didn't have any experience with the MMORTS genre, although I'd played Civilization and Age of Empires (again, mostly as a spectator sport), so I had some idea of the basic concepts. And I loved the idea of being able to play with virtues and moongates again without needing twitch reflexes. And then... well then I got addicted.

I started on World 7, but after 3 mergers I ended up in a dead-end alliance while another group won. In the meantime I had started on the first Australian server, World 22, which remains my main server. I'm in Crimson Thorn, the third-ranked alliance on the server, and I think we're doing pretty well so far.

I also have an unfortunate habit of starting a new server whenever there's downtime, so I'm also on World 26 and have a small presence on a couple of newer servers, although World 22 is where I spend most of my time (and all my diamonds).

If you play, give me a shout-out (I'm Snowdrop, easy to remember).

Here are some of my favourite resources:

The most important supplements to the game are the two Greasemonkey scripts - LoU Tweak and LoU BOS

A close second would be the LoU Flash City Planner (FCP) which lets you manually plan cities. I used to use LoU City to generate my resource cities (with the options use_slots=90 num_cottages=20 placement_schedule=F,*2,WSI,*100) but recently I've been using the  LoU Optimizer. I find it a bit fiddlier, and it doesn't provide an FCP link, but it seems to produce better results.

For general information, the official LoU Wiki is usually pretty helpful. The forum thread Fundamentals of Lord of Ultima is a very thorough strategy guide for new players, although it's probably a little overwhelmingly technical for brand-new players.

My best tips for new players would be:

• Start on the newest server in your timezone (the game should recommend this by default anyway), otherwise you will have too far to catch up
• Do the tutorial. It's not the best source for information, but it gives great quest rewards along the way.
• Join an alliance run by an experienced player. There's enough people on their second (or third, or fourth, or...) server that letting the blind lead the blind is a waste of everyone's time.
• Ask questions. The wiki is helpful for the basics, but if there's something you don't understand you're much better off asking someone in your alliance (or in world chat, or on the forums) than making mistakes that could take weeks to undo.

Snow Leopard

With the release of the App Store I decided it was time to finally fork out for the upgrade to Snow Leopard. I ordered it on Friday night so I had to wait until Monday before it was shipped but it arrived promptly on Saturday morning (so glad Apple changed to TNT overnight shipping; it used to take a week to get stuff shipped from the Apple Store).

The install was all very straightforward. I'd read some horror stories on the internet so I was a little bit worried but it all turned out fine. The upgrade cleared out about 6gb on my harddrive, which I was very happy about since I'm constantly running low. My only real complaint was that the version on the DVD was 10.6.3 so I had to use Software Update to upgrade to 10.6.6, which involved a 1gb download. Not too bad with our current internet setup but a few months ago it could have been an overnight job.

I was still running iLife '08 so I upgraded iPhoto using the App Store as I was eager to finally try out Faces. While not as accurate as I'd hoped it would be, it's still pretty awesome. I will probably upgrade iMovie as well at some point, but I finished off making a DVD of last year's holiday to Brunei before I did the Snow Leopard install so there's no rush. I haven't used Garageband for ages so I'm not sure if I'll make that upgrade or not. Even if I do end up upgrading all three apps, it still saves me a few bucks over buying the DVD, plus it comes off my iTunes balance so it becomes part of my Christmas present rather than coming out of my savings.

I haven't noticed any speed changes with Snow Leopard; there hasn't been an improvement but it doesn't seem to have any trouble running with the minimum 1gb of memory. I did have a vague hope that it might help my problems with Firefox freezing up while playing Lord of Ultima, but I think that has more to do with the game itself than anything on my end.

I still need to install and try out Facetime, and fiddle around with the other changes that come with an OS upgrade, but so far I'm happy with my upgrade-to-Snow-Leopard experience.

Happy New Year!

So it's been even longer since I last posted than I thought it had been. I decided that in the new year I'd make an effort to post more, but it's been too hot to do much at all (it's still hot, but I've run out of low-hanging fruit so I'm revisiting my todo list looking for things that I can at least do without moving around or thinking too much).

The traditional topic of the first post of the year is to talk about New Year's Resolutions. I haven't made any specific resolutions for this year but in general I'm working on improving/managing my CFS, getting a job, and writing more regularly.

The stuff I still have to post about our trip to America is now a bit out-of-date, I guess, but I'll make an effort to post it soon anyway. After that I'm thinking about using Plinky to get some inspiration to post a bit more.

Hopefully my next post will be in the next few days (maybe if I promise that I'll be more likely to do it...)