Well the last few days have been quite crazy, in the middle of being sick / upgrading my graphics card and birthdays I’ve found time to play Alganon.

The new video card has allowed me to crank every graphical setting to maximum and the more I play the more I’m enjoying it. There doesn’t seem to be many people playing at the moment but hopefully more and more people will decide to pick up it up in the future. You can get the game for $19 dollars which is the price of 2 pints of beer here in Perth so it’s not like its gonna break the bank.

There are some bugs and the game is more for the casual kind of game player rather than your hardcore MMO’er, but so far there has been a crazy amount of variation kinds of  Quests to complete and Landscapes to explore.

There are a bunch of things they could do to make the game better, and my suggestions are mainly to do with the interface:

1. Pad out the chat windows borders
2. Show how much XP I require to get to the next level when I mouse over the XP bar
3. Show how much Health / Mana / Anger I have when I mouse over my character stats
4. Change the very World of Warcraft ‘inspired’ section of the interface, it’s causing shit all over the internet from people who love to bitch and moan.
5. When I click my main backpack or press the B button, open ALL of my storage bags at once.
6. Fix the map, it is terrible! The world map should be a bigger and better version of the mini map!

Next post will come sometime next week when I’ve a few more hours into the game.

These days I don’t do too much PC gaming but yesterday I saw an advertisement for a new MMORPG called Alganon; it was 20 bucks so I decided to give it a try.

Now firstly the game runs like crap on my laptop which doesn’t say much for the engine the game is build on. I can play Age of Conan on it which looks light years ahead of Alganon and the framerate is much better. Game performance aside I’m enjoying the new world that I’m exploring.

I’ve noticed on a bunch of different forums a huge amount of negativity about the game, especially since the interface and work look very similar to World of Warcraft. Some of the critisism is fair, there are parts of the interface that look EXACTLY like they were taken from Warctraft, but in the end who cares. The world is different, the quests seem to be quite good so far as well, there are less ‘Go Kill 15 Boar’ quests that your average MMO.

I’m going to start a running commentary of my experience in the world of Alganon, if you’ve tried it let me know what you think.

This is an amazing talk, please watch it!

I started using LINQ about 8 months ago, before that I was strictly a stored procedure kind-of-guy. LINQ has made my programming life so much easier, no longer do I have to sit there writing SP's for every database query I require.

These days my database creation steps look like this:

1. Create database in SQL Server Management Studio

2. Open the Server Explorer in Visual Studio and connect to my database

3. Add a LINQ to SQL Classes file to my project

4. Drag the database tables from the Server Explorer into the LINQ to SQL file

5. Create any associations / inheritance between tables (Right click on the table object, hover over the Add menu option)

6. Save my project

Once these steps have been finished and after I press the save button Visual Studio automatically creates all the classes required for database interaction.

Accessing the database and tables via LINQ is also super easy. Lets say we have a program that sells hotdogs to people. Here's how I would add a hotdog sale to the database:

//Create the database object and the sale object

hotdogDBContext db = new hotdogDBContext();
sale newSale = new sale();

//Add the sale data to the sales object

newSale.price = 2;
newSale.seller = "Frank"
newSale.date = DateTime.Now;

//Insert and submit the sale to the database

db.sale.InsertOnSubmit(newSale);
db.submitChanges();

Now lets say we want to grab all of Franks sales from the database:

hotdogDBContext db = new hotdogDBContext();

//Get all sales from the database (As you can see the query is much like a normal SQL one)

IEnumerable<sale> franksSales = from s in db.sales 
                                                                    where s.seller == "Frank"
                                                                    select s;

IEnumerable<sale> franksSalesData = franksSales.ToList();

//Cycle through our collection of sales data and display franks sales.

foreach(sale s in franksSalesData)
{
       Response.Write(s.Seller + " - " + s.price + " - " s.date);
}

Pretty simple isn't it?

LINQ is just another great way for programmers to save time and make coding a little more enjoyable.

For the last few years I've gone back and forward playing a bunch of different MMORPG games; the main ones being Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft. I'm a pretty casual gamer these days but I've got characters that are close to the highest level in both games though I've never actually been lucky enough or dedicated enough to partake in raids. As the years have gone by the games have evolved and expanded with new places to see and things to do and I've move along with them enjoying what they have offered.

In the last few months though I've been feeling tired with both games and couldn't put a finger on why, but now I've figured out what the problem is. I'm tired of the story / the setting / the lore. I bought Age of Conan when it was released but it didn't run on the computer I had at the time. A year and a bit later I have a laptop that can barely run it and I'm enjoying everything about it.

I've never actually seen the Conan the Barbarian movie or read any of the Robert E. Howard books, the entire world of Conan is new to me and I'm really digging it. The main thing that has always drawn me to video games is being able to explore a worlds and participate in stories (no matter how crap some of them may be). Conan and the world of Hyboria feels refreshing and not seen any Dwarfs, Elves or Goblins (yet) is kind of great! AoC is rated M so its darker and more violent than the other games I've been playing, the setting feels tense and so far the quests given have actually been quite interesting. There is a much heavier emphasis on story telling which was pretty surprising.

So far I've flown through the first 20 levels of the game, and am really looking forward to getting a proper PC to check the game out in all its glory. I'm going to write more about AoC in the future, so if you're looking for a new MMO to play and would like to join me get Age of Conan!

I've finished off all client work and now its time for me to do a bit of learning. There are 3 main areas I really want to get into this week and they are:

jQuery and ASP.NET

Web Services

JSON

Whilst I do know how to use all of those 3 things I want to really understand WHEN I should be using them to help with the performance and experience of my own software.

I've already found a bunch of jQuery and ASP.NET tutorials online and tomorrow I'll post a list of useful ones for everyone to check out.

Monday has kicked off with a funny and depressing problem, one of my clients contacted saying some of their users were unable to properly access their site. Here's how our conversation went.

Me - "What's the problem"

Client - "They cant see the CSS drop down menu"

Me -"What browser are they using"

Client - "Let me check. IE5"

.

Me - "IE5?"

Client - "IE5!"

IE5? What the hell! I know that the majority of PC users don't really care about keeping their software up to date but I thought MS rolled out a bunch of forced updates a while back? Either way I'm gonna have to go back through and create a solution that will run under IE5.

Welcome to Monday.

So over the last few years I've watched a bunch of different Sci-Fi shows, catching up on all the ones I've always wanted to watch but never really had the chance. Babylon 5 turned out to be one of my favourite shows of all time and as of Saturday I decided to start re-watching the entire series.

The first season of Babylon 5 deals with the daily running of the space station and briefly introduces what will become the main plot point 'The Shadow War'.

Whilst the visual effects have aged pretty badly but the calibre of the acting is of a very high quality. All the characters have their own charms and you really feel for them.

Here's a little clip from season 1.

I'm back in Australia and all settled in! Time for me to start cranking out the blog posts.

Some really good news for Australian that love reading, the Kindle is finally making its was down under and I am super stoked! I was thinking about buying one of the US ones but the real selling point is being able to buy books wirelessly.

The release date is October 20 and it sells for around $310.

I'm on my way home from Greece, this video give a very good walk through of the N900. I really like the idea of different screens for different scenarios, anyhoo check it out.