Fixed.. I hope
stargrace To those people who were having issues leaving comments using IE…. it should (fingers crossed) work now. Please let me know!
Real Life
This and That
I wasn’t really in a gaming mood tonight – yes, I know, did hell freeze over (would be nice to get out of this heat that’s for sure). I spent the afternoon in EQ1 for the most part. My beastlord reached level 48, and the druid finally hit level 51. Actually she was 2% from 51 and died, but a kind cleric rez’d me for no charge and I wandered off for one more kill to ding 51. Very pleased with that progress. Afterward I headed to MPG (Muramite proving Grounds.. though I probably spelled that wrong) and exp’d some with an old friend of mine.
Anyhow, as I was saying. Tonight I wasn’t exactly in the mood to game, so I settled down for a few hours of DAZ Studio’s, which I’m still learning. There are two important things I need to learn how to do. Well, three I suppose. One would be applying textures. Another would be applying backgrounds, and the third would be lighting which I can’t seem to figure out for my life. Me and computers just simply do not get along. The 300 paged manual that comes with DAZ could probably help if I had any idea where to start. I’ll have to look up some other tutorials for it no doubt.
The screen shot above can be seen in far better quality (and size) here. Just click on the image if it doesn’t bring you to the full view right away. I still have no outfits to render for my characters, but the face shots are coming along nicely. I tried to frame this one after Stargrace in EQ2, who is a wood elf. It didn’t turn out too badly. Thinking of using one of these images I create to make a signature. We’ll see how that goes. I’d really like a dark elf texture, and I do have one but it’s not for V4.2 which means it’s not really going to work for me. I suppose I could colour it by hand in photoshop, but we’ll just have to see. Some times, it’s just nice to take a break.
Harbor
The harbor of Khal is an amazing sight. Especially when people’s boats are all parked in various places along the docks (as pictured above). Last night I dipped into Vanguard for a short while with Gozad and Growlius. Not on mains this time though – for once we all played lowbies. I was on my 18 psionicist, Growlius his 22 disciple, and Gozad on his 22 necromancer.
We all got the diplomacy necklace we needed to work towards our mount, and headed to Qalia to work on hunter’s league quests. We did not have a tank, but things went fairly smooth anyhow.
Shoulders were first, and it was very little effort despite the more interesting pulls we had from time to time.
Psionicists work slightly different then enchanters in EQ1/EQ2 in that they can only mez one mob at a time (or at least, that’s all I can do right now at level 19) but we can also charm one mob, and AOE stun for 8 seconds. When we mez (I’ve mentioned this before) we actually phase the mob right out of exhistence – and in order for anyone to actually attack the mob again, we have another spell that phases them back in. That’s right, no more breaking mez – at all.
One of my favorite tactics is making sure I cast my duplicate spell (it taunts the mob and replicates it, but basically does 0 dmg) before I unphase it. That way when I do unphase, the mob is already attacking the duplicate of itself, and I have a chance to snare it and nuke it a few times before that breaks / wears off.
Psionicists also have a world wide channel attached to one of their spells, it’s called ‘mind’ and it’s great. When you have the buff on you’re auto joined to it. A handy tool to ask others questions you may have about your class.
After we’d completed the shoulder quest I decided to take a break for a bit – being exceptionally worn out after a fairly exciting day. Thanks to Tipa over at Westkarana, I’m now writing for Beckett Massive Online Gamer – about EverQuestII. A writing opportunity came up and she happened to mention my name. Wow how amazing is that? I have my first interview next week, and yes I’m very nervous. These newsstand magazines are actually printed and sold in multiple places, you may have heard of them before for their sports magazines. My first two articles (as long as everything goes well) should come out for the September issue.
I think I’m still stunned over that one.
Xfire
Of course I’ve been following Ardwulf’s adventures through Vanguard, and subsequently his adventures with Xfire as well. Being as nicely computer inept as I am, figured I may as well add myself to it. So feel free to add me to friends on there, user name is stargrace. Be warned, I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m doing, but I do like the idea of tracking games played / hours etc. and maybe since Vanguard absolutely refuses to work with print screen most of the time for me unless I window in and out, I’ll get better luck with this.
Civilization Revolution
Now for something completely different, from me at least. Aside from the mmo’s I play, I’m not really a video game person – unless you count the sims. I used to play Mario games with my mom when I lived at home, and when my dad had his radio station job, but that was long ago. I’m not fond of racing games, or shooting games, or even puzzle games. I dislike complicated games that make me remember 100 processes in order to get something to work.
I’d never played civilization before, any versions of it, but I’d heard good things from a few people, and so when it came out for ps3 last week I decided sure, why not. It cost a total of $5 since there was money on the EBGames card still. Can’t go wrong.
So far, I have to sheepishly admit – I’m loving it. There’s just something completely awesome about creating cities and destroying other people’s towns and building.. well, everything. I suppose it’s my love of all things sims that helps me enjoy this game. I don’t have any friends on my ps3 network, so if you’d like to add me, let me know!
Aside from that – today I got my hair cut. Not such a big deal, right? Well, it was almost to my waist, and now it’s above my shoulders (slightly). Big deal to me! Had to be done though, it was just too warm. It’ll grow back by the winter.
I also played around a lot tonight with DAZ which was a whole lot of fun. I’ve figured out just about everything I’d need it to do so far – except applying textures. I’ll work on that next. I also haven’t quite figured out lighting yet, but I hope to with time. It’s been a learning experience that’s for sure. As long as I keep up with it I figure I’ll buy a kit or two a month from DAZ studio, maybe get some new outfits to render. Eventually I’ll be able to tweek the images in Photoshop. The only downside is the bridge from DAZ to photoshop is a whooping $199 american. That’s right, if I want to be able to save / open my DAZ files in CS2 I need to shell out $200. Ouch. Still working on a way to fix that one.
On the EQ2 front, Kasul is back! Pleasure to have him around again too, he’s been missed. Leaving this a relatively short post tonight, and I’ll write about the EQ2 adventures tomorrow.