Desire

There’s a new look to the blog today; I hope that everyone will agree that it looks good, is more suitable for the current theme (EVE,) and I think most people will find the larger type easier to read, but I will likely tweak it a bit whenever I get around to that. And screenshots are back (I could never find the directory where WoW keeps its screenshots. Why do MMOs not generally let you pick where you want them sent?)

It is probably time to do a maintenance sweep on my rig; it’s been about 9 months since it was built and I haven’t given it a good cleaning yet. I started this morning, uninstalling a few things I haven’t touched (Supreme Commander and two Total War titles) and incidentally sweeping away some junk that had already been uninstalled but left debris behind anyway (Lord of the Rings Online, Second Life and Lineage II.) In keeping with Tipa’s challenge I’m supposed to remove all other MMOs, but I haven’t done that yet; firstly because some of them are attached to launchers (NCSoft Launcher and SOE Station Launcher) and thus need more care to remove, and secondly because I want to make sure I have all my account information duly recorded and safely stored away in the event that I return to, say, Guild Wars (which seems very unlikely – I played GW a bit some weeks back and it seemed to me to be much weaker than the less-experienced me had considered it.) And I may keep WoW on the drive just in case Mrs. Ardwulf wants to play it over the summer, which I will happily do. In any case, I have a few more days left and may hop in once or twice to bid farewells to guildies.  Or even run a Battleground or two.

Yes, I’ll be sticking with EVE at least for the duration of the 21-day trial – I’m having lots of fun so far, although my accomplishments have been minimal. After that, we’ll see, but I’ll keep you posted.

I did make a new character last night, and ran him through the initial tutorial, but I kept skill training on my Caldari “main,” and did most of my play on that character as well. Turns out that, despite what I thought was a near-total lack of combat skills, he’s more than capable of ratting in 0.8 in the Heron. His fitting options are really limited, but most of the skills he’ll need for that don’t cost very much, whereas I have Daytrading from character creation, which normally costs upwards of 10 million ISK. By judicious timing (i. e. getting up in the middle of the night to change skills over,) I managed to get his Science up to 3 and his Cybernetics up to 1 this morning, which let me finally plug in the two +1 implants I’ve had sitting in station for a couple of days. I also scored a third +1 for the bargain price of 25K, one of the benefits of the trading build – I was able to do it from several systems away and go pick it up.

I also finished up the series of tutorial missions for Clavius (my Caldari,) and got the aforementioned two implants out of them, as well as a Heron, a Caldari combat frigate – not the best one, but ideal for ratting in relatively high-security space. The last mission was actually a research mission, something I have never dabbled in before – but which I found interesting, and will probably try again. If I continue to also do mining (and I plan to, even though my skills at it, and refining, are currently dismal,) I will want to get this character into a mining cruiser as soon as I possibly can.

I’m considering reactivating my original account and keeping the current trial around for eventual full activation as well. I really want to wait to make that call, but it’d be nice to have two characters in training, and I have enough ISK on that account’s main that it’d be worthwhile to be able to send the new characters some cash. (For anyone who doesn’t know, the ISK is the Inter-Stellar Kredit – EVE’s currency. By a bizzare coincidence, it shares the same abbreviation as the Krona, the national currency of Iceland, Glorious Iceland.)

I did look into how to turn on antialiasing, and can’t seem to get it working, although I plan to fool with it some more. Evidently there’s a hidden prefs.ini file where it can be turned on, although why this isn’t in the default graphics options screen is beyond me, as is why my default NVidia graphics controls don’t seem to properly override EVE’s settings.