Today’s the day I’ll finally be upgrading my old beast of a system to the new latest and greatest. Err…almost greatest anyway. Well, okay it’s pretty good. I’ve been contemplating this for awhile while playing CoD4 and having my frame rates in the mid to low 40’s and very common drops into the single digits - I knew I wanted it. But I waited, now with more games on the horizon and most all of them requiring more state of the art systems, I decided it was time.
I’m moving for the first time in about 10 years back to an Intel based system. I’ve been a big fan of AMD but on recommendations from squadmates who have them, I’m going to the Intel Dual Core processor series. Of course, I went balls out and got the E8500 processor - the fastest available in that series and marrying that to a EVGA 680i motherboard with 4 gigs of OCZ memory. I skimped a little on the video card, but not much. I wanted the Nvidia 9800 GX2 series card with the 1GB of onboard video ram but ended up getting a 9800 GTX with only 512mb. Still a big improvement over my old ATI x800 with 256mb.
Either way, you add up all that system ram, cache and video ram and you’re going over 4GB of total available ram - which is the limit on a 32 bit based Windows XP system - so I’m graduating up to a 64 bit version of XP to accomodate the extra ram and take advantage of the Intel 64 architecture on my new CPU which allows for greater access to larger amounts of extended virtual and physical memory. I’ll have the new system up and running sometime today (whenever Mr. UPS man arrives) and will put up a reply here about my frame rate gains in CoD4 and other general improvements. I’m salvaging my twin raptor 10k RPM hard drives off of my old system. I haven’t been able to convince my wife yet that I need a solid state drive. Soon!
Lively launched sometime yesterday and from all I’ve read pre-launch it was supposed to be Google’s version of Second Life. I virtual world where players could explore real world environments and interact with other people. This thing was supposed to redefine how people view and use the internet.
So far, bzzzzzzzzzzz. That’s my buzzer sound. I know it’s way to early to tell given that all massive projects such as this generally have a rocky start, but I was expecting Google to be a little different. I figured with their financial backing the powerhouse would be launching something like this perfect right out of the gate. Unfortunately it doesn’t look anything like I imagined.
Basically, you have to register for a Google account, fortunately I already have one. Then you have to download and install Lively, which actually is pretty painless. After that, the fun begins. You create a room, no not a world or a city - just a room. This is your personal chat room where other people out on the net can join and interact with you and eachother. You can pick a room from a wide variety of shells that are predesigned, no you can’t design them yourself - at least not yet.
You decorate the room with furniture and items you ’shop’ for out of what has been designed so far. In much the same way you can configure your avatar from pre-designed choices. Not exactly the best experience so far, but better than just a plain chat room. Which seems to be all this really is. You can go from room to room by a browser menu but you can’t really walk from room to room or explore in any traditional sense. Even moving around in your own room is not really walking as much as it is double clicking on a place you want your avatar to be and it appears there.
That said, I’m in the mind numbingly slow process of setting up a GameZig Lounge type room, in the probably going to be over-used shell of the underwater super hero base - which I just had to have. But I’m going to give it a rest for a day or two and let Google smooth out the bumps because trying to shop for items in Lively is going to make me pull my hair out. For now, if you have lively installed feel free to visit the GameZig headquarters - for the meantime I have it setup where guests can help me by moving and placing items. I would love some inspired artistic help here haha.
Happy 4th of July! I’m taking the day off of blogging to spend the day with my wife and daughter and go watch some good old celebration fireworks. If you are a hardcore gamer - I know a lot of MMORPG’s out there have their own versions of holidays, Star Wars Galaxies had a lot of fireworks on the 4th the first year I played it - but it’s no substitute for the real thing!!
Get out there and recontact with some of those friends and family you haven’t seen in weeks! Go watch the show and remember all those soldiers who have and are fighting to give you all those wonderful freedoms you enjoy!
Blackwings
