Steamed II

HL2/Steam update

Half Life 2 does indeed work in offline mode if you play it online long enough to unlock the game - about 10 minutes should be enough. And, it's highly addictive. I have therefore decided to keep it.

Nevertheless this doesn't change my thoughts about the Steam system and I won't be getting any more games that use it.

For reference (my own as much as anyone else's, in case I need to reinstall) here's how to get HL2 running in offline mode:

First, don't even begin the install unless you know you have three or four hours free.

Open your internet connection. If you use a modem make sure you get a good, fast connection because the installation will download quite a lot of data to your system and a slow connection will mean it will takes that much longer.

Drop the game CD in and start the installation.

Make sure you install CounterStrike even if you don't intend to play it. There is a bug that will cause the installation to fail about 80% of the way through if you tell it you don't want CS. You can always uninstall CS later.

The process will install the Steam components and the game content. This takes a while. At some point you will be asked to go to the Vivendi web site to register your game - this appears to be an optional step.

A little later you will need to enter your CD key and create your account on the Steam server. As far as I can remember all you need is a name, password and email address. Once the account is created the game content will be decrypted. Once that part of the installation is complete you're most of the way there.

Now, to make sure you'll be able to use the offline mode you don't really need to do anything because the default settings are correct. However, here are the things you should confirm on the Steam menus if there are problems:

1 - Leave the check box marked "Don't save account information on this computer" unchecked.

2 - Do not log out of your Steam account and then log in as a different user.

3 - On the login screen (which you will only see if you log out of Steam), make sure the "Remember my password" checkbox is checked.

Now the last hurdle, which is to get the last updates and have the game unlocked. To do this, start playing the game. The first thing that will happen is that Steam will pull down the updates and install them. This will take maybe 15 minutes on a good modem connection. Once that's done, you can play (at last!). As I mentioned you should play for maybe 10 minutes, then save and exit.

Now, right-click on the Steam icon in the system tray and exit it, disconnect from the Internet, then restart the game. Steam will come up again saying that it can't connect to the server; click the "start in offline mode" button. If the game has been unlocked it will start up and you're ready to go.

More game stuff

Now I didn't already mention that HL2 was not the only game I got at Christmas. Kate also bought me Halo and another game called Once Upon a Knight, which I'd never heard of before. As I did mention, I won a copy of Doom 3 and that was delivered right before Christmas. I've installed and played all of these games a bit and here are my thoughts on all.

Half-Life 2

The Steam system may stinko but the game itself is marvellous. The physics are fantastic, the graphics are excellent, the enemy AI is incredible and the storyline is engaging and keeps you guessing. At one point you get to drive an airboat, and you have to go at full pelt while under fire from a helicopter gunship that's dropping mines all around you - it's a blast. Later you drive a dune buggy, and you have to turbo up ramps to get over smashed bridges and other obstacles, while avoiding attacks from ant-lions.

On the downside, it takes a while - about 30 seconds on my system - to load maps when moving from one area to another. It's annoying enough when nothing is really going on but when it happens during an exciting bit (such as the airboat ride) it tends to kill the atmosphere. Shame.

Doom 3

Another really good game. It actually blows HL2 away on graphics - the textures and lighting are almost photo-realistic. The physics are damn good too. There's a tendency to get kinda blasé about these games when you've played a few but this one has some genuine scares, and I don't just mean demonic creatures jumping out at you from dark corners; when I started seeing glowing red satanic symbols on the floor and then heard whispering voices it made the hair on the back up neck stand up. It was genuinely creepy. I recommend playing this on a big screen with good speakers, and turn the room lights off. Or not, if you have a weak heart.

If there's anything wrong with this game it's that (at least as far as I've played) you never get out of the metal-corridors-ducts-and-catwalks environment, so really all you're doing is fighting your way from one objective to the next. The way I understand it, Doom 3 is a rework of the original Doom using modern technology, so I can't really fault it if the original storylline was weak by modern standards.

Halo

Anyone who's read any of Iain Banks' "Culture" SF books will see some familiar ideas; for example the Halo itself is a Culture Orbital in all but name.

I haven't played the game as much as the others but so far it's been pretty good. There have been some intense fights and there never seem to be enough med kits around, so it's fairly challenging.

The only thing I don't like is the save system: you can't save a game wherever you like - instead, the game saves for you automatically at preset checkpoints. These are often enough so that if you get in a fix you don't have to go back a long way so mostly it's not a problem, but it does have the bad point that if you hit a checkpoint when your health is low it can be very tough to proceed. All in all I like it, though.

Once Upon a Knight

I've played this even less than the others so there's not much I can say yet. One interesting point is that the game can be played as a Real Time Strategy game or as a Role Playing Game - your choice whenever you start a new game. I've played the first part of an RTS campaign and I'm planning on starting an RPG game to see how that plays too. So far though it's pretty good and I'll definitely play more.

That's all, folks

Okay, enough of the gaming blogs for a bit. Reality continues unabated and I'm intending for the next few posts to deal with some stuff from that dimension. Until then...

Steamed

Kate bought me Half Life 2 for Christmas - not just the "ordinary" game, but the Collector's Edition including a T-shirt. Nice!

I installed the game yesterday, and the chances are it's going back to the shop. The game itself may be a masterpiece but I may never know because, despite following the installation instructions (such as they are) I can still not get it to run in "offline" mode; that is, without being connected to the Internet.

The problem is the Steam software that installs along with the game. Its primary purpose is to stop anyone with an illegal copy of the game playing it, and it does that by registering on their servers, decrypting the installed files and other things as you install. You must therefore have your network connection up during installation. While it was installing the game it downloaded about twenty megabytes of something or other (it gave no clue about what it was doing) which, because I use a 56K modem, took about two hours.

If that's all there was to it there wouldn't be a problem - it's annoying but I could live with it. Unfortunately though, that's not all. Having installed the game I tried to play it but it wouldn't start - instead, I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.

No indication of why it wasn't ready.

No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.

So I reconnected to the net and tried again, and this time it started downloading upgrade files which took another twenty minutes or so. This on top of the two hours of downloading that I'd already had to wait through. When that was done I disconnected and tried starting the game again. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.

No indication of why it wasn't ready.

No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.

At that point it was after 11pm and I'd been messing with it for around three hours and still couldn't play. I wrote a mail to the Valve's tech support then called it a night and played Doom 3 instead.

I asked Donny about it, because he's been playing HL2 on his machine which is at a friend's house with a broadband connection. He said you have to play the game for a few minutes online before the server unlocks it and allows the offline mode. This morning I hooked up again and started the game. The first thing Steam told me was that it was going to download Half Life 2: Deathmatch - it didn't ask if I wanted it; I don't, so I cancelled the load. I got HL2 started and played a few minutes to give it a chance to unlock. I don't know if there's supposed to be some signal that says it's unlocked, so I just gave it five minutes then saved and exited, then disconnected and tried to play offline. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.

No indication of why it wasn't ready.

No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.

I'm a programmer by profession and as part of that I have to perform system upgrades fairly often. At work I have never had to perform an installation or upgrade that has given me as much trouble as this game has. I'll give Valve's tech support the rest of today to come up with a solution, and in the meantime I may try giving it just a few more minutes to see if it'll unlock, but if I can't get it running today it goes back to the shop tomorrow, T-shirt and all.

Valve are shooting themselves in the foot with Steam. Gamers are used to installing a new game from CD and then playing it right away (I installed Doom 3 in under twenty minutes), and not having to spend three or four hours waiting on downloads only to find that they still can't play. If you have a broadband connection and you're always online anyway, lucky you - but not everyone has broadband, and not everyone can be burning phone time to be playing a single-player game.

I also don't like that I have to have the Steam software running on my system soaking up CPU and memory while I'm playing a game. And I don't like that Steam will leech off my narrow-bandwidth network connection to tell me about new games and even perhaps start downloading them when I don't want them.

I play games to relax. Valve have traded their paranioa and insecurity for a system that makes playing a game a chore. I think Valve are going to be refunding quite a lot of cash unless they rework Steam to have it work the way their customers want, or better still scrap Steam altogether.

So whether or not I decide to keep HL2 I will never buy another game that uses Steam, and I probably won't ever again buy anything that has the Valve label on it.

Firefox, Windows Insecurity, etc.

Firefox Up

Our in-house news tracker pointed me at an interesting article in the New York Times' "Digital Domain" tech section today. The article is here if anyone's interested in the whole thing (you may need to create an account so that they can send you ad-mail you never wanted; I use a fake email address for such things) but here are the edited highlights. It seems that for the first time ever, Microsoft Internet Explorer has lost share in the browser market - 5% down since May this year - and it seems to be losing it to Mozilla's Firefox browser.

What is particularly entertaining is the squirming being done by Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, when trying to explain how Microsoft's plan to rule the planet is not affected by this. For example, he is saying that current IE users won't switch because they'll consider why they chose IE in the first place. To paraphrase the comment made about that in the article: I chose Windows and got IE, and the only reason I didn't switch was that I couldn't be bothered to change to something better.

What's also interesting is that Gary Schare doesn't use IE himself; he uses something called Maxthon which is based on the IE core but adds some features that IE won't handle.

Considering all the security holes that keep popping up in IE, and the fact that it took them until just a couple of months ago to include features I need - such as pop-up blocking - as standard, I have at last decided to switch to Firefox. I've already done it on my office system and I'll give it a few days to see how I get along with it, but I'll almost certainly switch at home before too long.

On the subject of Windows security...

Here are a couple of useful links:

1. In case you didn't already know, Windows XP includes as standard a program that implements their "Universal Plug'n'Play" (UPnP) feature. This is a useful feature... if you happen to be a network administrator. For regular home users it's worse than worthless, because the UPnP server has bugs that will let a hacker gain system-level access to your computer. The problem is that Windows ships with it switched on by default, which means that every time you go online you open up a server connection that anyone can connect to - and it happens silently, so you don't know it's happening unless you look. You don't need this program. Switching it off is a bit of a sod but it can be done by messing with a couple of menus. There's a better, quicker way: download the Unplug n' Pray program and run it. It's only 22Kbytes; I've been using it for a long time without problems. You can use the same program to switch UPnP back on again should you ever decide you need it.

2. When I first got WinXP it had MSN Messenger installed and active by default. I switched it off in the menus, only to find that this doesn't really switch it off... while nothing showed on my screen, as soon as I went online Kate's contact list would flag that I'd just appeared. That really ticked me off. I found a program that fixes the problem here. You can just disable Messenger as I did, but it will uninstall the damn thing completely if you want. BTW the guy that maintains that software has written a whole bunch of XP programs to give you back control of the machine you paid for - the index page is here.

Retraction

I don't know how many people read this blog, but in case anyone noticed I said a couple of weeks ago that Half-Life 2 won't run without an open network connection. I had better correct that in light of new information, just in case any legal people from Sierra or Valve or Gearbox or Hairpiece or whoever it is that sells the game, happens to have read that: It turns out that you only really need the network connection to unlock the program the first time, and then occasionally you can check for patches. You don't need an open network connection to play the game.

We are Borg

Well, it seems that there is indeed a core of people so addicted, so dependent on tech-geek gadgetry that they can't go anywhere without being wired. The latest in geekiness for these people is The Solar Powered Backpack. Now it doesn't matter where you are, you always have a source of power to make sure your cellphone, PDA and other geek necessities remain up and running. Nobody seems to have connected that probably 90% of places that people would be backpacking don't have any cellphone service...

I'm a winner

I just have to crow about this... I entered a sweepstake on NVidia's website a few days ago, and I just had a mail to say I've won a copy of Doom 3 and a T-shirt. Ok, so the only reason I entered was so that I had a shot at winning a 6800 graphics card, then Kate could have that and I'd take the FX 5950. But hey, I won something, right?

The air will turn blue

Oh, dear. One of the cable networks (Starz, I think) is planning on showing The Santa Clause 2 and Bad Santa back to back on Christmas Eve. Have the people that made that programming decision actually seen Bad Santa? I think there must be a whole bunch of parents of young kids who haven't, and they're going to be very upset when they sit down to watch it with their kiddies. And then Starz (or whichever one it is, I can't remember) is going to be flooded with phone calls and probably lawsuits.

Canadian, Eh?

I was thinking, about the time of the elections here, that I'd seen better-run elections in some eastern European countries not best known for their records on human rights and free speech. Now it seems those thoughts were justified. I quote:

"International monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures fell short in many ways of the best global practices. The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system..."

[see the complete article this is quoted from here]

Yes, folks, the whole damn circus is still in town, with all kinds of evidence^* that the election was rigged: electronic voting machines that gave no printed paper to the voters to confirm their votes with a paper trail, ran code that was not made available to independent experts for checking, were wide-open to hacking (one report said that a hacker demonstrated getting into a machine and altering votes in less than a minute), and suggestions that they may have actually registered votes incorrectly in front of the voters' very eyes... exit polls at wide variance with the official returns, but strangely only in swing states and marginals... intimidation of voters... the list goes on.

My own opinion is that ultimately The Truth Will Out and that if it turns out that the Bush misadministration did indeed engineer their "victory" they will be forced to pay.

In the meantime my advice for any American planning a trip abroad is to pretend to be Canadian. And in case you think I'm joking, check this out. A firm in Albuquerque, NM ("T-shirtKing.com") is selling "Go Canadian" packages including T-shirt, lapel badge, patch and a guidebook with handy facts about Canada, in case you get questioned. For example, on the subject of sports the guide suggests: "This is easy to remember. There is only one real sport in Canada and it is called hockey. Regardless of any trivia question, the answer is 'Wayne Gretzky.'"

I think I need to design a "Go British" package for Americans who want to go to Canada...

^* - Note: "evidence" and "proof" are two different things. Just so we're clear.

The day the Programmer stood still

This is truly a great idea. And of all of it, I like the tattoo idea best. I think you might want to add a couple of things like those fancy haircuts where the stylist uses razors of different shapes to carve company names and logos directly onto the scalp. That would look quite nice with the tattoos too.

Also the new USB flash memory on a key chain could be used as attractive and functional jewelry. Earrings, a nice necklace, even nose jewelry.

At the end of all this, the best most qualified men and women programmers would easily look as if they stepped off a Harley after being released from the local law enforcement facility.

No need for all the silly CV interviews, let's have this guy he looks like he's been around awhile. Great idea.

Or maybe I should hope to win that weekend in Italy just for a badly needed holiday.

Programming Heroes

When was the last time you saw a Hollywood blockbuster about an Accountant? I bet you can't remember a single one. Big Hollywood movies are about people who do dangerous jobs. People who lay their lives on the line every day. People like Firefighters, FBI agents, High School teachers, etc.

For the same reason you don't see many movies where the star is a computer programmer. There are exceptions, but they almost always happen because the programmer knows something he shouldn't, or has done/can do something that the bad guys want. There is a distinction between the Action Hero type and the Programming Hero type: Action Hero chose to be that way; Programming Hero was forced into it. Think about it: the only choice Neo had was between the red pill and the blue one. He didn't know what the hell Morpheus was talking about - in fact, he probably didn't care because Morpheus was giving him a chance to get away from a worthless job working for a worthless pointy-haired boss. The conversation could have gone more like this:

Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. In the meantime you'll have no hair, you'll be flushed down a sewer, forced to eat runny eggs and live in a hovercraft that's more like a rusting antique submarine, and ultimately you'll die. Won't that be nice?

Neo: Whatever. (takes the red pill.)

The rest is history; The Matrix made something like $270 million, and Neo a.k.a. Thomas Anderson, programmer for MetaCortex, became a household name.

What we, as a programming community, need is a way for all programmers to get the admiration of the non-programming majority. Some programmers think that this can be done by having "cool" names like Code Warrior or giving their development teams names like QA First Strike Team or Lethal Development Group or Cobol Mutual Assured Destruction Division. Of course they're still writing the same sort routines and wearing the same suits.

No, there's only one real way to be genuinely cool: the job of programming must be made more dangerous, more macho. In fact it should be potentially lethal.

How do we go about this? Here are a few ideas:

Environment

Most programmers work in air-conditioned offices with anti-static carpeting and the most comfortable furniture that employers can find for under $20. Instead, programmers should be working in more heroic locations such as on the flanks of active volcanoes, in the basements of flimsy skyscrapers built on the San Andreas fault, and in ocean-floor habitats under twenty thousand feet of black, icy water.

Machines

Computers are boringly safe. That can be fixed by building all commercial-grade workstations so that they are powered by their own internal plutonium fission reactor, cooled with liquid sodium. To add to the danger factor, the reactor and cooling components should be built to the exacting standards of the General Electric company (who can't make a 1,000-hour light bulb that lasts more than about 100 hours or an electric kettle that doesn't leak). The computer cases, keyboards and mice would be made of thin steel sheeting with sharpened edges. Monitor screens will, instead of being driven by 100-watt electron guns, be powered by industrial carbon-dioxide lasers in the megawatt range.

Languages

Java is the big deal these days. I propose a new programming language to be named "Lava". Compilation errors result in white-hot magma oozing from the CD drive slot.

Documentation

Online documentation makes programmers lazy. We should go back to printed manuals in thick binders like we used to have in the 80's. Remember when the manual set for the Microsoft C compiler was about a dozen books in a box that weighed thirty pounds? Like that, only we're aiming for the hundred pound range. Pretty soon all programmers will have muscles that'll make Vin Diesel look like Daniel Radcliffe.

Training

Getting a certificate for passing a training course is pretty lame, and anyway they're too easy to lose. We suggest tattoos instead.

I'm sure we can think of other measures that can be taken to enhance the image of programmers in the public eye and elevate them (us) to the heroic status we deserve. We'll know when we've succeeded, because Hollywood will recognize that the time is ripe for movies like:

Raiders of the Lost Archive starring Harrison Ford as Internet Jones.

Tomb Raider: The Cradle of JavaBeans starring Angelina Jolie as Java (Lava?) Croft.

Visual Basic .NET Database Programming for Dummies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the geeky cartoon character on the cover of all the "for dummies" books.

It's just a matter of time...

It's Game Time

I haven't posted for over a week because of the thanksgiving holiday and other things... I've been too busy in the office to find any writing time, and that's not likely to change for a while. At home I've been relaxing with games rather than writing. So, by way of an update, here's how things stand:

Freelancer

Started a new game and finished all 13 in-game missions. Edison Trent is now exploring the Sirius Sector (again). At the moment he's flying a Valkyrie and parked on Planet Cambridge. The plan is to completely explore Liberty, Bretonia and the independent systems to start, then move on to Kusari and Rheinland. By that time Edison should have a ship strong enough to risk taking on the border systems.

X2: the Threat

I've reached the point where I have to buy some piece of equipment from a Paranid. Before I can do that I have to make enough money to buy a new ship - class M4 or better - so that it can have a jump drive installed. I'm planning on an Argon Nova, which is an M3, but that's over $800,000. I have about $150,000 so far so it's going to be a while before I'm ready to take the next step. The plan is to buy a second Argon Mercury (around $100,000) or maybe a Boron equivalent so that I can be trading in a couple of areas to speed things along.

Sacred

My Barbarian ("Pug") is at the Oasis of Ahil-Tar on the way to check out the Orcs on instructions from Prince Valor's seeress Shareefa. He could really use some better armour.

Myst IV: Revelation

It's so long since I played this I can't remember where I left off. I'll probably start again from scratch when I've got a bit further with X2 and Sacred.

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On the subject of games I'm really disappointed that the makers of Half Life 2 decided to make it a requirement that you need an online connection to be able to play. I love the original Half Life (and now that my system has a new power supply up to driving the graphics card, I'm thinking about playing it again soon) but I have no intention of buying HL2 until I can be sure there's a way to play without needing to be connected to the net. I understand what they're trying to do with the Steam system, but I want to do things the way I'm used to - download patches when they're available when I decide to do so, when I can control my internet connection.