Oblivion and the problem with “save anywhere”

I finally got Oblivion last weekend so I could see what all the fuss was about.

The game lasted about 12 hours for me (over two days) and then I just got up and turned it off. In 12 hours it hard-locked the PS3 twice and had four non-recoverable bugs (player stuck or frozen NPCs). I have never before seen such an unstable game on the PS3. I’m *very* surprised it got through Format QA.

But that’s not why I quit playing.

I quit playing when I realized that all I had done for the last 12 hours was be an errand boy. I went to point A to talk to some dude. He sent me on a quest to point B to retrieve some item. I got the item and brought it back, only to discover it actually had to be delivered to point C. Setup. A catch. Conclusion. The first 12 hours was nothing but variations on this same theme.

A lot of RPGs use the “errand boy” mechanic but Oblivion is crazy-realistic in it’s recreation: in all those 12 hours I probably ran only 6-7 errands. Most games will have you doing 6-7 every couple of hours. Good games will weave the errands together in some meaningful fashion so you have to build a mental-map of how they fit together. In Oblivion there didn’t appear to be much benefit to parallelizing the errands, as they seemed to be designed to be done completely independent of each other.

Maybe I picked the “wrong” character at the beginning — a thief. Not much in terms of action with the thief. The little action I did see as the thief I didn’t particularly care for anyways. The combat made little sense to me–is it really only just button mashing with occasional timing?

The problem with “save anywhere”

There were a couple other things that irritated me about the game, and I don’t think these problems are unique to Oblivion, I think it’s the whole “rich RPG” genre that irritates me. These games can make you do things that just are simply not fun in my opinion.

Since you can “save anywhere” rather than at carefully chosen points, the game designer takes license to put the player into bad situations where there’s no way to get out of them. “If you don’t like the direction the game is heading, restart from your last save.” This works as long as you save often. When you forget to save, you’re screwed. This happen to me more than once; the first time it cost me about 2 hours of gameplay.

Starting over in these types of games is rarely fun. When you end up having to repeat something that wasn’t particularly challenging in the first place it’s especially not fun.

Because starting over sucks so bad you end up taking even more advantage of the “save anywhere” than you probably should. At any time when you think there’s even the slightest potential for the game to sink you into a hole you create a new save. As you progress, your threshold for what constitutes a “hole” diminishes. What you end up doing is you make things even less fun for yourself because you just eliminated the risk from the game.

You start out saying: Oh! Before I attack this mob I should probably save in case I die. I’m glad I remembered!

And by the end you’re thinking: Should I use 30 lockpicks to discover what treasure is in this chest? Who cares, if it’s not worth 30 lockpicks I’ll just revert to my last save file.

In the 12 hours I played the game I created over 70 save files. Something isn’t right when a player feels they need to take out that many insurance policies. With no risk you diminish the fun. But you can’t have the flip side either: making the player redo 2 hours of game play isn’t right either. (That is, unless repeating what you did previously is the game)..

The Avenger to the rescue

I got some nasty malware on my computer this week; I’ve had it shut off until I had the energy to investigate what was going on. AVG Free was reporting I had four viruses on it at various times:

Trojan dropper.agent.git
Trojan dropper.agent.dbo
Backdoor.agent.PDA
Virus Win32.lop (an adware virus)

However, no amount of quarantining was getting rid of the viruses, something was actively installing them. The damn thing was also continuing to infect other programs on my system..

Looking in my Windows\System32 folder I found several recently modified files:

ctfmon.exe
sstqp.dll
ddccaxv.dll
ptqss.ini
sstqp.exe
vturq.exe
qrutv.ini

I’m sure most of these file names were randomly generated… I was able to delete all of them except the dll’s. sstqp.exe kept reappearing, but I managed to nullify it by deleting it and then replacing it with a 0k read-only file.

Searching the registry, sure enough, I found a dozen spots where these files were referenced. Some in pretty clever places: Did you know you can specify an executable to run whenever winlogon is run? Did you know you can specify an executable to run whenever the windows authentication service is run? **Seriously** — what the hell Microsoft? You can’t even boot in command prompt mode to get rid of this crap.

Deleting their references in the registry didn’t work, something was just adding them right back. I needed to delete the dll’s to prevent them from loading, but how?

This stumped me for a good hour. I tried a bunch of different things to get rid of the dll’s (without pulling the drive and putting it into another NTFS compatible system) but nothing seemed to work. Running Unlocker on them hard-locked the system. Move on Boot was worthless.

Finally, while searching for references to “dropper.agent.git” I stumbled upon a hacky little tool called The Avenger that did the trick. With this tool you have to write a script that specifies the file(s) to delete and it will delete them the next time your computer starts up, presumably before Windows has a chance to execute them. IT WORKED.

Thank you, Avenger!

Photoshop lags opening files when your default printer is a network printer

At home and at work I’ve had this problem where Photoshop freezes for about 60 seconds whenever I go to open a file (7 at home; CS2 at work–both versions do it). Even a tiny 32×32 pixel file will lag opening. After my tenth productivity hang today I finally decided to track the problem down, and it’s not at all what I would have suspected: network printers. If your default printer is a network printer Photoshop will take longer to open files. And if your PC can’t connect to the printer for whatever reason it takes even longer. I frequently turn my network printer off at home, and at work I’ve got a ton of network printer profiles I don’t even use anymore, the default one being invalid. The workaround for me is to make my default printer at home a FILE: printer. Lame.

I don’t entirely blame Photoshop on this… even the Printer Control Panel can’t figure out if a printer is connected or not until you go to access it. But couldn’t they push whatever this printer thing is doing into a thread, so at least you can keep working?

This week in petroleum

Woke up to a shock this morning–we use propane to heat the living room in our house, and the propane bill showed we were being charged a whopping $2.75/gallon… at least a $0.60/gallon increase from the last bill I remember looking at. To find out if this was a reasonable price I did some searching and came across the Energy Information Administration’s This week in Petroleum website that tracks propane prices across the country. I guess things could be worse, the website shows for the week ending 12/17/07 the average price of propane in New England was $2.93/gallon.

But propane prices aren’t that interesting to blog about. [no offense] What jumped out at me on the site was this little graph that compared petroleum exploration investment to actual increases in petroleum reserves. Basically, there appears to be no correlation:

We’ve been spending more on petroleum exploration every year since 2000 but we haven’t seen anything come of it. Granted, the website says there may be reason for this: “It sometimes takes years from the start of exploration before oil is discovered and then designated as ‘proved’ reserves. Also, higher costs for raw materials and drilling rigs mean that some of the additional spending went into just maintaining what companies were already doing.

Pay no attention to that last sentence about petroleum exploration dollars going towards maintaining existing systems… Instead, take this information with the recent energy bill that passed congress, where: “nearly half of House Republicans condemned the legislation as a ‘No Energy Bill’ because it lacked expanded access to new oil and gas exploration“.

But according to the EIA website the results of new gas exploration has gained traction “only two of the previous 17 years.” One would conclude that the money we’re putting into new gas exploration isn’t bearing fruit! So why then would House Republicans push for putting more money into exploration?

Sacramento police agree to be advertising schlocks for local businesses

According to the Associated Press, police in Sacramento rounded up gift certificates from local businesses and are pulling people over while driving to hand them out. Apparently this is to “promote the holiday spirit and enhance goodwill between the traffic unit and the motoring public,” and to, erm, avoid doing real police work perhaps?

I wonder what the hourly cost of a patrol car is, and how much it really costs to pull someone over. I doubt it’s cheap. For every silly little $5 Starbucks gift card they’re handing out they’re probably burning $50-250 taxpayer dollars. (and then there’s the lost opportunity cost of catching someone during that time who was actually breaking the law…)

Microsoft quietly changes terms of Windows Feedback Program

Yesterday, many websites reported that Microsoft was going to be offering a free copy of Windows Vista to users who signed up for the Windows Feedback Program and participated for 3 months. I went to check it out myself today but found no trace of anything “free” on their website.

A quick search for site:microsoft.com found the original wording that appearing on their site yesterday. They must have removed it after they hit their target numbers:

What about the free product?
If you are a Windows Vista or Windows XP user and decide to join and participate in both programs, we will send you a free Microsoft product when you participate in the program. Limit one gift per person. This offer is non-transferable. This offer expires on 12/31/07, while supplies last, and is not redeemable for cash. Taxes, if any, are your sole responsibility.

It would be nice to at least say, “free gift no longer available”. But this is the Internet! Who cares!?

Source control bindings in VS.NET

I spent well over an hour last night trying to get source control bindings working between VS.NET 2003 and Perforce. (Yes, I’m still on 2003, I actually prefer it over 2005–long story). I had no problem binding the sln, vcproj and a couple of files to Perforce, but the majority of the files in the project would lose their source control status a few seconds after the project loads. I tried recreating the bindings, recreating the project, “opening project from source control” and a number of other things a dozen times and VS just wouldn’t recognize these files as being part of source control.

Finally when I went to add a new file to source control I discovered that the difference between the files that worked and the files that didn’t was their location. Files in the same directory (or underneath the same directory) as the vcproj were recognized; files outside weren’t. When I attempted to add a file outside the directory I actually got a meaningful error: “Some of the files you are adding to your project are located outside of the project’s binding root. These files cannot be source controlled unless they are moved.”

Aha.. I opened up the vcproj in notepad and whaddyaknow, there’s an entry called “SccLocalPath”. I changed that from “.” to “..” and it all magically started working. It would have been nice to have gotten that error when I bound the project originally. Go Visual Studio… :-/

GAO confirms airport security is a joke

The Government Accountability Office recently released a report confirming what many of us already know: airport security — specifically the practices put into place by the TSA — are totally worthless when it comes to stopping real terror threats.

The GAO managed to sneak bomb making materials into 19 airports totally undetected, even when the TSA apparently notified itself that the government agency was going to be conducting these tests: “Release of the GAO report follows a hearing Wednesday in which Hawley vehemently denied that screeners had been tipped off about covert security tests, even as lawmakers brandished an e-mail from TSA headquarters that not only warned employees of testing, but described the methods and appearance of those conducting the probes.

Begin brain dump…

For several years I’ve been carrying a small knife on my key chain. Many times when I travel I forget that I have it on me and it ends up in my backpack with the rest of my keys and electronics when I go through the scanning process. Not once have I ever been questioned about it. The state of knives on planes is a little vague: According to the TSA’s website, knives are still banned, however a sign at SFO I saw last week said that knives were permitted as long as the blade was under 4″. Either way: the fact that I can bring a knife onto a plane time after time (legitimately or accidentally) just makes the whole system seem like a joke. You can’t bring a box cutter onto a plane, but you can bring a knife on board no problem?

The current airport security process is a waste of time, energy and money. It’s costing the economy billions, $94B by some estimates. Not to mention we’re only protecting planes, not the airport terminals themselves. Every time I fly I think of a dozen ways someone could terrorize the airport without even having to go through the security.

My current favorite terrorist plot involves the security screening itself. Everyone has to take their shoes off, (which in itself startles me that people don’t find this disgusting–I personally don’t, but in this germaphobe society you would think more people would refuse), so why not attack there? There are lots of chemical and/or biological agents you could quietly release at that time.. ringworm, e-coli, ticks, parasitic fungi (athlete’s foot), etc. Could you imagine if someone broke open a canister of African ticks in the security line? Oh, the (project) mayhem.

I don’t claim to be smart enough to know what the solution is to the airport security problem, but I know that the way the TSA is going about it is definitely not the answer. More security is not the answer either. I think it boils down to fear mediation: The TSA needs to find a new way to calm the publics fears of terrorism without actually inconveniencing anyone. They could hang posters with statistics of air travel safety: “Relax! Your odds of being involved in a terrorist plot today are 1 in 5,351,000,000 — You have better odds of dying due to motion sickness.” (And you could have dimenhydrinate manufacturers pay for the posters!)