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I have had the pleasure of joining thousands of other players in the land of Middle Earth for the LOTRO stress-test event this past weekend. LOTRO has been in the beta stage for a month or so and I completely forgot to apply for it so I had to wait for an open event to check out this new MMORPG. I typically enjoy two gaming genres, RTS and MMORPG, so I’d like to say I have a fair amount of experience in judging these particular genres. This latest wave of games that will be hitting the market over the next few months are part of an entirely new generation of MMORPGs. The first generation consisted of founders such as Ultima Online and Everquest that set the groundwork. The second generation consisted of improved games that worked on improving the gameplay and lowering the learning curve and featured titles such as Asheron’s Call, Everquest 2, and World of Warcraft. This particular generation of games still had a few bugs in them and they had varying learning curves ranging from easy (WoW) to moderate (AC) to stupid complicated (EQ2). This next generation of MMOs are trying to break down the enormous time requirements while providing even more content and so far the prospects look good with Vanguard, Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings Online leading the pack. Well I think that’s enough history, time to dive into LOTRO.

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It seems like lately there has been a flurry of releases with demos and open betas. The enormous Command and Conquer franchise will be getting another addition with Tiberium Wars which looks to be a great counter-point to Supreme Commander. Funny how all the old games are coming back, Command and Conquer, Total Annihilation, maybe Starcraft? Either way here’s some links, I’m currently downloading from the FileFront link at a solid 250kb/sec. Once this finishes downloading and I finish my LOTRO preview I’ll begin playing with Command and Conquer. I can’t believe this, I JUST bought Supreme Commander on Saturday and I have yet to open the box due to having 3 different games in either beta or open demo. Enjoy, links below shouldn’t require a username/password.

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Rarely does the RAM in a computer receive all that much attention, normally the processors and video cards get all the hype with their 3D and numbercrunching benchmarks. Traditional desktop processors normally have a small amount of highspeed onboard memory or cache but this cache isn’t nearly enough memory to store all the variables necessary for a functional computer. Computer hard drives on the other hand have enough memory to store millions of images and files yet the access speeds are measured in milliseconds rather than nanoseconds like onboard cache. RAM fills in the gap between these two storage mediums with moderate capacities and decent access times. More often than not the operating frequency of the modules overshadow the memory timings so I will be doing a short investigation into the importance of memory timings.

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Sorry guys but I have some sort of wicked combination of about 50 different respritory and ENT problems right now. About a week ago I started feeling stuffy and now it is fullblown swollen throat, stuffy nose, light headache, and screwed up hearing so I’ve really slacked off writing here. Two all-night coding sessions this week haven’t helped me much either but I’m done with academics for the week so I’ve had time to catch up on things. Need to go to the doctor tomorrow and get them to pump me full of drugs but I’m feeling well enough to write a little bit and compile some of the data that I’ve accumulated over the last week. Once again I need a clone to do my work for me when I can’t.

I finally get to relax after having roughly 2 weeks of hell from my classes. Perhaps using the term hell is a bit strong but nonetheless classes have sucked and have kept me away from writing here. I seriously need to look into getting a clone to do all the work for me so I could get twice as much done. Tomorrow I’ll be building a single stage for a Georgia Tech alum which should be fun, later this week I should have some new ram sticks to review, and possibly at the end of the week I’ll have a new motherboard and processor. Otherwise I still have a bunch of testing to do with Vista, I have procrastinated on installing it. In statistic news, Google Reader and Google Homepages have started reporting the number of RSS hits so my readership “jumped” up past 200 last night which is a great boost for my ego! Thanks for reading guys, wish I was more regular in writing but that’d require better time management skills.

D-Wave Systems pulled through and actually demonstrated a working 16 qubit quantum computer on Tuesday. To say that I am thrilled would be the understatement of the decade. The demonstration did occur remotely meaning that the results still aren’t completely valid but the 16 qubit computer will be available for peer review in a major journal in the near future along with public demonstrations available via an online connection. From the looks of things D-Wave Systems might be able to make quantum computers a marketable product, first step will be to increase the qubits. Rumor has it that a 1000 qubit version will be available at the end of next year, so roughly 22 months from now we will have a useful quantum computer if all goes well. As of right now D-Wave Systems isn’t 100% certain that the scaled up version of their design will effectively compute tasks at blistering speeds but they seem optimistic and plan on giving the project the go-ahead. That’s about it, guess there won’t be much curing of cancer and solving of harder Sodoku problems until Spring of 2009..jeez.

Relevant Links
D-Wave Systems News Feed
Scientific American

Earlier I stated that Supreme Commander would be the end of the rest of my life and that pretty much sums up how addicting I have found this game to be. Between the eery similarities with Total Annihilation and the fantastic gameplay with shocking graphics, Supreme Commander has managed to deliver on all accounts with very few rough spots. Once I receive a copy of the actual public game I’m definitely going to do a more indepth review with more/better images and videos.

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Over the next 6 hours I will be working through all my previous articles and updating the image links and other smaller bits of code to try and streamline my writing process. In the past I had a rather jumbled image organization but now I’m trying to file everything away in a more easily browsed system. This is just a heads up in case you load up an article and there are no images or they are the wrong images. Right now at 7:30 EST I am digging through April and I hope to be done within 2 hours or so. After the image re-organization I’ll be working on minor changes within the php to fix problems that I have noticed and then work over the CSS and optimize it. Right now the website is a fat little thing weighing in at ~170kb for the frontpage load, I’d like to trim this down to 100kb which shouldn’t be too hard. Those two YouTube scripts take up 40kb in total, need that article to sink below the fold. I’ll be finally posting up some Supreme Commander videos also, been so focused on playing the game that I forgot to record some of the gameplay. Back to this headache that I have built over the last year.