Exposing my socks to the world

Bigfoot Networks is apparently bringing out a new Network Interface Card (the KillerNIC) that will sport an embedded computer inside the network card to handle the complex routing and prioritzation of packets and get you:

1. More frames per second in gaming
2. Significantly reduced network latency and
3. A significantly lighter wallet

For my less technically-minded readers, some definitions are in order:

Frames per second – Your computer has to draw lots of pictures to simulate motion in whatever game you’re playing, kind of like a cartoon. The more frames per second your computer can draw, the smoother the action.
Network interface card – The component in your computer that connects it to other networks, like a local area network or the Internet.
Network latency – The difference between the time you initiate some action and the time it takes to actually happen.
Bigfoot Networks – Crazy.

I would like to address a few quotes from an interview that Bigfoot Networks did with gD Hardware

GD: Why ping? Why did you feel this was an important enough thing to make a company and a product to address?

Bigfoot: Bigfoot Networks is dedicated to fighting Lag in online games, which we define as anything bad that happens in a game that is out of the gamer’s control. This could be their screen freezing, players jumping around on the screen, losing your connection to the game server, slow responses from the server, etc… Ping improvements can help all of these things, but is not the only feature of Killer.

Killer was designed to be a weapon that Gamers can use to put in their PCs that lowers Ping times AND offloads processing from the CPU, which combine to reduce problems caused by the Gamer’s PC. Killer’s strength is that you can take a high-end PC with all the bells and whistles, and plug the Killer in and get better online gaming performance.

I’m seeing some smoke and mirrors already. Firstly, they’re targeting Hardcore Gamers(tm) with this thing. Contrary to what you may have been led to believe by reading the marketing materials, networking in a typical game does not produce significant overhead, or at least not enough to cause any noticeable performance hit, especially on the machine of a Hardcore Gamer(tm). These people typically will have enough processing power that the overhead produced by processing packets would be negligible. There are situations where your network performance could impact the performance of the rest of your system, but inside the PC of a Hardcore Gamer(tm) is not going to be one of them.

GD: What do you say to the customer who already has great pings to the servers they play on?

Bigfoot: We designed the Killer for those gamers that care about winning, that care about being the best. With the Killer, your ping will be even lower. So, if you turn the corner and spot your enemy you will have more of an edge with Killer than without.

But that’s not all! Don’t forget the better Frames Per Second and overall better game play that comes with freeing up the CPU from dealing with networking tasks. This can lead to even more performance improvements and even more winning. Winning is everything, especially in online gaming.

But I care about winning! I care plenty! Okay, there are two things wrong with their answer: First, unless you’re playing on a local network, lag is going to be determined by all the connections between you and the server you play on, and no matter how fast your network card can process packets, if there’s something awry on the other side of your router (i.e. on the Internet) then you’re going to have lag, and there’s going to be nothing realistically you can do about it. Secondly, I suppose that if you removed your router, shut down all resident programs running on your computer, made sure there was a full moon, got a nice new network cable and rubbed it down with soap so the packets just glide right through, you might be able to see around a one frame per second increase in the performance of your game. Maybe. Likely whatever game a Hardcore Gamer is playing is going to push so many frames per second that one more is going to be imperceptible.

GD: What’ll be the retail pricing of this card?

Bigfoot: $279.99

So I lied. That price does not sound like a good deal for what could, at best, be a negligible gain. I apparently don’t care about winning at all.

GD: We have a marketplace of motherboard that already has low CPU-utilization on the NIC’s – why should someone shell out extra money for your card?

Bigfoot: First, the statement is false. There is no NIC or motherboard NIC other than Killer that gives significant low CPU-utilization performance. The only technology analogous is TCP/IP Offload accelerators that can be found in corporate servers. TCP/IP checksum offload and is a much-touted technology in these NICs you mention, but that do not benefit online games much at all.

Killer has checksum offload, but it is also CLEARLY different because:
1) The additional Frames Per Second that our card offers prove that better networking can dramatically impact your online game’s performance.
2) A lot of gamers run no additional applications while gaming because they want their CPU to focus on the game exclusively…with Killer’s Flexible Network Architecture (FNA) they can get their cake and eat it too. The NPU can run their apps and handle the networking, while the CPU focuses on the game.
3) Better Ping times over standard NICs.
4) PingThrottle, which allows gamers to adjust their ping for fair play reasons, or for training purposes.

I really couldn’t find anything about PingThrottle other than it allows you to ‘adjust your ping.’ Since you can only realistically lower your ping so much due to circumstances beyond your control (again, the myriad connections that comprise the mysterious Internet), raising it ‘for training purposes’ would seem to me to be counterproductive, since the whole reason you bought the $280 network card was so you wouldn’t have lag to deal with.

And my personal favorite:

GD: What makes Killer anything more than a glorified NIC?

Bigfoot: Winning! FNA! The answers are endless. Killer literally runs Linux OS on a sub-computer inside your computer… this is night and day different from any NIC ever!

Well, at least gD Hardware asked the question that was on my mind reading this article. The answer that was given is as humorous as it is saddening. I just know that out there, there are throngs of people that have been convinced that they need to steal their mom’s credit card and get this card so they can get more headshots in Counterstrike.

If you tried to access the site this morning and were unable to, there was a bit of a server hiccup:

“This message is to inform you that at around 05:20 EDT on Aug 08 2006 the physical server hosting your virtual server has gone down, and was back up at around 06:20. This was due to a failure with one of our remote power control devices. The issue has been addressed and the service is back up.”

Of course, the server didn’t come back up completely correctly, and I didn’t know about anything until about 9:30 AM PDT. All should be well now.

Looks like I’m not alone in thinking games are getting easier. One of the guys over at ExtremeTech seems to have discovered this trend as well. From the article:

“This is something I’ve noticed recently with PC games, too. Either games are getting easier, or I’m becoming a better gamer in my old age. As recently as three years ago, I often had to find walkthroughs to puzzle out a few aspects of a game. Usually, that meant I couldn’t find the way out, had a problem with a difficult mission or had to figure out exactly how to defeat some infinitely powerful level boss.

In the past couple of years, though, I’ve been able to figure these things out without outside help. Well, to be fair, my 13-year old daughter, Emily, sat with me during a few of the Tomb Raider sessions and offered up very useful suggestions. But I never had to resort to cheats or walkthroughs. The one exception in the past two years is Doom 3, but only because ennui set in, and I turned on God mode just so I could finish the damned thing and put it away.”

The rest of the article is mostly just about what new games the author is playing, but I found it interesting that someone else has noticed the same thing I did, and actually said something about it.

In the past few weeks, in between working at my Real Job(tm) and upgrading my PC (more on that in a later update), I’ve actually managed to squeeze in some game playing. Briefly, here’s a rundown of what I’ve been playing in July.

Dungeon Lords

I bought this game on a whim while I was on my mini-vacation back home. Big mistake. This game is easily one of the worst games that I’ve ever played. I only managed to play it for about two hours before I just couldn’t take any more. Just some of the problems I had with the game include:

1. The UI is confusing
2. The characters animate strangely
3. My mage started out with one offensive spell that had 3 charges. It took at least two to down an enemy. The spells recharge after several minutes. I rarely fought less than four enemies at a time. I died.
4. I died a lot. When you die, your character loses stats. Like Intelligence.
5. The first dungeon that I managed to get to was a sprawling, confusing mess. There was nothing Lordly about it.
6. Occasionally, you will be assaulted by a random mob of monsters (around four to six). Occasionally in this sense means ‘every couple of minutes’. So, you can’t take your time exploring or trying to solve one of the ridiculous puzzles without having to stop to fight hordes of monsters all the time.
7. When you open your inventory, all the characters on the screen that aren’t you will continue to animate in place. It’s kind of funny to see goblins running full-tilt, but not actually going anywhere… The first dozen times
8. I now miss my $40

That’s just a partial list. If I really felt like boring you, I could keep going, but I’m sure you get the idea. This game sucks. Nobody should buy it. Ever.

Mario Kart: Double Dash

I had never actually owned this game until just recently. Somehow I managed to both not get it and unlock everything on the various copies owned by friends. I went to my local EB and snagged the last copy they had. The good news is that after all this time, the game still holds up. I also have expanded my collection of games that use my broadband adapter to two.

Indigo Prophecy

Fantastic game, although a little on the short side (I managed to finish it in around four hours). Indigo Prophecy is kind of like an interactive movie/choose your own adventure kind of thing. There isn’t really anything terribly difficult about the game. The actual game play elements boil down to tapping the shoulder buttons, pressing directions on the analog sticks in time with the game, and gesturing with the analog sticks. I played this game on PC, and it does support the keyboard and mouse, but I very quickly learned that the game controls much better using a dual-analog controller. This is easily the best $20 I’ve spent in a while.

Fable: The Lost Chapters

Since I don’t have an Xbox, I never got to play this game until recently. The game itself seems to be well put together, but there are minor graphical anomalies all over the place that just bother me a bit (the hero’s hair clips through his head, for example). But I can generally overlook these things, since the rest of the game is decent. The game seems to be a bit on the easy side; I haven’t had a significant problem with anything yet. That keeps the plot moving along, I suppose. I foolishly took my hero into battle with a particularly vicious creature without the protection of any headwear, and promptly got slashed across the face. My hero now has permanent scars. Whoops. It’s kind of neat that your hero does go through permanent changes as the game goes on, but he isn’t going to be winning any beauty contests.

And that’s all. We’re in the Summer months, and there’s going to be very little in the way of new games coming out until sometime in the Fall/early Winter that I really want to play, so now’s a good time to go back and play some of those games that I had intended to play, but neglected to pick up when they were new.

I finally decided to take the plunge and update my computer that has served me well for probably the longest of any computer that I’ve ever owned without a significant upgrade. I last overhauled my computer in January of 2004. Since that time the only upgrades that I performed were bumping the RAM up to 1GB of PC3200 (in December of 2005) and installing a wireless network adapter a couple of months ago.

I had originally decided that I just wanted to upgrade the video card as the 5700 Ultra was beginning to show its age. Since my old machine only had the AGP slot I really only had two options in this regard: buy an nVidia 6800GT or buy a PCI express video card and upgrade nearly everything else in my computer. Once I managed to scrape up enough cash I decided to do the latter.

I decided early on that I would have to reuse some of my old components to keep the cost down. I determined that I would reuse my mouse, keyboard, monitor, case, and power supply. I also wouldn’t necessarily go for the top of the line system, midrange would be fine. I would further lessen the blow of purchasing all the components by purchasing the components in two stages.

Stage One

The motherboard

The motherboard I decided on was the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium. I chose this motherboard primarily for several reasons: it supports Socket 939 processors (I’ve always been a fan of AMD), supports PCI-e and SLI, and has enough things integrated that I can get rid of a couple of add-on cards.

The Processor

I had originally wanted a dual-core processor because, hey, two cores. I quickly realized two things: most of the stuff I used my computer for wouldn’t really see much benefit from having an extra CPU, and a processor with two cores costs roughly the same as two seperate processors. I decided that in order to keep costs down I’d go with the Athlon64 3500+. I have always had good luck with AMD’s stock heatsink and fan, so I decided to go with the retail kit.

The Video Card

Shortly before I decided to upgrade my PC, nVidia released their GeForce 7600GS GPUs, specifically aimed at the “midrange market”. Perfect. I have always had good luck with XFX, so I decided to get the GeForce 7600GS Xtreme Edition since it supports SLI, which I was wanting to try, it comes slightly overlocked out of the box, and XFX has an unbeatable double-lifetime guarantee.

Stage two

I gathered the remaining components for Stage two.

The Video Card 2

Sometime between purchasing the components for Stage One and beginning the purchase of the components for Stage Two, I decided that I wanted to try out SLI since I had both a motherboard and video card that supported it. So I picked up another identical GeForce 7600GS Xtreme Edition.

The Removable Media Drive

Nothing too exciting here, I picked up a 16x DVDRW/CDRW that supports Lightscribe.

The RAM

A few months ago I bumped up the 512MB of Kingston RAM in my machine to a full gigabyte of slightly faster Corsair RAM. I decided to go ahead and fill up the remaining slots on my motherboard with another gigabyte of matching RAM to get myself up to two gigabytes.

The Hard Drive

Since storage is becoming dirt cheap these days, I decided to retire my old reliable 80GB IDE drive and go for a 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10.

The Assembly

Now that I had all my parts together, I began the process of removing the old components from the case and fitting in the new. Motherboard installation was a breeze, and I was nearly finished routing the power when I came to a realization: the power connector on my power supply didn’t have enough pins.

Whoops.

One emergency trip to Best Buy later yielded:

The Power Supply

I was pretty much at the mercy of what the Best Buy had to offer, so I got their 430W Antec power supply over whatever house brand they were hawking that day.

The Assembly 2

Why is it that my local library waits until I’m:

1. Too old and
2. Living 2,000 miles away

before they decide to do something like this?

Quote:

“Prizes, food, and fun are included!”

Fun included? Yes. Very yes.

I’ve decided to give the personal broadcasting site PiXPO a try to showcase the videos that I’ve made over the years. The link is now to your right. Or you could check them out at Google Video. Or MachinimaHQ. If enough people like them, I may be motivated to do more in the near future.

Spammers are getting quite creative in their attempts to lure me into clicking random links so they can get my login information. I’m going to share a couple of my latest favorites.

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $63.80. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here (link removed)

Regards,
Internal Revenue Service

(c) Copyright 2006, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved..

Clicking on the link took me to a fairly convincing site, but I’m fairly certain that the United States Internal Revenue Service hasn’t yet decided to run its servers out of Japan, and even if they have, they probably would want more information from me than my Social Security Number and my credit card info. Unfortunately, I don’t need $63.80 bad enough to fall for this one.

Subject: Microsoft Outlook Lucky winner…

From: Mrs. Helen Van Patt
(Lottery Coordinator)

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

We are pleased to inform you the result of the Microsoft Outlook Award Lotteries, held on the 15th July 2006.

Your e-mail address attached to ticket #: 4434/2113-78 with prize # 83429/2 drew ?1,000,000.00 which was first in the 2nd class of the draws.

You are to receive ?1,000,000.00 (One Million Euros).

Because of mix up in cash payouts, we ask that you keep your winning information
confidential until your money (?1,000,000.00) has been fully remitted to you by our
accredited pay-point bank.

This measure must be adhere to avoid loss of your cash prize – winners of our cash
prizes are advised to adhere to these instructions to forestall the abuse of this
program by other participants.

It’s important to note that these draws were conducted formally, and winners are
selected through an Internet ballot system from 60,000 individual and companies
e-mail addresses the draws are conducted around the world through our Internet
based ballot system.

The promotion is sponsored and promoted by WORLD MICROSOFT OUTLOOK PROGRAMM.

We congratulate you once again. We hope you will use part of it in our next draws; the Jackpot winning is 2, million Euros.

Remember, all winning must be claimed not later than 20 days.

After this date all unclaimed cash prize will be forfeited and included in the next sweepstake.

Please, in order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications remember to
quote personal and winning numbers in all correspondence with us.

Congratulations once again from all members of Internet Microsoft Lotteries.

Thank you for being part of our promotional program.

For immediate release of your cash prize to you, please kindly contact our Paying Bank (Laagste Heypotheekofferte Bank Amsterdam,)

Send them the following Information Through the Email Address below:

(i). Your names
(ii) Contact telephone and fax numbers
(iii) Contact Address
(iv) your winning numbers
(v) Quote amount won.

Laagste Heypotheekofferte Bank. N.L.
Mrs. Jennifer Clark,
Email : (removed)
Email: (removed)
Tel: (removed)
Fax: (removed)

Congratulations once again.
Yours in service,
Mrs. (Grace Ferry)
(Lottery Coordinator)

I’m not so much surprised that I won one million euros, that seems to happen every couple of days. I’m more concerned that the From: line at the top of the email and the signature are two different names. I briefly considered replying to the people on the list, but then I realized that by posting this I have already forfeited my claim to the money. You know, since you all know my winning ticket number and can now claim my winnings that were previously held up in some kind of mix-up… or something like that.

And finally:

Subject: Re: cat who has inherited a castle

That’s it. The email didn’t have a body, just a subject line that I found humorous for some strange reason.

Been thinking about trying to get your Media Center PC and your XBox 360 working in tandem? You might want to give this article over at Stage Select a look. From the article:

Once you face the reality of Media Center though, it’s a god-awful mess, and no one seems to be talking about it. The problems that I’ve had with Media Center really boggle my mind. So, I wanted to talk about it – to open an Internet discussion. If you’re looking at putting your Xbox 360 in the mix with a Media Center PC, you should be aware of just how fickle the Media Center software is, especially when streaming TV or other video.

For about the space of a year, I was beholden to the MMORPG monster. I spent nearly all my free time grinding levels and not much else. I mostly enjoyed it, but came to the realization that in the space of an entire year I had only played two games, and the others that I wanted to play were just sitting around gathering dust. So last summer I decided to go ahead and shelve Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft for good.

Then I started having the cravings. I needed to slay some monsters, loot the corpses, and sell the loot so I could get better gear to kill stronger monsters.

I then remembered about Progress Quest

Progress Quest is an interesting MMORPG with all of the tedium abstracted out of it leaving you with the the meat of the MMO experience without the tedium of actually working for it.

Starting a new Progress Quest character is relatively straightforward: you select if you would like to play online (you then must choose your realm) or offline, you choose a name for your character (there’s even a random name generator included that generates fairly pronounceable names), select your race from 21 choices (including Half Man, Double Hobbit, Demicanadian, and Gyrognome), select one of 18 character classes, and then Roll your stats (Progress Quest even sports an “Unroll” feature should you change your mind and wish to go back to the previous set of stats). Once you are satisfied with your character you hit “Sold!” and embark on your quest.

This is where you sit back and let the game take over. The story is a bit cliché, but it gets the job done. Your character then heads off into the killing fields and begins murdering wildlife, looting the corpses, selling the loot and then getting better equipment. One of the best features of this game is that since it’s all automatic, you can still play and progress even if you have to leave your computer for any amount of time, or even while you’re playing something else.

The latest version of Progress Quest will minimize unobtrusively to your system tray so you can concentrate on other tasks while your character dutifully continues to make progress. You can at any time bring back up the main window which will show you everything you need to know about how your game is… um… progressing. There is a window that shows your character sheet, spells learned, inventory, equipment, plot development, what quest you’re currently doing, and what your character is doing at any given moment.

If you’re playing online, Progress Quest supports three kinds of guilds (evil, neutral, or good) that you can create and recruit people for. You also have access to the PQ Hall of Fame where you can see how your character measures up against the other players in your realm, who’s in your guild, and other exciting stats.

If I have to explain why Progress Quest is a great game, then you just won’t understand. But, trust me, it’s great.

See also

The official site
PQ in Wikipedia