I’ve been a fan, but never actually finished Fallout, or Fallout 2. I dabbled in Fallout Tactics, but didn’t get much into it either. Fallout 3 though, it’s pretty much perfect for me. First person shooter, with the option to slow things down with V.A.T.S. when I feel the need, or just want to watch the cinematic glory of a something being blown apart by my combat shotgun, or stapled to a wall by my railroad gun. Exploration, the go anywhere, do anything, real life sort of feel, but with the option to fast travel if things start to get tedious humping around all over the place. Roleplaying, it’s there, better than most computer games that I have played, though still not anywhere near an actual role playing session, it is still definitely fun. I recommend buying up your Speech skill to get better options.

I usually play on the steam locomotive on my way in to the citadel. So I only have about an hour to play at a time, and with this time constraint, I am not feeling lost or that I can’t play it. You are able to save pretty much anywhere, and at any time. So things that take a while can be broken down into smaller chunks. However, when I have had hours at a time to play, just like in my youth, they dissipate into dust of the wasteland leaving me only memory, beautiful, blood soaked memory. I also like the “random” encounters. If they are random, I can’t tell, and that makes them awesome. The wasteland should be dangerous and fairly unpredictable, but once you get to know what to look for, you can handle it. The game does that well.

There are a few things that aren’t bad, but sometimes detract from the game. The biggest, is the computer cracking. I am not sure if the Science skill does anything with cracking computers, other than let you get into harder terminals. I think I have seen that the number of passwords you have to guess at goes down, but I am not sure. The thing that detracts, is that you have four guesses, but if you can’t get it in that, it locks you out, but if you log off before then, you get another four guesses. So I end up spending three cracking attempts, logging out, making three more. The character matching hints that it gives after each guess are slightly helpful, but sometimes when I do get the password, it seems like the hints that it was giving had nothing to do with the password at all. So before I detract from the game more by making this larger than the actual review, let me say that the cracking is optional for the most part, and it does not occur often enough to annoy. There, that’s that. I won’t talk about any other negatives, because frankly, I don’t have any others worth mentioning here. Sure there are some, but they pale in comparison to what the game does right.

The one thing I would really like to see in this game, and others like it, is what I call Limited MMO play. That’s where one person would host a server and up to, say, 32 to 64 people max, would be able to share the play in the world. I would love to play it multiplayer at the lan parties I hold.

While getting sustenance today, I spotted something, and that something fit so well into my hunger for all things Fallout, I had to get it. I don’t know if some marketing genius knew that Fallout 3 was going to be big, or if it was just a huge coincidence, but I don’t really care. I had to get it anyway. So I did.

It’s faintly orange pop flavored, not orange juice, but orange pop. It’s not bad at all, it’s actually a step up from the Red Bull and Diet Rockstar that I have had. It’s also 0 carb, or at least the version I got is. So if you want a drink that fits the theme while you play Fallout 3 to the wee hours of the morning, afternoon, or night, then check it out. It at least looks cool on your desk.

I originally posted this over on the Dirigible of Pain site: http://dirigibleofpain.com

So we have the near final files from the client’s agency, and they look good, and perform all the interactions that are needed for the launch in a few weeks. Great! Only one problem. The animations never stop, flash on and off, and do all sorts of other things that are strange.

All of it though, is explained by there being no stop() actions in the Flash swf. To remind you, our gentle reader, both Flash and Flex are published in AS3 for Flash Player 9. I had the foresight to request the original FLA files, so even though I don’t have the fonts available, I can still look at the code, and tweak it to see if any changes I suggest to the agency will actually work. The stop() actions are there! What the frell?

So I do some searching, and searching, and searching. Nothing. I did find out that the default frame rate for Flex movies is 24 fps. So taking that, I thought that the frame rates might not be syncing, since the Flash swfs are set at 30 fps. So I change the setting in the Flash swfs down to 24 fps. Nothing, same errors with things spinning, and button states flashing.

Then I noticed that when I rolled over the buttons, that they stopped flashing, even when I was no longer interacting with them. It was like they caught the stop() that was on their timeline. So after a bit of tinkering I found out this. In our Flex application, when these swfs were loaded, if the loaded swfs had Tweens that tweened an animated movieClip, the animation would ignore the stop() actions in it’s clip.

To solve this, I found out that stop() actions needed to be added to every keyframe that the animation had, and it needed to target the movie that was animating. So if a sign was twirling around, it was, I had to add sign.stop(); to every keyframe where I wanted the sign to not move. I added this on the timeline that had the fade in tween of the sign movieClip.

I still don’t know why this happens, but adding the stop() actions that directly target the movie clip that needs to not move fixes it. If anyone has more insight into this, please let me know. I’m stumped as to why it is happening, and why this workaround is needed.

NOTE: I created a test Flex application, with nothing but a swfLoader to see if I could give that to the agency for testing purposes. In that, the animation behaved 100% correctly. So it’s not all Flex applications, just the one I am working on.

I liked it, it’s very different, and definitely like a board game, but as the GM, I liked it. The monster stats in the first module, and the monster manual ones as well, are excellent and nearly all you need to run that monster I think.

Other people… not so enamored as I was. It has a much different flavor than 3.x, and is definitely not possible to run a low magic campaign with. Though it does give people something to do nearly the whole time, it also feels a bit like playing an MMO, with special powers being used constantly.

I played World of Warcraft recently, and after playing it a while, I questioned why I have a hotkey for a regular attack, when it is much better to just hit one of the several special attacks instead. Sometimes 4e seems that way too. With the regular attack being pretty much a waste of character sheet space. The other special attacks are definitely something to use over the unpowered attack.

Now as a GM I am wondering. How do I use one of my tricks of taking the powers from the characters would even work in this game?

I spent days working on this. Why?

Well, two things:

1. We get these files from a design firm and I wanted to not change their code that we gave them earlier.
2. Cross domain issues.

I tried everything I could think of to bust this open, searched around, and came up with the solution. I had to change the code that the design firm used, moving them from AS2 to AS3.

Sean the Flex Guy has an excellent and simple tutorial for doing half of what I needed. It loads in a Flash swf animation, and then Flex talks to it to move the animation forward frame by frame. So that was covered, at least once I made the decision to move to AS3.

The other half, Flash talking with Flex wasn’t covered, but I found a solution in the Adobe Docs. As long as both the Flex and Flash swfs have their Security.allowDomain set properly, then the two can communicate back and forth (this needs to be set for the Flex to Flash work too). What I found out, was that events, such as Mouse events, will bubble if this is set properly. So all I needed to do was to listen for the MouseEvent that was fired when the buttons in the Flash swf were clicked. The rest was easy.

I imagine that if there is something else that happens in the Flash swf, you can create a custom event for it, and listen for that in the Flex swf. Since there are more things in Flash and Flex than are controlled buy your MouseEvents Horatio.

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It turns out that the major stumbling block here was the wmode tag that was being used. It needed to be set to wmode=opaque, and it was set to wmode=transparent. Why? Well, wmode transparent as most of you know, allows for Javascript dropdowns to flow over the Flash Player, which we have on many of our client sites. Unfortunately, how it does this is it makes the Flash Player effectively transparent (go figure) to the web browser’s DOM. So the web browser doesn’t take it into account when drawing things on screen. This has the added effect of making the screen readers that attempt to read the contents of the Flash Player either not see it at all, or act erratically when they do start to read it. Nice eh?

So, setting wmode=opaque, the five second change, solved most of the problems with our accessibility, so there was no need for me to do the research and my project on it was cancelled. I do still think that there was a lot to learn for everyone on accessibility, and that the sources out there do cover it, but not all in one place. We’re under tight deadlines though, so any saved time is taken by other things. Considering it meant that I didn’t have to work a weekend or too late, I was totally cool with that.

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Gen Con was a blast, at least as good as last year, I would say baring a few things, even better than last year. Vegas After Midnight ran very well, and we got both exceptional feedback and a host of possible playtesters. VAM was stripped down to start, but Daniel Perez (http://dmperez.com/) focused in on something that I hadn’t been able to put a name to. That was that we only had half or less of the Madness mechanics in the game. We just had ways to incur Madness, but nothing about it’s effects, or how to track it. So we slashed the things on the character sheet that required Madness (really just a few things), and ran with the edited versions. As I said, they went great, and the feel of VAM without Madness is there, now we just need to add in the darker aspects of Madness to make it complete.

Going as press for the second year in a row was definitely worth it. I got a great interview with Greymalkin Press about their new game Desolation, which never got recorded due to a recorder snafu. I am working with them to get it redone soon. Oh, and btw, Matt Somers, one of the key designers, has been my friend since college. Full disclosure and all that.

I also got to play Hellas with Jerry Grayson (http://hellasrpg.com), and that was awesome. I had the pdf review copy before the con, but it was so nice I had to buy a copy. So you can expect to hear it played on The Game Master Show (http://thegamemastershow.com) soon, along with Desolation.

Met a bunch of old friends, many of them podcasters, and met a fair amount of new ones. Played several playtest sessions with them, like: Mythender, and Mecha. Two excellent games, that just need a bit more polish. I expect to hear about them coming out within the next year.

I did get to go to the White Wolf party this year, thanks Matt - I think, but if you want to hear more about that, you’ll have to listen to the podcast for The Game Master Show that comes out soon. We’re recording it tonight.

Toodles!

I am at Gen Con 2008, day 2 (Friday). Mick and I have run Vegas After Midnight (http://vegasaftermidnight.net) three times now, and it has been excellent. We have learned a lot of the rough spots, and already started sanding them down. We have loved all of our players, and a good portion of them we think are going to playtest for us. We are going to run it at least three more times before the end of the con, and I can’t wait to run them!

I’ve also done an interview for The Game Master Show (http://thegamemastershow.com), and ended up recording silence through my own fault. We also have played Hellas (http://hellasrpg.com), again, awesome - more to come on that front.

Ok, Erin is pulling me out to eat. So more later hopefully!

My research into accessibility for Flex custom components continues. This time I have something from Zeus Labs. It documents Josh Tynjala’s same efforts as mine in looking into accessibility. He’s discovered some limitations of the flash player, the article is dated May 5, 2008, so it’s timely and focuses on the current Flash Player 9.

Here is a summary of the article, followed by a link to it:

• Flash Player isn’t accessible on a Mac. (Probably since it uses the Windows accessibility code for Windows, and it looks like it does not include the Mac version of the same.)
• AccessibilityProperties class doesn’t support roles. Everything is viewed as an image by a screen reader in Flash, not buttons or lists, or any other role.
• AccessibilityProperties doesn’t expose the display list hierarchy. Things like TabBar’s don’t display as a tree of objects in an assistive application, but as a list of objects. Whereas a Windows application shows a tab list as a tree of objects.
• Some accessibility APIs in Flash Player are undocumented. Go to the article for the specifics.

Zeus Labs - Adobe needs to improve accessibility in Flash Player (http://www.zeuslabs.us/2008/05/05/flash-player-accessibility-feature-requests/)

What it comes down to is this: While Adobe has definitely improved the Flash Player accessibility, it still isn’t up to the standards of something like an HTML page.

My search continues.

So I’ll be using ScribeFire to make posts from now until something better comes along. Thank you Chris Miller (http://www.unquietdesperation.com/) for making my life a little easier by suggesting it.

Here are the links I have found so far. I’ll post more of my discoveries as I am able.

Creating Accessible Applications - Adobe
Accessible Rich Internet Applications using Dreamweaver CS3 and Flash CS3
Lin Lin: Flex 2 and Accessibility

Overall, I have an awesome group that I play with. We’ve been playing for several years now, with a few players leaving and a few new ones coming in, but in general a very stable group. I was worried about the game on several levels, the characters gelling being one of them, since they didn’t last game with another GM. It looks like most of that was due to people having shifting schedules and not a change in the group dynamic itself. *whew*

So, the game. As I said, it went quite well, the players only stumbling a little on the rules here and there. Once they got the hang of one though, we didn’t need to revisit it. Magic is going to be interesting for a while. The setting was formerly a DnD setting, so right now the stunts are more or less patterned after the levels in DnD. Oh, the characters are about 10th level in DnD terms as far as power level goes. The Fate system made for a much more cinematic style of play. I started them out with a combat and not so heavy on the roleplaying, since it would teach the crunch in a quicker manner. The combat and spellcasting was excellent! There is one player in my group who always plays a caster, but has always interpreted spells in his own way and never the same way twice. Fate has allowed him to do what he wants with spells, and not to worry about some description somewhere. It totally worked.

My big surprise of the night was another character who was also playing a caster, this one a mage, and his description for his spells were awesome. I found myself realizing halfway through the night that I was still in DnD running mode and not in cinematic SotC mode, but he totally got it even though it was his first time playing. Casting spells that would put aspects on the scene like “Portal to the realm of earth” and at the same time another one of “Sucking Vortex” so that they could push the elemental creatures they were battling into the portal and get rid of them, but also using the Sucking Vortex aspect to help them do it. 100% recycled SotC awesome!

Whew, ok, that’s enough for now. Next game is next Wednesday, and if it relates to VAM playtesting and design I might post more about it. Unless you comment and ask for more anyway.

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I’ve been working on a few things to get the alpha documents ready, and frankly I got sidetracked. Life sped up for a while, and I got distracted from VAM. I was working on a guide to the Factions, a re-written version of Dylan’s Guide to Vegas After Midnight, written by her brother Vic. Mick and I decided to do this since Mick’s vision of the Factions had changed since he put out the original Guide a while back. I’m doing the re-write so Mick can do some crunchy things with the system, and I can do some of the fluff. I was enjoying it, but as I said earlier, got sidetracked. I should start up on it again soon.

I was also working on the equipment section of the rules. We know we want equipment, more than the Spirit of the Century games we have played in recently, but not so much that the game becomes “How much stuff can you carry after Midnight.” So I’m keeping it lighter, but still interesting, and giving a reason for why characters would want equipment in the first place.

So… before I go on more, and possibly lose it all, I’ll end the experiment here. If it works, and I don’t lose this whole thing, then you can expect more from me, more frequently.

Now I haven’t really started using it, in fact this is my first post with it, and I am online right now. So take that with a grain of salt. I’ll try it out on the train tonight though, and let you all know what I think. With a post from the train no less!