My wife and I have played World of Warcraft for 6 years. This past weekend we tried out the new Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic, courtesy of my mother-in-law's unused account. I think it's safe to say that both of us are hooked, we both bought our own copies. Here are my observations about SWTOR, how it improves on the MMO genre over WoW, and areas it could use further improvement itself. I'll be updating this post as I continue to play the game and find more things of note.

Improvements over WoW

Looting.

• The "corpse is lootable" effect is significantly more visible, even from 50 feet away. A bright pillar of light shoots out of the corpse and up into the sky. There's no missing it.
• The effect is colored to indicate what kind of drops are on the corpse (white for money & grays, green for gear, yellow for quest items).
• The loot screen always moves to your cursor, and positions itself so that your mouse is over a "Loot Everything" button. This was one of the first addons I ever installed on WoW, they should really pay attention to this.
• They also added Area Looting, a feature common in other newer MMOs, where you can loot every corpse within a certain range at once.

Instant Travel (Hearth)

• In WoW the hearthstone is a fixed destination. There are innkeepers in every town that you can speak to to set your hearthstone destination. You only get one destination, but it can be anywhere in the world.
• In SWTOR, innkeepers have been replaced with a landing pedestal (I don't know the official name for it). Whenever you find one you interact with it and it unlocks for you. When you active your Instant Transport (SWTOR's hearthstone) a screen pops up showing every pedestal you've previously interacted with. It makes hearth significantly more useful.
• I assume this is limited to the planet you are currently on (I've yet to level high enough to leave the starting planet). If it works across planets, I'll be blown away.

From level 1 your character is a badass. In the early levels of WoW you feel like a lowbie; you have very few abilities, not a lot of health, and all the NPCs treat you like fresh fish. In SWTOR, the opening cinematic introduces you as a total ass kicker; You're being brought in because someone needed a job done and you're the best man for the task. I have to remind myself some times that I'm only level 7 and there's much tougher enemies out there.

The HUD

• The HUD has a range finder by default. Simple, I know, but it's taken WoW years to have a reliable means of determining target range.
• The HUD tells you if you are nearing an aggroable mob.
• Player and Target health & portraits are at the bottom center of the screen, directly above the action bar. Every UI pack for WoW makes this change and even Blizzard is realizing that having them so far away from the center of the screen is a bad idea.

Quest text is replaced with dialog cutscenes that are directed by the user via an interaction wheel. This is really neat for several reasons:

1. It forces the player to actually pay attention to the "quest text", so they absorb a lot more of the lore (this is why players keep saying they feel more connected to the story).
2. It defines the character's personality, bringing the RP back into MMORPG. No matter which faction you choose, you can still choose if your character will be a good guy or a total asshole.
3. It slows down leveling. I'm sure this will be very annoying in a year when I'm just trying to get a character to max level as fast as possible (thankfully audio dialog can be skipped through by pressing the spacebar), but for the moment it makes the experience much more pleasurable. You're not focused on just getting the missions done and getting your XP (I barely even acknowledge when I level). I played for over 5 hours yesterday and didn't even hit level 10 yet (the first specialization opportunity). In WoW you can hit level 10 in half an hour.

When a player is involved in a cutscene an icon appears over their head indicating that they are not available for interaction. WoW needs this so badly, currently players in a cutscene either vanish or just stand there like they are AFK.

Questing Phases are always extremely visible and clear, you know with absolute certainty that you are entering a phased area thanks to a green portal effect on the entryway. Phases are instanced to every character, and you have to choose to bring party members into a phase with you.

Kill quests, where you're told to kill X number of mobs, are always optional bonus quests that popup while you're doing something else, and the count is usually pretty low. Most of the time you complete this quests automatically during the course of finishing other objectives, it's just extra XP. This helps a lot with reducing the grindy-ness of the game.

Heroic Zones. These are parts of the map that have an increased difficulty level. They can only be entered through specific doorways which, much like phased areas, are clearly visible as such. Upon entry the player is warned that they've entered an area of increase difficulty. Heroic zones always contain Heroic quests (the equivalent to WoW's elite/group quests). I find this system preferable to the way that WoW handles elites, as there's no risk of just bumbling into a mob that is going to kick your ass.

Combat. I have a love and hate relationship with SWTOR's combat, and I'll name my negatives later, but here's the parts I like.

1. No Auto-Attack, you have to hit buttons to do damage, resulting in more player involvement.
2. Cover is a core mechanic, and is readily provided in the environment. Some abilities can only be used from behind cover, and damage blocked by cover shows up on the battle text (or FlyText as BioWare calls it).
3. Enemy AI actually exists. Targets duck and dodge, moving to try to gain better ground or get behind cover. This means you actually have to move during combat for reasons other than getting out of fire.
4. Blaster attacks fire as barrages, and not all shots will hit their target (Star Wars bullet accuracy, lol).
5. All of this results in ranged combat that feels like actual combat, despite the target lock that the genre uses. In comparison, WoW's combat system feels like Revolutionary War battles where everyone stands still and shoots each other in the face.

Maps. SWTOR's map system is extremely informative. Both the minimap and the world map can be set to display just about every friendly intractable NPC type, and quest objectives are clearly marked. If you are running while the world map is up, the map becomes translucent so you can still see where you're going.

Death. Upon death you are presented two options: Call a medical drone, or return to nearest medical station. Medical station works just like graveyards in WoW, but medical drone will revive you right where you fell (giving you 10 seconds of invisibility to get to safety), and has a cooldown that increases every time you use it. This is awesome as it gives you the option of running back, or just getting up and getting a drink while you wait for the drone to cooldown. It may just be because I'm a low level, but there doesn't seem to be any punishment for death (such as durability loss in WoW, or XP loss in Lineage).

Areas that need improvement

Character Silhouettes, or lack there-of.

• Like many modern 3D games, SWTOR's lighting engine results in environments that have very uniform color palettes. Everything is a shade of some hue, resulting in views where everything kind of bleeds together. This makes spotting NPCs extremely difficult, especially for someone like myself with a mild case of color blindness.
• For all the crap people give to WoW's graphics, their color scheme gives NPCs an unmistakable contrast that is visible from a long way off.
• SWTOR NPCs just blend into the background, and if the minimap didn't tell me they were there I would walk right past vendors. This is improved significantly by turning on NPC Nameplates, giving you bold primary colored floating names to identify the presence of an NPC.
• All players are bipedal humanoids, and the only difference between races is the shape of the head and/or skin color. There is slight variation between armor types (light, medium, heavy), but from a distance they are indistinguishable. This all results in a system where your only means of determining a players race and class is to mouse over them. This is further exacerbated by the player ability to choose body type, varying from short and skinny to tall and chunky.

Lootable Objects. Where corpse looting is massively improved over WoW, quest object looting is a step backwards. The only indication that an object is a quest item is a slight blue tint that be comes more obvious when you mouse over it. If the object is small, good luck finding it. There's been several quest items that I only knew they were there because the map pointed them out for me.

Very few options for questing locations. Characters must level in the start zone for their class and have very little choice about what planets they can go to after finishing each zone. Thanks to @janeylicious for pointing this out

The Inventory window isn't very informative. I have to mouse over items to tell what they are and the item icons are not very informative (screenshot to come later).

UI windows don't always open in the same place, and you can only have two open at a time. If I'm at a vendor and have my inventory open, opening the character panel closes both. Those three windows should be usable at the same time.

Racial Perks seem to be limited to little bits of social flair, silly actions that have no impact on battle.

Character Customization feels only as good as WoW. The addition of body type is nice, but other attributes need a lot more choices.

Classes. Technically the game has 10 classes, as both factions have five classes each that are unique to that faction, but in practical usage each class has a matching equivalent on the other faction (Sith Warrior = Jedi Knight, Imperial Agent = Smuggler, etc). Each class has uniquely named spells, but they do exactly the same thing as their matching class's spells in the other faction. It feels like a half-assed attempt at creating diversity between the two factions.

Cantinas. Just like how you gain rest state for logging out in an inn in WoW, SWTOR gives you rest state for logging out in a Cantina. However, cantinas seem infrequent, at least in the low levels. Each planet only seems to have one?

No pet class. Eventually you do get a "companion" who follows you around, but this is available for every character and works much like the companion system in Skyrim. Basically you have a mule. The game could really stand to have an equivalent to WoW's Hunter class.

Some default options kinda suck and aren't obviously changeable, such as the existence of captioning on cutscenes. The options exist, but you have to dig through the interface settings to find them.

A sprint ability on cooldown would really help with running between zones. Eventually players get a vehicle just like in WoW, and instant travel helps a lot, but there's a lot of time in the early levels spent just running between quest objectives. I'm told now that you do get a sprint at level 14, but it would be nice if you got it sooner. Some of the start zones are really lacking in transit stations.

Combat. I said I'd be getting back to it.

• For all the dynamic that ranged combat in SWTOR provides, melee combat feels retarded.
  
  • Melee vs Ranged Mobs, the targets stand there and shoot you like dumb cattle while you slice them to bits.
  • Ranged vs Melee Mobs, you feel extremely exposed and vulnerable and most of the time end up running away.
  • Melee vs Melee Mobs feels no different from playing WoW, where both parties smack at each other until one dies.
• Combat engagements always swing from frustratingly difficult to annoyingly easy, there's not a lot of balance in between.

No Addon/Mod Support. This is both a blessing and a curse (heh). On the plus side, people can't add things like damage meters and gear score calculators that promote player arrogance. On the down side, you can't fix the areas of the UI where Bioware has failed. I hate the SWTOR UI color scheme and would love to see someone mod it with more earthy/metal tones.

The game is huge. The installer downloads over 10GB and the default installation sits at 25GB before it applies the first content patch. When WoW launched it was a measly 4GB, and after six years of content patches it still only sits between 30-40GB (and the next patch will be making that smaller). All that quest dialog audio must really add up.

So far we're only a little ways into the game, and I've not even hit level 10 on any of my characters (the level cap is 50), so I'm sure some of these opinions will change. We'll just have to wait and see.

Last night San Diego suffered the worst power outage it has ever seen. An "operator error" in Arizona led to the shutdown of the electricity feed coming into San Diego from the east. This loss of power caused an overload at the power plant to the north, killing all electricity flow into all of California south of San Onofre. 1.5 million "customers" without power, or approximately 5 million people, for almost 12 hours.

Funny things happen in modern society when the power goes out. First there is dread and idle anticipation as everyone waits for it to return. As time passes, panic sets in. I immediately turned to Twitter to see just how widespread the outage was. I realized pretty quickly just how huge this was when I started seeing tweets from all over the entire county, from Oceanside down to Chula Vista, and as far east as Yuma & Coachella. An outage that large was sure to take hours.

After panic comes acceptance and preparation. I went around and turned off all the power strips leading to major electronics, in preparation for the inevitable power surge. Kat and I both found books to read and we settled down for a few hours of tedium. With the 100º weather bearing down outside it was important to stay as still as possible to keep from overheating. In the first hour the temperature in the house climbed six degrees, we knew it was going to get hot.

Near evening we started looking for food that we could cook on the stove alone. Not knowing how long the power would be out, we didn't want to open the fridge and let the contents warm up. We're moving to a new house in a month and we've been deliberately trying to use up the food in the pantry, so options were scarce. Kat finally settled on some stovetop stuffing, which actually was really good.

With the sun setting we realized just how under-prepared we were for such an emergency. We only have two flashlights in the house, and one of them had a dead 6v battery (who keeps spare 6vs?). Kat hates candles and had purged many of the ones I had before, but thankfully I found two squirreled away in a cabinet. After a few minutes of that, we decided we needed to get out of the house and see what was going on.

Driving around in a city that is alive without power is a strange thing, with nothing to do, people took to the streets. Our neighborhood was full of people walking or riding bikes, and when we got into the shopping area there were packs of people roaming the sidewalks, the only light for their path coming from the cars on the road and the moon in the sky. Buildings were completely dark in a way that felt totally unnatural. You never really think about just how much light a closed business puts out until it no longer is. Entire shopping centers vanish into the night, only visible when a car headlight reflects off a dead sign.

With the loss of power, all stop lights were running on battery backups and operating in emergency mode. Anyone who actually paid attention during drivers education knows this means it's a four-way stop. Sadly, a lot of drivers in SoCal didn't pay attention, and every major intersection was a nightmare. San Diegans are especially known for being awful with 4-way stops. We decided to make a full loop around Poway, only making right turns to avoid trying to cross major intersections. As we passed the Target shopping center, Kat said she thought she saw some light, so we pulled into the parking lot and found it full of cars! People were streaming in and out of Target and Albertsons, which miraculously still had power.

Shopping during an emergency is very surreal. Only emergency lighting was running, so the store was very dim. Every person we passed in line at the registers had carts full of whatever food they could find. A woman standing behind the registers was directing customers to all the important sections of the store, and informing people of what supplies they still had in stock (flashlights were long gone, but batteries and candles were still available). Thankfully the store still had an active internet connection and was able to run credit cards, otherwise I think people would have been much worse off. We grabbed a few snacks and an extra candle and made our purchases. As we were walking out the security guard was standing outside telling people the store was now closed and they couldn't get in. No refuge here, the supplies have been taken. We got back in our car and headed home.

My laptop was thankfully fully charged; our cell phones, not so much. After several hours of constantly pinging Twitter for updates, we rather quickly depleted our charges. I used our one car charger to give mine enough juice to last through the night, and then forced myself to only use it every half hour. When we got home we broke out our snacks and sat down in front of the glow of my MBP to watch the only video I had on the hard drive… My Little Pony. After a couple of episodes we decided to take a shower (by candle light) and head to bed.

I am not an easy sleeper, the slightest sounds wake me up. To battle this, I sleep with at a minimum of one bedside fan running to produce white-noise and keep airflowing across my face. Without this vital resource, I cannot sleep. Between the ringing in my ears, the sounds of traffic, my wife and dog snoring and the gurgles and pops of my own digestive system I have no choice but to lay there completely wide awake, staring into the darkness. Because of the summer heat, our bedroom is completely sealed up, the window can't even be opened, so the air in the room sits dead. After a few minutes of that I remembered that I had a small battery powered fan in the utility room. I loaded it up with a couple AAs and set it running next to the bed. This gave enough marginal airflow that at least I wasn't sweltering on the sheets, but no where near enough noise to cover up the sounds of the evening. After two hours the batteries died and I didn't feel like putting in new ones.

At 12:30am SDG&E tweeted that power was restored to parts of Poway. An hour and a half later the fans in the room came to life; within moments I was asleep.

I am immensely thankful for modern technology today. If it weren't for my smart phone and Twitter, we would have had no clue what was happening last night or had any hope for the restoration. I have huge respect for both AT&T and SDG&E for their efforts last night in keeping information flowing thru-ought the county; ATT for their quick response to the situation and getting towers back up and running when battery backups started to fail, and SDG&E for their rapid response (they initially thought it would be well into Friday before everything was running again) and their excellent use of social networking to keep the public informed.

Huge thanks to all those men and women who worked tirelessly into the night to restore service to the people of San Diego. I also am immensely thankful to Target and Albertsons for being the only stores in town with the foresight to have backup power so they can continue to serve the community in an emergency.

Went looking for information on this today to link to someone and couldn't find anything recent, so I figured I'd write one up myself. Here's a simple process for getting a 100% legal copy of IE9 running on your mac using disk images provided by Microsoft themselves.

1. Download and install a copy of virtualbox, it's a free virtualization program like VMWare or Parallels. Make sure you have the command line utilities checked in the installer.

2. Download the official Microsoft Application Compatibility Virtual PC Image for IE9. As of this writing the latest versions are as of August 16th, 2011. The IE9 image is a seven part self extracting RAR file. Images are also available for IE7 and IE8. This image contains a fully legal copy of Microsoft Windows 7, licensed for developer debugging use in a virtual machine only.

3. Use unrar (installed via macports or homebrew) or The Unarchiver to extra the multipart archive. This will result in two files: Windows 7.vhd and Windows 7.vmc. You can discard the vmc file.

4. Open the terminal and cd to the directory you extracted the vhd file into. Run the following command:

   VBoxManage clonehd "Windows 7.vhd" Windows_7_IE9.vdi

5. Move the resulting .vdi file into a safe location. By default VirtualBox puts its disk images in a unique folder inside ~/VirtualBox VMs, but I prefer them to be on a separate disk partition.

6. Launch VirtualBox and click the New button on the toolbar (or select New… from the Machine menu). This will launch the new virtual machine wizard. Name the machine however you want and select Windows 7 from the Operating System Version menu.

   

7. VirtualBox will allocate 512MB by default, which in my experience is enough for basic web testing, you may wish to give it more.

   

8. When prompted for the hard disk, choose "Use existing hard disk" and click on the browse icon to the right of the menu. Find the Windows_7_IE9.vdi file that we created in step 4. Click through the remaining dialog panes and finish the wizard.

   
   

9. Due to an incompatibility with VirtualBox and VirtualPC, this disk image will Bluescreen when you attempt to launch it, so there is one more thing that has to be changed to get it working. Select the new virtual machine and click on the Settings button. Switch to the Storage tab. By default VirtualBox places the boot media on the SATA controller; you need to move it to the IDE controller.

   

   Do this by selecting the IDE controller and choosing Add Hard Disk from the plus button menu. Select the .vdi file from the list and click OK. Now remove that same drive from the SATA Controller by selecting it and clicking the minus button. Click OK.

10. Select your newly made Windows 7 virtual machine and click Start.

11. When you get to the windows login screen, choose Administrator. The login password is "Password1"

12. Windows will tell you that the copy you are using is non-genuine. Microsoft does not issue valid keys with these images, as they are intended to be temporary, and their official stance is to just reset the disk image when the trial expires (seriously, it's in that link above).

    

    Click cancel on the activation dialog box so it takes you to the desktop. Double click on the Command Prompt icon and type in the following:

    slmgr –rearm

    This command resets the genuine advantage countdown timer to 30 days so that it will stop bugging you every time you launch it. Unfortunately, Windows Security Essentials will continue to bug you about it, so feel free to disable that. A dialog will popup telling you to restart, but we don't want to do that yet.

13. Press the command key to get Windows to release your mouse, and choose "Install Guest Additions" from the Devices menu in Virtualbox. Windows will popup an AutoPlay confirmation, click "Run VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe". An installer will launch, click through all the dialogs. When Windows Security prompts for permission, click Install.

    

    Finally, when it asks to restart, let it.

14. The final step is optional, and that's to enable to auto-login feature so you don't have to enter the password every time you launch the machine. This article on MSDN will show you how to do that.

Congratulations, you now have a 100% legal copy of IE9 on your Mac. These disk images are valid for 3 months from the date they were made (The August 2011 images expire November 17, 2011). You will need to repeat this process for the new images when they come out.

If you need to configure Windows for any local virtualhosts, the file you need is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (note, you need to be an Administrator to save the file), and the IP to forward to is 10.0.2.2 (which is also localhost).

The August 2011 IE9 disk image also comes preinstalled with Google Chrome, Firefox 4, Adobe Flash 10.2, and a hand-full of other useful development tools.

linxeh: I dont see the point in battling against SVN or similar now git is ubiqutous (and powerful)
deryl: SVN is wanna-be git on drugs
deryl: bad drugs
linxeh: well, it was better than much else at the time
linxeh: at least it supported changesets
FylGood: SVN is kinda like Nethandrahal man, just becoming upright, but definitely lacking in many ways.
chiper: SVN is like the salt & pepper shakers, and git is a full spice rack
chiper: for some people, a little salt is all it needs
ibiwan: so where's CVS and VSS fit into your analogy?
chiper: ibiwan: salt & pepper has to come from somewhere
ibiwan: I think CVS must be a bowl of peppercorns
chiper: indeed
ibiwan: and VSS is a beautiful crystal vial of powdered dog shit
chiper: ibiwan: that costs $50 per gram
FylGood: Next time I'm in a job interview, if they ask me to tell them about my experience with CVS… I'll just say "it's basically a bowl of peppercorns". :p
chiper: haha
ibiwan: and there's only one peppermill for the whole table, and it must be washed out and let air dry between uses
FylGood: ibiwan: and I would say that if two people try to grab the peppermill at the same time…. (you fill in the rest)
ibiwan: FylGood: it explodes and gets pepper in everyone's eyes
ibiwan: in comparison, SVN is downright modern and developer-friendly
FylGood: lol
ibiwan: even the ones who weren't reaching for it
ibiwan: and it's STILL better than VSS

From #macosx@freenode.

Just submitted the following feedback to Apple.

Using the quick lookup feature (three finger tap, or "Lookup" from the contextual menu) in applications that predate Lion results in dictionary popups that cannot be dismissed. The word gains the yellow highlight, the popup appears. Clicking anywhere in the field causes the word to lose highlight, but the popup remains. The only way to dismiss the popup is to close the window.

Certain words appear to be more prone to this than others. I can reproduce it 100% of the time with the spelling "cigaret", or even the word "hello".

Apps I've tried this in and reproduced it: Linkinus, Adium, Transmit, Chocolat, Unison, Twitter

I am unable to reproduce it in any Apple applications (I tried Mail, Stickies, Finder, Safari, Address Book)