Probably the best feature of Firefox 4.0 beta

Resizable text boxes. You don’t notice it until you really need it. Thanks FF developers for finally making notepad and copy/paste obsolete.

Starcraft 2 closed beta

Yes, I was invited to Starcraft II closed beta.

 

I won’t bore you with stuff you can read on other websites but here are some observations of mine.

Battle.net

The battle.net system of screens/windows is a mess. Navigating them is awkward and sometimes you don’t know the difference between buttons and some design elements. You can only find out if something is a button (or what the button does) if you hover over it. Next, the colors are very shallow so you can see gradient bands all over the place which looks very ugly. Then the layout (with regards to resolution) just doesn’t feel right at all. Elements are just thrown all over the place. The only good thing I saw was integrated chat and an easy way to add players/AI when creating a game.

Gameplay

It has a real Starcraft 1 feel. It is fast and mostly responsive. Everything is very similar but this time you can select as many units as you wish;)

But there are some serious downsides too. There is just too much of micromanagement. There are a lot of units which have use/spell mechanic and none of those can be selected for autocasting. Just terran’s medivac can heal other units automatically. Then some relatively simple actions require too much clicking and/or targeting. It is just clicking hell. Build trees are a mess too. 

There are a lot of units. It is a rock-scissors-paper2-rock2-scissors2-paper2-… game. So you have unit x which is better than enemies unit y etc. In other words you have to spy all the time what the enemy is doing and building counter units. This was always the way with starcraft 1 but now it is even more slanted in that direction. My general complaint is that there are too many of those units like “can only attack other ground units” or “can only attack air units” etc.

Graphics and sound

Graphics are quite good and unit animations are excellent. Explosions are excellent and everything has superbly fluid feel. Of course that there are some bugs here and there, but I’m confident they will be solved later. One substantial criticism is that the game has about the same scale as the original game. That means you have about the same view of the playing field, the UI is about the same size etc. Just the resolution is much better. I would have hoped for smaller UI and larger playing field though.

If something really disappointed me, that must be music and voice acting. Music is a rehash of original starcraft music, but that wouldn’t be bad in itself (as sc1 music was absolutely fantastic and memorable), but this version was done badly. I’m no music expert but I can recognize good music from bad one. The title music is bad, the terran music is some country music without vocals (original music was just fantastic), and I just forgot what protoss and zerg have. Yes, it was that memorable. Voice acting is, well, bad. A lot of voices just sound awkward and are rotated around the units when comparing them to sc1 so at least now they sound a little out of place. Sound effects are good as you might expect.

Closing remarks

The thing that is bothering me is that you can’t play offline (aside from missing LAN mode). I mean, even if you play against AI players, if you get disconnected from the internet, you will be kicked from your game too. That is DRM at its worst. Of course, if you get disconnected in the middle of any other type of game you will get kicked too.

I’m confident that the game will sell in droves but when looking into the future I’m not quite certain what will expansions bring. Of course they will bring more units and more single player content, but even with this count of units and absolute horror that is micromanagement now the gap between a causal and a pro player is absolutely huge. I just hope that the matchmaking system will be better than SC or W3 had (they were completely broken). I’ll post some screenshots and videos as soon as I get some good ones.

 

Windows 7 beta build 7068 x64 impressions

I won’t bother you or myself with detailed descriptions of this build (which you can get on other sites anyway) but I am going to share things I did notice.

1. Team Fortress 2 runs like Usain Bolt, that means fast and smooth! Even faster than my Windows XP. I kid you not. On xp when I enabled Multicore Rendering even though I did not get bigger slowdowns, there was a constant choppiness, the game wasn’t smooth at all. But with this build the difference is very tangible and welcomed. (Just for your information I play at 1920x1200). Another problem which vista x64 and previous build had was hl2.exe crash when exiting the game. That was solved by Valve in some recent patch, it wasn’t microsoft’s fault.

2. That file permission bug I was talking about is still present! That bug really showed up much sooner than expected and that means yesterday (same as install day) all the files in my documents folder were locked (at least there is a nice little icon with a lock so you know they are locked) so I couldn’t view or edit them. But I did manage to fix the problem, more precisely, the symptoms, rather then the cause. But as I can treat the symptoms now, I’m not that much worried because I certainly can’t fix the cause (only microsoft can). So enough with the medical claptrap and onto the solution itself.

Solution to the file permissions problem in windows 7 beta 7068 x64:

1. Download the takeownership.zip from blogsdna.com article. The file included two .reg files and one of them adds Take Ownership to the right mouse click as seen below. You can download those two files individually here and here. You need this reg hack because without it you have to take permission for file after file manually which is extremely inconvenient.

2. Select the folder where you have the locked files and Take Ownership.

3. Go into “Advanced Security Setting for $yourfolder” [1]. Add yourself and administrators. Be very careful to absolutely click on the “Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object”. I didn’t click on that checkbox the first few times so it didn’t work for the files in the folder.

4. There is no step 4.

[1] To get there you have to go to folder properties->security->advanced->change permissions.

As you can see, I’m not complaining about anything else at this time, so stay tuned because something will probably come up.

If you need any help with the file permissions or anything else, be free to leave a comment.

 

Windows 7 beta build 7000 – updated impressions and file permissions bug

As you may know, I had bought additional 2GB of RAM for my desktop computer so I decided to give a Windows 7 beta x64 a spin.

It all went very smoothly, and I had no problems at all. To my great surprise Team Fortress 2 did run acceptably good, which means it was better than vista/vista x64. So all was well and good for the next 4 days.

So I wouldn’t be writing this if all was well isn’t it?

You are right of course because yesterday I was stunned when I discovered that iTunes wouldn’t play songs. This was very fishy so I immediately copied my 70GB of iTunes managed songs on another backup drive. I cannot recall the exact sequence anymore because I was really upset yesterday so I’m just going to tell you what were the problems yesterday and what I did to solve them.

Problem 1: iTunes couldn’t play music from iTunes folder (70ish GB of music and podcasts)

Solution: Immediately copied the folder to another drive.

Later problem 1a: I couldn’t access iTunes folder at all (after xp reinstall)! Couldn’t unlock the folder (with Unlocker), couldn’t delete it, nothing.

Solution: formatted the partition of the hard disk with the itunes folder. Copied the folder from the backup disk.

Problem 2: Couldn’t read any document from My Documents. I could add new documents in the folder.

Solution/description: File/folder permissions were set up ok. Nor did I change something before so the problem manifested just now. Strange thing was that when I copied some file on to another folder I could read it without problems. I managed to copy some of the more recent documents to another folder for backup but this isn’t really a solution. This isn’t really a small problem, it is a huge one, and I was constantly afraid that the “iTunes problem” wouldn’t happen to My Documents folder as well. So I didn’t want to leave anything to bugs of some programmers, so I reinstalled Windows xp from ghosted image 5 days ago. In xp my documents seems to be intact, which means everything is ok with it. But iTunes folder afterwards was completely unreadable. So I reformatted the partition as described in the previous solution.

But this could be all forgotten as a showstopper beta bug, and I was thinking that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. The following morning (today) the very similar thing happened on my msi wind which is running windows 7 beta 7000 too (but 32bit version). Problem with my documents folder on the Wind I solved quite more easily with taking ownership, and giving myself permissions (didn’t work on my desktop computer as there everything was (re)configured correctly). I thought that was the end of the problem (as I really didn’t want to reinstall xp, as Windows 7 was working pretty much flawlessly (until today). But I realized that the My Documents problem was only a part of the a larger problem. I went to this site’s blogger dashboard and there I was greeted with the note that I need to set my browser to accept cookies (because the site failed to write one to my hard drive). As I never, ever disabled cookies on this computer I immediately figured that this was the same problem with file permissions as the problems I mentioned previously. As I have no intention to hunt down and try to get back permissions on random occasions, I decided to reinstall xp on wind.

This really is a showstopper bug because I’m always ready to accept some rough edges and beta bugs, but when you are actually afraid for the existence your own files/folders, I had no doubt in my mind to reinstall windows xp (which is saying a lot, so to be short yes, I do think that Windows 7 will be a replacement to windows xp worth installing and using). There is even some irony in this too, because I always considered msi wind for experimentation with other operating systems, but I just cannot pass over the security of my own files on my own hard drive(s).

Until they fix this problem, I’m not going back to windows 7 beta.

Finally, I have provided a file and a web page which is generated by the extremely cool Problem Steps Recorder program which is included in Win7 (I’m hoping in all versions). The mht file (compressed as zip) opens only in Internet Explorer and Word but I’ve saved the web page opened in IE as a normal html page so you can see it by following this link. Be warned though that the IE version (mht file) looks much nicer, but if you avoid IE at all costs you can see the (poorly) saved html page. The linked page/mht file is going to demonstrate you in detail one instance of the larger problem with write permissions. 

PS: There is ongoing (?) discussion on two forums concerning the problems I mentioned in this post. Seems too me that they are just instances of the large problem, even though on the forums they treat it as separate issues, and some even say it is the problem only with x64 version of Win7 which is not a truth at all.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t720870.html

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=720922&st=0&gopid=590406834&#entry590406834