A Propos Of Nothing In Particular...

Li'l bit busy this week so rather than fall behind on my non-existent, non-essential posting schedule, here's one of those bits 'n' pieces posts filled with stuff that won't quite stretch to a whole post all its own. I actually look forward to these when I read them elsewhere so I don't know why I (And others.) keep apologizing for them...

Tarisland Closed Beta #2. 

My invite just arrived so I'll be doing that. And there's no NDA, so I'll be posting about it too, I imagine. It comes at a very handy time because I have next week off work and the weather ain't great so chances are I'll be staying in. 

According to the chatty email invite, the test, which begins tomorrow, is set to last "for at least two weeks". I'm glad about that because the single week of CB#1 definitely wasn't long enough and since there's a completely new client and all previous progress was wiped, I'm going to have to start over from the beginning (Or begin again from the start, have it as you will...)

I'm downloading the new client right now. It's quite small for an MMORPG, which I assume means we only get part of the whole thing. I doubt the final version will come in under 20GB, although it would be nice if it did. 

You can't patch up the old one, either. You have to unistall and reinstall so it's just as well they have a big pipe. It's done now and I only set it off just before I began the post.

There are two new classes in the upcoming test, one of which I like the sound of, the other not so much. I might well try the Phantom Necromancer, which Chris Neal at MassivelyOP made sound very appealing: describing it as "a caster that specializes in ranged damage and healing. Both of which appear to be managed with a lantern full of spooky ghosts and moths." 

I really want to kill people with moths. Or heal them. I'm easy either way, just so long as it's moths.

The actual teaser video makes it look less appealingly weird but still worth a go.

I'm a lot less interested in the other new class, the Shadow Swordsman, clearly some variation on the usual rogue/thief/assassin paradigm. Any class that relies heavily on positioning and stealth attacks is too fiddly for my taste. I'm not crazy keen on needing to debuff to get good damage, either. I'd rather just thump people or set them on fire. I'm hella subtle like that.

As well as the classes, new stuff includes "fresh story-driven quests, a new raid - Battle of Ancash, innovative battlefields, Inscribed Stone skill, and an enhanced Crafting skill system". Of that, I imagine I'll see some of the questing and crafting and that'll be it. 

They're already begining to think about getting some money out of the game, even in beta. There's a clever introduction to both the cash shop and the inevitable Battle Pass, common to all games that use the popular no-subscription-needed-but give-us-money-every-month-anyway approach: "In this test, it is our first time to introduce commercial contents into the game, allowing players to make optional in-game purchase based on personal needs." 

Put simply, you can buy stuff in the beta and have your costs refunded after launch in the form of in-game currencies at an advantageous rate. If you spring for a beta Battle Pass, you get the same Battle Pass again, at no additional cost, when the game goes Live.

I will not be bothering with any of that but then I never do. I'm just going to play the game with whatever they give me for free and have fun that way. I certainly did last time. Looking forward to it!

FOMO - Bonus Edition

A few days ago I posted quite enthusiastically about the opportunities offered by EverQuest II's huge Extra Life success. I made some optimistic statements about how much use I was going to make of the massive bonuses to XP and I had plans - which I kept to myself - to do even more.

In the event, I managed to get my Inquisitor/Carpenter to the level cap in both Adventuring and Crafting but it took me waaaaaay longer than I expected. Not because of any deficiency in the additional XP, which was truly huge, but because of the inordinate amount of pre-requisite gearing and general preparation required before I could do pretty much anything.

When I finally go to do the quest hand-ins, I got insane xp for them. It took just two hand-ins to go from 120 to 125 in Carpentry. Getting to the point where I could do the hand-ins, however, felt like it took forever. Still, it's done now. She'll be at the cap for all of a month then I'll have to do it again.

I naively thought I'd have a better experience with Honeychurch, my Fury, who was 91 at the time, or with Mitsu, a level 119 Jeweller. I did not. First, I tried taking the Fury to a level-appropriate zone and questing normally. 

Once again, the xp was fine when I got it but quests take ages. Kill xp was good but even in the 90s you need a lot of it to get anywhere. It has to be quests and quests are fidlle-faddle when all you want to do is ding.

In comparison to regular play the bonuses made a huge difference but it meant I was getting a level in half an hour and I was hoping to get one in five minutes. I tried mentoring down and going to a dungeon but again, while it was fast, it didn't feel fast enough. In the end I made a couple of levels and called it a day.

On the evidence of the Carpenter's post-120 experience, I thought it would be a good idea to finish off Mitsu's Jewelcraft by doing the same questline again. It was fresh in my mind so I thought I'd be able to rip through it in no time. I just needed to get her to 120 because you can't get the introductory quest until then.

What I hadn't reckoned with was getting out of 119. I tried segments of quests from three different expansions and ran into a problem each time. The older ones gave good xp but not crazy good, while the later ones, which might have been amazing at the hand-in, all had multiple steps with no xp at all before you got to the payoff. 

If I'd had the patience to pursue it, I'd have reaped the rewards but I didn't and I didn't. Instead, I looked at what I was doing and decided Mitsu really didn't need to be a max level crafter while her Adventure level was still somewhere in the sixties. The only reason she's a Jeweller in the first place is to make her own Combat Arts and she's good on that for another forty levels.

I also tried doing a couple of at-cap instances with my Berserker to get some benefit from the bonus drops but the problem there was that those drops are already out of date even before the new expansion arrives. I was hoping for a good Mercenary but I wasn't willing to chain-run instances for the chance the rng gods might smile on me so I stopped.

The bonus week ends tomorrow. I don't feel I've done myself justice but at least I made an effort. I'm quite glad it'll be over soon, though. I don't like feeling I ought to be playing a game just because there are bonuses too good to miss.

In Another Life

Tipa, who always has great ideas, had another yesterday. She got CHATGPT4 to look through her Blog Roll and instruct DALL-E to create a clickbait image to use as a thumbnail. The results were superb. 

Mine, which you can see at the head of this post, looks disturbingly close to how I might look, were I forty years younger and a different gender. My initial thought was to steal the image and use it to replace my extremely outdated Blogger avatar, a gnome I used to play back at the dawn of time.

After a moment's thought, however, I decided it might be fun to make my own avatar using the same process. Unfortunately, as I found after some conversations, first with CHATGPT3.5 (The best available free model.) and then with Bard, neither of them have the ability to do what I want.

GPT3.5 can't visit a website and parse the data there solely from being given the URL. Bard says it can but when I gave it the URL of one of my posts it wasn't able to do it because reasons. I cut and pasted the bulk of the post - as much of it as the input field would allow - and had Bard write me an author profile based on that but all it really did was precis the specifics in the post. 

Even that would have been enough for my purposes but when I asked Bard to use the profile to create a prompt I could give to an art AI to make me an avatar for the blog it just mumbled an apology: "That’s not something I’m able to do yet."

Both from what Tipa has already shown and from several YouTube videos I've watched recently suggest, I'm pretty sure GPT4 could do all of what I'm asking. GPT4, however, is not free. 

I'm interested enough to consider paying. I think I'd probably make enough use of it to justify a subscription on the order of what I pay for Amazon Prime or Netflix or even an MMORPG. OpenAI, however, is currently asking $20 a month for the upgraded version and that's about twice what I'm willing to spend at the moment.

In the end, what I did was take the file name of Tipa's picture, which handily turns out to be a long, detailed description, possibly the actual prompt she used, and fed that back to some AIs I do have access to for free via NightCafe. I changed a few things around and tried a couple of the more expensive "Pro" models, using some my handful of trial tokens. 

All the results are here in the post. I like them all. I might use one of these (Do feel free to express a preference in the comments!) or I might keep experimenting. I'd love to see what the AIs would do with some of my Secret World screenshots as a visual key. 

I know one thing for sure, though. The era of the gnome is over.

What Does The Fox Say?

And the whole thing stitched together via YouTube...

Post literally speaks for itself but a few notes:

Astute viewers or, more accurately, listeners will have noticed the voices are different on each of the videos. This is because there are almost two dozen voice actors to choose from and I am fickle. I did explain in one of the sections how it worked but it was fronted by a cartoon fox and failed to generate a valid result. I also forgot to copy the text before I deleted it and then, when I re-wrote it, I couldn't remember if I'd already used the part about the voices in a previous section, so I left it out. Turns out I hadn't. 

I think the last one is the one I'd keep. They all have names but naturally I can't remember which one it was. Sorry, Jane or Amber or Ashley or whoever. Not, I imagine, that those are the actors' real names.

I was also going to add some AI-created music in the background but that, too, came to nothing. I did find a couple of places that made a decent fist of creating something bearable, using the same prompt I used for the image. Unfortunately, if understandably, they all required that I set up an account before I downloaded the results and I just could not be bothered. My tolerance for filling in forms is limited to once every sixty minutes at most.

My original inspiration for doing any of this came from a video called Using AI Text-to-VIDEO Generators (animation and realistic) on a channel called Sharp Startup. It's only seven minutes long and it's an interesting watch. It has links to three websites that have some kind of free trial or service but the only one I've tried so far is the one I used to make the videos above: D-ID. I most likely will be trying the others, along with some more I found elsewhere.

If there was an unlimited, free version of D-ID or something similar, I would be quite keen on using it to create an animated, talking head version of Inventory Full, which I guess I could post on my YouTube channel. Or, indeed, here. Not all the time, of course, but some posts would really suit the format. At the moment, a free service doesn't seem to be a possibility and I'm not likely to start paying to do it but I'm pencilling it in as a possibility. I believe Google are working on something.

You have been warned!

The Very Model Of A Metamodernist Metaverse

It's pretty clear, as we head into 2022, we're already well past the point where the term "Metaverse" has any meaning left. It's not even a buzzword or a meme now. It's just advertising jargon. Metamodernism, however, feels a lot fresher. By some counts it's been around since 1975 but I only heard about it this week.

That's language for you, tricksy, slippery and not to be trusted. No matter whether the words are so new you can't see past the gleam or so overused there's no shine left at all, it's the underlying concepts you need to watch. If you can just split out the hype and the fantasy and concentrate on what's being made, you can see we most probably are at the beginning of a new age, after all.

A new age of what, though? That's the question.

If you've been wondering what Paris Hilton's been doing with herself lately (Believe it or not, that is literally a conversation Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had while we were out walking a week or two back, which may tell you more about our home life than you need to know...) I can tell you. She's been building a Metaverse. 

Okay, she probably hasn't been building it herself. I imagine she has people to do that for her. She's also not creating it from scratch. It's inside Roblox.

Paris World is an island containing, among other things, "a replica of her Beverly Hills mansion and attached dog mansion, as well as a recreation of her neon carnival inspired wedding."  Tell me you don't want to see inside Paris Hilton's dog mansion. 

I don't believe you.

Paris Hilton actually has a surprisingly succinct, clear and, to my mind, realistic idea of what a "Metaverse" means at this point in time: “For me, the metaverse is somewhere that you can do everything you can do in real life in the digital world”, she says and that seems like as good a definition as any I've seen so far.

You can meet people, talk with them, dance with them, play games, watch video, listen to music. You can buy things and sell things and make things. All of those and lots more. What you can't do is download your consciousness or break the laws of physics. So long as people get that straight we're in for a fun ride.

I strongly suspect the kinds of Metaverses we're going to see (And really, shouldn't there be just the one?) are ones like Paris World and the place I spent much of this morning, Korea World. It took me a while to get in but once I was there I had a kind of fun, for a while.

Korea World is "a virtual space prepared by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism's Overseas Culture Promotion Center so that foreigners can experience and communicate Korean culture anytime, anywhere." Kind of like Neriak's Foreign Quarter lets the rest of Norrath experience Teir`Dal  culture in relative comfort, I guess. Maybe not the analogy they were looking for but the first one that popped into my mind when I read that last paragraph back.

If it was accessibilty they were after, I'm not sure they've nailed it yet. You can't just click on the web portal and go to virtual Korea. First you have to download and install an app. It took me a couple of tries to get that to work but I got there eventually. 

You can register at the site but you don't need to and I'm not sure what benefits there would be if you did. Maybe it saves the character you make but since there are hardly any options at character creation and it only takes a few seconds I can't see why you'd bother. 

There are a couple of competitions runnng at the moment, one for screenshots, the other for videos, both of which have some good cash prizes (Well, Amazon cards, anyway, which are as good as cash.) so I imagine you'd have to register to be eligible for those. I might do that at some point. I certainly took enough screenshots although none of them were very "funny". Also, I'd have to make an Instagram account, so probably not.

What I mostly did was wander around, gawp at things, take selfies and press buttons at random. As a virtual recreation of a school trip to an art gallery it was flawless, even down to the annoying kid who keeps following you about, even though keep telling him to get lost.

I think that was some kind of bug or glitch. You can see the kid in some of the screenshots here, a clone of my own avatar, dressed in blue jeans and a KOCIS tee, always a pace behind me, everwhere I go. I finally lost him by ducking in and out of the Conference Room portal. Maybe he's still in there.

Before I got shot of him, the pair of us watched videos by several KPop bands, tried on a number of hats, changed clothes a few times (Tellingly, perhaps, there's no cross-dressing allowed.) and listened to people in Columbia, Canada and the Phillipines telling me what they liked about Korean culture, even as they cheerfully appropriated it. All at the direct invitation of the Korean government, of course, so I guess that's fine.

There's a very great deal of this stuff, all experienced through a highly effective interface that reacts almost instantly when you click on any of the many pictures hanging on the walls.

Here and there are some much larger screens playing video and sound directly into the exhibition space itself. I stood in front of one and watched a band play for a while. I was hoping for a full concert but it turned out to be one song looping over and over. That seemed to be the case for all of the big screen entertainment.

The exhibition space was bustling with avatars like mine, or so I thought at first. After a while, I realised all of them were NPCs. I never saw another living person (You know what I mean.) in the hour or so I was there. There's a chat function that supposedly allows you to talk to both other humans and to NPCs but I couldn't figure out how it worked. That's to say, I could see how to say things but not how to say them to anyone or anything.

There were emoticons aplenty, signifying emotes my avatar could perform but I coudn't get those to work, either. I did eventually stumble on how to move at more than a slow shuffle - hold down shift. These cavils aside, the controls felt quite smooth and pleasant to use and very familiar. They should. The supposed "Metaverse" appears to be built on the Unreal game engine. Windows Defender identifies it as a "3rd Person BP Game Template" published by Epic Games.

It's a bit clunky but as a way of finding out more about Korean culture it's not at all bad. Certainly beats reading the endless news items about KPop and Korean TV on my NME feed or watching random videos on YouTube. My main motivation in installing the app in the first place was in the hope of finding a fairly painless and low-effort way into what's shaping up to be the dominant cultural influence of the next few years. I'm not sure Korea World is quite there yet but it's a start.

It's also a pointer to the kind of thing we're likely to get in the name of the Metaverse over the next few years. Corporations, companies, governments and special interest groups pushing their versions of reality on to us by way of gamelike, interactive experiences in communal, social, virtual spaces. So long as we aren't expecting a lot more and so long as we make sure we stay firmly in control of which experiences we choose to engage with, it could be a lot of fun.

We might even learn something along the way, although I wouldn't count on it. All I learned was that I like wearing animal heads even better than I like wearing hats and Korean male fashions are not what I was expecting. Now that I come to think about it, that's not nothing, is it?

Pictures At An Exhibition: Vanguard

Back around the end of August I happened to spot this short item on Massively OP.  It was a piece about a survey being run by West Virginia University on "Players and Their Avatars".

Over the couple of decades I've been playing MMORPGs I've participated in a few such academic data-gathering exercises, the best-known probably being NIck Yee's long-running series, which eventually evolved into The Quantic Foundry. I've always found filling out surveys both interesting and enjoyable, particularly so when the questions relate to something I find intriguing, making me a naturally self-selecting resource for such research.

I duly followed the links from MassivelyOP and completed the questionnaire. The initial part was an "online survey, where you'll be asked questions about your favorite videogame avatar, your thoughts about it, and your favorite memory of it."

The very premise gave me pause for thought. Over the years I've created and played so many characters. How was I supposed to choose just one?

I could have gone for my first long-running EverQuest character, a female human druid, whose personality was possibly the clsest to my own of any I've ever played. The EQ Gnome Cleric, who I took over at level 12 from Mrs Bhagpuss and played for several years, all the way to the level cap through the Velious and Gates of Discord eras, could have been another.

Then there was my Iksar Necromancer from EQ2. I played her for five years, mostly in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss; or I could have chosen my Ratonga Bruiser from the same period. Currently my two most-played and most closely felt characters would be my Ratonga Berserker in EQ2 and my Asura Elementalist (well, one of my Asura Elementalists...) in Guild Wars 2.

Even my Templar in The Secret World was in with a shout but in the end I was surprised how easy it was to decide on my all-time "favorite".The very first character that came to my mind as soon as I began to think about it was Korky, my Raki Disciple from Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

I've written many times about my love for Vanguard. Had the game been more successful commercially and received the attention and development commercial success would have brought, there's a very good chance I would now think of it as my favorite MMORPG of them all.

Even as it stands, with the official servers long gone dark and the game, when live, having never received a single expansion, Vanguard retains an unshakeable spot in my all-time top five MMORPGs. A good deal of that enduring affection rests with the characters I made and played there. He'd have to stand on a box to do it, but towering head and shoulders above all of them is Korky.

So, I filled out the survey and when it came to the bit where it asked for a short anecdote that illustrated why I'd chosen the particular avatar as my favorite I recounted the familiar story of a bug that recurred in the early days. It seemed entirely appropriate, given Vanguard's reputation as the buggiest triple-A MMORPG ever released.

This particular glitch used to have Mrs Bhagpuss and I in fits of laughter. It also helped establish the personalities of the two characters we played for the life of the game - her Varanjar shaman and my Raki Disciple.

All good shamans have pets. In this case the pet was a wolf named Smiffy. Whether it was some form of lupine/vulpine rivalry or just an overdeveloped protective drive, that bloody wolf hated Korky. There was absolutely nothing in the game's lore or its intended code to support it but every chance it got the wolf would try to sink its fangs into the seat of Korky's leather pants.

In the early days when we didn't have mounts, playing Vanguard involved a lot of running across country. Most of it was accompanied by the snarls and growls of a wolf and the increasingly harried and desperate pleas of a small foxlike fellow to "Call him off!"

The blasted wolf would even sometimes change target in combat and start attacking me instead of the enemy. I can't recall if he did me any damage - Vanguard had no PvP but it did allow dueling so I guess it's possible - but boy, was it distracting.

Eventually that bug, like most of them, got squashed. We rather missed it. By then, though, the relationship between the two characters was well-established. Korky, small, innocent, put-upon, long-suffering; his shaman companion large, bluff, sarcastic, ever-amused at her companion's discomfort.

Having completed the survey for WVU I thought no more about it. I knew there was a potential follow-up, where "100 players will be selected and invited to complete a second online survey in which they'll be asked to tell a more detailed version of their favorite gameplay memory with the avatar, and submit an additional screen-capture of the avatar" but I didn't expect to be called.

In September, however, I received an email asking me if I'd like to participate in part two. Well, of course! I answered the supplementary questions, expanded the anecdote with more detail and appended several pictures of Korky from my not very extensive archives of the period.

I was lucky to find a group shot of Korky, Mrs Bhagpuss's shaman and her wolf. I also included a picture of Korky doing one of his very favorite things - sailing his sloop along the Qa river in Qalia.

In due time, this should all end up as part of an online resource "curated and hosted through the WVU Library web site". According to Dr. Jaime Banks, one of the two academics co-ordinating the process, this is somewhere around half-finished now. I very much look forward to being able to browse that archive and I'll be sure to link it here when it becomes available.

Before that, however, there is a physical exhibition - "a curated collection of multimedia stories to be displayed in print in the WVU Library as part of its Art in the Libraries program". That's in place now and Korky made the cut for the sixteen images included!

Dr. Banks was kind enough to send me an image of the framed version, hanging in the exhibit, of the screenshot showing Korky at the helm of his boat. The exhibition runs until the end of December if anyone's in the area and cares to check it out.

When the closure of Vanguard was announced more than four years ago it seemed not just that the sun was just going down on one of the best MMOs ever made. It felt as if a great work of art was being destroyed and I was losing a cherished friend.

The magnificent work of the Vanguard Emulator team has preserved the art and now the WVU archive ensures my imaginary friend lives on, too. He'll be oblivious to it all, as he always was. Just a little fox trying to do his best in difficult circumstances.

Thanks to Drs Banks and Bowman for giving Korky his little moment in the sun. And to the EMU team for giving him a new home.