Slashdot Mirror

Bruha writes "Over at Rubies of Eventide Warcry it has been announced that the fantasy-based PC MMO Rubies of Eventide will be shutting down operations in December unless they can find some way to pay the bills. The owner of the company sent out an announcement where he said those paid up to that point will be receiving refunds and pointed out that they just did not have enough players anymore to continue: 'Our customer base continues to decline; as of yesterday we had only 806 paying customers (we lost another 41 over the weekend).'" Are there just too many MMOs out there, thus spreading players too thin, or are these problems down to the state of this particular game?

Bruha writes "Over at Rubies of Eventide Warcry it has been announced that the fantasy-based PC MMO Rubies of Eventide will be shutting down operations in December unless they can find some way to pay the bills. The owner of the company sent out an announcement where he said those paid up to that point will be receiving refunds and pointed out that they just did not have enough players anymore to continue: 'Our customer base continues to decline; as of yesterday we had only 806 paying customers (we lost another 41 over the weekend).'" Are there just too many MMOs out there, thus spreading players too thin, or are these problems down to the state of this particular game?

Bruha writes "Over at Rubies of Eventide Warcry it has been announced that the fantasy-based PC MMO Rubies of Eventide will be shutting down operations in December unless they can find some way to pay the bills. The owner of the company sent out an announcement where he said those paid up to that point will be receiving refunds and pointed out that they just did not have enough players anymore to continue: 'Our customer base continues to decline; as of yesterday we had only 806 paying customers (we lost another 41 over the weekend).'" Are there just too many MMOs out there, thus spreading players too thin, or are these problems down to the state of this particular game?

Thanks to Warcry for their discussion with a number of female MMOG developers, asking whether "the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths... is that they were designed, built, and maintained by men." Of the respondents, Judith at Turbine Entertainment points out that "an audience that skews towards immature males will very likely have exaggeratedly female avatars for them to play with", and Srand at Turbine doesn't see any particular male-patterned design trap, suggesting: "the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths... is that they were designed, built, and maintained by people. And people, as the mantra goes, are stupid."

tvalley000 writes "Warcry has just finished up a 3 part interview series with Brian Green, CEO of Near Death Studios and Lead Developer for Meridian 59, potentially the oldest commercial MMOG still running today. You can catch the first part here, the second part here, and the third part here. Brian talks about the PC MMOG genre, where he came from, and how the game has weathered the storm of nearly a decade in development and production."

tvalley000 writes "Warcry has just finished up a 3 part interview series with Brian Green, CEO of Near Death Studios and Lead Developer for Meridian 59, potentially the oldest commercial MMOG still running today. You can catch the first part here, the second part here, and the third part here. Brian talks about the PC MMOG genre, where he came from, and how the game has weathered the storm of nearly a decade in development and production."

tvalley000 writes "Warcry has just finished up a 3 part interview series with Brian Green, CEO of Near Death Studios and Lead Developer for Meridian 59, potentially the oldest commercial MMOG still running today. You can catch the first part here, the second part here, and the third part here. Brian talks about the PC MMOG genre, where he came from, and how the game has weathered the storm of nearly a decade in development and production."

tvalley000 writes "Warcry has just finished up a 3 part interview series with Brian Green, CEO of Near Death Studios and Lead Developer for Meridian 59, potentially the oldest commercial MMOG still running today. You can catch the first part here, the second part here, and the third part here. Brian talks about the PC MMOG genre, where he came from, and how the game has weathered the storm of nearly a decade in development and production."

Bruha writes "Dungeons and Dragons Warcry has posted its first interview with Turbine Entertainment's development team for Dungeons and Dragons Online, an upcoming MMORPG based on the famous role playing game. Many subjects are covered, including what rulesets will be applied to the game at release." It's a good look at the conversion process a game undergoes when taken from the tabletop and moved to PC.

Bruha writes "Dungeons and Dragons Warcry has posted its first interview with Turbine Entertainment's development team for Dungeons and Dragons Online, an upcoming MMORPG based on the famous role playing game. Many subjects are covered, including what rulesets will be applied to the game at release." It's a good look at the conversion process a game undergoes when taken from the tabletop and moved to PC.

Bruha writes "Dungeons and Dragons Warcry has posted its first interview with Turbine Entertainment's development team for Dungeons and Dragons Online, an upcoming MMORPG based on the famous role playing game. Many subjects are covered, including what rulesets will be applied to the game at release." It's a good look at the conversion process a game undergoes when taken from the tabletop and moved to PC.

An anonymous reader writes "Now that Sony has restricted their Star Wars Galaxies forums to players only, it is unlikely that any non-players would know about the major problems happening with this game. The largest patch in several months was planned for release yesterday. A scheduled 4 hour downtime to install the patch turned into a 16+ hour downtime for most players, sparking a huge outrage in the SWG community. Sony's forums quickly became overloaded, and instead of responding to issues, the moderators went to work deleting as many complaint posts as they could. To make matters worse, once the servers did come back online, it seems that the patch has caused more problems than it has solved." Are complaints about SWG down to a vocal (unrepresentative?) minority, or is there a more general level of dissatisfaction with the game?

Tark asks: "I have been tasked with creating a reliable, portable 802.11b signal strength indicator. I have looked over various PDA's, and have narrowed it down to two: the Sharp's Zaurus 5500 Linux PDA, and the HP iPAQ 2215 Pocket PC. I have chosen these due to the fact they both support cf and sd slots. Which of these 2 PDA's will provide a reliable solution for detecting an 802.11b signal, and which wi-fi card should I use with the PDA? Also, is there a CompactFlash wi-fi card that supports a external antenna connection?"

Tark writes "Over at Warcry.com, there's a new column from Warthog discussing his post-launch impressions of the PC MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, a month after official release date." This opinion piece is from the writer whose entertaining review we featured just after game launch, and it's interesting to see how his opinions have changed over time - he still says SWG lacks the "Crushbone Factor", referencing a particular area of Everquest which "..had quests... unique monsters... cool, level appropriate loot drops... [and] personality."

Tark writes "Over at Warcry.com, there's a new column from Warthog discussing his post-launch impressions of the PC MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, a month after official release date." This opinion piece is from the writer whose entertaining review we featured just after game launch, and it's interesting to see how his opinions have changed over time - he still says SWG lacks the "Crushbone Factor", referencing a particular area of Everquest which "..had quests... unique monsters... cool, level appropriate loot drops... [and] personality."

DCowern writes "Mandrake today announced 9.2 beta 1 of their distribution. More interestingly, Mandrake has included a test version of kernel 2.6 in cooker (their development version). It's dated 27 July so it should be on all the cooker mirrors in the RPM2 directory by now. If you can't find it on your favorite mirror, it's definitely on ftp.sunet.se." Better yet, Bruha points to BitTorrent files for the 1st 2nd, and 3rd ISOs, and a link to the Mandrake 9.2 wiki, writing "Note that the beta1 installation uses the same kernel as 9.1 did, so if you had problems installing 9.1, you may want to wait for beta2 (which will use an updated kernel)."

Bruha writes "It appears that Charter Communications cable division is in the first phase of rolling out a new home media center-style cable box. The article on CNN describes the box with a 80 Gig hard drive, dual tuners (With HDTV), DVD, and WiFi networking capability to allow music to be transferred to the unit along with pictures from your PC. Copyright protection prevents recordings from being copied to the PC, and Charter has ordered 100,000 of these boxes." We covered a preliminary announcement of this box, which uses the Linux-based Moxi software, last year.

Tark writes "Want the inside scoop of what SWG is like? Well, Warthog has written a review for all of you, entitled 'Warrior, Brawler, Hairdresser' with his insights on the game. Sort of. Let's just say you won't find a review anything like this one anywhere else."

Tark writes "Want the inside scoop of what SWG is like? Well, Warthog has written a review for all of you, entitled 'Warrior, Brawler, Hairdresser' with his insights on the game. Sort of. Let's just say you won't find a review anything like this one anywhere else."

Thanks to several readers for pointing out that, according to a post on the official Star Wars Galaxies messageboards, the NDA has been lifted, so Beta testers are free to talk about their experiences playing this PC MMORPG, which ships on June 26th. Naturally, the official messageboards are filling up with many and varied viewpoints, and sites such as SWG Warcry, SWG Vault, and many other fan sites are posting a multitude of screenshots and opinions of this much anticipated title.

Bruha writes "Lewt over at Warcry News Network has written his review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's."

poop writes "Most true Unix geeks will recognize just how nice LPD is as a distributed queueing mechanism for managing all jobs sent to the printer. But, what most people don't realize is that LPD can be used for other things too. In fact, it can be viewed as a general queueing mechanism with a few added bells and whistles for printers. So let's examine a more interesting use of LPD, an engine for distributed spooling of MP3s." Bruha points out this mirror.

poop writes "Most true Unix geeks will recognize just how nice LPD is as a distributed queueing mechanism for managing all jobs sent to the printer. But, what most people don't realize is that LPD can be used for other things too. In fact, it can be viewed as a general queueing mechanism with a few added bells and whistles for printers. So let's examine a more interesting use of LPD, an engine for distributed spooling of MP3s." Bruha points out this mirror.

Bruha writes "This story from Linux Online Gaming points out that ThinkTanks, a 3D tank combat game, is now available for Linux. It can be bought here, and a demo is available. This has to be one of the most entertaining games I've played on Linux in a long time." The site also has a Mac version available, with the developers telling us the Windows version should be out before the end of the week, and this looks like a very neat use of the GarageGames Torque engine to create a good-looking, playable independent game on multiple platforms.