Vanu Rangers

I'm back at it again, making a huge and complicated mission for ArmA 2. I've waited for the ACE2 Total Conversion for ArmA 2 to settle out and get most of their intended content in.

I've been spending the past week grinding standing with an NPC corporation so I can refine with zero taxes. It's driving me nuts how slow it is going! I started at 0.0 standing and now I'm at 0.37 standing with the corporation. It doesn't help that the lowest agent I can use is a -17 quality agent and the next one I can use is a 15 quality agent... meaning I'll need roughly 0.75 faction before that better agent starts giving me missions without talking dirty to me.

First and foremost, I added a content tagging feature to the website to make it easy to categorize blog entries, stories, pages, and polls. You can freeform enter tags that describe whatever it is that you are writing about. With this blog entry, I'm writing about the Website and Eve Online, so I added those two items, with a comma seperating them, to the Tags box. Easy as pie, and when you enter something, it will give you suggestions, too! It's GED friendly!

I've been mining in Eve Online and hauling in a minor role for more than a month now. While this afforded me plenty of idle time that I spent reading up on the game while I waited for my mining lasers to cut up a rock or autopilot to guide me through many systems to drop off some items on a courier contract, it also gave me time to train on the base and core skills that make the difference between a new pilot and a better pilot.

I participated in my first organized mining operation in Eve Online last week. It was a fairly large turnout. We pulled more than 2 million cubic meters of ore from 3 different asteriod fields.

We used two ORCAs for ore deposits. One stayed in the asteriod field and all of the miners put their ore into the corporate hangar and the other ferried the ore from the main ORCA to the nearby station.

Here are some images from the event.

I recently purchased an Osprey Cruiser. It has 3 turret slots and a drone bay that allows for four mining drones.

I've adopted the "jetcan" technique. (See: http://www.eve-wiki.net/index.php?title=Haladas_Mining_Guide#The_Basic_M...)

Basically I jettison what I mine into space which goes into a container that I can rename and add more ore to. Once this is full (or ~90 minutes is up) I return to the station I'm in and hop in my small freighter and retrieve the jettison cans.

I found a handy document that gives an indepth look into mining ore in Eve Online as well as how to do it.

If you are interested into advanced mining at all, make sure you read this.

And by "early", I mean 2:48 PM local time - I just woke up.

Many guys here play Battlefield Bad Company 2 on their PC and recently a patch was released for it. However, it requires each computer to download the patch using the lovely patching platform. Great idea in the ease of simplicity, not a great idea when you share a slow satellite link for an internet connection and when the patcher disconnects and restarts the download completely. An issue that is further complicated by having several computers trying to download the patch all at the same time. I looked everywhere for a manual download the patch and I have found none. I'm in the process of writing EA to see what they can do for us here. HALP US JOHN KARY WE R STUK HEAR IN IRAK!

I finished downloading Goldeneye: Source and I hastily installed it, giddy as a child, only to realize that I need the Source SDK installed. 2.2 GB of SDK... So that's downloading now. It's going to take a while, but at least it'll be a stable transfer. Hopefully I'll be up and running for some Goldeneye action in the next few days.

Between waiting for a response from EA and the Source SDK downloading, it looks like I have plenty of time to devote to Eve Online! Yippee!

I've been playing Eve Online for about 24 hours now. Not nonstop.

I'm starting to really get into it. It reminds me of Freelancer, except it is what Freelancer should have been.

I'm playing now as a miner - mining ore and selling it to the local economy. I'm working on training up various skills, mostly those that focus in mining, but not yet. I'm working on leveling up three learning skills in a strategy that will decrease the time it takes for my character to learn skills. I'm leveling up Learning, Instant Recall, and Analytical Mind to level 3 for now which should give me a pretty immediate boost in skill learning speed.

I plan to use this time to amass a wealth to put back into a personal purchase of heavy duty mining equipment and I plan to devote my time to mining medium-demand ore to amass a wealth to fund future endevours and perhaps fund a corporation. Plus, if we are going to take Dust 514 by storm, we'll need a nice bank account in the Eve Online universe to springboard it at the get-go.

I scored May's issue of PC Gamer Magazine. I've been out of the loop for a while now.

I read a few things about a game called Sins of a Solar Empire, which sounds like a mouthful but in all honesty, it seems like it is the space RTS that Spore's space age tried to be or what I felt it should have been.

I'm working now to line up a digital download of the game, or at the very least a demo.

Also, Goldeneye: Source. Most of us here probably all loved the crap out of Goldeneye on the N64, now someone has brought it back to life, on the PC, and internet multiplayer compatible. It's not some hacked up "mod" so much as it is an exact-to-the-millimeter port onto the Source engine. I've read some exciting things about it and I look forward to giving it a spin. Hopefully I can get a few guys around here to play it with me.

Links
Sins of a Solar Empire - Official Website
Goldeneye Source - Official Website