What's been going on.

As a part of my effort to update this blog more often, I bring you the following.

What I've Been Playing:
Well, school has started up again. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I've decided to go back to school for my bachelor's degree. Add that to a full-time job, a toddler, and a list of chores and repairs that come with owning my own home, and it's a wonder I have time to play at all.
But this isn't a blog about why I'm not playing, it's about what I am playing. Lately I've been playing mainly Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Sims 3, and Minecraft.
First: Star Wars. Sometime recently I was clued into the problem with shadows in The Old Republic. In case you haven't heard, there is a huge performance hit if you have shadows on. I've heard that having shadows set to high does not have the same issue, but I can't confirm that. If you are experiencing lots of performance issues in Star Wars, make sure your shadows are set to "off". This was such an improvement that I can actually play the game on my laptop, though still only at the lowest settings.
So, I've been playing more Star Wars. My main when I played World of Warcraft was a Paladin tank. I really kinda liked tanking in WoW, though I was better at healing. So, for my first character in Star Wars I decided on a Jedi Knight, figuring I'd probably roll a Consular next. So far the storyline for the Jedi Knight hasn't been anything spectacular, it's nice but just about what I'd expect. I'm sticking to the Light Side, though, and I'm guessing that the story can be a lot different if you chose to focus on the Dark Side. I may chose to visit the Dark Side when I roll that Consular, but I just find it hard to justify a Dark Side healer.
As far as crew skills go, I chose to go with Cybertech, Scavenging, and Slicing. Cybertech allows me to create modifications that can be applied to most equipment that will accept modifications, which makes it kind of all-around useful. Later on I think it will also allow me to create earpieces and maybe some other gear. Cybertech suggests two compatible skills: Scavenging and Underworld Trading. The great thing about Scavenging is that a lot of times I get to loot droids for their spare parts. I decided to go with Slicing over Underworld Trading because it allows me to get cash which can be used to buy anything including the uncommon materials I need for my Cybertech.

Next: The Sims 3. While my previous rant about how Story progression needs to be fixed still stands, the addition of the ability to create a Young Again potion and the ability to give gifts to other sims does mitigate this to some degree. Given these factors, I finally decided to turn aging and story progression on in my game and start watching all of our friends grow old and move away. After all, I can always just add new copies from the tray later, right? We'll see what happens there. So my family is now aging and having kids, but none of that is going very fast. One funny thing, though was that when the first child was born I set the Sim lifespan to Epic, then I noticed that it had been several days and my baby still hadn't turned into a toddler. It turns out that on Epic setting, the baby stage lasts for 32 days. So I changed it back to Long, which reset my existing toddler's age to 1 day while Mom was pregnant with Baby 2, the end result being that Baby 1 is only 3 days older than Baby 2, such is life.

On to Minecraft. As I said in my last post, in Minecraft you have to make your own fun. The good thing about that is that I've been making a lot of it. I decided when I started that I wanted to do everything legitimately. The world is infinite, so if I run out of diamonds, I'll just have to go find some rather than hacking my save file or getting a mod that will generate whatever I want. I've also been looking at a lot of the machines that people have been building and I've started making some of my own. My current project is a monster spawner and killer that is taking a long time because I have to light up all of the places a monster could spawn to ensure they spawn in my machine. I'm hoping that my design will actually be able to trap slimes, but we'll have to see about that.

That's pretty much what's been going on the past week. I'm hoping to play some more Savage Worlds soon, so I can tell you all how that's going. If anybody wants to say Hi on Star Wars, I'm on the Hedarr Soongh server and my main is Haledar.

Good Gaming.