Black Tree Gaming

I’ve had quite a few emails from folks in the Elder Scrolls community who have asked me whether I’ve thought about making another Nexus site, normally in relation to Fallout 3. I’m willing to admit that the thought had crossed my mind pursuant to a number of different factors.

Most noteably, and also most hindering, is the release of an SDK (aka Construction Set) for the game that Bethesda have refused to comment on. To me the idea of Bethesda not releasing an SDK with the game would be utterly perplexing, but it’s important we don’t take for granted the awesomeness of the two Construction Sets that Bethesda have released for Morrowind and Oblivion respectively. Irrespective of the (what I’d call) selfish whines of many community members that complained about a dumbed down Oblivion Construction Set, these two pieces of kit are still amazing pieces of software blasting the two games from 30 - 50 hour games to 200+ hour games. Isn’t sensationalism great?

Almost just as important, however, is Bethesda’s awesome decision to have the SDK’s ready for release day. In my personal opinion there are many game communities out there (hello Dark Messiah) that could have been saved had an SDK been released soon enough. Instead many developers seem to play down the impact SDK’s seem to have on the popularity of their games and make them a side project for future release. Unfortunately many modern releases seem to be as bug ridden as English hospitals so the SDK release gets thrown further into the future as the entire development team focuses on patching the game up to acceptable standards. Almost ironically, if the SDK is done right, the community itself can often come up with unofficial fixes for many “show-stopper” bugs in games that cause people to quit, uninstall the game and hold illwill against the developer in question from then on.

So with that out the way I’ll say that if Bethesda announce Fallout 3 will contain a Construction Set-esque application, I could see a Fallout 3 Nexus site cropping up at release. However, at this time I cannot foresee launching a general news and information site for the game. There are already a few sites, like NMA, that do this very well, and why try and compete with them and attempt to split the community in this area? I like to think my skill lies in coding these behind the scenes systems that keep the site ticking and the people happy, but I’m not all to good at the real meat and veg of these great sites, like article writing and news posting.

This week I updated the file uploader on TESNexus to give a real-time representation of the upload progress on the site. Since many files on the site are 30MB+, and the upload limit has just been upped to 300MB, it made sense to provide users of the site with a system that lets them know how fast their upload is going and how much has been uploading so far. Getting this system to work was not without its share of issues, however, and I thought I’d write this article to help out those people that may be in a similar situation to me.

I was looking for a PHP uploading system that provided a real-time representation of the upload process that would easily fit into my current upload system. The system needed to be able to change the filename of the file being uploaded into the syntax I use on the site. If the file on the user’s system is called “testfile.zip” the system had to be able to change the name of the file to the site’s syntax, which is <name>-<fileid>.<ext>. Once the file was uploaded it needed to return the filesize and new filename of the file as variables so they could be easily added into a MySQL table for files.

Many of the upload progress scripts on the internet are currently written in javascript and perl using AJAX or iframes to return the real-time progress of the upload. I’ve never written in perl and tried to avoid it as much as possible. At this point I came across What’s new in PHP V5.2, Part 5: Tracking file upload progress, an article on the IBM site that provides a step-by-step run through of a simple PHP upload progress system. No perl. The code is extremely simple to follow, edit, adapt and manipulate to your own needs, and the site also provides a handy zip with all the necessary files ready for instant uploading and testing.

This script requires PHP 5.2 and a php “hook” known as Alternative PHP Cache (APC) to work. Before starting I was running PHP 4.4.x, so first things first I had to update to PHP 5.2. This was particularly easy for me; I control and maintain the server the TESNexus site is served from, and there are no other sites on the server that would be affected by the change from PHP 4.4.x to PHP 5.2. Similarly, TESNexus is a completely custom-coded PHP site and doesn’t make use of any proprietary off-the-shelf scripts or programs that might be affected by the change. So that was easy. Next comes the installation of the APC hook. I found a handy article that explained how to install APC via SSH. This was the easy part and was done in a few seconds. Next I had to add “apc.rfc1867 = on” to the server php.ini file. Incase you’re a bit of a rookie and don’t know what php.ini file your server is using you can find out easily by uploading a test file to your server with the following PHP code in:


<?
phpinfo();
?>


The line can be added anywhere in your config. Unfortunately this didn’t seem to work. The script didn’t work and there was no recognition of the addition of the apc.rfc1867 hook being enabled in my phpinfo page. What’s worse is I had no idea whether it was the script or the server and I had no idea whether my phpinfo page was meant to recognise the addition of the apc.rfc1867 or not. Now that I’ve got it all sorted I can tell you that YES, if the apc.rfc1867 hook is enabled then it shall say so under the “APC” module area of your phpinfo page.

After searching for possible solutions to the problem I came across a forum discussion that mentioned that APC will not work if you have PHPSuExec enabled. So I went into my WHM and checked out my SuExec settings and, sure enough, PHPSuExec was turned on. So I turned it off. The script still did not work. After more exhaustive google searching I finally stumbled upon another user suggesting people turn off Zend Optimizer and see if that works. I had no idea whether I had Zend Optimizer installed/enabled or not, but added the line “zend_optimizer.enable_loader = 0″ to the top of my php.ini file none-the-less. Success! The apc.rfc1867 was installed and recognised in my phpinfo page and, as a happy ending to the story, the script worked and I was able to adapt it and modify it to fit my exact needs. User feedback has been positive and I’m sure the file uploaders now appreciate the new functionality on the site.

Update: Turns out that the upload_ session cache function for file uploads in APC does NOT work with modsecurity installed either. So now make sure that you do not have PHPSuExec turned on, make sure Zend Optimizer is disabled, and remove modsecurity from your system!

Editor’s comments: some people, mostly Americans not used to my personal flavour of humour, have taken personal offense to this article. The idea when reading is that, with most blog posts (and especially mine) you take the article with a big pinch of salt. All is not as it seems..

Lets not beat around the bush on this one; if you’re one of those people who sings the praises of AdBlock Plus, the plugin for FireFox that allows users to broadly disable advertising on all the websites they visit, then you’re a filthy scum bag. But we’re all filthy scum bags really. Only the other day I was bored in my Marketing lecture and managed to amuse myself by flicking bogies at a nearby sloan girl (the skill is aiming for those girls that have that deliberate “out of bed” frizzy style hair that just screams “define me”). But still, if you use AdBlock Plus, you’re scum.

I’ve had pretty hard-line views on the subject for quite some time now. As the owner of TESNexus, a popular video game site that is very resource and bandwidth intensive, I began taking personal offense to the members of the site forums who would openly suggest using AdBlock Plus, or similar applications, to circumvent the advertising on the site. As offenses go, I’d say it’s up there with those gimps who work behind the tills in nightclubs who think, just because you’ve drunk too much, you can’t count your change.

I’m willing to be realistic about this; I can see certain uses for an ad blocker. One of those uses doesn’t include financially raping those webmasters who run an honest resource for community members with good quality advertising. In the interest of keeping the peace, what I advocate is a more subjective use of adblock programs, rather than a “fuck them all” approach. These programs allow users to specify whether all ads are blocked, or just ads on specific sites. So here’s a clue, why not block sites that you subjectively view are taking the piss when it comes to advertising? I’m sure we’ve all been to those sites that manage to trigger massive brain hemorrhages with their epileptic flashing colours, ads that scream out in some tard-tastic yank accent that you’ve won a free iPod or ads that bounce around the screen, and even when you click that tiny little “x” in the corner to close the ad it seems to think you’re interested in what they’re selling. OK, that’s lame, and no one wants to experience that, so at this point, why not block the ads for this particular site? Then again, the only sites that do that these days are porn sites, or sites with nil content, so you’ve got to start questioning your own browsing habits if you’re experiencing this shit regularly.

If you’re one of those Adblock users who has this retarded idea that advertising has no effect on them and turning off the ads is perfectly acceptable, I’m going to be blunt: you’re an idiot, and you’re wrong. Use the internet or go do some psychology night classes. Irrespective of whether you think you pay attention to advertising or not, the whole point of it being there is to provide revenue to the webmaster, revenue used to help pay for the site you are using. There are plenty of blog articles and internet bitch fights on the net about this shit that normally revolve around some headline grabbing, middle-aged codpiece referencing the concept of adblocking = theft, and I’m not going to do it here (you dirty thieving shits). Instead I’m going to take the high-ground and avoid all the name calling and hype phrases and get to the point: using ad blockers in your browser is your prerogative, in the same way that downloading the latest episode of Lost to satisfy your bleak concept of imagination via bittorrent is also your prerogative. Just don’t start whining like a bitch when the original sites you use start limiting your bandwidth, or doing similar things to screw you back.

I’ve been toying with the idea of limiting the download speed of users on TESNexus who are using adblocking programs. Rather than completely screwing them over by blocking them completely, or doing something ridiculously thickwitted, I’ll continue to provide the site for the entire community, including the dickheads and thick shits who blanket block all advertisements on all sites irrespective of circumstance, but simply limit the download speed for files to something rather small, say, 20kb/sec. No problem for those hill-billies still on dial-up, but those guys are so backwards already that I’m sure any reputable advertisers wouldn’t want their interest anyway (yes, haha, except broadband ISPs).

I’m guessing that at least 5 million work hours are wasted every day when bloggers mentally strain themselves during working hours trying to come up with some witty but ultimately lame title for their blog article. I’ve decided against attempting this popular blogger past-time this evening in the interests of haste: it’s important the message gets out; Hellgate: London is shit, and you shouldn’t buy it.

As an avid Diablo and Diablo 2 lover I loosely followed the progress of Hellgate: London. For those in the dark on the game (go back to CSS and stop reading now) it received quite a large amount of hype (see: PR bullshitting) over the fact some of the developers were in the Diablo 2 development team. As far as I know

So shit I googled this image to prevent having to play the game again

(don’t quote me), upon leaving Blizzard these developers setup Flagship Studios and set about attempting to make Diablo 3 a totally new and original Action RPG. The result is quite shocking.

To save you all a lot of hassle I’m going to sum the game up in a short sentence. The game is bland, boring, dull, lower than average, and, worst of all, it’s taken the things that make MMORPGs shit, grinding and repetitive questing, and added it to the Action RPG genre. Way to fucking go, Flagship Studios. Top that with probably the most ridiculous subscription system I’ve ever seen in a game and you’re on to a Douche Award winner.

Now, if the ramblings of some random nerd on the internet haven’t swayed you from parting with £30 (or the local equivalent) then you can read my further banal twittering on the subject.

Bland
Flagship Studios took a system that worked in Diablo 2, randomly generated maps, and managed to make it shit. The concept is sound; by never playing the same map twice the replayability of the game is extended. Unfortunately I’ve played the game for coming on 7 hours now and I’ve yet to see a deviation from the same generic dungeon look. So the routes you take change, but if the whole game consists of the same architecture and location types throughout (sewer, street, hell being the three location types), what’s the point in randomly generating things? Diablo 2 had five different acts (if you had the Lord of Destruction expansion pack) each with their own environment; Act 1 was forests, Act 2 was desert, Act 3 was jungle, Act 4 was Hell, Act 5 was mountains. Then within each act there was some diversity. Obviously Flagship Studios thought people wanted randomly generated crap in place of static master pieces. The GamePro review of Hellgate: London has a great quote: “a cat walking across a piano might compose something new each time, but would you rather listen to that or the work of Beethoven?!”. Spot on, free drink to Cameron Lewis from GamePro if I ever meet him in a bar.

Boring
This one isn’t funny, it’s deadly serious. The side quests in Hellgate: London consist of “kill x amount of monsters and bring back what they drop to me” quests. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the hype generated for this game stems from the fact some of the developers were on the Diablo 2 development team, right? So why the feck have MMORPG elements creeped into this Action RPG? My guess is that those clever clogs at Flagship Studios thought one of two things (a) it works (I use the term loosely) for MMO’s so it should work here, or (b) more shit, boring, irrelevent, monotonous quests (like MMOs) is better than less quests with far more depth and relevence (like Diablo 2). WRONG.

Dull
I played an Evoker because they are the closest class to the Sorceress in Diablo 2. Before installing the game I set about planning my skill tree up to level 50. Any experienced Diablo player will tell you that planning ahead is very important for future game success. Now, I care so little for this game now that I decided against counting the total amount of skills available for the Evoker class compared to the total skills of the Sorceress, but I’m sure there are less Evoker skills. What skills/spells there are are disappointingly dull and have similar effects to a 1cm sparkler stood next to a Chinese new-year firework display.

Lower than Average
I’d rather play Dungeon Siege than Hellgate: London. Enough said.

I’ve played this game both single-player and multiplayer as part of a group of 5 and can conclude that it’s equally boring in both. When playing with four friends it managed to completely silence the Ventrillo room. The only breaks in this silence happened when someone looted something that might have been of possible value to one of the other people in the group. Essentially Ventrillo chat was reduced to the pathetic banter of a flee-market. The reason is simple: the game is so easy it requires no group coordination what-so-ever.

Personally I think Flagship Studios think most gamers are tools. They’re probably right because it seems people are actually subscribing to Hellgate: London. That means people are paying $9.99 for additional content that doesn’t actually exist at this time. The Subscriber Chart on the official Hellgate: London site outlines the differences between the free to play system and the subscriber system. The amusing thing is that Flagship Studios are charging money for features that don’t cost anything to support and should be a part of the standard game. This includes: hardcore mode (when you die you lose your character, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Flagship Studios somehow managed to change this — I’m not giving them $9.99 to find out), guild creation and management, larger stash and an additional character slot. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the whole point of subscription systems was that you paid a recurring fee in exchange for regularly added new content for you to play. I’m guessing that Flagship Studios know this, but they realise that, in rushing the game out, they haven’t had time to make any unique content available to subscribers and, ergo, they’ve actually had to cut out parts of the game that should be available for everyone just so there’s an incentive for people to subscribe right now. The production costs for the game were probably high so they needed to start milking this cow as soon as possible — they don’t care that this cow is actually only a calf (see what I did there?). The result is a system that soundly buggers both non-paying and paying members alike. I’m going to chuck the word “scum” out there and see where it lands.

Now it’s possible (I say laughing) that the game actually gets good the further you progress. As I said, I’ve been playing for 7 hours (plus a couple on the demo) and it’s the same old shit. If people are going to be critical, telling me I haven’t played the game enough to make a proper assessment and, thus, have no leg to stand on then they can fuck right off. Some of the developers might have come from Blizzard where dim-witted gamers “fell for it” when Blizzard said “the good stuff is at the end” (hint: it’s going to take you atleast a couple of months to get to that stage … mmm … money) but, if it’s true, then I have no intention of wasting my time on a cess-pit of mediocrity for x number of hours to “reach the good bit”. Games are meant to be good, enjoyable and entertaining from the start and not contain necessary boredom for future benefit.

I’m a negative dick but I fail to see the point in Flagship Studios releasing a game that plays like Guild Wars but replaces the boringly shit turn-based style combat with boringly shit real-time combat. I could carry on going about how I managed to get stuck in the first station, twice, just by jumping around waiting for group mates to ready up (the game comes with a /stuck command to port you out of stuck positions after a short time — Flagship Studios obviously foresaw how bad their level creators were…) and the fact the game has clear memory leak issues and performs like shit on my Quad Core 8800GTS system and the fact that you regularly enter zones and cannot see your own group mates. What really irks me is that some of the people I play with actually seem to think the game is good. This made me question myself for a split second. I concluded that they’re dumb in the head. Hi guys.

I promised myself that, in paying £29.99 for the game, I would finish it. I’ll be sure to update this article should I somehow knock my head repeatedly on a concerete pavement and become fully (rather than partially) brain-dead.

Update for shits and giggles: Straight off the Blues News press “The growing pains continue for Hellgate: London, Flagships just-launched action/RPG, as we’ve received multiple reports of customers having their credit cards billed more than once for the game’s monthly subscription fee. Several threads complaining about this are on the Hellgate forums, and according to a report on this on Shacknews, Hellgate community managers have promised an update on this situation soon, though their attempts at getting an official comment on this from Flagship have not met with success.”

What?
Welcome to the Black Tree Gaming blog. Black Tree Gaming Limited is the personal company of Robin Scott (that’d be me). Registered in September of 2007, Black Tree Gaming is the name under which my personal projects trade under. This blog is my personal mind dump for anything I find interesting, largely focusing on the gaming industry, the gaming community and broadly on gaming in general.

I’m probably what you would call your stereotypical gamer demographic; born in June of 1986 (making me 21 years old at time of writing) in England, I currently study Business Studies at the University of Exeter after completing two years of a Computer Science course. A gamer at heart, I began playing games back when I was three on the Atari ST system. Following on from that I owned and played on the Sega Megadrive, Nintendo 64 and Playstation before settling on the PC. I now rarely dabble in console gaming.

I began creating gaming sites back in 2000 when I was 14. These were unexciting sites that were less useful than crap in a bag to anyone but me — thankfully lost over time and irrecoverable (don’t try it). When I was 16 I began work on a site that has been the keystone of my web presence ever since. Named Morrowind Chronicles, the site was developed in conjunction with a friend to cover the upcoming release of “The Elderscrolls III: Morrowind”. The site was met with what I considered to be great enthusiasm and by 2002 the site was receiving over 6,000 unique visitors every day. Following numerous hosting issues I created and developed “Gaming Source”, a subsiduary project of a UK webhost before finally becoming a company, named Gaming Source Limited, in late 2006. Gaming Source focused on providing unlimited free hosting for select gaming fansites in exchange for advertising real-estate on the site. In 2005 Gaming Source was hosting over 40 popular gaming fansites.

In September 2007 I decided to leave Gaming Source Limited and focus on my own projects, falling under the “Black Tree Gaming” label. Through agreements with the other director of Gaming Source Limited I had exclusive rights to the database for the Gaming Source forums (over 450,000 members), as well as the site that Morrowind Chronicles had become, TESSource. The site was quickly renamed to TESNexus and 3 years of PHP coding was dropped to make way for a completely new custom coded site.

Serving 30,000 unique visitors daily, TESNexus is a reputable resource for user-generated modifications for the critically acclaimed “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion”.

and Why?
Often at night I lie in bed brain storming all sorts of shite. I’ve decided I’m going to start logging some of the shite here; the internet is full of shite (a lot of it is on Wikipedia and IGN) and I feel it might well benefit from the shite I can bring to it.