July 2005

2/7/2005. 1st saturday of the month. a non-working saturday. but where was i 7 hours that day? at the office… *sigh*

it was supposed to be a disaster recovery test. things were going smoothly till my assistant accidentally ran a loan program which defaulted about 900 company loans. woo hoo we had some exciting moments indeed. not.

1st depressing moment.

it was already late afternoon and fish had already concocted some dinner plans so i didn’t bother going home right after. went straight to kg. baru in me waja for some super nasi lemak. the sambal was just exquisite, and well complimented by a bergedel and some sotong.

1st gratifying moment.

after dinner, we stopped by at merv’s shop, to pass him a few loose screws. computer ones. anyway, my mind’s been preoccupied all day, having fish buy me a copy of battlefield 2 that morning. most of my thoughts concerned upgrading my pc to minimum spec at least and when to go visit low yat for the necessary items. merv had also offered me his second hand rma’d asus motherboard which didn’t help calm my excitement.

then an idea (from merv, again): why not go to low yat tonight? i didn’t have the cash, but i certainly had the plastic. that pretty much put me over the holding-back threshold, and immediately we flew to low yat, all 4 of us, for some hardware shoppin’.

i got meself a radeon 9800 pro, and a piece of 512mb ddr-400 ram. needless to say i was rather pleased with myself. gigi, the cycom girl at the counter, also offered a 3.0e processor at merv’s recommendation, but i declined, not having the funds to manage that kind of debt at the moment.

2nd gratifying moment. things were starting to look up.

so all i could think of after that was to get home and get everything up and running. took the elevator back down to the basement, paid for parking, and we were ready to leave.

as soon as i drove out of the parking bay, i suddenly realised something was amiss. “where is my parking ticket?”, i thought. my brain quickly scanned the near past in some broken synapse, and i realised that i could not recall having taken the ticket out of the payment machine.

horrified, we zoomed back to the machine. but we were too late. it was gone. we double checked everywhere, every corner of the machine, every nook and cranny of the car, but it was lost forever. someone beat us to it. mofo!

that incident cost me 50 ringgit. so there goes all the gratifying parts down the drain. we were already late, and henry might miss his date. but my brain took a forced break at the time, and i couldn’t bring myself to push my driving skills.

henry, i hope your date went well. 😛

so i got home that night, and fixed up my new gear without much hassle. couldn’t get windows to boot, so i was forced to do a complete reinstall (twice!). needless to say, i couldn’t start having fun with my new game right there and then.

*sigh*

fortunately, things started looking up the following day. but that’s another entry.

Neverwinter Nights (NWN) official campaigns (OC) are now officially finished. i loved the plot twists in underdark, and i’m itching to try out the premium modules. don’t have the funds for it yet though.

moving on, i’ve gotta think about how to create a richer NWN experience. besides the multiplayer party of 3, there are tons i can do. been looking into installing the CEP (community expansion pack) on the server to support a whole range of custom objects like new hairstyles and clothing. but that i’ll probably enable once we finish off our multiplayer OC storyline. don’t forget, i’ll need to find proper modules that support the CEP.

besides that, i could also join one of the many persistent worlds (PW) online. these are basically something like MMORPG worlds, with things to do and people to meet. Every NWN PW world is custom built, with different sets of rules and abilities.

can you imagine the number of hours i’ll waste on these activities?!

anyways, fish (JL) and i were discussing a few days ago about our respective solo campaign characters. since Shadows of Undrentide (SoU, first NWN expansion)’s storyline requires a fresh character, he was wondering how he’d want to transfer items from his OC character to his new one. one simple way is to save his OC character and then logon to the bangsar.net NWN server and leave his stuff there. then he’d be able to load his fresh character and pick them up, then start off his SoU campaign with that character. now NWN doesn’t restrict you from using your original character from OC, or any type of character for that matter. if you do that however, it’ll hurt your SoU, and ultimately Hordes of the Underdark (HotU) experience.

something else that we were thinking about was how to override the character in a save game. let’s say there’s this particular part of the game where you’re having utmost difficulty, and need a more souped up version of your NWN self.

i only just realised this: every save game has a player.bic file which i think contains the character information. you might be able to override this file with another from your localvault directory. never tried it before though, so proceed at your own risk. 😛

how did i just find that out? i was copying save games from home to my office pc this morning. we’re having a disaster recovery test today, and most of it is just waiting. so instead of waiting, why not NWN? 😀