jenkz.org

Well, I’ve been using Visual Studio Express (C#) as my development environment at home for a while now. I am use to standard Visual Studio Standard at work, but use Express at home. I’ve recently got a copy of Vista Home Basic (x64) and Visual C# 2008 Express builds “Any CPU” assemblies which seems to default to the current architecture. You can’t, at least via the interface that I can find, specify what assembly to produce (x86 x86) in Express. In standard you can setup build configurations for Debug/Release/x86/x64/Any CPU combinations. Express, on the other hand, is naff when it comes to this.

Long story short, I have been coding for Managed DirectX which are 32bit assemblies (x86) and my application level code has been compiling to x64 under Express as I have a 64bit machine. Result is a BadImageException at runtime as it load’s the 32bit Managed DirectX assembly from the GAC into a 64bit runtime application. Joy.

My solution has been to edit every one of my .csproj files manually to add the PlatformTarget tag like so:

<WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>
<PlatformTarget>x86</PlatformTarget>
</PropertyGroup>

I think I’m going to write an XNA renderer as hopefully XNA has 64bit assemblies…

Well Kris and myself finally hit level 50 in Lord of the Rings Online (or “lo”-”tro”, what a stupid name). We’ve been playing it casually since Christmas, and really casually - like maybe a couple of hours a week. It’s quite suited to casual play for leveling, it’s very quest centric and there’s a bonus XP that builds up if you are offline. I think we leveled entirely in bonus XP.

Now we’ve hit 50 though, the kind of realisation hits that you need to finish your character setup - that involves getting equipment, and traits. Traits involve farming NPCs, and the higher traits involve farming stupid numbers of NPCs - like 400+ Yawn, time-sink. The other aspect equipment, is another story. For a decent setup you need a couple of bits of highest-tier crafted, which are expensive as hell (like 5-8g, and 1g takes ~1 hour to farm unless you get lucky drops). The other aspect of equipment is drops from raiding. I dont think it’s remotely like DAoC high end raiding (i.e. Caer Sidi or ML10 dungeon) but still, it’s more raiding.

We’re also going to try out the PvP aspect, which is a little weird. It’s called PvMP (Player vs Monster Player). Which is a battle between the “free people” (the characters you level to 50) and player controlled monster characters. Anyone past a certain level, I think 15, or 20 or so, can make a monster character. These can only be played in the PvMP zone, and I think they rank up, and you equip them from PvMP encounters. I don’t know anything about it really, but I’ll probably post a comparison with DAoC RvR after trying it for a bit. DAoC RvR obviously had much more attachment, actually fighting other people’s main characters, rather than some PvP alt, but we’ll see…