Where's the Mystery?

I don't get it.

I ran across this thread in the WoW forums concerning the upcoming "Scourge Invasion". Sounds cool, and if I was still playing I think some of it would be fun. But the FAQ pretty much lays out a great deal (if not all?) of the things that will happen and the strategies to deal with them. People seem excited, but where's the mystery? Where's the thrill of discovery? A lot of the stuff sounds like it'll be cool to see, and naturally there'll be new phat l00t for people, but don't the players get any enjoyment out of something new unfolding rather than having it all plotted out for them?

Of course, I don't understand the people who spend hours upon hours in the endgame raid instances just to get their armor sets, either. People looking for different things in an RPG, I guess. Or rather, in a game - "role-playing" doesn't really enter into it at that point (if it ever did).

Freeware Installation Tool - Advanced Installer

So version 5 of TableSmith is finally in its last stages before release and I realized that I didn't have anything in place for its installation. An advantage of a program that uses .Net is that you can simply copy whatever files you need wherever you want them and you don't really need an installation process. However, many of the people that use TS aren't necessarily computer-savvy so I still need some standard way to install TSv5 - a setup program that does all the work for them. Previous versions of TS used VB6, which had an "Application Deployment Wizard" (or something like that) which created the setup files I needed. I didn't see anything like that with Visual C# 2005, at least not at first.

Upon further review, I discovered "ClickOnce", which is Microsoft's build-in deployment tool. Unfortunately, though rather unsurprisingly, it didn't turn out to work for me. Without going into details, the tool took what should be a simple process and made it more complicated than it needed to be. What's worse is that ClickOnce installs an application into its "application cache" on the target machine, rather than wherever the user wants it to go. Now, there are some distinct advantages to ClickOnce (such as having a program automatically update itself when a newer version is available), but for what I want it just didn't work.

Fortunately, I was able to find a freeware alternative - Advanced Installer. Intuitive and easy to use, it does exactly what I want and need it to do. There are other versions you need to pay for if you need something beyond the freeware version, but so far that's working out good for me. If you're looking for a simple tool to create installation MSI files, I'd recommend it.

Today's Euphamism: "Limited Connectivity"

Still can't get the wireless to work with Vista. I'm even trying a new network card from Belkin (versus the old one from Netgear) and getting the same results. Since the hardware works fine with XP, there's something with Vista that won't work with my network. Vista can identify the SSID of the router, but that's it. Of course, I'm told that I'm connected but I have "limited connectivity". Which is apparently Microsoftese for "no goddamn connectivity worth anything beyond giving you an SSID and signal strength." Gee, thanks.

So, my opinion of Vista is that it's still crap. If the wireless networking can't function - on the exact PC where it works perfectly fine with XP - then there's a problem.

Update: Naturally, shortly after I posted this I got it working. The problem seemed to be with the wireless security I was using. No security didn't work (odd, though that could be by design with Vista, even though it didn't tell me that), WEP didn't work, but WPA did. Of course, I had to switch to the old network card because Vista told me that the Belkin didn't support WPA, despite the fact that it does. Now, this isn't the final release I realize, but you still expect a little more from a beta.

Initial Thoughts on Vista

So I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on my other computer (this laptop has more RAM, a faster processor, and other superior features but only has 64MB of video RAM, so it's not an option here).

My initial impression: It sucks.

Of course, I'm basing that entirely on the single fact that it doesn't seem to want to connect to my wireless router. I'll play around with it more tomorrow and see if I can get that working. What surprises me, though, is you'd think that would be a no-brainer, given how ubiquitous wireless networking is these days. The XP install on that machine still connects fine to the router, so I don't know what Vista's problem is.

Great Mapping Tool for MasterMaze

If you use MasterMaze scenery from Dwarven Forge, you'll want to visit this site. It contains tiles for MasterMaze for a program called "Tile System" (originally created to make maps for FFG's Doom game). The "photos" sets work the best.

It's nice to find this kind of thing - it saves me from having to write it myself.