AlexRoz9:blog
:
Červen 2010
New Worlds: Alexville and Alexview under construction.
POSLÁNO V
09/06/10
Okay, so as everyone probably knows by now, I was more than a little annoyed last December when Create-A-World--BETA
was released as a PC-Only tool. I had worlds mapped out in my mind--stories in place, and was ready to start creating only to find out that my Mac Pro wasn\'t capable of running Create-A-World
. I was, and I still am hoping that EA will release a Mac version of Create-A-World
, and I admittedly waited six months for them to do so.
Last weekend I finally cracked though; I wanted to use Create-A-World , and I wanted to use it six months ago. Basically, I went to Best Buy, asked them what the cheapest thing they had that could run The Sims 3 was, and gave them a price limit of $500, which is admittedly far more than anyone should be paying to fix a \"mistake\" on EA\'s behalf. The Best Buy sales associate directed me to an eMachines desktop (I didn\'t want a laptop,) that was suitable. I purchased it, along with antivirus protection, for just under $500 and went home. My eMachine\'s specs are as follows:
Anyway, when I got home, I set up my new eMachines desktop, and prepared for my return to the \"Wonderful World of Windows,\" albeit under severe duress, and only for Create-A-World . I attached the keyboard, the monitor, and the mouse, sat down, and prepared for my impending return to the Borg Collective. I pushed the big giant \"e\" power button, and the machine roared to life; then like a scene from a bad sitcom, or even The Sims , something went wrong.
I was sitting in front of a \"black screen of death.\" My computer was tersely telling me that it couldn\'t find the \"boot device,\" and that I needed to select or configure the \"boot device\" if I actually wanted to run Windows. \"Grr...\" I grumbled, as I thought to myself, \"uh-oh, they didn\'t just sell me a machine without a hard drive, did they,\" \"maybe I should\'ve taken the one with the torn box,\" and \"I really don\'t want to deal with this now.\" All at once I remembered why I had left the \"Wonderful World of Windows\" in the first place; it was bad enough that I had to create my own restore discs, it was bad enough that I was going to need three of them (as opposed to one,) and it was bad enough that I was reduced to using an eMachines desktop, but now I had one that wouldn\'t even load Windows. Fortunately, I have plenty of experience dealing with poorly constructed scrap metal running Windows. After turning the machine off, I grabbed one of my screwdrivers, carefully removed two screws, and popped open the case. Sure enough, as I had hoped, the hard drive was in the machine, but the stupid factory tech over in China never bothered to connect the power cable to it. This was simple enough to fix, and a few minutes later, I was up and running in Windows. It took me a moment to realize that I had no Wi-Fi antenna, which meant that my brother\'s laptop was going to turn into a $2,000 dollar MacBook Pro router for the night, (which it did,) and after an hour of burning restore discs, I was good to go.
I have now been working with Create-A-World for two days. I can\'t run EIG or TS3 itself thanks to EA\'s patch, but I can run Create-A-World , which I have been doing. Two of my four initial towns are now under construction. Alexville is the older of the two and will have a good deal of backstory behind it, while Alexview is the newer of the two, and doesn\'t have much backstory at all. However, I\'ve recently come up with a Sci-Fi twist to its plot, and I\'m seriously considering using the modified story with the aforementioned twist. The time travel element seems way too cool to ignore, and it would really give the world a richer backstory.
At present, both worlds are in very early alpha stages. Public alpha builds will be made available once a little more work is done so that routing problems can be weeded out early and often, and so that the final release version of the world will run as smoothly as possible. I welcome Mac users to test the aforementioned worlds as well, because I will be using them on my Mac Pro. The only thing that I\'ll be using the eMachines computer for is actual CAW/EIG work that can\'t be done on my Mac, at least not at present.
-AlexRoz9
Last weekend I finally cracked though; I wanted to use Create-A-World , and I wanted to use it six months ago. Basically, I went to Best Buy, asked them what the cheapest thing they had that could run The Sims 3 was, and gave them a price limit of $500, which is admittedly far more than anyone should be paying to fix a \"mistake\" on EA\'s behalf. The Best Buy sales associate directed me to an eMachines desktop (I didn\'t want a laptop,) that was suitable. I purchased it, along with antivirus protection, for just under $500 and went home. My eMachine\'s specs are as follows:
- 2.7GHz Intel Pentium Processor
- 4GB DDR2 RAM
- 750GB SATA Hard Drive
- nVidia Integrated Graphics
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- PS/2 Keyboard Mouse
- Two 3.2GHz Intel Xeon Quad-Core Processors (8-Cores Total)
- 16GB FB-DIMM DDR2 RAM
- Four 1TB SATA Hard Drives in two RAID-1 Arrays
- nVidia Quadro FX 5600 Stereo-3D Graphics Card w/1.5GB RAM
- Mac OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard)
- USB Mouse/Keyboard
Anyway, when I got home, I set up my new eMachines desktop, and prepared for my return to the \"Wonderful World of Windows,\" albeit under severe duress, and only for Create-A-World . I attached the keyboard, the monitor, and the mouse, sat down, and prepared for my impending return to the Borg Collective. I pushed the big giant \"e\" power button, and the machine roared to life; then like a scene from a bad sitcom, or even The Sims , something went wrong.
I was sitting in front of a \"black screen of death.\" My computer was tersely telling me that it couldn\'t find the \"boot device,\" and that I needed to select or configure the \"boot device\" if I actually wanted to run Windows. \"Grr...\" I grumbled, as I thought to myself, \"uh-oh, they didn\'t just sell me a machine without a hard drive, did they,\" \"maybe I should\'ve taken the one with the torn box,\" and \"I really don\'t want to deal with this now.\" All at once I remembered why I had left the \"Wonderful World of Windows\" in the first place; it was bad enough that I had to create my own restore discs, it was bad enough that I was going to need three of them (as opposed to one,) and it was bad enough that I was reduced to using an eMachines desktop, but now I had one that wouldn\'t even load Windows. Fortunately, I have plenty of experience dealing with poorly constructed scrap metal running Windows. After turning the machine off, I grabbed one of my screwdrivers, carefully removed two screws, and popped open the case. Sure enough, as I had hoped, the hard drive was in the machine, but the stupid factory tech over in China never bothered to connect the power cable to it. This was simple enough to fix, and a few minutes later, I was up and running in Windows. It took me a moment to realize that I had no Wi-Fi antenna, which meant that my brother\'s laptop was going to turn into a $2,000 dollar MacBook Pro router for the night, (which it did,) and after an hour of burning restore discs, I was good to go.
I have now been working with Create-A-World for two days. I can\'t run EIG or TS3 itself thanks to EA\'s patch, but I can run Create-A-World , which I have been doing. Two of my four initial towns are now under construction. Alexville is the older of the two and will have a good deal of backstory behind it, while Alexview is the newer of the two, and doesn\'t have much backstory at all. However, I\'ve recently come up with a Sci-Fi twist to its plot, and I\'m seriously considering using the modified story with the aforementioned twist. The time travel element seems way too cool to ignore, and it would really give the world a richer backstory.
At present, both worlds are in very early alpha stages. Public alpha builds will be made available once a little more work is done so that routing problems can be weeded out early and often, and so that the final release version of the world will run as smoothly as possible. I welcome Mac users to test the aforementioned worlds as well, because I will be using them on my Mac Pro. The only thing that I\'ll be using the eMachines computer for is actual CAW/EIG work that can\'t be done on my Mac, at least not at present.
-AlexRoz9
