Borgs and Backpacks

13 07 2009

Babaoroody headed out for Perpetual Wastelands from Newland City Sunday evening, determined to get back on the leveling train. His experience bar was sitting just past 50% towards a new level, so he was hoping to tick it over tonight.

He took his usual route there, which consisted of using the grid from Newland City to the Sentinels post in Mort. From there he flew due east in his Yalmaha, passing over sandworms, anuns and mantises.

He paused at the Mantise Dyna camp name Tranquility just inside Perpetual Wastelands, but although he is levels above the 105 Dyna, the enclosed nature of the ‘fort’ style camp and the fact it is packed with 70-100ish mantises, leaves him unwilling to try and find out if he can attack that Dyna without getting swarmed by the rest of the Mantises.

Bridge of Escape, the plateau is too small to out run a Dyna borg.

Bridge of Escape, the plateau is too small to out run a Dyna borg.

Baba did drop down at the next Dyna camp with two 105 and 110 type Borg Dynas.  The spot is called ‘Ruins’ on the map, and is in a small platueau surrounded by gorges, with two large suspension bridges for access.  He thought he had had approached so that he could just pull one of them, but when he got close enough to trigger aggro, they both came running.

Baba made the mistake of trying to stand toe to toe with these two, and before he knew it, he was down past 50% health.  As soon as Baba dropped one, Baba started running east and crossed the suspension bridge with the other Dyna in chase.  He needed to run long enough to use and cycle his First Aid stim at least twice.  Once he had done this to bring his health back up, Baba circled around and kite killed the remaining Dyna.  While the loot both dropped was nothing Baba could use, it was good shop food.

Borg Highway, levels 110-140 Borg, in North East Perpetual Wastelands.

Borg Highway, levels 110-140 Borg, in North East Perpetual Wastelands.

Baba headed a little farther east and when the road turns from going due east to heading North East, he could see Borgs every few hundred meters, guarding the area.

Baba got buffed up and started kiting Borg singly and in groups of two to three.  These Borg were for the most part in the 110 to 140 level range, and a fitting warm up for Baba.  Eventually he planned on hopping over the Borg mine and main base and work on the level 175+ Borgs in the dunes north of the Helipad.

His experience bar was gradually moving towards the top the farther up the road he progressed.  Just before he reached the area labeled ‘town’ on the map, he stopped to rebuff and then recharge his nano.

Taking a break from kiting, to watch an Alien raiding a player city nearby.

Taking a break from kiting, to watch an Alien raiding a player city nearby.

As he was sitting there, he spotted an Alien ship raiding a player city off to the south east.   By the time Baba had worked his way to the ‘town’, he was very close to getting a level.  There is now a Tower field just west of the town, which eliminates pulling Borg to that area for kiting.

Baba first proceeded around the outer perimeter of the base and pick off the Borg he found there.  He started making careful forays into the town, to pull single Borg out.  When he approached the center portion, he spotted a high level 200 Dyna, General Chira Sulanol, unmistakable in her shiny greenish aura.  Baba took note of her position, and retreated to the back side of the base, where he picked off the remaining Borg that were outside of the Base.

General Sulanol where she made short work of Baba in PW

General Sulanol where she made short work of Baba in PW

He was getting so close to leveling that he was starting to think about his return trip from this expedition, when things took a wrong turn.  He tried to stay around the North side of the base because General Sulanol had been spotted on the South central portion.

After pulling several Borg from the North West corner of the Base, he squeezed through an alley between two buildings to try and taunt a few Borg he could see in the North central part of the base.  They came running soon, but they were trailed by General Sulanol.  He guesses that the General had a habit of waking around the base more than the typical high ranking officers.  Baba did a 180 and ran a fast as he could, but her level 200 skills enabled her to up the distance quickly and she sent him back to reclaim in a few seconds.  Baba is not sure if this is a new Dyna, or if it had been trained from a spot located due east of the town on the other side of some hills. Several maps show a 200 level mob located there.

After rezzing to at the Newland City reclaim, (the one on the hill overlooking the city), he was a bit discouraged, but he also knew that when he returns to kite the Borgs his experience pool will speed up the leveling.  He was feeling good about his Borg Kiting skills, had he not gotten too close to Sulanol, he took hardly any damage while kiting this evening.

His many backpacks were mostly full, so he took some time to sort them out.  He had gained almost a half bag of various Miy’s armor, which he is sure Babaente and Tireen will thank him for eventually. After sorting out the Miy’s, the monster parts, 125+ implants and clusters, and interesting items, he handed off 8 bags to Babaente, our Nanotechnician, who in turn transferred the bags to Tireen, Baba’s trader alt.

Tireen took the bags to the Trader terminal in Newland City and was turning in the shop food there, when a fellow Trader, Sypherdias (level 93 male Omni Trader, member Good Old Days) took note of Tireen’s Solar Powered Backpack.  The trader offered Tireen a bag of 60 of the experience stims, which Tireen might sell for many credits.  Tireen had no idea what the going market rate was for these, and had no idea as to just how liquid such a resource might be.

The Solar Powered Backpack was a promotional gift handed out by NPCs during the 7th AO Anniversary weekend celebration.  It looks nifty, and works like a standard backpack in both capacity and function (it gives no buffs).  In the year or so since she acquired it from an NPC at the ICC Whompa center, she has perhaps seen one or two other players wearing one.  So while in a typical stroll down the streets of Borealis you will spot many copies of supposedly rare or hard to get back items, Tireen very rarely sees another Solar Powered Backpack.  Since traders as a profession seem to lack a trader specific back item, she feels her nifty backpack sets her apart.

It is the most unique possession Tireen has at the moment on Rubi-Ka.  She may not sport the best implants, armor or weapon, but she is proud to display her unusual backpack.   She ended up turning down the offer.  She knew how much she got out of wearing the unique backpack and she did not really want to use the experience stims to speed up leveling.  Beyond that, she did not savor trying to sell them.  Even though she is a trader, trying to hawk stuff on shopping chat channel is not her preferred way to pass the time.

So after she declined, and finished feeding shop food to the terminal, she traveled back to meet up with Babaente, to return Baba’s empty backpacks and his new credits (Baba’s 8 backpacks of mostly Borg loot, netted around 800,000 credits).

Solar Powered Backpack and the Refitted Backpack

Solar Powered Backpack and the Refitted Backpack

When she met up with Babaente, they posed for a picture framing both of their special backpacks.   Babaente’s backpack is the second type handed out by NPC’s during the 7th Anniversary celebration.  It is named a Refitted Backpack and it looks exactly like the Empowered Robust Backpack, which is one of the harder to get rare items since it must be made by combining two items which drop in Camelot Castle in Avalon.  The items are dropped by a mob called Administrator DeValos who spawns following the death of Tarasque. The two items are the Robust Backpack and an Infusion Device.  Combining the two items makes the Empowered Robust Backpack which provides 1000 in all ACs and +80 in all damage to the wearer.





Customize your AO HUD GUI

27 06 2009
OUr old AO HUD GUI, click for larger view.

Our old AO HUD GUI, notice the distance between player health and team health bars, click for larger view.

Anyone can have a high performance, minimalist heads up display graphical user interface in Anarchy Online and it does not require coding, deleting existing GUI files, or installing additional third party software.  Babaoroody the enforcer, and his alts, Tireen the trader, and Babaente the NT, have relied on the Notum/Darktech Dark Mini as their custom minimalist HUD GUI in Anarchy Online for quite some time.  When the most recent patch (18.1 ) from Funcom refused to install, a number of things came together, like a perfect storm, that made us want to customise the classic AO HUD GUI.

When we logged in for what we thought would be a fun time surrounding the eight anniversary of Anarchy Online, we were greeted with the need to patch message.  This was one of those huge patches, that took over a half hour to download and unpack.  When that finished, it gave us an error message, that was of course pretty much useless.  Another hour or so later after searching both the official forums and the AOFroobs forums, it became clear that our problem would not go away until we had completely removed the Notum/Darktech GUI directory and files.

Once this was done, up came the shiny new game, and as we went about our business with Baba and friends, we noticed that several things had improved immensely.  The most obvious new change was that the time from hitting the login submit button till Rubi-Ka was before us and Baba could start walking around, had been halved or better.  It only took about 20 seconds.  Previously it would always take 45 seconds to a minute to accomplish the initial log in.

The next pleasant shock was when Baba made his first post 18.1 whompa trip.  Stepping in the Whompa door, he found himself walking out at his destination a within 15-20 seconds.  Previously zoning was like the initial log in, taking 45 seconds to a minute or more.  This really caused game play issues in places like the Temple of the Three Winds and Biomare, two places where teams have to negotiate numerous zoning type apertures ranging from doors to teleporters.   Very often Baba would step into a portal in Biomare with his team, and exit on the other side a minute later, with his team far ahead out of sight.

This left us wondering just how much of this performance improvement is due to 18.1 and how much is due to using the original classic HUD GUI.  We have heard several reports in the forums that 18.1 has split the item database into several chunks where the database used to be one huge file.  It might be that on older PC’s like mine, loading several smaller files is faster than loading one huge one.  We not seen wide spread reports of other players seeing these improvements, so we suspect that it may appear only for those with older machines.

We do not want to give the impression that we think the Notum custom GUI caused poor performance.  After seeing that we could get a HUD we liked using the classic components, we saw no need anymore for the Notum skin.  It may very well perform just as well with the new patch.  We simply are not interested in having to perform a number of extra intricate steps each time there is an AO patch.

Our next quest was to see what we could do to get the most out of the old school classic AO HUD GUI.

For inspiration, we turned to YouTube videos of AO gameplay and specifically AO Battlestation PVP.

We did this not so much to watch the players technique or to pick out specific details of their screen layouts, but more to spot some overall trends and similarities of the screens used by several hot shots.  Looking for videos of players cleaning up in Battlestation we spotted several things common to the screen layouts of these masters of mayhem.

One common trait was to move the team panel towards the upper right corner of the screen along with the health and nano bars of the player.  This allows one to see both the health of the player and team mates with one glance.  In team versus mob and team versus other human team combat, it is very important to keep situational awareness of the relative health levels of the entire team.

We also noticed that many players relied on only one or two hotkey bars plus an open actions panel.  The number of buttons included in the actions panel seems to depend on profession and types of attacks.

The other main take away from looking at both Battlestation (PVP) and dungeon videos (PVM) was the absence of menu bars or the wings of the classic GUI.  We did a little reading up in our dusty printed copy of the AO manuals and found the keyboard commands to open any of the menus or panels.

Here is what we found:
AO-PANEL KEYS
CTRL +
1    WEAR
2    ACTIONS
3    KNOWLEDGE
4    MISSION
5    TEAM
6    MAP
7    FRIENDS
8    PROGRAMS
9    STATS
0    NCU
MORE:
Y    TOGGLE hotkey bars
Shift + #      Select hotkey bar layer
CTRL + #        Select active hotkey bar
1-0            Activate hotkey
I            Inventory
U            Skill (IP POINTS)
F10            Options Menu
|            Cycle layout ???
Shift F        Team Search (LFT)
Our new custom HUD GUI using classic AO, click for larger view.

Our new custom HUD GUI using classic AO, click for larger view.

All we needed now was a way to remember the 10 control key combos.  One way to approach this is to rename our utility backpack, the backpack we keep open in order to use items during missions or combat, like rings, stims, etc.  We re-named the backpack WAKMTMFPSN from the first letters of the panel names.  This provides a small easy to spot aid for remembering which key combo to hit to pull up a needed panel, so no more need for the menu wings of the classic GUI.  The wings can be disabled from within the F10 options windows.  We also used the F10 options to set the agg-def bar and the experience/NCU bar to fade out within 2 seconds of not being used.

We also took advantage of another AO feature that has been around for ages, and combined our multiple chat windows into one by using the tab function.   Simply right click on the title of a chat window, and then drag the title and drop it on another chat window.  The title will now appear as a tab in the second window, so you can get rid of the previous window.

The only thing left that we really wish could be changed is the placement of the ‘action’ or ’swing’ bar(s).  These appear during combat and animate the progress of either casting nanos, shooting and reloading, or swinging melee attacks.  There does not seem to be an option to move these and they resist dragging with the mouse.  Let us know if you have found a way to move them.

It would be ideal if these could be moved to the right so as to be just left of the drop down panels.

Take a look at the pictures of the old layout using a custom GUI and our new layout using our tweaked out classic GUI.  We are very happy with our new arrangement using our tweaked classic HUD.  We wish continuing Notum users well and good luck with thier extra post patching activities.