The Little Blog of Games

Last week went by while I was putting together my stealth bomber fit for Lassie and generally just hang around in FNA chat. It is really easy to just forget the business at hand and spend a few hours getting nothing much done. After Lassie got her skills to the point where I could fit everything but the probe launcher on her Hound I took it out for a test spin. The results weren’t exactly what I had hoped for.

During the weekend I also got back to exploring a bit and ran some new sites I had never done before. This involved a dip into a C1 wormhole system too. Here, I’ll take you through the week…

Mainly stealth, few explosions

After my shopping spree for Hound and modules I still needed to wait a few days for Lassie to get her support skills high enough to fit everything I wanted. I spent the time setting up some trawl orders (this is what I call wide range, low ball buy orders for items that will slowly accumulate) for the torpedoes, hopping into Heimatar for some skill books and eventually bought some torpedo BPCs too.

My Hound fit is a pretty basic MSE fit. I opted for the medium shield extender to get some buffer as I’m not comfortable with flying a SB yet. Full out damage fit leaves your pretty boat paper thin and a fumble will usually result in a wreck.

After some launcher rigging and weapon upgrades training I could just fit everything but the probe launcher and figured I was ready for a test drive. I took the ship to my usual exploration system and set up a few belt bookmarks just in case. I didn’t have to fly around for long before I came to a rat spawn that seemed suited for my testing. It consisted of a Sansha BS (650k bounty) and two frigates tagging along.

I have read all the SB guides and figured my best option for a solo kill with the frigs around was uncloaking for a single run and then recloaking before getting targeted. Rinse and repeat until the BS is dead seemed to be the idea. So I got into position some 30 km away from the group and dropped my cloak.

The siege launchers hissed as they spewed the torps out towards the unsuspecting rat. I was somewhat nervous so I managed to recloak early, losing lock before the torps hit their mark. Ok, live and learn. Another try and I managed to hit the BS and recloaked succesfully. The damage wasn’t very good though. The torps only hit for just below 800 damage, barely denting the BS’s shields.

Frustrated I uncloaked and started pounding the BS while aligning for a safe. The frigs started closing in but couldn’t really hit me and my shield soaked up any hits they managed to put in. I fired about ten volleys before the frigs got too close and the BS was about half way into armor at that point.

I was really angry when I took off. That was 30 torpedoes spent to scratch the paint job on the Sansha battleship. Stealth bomber my ass. Sneaky paint remover more like it.

In retrospect I realize that the Sansha are the least opportune target for my Hound and its Bane torpedoes. Explosive damage is exactly what the Sansha resists are hardest against and while I could have swapped the Banes for Mjolnirs it would have removed all the ship bonuses seriously dropping the dps. But it would have been more effective even so, damn you 75% resists!

Next time I’ll head to the nearby Angel space and try things out again. Maybe even Mynthea will have her SB ready for some duo fun.

A quick detour

During the weekend I was back scanning in my usual system but I had spotted another scanner there earlier on and now sigs seemed few. The only thing I could find was a wormhole leading to a C1 system. This sounded as good as anything so I dropped the BM in a can at a safe for Mynthea and in I went.

I quickly set up a set of safespots before starting to probe. Setting up safes has become second nature to me after spending so much time in low sec and I do it in about two minutes nowadays. First order of business was checking for other people and a quick cover with combat probes showed a single tower and no ships to be seen. The tower was online, but since things were pretty quiet I didn’t mind it much.

Unfortunately the only site I found was a mag named Forgotten Perimeter Coronation Platform. Well, that was better than nothing so I warped in at range to look around. Only three cans and no sleepers to be seen. This was a bit of a letdown as the salvage from the sleeper ships is often quite valuable. It was time for Mynthea to come in.

It didn’t take long for her to warp to the site and as she got to work on the cans I kept a nervous eye on the directional. Everything went smoothly and we weren’t disturbed by either sleepers or residents.

Of course the loot turned out to be really crappy, just some sleeper parts worth nothing. Disappointed we jumped back to our familiar low sec.

Have junk, will travel

Last night I was at it again, scanning my home away from home. Things were really quiet and quite surprisingly I hit five sigs on initial scan. Conveniently located at only two planets I picked the one with three to go first. Within five minutes I had a radar (Decayed Sansha Mainframe), a mag (Decayed Sansha Mass Grave) and a grav (Small Gneiss Deposit) pinned down.

Normally I would have gone straight for the radar, but I had never seen a mass grave before so I was intrigued. Besides, Mynthea had an analyzer fitted on the Wyrm and I couldn’t be assed to go fetch a codebreaker. Still, there were two more sigs to scan and soon I had another mag (Decayed Sansha Excavation) and a wormhole added to the list. That settled it, I was going for a junk run.

Mynthea was already in system so it only a matter of me getting into position for her to warp in. Coming out of warp at the mass grave I begun the understand the sites name. Looming at me was an eerily familiar structure, so gigantic that it eclipsed the sun as it blocked half the view. As I looked at it closer I realized why it was so familiar looking: it was the remains of an Amarr station.

Littered around the station remains were eight containers that seemed promising for a salvager like me. Guarding them were five Sansha cruisers and two frigs. Nothing much to worry about. The only problematic thing about the site was its sheer size. Since the cans were spread pretty much all over the place it meant having to fly around the station to get to all of them. I really hoped Mynthea had a MWD fitted…

I signaled Mynthea to fly in and she soon set to work on the cans. The rats proved little resistance to her drones and soon the only thing limiting our progress was the sorry ass cap on the Myrm that let her only pulse the MWD. I mean, the damn thing recharges at the speed of a snail on hot tar. Those shield power relays sure come with a price.

A few more frigs spawned while Myn was cracking the cans open but otherwise there wasn’t much to do except marvel the sights. In the end we left the site with pretty meager loot. The cans contained a crap ton of salvage and a Amarr encryption methods skillbook, but moneywise it wasn’t much above a few million.

I immediately warped to the excavation site as I was really bored. When the ship came out of warp I groaned. The site had seven cans again littered all over a huge asteroid mine. The cans were in a string about 40-50 km apart from each other with something like 400 km to cover all together and some rocks to dodge on the way. At least there were no guards here.

Mynthea warped in again and started traversing the obstacle course. Again the MWD could only work in pulses and I was half asleep by the time she was finished. It was another load of salvage, but nothing worth much.

I guess it is nice to get some salvage for my rig building, but I think I would have been much better off just running the radar. Oh well, at least the grave site was a sight to behold.

Dual vision, double fun

I bought a second monitor (a 24″ BenQ) last summer and I’ve been running Eve in the new monitor and surfing and whatnot in the other. Ever since I got the second account it has been bugging me that I have to switch windows to see what is going on with the other char. While this has been somewhat annoying it hasn’t been a real problem since I’ve mainly scanned with one char and run the sites with the other.

Now that I’ve got the capabilities for the alts to participate in combat (at least potentially so) I seriously wanted to get the second account to run in the other monitor. So far the real problem has been the horrible performance (about 5 fps) when running in two monitors and I always figured it was just the lack of horsepower in my graphics card.

After perusing the forums a bit I gathered that the performance degradation is due to the screens overlapping each other. If one game screen spills just one pixel over to the other monitor your framerate drops like a sack of bricks. So last night I tried things with the Evemons relocation function which basically just moves the screen so that it appears to be full screen and also relocated the second screen on the second monitor. Suddenly things worked pretty well.

Both game clients need to be in windowed mode with the screen resolution set to the respective monitor resolutions for this to work. Having “separate” clients using junctions (I think the Windows XP shell extension for this was named Link Shell Extension) helps as you don’t have to fool around with the settings all the time. The game windows still overlap a little at the edges, but since it is only the window border and not the actual 3d contents it doesn’t seem to affect performance much.

The performance is still only around 30 fps for the active screen and about 15 fps for the non-focused screen, but I think this is due to my low power graphics card (passive Asus GeForce 7600 GS). It’s enough for me to play although I wouldn’t necessarily seek pvp with this setup.

Tags: eve

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.