Cav's Place

I find it quite nice that “the 2010 version of the space race”, as someone put it, seems to focus on finding extrasolar planets quite a lot. This has become much more noticeable over the past few days, when the HARPS, HATNet and Kepler teams have all announced new discoveries. The rush was apparently caused by a conference on this topic which was held this week in France.
By far the most notable is the HARPS discovery: A system with no less than five confirmed planets, which would match the record currently held by the 55 Cancri system, and two more candidate signals with a very high probability of also being planets, which would make this system the new record holder. Under these circumstances, the eight new planets (different link on each word) announced by HATNet only grant them a very distant second place, mostly thanks to HAT-P-20 b, which is a hot megajovian about two and a half times denser than Earth, therefore some ten times denser than Jupiter. The Kepler discovery of the first system with two confirmed transiting planets and another candidate signal which is very likely to be a third planet, with a radius only about 40% larger than Earth’s, seems to trail behind the rest…

I need to get back to the HARPS discovery, because it’s really interesting. The number of planets alone is enough to warrant special attention, but the distances between them tell another interesting story. The five confirmed planets, all of them with a mass roughly comparable to that of Neptune, are at about 0.06, 0.13, 0.27, 0.49 and 1.42 AU, respectively, from the star, with the two very promising candidate signals being on either end of the line, the small one, with a mass estimated to be only about 40% higher than Earth’s, a mere 0.02 AU from the star and the large one, with a mass roughly comparable to that of Saturn, orbiting at 3.4 AU. That means the distances between the planets, including the candidate signals, are about 0.04, 0.07, 0.14, 0.22, 0.93 and 1.98 AU, respectively, roughly doubling except between planets e, f and g, where it initially increases by only about 50% and then suddenly quadruples.
That may mean there could be another planet in that area, though an asteroid belt would be another possibility. To be fair, an asteroid belt seems more likely, because if there would be a planet at roughly 1 AU the distance between it and the next one would be equal to that between it and the previous one instead of doubling. But that would be possible, seeing as the distance didn’t double between planets e and f either, so I can’t rule out the possibility of a small terrestrial planet having such an orbit, seeing as its gravity shouldn’t have much of an effect on those beyond it, but could perhaps interact with the one right before it, thus explaining both anomalies. And that possibility would be of particular interest because the star in question is a G1V, so only a tenth of a class above the Sun, meaning that its habitable zone would be comparable to Sun’s, so right in that area where something appears to be missing…

But so far, with the possible exception of Gliese 581 d, we don’t have any confirmation of a planet that would fit our criteria for supporting life. Not that those criteria have to be correct, not to mention that the discovered gas giants are likely to have moons, some which could perhaps even support life as we know it. But finding a planet of just the right size and just at the right distance from its parent star remains the elusive goal of all these searches, though discovering such a small planet at such a distance from its star with our current technology would seem almost a miracle.
Yet every such discovery is interesting in itself, because it helps us paint an ever clearer picture of the galaxy we live in and better determine our place in the universe. So I’m pleased that such discoveries are getting more and more frequent and can only hope that such efforts will be encouraged even more in the future, because it’s a worthy endeavor even without discovering “another Earth, with kittens and butterflies”, as someone was saying recently.

On the other hand, I’m pleased that the Kepler team finally decided to announce something new, even if it wasn’t much. Now I’m quite sure it was just because somebody lit a fire under them because everyone else had important announcements and it would have looked really bad if they’d be the only ones with nothing meaningful to report, but a step forward is a step forward, even if it was caused by a kick in the butt.
They did recently announce that all their candidate signals have been observed with Earth-based equipment at least once and only a dozen have been ruled out as false positives, or more specifically eclipsing binaries. If you keep in mind that, according to what they said so far, they’re working on those 400 candidate signals they didn’t make public out of those found in the first 43 days of observations, that should mean that 388 are quite close to being confirmed as actual planets, or possibly 385 if the two confirmed ones and the third candidate signal noticed in that system they now announced were from that lot. So there should be one huge announcement at some point, assuming they’ll ever get to verify all of them. But I seem to remember them saying that the Earth-based observation season for the area they investigate is between March and September, so they’re unlikely to be able to do much more until next spring…
Of course, those are signals noticed in 43 days of data, though later observations have more than likely been used for confirmation. But they now have no less than 15 months of data, which should likely include thousands of candidate signals. And even that number should be extrapolated, since the transit method can only detect planets whose orbits are just at the right angle to make them pass between their parent star and us, which is in fact extremely unlikely to happen. One has to wonder how many planets would a similar mission that’d use the radial velocity method find in the same amount of time, assuming it’d get similar benefits out of gathering the data in space as opposed to from Earth.

If memory serves, I played and finished this game at least two and a half years ago. Yet I still remember it quite fondly, perhaps even more so just because I actually played Diablo II shortly after it and that showed me just how much better Divine Divinity is in every aspect. It’s true that it takes the basic Diablo II recipe and builds upon it, but it adds a lot to that recipe and in doing so it does nearly everything right, while Diablo II did pretty much everything wrong. At least that’s my opinion, regardless of how many will be bothered by it.

Being very interested in game mechanics, I’ll start listing this game’s many good points with the huge amount of freedom you have in developing your character. Yes, there are three classes and your choice when you create your character does have certain effects, such as a wizard getting twice the amount of mana a warrior with the same intelligence would have or a warrior getting four times the damage bonus a wizard with the same strength would have, but you are completely free to raise those attributes however you wish and to pick any skills you think will better suit your playing style. That’s right, all 96 skills are available to all three classes, so you can mix and match at will. Luckily, you will get a few skills for free over the course of the game and most mage skills can be learned from books, which can be found or bought, though the prices are steep. Even so, with each skill having five levels and the vast majority of the skills being useful, the 60 or so skill points you will obtain by the end of the game will need to be distributed carefully, making for several character development paths that could be just as good, depending on your playing style.
The game world is large and reasonably interesting as well. It will take a long time to explore every area, but you will likely find it worth your effort, as this game offers way more than swarms of enemies to kill and lots of nice loot to use or sell. Sure, there is a pretty insane amount of that as well, but there are also a whole lot of side-quests and even more NPCs that will have something to tell you, a fair portion of those discussions being quite humorous. And the music is excellent as well, adding a lot to the atmosphere of every section of the game. (For those who are interested, it is available for download from the composer’s site. Though it loses its meaning when separated from the game, seeing as it was made to perfectly accompany the various areas you will end up exploring.)
Another interesting thing that I need to mention is the kind of information your journal provides. Sure, it does the usual job of keeping track of quests, but statistics regarding the exact number of enemies killed of each type are also available, including some of the attributes of each, which can be nice if you simply want to keep score but can also provide some useful information that you could use in preparing for future fights. Also, you’ll be able to see some detailed information about your character on a screen that adds descriptions for each attribute, including your level and your resistances. And many of those descriptions will tend to be at least somewhat humorous, which to me says that the developers enjoyed making this game and wanted to provide the players with as many reasons as possible to enjoy playing it as well.

But not everything is good, of course, and likely the main issue has to do with the combat system. As one would expect, it closely follows the Diablo recipe, as many other games did as well, meaning that most fights just require you to click a button countless times. And sometimes you need to click that button as fast as you possibly can, for example if you are using the lightning spell, which hits the enemy instantly, so any fraction of a second lost between clicks translates into less damage done and therefore a higher likelihood of the enemy managing to hit back. That, coupled with the relatively small number of quickslots compared to the number of available skills, tends to diminish the positive value of such a varied and open character development system.
Another significant problem is the fact that the attributes of items are determined randomly when you first pass your mouse over them, the game only sticking to a general overall value of the item in question, roughly represented by the color of its name. So you may well need to first learn the location of any important items and then save before passing your mouse over them, reloading if the attributes you see are not suited for your playing style. It’s quite a tedious process, made worse by the fact that adding charms to items that have free slots is a permanent decision. That can cause quite a lot of frustration if you add your good charms to an item and a short while later find one that’s more useful for your particular playing style, even if perhaps its overall value would be lower, but also if you decide against adding any charms but fail to find a better item for a very long time, meaning that you struggled with weaker equipment for no reason.
I also need to make note of the size of the dungeons. The world itself is large and quite interesting, but the dungeons tend to get tedious after a while. And the real problem with that is that they’re absolutely huge, usually spanning several levels, each of those levels being large in itself. There are usually a few interesting moments in each, for example I still remember the skeleton who very bluntly hit on me, but for the most part you’re just running through seemingly endless catacombs, fighting wave after wave after wave of enemies…
And then you have the main story, which isn’t noticeably better than you’d expect from such games, being one you have likely heard hundreds of times before and will likely hear hundreds of times more in the future. Thankfully, the side-quests, NPCs and humor save a good part of the overall impression, but it would have been much better if the main story would have avoided at least a couple of clichés…

Overall, despite its flaws and the uninspired name, I certainly have to say that Divine Divinity is Diablo II done right. If item attributes wouldn’t have been randomized, or at least not randomized so much, it would have probably been about as good as a game of this type could possibly ever be, seeing as the other problems are more or less inherent to the genre.

Anyone? Please?

I guess I could add some more things to this post, though all that matters is what’s written above. Writing this in Notepad though, not directly here, because I just feel like it. All right, not only because of that… It’s also because of WordPress being annoying and creating a separate post for the autosaves when you’re editing something that you already published instead of, say, having a separate system to store those and not take up regular post numbers. Either way, you’ll also notice the lack of links. I really don’t feel like adding any of those…
There’s a smell of raspberries coming from outside. It struck me just as I meant to start writing this… Which caused me to pull that old deodorant sample out of my desk. You know, the one that smells like watermellon that came with an issue of FHM back in 2005. So now it’s really old and not much left to it, but there is actually still a bit left in it because I only used it a few times and only for this purpose, when I needed a more direct reminder. Kept it because it smelled just like a shower gel Andra really liked the smell of, to the point of no longer using it when there was just a little left and keeping the bottle in our room after that point, so she’d be able to take a whiff when she felt like it. Not that she actually did that more than a few times, but she wanted to keep it there. Can’t exactly remember why didn’t she just buy another bottle. Perhaps it was some “special edition” and she couldn’t easily find more, but I’m really not sure.
Otherwise, the same old worries and the same old reasons. Only getting worse and worse every day, whether they’re health concerns, worries about what Andra’s doing or the feeling that everyone I know or used to know is conspiring against me. I actually worked out a little plan to check out one of the more recent health concerns, as much as I could myself, and what I found was terrifying. Now I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on how it develops. What that requires is somewhat unpleasant, but at least I’m just doing things myself. Of course, I may be all wrong, as usual… So I have to move on to the other things and say that of course it’s very unlikely that everyone I’d actually want to keep in touch with is conspiring against me, but that in fact they’re just moving on with their own lives, which didn’t, don’t and never will include me, so they leave me behind, as always, because at best nobody cares about me and most likely they really want to get rid of anything that could drag them down, and I’m obviously right at the top of that list.
There is one change, however… I went from only sleeping some three hours per day to some ten hours per day… And I’m still exhausted all the time and would never wake up. But now all those things I was saying are keeping me just crawling on and on keep me from spending all day in bed. They kept me from doing that for years… I’d need that, just spending days and days in bed, holding the teddy bear and convincing myself that all this is just a nightmare that I’ll wake up from someday, as I often did for the first several months after being thrown back here. But it doesn’t seem possible anymore. Nothing seems possible anymore. Or at least nothing except things getting worse and worse, perhaps in ways I couldn’t even think of, though that may be hard to believe at times…

Yes, I’ll just be complaining some more. It’s not like I can do or think of much else… The loneliness and feeling of doom are only getting stronger every day and I feel as if I’m already dead and just don’t know it yet. Not exactly any new reasons for that, only perhaps some additional reasons to focus on a couple of them even more. So I’m just throwing a post on here and wondering what I’ll do about the second one this week, seeing as I already said I can’t think of or do much else…
Well, Ami posted some brief reviews for some of the webcomics people recommended to her after she asked for such recommendations and, as I wasn’t doing much else anyway, I went through Flipside from start to end. And now I’m trying to work my way through Drowtales, though this isn’t working too well so far. But I did actually get a couple of ideas from Flipside and Drowtales could perhaps provide even more, assuming I’ll manage to wrap my mind around it properly. But the few times I tried to follow such things before I usually got bored and gave up, so I guess it depends on exactly how much I’m trying to find something to do that’s not any of the other things I try to keep myself together with… Not that I have any idea how or why I’m even keeping myself together as much as I currently am.
As a matter of fact, I did manage to write a little more today, after much struggle, but that won’t be getting anywhere. Not that anything I do ever will… In fact, it’s really frustrating how I’m creating these schedules for myself, serving only to force me to do things I know I can’t do right, so only adding to the frustration and hopelessness and despair. Or, perhaps more often, serving to just keep me going from one point to another of the routine instead of just crashing and curling up in a ball in a corner, with my arms wrapped around myself and rocking back and forth, going completely insane as I feel I ought to, because this isn’t manageable in any way anymore…
But I can’t even seem to get myself to do that. And one of the really frustrating reasons for it appears to be the simple fact that there’s no carpet on the floor in my room. Even though a carpet would be harder to clean and therefore likely to actually be dirtier, there’s just something that prevents me from just slumping on the floor and losing it completely like that because I think it’d be dirty. Which I guess means I didn’t lose it quite so completely yet, seeing as I’m thinking of such things. Or perhaps it means I lost it even more than I thought, if such things are on my mind…
Who the fuck knows anymore? It’s not like anyone cares… It’s not like anyone could care, apparently, as the issue obviousy is that there’s not a single person in the world that I could get along with and who would be interested in me. So all that’s left to do is sit here and complain in a mad daze… Because there’s no carpet either…

It has a “magical” feel to it, due to the entire atmosphere, the way the characters talk and to some extent even due to the events that take place, but it seems quite shallow and more a children’s book than Tolkien‘s darkest story, as it is described. If you ignore the ending, at least…

Rating: 3/5