So long, and thanks for all the fish!

I never thought I would be making this post, from the first day that I popped the install CD into my PowerMac G3 and created my first character – an Undead Priest named, creatively, Leeroyjenkin (I since realized that not only was Leroy spelled wrong, with the addition of the Jenkins title, I could have created the desired effect without running out of characters).  Running through the first iterations of World of Warcraft, through hit and miss patches, eventually reaching the once famed goal of Level 60.  Inevitably, I built up my UBRS and LBRS gear until I was viable in a Molten Core raid.  I suppose only those players who engaged in the masochistic activity that was 40-man raiding, complete with cycling all of our raiders through UBRS for the fire resistance buff, farming endless Dreamfoil for Greater Fire Resistance Potions, and finally the laughable number of times Vendorstrike was rolled upon.  From the first few raids, through to the defeat of Nefarion, and onto the Ahn’Quiraj, stopping for a lengthy period in Zul’Gurub.  Enter now my first hiatus, once the first round of Naxxramas was released, and after spending hours upon hours learning kiting, and positioning rotations, an important summer was taking place, the core of 5 friends that I played with were playing less and less and we all drifted away from the game.  However, Burning Crusade and the changes to PvP as well as general class mechanics combined with being quite bored with the new school year all conspired against my social life, and I slipped once again into Azeroth.  I played through the release of Sunwell, but only saw the killing blows dealt to Prince Kael’thas and Lady Vasj.  Finals once again struck, and there was not enough time to learn Blizzard’s new shenanigans.  At this point, I decided to again take a leave of absence from Warcraft, and if asked at that time, I would have been sure that this was the end.  But as any medium to long time player knows, it may be harder to quit smoking than to quit World of Warfcraft, I mean at this point my priest had well over 100 days of in-game time logged, as well as several alts probably contributing to more than 1/3 of a year of play time.  One can’t just waste all that time, right?  Fortunately, Wrath of the Lich King was released, effectively pressing reset on the game once more, and giving players a chance to justify coming back, I mean, you can get into the cutting edge of gear, because everyone else is on a level playing field now, right?  Of course, you may have to spend Friday nights farming badges or building DKP or at the very least attendance.  You start running out of good excuses, your friends begin to notice, and worst of all it is no longer possibly to drink 24 beers in a night without puking.  Long story short, Warcraft became the well-known secret life of mine, and slowly degraded into basically a hang-over cure, all the while it developed the same connotations as herpes when mentioned outside of specific circles.  It was time to quit.  So, just press delete on the game files, and do it cold turkey.  Or at least, that was my plan, until one night, with the help of a couple bottles of wine, the Blizzard Installer made its way back onto my system, and I found myself once again farming badges.  I was on the cusp of making the choice to be a “raider” again, except that my computer would only play the intense bits of fights at 1 or 2 fps, and when those parts involve standing in fire, sometimes the 2 seconds that it took for the fire to display was too long.  However, plans of a new computer, with a new video card, and the promise of good frame rates reared its ugly head, and things were looking grim for Redtoke’s night life.  But in a blinding spark of clarity, one night in the computer lab at school, in particular the 5th night in a row that a certain Warcraft player had been coding till the sun came up, the answer broke through.  A reflection about what the conversations looked like, a comment from a group mate, and very probably a chick flick made the right choice, and my account was canceled, the game removed, but most importantly the mental choice to no longer fall into that particular category of Software Engineer was made.

It has been a month since that day, and I’ve finally stopped checking mmo-champion.com on a daily basis, instead moving on to Diablo 3 news, since that is at least a year away, I can drown my sorrows in a game that can be whatever I want it to be.  But also in the free time, I’ve started looking into top of the line real-time graphics and cutting edge high quality renders both in the form of ray-tracing.  I’m going to be posting a series of selections about how ray-tracing works, my experiences with it, and some of my thoughts as to why people should even care about it.

Lastly, I know I’ve been a stranger to this medium for a long time.  It’s been too long.  I’m hoping that I can catalyze my desire for implementing ray-tracing, with sharing my progress here, and that hopefully it will result in a better end product in both cases.

Red.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.