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Cataclysm Beta: Engineers provide new version of Great Feast
The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the humidity is down to a comfortable percentage. It is truly a beautiful day for a raid. What do you say we break out the picnic tables, slam down a Great Feast and then fire up the ol' goblin barbecue. Wait, what? Goblin barbecue? Datamined from the next beta patch, engineers will now be able to craft a Goblin Barbecue, an engineering version of the chef's best friend, the Great Feast. Giving well fed group and raid members 60 stamina and another 60 points in another useful stat, this barbecue promises to be delicious in all the right ways. In my opinion, engineering has been getting some amazing love this expansion, truly cementing the profession as the utility-focused trade. I cannot wait for the graphic to show up. Sing it with me, engineers: Engineering, best profession.
Earthrise reveals complex crafting screenshot
While the information flow from the Earthrise beta is a bit slower than we'd like, the team at Masthead is occasionally letting tidbits slip out into the wilds of the internet. In addition to last month's interview with studio head Atanas Atanasov and lead writer Momchil Dilov, Masthead has posted a beta screenshot showing off the sci-fi MMORPG's robust crafting interface. As ever, details are sketchy, but a thorough look at the shot reveals what seems to be a fairly complicated crafting system, with information on three separate processes (disassembling, recycling, and manufacturing) and a fourth, engineering, barely viewable at the bottom left of the main window. The screenshot also shows four variants of the item being crafted, in this case a Fasetech Rifle Chassis. While we don't yet have many details as to how the system works, we can say that the shot whets our appetite for the kind of in-depth crafting system that seems to have deserted the MMO scene in recent years, and we'll be keeping a close eye on the Earthrise beta. %Gallery-48760%
AutoCAD comes back to the Mac
Autodesk, proprietor of popular 2D/3D design software AutoCAD, is about to bring AutoCAD back to the Mac after a nearly two decade estrangement. AutoCAD is to engineering and architecture design what Photoshop is to photo editing, so this is a Pretty Big Deal. Like many software makers (and users), Autodesk bailed on the Mac platform during the early 1990s, at least as far as AutoCAD is concerned. Since then, it's been one of the biggest of the big names in software absent from the OS X platform and one of the few things Windows evangelists could point to and say, "Yeah, well Macs can't run that!" Starting in October, your Mac will run AutoCAD, as long as you're willing to pay around $4000 for it (the same price as the PC version). Not only that, Autodesk is reportedly working on an iOS version of AutoCAD as well. AutoCAD WS will be a free download from the App Store and will run on iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Naturally you won't get the same functionality out of the free app that you will out of the $4000 Mac software; while the mobile version will be able to view AutoCAD files generated on PCs or Macs, don't expect to be able to make more than very minor alterations on an iPad. Still, as the New York Times notes, carrying around blueprints on a svelte electronic device like an iPad beats schlepping big rolls of paper around on a job site. Welcome back to the Mac, AutoCAD!
Captain's Log: Starship interiors and hints of the future
Oh, hi there, readers! You'll have to excuse me; I was just enjoying a little quiet time in my quarters. My starship quarters. Inside my starship. Because I have those now. Yes, among many other features, Season 2: Ancient Enemies introduced starship interiors to Star Trek Online. Continuing from last week's discussion of diplomacy, one of Season 2's other big additions, I thought we'd spend this edition of Captain's Log examining ship interiors. Plus, we'll take a special side trip into the future to consider what else STO fans can look forward to -- in the future!
Gold Capped: Ask an auctioneer
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. For half-arsed, last-minute mailbag posts, tune in every Thursday after Basil forgot his deadline because he was buying his wife stylish side tables at large Swedish furniture stores. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I have a bunch of questions and comments piled up in my poor neglected inbox, so today we're going to jump right in and address some of the good ones. Bernake (awesome name, by the way) writes: Previously you have established that it is not profitable it to transfer gold frequently across faction. While this is generally true, I play on a server where the Horde population playing at peak hours is no more than 600 people, less than 2,000 active on the server. I was wondering (if that) warrants a change in this policy, as the Alliance have over 9,000 active players with at least 600 on throughout the day and over 2,000 playing at peak hours on any given day. I was considering moving into the Alliance glyph market, as the Horde glyph market is quite small. I was wondering if you would support this move as well as give some insight? I believe you're talking about this post on cross-faction arbitrage. In fact, it can be extremely profitable to move money and products across the neutral AH. I may have sounded a little negative because it is risky; however, unless you're losing a chunk of your stock to snipers or 20 percent of your gold to the neutral AH cut, it's not a bad thing to do. You can just buy to resell, or if you're having trouble finding mats on your home faction, you can use stock from the other side to keep your costs in line.
Stanford cuts down on clutter by removing 70,000 books from its Engineering Library
Guess this is one way to tighten your belt. Stanford University has opted to drastically reduce the catalog of physical volumes within its Engineering Library down from its original 80,000 to a svelte 10,000 copies. Before you cry foul and analogize between this and the prep school that threw out all its paper books, note that we're mostly talking about periodicals here, which tend to be used for quick references -- something that the newly digitized and searchable copies will probably make a lot easier. This action was prompted when the University noticed a large proportion of its leafy volumes hadn't left their shelves for over five years, and now the librarians are all aflutter with excitement about using the freed up space and resources for more productive causes. Such as educating us on the unappreciated benefits of indexing.
Cataclysm Beta: Professions and trade skills
Step aside, class changes. Back off, world revamp. Now it's time to put what everyone really wants to see into the spotlight: trade skills. MMO-Champion, which is having some difficulty staying up and stable this evening, has what you're looking for amongst its Cataclysm information. Blacksmithing Tailoring Jewelcrafting Alchemy Enchanting Leatherworking First Aid Mining Fishing Herbalism Inscription Engineering Cooking Skinning Okay, trade skills aren't the most exciting thing in the world, but these previews give us a glimpse at what sort of stats we'll be dealing with on our gear in this expansion. Just look at the Elementium Poleaxe, Bio-Optic Killshades and the new gems. If those MMO-Champion pages aren't your style, there's also a good unofficial trade skill compilation on the Cataclysm forums. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From goblins and worgens to mastery and guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.
The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing a new level 80 ret paladin
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. As I said last week, I'm looking for action screenshots of retribution and protection paladins. I've gotten a lot of good shots thus far and am always looking for more (especially you retribution paladins out there, as I got a ton of protection ones). They can be any level between 1 and 80. I'll be using these for header graphics like the one above. Please send those as well as any other comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. If you've been following the column recently, you've seen the three-part series we did on gearing up a brand new level 80 protection paladin. We're going to take the same approach now to the retribution tree and work our way through the different types of items. First up, we've got craftables and reputation items. We'll be taking a look at stuff you'll be able to grab in dungeons next week and finish up the week after with a run-through of what all you can buy with the badges you got from all of that time in the random dungeon finder.
Blood Pact: Warlock professions
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest, brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "The slightest loss of concentration is all it takes." -- Medivh. Selecting professions for your characters often comes down to a choice of utility; if you have several toons, you may want to make some gather and others be the crafters. If you only have the one character at 80, there is a greater desire to be self-sufficient. Professions are also one of those things that many people feel are a part of their character and help define them almost as much as their class. If you're uncertain which professions your warlock should take up then this is the place for you, as Blood Pact takes a look at all 14 and considers which are of the most use to the 'lock on the go.
Insider Trader: Selling arrows in singles for the price of a stack scam
Got trade skills? Want money? Insider Trader is the column to read. Whenever they let Basil write it, he'll do his best to fill your head full of ideas and your bags full of valuables and gold. I'm going to come right out and say it: Don't do this. I recently wrote about ways engineers can make money, mentioning (among other things) selling epic ammo to hunters. The problem with making the best raiding and PvP ammo in the game only available from players is that it forces hunters to either find an engineer with the recipe who is willing to do all the crafting by mail, or buy it off the auction house. What do I have against the auction house, you ask? Well, overall it's an excellent tool and far superior to the much nastier alternative of being forced to actually use trade chat for, you know, trade. It's not perfect, however. In fact, there's one massive glaring inadequacy that can be found.
Gold Capped: Engineering isn't so useless after all
Gold doesn't matter, right? It's just gold, and you get more than enough for your needs through dailies and the occasional mining spree. Why even bother getting Gold Capped? It's not like you'll ever be able to spend it all! Wait a sec, how does that bank alt have a single Ulduar clear and have Mimiron's head? Every week, check in with Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast and the Call to Auction podcast, as he attempts to mold all the random information jostling for cerebral space into a coherent, readable post about how to make gold in the World of Warcraft. In real life, engineers are brilliant and dedicated individuals who work together with tradespeople to accomplish some of the technological marvels of the modern world. Historically, these are the people who built the pyramids, the boats that brought Europeans to the new world, and the spaceships that took mankind to the moon and back. In World of Warcraft, engineers are a bunch of goofy characters who speak in childishly high voices and have a tendency to blow themselves up by accident in humorous ways. Anyone else sense that whoever did the concept art at Blizzard for gnomish and goblin engineers flunked out of engineering? Anyways, while engineering is an amazing profession for certain parts of the game, it's dead last when it comes to making money. There are only really a few things engineers can do to make cash. Wryxian In general, we want Engineering to remain a tradeskill mainly focused on creating fun or useful gadgets for the engineer, but we are exploring options for items that can be sold to other players for profit. source This quote was from the Cataclysm profession preview we posted about earlier. Engineering is currently barely ahead of farming in terms of income potential, and it's nice to see that Blizzard acknowledges this and might fix it. Not all hope is lost, though. A savvy player can eak out a living if they focus on the right markets. First off, the elephant in the room: selling epic ammo.
Encrypted Text: Profession perks for rogues
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we talk about which professions are the best for rogues and how to maximize their benefits. Our story today starts all the way back in Molten Core, the first raid dungeon in WoW. Back then, warriors were the only tanks and unless you were a warlock or druid, none of your gear dropped. Rogues were the only true melee DPS class in the game, as warriors were stuck tanking and the melee hybrids had nothing in their arsenal besides the fearsome Auto Attack. It was a good period for Blizzard's favorite class, and we enjoyed a time of prosperity and abundance. If you look at the game as it stands today and compare it to its humble beginnings, it's easy to see the numerous improvements to both gameplay and also to the general quality of life of a player. One area that saw an abundance of changes was the profession system, which has gone through several iterations. We've seen new trade skills introduced with each expansion to the game, as well as many additions to the capabilities of each. Due to the strong tradition of min/maxing in the rogue culture, choosing the right professions has obviously become a topic of discussion amongst those looking to perfect their characters.
WoW.com's Weekly Comic: Byron, the Tauren Rogue!
Welcome to another edition of the WoW.com Weekly Comic, Byron the Tauren Rogue! We meet our esteemed security system in today's comic. Time for Byron to do a little bit of ... "evaluating" (if you catch my drift). Check out the full version right here, and tune in next Tuesday morning for a new page. You can also see all the previous pages in the gallery below. %Gallery-77825%
NVIDIA's Optimus technology shows its graphics switching adroitness on video
Explaining automatic graphics switching and the benefits thereof can be a somewhat dry affair. You have to tell people about usability improvements and battery life savings and whatnot... it's much more fun if you just take a nice big engineering board, strap the discrete GPU on its own card and insert an LED light for the viewer to follow. NVIDIA has done just that with its Optimus technology -- coming to a laptop or Ion 2-equipped netbook near you -- and topped it off by actually pulling out the GPU card when it wasn't active, then reinserting it and carrying on with its use as if nothing had happened. This was done to illustrate the fact that Optimus shuts down the GPU electrically, which is that little bit more energy efficient than dropping it into an idle state. Shimmy past the break to see the video.
Insider Trader: Guide to making BoE engineering pets
Insider Trader is where you turn when you need to know something about your professions. As we mentioned in a recent patch 3.3.3 update, the Pet Bombling and Lil' Smokey engineering manufactured pets are going to be changed to bind on equip. Pets from almost any source are a lucrative market to be in, and this will provide another way engineers can make a bit of cash from their horrible gold sink of a profession. Hunter ammo was a step in the right direction, and this is too.
Professional number crunching falls short with the Formulator Series calculators
My name is Steve, and I'm a recovering engineer. Although I'm no longer a practicing engineer, I still hold a Professional Engineer license and I'm still interested in most things dealing with engineering. That's why I perked up when I received an email from MultiEducator, Inc., a software development firm known previously for multimedia history CDs and their Historycentral.com website. Their new Formulator Series of specialized iPhone calculators for engineers, architects, plumbers, and construction professionals features 22 individual apps priced between US$0.99 and US$17.99. Since my background is in Civil Engineering, I requested a review copy of Civil Engineering Formulator [US$4.99, iTunes Link] to get a feel for the depth and breadth of a typical Formulator Series app. A look at the web page for Civil Engineering Formulator shows that the app began with 75 formulas in the Civil Engineering areas of beams, bridges, columns, elevators, piles, plates, roads, soil, and structural steel. Over the next few months, the app is to grow to more than 200 formulas, at which time the price will increase for new buyers. Civil Engineering Formulator also includes almost 100 conversion formulas, as well as 50 area calculations.
Self-assembling solar cells built using ancient wisdom, modern technology
Alright, so self-assembling electronics are hardly new in and of themselves, and nanoscale tech tends to always come with bombastic promises, but you don't wanna miss how this latest innovation is built. Two professors from the University of Minnesota have successfully demonstrated a self-assembly technique that arranges microscopic electronic elements in their proper order thanks to the absolute enmity that exists between water and oil. By coating elements with a hydrophilic layer on one side and some hypdrophobic goo on the other, they've achieved the proper element orientation, and the final step in their work was the insertion of a pre-drilled, pre-soldered sheet, which picks up each element while being slowly drawn out of the liquid non-mixture. The achievement here is in finding the perfect densities of water and oil to make the magic happen, and a working device of 64,000 elements has been shown off -- taking only three minutes to put together. If the method's future proves successful, we'll all be using electronics built on flexible, plastic, metal, or otherwise unconventional substrates sometime soon.
Popular Science explains the making of Project Natal
Vaunted science magazine Popular Science got to check out Project Natal at CES, and has posted its own take on the project over on its site. While most of the coverage we've seen of Microsoft's motion controller has been from the gaming press, Pop Sci comes at it from a software engineering perspective. Essentially, Microsoft is trying to build a sophisticated AI that can look at video of what you're doing in front of a camera, and translate that to information the game can use. To accomplish that, the coders behind Natal took lots and lots of reference pictures and videos, and they're still "teaching" the software what it looks like when you try to hit a soccer ball or wave at Milo. It's fascinating stuff -- thirty "guesses" per second at your body's location and movement based on what the computer "knows" about what bodies look like and how they move, and lots of calculations based on that data. Hopefully by the time it's supposed to release later this year, Natal will have figured out what it looks like when we melee with a battle rifle. [Thanks, Wonderflex!]
The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 4
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. Here we are again with the final section on the low level paladin tanking guide. You can go back and read parts one, two, and three if you need to catch up. This final part deals with consumables, macros, and addons. As a dungeon runner, you don't have the high requirements usually associated with raids, but there are a couple things you'll want to keep an eye on. You'll want to keep reasonably buffed, have some useful macros to fall back on, and have some addons to help organize some of the more procedural steps. Let's take a look after the break.
EVE Evolved: Research: Reverse Engineering and Tech 3
In the first two parts of this guide to Research in EVE Online, I covered the basics of Tech 1 blueprint research and the "Invention" system that allows players to make their own Tech 2 blueprint copies. The reverse engineering process used to make Tech 3 blueprints is a lot like invention except with a new set of materials, equipment and skills. Though the process used to create it will be familiar to inventors, the end product is a strange beast. Unlike Tech 2, Tech 3 isn't just a straight improvement over lower tech levels and doesn't use Tech 1 or 2 as a base. Instead, it's an entirely new technology used to make custom, modular ships. At the moment, the only Tech 3 products we have are the modular "Strategic Cruiser" class but more is planned for future patches. Tech 3 frigates are rumoured to be next on the development table and it's entirely possible that we'll see strange new Tech 3 modules thrown into the mix too at some point. In today's part of this bumper guide to research, I look into EVE's newest addition to the researcher's repertoire as I examine Tech 3 and "Reverse Engineering". I'll look at how it all fits together to make a finished product, what's required to get involved and best practices for staying profitable in what has become a very competitive marketplace.
