Thoghts on Fallout 3

Just got Fallout 3 and play a little bit yesterday. Most of the people and game critics gave it high score and high praise...but for some reason I find some of its features annoying, and they stand out quite a bit. I don't know why most people don't have my kind of problems with this type of game (Fallout 3, Oblivion etc). I actually played Oblivion before as well, and don't like it that much. But I thought I gave Fallout 3 another try because it just looks so good. It's actually better than Oblivion so far but still I find the following things annoying. Most people I imagine will disagree because I think they are actually personal preferences in which you can't have one way and the other at the same time.

1. No immediate access to mini-map: to see the mini-map, you have to bring up Pip-Boy. But couldn't they just put the map on the t0p-right hand corner? Yea, it's not as real or authentic, but it seems more convenient to me. Because I find it quite disorienting especially when I am in a new area.
2. NPC walk too far away and too often: I notice NPC just go around doing their business etc. Most of them stick in certain area but still there are time I wonder...couldn't they just make all of them sit tight in one place? Yea, again the realism will suffer, but it's more convenient if I can just see whom I want to speak with at exact location.
3. 3rd Person view gameplay looks bad: or at least it doesn't play as well as 1st person view. The animation is bad and the aiming is kind of weird I think. That bothers me a bit because I like to see my character most of the time, and 1st person view makes me dizzy sometimes.
4. Health Recover difficult: Again it's a realism/convenience trade-off. Yea, I imagine in real wasteland it's tough to get a good rest or eat some good food. But come on...why gives us a hard time just to recover some health. I can't even find a bed in the first town right away that I can sleep in, and the doc is just way too expensive. Other ways come with side effect like radiation...it's just a lot of headache in my opinion.

Maybe I just like simpler, dumber and faster pace game like Diablo 2...yea, most likely that's the case.

UPDATE: Although I still find those things annoying, the game become more enjoyable once I got a hang of it. The VATS, especially, is a new feature that I enjoy. Also the game let you save any time so it's good for "experimenting," and being able to stop playing at any moment is good for a "busy" guy like me, ha.

Interesting Stuff on Skinned Mesh

As I tried to setup the skinned mesh and skeleton animations I researched on the subject and found many interesting information regarding the utilities provided by directX and D3DX. I am pretty sure it will make my life easier and help my implementation of the game. Still, it's a lot of work to implement and make everything work properly. But I am pretty sure now it was a good idea to switch to DirectX because it seems to be more game oriented. OpenGL also works well but it doesn't seem to provide easy and searchable access to game related technologies. Since I don't have a lot of time and budget, DirectX seems to be a better choice indeed. At least I am also learning new stuff as I go along.

Progressing

Some implementation has been done during the weekend:
1. FPS display
2. CEGUI events setup
3. Camera follows

Right now I am in the process of implementing skinned mesh for the robot.

Problem Solved

Finally solved the problem. I have to download the CEGUI code and find out the render state it's setting so I can set them back. Apparently CEGUI called the following on directX device:
SetSamplerState( 0, D3DSAMP_ADDRESSU, D3DTADDRESS_CLAMP);
SetSamplerState( 0, D3DSAMP_ADDRESSV, D3DTADDRESS_CLAMP);
For some reason the clamp setting cause the sprite to use only the first pixel of the texture image. This is really weird. The reason behind it is still unknown to me. But now I just set them back to D3DTADDRESS_WRAP and that solves the problem. It proves that while these type of libraries are supposed to be black box, during debugging, it might be worth it to look into their code. (Yea, that's not supposed to happen but nothing in this world is perfect).
While at solving this problem, I also found some interesting directX classes such as LPDIRECT3DSTATEBLOCK9 and LPD3DXMATRIXSTACK, which is good.
An interesting link is also found: http://www.codesampler.com/dx9src/dx9src_2.htm

Another Wierd Problem

I have made some more progress in setting up the CEGUI. Right now I am able to use scheme to show up a window, and tried out CEGUI's utilities.
But now I encounter a very weird problem, which is still under investigation. It appears that after drawing CEGUI windows, my texture coordinate of sprite is messed up. It's kind of wierd because the model's texture is still correct. I think CEGUI must have change something in the directX device.
I think I might have encounter similar problem before, but not sure. In any case, further investigation is required.

Interesting Linking Problem

Now I got the CEGUI initialization setup, I attempt to load the image set. But then I started to get some really weird errors. The debugger did not help because it just shows some weird location and some exception that just does not make any sense. The CEGUI message dump in CEGUI.txt did n0t help neither because it just ends right when it attempts to load the image set.
Eventually I get to see this BLOCK_TYPE_IS_VALID assertion failure, which leads me to this link: http://www.zeroc.com/faq/windowsLibraryMixup.html...it's not related to my application, but basically the problem is caused by building application in debug mode and linking it with release mode libraries...yea, because I see all these debug information not found warning, I thought I can just use the release libraries instead of dubug libraries...
Yea, very dumb, but that's another interesting information. Now I am back into the "normal" situation, and trying to solve the usual image file not found problem...ha.