"I quit, and so should you"

I was thinking about quitting realm for some time.

Honestly, I already did quit a few days ago but... then I returned. To the forum only. Just to see last posts or maybe some private messages. Then I started reading. Reading the forum made me want to play and I entered the game - just for a few minutes. Then minutes became hours... As always. That's something sick, an addiction. At least it's better than pills or drugs or alcohol.

I realized that it's eating too much of my time. Too much of my energy that could be directed to my own creative projects. From being just a casual game it become sort of a monster that eats a big part of my life. Because not only I'm playing a few hours a day but also thinking about realm during the day. It's interfering with my real life. Is it worth it?

In realm we are busy with solving artificial problems - defeating enemies that don't really exist, gathering artificial wealth based on artificial scarcity of items. Also, there is nothing new there. I completed hundreds of tombs, trenches and undead lairs. And not so many cemeteries or candy lands but they aren't worth it. How many times can one person do these things again and again and again and again?

The content can be completed in a week and perfected maybe in three months (especially tombs). So this game is not about content. The point of this game is social interaction. But it's still artificial and shallow, it's based on solving all these artificial problems together.

You can develop friendships when times are hard, when people are struggling, overpowered by some crushing forces. That force can be a permadeath - when noobs are struggling and give away noobish items to help their brethren to rebuild.

I no longer have economic problems in the game. I'm wealthy. And even if I lose everything, I can rebuild.

Yes, there is still a room for improvement. I can still get better at running tombs. And maybe beat Krayzie in a speedrun one day? That could be a worthy goal. Speedruns give a lot of replayability to any game. Or maybe farm fame for all-time legend? That's too time consuming and there's no real challenge. And it's only a game. All things achieved here are really worthless.

And there is a problem that many parts of the game that were fun for me are no longer fun. I kill these poor gods one by one or rush a tomb and I think: what am I doing here? With a feeling that it's no longer a right place for me. It's no longer playful.

One of my most enjoyable moments in the realm was joining a midland train as a noob. I leveled to 20 by making one circle around the map and the train was crushing everything in it's path. All those scary monsters, hard to take out alone, were vanishing under the train's firepower! That was fun. Or visiting dungeons for the first time...

My best IRL friend didn't want to play Realm. He started, leveled to 20 following the quest marker and said the game is no challenge to him. And he would be a boss there because he beats me in all games.

I was also thinking about improving the game - it's interface and mechanics. I have lot of ideas. I keep them to myself because the developers don't give a shit about player's ideas. Or worse - they may implement it and charge gold for things I'd like to be free for everyone. I should probably make my own game and channel my energy and time into that.

The conclusion is - if you want to quit, don't visit forums, don't enter IRC or mumble.

Now I'd like to say "thank you" to all people who I know and care about, you know who you are. Or you don't. I'm not really a social person. And my oldest realm friends (if I can call them that) don't play the game anyway. There won't be wine cellars, tombs and drop parties. No mass suicide of all characters. I won't even return to the game to say good bye. I'm not even sure if I will really quit. My quitting will be probably instant.

Now the character's death is a good opportunity to leave because I want to fool the all-seeing Sauron's eye of realmeye into thinking it's still alive. Also, according to my religious beliefs, I will treat this highly improbable death as a "sign" (from universe or gods or whatever spiritual forces) that my previous decision about quitting was right. My cruel gods say: stay true to your word and do as you stated. Or we will do it for you.

See you in another life, brothers.

The Legendary Archer

I "achieved" a weekly legend. And I'm not proud or happy about it. 

I was clearing some part of Mad Lab, then I realized that other people are already at the boss. So I clicked teleport and... landed in a death screen. I didn't even see the place I teleported to - instant death. So it's not related to skill. Maybe except that skilled (experienced) person should already know that one does not simply teleport to the boss in Mad Lab.

That archer was one of my oldest characters. I was always careful with that character and broke only one ammy on him ever (well, Geb did that for me). But shit happens and teleport death can happen also in the godlands - you teleport on top of a Ghost God and it's game over. And we teleport a lot.

Did I feel angry? No. Sad? No. I was completely indifferent.

Maybe that's because now I perceive my characters as tools, not as living personalities. So there will be no death videos and no wine cellars in memory of my dead archer (that's silly isn't it?).

Death is not a big problem - I have some spare doom bows and ton of life pots, I can easily rebuild. I can have another archer with similar capabilities in a few hours. Or maybe a huntress. Death of high fame character is even liberating - because you can stop caring about all that fame and play the game more happily because there is much less to lose.

But I guess I won't rebuild because... I'm quitting.

Realm Video Recorder

If you have a 5-year old computer with integrated video card - you'll run all flash games without problems. But recording videos will be a problem.

I tried Fraps, Bandicam, Camstudio, Debut, Expression Encoder and some other recorders. None of them is perfect. The lag increases noticably and it makes the gameplay much worse. Fraps performs best among them but it's not free and it records the whole screen.

Reducing video size by half (to 400x300) and framerate to 15 fps helps to get better performance but the quality of video is very bad and the lag is still there anyway.

The main problem is that computer's processor is used to encode the video in real time. And encoding is expensive. What if the raw screenshots are saved during gameplay and encoded later?

That's why I think about writing my own recording software. It seems easy to achieve. Just capture the game rectangle 24 or 30 times per second and save them as raw BMP files. No processing, no compression. Those screenshots can be imported later into some encoding software to make a movie.

How much space is required?
one frame = 800 x 600 x 3 RGB components = 1 440 000 bytes
one second at 30 fps = 41.2 MB
1 minute = 2.41 GB
10 minutes = 24.1 GB
30 minutes = 72.4 GB
one hour = 144.8 GB
Those amounts seem affordable.
The FPS could be reduced to 24 or 15 to reduce disk usage.

The recorder dedicated to RotMG could take advantage of knowledge of game's interface. The 200 x 600 part on the left side rarely changes. Sometimes the HP/MP change, sometimes the item gets dragged in or out but most of the time it doesn't change. Saving only the differences between frames there practically eliminates that area. The frames would be reconstructed after recording is done. That leaves us with 600 x 600 main gaming area.

Let's calculate again for 600 x 600 and 24 fps.
1 second = 24.7 MB
1 minute = 1.45 GB
10 minutes = 14.5 GB
30 minutes = 43.4 GB
one hour = 86.9 GB

Now the disk should be good enough to cope with writes. How good should it be? I'll just copy some large file from one physical disk to another and see how long it takes...
Copying 4.2 GB file took 108 seconds.
That's 2.33 GB per minute. While only about 1.5 GB is needed.
So yes, my disk should perform well enough.

Things that should additionally improve performance:
    - saving to physical disk other than system disk
    - disabling compression and encryption for that disk
    - disabling antivirus software, at least for that disk
    - defragmenting the disk before recording
   
Some cheap compression schemes like run-length encoding, or looking for differences between frames, could be used to reduce disk usage. But they probably won't work well when they are needed most: during the intensive action sequences, when the screen is rotated. They would work well during loading screens or when the character stays still.

Another idea would be to monitor processor and disk usage and encode the movie in the background when the system is idle. The encoding progresses at its own slower pace, without interfering with game or with recording of raw frames.

Capturing audio that is in sync with video would be another question.

A completely different approach would be to record only user's input and network packets and use a modified game client to render the video later, perhaps at slower pace. This would be very cheap to record but things would probably get out of sync when replaying.

Another idea is to record the state of flash objects visible in the frame (tiles, their rotation, monsters, projectiles, text, etc.) and render the frames later. This would require a detailed knowledge of the game client.

I'm not going to write such software right now. Probably because the cheaper solution is to buy a better computer dedicated to gaming. I just wanted to get this idea out of my mind.