Inside with Incarna

I couldn’t resist.  New stuff in the Incarna expansion made me want to peek back into EVE Online.

Incarna looking at you…

The patching took a while, so I haven’t had much time to poke around, but I did get a view of one new feature, the captain’s quarters

Gone are the hanger views of your current ship.

No more ship view…

Instead, when you log in, you are in your new quarters.

Your new home

You can move around, but the controls are… wrong… in my opinion.

They use WASD to move, but they keys are for absolute direction, not relative.  So A doesn’t turn to you or make you strafe right, but turns your body and moves you West, while W moves you North, and so on.

Not a totally outlandish idea.  If I recall my short time there, it is the way that you move around in Dream of Mirrors Online.

Coming from an EQ/WoW/FPS background it felt awkward in DOMO and it feels awkward in EVE.  And while you don’t have to move around a lot, you do have to walk a bit when you return to your station and dock.

When that happens, you get placed at the far end of a walkway and must walk to your quarters.

I just got these legs, I don’t want to wear them out

Not a long walk, but you have to do it.  You can see my quarters through the hatch.

In your quarters you get access to the same things that used to have buttons on the side bar, hanger, drones, storage, and the like.

Access to controls

Then there is that big screen TV flashing stuff at you.  A little more useful than the CONCORD billboard you see at every gate, but not hugely relevant.

And so there you are in your room, a little hologram of your currently select ship in front of you, standing there, wondering what the big deal is.

Well, I am out of that damn pod at least!

I redid my avatar… tried to make him a little more Michael Westen-ish.

I guess the new quarters are cool.

I am not sure it adds much to the game yet.  And, like any change to a user interface, it feels awkward and less functional when you first start using it.  We shall see if it grows on people as time goes on.

And this will lead to walking on stations and seeing other people some day.

And /dance emotes… I bet we get those as well.  You just wait.

Addendum:

Per Soliloquy’s comment below, I did managed to sit down.  You seem to have to get yourself and the camera in the right position to get that option.

Sit or Stand, your option

However, once seated, the camera pulls in too close to see much unless you rotate it around to look at the back of your head.

What is on Space TV today?

I cannot seem to get a decent screen shot of my character sitting.  I can get his whole body in if I move the camera practically up to the roof, but to look into his face, the camera positions itself so you can only see him from the waist up with about 2/3 of the screen showing stuff behind and above his head.

You can also see your pod.  I did not turn around when I docked, it was right there behind me.

<make Pod Bay Door joke>

And you can see your ship docked as well.

Behold the mighty Sushi Boat!

The ship rotates very slowly.  I would guess it rotates about 1/10 the speed of the wireframe model you see as well.  So waiting for a profile screenshot can take a bit.

And you cannot scroll the camera into first person view, so any screenshot would include you as well.

(And there is Stargrace in her quarters staring at her Domi.)

YouTube and the Holy Grail

It was one of those strange junctures in life.

I walked by my daughter, who was sitting at her computer, to see what she was doing.  Her iMac sits in a corner of the family room, so is pretty visible but I make regular close passes to see what is going on.  The old eyes are not what they once were.

It turned out that she was on YouTube watching the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

I told my daughter, “You know, I have that on DVD.”

It is true.  I have the complete set of the TV series on DVD.  It is something of a requirement for a nerd my age.

She then asked, “Do you have the ‘Bridge of Death’ bit?”

It was like a grail shaped beacon had been lit.

But of course I do!

I briefly explained that it was from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail and that it was in the cabinet with most of the rest of the DVDs that aren’t quite suitable for children, like The Wild Bunch and The Manchurian Candidate.

So she wanted to see it.  Actually, she just wanted to see the bridge of death scene, but there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to show her yet another of the movies on my list of films I fully intend to force her to watch at some point.  I’ve already had her sit through Bye Bye Birdie, Airplane!, Top Secret, Romeo and Juliet, and The Matrix. (Though only the original.  I’m sure we can all agree that she can discover the other two movies on her own later, when she is ready for that level of disappointment.)

So I was prepared to get the movie out, recalling that I got my grandmother to bring me to see it back when it was in the theater when I was my daughter’s age, and it… barely screwed me up at all.

But then I stopped, thinking that perhaps I had best clear this with the wife.  But she was calling us out to the TV already.  She was watching The Graham Norton Show on BBC America, no doubt to see Janet Jackson who was the main guest, but then one of the other guests turned out to be Eric Idle.

It was a sign!

My wife gave us the green light, then withdrew to the other room, not really being a fan herself.

And we watched the movie, and it was good.

I did pass over the tale of Sir Galahad.  Thank for the format creator for the ability to easily skip chapters.  I wasn’t quite ready to explain what was going on with Zoot and her identical twin sister.

But the rest of the movie went pretty well.

It was a bit annoying that she had seen bits of the film on YouTube, specifically the bridge of death, the Black Knight, and the rabbit, though that wasn’t enough to spoil the whole thing.

I am not sure that absurdest humor is quite within the grasp of a 9 year old.  In my memory, I have always found the movie funny on the levels I see it now, but I am no doubt wrong.

So she wasn’t sure why saying, “Ni” to somebody would hurt them and the holy hand grenade was “just a grenade dad.”  And the ending was sort of a, “Wait, what?”

On the other hand, she liked Sir Robin’s minstrels and the French, got the giant wooden rabbit reference (are they totally ripping off the Greeks?), enjoyed the coconuts being used for horse sounds, and at the end when Sir Bedevere, after the bridge of death, asks King Arthur how he knows so much about swallows, she was quick to point out that he learned all that in the first scene when he gets in the argument about the coconuts.

And she did come away happy, as though she enjoyed it, unlike that time with Bye Bye Birdie. (Though in my defense, she still sings a couple of the songs from it to this day!)  And she has been exposed to yet another reference point in nerd culture. (A point proven by Epic Ben just today.)

Which culturally significant film should be next on the list?