Tag Archives: Guild Wars 2

Getting Back into Guild Wars 2

Lately, Jessa and I have been playing a lot of Guild Wars 2. The thing that really brought me back to Guild Wars 2 is the removal of my primary complaint about it at the start: the level grind. In particular, there are a couple of new features that made this less of a problem for me.

The reason the leveling annoys me so much in Guild Wars 2 is basically two-fold. First, Guild Wars 2 is a mostly-open world MMO, meaning that you can pretty much go to anywhere on the map immediately after the tutorial. The catch is that a lot of this grand map will be indirectly locked off if you’re not high enough level to deal with the mobs located there. The reason this one in particular sticks in my craw is that they’ve made levels irrelevant up to your level by downleveling you when you are in a zone that is below your level – so if they can downlevel you, why won’t they uplevel you, or, better yet, remove levels altogether? Continue reading Getting Back into Guild Wars 2

Printing 3D Pictures

I have a 3D printer, and I’m often looking for cool new things that I can make. Since I’m not an artist nor a designer, this can be quite tricky, and instead I have to rely on my other skills, such as programming to do interesting things. A while back, I learned how to write STL files (the standard file format understood by 3D printers) via C++ or perl. This really opened up what I could do, since I could now create designs programmatically.

One technique I have spent a fair amount of time working with is embedded raster imagery. Namely, given an image or icon, I want to create a 3D object with that icon extruded, embossed, or otherwise present on the object that I’m making. A few examples of this are my Aquan/Kurak Alliance command tokens:

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Christmas in July

For Christmas last year, I did a lot of stuff with my 3D printer. For me, it’s a compromise between “hand made” and “doesn’t look stupid” because, well, I’m neither artistic nor very good at hand made. I never really got the chance to talk about them, as I ended up being very busy this spring, so I wanted to do a little show and tell since I had a bit of time to write. Here’s a brief selection of what I made:

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