Games I play : Final Fantasy XI

Today I decided to dedicate this to the games I play. I did say I'd post whatever comes to mind, and I've been putting it off for too long I suppose!

So today, Final Fantasy XI. I've been a regular player since the US launch in October 2003, technically November since with delays in shipping and stuff I only got it installed by the 31st and started on November 1st.

At first I had a random server and city, not really knowing anything. My computer also had a rather craptacular framerate. The Official Benchmark could barely get 1500 points, a minimum of 1000 was almost required to play at the expense of just everything. It prompted me to get a new computer, which I didn't regret doing either.

From a P3 866mhz I went to a Athlon XP 2500+ (1.8 ghz or so), which was pretty good at the time as the chips were stretching past the 2.5 mhz mark and no Dual Cores yet. That increased my benchmark score to over 3000 right there. That computer lasted me over 3 yars before I got my latest gaming computer, which is a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 (x2) ghz.

Anyway, at the time, the webcomic Real Life had a grouping planned that weekend on the Phonix server, in the starting town of Sand'oria. Using a little trick to re-randomize what server you end up on (took me a good 25 tries too), I got there a whole day late, and then the group was so big that they had to make a subgroup, so I never managed to get a hold of any of them, and trudged my way with random groups (called Linkshells), until I met up with Madsen from LittleGamers, a Linkshell that lasted over 3 years before drama just broke it apart.

From the start I wanted to be a Paladin, but getting there takes some patience on its own. My personal goal was to gain some notoriety, some fame, which for an online game is not always easy with thousands of players around. Not necessarily being a legend, just the kind you spot the same and go 'I know that guy'.

I had a break of over a year along the way, but it took me almost 3 years after I joined to get my Paladin to level 75, the maximum attainable. The feeling of being there is quite unique, and dramatically changes your outlook of the game from there on. You look back at all the work you did and you can only keep going back for more on other jobs.

Yes, this game allows a single character to have more than one job, so I also have White Mage, Red Mage and Bard all at 75. I'm nowadays more often a Red Mage due to needs in the groups. Even if Paladin will remain my favorite job, I always enjoy being able to offer what jobs I have available for the greater good.

So here it is, a picture of my character made with a modelviewer that allows you to play with the poses a bit. This was used in my sigblock that I'll link right after.

I'm currently wearing the entire relic set of armors for Paladin, the Valor set. These are time and gil consuming to acquire due to their relative rarity and difficulty to get. I might talk about that in more details later.






And there's the sigblock, which I try to keep updated with my current levels and progress in the game. I created the basic model of it, but Ayasu of Phoenix made it look even sweeter with his superior Photoshop skills, hehe. It represents nicely my 4 jobs, and a bit of humor from a Phoenix Wright fan.

If you wonder, the 3 letters are the abbreviations for the jobs in the game, currently 20 existing : Warrior, Monk, White Mage, Black Mage, Thief, Red Mage, Bard, Beastmaster, Dragoon, Paladin, Dark Knight, Ranger, Samurai, Summoner, Ninja, Blue Mage, Corsair, Puppermaster, Scholar and Dancer.

More details on the game some other day perhaps :)

History Lessons #3 : Music part 2

Been a little while huh? Well still alive, and here for more. Today I decided to continue on the music side of the gaming evolution. Last time I went through the MIDI standard. This system was used in most consoles up to the NES, as systems would have their built-in instruments and/or sounds. Only a few exceptions had some samples on the cartridge, mainly voice samples. The next generation brought numerous changes.

Starting with the SNES era, games started to increase their size, and allowed for a new system for music to be used. Sound samples would be stored on the cartridge, and then read at different pitch and speed to simulate instruments. This was called Modulating. This system is still in use in newer generation consoles, although thanks to better compression and higher CPU power they are also able to use higher quality sound files (like MP3s) in certain games instead.

When I hopped on the internet some 10 years ago, one of my main interest was collecting these music of games. That's where I learned about these different systems for music. There was a website, now defunct, that concentrated on collecting these files, and then fanarts and stories. It would eventually evolve into what is today's RPGamer, but at the time it mainly concentrated on Final Fantasy music, since it was such an inspirational source.

Similar to MIDI files, most of the music files hosted were fan created. This was well before the MP3s and small file sizes. At the time, a CD-quality 3 minute song could easily take upward of 25 megabytes. That looks ridiculously small with today's gigabyte hard drives, but when you worked off a 56kbps dialup modem at 5k/s download, and using 1.4MB floppies, those were huge to carry around. Today, a MP3 takes roughly 1MB per minute of music with relatively high quality compared to what we had back then.

Thus fan created sounds attempted to recreate the music as close as possible without blowing the filesize out of practical range. The first was MIDI, the second was Tracking, otherwise known as Modulating. The programs were numerous, from FastTracker to ModTracker, with equally numerous file extensions, many programs worked to reproduce the sound system consoles used with varying features.

The basis of Modulating/Tracking is like this. You take a sound sample, let's say a guitar string. The tracker would create an instrument from it, and then you'd need to tell the program on what 'key' to play it, which would slightly modulate the sound sample faster or slower to simulate it. That sounds simple, but then you have to consider that a song is not a single instrument but many. In fact the SNES had 16 channels total that it could use.

A single channel can only play one sound sample at a time. It may change instrument, but not while 'holding' the note of another. Thus you were technically limited to 16 sounds played exactly at the same time. You had to give the program the right BPM to make the rhythm work, put the notes into sheets to recreate the melody.

Unlike Midi where you need to literally make the musical score in a single line, in Trackers they were divided in sheets. So if a certain part repeats itself often during a song, you could play the sheet instead of playing the same notes again. The tracker would technically read the sheets in the order it was told, which also allowed for loops to be created.

You probably noticed the problem with MP3s of repeating a single song over and over, there's a pause or some 'intro' to the song that you simply can't skip. In Modulating you could create a loop point and listen to it forever, just like you would in the game if you left it on.

Since it's fan created, the songs obviously are not 100% the same as the original or the MP3, ut it still allowed for much smaller files to be created to play this song at home. One particularly great Tracker was known as TSSF (The Super Street Fighter), which had an impressive collection of songs he modulated. There's one song that comes to mind as his most impressive feat.

Using simply what we could hear in leaked videos and demos, he managed to recreate down to perfection the FF7 Battle music. At least the beat of the song, as he used the closest instruments he could find. He put in the comments that he wasn't sure of the loop point either, but he still managed to nail it right on. And this was done months before the game was even released.

So here's to compare with your ears the differences between the sound of the 3 formats. I picked the 3 battle themes for Lufia II :Rise of the Sinistrals (Battle, Boss, Sinistral), one of my favorite games. The first is the original song in MP3, the second is in MIDI, and the last one is the MOD version. All can be played with recent versions of Winamp.

Battle : MP3 MIDI MOD
Boss : MP3 MIDI MOD
Sinistrals : MP3 MIDI MOD

You can get many MIDI and MODs (and a few remixed MP3s) for Lufia games on the excellent Forfeit Island website.