Arcanaville

I haven't done this in a long time with normal user tools, but going from memory there are a couple of options besides manually copying everything (if you could do that, you wouldn't be asking here).

Microsoft makes a tool called Windows Easy Transfer. The idea is you run the tool on the old PC and it spits out the data somewhere, then you run the tool on the new PC and it suck in the data from that same somewhere. You can network the two PCs together or use a USB external harddrive big enough to hold everything. As your old system was less than 150 gigs, I would go that route since external hard drives with that capacity are not expensive, and then you have an external hard drive to make backups and stuff.

If memory serves, this tools moves data and some system settings, but not whole applications. You'll have to reinstall applications. I think it tells you which apps it detected so you can reinstall them, but it doesn't do that for you.


Alternatively Laplink makes a commercial tool that supposedly moves apps and data from XP to Win7 called PCmover. It purports to do this in a fairly automatic way, but I haven't used it to migrate to Windows 7 (I did use it once a long time ago to do an XP to XP migration for someone else). But its kind of expensive in the sense that while it only costs about $30, it can only be used to do one conversion for that $30. But it does claim to move apps. Keep in mind if the app doesn't run under Windows 7, no tool can really fix that.


To be honest, when I jumped from XP to Win7 I just virtualized my old XP system and ran it under VMware, because much of the stuff I had on the old system wouldn't run under Win7 at all.


Whatever you do, I would caution this: don't assume whatever you do actually worked perfectly, especially if you're not a pro (and even if you are: I do this also). Assume the process missed something, something you aren't going to realize is missing until weeks or months later. Take the old hard drive out of the old system and stick it into the new system as a D: drive, and keep it around for a while. That way if you discover something missing, you always have a chance to grab a copy from there. Once its gone, its gone. That's another reason why I kept a virtual image copy of my old XP system (and I still have it now, years later).

Matt Miller smiled to himself, as he mentally scratched "Victorian/Steampunk" off his list of themes he convinced people a purple suit, fez, and mutton chop sideburns was appropriate for. This was the second hardest one to achieve, he felt, after "Zombie Apocalypse." With only "Saturday Night Fever" and "White Christmas" to go, it would soon be a slam dunk.

Let me suggest that if the devs are looking at Blasters, and have proceeded far enough along in their ideas that Synapse is actually hinting they've been playtesting them a bit, then players should be thinking in terms of flexible ideas that could be integrated with whatever the devs are thinking.

I can already tell you what will happen. At some point the devs will release a bunch of changes to beta for us to test. No matter what amazing idea any of us has for blaster changes, the devs will say "great idea, now please test ours." Their idea may be great, it may be bad, or it may be incomplete. It most likely will require some adjustments of some kind. The devs tend to like suggestions of the form "lets keep that, but lets add this to make it better" and tend to frown upon ideas like "that's ok, but here's my totally different idea that has nothing to do with yours: do mine and you can do yours also if you insist, devs."

Think in terms of what blasters need, what their specific pros and cons are, what their different playstyles are for different players. Think about which powers seem to have issues, and which you'd leave alone. But most of all, think in terms of general principles that could mesh with whatever the devs have come up with. If the devs figure out a way to make us more survivable, will it be in the right ways? What tests would you conduct to test survivability, and what deficit does each test suggest about a specific weakness about blasters. Suppose they make us more survivable by giving us a new power. Can we activate that power quickly enough, often enough, and at the right times? If they make our offense higher does it increase offense in the right way? Does it increase the gap between the high and low blasters, or does it reduce that gap?

We have hover blasters and blappers and all sorts of other blasters. No change will be perfect and help everyone perfectly equally and well. But what would you expect the change to do, and what do you hope it doesn't do, to all those players in general?

In other words, whatever you think you want, start thinking about the most flexible ways to get it, so that you can react to whatever the devs do. That's Arcana's Getting What You Want From the Devs rule #8.


I'm just tossing this out there; I'm not a dev, don't represent the devs, and don't speak for the devs. Having said that, my recommendations at this point in the brainstorming process is, for what its worth:

1. Avoid suggestions that require animation changes.

2. Avoid suggestions that require specific hand-tweaking of every single blaster powerset.

3. Avoid suggestions that require major tech (code) changes.

4. Focus on changes that would have the greatest impact on solo blasters operating between +0x1 and +2x5 and teamed blasters in all normal teaming situations.

5. Focus on changes that make small changes to offense and moderate changes to survivability.

6. Focus on changes that would be relatively easy to describe to new players.

7. Consider changes that have high gameplay benefits over and above pure numerical ones.

8. Think about Blasters' closest cousins: Dominators and Stalkers.

Someone used to give me free copies of Premiere (as in: a friend who worked at Adobe, not someone who pirated the thing) but since I don't use it professionally (or at all) I never bothered to load it on my current platform, nor can I find the last copy I got to load it. So what you see is actually done with Fraps to record, and then Virtualdub to mark out and save the segments I want, crop and splice them together, and then rerender into divx for upload to youtube.

Pretty much as soon as I was pointed to the thread, which is why I tried to get onto the beta server over the weekend it was down.

My first thought was a screencap, kind of like the screencap I posted. But then I realized that it would be difficult to properly convey what was going on in a still frame. I could add thought or speech bubbles, but I'm not fond of those in general. A short video sequence of that screencap to convey motion made more sense, but then I started wondering if that was enough to convey the entire story of what was going on. So I scripted a sequence involving walking up to Null, the "why me" emote, and then the worship emote. At that point I still wasn't sure how to convey Laz in there, but I figured I would figure it out when I had a chance to get on the server and experiment. I shot a bunch of sequences on Monday night, but I decided it just wasn't right without Laz so I asked him for his costume file, and then reshot it on Tuesday night and encoded and uploaded on Wednesday morning.

If the servers were up that weekend, I might have taken a bit more time, but I decided by Monday that it would be a one-day thing to get it out quickly, so there's two big glitches. One or two segments have mouse cursors visible: that's an artifact of mixing up some test footage and the final version. And when Laz ports in, I should be in the why-me stance and not standing, but I filmed that out of sequence so I made a continuity glitch. There's also a moderate editing error: Laz "glares" about two seconds too long: I made a mistake on the edit marker there.

All told, its about two hours of goofing around and trying to find the right angles and emotes, and editing down some, and then about twenty minutes of shooting it, cutting out the segments I wanted, and then splicing it together and encoding it for upload. I wasn't exactly sure how long I needed in advance, but that's a long time to hope a live server's Pocket D will be completely vacant without even a passing-through traveler.

It took a couple of hours to test things and set them up and then record them, and I didn't want someone walking into frame and forcing me to reshoot something. Even if they don't walk into frame, walking past can trigger all sorts of dialog from NPCs that generates pop up text which can also mess things up. I basically wanted an empty Pocket D to video in. And who goes to D on test in the middle of the night?