Randox
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Posts posted by Randox
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I've owned KOTOR 1 and 2 for a while now. Started on the first game a while back but got distracted by other things. One of my friends saw it in my library and told me I should give it another shot, but the first game crashed and I forgot the fix, so I started into the second game instead and it's fantastic (the first level is a bit long though). It's been a long time since I got hooked on a game this bad (the last games to do it were Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim. Games that hook you so bad you'd forgo sleeping and eating if you could).
On a side note, I've tried to get up to speed with some of the surrounding lore while trying to dodge spoilers, and god damn I'd forgotten just how stupid some of the EU lore is. I'm not a big fan of comic books stories, largely because the stories tend to keep escalating past the point where they devolved into absurd nonsense that no longer has much bearing on the original source material or ideas. See the endless clones of palpatine or the Sith Lord who led the Sith to Victory over the Republic, only to withdraw from public view so that he could found an entirely new empire to reconquer the finally victorious Sith Empire he was still Emperor of. Too much of the EU lore came from comics that did that. Plus you had to set your story like 6000 years before or 2000 years after the first movie if you wanted to make new lore that didn't tie into existing material.
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Had Christmas with my parents as usual. For the first time in my life, we went to someone else's house for Dinner. For the first time in my life, my parents house lost power on Christmas day. The power went out at some point after we left, and despite the outage map suggesting otherwise, was restored a couple of hours before we returned, so the house wasn't even cold.
Anyway, I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and their power stayed on if they're in an area experiencing stormy weather like I am.
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Don't get me wrong, the math and methods behind graphics are amazing, particularly signals processing. It's just never been my cup of tea. For a game, I'd much rather build the world itself than the rendering of it.
The weather here is too warm, and I'm pretty sure the UK stole our snow. It hit 11C yesterday with high winds which made driving on the highway with snow tires just oh so fun (like driving a wind vane). Needs to get cold so the snow can stick around a bit. Even a light dusting would be nice going into Christmas (Christmas music feels wrong with no snow).
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I'd be fine with 25 C year-round.
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Ooh, lights. The 'sun' is above the pillar (squarely in the middle of the area). It blends between the two lights as the little guy walks around.
Spiffy.
:thumbup:
I hate programming graphics. If it weren't for other people then everything I've ever written would be pure command line, so kudos.
I got LSPDFR (play as police in GTA V) setup again, mostly because I finally got into watching DoJ videos on youtube (DoJ is a roleplaying group that uses the FiveM mod for multiplayer, allowing them to set up proper RP mods). The AI is way too goofy for that level of experience, but I don't have the time to get into DoJ stuff, so this will do. I also finally figured out how to mod in new cars and a mod that adds more ambient crime (something I feel GTA V lacks compared to GTA IV) which makes things so much better for me (I want to do more than just traffic stops and answering calls. I want things to happen dammit!).
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That's how some of the games, like World of Tanks/Warships/Planes and War Thunder work. Sort of. They're free to play titles, like RuneScape, but they have membership packages that unlock faster progression rather than new content (well, some limited cosmetic content). I think the companies behind both these games are hilariously profitable.
And at the end of the day, I don't disagree with their approach. I don't care much for the premium vehicles both games have, but as long as they stay balanced I can tolorate it. At the end of the day though, a multiplayer game needs constant attention to stay relevant. If you just release it to the world and never touch it again it wont last, so subscription based money streams make more sense, because that allows you to keep updating the game.
I would never get into a multipler game that is going to charge me a huge fee upfront and release a new version that will erase my progress a year or two down the road.
And at the end of the day, vote with your wallet. If a company does something you don't want more of, then don't pay them.
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I find I notice the effect of ping mostly in 'but I shot first' situations. There is also the ugly reality that at closer to 30 than 20, my reflexes aren't quite prime anymore, so I'm simply going to lose in that scenario a bit more often.
One of the weirdest things I've seen in online gaming is trajectory correction in World of Tanks. The client naturally makes a guess as to what the shell trajectory should be based on what it knows. But if the shell stays in flight long enough and the server trajectory is sufficiently different, you'll see a visible mid flight correction as the client receives the corrected trajectory prior to impact. It's hard to catch live, but I've caught it before in replays.
One thing WoT offers is the server reticle, which I think is recommended past 150-200 ping. It can be a bit trippy to use (because it has latency), but it's synchronised to everything else your seeing so at high pings it tends to be more reliable for actually hitting the target.
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I prefer dedicated online games that user server side calculations so that peoples connection issues don't become other peoples problems. Games that rely on clients are too open to manipulation.
180 ping is a bit high though. I mean, it shouldn't be as bad as you're describing, but you'll certainly expect to suffer a bit against people in the 40-70 range. It drives me nuts when I try to play Hero's and Generals since the games take place on servers all over, and finding a NA match can be difficult, but I do a lot better on them.
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I feel like the deadline for breakups was mid November at the latest, but yeah.
I think people panic as November comes to an end because they realise they're going to have to ride out the holidays otherwise.
I've done the ride out thing before. Just reached a point where we basically hit a wall of limited shared interests and ran out of things to do or talk about, but it seemed to close to the holidays. Still enjoyed time together so it was fine hanging out, but it was a bit weird to still be together since I think we both knew at that point that the relationship had already run its course. We waited until mid January to part ways.
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Any cryptocurrency folks here?
As a gamer, I mostly resent them :P
(I am super happy I got my graphics card last year before the current crypto boom)
My parents had their furnace cleaned this morning, and it looks like they're getting a new one. It's a triple pass boiler that uses a burner insert in the main chamber to separate the first two passes...and it looks like there was/is a blockage in the injector nozzle that steered the flame onto the insert and caused impingement damage. The insert is cracked, deformed, and partially disintegrated, and my parents noted that heating costs seem to have been climbing faster than fuel prices, so this has probably been a while in the making. And since the furnace is a couple decades old the insert isn't made any more, so what would probably be a $200 part is now $1100 (it's now made to order), and would arrive next year. So, new furnace it is, because the insert should not look like this:
They're taking it pretty well though. The furnace did a good job insofar as it continued to work at capacity and without burning the house down, and a new furnace will probably lower the heating bill so much it will pay for itself inside 2 years, so that's nice. In the mean time, I believe my house will be providing them with hot showers and laundry, and shelter if the temperature drops too much for their fireplace and space heaters to keep up with.
So yeah. Exciting morning.
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I finally decided to get Viscera Cleanup Detail. It's been on my radar for...I guess years now. I got Santa's Revenge a while back, and I decided to give it another spin the other day but it's too early. So despite never having even completed that little stand alone in at least 2 years of having owned it, I got the whole game instead, and it's pretty fun.
Or maybe that's the wrong way to put it. It's relaxing in the same way as any game with repetitive play can be, and finishing a level is immensely satisfying. So it's not fun in an excited to play way, and I find it can be rather overwhelming as you start out in a given level, but damn, when you drop 3+ hours getting a level clean, fixing the damage, and getting things organised...it feels good.
Plus I love doing the whole CSI thing at the start of the level (where you basically work out how everyone got killed for bonus points).
Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but playing the game I feel like I'm less a cleaner in the janitorial sense and more in the criminal sense. That is, I'm pretty sure my services are being engaged to cover up these 'incidents' entirely. At least, I like to think that. Helps me take pride in doing a good job.
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I would think that, unless you live next to a mall, doing the laundry would be faster and easier than going out to buy new underwear.
This reminds my friends story from the liquor store. They had a customer who kept coming in and asking for any cardboard trays they were throwing out (if you ever need cardboard boxes or trays, ask a liquor store). After a few rounds of this someone finally asked him what he was using the trays for. Turns out he was using them as dinner plates so that he didn't have to wash dishes.
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I think there's still an active mod or two isn't there? Maybe they're just on break
Yo.
Today I fixed my good keyboard. I spilled something on it a while ago and lost a column of letters. I had some time today to take another stab at fixing it, and with a little more organization and time spent on it I found a bad trace on one of the membranes. Turns out my local computer store doesn't have any liquid conductor, so I've ordered some online that should do the trick, but I figured that since I found the problem, I can still engineer a quick fix for the time being. As a compromise for not wanting to risk the other traces I settled for a thin strip of aluminum foil on the back of a sticky pad (a little square of the sticky part). Hopefully the sticky pad glue is weak enough to not be an issue. Took some fiddling but I managed to get a good enough contact that my keyboard now works again.
Also have a little LED string I wanted to stick in my computer. I got it a while back because I needed the battery box, and I got around to figureing out what resistor I should be using to hook it up to my computer. Of course, now I have to source a resistor. I tried making one but apparently my pencil lead sucks because I can't get anything under like 15k Ohms. I need ~86. Will have to see if I can find a darker art pencil with more conductive lead that spreads better on paper.
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I like TV as background noise for falling asleep, but I have headphones I can wear in bed in addition to my mask so it's usually not a huge issue. For bonus points though things like checking your phone wouldn't bother me as long as you don't move around too much while you do it.
It's kind of funny (to me) how much I've adapted to sleeping to the sound of TV though. When I first started doing it it caused me to keep hearing the real world while dreaming. I'd also wake up pretty quickly when the DVD backed out to the main menu. Now I normally use Netflix which stops after a few episodes automatically and my laptop goes to sleep, and I rarely have the sound invade my dreams or wake up when the sound stops. The upside has been that things like the sound of my bedroom door opening don't always wake me up either anymore (that used to be an issue).
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I know the feeling. I highly prize the freedom to do as I please, and having another person in the picture complicates things. At the end of the day though, I feel like it's a combination of both reasonable compromise (I'm sure we all have habbits we could do without) and being comfortable enough with someone to be yourself.
For me, my most highly prized freedom is alone time. Sooner or later, I need time away from people to recharge lest my personality suffer until people are more than happy to give me the alone time I need, and it can be hard not to take that personally some times.
The other problem is mornings. Contrary to the above, I think anyone who has been around me in the morning a few times would be positively thrilled if I got out of bed and played video games before they got up. I am not a pleasant person to talk to until I'm more awake and have had a chance to at least skim the morning news. It's not my most attractive feature to be sure, but there it is.
It's usually an interesting experience at any rate.
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Rise of the Tomb Raider was on a good sale, so I picked that up. I enjoyed the first game a fair bit, and so far I'm liking the second one. That said, the increased focus on scavenging/crafting is an unwelcome one to me. It reminds me too much of equipment crafting in far cry 3/4. It's a chore.
This is also the first game I've gotten a chance to run in DX12. Performance gains aren't huge, but they're there. The post process AA really struggles, and the final solution has been to use virtual super resolution to mimic the in game SSAA (at x2 because that's all my RX 480 can really manage), and then set the game to use the SMAA filter. x4 SSAA would be better (I can't believe after all this time the computer industry has come full circle back to SSAA, or that the hardware is now powerful enough to use it), but this works (I went back and checked, and I can manage x4 SSAA in the 2013 Tomb Raider).
I've also ended up changing drivers a couple times because AMD loves to break things, and the trick is to find the islands of stable drivers in a sea of nonsense (the most recent island being 17.7.1, which I am now using).
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Like anything, it's going to depend on where in Estonia and Canada you are. The easiest place for any of us to use as a bench mark is probably Tallinn. Compare to our capital Ottawa, which gets colder in the winter and warmer in the summer. Tallinn is similar to my native Halifax though. Both are coastal cities with ocean moderated weather.
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It hit at least 21 C yesterday (70 for americans), and the humidity must have been near 100%. Makes me wonder if we're getting a super mild winter this year, or is it going to go the other way, and we're going to get all the cold and precipitation we've not gotten for the last 4-6 months as a winter wonder bonus upgrade.
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That's certainly possible. Most of my physical encounters with evergreens these days are Christmas trees, and I think they've all been pines.
Ah well, I guess just something to keep in mind if I go hiking or camping. The rash doesn't seem to be too severe. Some benzocaine spray and aloe vera seems to have it sorted. Can't feel it any more, and can barely see it.
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Apparently I have an allergy to spruce needles that I managed to get this far into my life without knowing about (including a childhood spent running through the woods). Kind of backed into what I think is a spruce tree, and now I have a little red dot or blister everywhere the needles poked me.
Mostly I'm just confused. Maybe there is something growing on that particular tree and the needles are just obnoxious enough to push it into the top layer of skin.
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Finally decided to get Medieval Engineers. I've been watching it since it came out (I was already playing Space Engineers for a while at the time), but the game has really taken a long time to start maturing. I finally found a youtube series on the game I actually like (by RadioMan03 if anyone is interested). The building system is better, and I can approach design from a clear direction (ground up).
Anyway, it's actually started to develop into a pretty fun game, though my inner engineer desperately wants more tools for building contraptions (mostly proper gears and a pulley, and proper tracks for cart wheels).
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Moved to Forum Games :)
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That's a perspective that only makes sense in a world where gender doesn't impact people's perceptions of one another, and that's not the world we live in.
This.
Humans categorise by nature, and it's crucial to how we interact with each other. Categories, stereotypes. They tell us how to act. When you meet someone for the first time, your mind instantly starts to categorise that person for you. How they dress, how they look, what gender they are. The sum of these categories is your starting point. You start talking and learning more about each other, and more categories follow. If you get to know them well enough, they become a category all their own, a whole that other people can be referenced against in turn. This is what our minds, what neural networks, do.
Gender is one of the most basic categories that influences how we interact and perceive people. For me for example, gender has a huge impact on what topics of conversation I'm likely to bring up. It's not a conscious decision I've ever sat down and made, and it's frankly kind of irritating. It's also super obvious, at least to me. I tend to get along better with men I don't know than women because the things I enjoy talking about fall along male stereotypes, and I've had a lot more positive experience talking about these things with men than I have with women, so I've learned to talk less about say, monster trucks, until I have more information.
What Game(s) Did You Last Get and What Are You Playing?
in Off-Topic
Posted
Now that I have a PC wheel I've decided to give iRacing a try.
It reminds me a bit of DCS World insofar as it doesn't baby you. I've stated with road racing, and for bonus points my first course is Charlotte, which seems to be a bit of a baptisim by fire kind of course. Seems like a good intro though. The course has a bit of everything, but nothing too complex, so it seems a good place to start. I always knew I liked to turn early in racing games; didn't realize just how early though (I'm turning in like 2 car lengths early, which often puts my exit trajectory in a field). Also getting used to over steer. It's kind of unnerving at first, but it also seems like it will be a massive amount of fun with practice.
I've entered 2 races so far. On the first one I got rear ended and wasn't able to finish. Not sure if it was my fault or not. I think it was mostly a case of the guy infront of me braked, and I braked in time, but the guy behind me didn't. The second race I got to be the one who went off the track in turn 4, over corrected, and got t-boned crossing the track sideways as I spun out. The damage to me was relatively minor and I was able to finish that race (last, of the people who didn't wreck out). Was like a minute out from my third race today when they decided to roll out a hotfix. A shame because I had just set my personal best time in qualifying on my second lap after binning it in the first. To be able to do that in qualifying when I'm mostly focused on staying in control (any mistake like going off the track voids your time) makes me happy. As of the posted results, I would have started in fourth (which likely would have put me ahead of any first lap crashes, assuming I wasn't the one who lost control). Ah well.