Month: April 2020

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all being well. I’ve been trying out a new game … Well, a not that old game but today’s the first time I’ve gone back into it for a while. What’s the game ?

Coming in to land in a ship who’s name, alas, escapes me for now. The start of No Mans Sky sees you emerge into consciousness on a far flung planet, with no memory of what’s gone before.

In my case for this game, a fairly radioactive planet with lots of orange and yellow. The game leads you in to what it has to offer reasonably gently although I’m sure I’ll forget it all as I go. When the game originally came out, the idea was to steadily make your way to the galactic centre, upgrading your systems and ship as you went.

Ship definitely starts as a fixer upper. It’s a short, stubby affair but I kinda like it.

Don’t mind the “Omg it’s a bit on fire” look. All fixed up now. Venturing further, I find myself at an abandoned base …

Yep. That’s radioactive dust being kicked up. Only slightly cooked. This place had that Merhetic Seal or whatever it was I needed to get the ship going.

One major difference between this one and Elite is that as well as having the space ship stuff, this game is really more about the ground exploration.

Found that one later … A distress call leaving a mysteriously abandoned ship and no traces of the previous owner. Where could they have gone ? I don’t think I’ll be flying that ship for a while it’s pretty broken.

Oh ! I have my own base too !

Looks great doesn’t it. Dunno about the neighbours in the more sophisticated facility a little bit further off there. They’re mysteriously missing too. Wonder where they went ? My little hut now has a teleporter device attached too which apparently brings your ship back too.

I do like that big space station. Very … round. Populated too with odd aliens, although I need to explore in order to learn their languages. Perhaps to them, I am the odd one. If they think that then they’re excellent judges of character.

Lots more to do, although I disappeared out of the game earlier due to impending hunger. A nice start, a pretty game, wondering where it’ll go, hoping that upping the graphics options is going to make it even prettier without affecting frame rate too much.

I’m very confident that the Ryzen 5 3600 in Meltdown will handle it without too much effort but my graphics card is probably starting to show age now. It doesn’t have the graphics memory (3GB card) that the heaviest and most detailed texture work needs.

A good start though.

Ship needs a name too ! The first word of her name is “Radiant”, I think the second is “Duster” but I’m not sure. Radiant Duster is a decent name.

Stay safe, be well everyone.

2 games today !

And a book maybe too.

I’m attempting to settle my bouncing between games down to just about 3 or 4 at a time … Elite and the flying is one, a first person shooter style will be another and the last game will be much more hands off, letting my dodgy wrists recuperate a bit.

The hands off game is currently transitioning from Motorsport Manager over to probably Pathfinder Kingmaker. That’s a role playing game set in the Pathfinder rules set that is essentially an offshoot from D&D. It’s a curious start so far, although I’ve been faced with having to remove and reinstall the game tonight in order to reverse damage due to mods … (oops, no additional portraits for now). Probably more on Pathfinder at a later date, although that’s much less impressive in the visuals compared to games like Elite or Mass Effect Andromeda.

One fun thing about Elite is the lighting. You can usually depend on the lighting to change on the planets between landing one evening and taking off the next.

Same place, different day. I do like landing on the edges of the canyons. The surface features are interesting, especcially with that shadowing in there in the abyss.

Found some nice places on the way back.

But every journey comes to a conclusion at some point and this is Tea-89’s final docking at Medupe Station. I’ve switched back to the big Tiamat’s Chariot now, although I haven’t played since docking up on Thursday.

I have names and a callsign for 2 more ships now …
Dolphin or Beluga class : Chasing The Rainbow
This one is named after my last Warcraft guild, Chasing Rainbows. I didn’t stay in the game for too long with that guild but they were a fun bunch led by the lovely pair of Katherine of Sky and Caledorn the Tentacle Lord and after hearing that Caledorn was using the Sleepydwagonman name in his Stellaris play through, I thought I had to give something back. Chasing The Rainbow needs a callsign though.

Type to be determined : Tea and Medals, callsign VOLT-5.
This one is for the Eve Online people, some of who I still keep in touch with. There’s some very good friends there. I haven’t played Eve in years but Tea and Medals fired off a “That’s fun!” and I do like to indulge that. The name is for my first corporation in Eve, Back Home In Time For Tea And Medals and the callsign is for the 5 founder corporations of our alliance.

I think Dark Mercenary might appear as well at some point as another WoW themed name and there are many more people I’d love to name ships after as well. But I am a little limited by wanting to keep real life friend names off here … and all the ships will be captured in Inara and EDSM (links to the right) so the names would appear on the internet at some point.

After hearing one of the best of its music come over the iTunes just now, I’m tempted to have a look at Teslagrad. It was a freebie acquired through Humble Bundle and its music is magical. Here’s a link to the theme. When I transferred my library over to the new laptop, a lot of the game soundtracks didn’t make it because they’re a bit too bland and non-memorable. But even though I haven’t played the game, the Teslagrad soundtrack stood out.

I’ve enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda, although at 76 hours to complete the game to 96%, that felt like a decade !

There are some amazing visuals in there.

Creepy, mysterious locations.

Spectacular places.

Otherworldly structures.

I’m glad I went back to this one and finished it. It had massive criticism when it came out, most of which I think was down to the Star Wars factor where the fan base becomes massively unsatisfied with what comes next with their favourite series. In the case of Mass Effect, the story was well and truly concluded at the end of Mass Effect 3, so where could they go with the next game ?

Answer, an epic quest to another galaxy. The Andromeda galaxy. A new place, with new challenges, fresh enemies, interesting allies and updated ways of playing in the universe. The combat was genuinely more fluid than what we’ve seen before, with movement playing much more of a part. The setting was a more peaceful set up, with an unarmed scout ship and an unarmed rover. It was fun doing Mako Mountain Climbing in Mass Effect 1 but I really disliked the hovertank of ME2 and I can’t remember ground vehicles being a thing at all in ME3.

Another reason ME Andromeda got a bad rap when it was released was because it was released unfinished. Animations and faces came out weird. There are bugs in there around the quest and journal system (although these are nowhere near as bad as the ME3 bugs). Sara Ryder, the female option for the protagonist and your character, was described as ultra derpy. I actually liked this, added to the charm. Plus as the story goes, she (redacted) as a chronological 22 year old. She’s allowed to be just starting to figure things out at that age.

What I find weird is that finding fault in things like that, graphics that look as good as that.

And they do look really good.

There are elements to the game I don’t like. Couldn’t stand Liam, loved Peebee. Game went on too long … but this meant there was a lot to do. Some of the time, that felt like busywork but it spaced out the heavier themed main missions more. And the enemy was pretty brutal too.

I don’t think I’ll go back to this game for a good long while because it did take a long time to finish but it was a good journey.

The next game of this style is probably going to be Deus Ex Mankind Divided, because the series on this by Hannah Lomadia is coming up on my upcoming video playlists and I’d like to play it before it does. I also played the hell out of Deus Ex Human Revolution, loved that game. Mankind Divided is the sequel but I bounced off it when it came out because my machine at the time wasn’t really up to playing it.

Definitely more to come there.

What else is on the list ? Maybe a bit of No Mans Sky as well. This one is another space exploration type game that I bounced off, also due to trouble getting it to run. (It didn’t like the monitor scaling I use on this 1440p screen).

I think I nearly mentioned book as well. I have abandoned a book ! First time in a while. I was highly intrigued and interested by Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, so when Rama II appeared as, I believe, a Humble Bundle thing, it went on my list of things to read. Trouble is, Rama II isn’t really an Arthur C. Clarke book, it’s a Gentry Lee book and it shows. Whereas Rendezvous With Rama was a short, tight, hard scifi book that came in, told its story and waved good bye again quickly, Rama II is not about the scifi and it’s definitely not short or tight. I read a third of it before giving up. It took that long for them to get to the second Rama. Most of that third was tedious interpersonal human drama between instantly dislikeable characters. A lot of it was wasted with heavy handed over descriptive prose about concepts that Arthur C. Clarke would have conveyed to the reader with nonchalant efficiency.

After getting a bit sick of the book after that third, I looked up reviews which pretty much confirmed what I thought already and … said it would get worse.

Next up is Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds. It’s the sequel to Revelation Space, set in the medium future (27th century) where humanity is among the stars and both different and the same. A few interesting characters have made themselves known so far and one characteristic of Alastair Reynolds characters is that while you’re in their heads with the prose, you never really know where they’re going to go.

I think I’ll be enjoying more of that book in about 1 minute after hitting post ! Well, maybe 5 minutes after catching up on Twit/Book and Discord.

See you soon, stay safe, be well.

As the current crisis continues, it’s starting to feel a bit strange like the days are blurring into each other.

I think that’s actually a good thing, as one way to not notice the passage of time as a thing is to not pay that much attention to it. Sounds strange that doesn’t it. One of the more memorable things I picked up from Star Trek Next Generation and Cdr Data’s journey was the thing about “A watched pot never boils”. He does the scientific experiments on it and whatever he does, the test kettle always boils in exactly the same time. Except when he turns off his internal chronometer, is distracted (I think cuddling Spot!) and the kettle boils as a surprise.

Gosh that’s an odd one to start off the post with.

^^ I even ventured out to get the shopping tonight. Acquired 2 small Easter Eggs (there are still some left) as well. One is currently mysteriously disappearing. I grabbed a bunch of other stuff too and shouldn’t have to head out for over a week again.

I’m doing the work at home thing as well but one difference from last year is that whereas last year, I was getting out and about looking at Stuff, the only period I’ve done that this year is the Canada thing. Hopefully more of that later in the year. You get a lot more context about the kit, how it works, what it does that you weren’t expecting, when you see it in action. You don’t get that sat behind a desk.

It’ll be good to see the work people as well and see that they’re all coming through ok. One thing that’s going to be really tough is that the statistics say that at least a few of the people we all know won’t make it. Hopefully for me that’ll be zero and everyone I know will come through this ok. The only thing I can do to impact though is to not endanger them by being the source of the risk.

But enough of that, this was supposed to be more about things to look forwards to when we get to go out again.

Hopefully lots of places to be. For me, there are going to be the highlights of :

Bookbarn. This is a nice chilled out place with an absolute avalanche of books and a nice little coffee shop too. Even better visiting it with a friend and helping them carry away the books that you persuaded them to buy.

Cardiff. Here we have the Book Cave, the sweet shop and there’s also the Lego shop too … And you can get a nice chilled out wander over there too. Cardiff is a big hot spot though, so … maybe this one will be in a good while.

Bristol centre ? Not so thrilled about Bristol centre these days. One issue with the raising of the business rates is that the smaller curiosity shops closed and moved out. There’s less of interest around these days, although again it’s a nice little chilled out wander.

Heading out with friends. I know a few very special people and it’s great to catch up over a meal out and / or a movie.

Popcorn and a movie. I nearly caught a movie on the last few days that the cinemas were open but wasn’t feeling it. It’ll be good to get out to the movies again with a big bucket of popcorn salty enough to make your lips feel like they’re burning. And to see a great movie too. I don’t think I’ll care too much what I see, I’ll just be very happy seeing movies again.

Getting out in the fresh air again, maybe a long walk. I’m not getting much exercise at the moment and I’ll definitely feel that when I ask my legs to be doing stuff again.

I always look forwards to Comic Con every year. Hopefully we get one this year. The London and Birmingham venues are currently Nightingale hospitals.

The cricket too ! That’s in severe danger of not happening at all I think. The Lords days are long days but it’s great to chill out in that stadium watching the cricket in a quiet area away from the more dense areas of the crowd.

And lots of other places too. I’ve had Bristol’s Planetarium in my list of things to see for a number of years now. It’d be good to do some day runs into the Cotswolds too. Bristol Aquarium ? Portsmouth ? Perhaps.

Yep. Plenty of things to see out there.

I would sound a note of caution though …

When the restrictions are lifted, be a bit cautious still. I’m not really thinking virus there, I’m thinking attitudes. There will be a huge number of people out there who have a sense of immortality due to surviving. There will be the people who have got used to not being responsible. There will be the people who are just normally incredibly reckless.

You will see these people out there around you if you venture out at the moment. Better believe that when restrictions lift, these people will be out and about crowding without a care in the world. Hopefully it doesn’t lead to a resurgance in the virus but I’m not really thinking of that, I’m thinking more of accidents on the roads, general poor behaviour and huge crowds. General craziness on a level we haven’t seen before.

Personally, I get a bit wobbly when I’m in crowds anyway. I have a kind of Too Many People alarm that goes off and I’ll want to escape to peace and quiet for a while. I think the throngs that we’ll see will definitely trigger too many people anxiety feelings.

So … be careful, be wary, watch out for other people being silly but most of all :

Have fun. Be safe. Stay at home for now, dream of when we’re allowed to get out there again. Make plans ! I don’t think it matters that those plans won’t have a date they can happen yet. Just keep in mind what you’re going to be looking forward to after the isolation periods finish. And the more discipline we have now, the sooner we’ll be able to get out and about again.

Have a great evening everyone 🙂

Hello everyone,

Still here, still doing that isolation thing, also back in that work thing too after having the week off before Easter. It’s feeling odd though doing that switch from work mode to play mode though.

Saying that though, about 10 minutes after the work laptop shut down yesterday, I was in that internet spaceship pilot seat again. I’m having that thought that I’d like to be in a game again but … which one ! Haha, part of the not being in game at the moment is due to the dinner being in the oven so that means game would be something like Motorsport Manager or one of that ilk where it’s :

A – much more hands off than something like a first person shooter style
B – doesn’t take up space on the desk like the flightstick in Elite does.

But first … I have a couple of rants … And of course, before that, we need a suitable thumbnail pic for the post.

What could be over the horizon ? I sense there are many tasty munchies over there (that I haven’t burned in the oven) and some great company that’ll have plenty of stories and things to talk about after we all emerge from quarantine. But at the same time, I don’t want that to be too early because then the trend of infection will just bounce back, we’ll be in isolation again and we’ll have to get used to potentially even more friends and contacts no longer being with us. (I haven’t been directly touched by it yet but you see the stories and it can get to you).

First rant … You’ll have seen, maybe, stories about science groups like Folding@Home and Rosetta asking for you to donate processing power in order to aid research into fighting this virus. The trouble is, some of them believe they have more rights to do their science than other people.

Folding@Home never got on to my machine for other reasons (they don’t play with BOINC and it burns out graphics cards). But Rosetta’s close to getting binned for been far too keen on sending work to the machine.

The default setting I have is to have 2 days worth of work on the machine. That’s on an old understanding from almost back in dial up modem days so that the machine wouldn’t be going to the network too often. It’s also on an expectation that there would be about a week to return units. Rosetta seems to have cut that down to about 4 days. Not on. Oh and they’ll also ignore the priority settings so that their work units get downloaded instead of another project’s science. I turn the science off when I’m in games because it’s like : My Computer and I get first call on its time. Shoving 2 days worth of work unit on to a machine and expecting it to be done in 3 is cheeky.

That’s got other people (like LHC@Home) banned from using the machine as well and … I set this one to clear all tasks today. When the system runs out off work, I’ll turn on the work fetch again to see how it behaves but to be honest, we’re reaching the time of year when I don’t want the computer pushing out heat due to doing Sums.

Rant 1 done. I think we’ve earned a pic …

Quite.

The other rant is about games …. I thought about putting a fair bit of time into Mordheim. It’s a Warhammer game, based around small unit tactics. 2 matched warbands go into the streets and fight over the resources scattered around the map. It’s most interesting feature is the amount of customisation you can put in to your people.

But those dice rolls …

Some games attract a certain amount of infamy for their random number generation principles. Other games induce complete and utter rage.

Let’s just say that Mordheim isn’t on the machine any more after being uninstalled. It’s not often something pushes me like that but when you confirm a stream of rolls that improbably go heavily against the probabilities quoted, any potential joy goes out of the game and you have to walk away.

One thing about strategy and tactics games is that you should not be fighting fair in order to win. You stack the deck through strategy in order to weight the fight in favour of your side. If you get caught out and lose, you should be able to figure out why you’ve lost and come up with an answer. Like having a favourite soldier in XCom 1/2 be lost because you left them out in the open and exposed. I’ll accept that kind of loss in a game but if it’s a case of crowding an enemy and then losing your people to crazy improbable streaks of dice rolls … it’s time to find a fun game instead of one that has hidden mechanics that are designed to torture the player.

And it doesn’t help when the game continually saves status and doesn’t let you roll back a save.

That probably sounds a bit petulant doesn’t it. And you’d be right !

But at the end of the day, if the game isn’t fun, walk away and find a different game. It might well be Pathfinder Kingmaker for me next. That’s a D&D type system that emerged when people got a bit disgruntled at the lack of customisation in D&D 4th edition.

Should be good, although I didn’t get that far in either of the Baldur’s Gate games.

That’s me done with the rants. I’m looking to allow my hands to recover a bit with Elite. They’re not painful at the moment but they’re giving me the starts of “If you’re not careful, us hands we gonna flare” and it’s best to obey those signals before the real pain starts or recovery takes longer and is more painful.

That’s the Colonia Nebula and signaled my arrival at the second leg of Tea-89’s journey.

Click for bigger on these by the way :-). This was the first Brown Alert moment for a little while. Sometimes you pop out of hyperspace at a close binary arrangement like this and the second star will be behind the one you enter the system at. You go through the corona of the star as you’re coming in. You don’t hit because there’s a game mechanic which prevents that but … it’s still Brown Alert when you see it on screen.

I was flying further on the trip back and found this, thought it looked like a Firebird. Pretty.

Some places are odder than others …

I found an abandoned exploration camp …

Had a good look around. Note the sad lack of RGB’ing on the wheels … I have actually been shamed for the red lighting on one of the discords. I sadly forgot to reapply it when switching the configuration of the ship around slightly but ….

Normality resumed. That’s actually where I am at the moment but … one last pic :

Another luminous green gas giant ! I do miss Mint Choc Chip ice cream, haven’t had it for a little while.

Stay safe, be well.

Hello everyone, hope you’re all well …

I found the Happy Planet today !

Actually looks a bit like the Cranky Planet. I had to wait a couple of hours (actually logged off, eyelids were heavy and I lost that couple of hours!) until the sun came up in its day / night cycle and I don’t think the Happy Planet had had any coffee yet.

I’ve been finding some more things as well but first … Spotted this earlier :

Neat ! And good things to bear in mind during this isolation period. Let’s see :

Keep communicating : oh yes. Definitely. Our own minds tend to be a trap which distort our perception of the world. It’s good to break out off that trap, talk to other people. Listen to others, share in what they’re going through. See if they have something that makes you chuckle. Pass on that thing that made you chuckle to brighten up someone else’s day.

I’m probably lucky that I have a few excellent friends who I can keep that communication going with. Plus I was very lucky to find HeyChrissa’s community which drew me in to the best communities in the online streaming world. You have to be a bit careful in which communities you stay in, avoid the toxic ones, I’ve also rapidly retreated from some which were just too frenetic. Others have areas which are incredibly busy, I don’t even try to keep up with those.

Stay healthy, both in body and mind.

Stick to a routine – sometimes when I’m on leave or otherwise not in work for a while, I’ll allow my time sense to steadily shift. I’ll have like a 4am sleep to noon wake cycle. That’s not really healthy. I’ll sleep long on the weekends but I’m logging in for the work from home at around 7.30 to 7.45am every day. Plus it helps a lot that I’m not losing at least 90 minutes on the trip in and out of work at the moment.

Make Technology Work For You – and at the same time, don’t let it work against you. Our ability to exploit technology to communicate has completely transformed over the past 10 years. Smart phones existed before but were rarer. We had slower email. Discord didn’t exist and I wasn’t on Twitter 10 years ago too. We are so much more connected via the virtual world. HOWEVER ! That means we’re also far more connected to the virtual world. There’s huge amounts of bad stuff out there. Keep to the good, cut out the bad. You don’t need to search out the bad stuff and have it in your life.

Don’t waste energy worrying about things outside your control. I can’t control who is getting sick at the moment. I can only control the chances of me getting sick and through that, the chances of passing me being ill on to other people. That said, my mind goes to the numbers when I try and get to sleep. I am genuinely losing sleep due to the numbers being shown at the moment and from thoughts of where those numbers could go. If you’re doing that as well, I applaud you. It’s not a particularly healthy thought but it is an extremely human thought and if you are worried about the other people affected by this tragedy, that means you have a good heart.

Look for new opportunities to be creative. Don’t worry about the “You have loads of new time, learn a new skill !”. You may not have the aptitude to become a portrait artist or learn new languages. I don’t and that’s ok. It’s ok for you too. Look at what you, yes you, can do to keep your mind busy and active. Me, I’ve been looking at seeing what I can get from Elite from the screenshots (more later) and from my own paltry art skills to turn daft ideas into things I hope make other people chuckle. I’m also looking to keep posting here, partly to reassure people reading this (you’re awesome by the way) that I’m ok but also so that I’m writing and getting thoughts out of my head.

Accept that we must adapt to the new environment we are living in. I’ve come to terms with it, there’s not actually that much change for me. But I am so definitely looking forward to having the freedom to idly wander around city centre shopping without thoughts of catching something. I want to watch cinema movies again. And I want to see friends again.

Embrace the fact that the future will be different. I’ve seen a few people saying that we mustn’t go back to how things were before. I disagree. We must always remember. But we must not be marked by it. We must not be dominated by shadow, we should be able to find the path back to fully enjoying life and each other.

Don’t worry be happy as the song said.

And I’ll be looking forward to visiting new places too.

I can hear the dinner alarm going and it’s already a bit late ! So I’ll save the other screenshots for later and bid you a good night.

Stay safe, be well.

Back to work yesterday ! Kinda.

We’re still in working from home mode but I was mostly ready to go back. There’s a weird kind of anxiety at the moment where the uncertainty over the incubation period of covid makes you wonder if a wheeze is a sign of impending virus or if it’s just allergies.

I’m pretty certain it’s just allergies (because I’ve been isolating at home for almost all of the last few weeks) but that anxiety tends to kick when you don’t want it to.

Hope everyone reading this is ok.

Right – that’s anxieties logged and hopefully able to be moved on from … I’ve been thinking about new games to follow from the ones I’m in at the moment. I’m also tackling Arthur C Clarke’s Rama 2 which is frustrating from some points of view, curious from others. It reads better so far than some of his others. More of that when I finish it.

There have been more journeys of Tea-89 … Seen there discovering an Earth Like world while venturing across from the Galactic Core.

I found a good place to stop too on Monday. Very rugged.

Looked better in the daylight, although it can be tough to get the perspective to really show off how rugged some of these planets can be.

Can’t land on planets with atmospheres yet though, that isn’t in the game yet.

That session finished with me visiting a gas giant world that’s been dubbed The Palantir. Shiny. It had some moons as well, which saw me finding a good spot to park up …

A fairly rare shot for me showing the detail at the stern of the ship. I like the detail, from where the engines are, to where that rear hatch is. Detail is good.

Nice impact crater too and a planet bringing out that lovely paint job.

It hasn’t all been Elite though (I’m somewhat looking to ration the time there so I don’t break my hands on it). The Mass Effect Andromeda run is coming to a finish, that’s been an epic one.

Stunning visuals for that place and ultra low gravity giving opportunities for hang time with the jumps.

Nice looking ships too.

I think it’ll be Deus Ex Mankind Divided after finishing Andromeda. After being addicted to Deus Ex Human Revolution and keenly anticipating DXMD, I bounced off the sequel quite hard partly due to experiencing technical problems. I have a different graphics card now though and an upgrade … so it should do better.

Another different one is Mordheim … which is more a tactical game. It doesn’t need twitch reactions, so it’s a more relaxed playing style. But it’s brutal …

OUCH ! That was a really tough start and the second try was almost as bad ! Sleepy von Dwagon died the first time and got brain damage on the second attempt. I’ll try again at some point. Just gotta get the dice rolls in my favour for a change.

There’s a thing in gaming that started with XCom … beware the 95% chance to hit, because the game (or luck) may have a bias built in. You go for that almost certain chance, knowing that missing causes certain doom and … whoosh, miss, bad things happening. XCom does that, Mordheim does that, Blood Bowl definitely messes with your mind like that.

But we still go back to play them :-D.

Stay safe, be well, hope your sanity is more intact than mine can get after a Xcom / Blood Bowl / Mordheim session. And if you’re getting frustrated at something that’s supposed to be fun, give it a break for a bit, come back refreshed with more ideas for how to win.

Cya !

Hello everyone,

I have to report that I’ve ventured out of the house again … Needed food. And an egg. Food and egg have been acquired … I wanted to give the car a little run as well because in this current climate, it isn’t being used much at all. So instead of going directly to the supermarket, I went the slightly longer way around … (Not too far, just a fairly quick circle to make sure battery ok and all things that like to turn had a chance to turn !)

That’s the in real life stuff out off the way … I tried a little bit of speed running yesterday. I vaguely remember doing speedy runs of games like Alone In The Dark (a long time again) but it’s not really my style of game play any more. But a challenge is a challenge and it got me back into one of the smaller ships again.

That’s me at the start, in a Cobra Mk3 named Warp Factor Potato, given a special paint job and with the callsign TEA-89. Various references there to the online communities I enjoy nattering and sharing screenshots with.

(words for a bit, couple more screenshots later)

The challenge is to see how quickly you can make your way from the home of humanity, Sol, to the centre of the galaxy. The distance is 25,899.71 light years. Well, Galileo Station, in orbit of the Moon. Pretty station too. I didn’t want to have it take too long, so I set up a ship for the Unlimited class. There are 3 classes …

Classic – no engineering modifications or boosters, no help from neutron stars.
Neutron – no modifications again but you can use neutron stars to cut the time down.
Unlimited – you’re free to use enhancements and neutron stars.

(Before I go any further, here is the Frontier forums link with the challenge)

The difference between classes is that my Cobra was capable of doing jumps up to 51.2 light years, which boost up to just over 200 with a neutron star. The unmodified version of the ship would be able to jump 26.4 light years. It’s not just a doubling of the distance, it’s being able to go in a straighter line. The stars aren’t exactly 26.4 or 51.2 light years apart, so the ship with the shorter distance may have to go on a more wiggly side to side up and down route in order to make forwards progress.

The record for a Cobra Mk3 in classic is 14 hours 26 minutes. I made it in 6 hours 7 minutes. It should be possible to knock probably 2 hours off that. Let’s see … there are times for the Cobra Mk4 of 16 hours 12 on classic and 4 hours 30 on unlimited and I’m seeing the jump ranges as being 23.3ly classic or 46.2ly on unlimited. So I should be quicker than the Mk4. Ok for a first shot and I’ve learned more for later. The fastest time is just under 98 minutes in an Anaconda, which is a big ship that can take advantage of the fitting systems to get massively long jump ranges around the 77ly range.

There’s a site called Spansh (link) which lets you plot a route with the neutron stars to speed things up, the mk3 comes out at about 200 jumps whereas the mk4 reckons 242. The next attempt is likely to be in a little Dolphin passenger ship and I’ve already forgotten the name I picked out. Gotta get home first though.

Too much theorycraft !

The competition rules ask you to post two screenshots, the first of which sees you in the departure station, ready to launch … with the time stamp. (I’ll post the other one later).

The route mapper has been vastly improved since the first days of the game. It used to be able to plot up to 1000ly with you having to go down to perhaps 250ly skips near the Core (it would crash). Now you can plot up to 20,000ly. You still have to use a couple of waypoints with that but it is way better.

That was taken just as I was about to embark on the last leg of the trip, with the blue light being the light of the neutron star I was about to get a boost from.

Another of the conditions is that you make the trip in Open …

There we are part way through the trip. I don’t like playing in Open because I’m not a fan of the people who are able to put way too much time into a game which then enables them to take out their sociopathic tendencies out on other players. But that’s me. I’m just not that in to multiplayer gaming and spend most of my time in this game in the Solo mode.

Not too far to go and about to enter the Galactic Centre sector. The stars come out much more around the Core, as the star density is much increased over the density of stars near our star system.

Final jump !

And emerging from hyperspace at the monster which is Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole which is the engine of our galaxy.

And the other condition for the competition is to post a screenshot of the galaxy map when you arrive at the destination, this has a time stamp on it as well.

Not much time for sight seeing on this run, as it’s pretty much just Jump-scoop-jump whoosh but I took a couple at the end :

Silhouetted by the Core …

And then looking on at Sagittarius A* from the safety of a planet just over a light year away. (Sagi A* is the white dot just over the horizon that’s down and left from the black dot which is another planetoid.)

And I turned around for a better look at the ship and her markings.

A good learning trip, it’ll be a bit of time before I do this again though because 6 hours at the stick with minimal breaks is a bit of a silly thing to do.

Time for a chilled out day demolishing yesterday’s Easter egg.

Have a great day everyone, stay safe, be well.

Hello everyone,

Almost Easter ! Hope everyone reading this is well. As well as the games, I’ve been enjoying going back in to the books lately. Although it feels as though the last one broke my brain a bit.

It was called Ignition! by John D Clark, An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants.

A fun read but it does go quite deeply into higher levels of Chemistry knowledge and you ideally need A-Level equivalent going on to degree level Chemistry to be able to really understand everything going on in here.

That said though, he did a remarkable job of explaining the routes the chemists went to in attempting to figure out the issues around getting the best propellant all round, looking at issues like storage, power and toxicity.

Instead of being a reaction like car fuel or what goes on in gas turbines where the fuel is combined with oxygen from the air, the rocket fuel has to carry its own oxidiser. That’s not usually Oxygen either because Liquid Oxygen fails that storage criteria (it boils off if left and these needed to be good for years). The ideal that they were looking for is like :

The idea being that two chemicals on their own would be reasonably benign … but if you mixed them together, watch out. After all, the intention was to make things go very fast, very quickly so there was a fine line between these being chemicals to make things go WHOOSH and chemicals that went BOOM.

One consistent theme running through is that everything in the chemistry world runs on strict, set rules. Elements, molecules and compounds will only react in certain ways and those ways are set. If you know the rules, conditions and exactly what’s occurring, the results are predictable. The problem that the early rocket fuel scientists had was that they had very little idea what the rules were.

It’s one difference between computer simulation and the real world. A simulation is only programmed with a certain set of conditions and it only contains the rules that the programmer knows about or is interested in. In the real world, all of the rules get applied and when the results differ from what was expected, you’ve just discovered a rule that you never realised existed or applied.

Fun stuff. And very Scary too for the more sane of the scientists …

Oh and the author doesn’t hold back with comments on what he thought about some of the more ambitious or foolhardy attempts to get a better rocket fuel. This probably applies :

And some of the after incident anecdotes definitely resemble :

They’d have some compounds which were ok until those chemistry rules satisfied a certain set of conditions and then KABOOM. Even if the fuel had been sitting in a drum apparently inert for a while, the decompositions and ongoing reactions, including the physics behind the solution settling out, would change the overall composition.

Well worth a read and when you’re reading about the various stages they went through :

Quite. I could do with grabbing more coffee.

Banners ? Another game that’s just come out that I won’t be buying for a few reasons* is Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord … it has a banner editor …

*Reasons – it’s horrendously buggy, it looks like just a graphical update of an 8 year old game and has the same issues, I barely played that 8 year old game and … expensive. Oh and there’s other games I want to play.

However, the same thing applies as for games like Animal Crossing. If someone else is enjoying the game, I’ll enjoy watching them enjoy it. Fun is something universal. And I seem to be catching a tendency to enable other people’s enjoyment by making things for them. The latest is the M&B2 banner editor … (link).

2 banners have appeared so far, the first is one for Fuzzyfreaks :

The editor is bound by the rules behind banners in the game and doesn’t have many features but … You can make some cute stuff with it. And the codes it comes out with can be taken by others and refined or otherwise improved.

Here’s the other one for Enter Elysium :

That one has worked pretty well and it’s not that far off his old logo.

As far as my own gaming goes, I think I’m nearly at the end of Mass Effect Andromeda now … the follow on game to that is highly likely to be Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Elite is still bringing out the super pretty screenshots but I might be a little burned out on that now. It might be time to look at No Mans Sky, which is similar with the spaceships but much more focused around the exploring of planets. And there’s also the last little bit of Motorsport Manager.

There’s also Skyrim and Fallout 4 which I’ve never finished …

After coffee !

Have a great weekend, stay safe, be well.

Hello everyone,

I’ve been playing a bit in the Elite beta today …

Ooo – shiny …

It’s just in beta at the moment, so the carriers aren’t part of the main game yet but it’s been nice to check them out.

There we go. Different one, not quite in as pretty a location as the other one.

Circling back to go on approacch. That’s the docking bay side, which seems actually to be the underneath although there does look to be a flight operations control tower at the end there.

There we go. Landed ! And about to go into hyperspace on a jaunt to another system. There’s not much to see there though. You get put into a lockdown state in the hangar bay without a view of the outside.

And then you come out in a different place ! It’s a bit different from the outside …

Going :

Going …

Gone !

Or it’s melted into a cloud of something.

That’s another from before a jump.

The asking price of 5 billion credits is way too steep for me. I haven’t gone into that phase of grinding out massive amounts of credits yet. To be honest, that bores me … I’d rather be out and about seeing stuff than staying in one place and exploiting the game mechanic that makes that possible.

The name of the place if I’d been able to get one though : House of Elliott. I wonder how many will get that reference ? (It’s not related to a TV series about dressmakers …)

What do I think about the carriers ? Nice to have them in the game. They’re a bit like a form of player housing, acting as a base for repairs, trading, outfitting, shipyards and they can jump from place to place as well. You wouldn’t want to go to the far side of the galaxy in one though. It takes 2 hours to jump up to 500 light years and an exploration fitted ship could do that distance in 8 jumps … or 8 minutes.

I couldn’t actually do much with the carriers that I landed on. I had a full cargo hold of stuff looking to be sold … but couldn’t sell it. I suspect that’s down to the settings of the carrier, although I can’t test that because the beta doesn’t give the funds to buy the carrier for testing.

If they stay in the game as they are at the moment, they’ll be a rare curiosity. I can’t actually see the point of having one at the moment, especially if you have a tendency to disappear off round the galaxy for a few months at a time. There’s no point taking the carrier with you. It would be good if there were refinery or other production services built in, so you could buy resources, add value by turning them into other things and then sell for a profit which would go back in to the carrier.

Bit like how the X games do starbases. They do feel a bit like a “what’s the point ?” at the moment and they’ve come in at a cost of things like :

Keeping the galaxy story alive through the Galnet news service. This has gone silent.
Community Goals. These were very handy for giving something new and interesting to get involved in. There hasn’t been one since Xmas.

It’ll be interesting to see how the carriers develop. Later !

Stay safe everyone.

I’m on leave at the moment !

Don’t worry. Not going anywhere. Just needed a period of not thinking about work for a while, for disconnecting from the world for a while. Although it does feel like the world has disconnected from reality as well and we’re living some parallel timeline from a disaster movie or book.

More like a book because books have a longer timescale than movies.

I’ve been in the self isolation for quite a while now. I have actually talked to people but it’s been over the phone with work stuff over the last week. They’ve been a bit worried about me coughing over the phone … It’s not so much a cough, more allergy season kicking off.

Yep. Allergies and dust issues aren’t good around now and they’ve definitely been in my lungs. I don’t think it’s anything more sinister than that although I think the issue that’ll make this current situation continue is that if isolation doesn’t continue for long enough, the outbreaks will keep re-emerging.

As far as I go, I’ve been out of the house maybe 5 times in the last 3 weeks. A couple of those were to top up on supplies, 3 of those saw me in work. So instead of getting out and about in somewhat fresh air, I’ve been breathing in that dust in the house … dust which is worse due to the skin condition I’m pretty much just recovered from.

Most of dust is actually us … and I’m dusty.

But after massively overheating and suffering from breathing in dust on Saturday (an attempt at cleaning !), I’m breathing fairly ok at the moment. I’m probably scaring the neighbours too with some of the coughing that’s been happening. And it’s not as bad as the bug I seemed to pick up around the start of the year.

Apart from that though, light stuff happening at the moment is seeing me in Elite, in Mass Effect Andromeda and in Motorsport Manager as well. I also tried out a little bit of Torchlight too.

I was sorting out the problems of the Planet Of Deadly Holes yesterday. I’m still enjoying the game but kinda want to move on to something different now … but I also want to finish it.

Over in Elite, I’ve been bringing Tea to thirsty miners in return for very rare stuff that goes in to modifying the components of your ship. The Tiamat’s Chariot is a very powerful beastie at the moment and due to get even more powerful when the current target in the game is complete. (unlocking Powerplay shields) But that’s a rather boring grind and I stepped away from it today to do some roaming trading.

Here’s another of the places where I found myself :

o7 Commanders.

I’m a little concerned about the state of the game at the moment though. There’s a new update coming very soon for Fleet Carriers, which don’t seem nearly as good as what people were looking for. I’d kind of like them to be a kind of player station, which they’re implementing mostly. But they do seem to be a money sink instead of something actually useful. They’ll have commodity markets and other services but what I’d like to see are things like refinery stations or manufacturing stations (like the X games and Eve have) so that the station/carrier can be used more like a hub to passively make you money … instead of being a money sink that you can’t do much with.

I’ll have a look in the Beta though. Need a name for that imaginary carrier that I’ll check out for a short time in that beta testing phase.

Apart from that, it feels like I’m approaching hitting all the goals I had in the game. I’m in my end game ship now, I’ve been to places like Beagle Point at the other side of the galaxy again. I’ve acquired almost all of the ships. Where to from there ? Outside of maybe another reset. I’d consider that …

Outside of that, there is a huge amount of music listening going on … even more now that I’m on leave and not working from home. I have a few rules for Working from Home when I do it :

No music. Because this is one of my separations of Work Time vs Me Time.
TV doesn’t go on. Because daytime TV is a route to insanity and daytime TV ads are even worse.
I keep to normal working hours as the pattern and switch modes when the laptop goes away.
Lunch is important and while I’ll keep an eye on what’s coming in through email, I’ll look at doing something different for that 30 minutes or so. (I’m not good at this and have been working through that lunch doing a few quick tasks !)
Breaks happen because you have to top up that coffee mug or otherwise keep yourself hydrated.

Other people do the working at home thing better but it was good to not think about work at all today.

Apart from that, I’ve been attempting to read through Ignition! More about this in a later post but while I’m learning stuff from it, the book definitely requires A-Level Chemistry to understand it and I suspect it’s going in to degree level Chemistry as well.

It will be good when we get past the isolation period. It’s sad that the live events like the sporting schedules have been pretty much stopped completely. But they’ll start up again at some point. That’s for sure.

I look forward to London Comic Con and the Lords cricket every year. Not sure if the cricket will happen this year and I’m uncertain about the Comic Con too. Same with the motor racing on the telly. Motorsport Manager is a poor substitute for watching the races !

It’ll be good to see actual people as well. I’ve been missing a few people in particular.

We’ll see what happens over the next few weeks with the curve of the cases.

Back to me again, my game playing has been limited by a couple of things :
State of my arms. It kinda feels like I’ve been getting a tennis elbow thing where my arms don’t want to fully straighten ! Weird. My wrist was complaining bitterly as well and threatening to go on painful strike (I think this was from holding my phone awkwardly for a teleconference).
Interest in the games. I’m maybe a bit burned out on Elite and don’t want to put the mental effort in to learning new games. It has been good to watch the videos though. At the moment, it’s a Starsector video by Man The Maker.

I’ve been tempted to order some things as well. Like marshmallows from the posh marshmallow place. Like upgrades for my Elite control stuff. Amazon stuff (although Amazon are a really nasty company towards their work force and I could do with finding an alternate). I’d like another Ugears wooden model, also down to just one unbuilt Lego kit.

I’m not ordering anything online at the moment though out of respect for the Postal workers. They’re in a really bad situation as well at the moment with not enough protection and a CEO who needs a butt kicking. I don’t want to make that situation worse by ordering stuff that could easily wait a while.

I do miss pizza as well. When I’d get pizza, it would be on a £10 for any pizza any size collection deal, which isn’t available at the moment. Pizza’s expensive ! And it’s mostly about pizza for multiple people too and I’m just here on my own.

I think my first non-me meal after the isolation will be from our local Chinese takeaway though. They’re a wonderful bunch (disclosure note – I occasionally get free bonus prawn crackers from them) and that’s why I’ve been going to them for over a decade.

I think that’s enough for me for tonight. Am doing ok, although the dust and other allergies have been affecting me consistently over the last few weeks.

Hope you’re doing ok as well. Stay safe, be well.