Author: Sleepypete

Crystal Olympic Shard Bugs

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July 25, 2021

9:39 pm

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Hi everyone,

What’s this ? Second post in a week ? I need to post more often, even if it is just internet spaceship pics.

Picture. Cartoon. This is a 2 by 3 set of panes. In the left panes, a single figure, shouting. The right panes have three figures with their arms raised, shouting. The words go : "Who are we?" "Readers!" "What do we want?" "All the books!" "Where will we put them ?" "We Don't Know!"
Yep. Need more book cases

Yep. Kinda between books but I know what the next one will be. It was nearly Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The start of his books tend to be the best and I was enchanted by the story of Nadia as she builds the earliest permanent Mars habitation. Red Mars was a really good one, the story kind of petered out as it went through Green Mars and Blue Mars. I think he’s an author with fantastic ideas about world building … but the overall plot line tends to suffer. Still great books though. I thought the world building in 2312 was fantastic.

Can’t find my copy of Red Mars though, I’ve either picked it up and put it somewhere not near the others or it’s one of a little collection that I lent out a while ago.

Anyway, next book is looking like an overdue reading of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which was a birthday present from CK. Can’t remember when !

Anyway, last book was The Crystal Shard, which was R.A.Salvatore’s first entrance in to the Dungeons and Dragons area of book. There was a cluster of these released to support the Forgotten Realms world building pack, with this one covering the forbidding area of Icewind Dale to the extreme North West of the Realms. It’s a cold place, with Ten Towns (literally called Ten Towns) filled with rowdy frontier folk who are more interested in a fight than teaming up against the invading hordes. And invading hordes there are. It’s still a very readable book, 30+ years on from when it came out and I’ll be moving on to the rest of them in due course.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We are landed on a rugged grey white planet. We're on the day side. Our ship is filling a landing pad in the lower centre. It's the purple Cutter ship with two engines on outriggers to the sides and a tubular hull. A decent sized settlement stretches out to the left of the ship. The ship is longer than the settlement.
Ship is chonky

I avoided playing games pretty much all this week. Temperatures in my main room were hitting 30 degrees C on my fan and the graphics card was up to 53 C at idle at some points. That’s about 7 degrees above where the point where the graphics card says things are ok. It’s 49 now. If games happen, the graphics card and processor need to do work, which means heat getting introduced in to the room. I could feel it in yesterday’s session (but continued !) and definitely felt it in today’s session.

They started off with a bit of ferrying around cargo, that’s the job of the Imperial Cutter class Tiamat’s Chariot. A fearsome craft, she takes on all pirates who come to try and rob her of her cargo and also takes a massive amount of cargo around. I’ve not been enjoying that quite as much as I have done before though, so only 3 cargo runs have happened this weekend. It’s Community Goal time, with this week’s ones being a Trade one (bring cargo for reward) and a Combat one (shoot pirates for reward).

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same grey white planet as before. We are looking back at our ship from the other landing pad. Our pilot stands at the bottom under an entry sign. The base consisting of blocky looking buildings is sprawling out behind us, with our ship on the horizon behind all of that.
Don’t leave without me !

Another one of Tiamat’s Chariot from the other end of that base. It was fun to see the scale of the ship here, especially as one of my pick up points for cargo was as well lit as the base here. Another thing I appreciated was being able to take the taxi around the galaxy. This is one of the good features of the Odyssey expansion. Before, you’d be able to request your ship be delivered to you but I thought this time, the ship is set up to make travel easy so I’ll go to the ship. This time it’s …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is heading away from camera. She is the Federal Corvette, a roughly triangular ship with a blunted off point at the front end. She is in purple with dark grey covers above the engines at the back. She's flying above a base with scattered domes and landing pads that's on a grey plateau, with orange lowlands in the background.
Alpha Lima inbound

The Admiral Luperza, a Federal Corvette class warship. She did alright in the bit of combat a week or so ago but I wanted to put some upgrades in. I’ve ended up rearranging the fit as well, so instead of two massive beam lasers and 5 smaller gatling cannons, she has 3 massive gatling cannons and 4 smaller beam lasers. The ships are limited on battery (capacitor) and the big beams drain that capacitor really quickly … This set up feels like it’ll have more combat endurance. Oh and I’ve boosted the range of the beam lasers as well.

I haven’t tried it out yet though, there are no suitable combat locations in the system where the Community Goal is ! Oops. There’s more work to do on this one, always more grinding to do in games like this.

Oh and I was very close to having another look at Eve Online, as it’s another one that has a definite draw for chilled out space trucking. Eve is pretty much pure pvp though. You have to be able to accept that style of gameplay to get the most out of it, which includes voice comms and patrols which have very strict demands on your time. I decided that wasn’t for me quite a few years ago and nothing really has changed.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our triangular purple Corvette is landed on a pad in the bottom right, pointing away from camera. In the distance is another collection of domes, with a conical structure with the top chopped off up ahead.
Awaiting upgrades

There’s a bit more to the Elite stuff, which I’ll close out the post with later.

Olympics ? It’s been good watching it so far, although with proceedings starting from about 12.30 local each day, it’s on a bit too late for me. I take advantage of the telly box being able to rewind an hour and then fast forward through the boring stuff, like filler segments and football.

I’ve been curious about the outfits again … The martial arts players have a set outfit that must get in the way :-D. Tennis highlights were just on … those look pretty normal. Hope they’re ok in the heat. Cycling will always be a sport for the lycra. Moving swiftly on. Then there’s swimming with the form fitting outfits and swim caps …

I think the big thing there is that all of the competitors should be on an equal footing, with no performance benefits being allowed from someone having a smarter technology behind their outfit. (Non-friction swimwear? Maybe)

I was curious about the gymnasts … Why do the ladies wear the leotards and the blokes wear the trousers ? Which one is better for doing the moves for their sport ? I know/knew a ex gymnast, she worked in the last team. I never asked her and it’s probably not a question you can casually pop into conversation ? You know ? Equality and diversity and all that ?

It’s always fun to see the archery people. They use hats. Hats are cool. And the Korean ladies were giving a scary sense of invulnerability earlier. Yep. Zombie apocalypse comes and you need people to take out zombies silently, get these ladies on your team. The skateboard people were like your typical cool street kid. It’s good to see them get their chances on as big a stage as this.

That’s the thing with the Olympics, it’s a fantastic festival of sport, where you find yourself watching things you’ll only watch every 4 years or so and they’re so compelling due to being right there with the competitors baring their passion for what they do.

Like the triathlon starting in a few minutes ! Things kick off early tonight so I better wrap up.

Bit more internet spaceship … I’m still invested in Elite. It offers a good chilled out alternate reality space to escape in to. And that can be valuable, especially in times like this. Wonder what I’d be like as a trucker in this world ? That would be a massive shift. And then it also has its exploration and combat side too.

But there are so many bugs … The most frustrating one is in the lighting system, where you’ll be heading to a planet and not be able to see anything at all due to it just appearing jet black. As in, it’s a hole in space occluding everything behind it but you can’t see the thing blocking the view. That’s perhaps the biggest actual bug in the Odyssey expansion. The abysmal performance isn’t really a bug, it’s just utterly flawed output from the developers. Here’s another of those bugs …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're on foot, with the camera looking up at our pilot and beyond that, windows that mark the edge of the area we are in. Reflected in the glass is a small grey ball of a planet and a space station that is a mix of square and triangular faces that come together to form a cube.
Hope the windows are air tight

This is the bar, inside the concourse which is common to all of the space stations. The concourse is usually inside the space station … not floating around outside where the reflection of the station gets caught in the window. Where is that though ? Is it a reflection or a ghostly form of the station and planet ?

Who knows.

So many bugs. But it still has that hold on that part of me that enjoys flying around in spaceships.

Stay safe everyone ! Be well.

Melting, boiling blood, admin fun

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July 21, 2021

7:24 pm

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Hello everyone,

England is warm at the moment. As in un… I almost wrote unseasonably warm but July seems to have become our It’s A Scorcher month. There’s a reason my desktop PC got called Meltdown and it’s only partly down to me not understanding the instructions on the cpu cooler and initially installing it with a protective thing still on it (I’ll come back to that in a bit !)

Picture. Patches of tufty brown grass can be seen among thin snow patches on the ground. In the centre, a globe like lump with stones for eyes, a black thing for a nose and an open mouse. Two branches reach up to the left and to the right. Caption "It was at this moment I realised ... There is such a thing as being too host." It looks like what's left of a mostly melted snowman.
Indeed

Yep. We’re having a toasty week and the only time this week I’ll be in air con is Monday and Tuesday just gone. (Work trip). That’s one reason the graphics card buying hasn’t happened yet (oh and they’re too expensive and rare still). Not gaming much at the moment because that just adds heat to the room. The upgrades coming by the way are :

Cpu Cooler swap. I’ve had a better one for a while but this is a sizeable job because the motherboard needs to come out to do it. It’s almost more efficient to swap everything over to a new case which I might need to do anyway for :

Graphics card. I’ll be upgrading from an ageing 1060 3GB card up to a 3060 12GB card. It has at least 3 times the parallel processing power, which means it can push more pixels around and do more Make Everything Shiny transformations on to build up the picture. The extra memory means it can hold a shinier picture and better looking textures. But I might need to get one that’ll be an uncomfortable fit in my case.

Hard disc. I’ve actually got one of these ready but I need to a) install it, b) copy everything on a drive over to it c) swap them over. And I’ll need to do that when I’m not using the desktop. So I’ve held off on that one.

Gosh, can’t remember much more and I’m definitely missing something. That’ll be the heat …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the inside of a space station. It's a bit battered and shabby with everything having an orange rust tone to it. We see our ship on the landing pad. This is the Corvette, which is a long, thin dagger type ship with a wider centre where the cockpit rests on top, a thin front (closest to camera) and a wider section at the stern where the engines are. This one is in purple, which looks pink in the lighting.
Admiral Luperza awaits

There we go. That’s the Admiral Luperza, which had a little outing trying out the combat side. The game actually did ok with the combat, although the lighting bugs are disastrous at the moment. The best place to find a series of fights in Elite is to go to Resource Extraction Zones in the rings around planets. They’re giving a rating according to how hostile a zone they will be, so you can find your level. It works well for the gameplay. However … the lighting bugs in the Odyssey update mean that the planet can be black, the rings can be black and you have no idea how close you are to them due to black things on black background. It’s an issue. I could get round this in combat by enabling a Night Vision mode, which adds a green border to everything.

Here we go :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We are landed on a dark planet. We're looking at the port side of the ship, which is pointing upwards (landed on a slope). Part of the ship is illuminated by the lights of our pilot standing in front. The ground is dimly lit, there is a faint atmosphere showing at the horizon and an arc of a planet above.
Bedding in for an evening

This is how the game looked in the debug camera mode and this was considerably brighter than the black landscape I was looking at from the pilot’s seat. The lighting is another known, crippling, issue with the Odyssey changes.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the port side of our ship, in the sky above the planet. The guns are out and we see a big laser cannon at the top of the back of the ship. There are a series of red running lights along the hull. The planet is a rugged light grey. The atmosphere can be seen at the horizon in green fading to blue. In the sky is a planet patterned in light and dark stripes.
Fangs out

That one is the same place, a little bit earlier as I was coming in to land. It’s had the touch of the GIMP with an Auto White Balance. It worked pretty well ? This isn’t the brightness level I’d expect but it’s far better than the brightness available. It’s a bit disturbing that the lighting in the external camera is different to the lighting from the cockpit …

Anyway. Pretty game is still rather pretty if you can find a place that allows the game to show off the graphics and there are numerous bugs and downright broken stuff getting in the way of that.

Oh ! I’ve managed to get myself distracted …

Admin fun – it looks like WordPress have pushed an update out and the Waterfox browser I use most has started refusing to load the Add New Post thing. So I’m writing this on Chrome. It’s handy to have an alternative. Waterfox (it’s a fork of Firefox) has been a good browser over the years but it does have problems running some sites and others (like Youtube dashboard) just say NO when you try and use it to access them.

Hopefully I’ll get that access back soon.

Cooler thing ? I mentioned that earlier … Computer coolers have advanced a lot over the years. In the old days, it used to be a spring clip that would attach to two hooks on either side of the socket. Now, you have a bracket on the underside of the motherboard under the socket. The cooler sits on top of the processor in the socket and a screw at each of the four corners go all the way through the motherboard connecting it together from above and below. I missed the instruction that said to remove a compressible protection thing from the backplate, so it wasn’t going together correctly. (It has to be firmly clamped to take the heat away). No permanent damage – phew !

Blood boiling ?

That’ll be the Olympics.

There’s a number of unsavoury stories coming out about the Olympics. I’ll let you look them up or you’ve probably heard them already. I’m not going to repeat them too much here. One is about the composer of the ceremony music, who has been exposed as an extreme bully. Not a good look for the organisers.

There are an increasing number of stories about the organisers being way too proscriptive about what the competitors are supposed to be wearing. And this is where the blood starts boiling.

Unless you are required to wear specific things for safety reasons, you should have full choice on what you wear if you are doing a sport. So a sailor will wear a lifejacket and harness if they’re on deck because we don’t want to lose anyone over the side. And that goes for the racers too. Motor racing people are bedecked in fireproof gear and wear a crash helmet. It’s to give them a fighting chance to survive in a crash.

For my own sport, protection is mostly optional. It’s the choice of the player as to what they wear. Personally, I went by the maxim of “If I wear too much, I will get hit more” because I trusted myself to get out of the way. But I always wore the leg pads, the box for my bloke bits, the gloves and I started wearing a helmet after a freak ball to head incident. Picture ?

Picture. The background is a (dusty) wooden floor and there is a white coloured wall behind. Two white cricket leg guards are propped up with a cricket bat between them. There is a helmet on the floor in front and a pink ball protector on top of the bat handle. A glove is draped on each of the pads. There is a lot of padding on them.
Not used those for a while !

Cricket leaves it mostly optional with regards how much protection people use, although I think it became mandatory for kids to wear the helmets. With the cricket, it’s a really bad idea to face a cricket ball without the pads, it’s not a matter of If you get hurt, it’s when. Similar with the gloves, they’re there to take the impact of a cricket ball that will break fingers. And the helmet is there to take the energy of the ball, instead of that energy going into your head. But this is all I wore, I tried an arm guard and got hit more with it, same story for thigh guards. I’ve seen someone get hit in the bit that the pink object protects and he was down for quite a while. (I was hit just to the side a few times)

A couple of examples in the cricket – Mithali Raj (superb Indian cricket lady) used to bat in a floppy hat and I adored her for doing so. Cos I used to bat in the floppy hat too and there was a kinship thing there. But it wasn’t about the floppy hat, it was a highlight watching this lady bat because she was incredibly skilled and it was great to watch. Same with Sarah Taylor, absolute legend of a wicket keeper (best I’ve seen of men and women players), I used to have a pang of “I want to watch what she does because it’s awesome but I don’t want to see her get hit on the head and hurt.” Sarah Taylor used to go by not wearing the helmet because it slowed her down but switched to keeping in the helmet later. A lot of the Asian cricketers go to caps or hats when batting against slower bowlers and take the helmet off.

I applaud them for their choices, either way. It’s a sensible balance of risk against the danger. It’s their choice too, they’re aware of the consequences if they get hit and they accept the risk involved. Oh and Mithali Raj was still playing for India in the recent series against England and was giving an exceptional show with leading the way with her batting.

But this is the other end of the scale. Yep. Mandate gear if it’s safety related. I’m all for that. We should have our sports people able to compete to the maximum without fear of getting hurt. And that goes for reducing the amount they wear when it’s really, really hot. (I’m thinking of tennis people here)

Cricket let one of the mandatory outfits for women crickets go quite a few years ago. The one that enforced above knee skirts. URG. It’s good to see them go in favour of the ladies being able to wear ankle length trousers instead. There’s a safety thing there as well, the exposed skin is far more vulnerable to cricket balls.

And then we get to the stories coming out of the Olympics …

One was from a few weeks ago and it was about the caps that the swimmers are required to wear. Swimmers with Big Hair not being allowed to wear suitable sized caps. Let them ! It’s identity. It’s their character. We need our sports people to be Characters and not just faceless individuals forced to squish into a mould. If the big cap slows them down, that’s their choice. We shouldn’t be forcing them to look a certain way.

Olympic sport should be all about who is the best on the day and that’s in performance, skill and how they manage to bring all their talent at their sport out. Sometimes they blow it. Applaud them anyway and give them your support again next time. They work really hard to get to where they are.

It should not be about the show. Cricket’s previously been doing really well because the players of all codes have been spectacularly bringing it lately. From Harleen Deol’s catch on the boundary, England’s all round class with the ladies and some spectacular stuff with the men as well. Their appearance is just a side show, it’s not something we should care about. I don’t watch women’s cricket because of any thought that the players might be cute, I watch it because they play a game I love with considerable skill and passion. They’re fierce competitors and it always makes for a compelling game to watch.

And then we come to the beach volleyball and what’s happened with the Norwegian Ladies. They want to play in shorts instead of the bikini bottoms. And they’ve been fined for it. I AM SHOCKED.

This is where the blood starts boiling. I guess that the skimpy clothing is justified because it’s hot and sand gets everywhere. And then Something gets involved and instead of it being a test of skill, it’s about a sideshow in skimpy outfits.

When I’m watching sport, I’m invested in who’s going to win. And that’s being really happy for the one who knocked it out of the park and was better than everyone else and being sad for the one in tears because they tripped up right at the start and didn’t let their talent out to play that day. They’re both awesome. It’s better to try and fail than not try. When I’m watching the endurance motor racing, I’m more likely to be rooting for the people down the field who have lost huge time to mechanical issues and they’re fighting to stay in the race. They tried, failed and then try to recover. I have massive respect for that.

I’m not interested in what they look like, although Happy Smiling People make me happy too. Oh and if they have distinct character too, like the ski jumper with the enormous moustache. Loved that.

The sooner we can get away from archaic attitudes like mandatory outfits for things like sport the better. It should be the player’s choice for what they wear for their sport and they’ll optimise their gear choice to make them better at it. The only thing that should matter is where there might be a performance benefit coming in, like a bigger bat, gloves that let them catch unfairly better or prosthetics that have better tech then the competition.

Erm. It’s hot I kinda ranted.

Make your own mind up with the stories about sport at the moment and the really bad looking ones around the Olympics. Watch sport for the skill, not because you fancy the players or you like watching people in skimpy outfits. Respect the performance, not the appearance.

And I’ll now retreat back into my Not Wearing Much (get that picture out of your head for your own sanity !) and trying to keep functioning in the heat. Roll on Saturday :-D.

Random Rovering

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July 12, 2021

9:53 pm

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Hello everyone,

Lots been happening in the sporting areas lately hasn’t there ? Yep. Stunning catch by the Indian lady was the absolute highlight. Here we are. It’s well worth linking up for you. (Harleen Deol catch on Skysports). I saw it happen live and even though I’m an England supporter through and through for all things apart from one particular sport, I was seriously impressed with what she pulled off there. It was something special, probably the catch of the decade. I don’t think we’ll see a better one this year.

But wait, we need a thumbnail pic.

Game screenshot. Mars Horizon. We see the orange landscape of Mars, with orange buildings in the background, a circular habitation module to the right which is on leg stilts, a white rover with 3 axles on each side and in the foreground, an orange and white flag with a stylised cow on it.
Perhaps not the space game you expected !

I’ve been in the other game too. (Oh and the typing was going somewhere random there so unobserved weirdness may have ensued) Space games are in a bit of a sad situation at the moment. Elite is suffering from a vast number of issues but at least it appears with an announcement from the CEO that they might be turning a corner there. The advice still stands though : Don’t give Frontier any money until you are completely assured that you will get a quality product at the end of it.

I nearly spent money on X4 in the steam sale. That game has issues as well, although its style feels like it’ll be one I could enjoy. Star Citizen is very far from being done at the moment, or even basically playable. I do have a few more like Empyrion, where I have ideas for ships to build but no real inclination to build them. I had another look at No Mans Sky but that feels more about the wandering around planets than finding pretty things in space. So I’ll continue with Elite for now but with most of what I do in there now, there’s a reminder of the flaws that are currently in the game.

Oh and I need to acquire another graphics card so I can go back to some of the newer things and play them with the graphics turned up. Like a second playthrough of Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I enjoyed that one first time around but I’m saving the next run for when I have more pixels to play with.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is on a rise to the left, looking right towards a purple buggy that's parked in front of our silver spaceship. In the distance there are three spires of a base, to the right behind the ship is another smaller dome. There is a thin atmosphere giving a blue tint to the horizon.
Having a little look outside

I had a little look around a base in the Kremavi system. It’s on one of the improved Odyssey planets, so it has a thin atmosphere causing the shading towards the horizon. This base is also on a tidally locked planet, so the base is in permanent sunlight. The Buckyball racing crew have adopted it as their latest race base, which involved landing the ship 5km away, having a little foot race to the buggy, racing the buggy to the base, flying a ship through the base and flying a fighter through the base. The current leading time is 5 minutes 16 seconds. I’m not going to make an attempt, my game performance is nowhere enough to think about it.

Oh ! Yep. Enjoyed the cricket. The F1 racing has been interesting this year as well, with a resurgence of Red Bull. One big difference between Red Bull and Mercedes in F1 seems to be the potential of them making mistakes. Red Bull’s mistakes tend to be on track incidents, although they’ve somewhat dealt with that as Verstappen has matured and as they have gone through some terrible, ghastly even, drivers. Apart from that, Red Bull’s strategies are perfect and spot on when they go reactive. Mercedes have an unfortunate tendency to shoot themselves in the foot, like the German GP when they did a celebration, forgot they were actually racing and had a bit of a disaster.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our purple buggy is driving away from camera, lights illuminating ahead. The buggy is driving between base buildings, with a series of landing pads on elevated platforms ahead.
Just on a Sunday drive

Not actually Sunday, actually Monday. Performance in the buggy was “ok”, I’ve turned the antialiasing off (it blurs the lines) and it’s made things a bit better. They’ve attempted a graphics kludge to try and make things better … but I think it causes the game to crash so I turned it off and had no crashes since. No antialiasing though means the bitmaps have nasty graphical dot artifacts in them, happily the jpeg compression hides a lot of that.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our purple buggy is to the left of shot, looking to the right. In the distance are a pair of tower skyscrapers with square windows lit by white lights inside. Not all of the lights are lit.
Anyone home ?

One thing about this little jaunt, the base was empty. As in absolutely devoid of movement. You don’t really notice it as you’re wandering around and there are occasional ships coming into land at the pads that encircle the base but on the ground, there is nothing. That’s a little sad but it would mean more thought and processing power needed to make the buggies and people happen.

I’ve been enjoying watching the cricket too. It’s a symptom of what’s going on that the England cricket team needed to pick a completely fresh squad for the current one day internationals as Covid got into the previously selected team. It’s still a Thing, even if people seem bent on ignoring it.

It’s not going away, if anything the Delta variant is hellishly dangerous. The virus doesn’t care what we think of it, it just wants to spread … and Delta’s unlocked a way of it spreading even more dramatically than before. The lesson is – get vaccinated … and even there, keep being cautious. The virus has shown it mutates readily, it can mutate to having more impact on the body as well as being more infectious.

Oh ! Cricket stuff – I have watched some of The Other Big Sport Championship (not Wimbledon). I was unlucky enough to tune in as one of our players dived and got the penalty decision that saw England go through to the final. The big reason why I don’t watch football now is the cheating inherent in the game. Even with the video refs, they can’t get rid of it.

Cricket has managed to pretty much stamp it out with the decision referral system. There are still some odd decisions that happen but compared to even 10 years ago and especially before neutral umpires were introduced, massive mistakes and perhaps deliberate errors happen. There’s no debate now with the decision referral, the ball tracking seems much better and the sound and camera system make it very clear whether the ball’s been hit or not. The only tricky bit is whether a catch very close to the ground has been held cleanly.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our buggy is facing us, shining its headlights into the camera. The local star is above and right of shot. There are two small cylindrical towers, plus lower flat buildings. Behind the buggy is a round building with triangular sides up to where the top is flattened off. A spaceship is near the sun.
Sun light, star bright

It still looks really pretty. But once you see the issues in the game at the moment, you can’t really ignore them. I don’t think there’s any big ones in that shot though.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our purple buggy is in front of shot. The silver spaceship is parked behind, pointing to the left. There is a hill to the right and the star is poking out above the hill. The spires of the base are visible in the background. There is only one set of tyre tracks behind the buggy.
Look behind the buggy …

That was at the end of my little joyride. I had missed the Flawed Thing in this one until someone pointed it out in one of the discord servers … I don’t think I was driving on one set of wheels …

I thought this post was going to be a bit random, more so than interleaving the buggy pics with things like sport. Only one more buggy pic to come though.

In other news – finished Shadow Caption by Alastair Reynolds. Good book. Good middle of a triology. I read Silversands by Gareth L. Powell, which is a standalone scifi book set on a colony of Earth in a galaxy with gate wormholes between planets … which have randomised destinations. So the colonies exist independently and cut off from each other. Silversands was a very fast tale, a quick book and a pretty darn good one too. I’ll keep reading Gareth L. Powell’s books. He’s a great guy too, local in Bristol, fairly active on Twitter and I’ve had a few very pleasant interactions with him.

Oh ! I was going to comment on how things Look. When you’re doing things, are you concerned with how they Look to others ? I am. It’s why I don’t rant much here or indulge in talking about stuff like politics too much. Ranting isn’t a good look. Neither is hooliganism, which we’ve been seeing as the other thing that hopelessly mars football as a sport in this country. It’s about that face that gets presented to the world. Is it one you’re happy people seeing ? Is it something that will come back to haunt you in a few years due to the Internet not forgetting anything ?

I’m quite happy with the face that I hope I present. Although there is that constant of the face you present not necessarily being what other people see when they look at you.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our little buggy is parked facing to lower left of shot. The headlights illuminate the words "KEEP CLEAR" painted on the ground in front. Behind, there is a domed building with a few more taller buildings behind. There is another to left of shot plus a small tower in the background. We can see the sun peeking out behind the building to the left.
Not good at following instructions.

Perhaps the antics above present a face of “Rebel”.

Stay safe everyone, be well. It’s tough but the crisis is far from over, keep that caution up.

Seeking Space Adventures

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July 4, 2021

9:45 pm

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,

And other things too.

Where did I leave it last time ? Ah ha ! With the Lego R2D2. That was a good little build that and I definitely appreciate the clever, simple, slick mechanism for the central leg plus it has a few other things hidden in there too for tool arms and a fully rotating head. This could be the first Lightmybricks kit I go for, although I should probably go for the Porsche and the BB-8 light up kit too. Thumbnail pic ?

Game screenshot. No Mans Sky. We are looking on a rugged yellow landscape with occasional rocks and small red spiky plants. The sky is a very bright yellow.
Wait … different game ?

That’s actually No Mans Sky, which I had another look at yesterday. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Elite Dangerous is in a very bad way at the moment. There’s been a series of patches since the Odyssey expansion was unleashed on an unsuspecting customer base and they’ve been very up and down in quality. The latest effort was introducing an AMD technique as an attempt in plastering over some of the massive cracks in the game at the moment. It hasn’t worked. I’ve actually turned it off now because I think it was crashing the game.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship can be seen lower right, facing away from camera towards a tiny selection of buildings on the centre left. The landscape is barren grey and the horizon is just at the top of screen.
India Charlie Echo inbound

I’d been playing around with the various paint packs that I have available and this one works pretty well in all lighting. It’s like the Cadbury Clipper photoshop thing I did a while ago, where I did a graduated purple aft fading to white forward. This is the Cutter ship again, named Tiamat’s Chariot, callsign DL.SDL. There’s reasons for all my ship names, they’re often tributes. Tiamat was the Queen of Dragons, so it felt fitting that her name be part of the name of my flagship.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My ship is on a landing pad close to camera, pointing away and to the right. She is in the shiny purple livery this time, although it looks black with purple highlights. There is a smaller white ship behind and to the left on another landing pad. Assorted base buildings can be seen up and right.
Empire representing

I had an opportunity here with the Imperial Clipper that’s landed on the pad that’s a bit further away. The Clipper is the less expensive sister ship to my Imperial Cutter. Great ship too. If it were smaller, I’d look at it for being a landing ship. Anyway, this shows off the shiny purple paint job … It’s a stunning looking paint job, if you get the right lighting for it. I can’t use it for spacey screenshots because it just disappears into the background. However …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our Cutter ship is in the lower half of the image. You can't see much because the ship rather fades into the black background of space but there are various silver highlights of parts of the ship, plus the star light is making small points of light reflect in the purple hull.
Set course for the next star

This one looked good. I was avoiding a White Dwarf star here. These are very old stars, which have gone through a nova phase and the remnant left behind that explosion does not have the mass to become a neutron star or a black hole. More about them at the link. In game, they’re a fairly dangerous and annoying object because you come out of the jump right on top of them and have to steer a wide berth around them to progress. You can get a boost off them but you have to get dangerously close. I don’t think it’s worth the risk (and annoyance!)

The reflected lights did look rather spectacular though didn’t they ? I have to admit though, this one has some processing to increase the brightness and contrast, otherwise that shiny purple disappears into the background of the void.

I think I’m on the verge of skipping to something different though. Elite’s got big problems at the moment, both within the game and especially within the publisher. A graphics card update will address some of the issues. Those are coming on to the market but the prices are still too high. A 3060 card on release was around £370 (still high), these are back on the market again but the prices are around the £550 mark. Scan had some for £470 … but I don’t absolutely need one yet so I’ll wait a bit longer. Anyway, when driving the buggy around today, I was having issues with the control of it that I’ve never had before. It was essentially racing out of control probably due to the shocking frame rates around populated bases.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the aft end of our spaceship heading out to the exit of a space station. We see purple engine flare and blue light reflected in the hull.
Trouble Dog, departing

This is the latest ship, a Python class ship callsign TRBLDG. More on that later. Gonna talk about books :-). The Python is a great all rounder in the game. She has a roughly triangular cross section from above and behind, with mounts for 5 guns on top and an armoured shell. They can land anywhere and this time, the ship is fitted out for carrying passengers. This is the next step in trying out the money making schemes … plus I haven’t done it before.

But I am kinda looking for a different space game at the moment. Elite’s got a lot of flaws and I haven’t really been enjoying the game play loop grind lately. I have to either vary it or have a certain mission to go for. Before, it was finding shiny things to look at while bouncing around the galaxy. At the moment, it’s getting the credits to buy a carrier ship and then I’ll take that exploring again with a selection of support (mining for fuel) and other ships.

The other games out there are the moment of note are No Mans Sky. Which has come a very long way from another bad launch. However, it feels very much like a ground game that happens to have spacecraft in it and I think that’s why I keep bouncing off it.

The obvious candidate is X4, the latest in the universe set up by Egosoft. I’ve had most of their games over the years but never really put much time in to them. They always seem to have their own bugs and issues in their gameplay and that appears to be true with X4 as well. It has its devoted fans but I know my history with the previous games where I just don’t get on with them, combined with what I’m seeing from reviews about the game having its issues.

Star Citizen is another one … I think this game will be ready this decade. And yep, there’s 9 years to go there. It’s a massively over ambitious project that hasn’t come out with anything really worth playing yet.

There are other games in the Steam wishlist. I should probably have a look at Frontier Pilot Simulator. This one isn’t done yet but apparently has a lot going for it. It’s not strictly space … but it is a space colony that needs pilots to take cargo around. Sold.

We’ll see. But first, another look at that new ship …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same place as before, except we are looking backwards into the space station interior at the bow of our ship. The blue lighting reflects off the chromed hull.
Mutt of Mayhem, departing

There we go, this is the Mutt of Mayhem. The name comes from Gareth L. Powell’s Trouble Dog trilogy of Embers of War, Fleet of Knives and Light of Impossible Stars. It’s a great trilogy. Very gritty … very dramatic. It’s another that bounces between characters and places as it goes but it uses that to great effect to aid its pacing and to allow the story to develop in a very well judged time.

Oh and all bets are off as far as the characters are concerned. A character you were convinced was going to be around for all 3 books might see a sudden end. I dunno about you but not plot armouring all of the characters adds a lot to the drama. One central character of the books is the ship, Trouble Dog, a Carnivore class cruiser which leaves active naval service due to the events right at the start of the first book. I’ve felt like borrowing the name for a tribute for a while now. Thoroughly recommend the books.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed on a barren grey brown landscape. We see her port side, looking left. There is a shadow under her silver hull. In the distance are the domes and spires of a planetary base.
A base to race ?

I might have a closer look at this base before going on the passenger grind … This is the Mutt of Mayhem parked in front of a base in Kremavi which has been chosen as a new race track because it has convenient access and is in permanent sunlight. A definite bonus for taking pictures.

Books ? I finished Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds. This is the middle book in a trilogy set apparently in a very much future solar system, where all of the planets have been dismantled to form a multitude of settlements and other treasure hiding places. The dominant space technology is to have solar sail ships ply their way between the stars. It’s very much pirates in space, with the ships owing a lot to the old sailing ships with broadsides of cannon. It works pretty well as a setting and I’ll look forward to reading the conclusion when I get round to it. Book 1 – Revenger, Book 2 – Shadow Captain and book 3 is Bone Silence.

The next book is another Gareth L. Powell. It’s his Silversands and although short, it’s exploded into action right from the start. I’m looking forward to getting back to it, which will happen in 5 … 4 … 3 … 😀

Away, offline, resting, droid

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June 24, 2021

9:48 pm

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Hello again everyone,

I have been trying to post more often, honest :-D. I’ve even got things lined up that I could post for internet spaceships, other games and … more Lego now too. I left the last post on Monday last week saying that it got a bit too hot … And yep, it was toasty through to Wednesday and has calmed down since then. Thursday saw me hopping out to the place in today’s thumbnail pic :

Photo. We're looking towards a line of shop fronts to the upper left of shot. The lower right is an irregular paved pedestrian only street. I don't remember 2 of the shops but 2 are the Lego shop in the centre and Foyles bookshop to the right. There are 3 masked shoppers heading into the third shop.
Two very cool places there

Thursday saw me heading out to Bristol. I was feeling the Lego shops calling, plus I wanted to check out the more local Antics model shop and the heat was making me have an urge for a Frostino thing to freeze my brain. Frostino was acquired and I even went back to the Lego shop after an earlier first look. It was either Cardiff or Bristol for the trip and I didn’t fancy fighting my way in and out of Cardiff. The roads aren’t the best. Oh and I also found myself going up the motorway a bit to the farm shop services place. It was good to stretch the legs.

Needed some air too, I must check out some of the local castles. A friend takes her gorgeous dog Henry on outings to the castles and treats us with great piccys.

Anyway, Antics was a bust. The shop in Bristol is about the same size as the Cardiff one and the people in the Cardiff one were better. If you’re going to be rude about the people who work in the shops next door, wait until the single customer in the shop can’t hear you. And there were other issues there. But I did have something catch my ear in HMV and therefore several cds escaped with me. The one playing in the store was Garbage’s latest and Jean-Michel Jarre’s Planet Jarre caught my eye, as did a Madness collection. Oh and I’ve since been able to download the Elite Odyssey soundtrack, so I’ve been listening to that too.

Before I get on to the main event for today, internet spaceships have happened …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're landed on a mostly flat grey world. In the foreground, our pilot stands in a thin spacesuit amongst scattered long straight leaved green bushes. The buggy is behind her and behind both, is a landed small ship that's like a fighter jet. Above that is a small ball of a planet. A thin atmosphere gives a graduated sky here.
Of course internet spaceships happened !

The idea I had last week for doing Empire missions didn’t work out, which meant swapping to a new place. Tiamat’s Chariot is too big for that, so it meant the arrival of Milo’s Messenger, callsign -NANO-. It’s named for Kim Nanosounds and I got the idea for a name theme while one of her streams was on in the background. It’s a nippy ship too. This was my first landing at a planet that has the thin atmospheres that also allow landing. We can’t land on thick atmosphere worlds yet but seeing horizons like that in the game now since the Odyssey expansion is going to be a treat to look out for when I do exploring again.

There was a decent amount of internet spaceship but the evenings since that Thursday have partly been about …

Picture. This is a column of assorted Lego blocks.
Lego !

Spot the elastic bands … This is the centre column of the latest acquisition from the Lego shop. It’s the start of quite a smart mechanism that snicks around pretty well.

Photo. More Lego. The column before now has a foot at the base and it has been wrapped in a boxy frame.
The game is afoot

The mechanism is mostly together there, with it being captured within the central frame. There’s a couple of level arms up at the top there as well in green and yellow, these activate the mechanism.

Photo. The centre frame has had a couple of side casings attached. The previous pictures had green pieces facing us, now we have occasional red pieces facing us. Plus the red fluffy dwagon is sitting to the left.
4D was going to pop up at some point

One internal clever thing about this one was use of colour to denote which side of the model you would be attaching pieces to. One side has red bits, the other side has green bits.

Photo. Our model now has three legs. One to each side and a central foot. The red fluffy dwagon is to the side.
Standing …

There we go. You must be able to tell what this is building into … Here we have the standing position, with the centre leg retracted into the casing.

Photo. As before, our model has three legs except this time, the centre leg is extended. The red fluffy dwagon is on top.
Best foot forward

As you move the side legs backwards, the mechanism releases the foot.

Photo. A perhaps familiar round body of a Star Wars droid can be seen. The model is R2D2. We can see his white and blue main body from the front but he doesn't have his domed head yet. Instead, the red fluffy dwagon is up there.
Onwards !

This got described in one place as the mount of a Kobold Artificer, a Kobold mech rider and a Kobold Mechapod by me later. There are a couple of hidden compartments on there as well.

Photo. 4D is lying on the chair and R2's white and blue domed head is above him.
4D gets a head

There we go. Last little bit of the model coming there. There are a couple of compartments here as well, like the periscope thing R2 has and a hole for a mini lightsaber.

Photo. The Lego R2D2 droid is on the left with a label plaque at his feet. A tiny R2D2 is on the plaque as well. The red fluffy dwagon is lower right and behind them, is the Lego box.
Yep. It was R2 rumpling the sheets, honest.

There we go, all done. The head rotates freely as well there. A good model, fantastic level of finish although it is fairly expensive. The parts count is pretty high at 2,314 pieces, although a lot of these are single block or finishing block items. The model itself is relatively small, although that was actually a draw because it means less space required to keep it !

Photo. The Lego R2D2 is on the left, with body leaning back and middle foot extended. A Lego BB-8 model is to the right, this is a mostly white ball with orange highlights, with a dome on top. They both have small tools extended.
An old friend joins the party

There we go. I had to bring out the BB-8 as well for the last shot.

Good model, it’s been pretty relaxing over the weekend … and then the Mars Horizon took over for the last few evenings. They’ve released a new update that includes a new Iron Core mode (gotta accept bad results, can’t reload to erase them), the Falcon 9 reusable rocket and a version of the Perseverance Mars lander and helicopter system. It’s a good little update to a game I’ve massively enjoyed.

Work’s been good too this week, it was fun to see the thing I’d delayed my leave for turn up in the local newsletters. It was a good day that and a very satisfying trial. There were problems, there always are (and you learn more from problems than if everything whooshes straight through) but our kit was all good and working.

Plus it was another day or so away from the working at home thing.

More post at the weekend hopefully ! I’ve had those thoughts of “I have things I could write a post about” but then post doesn’t happen. Must break out of that.

Oh and I’m double vaccinated now by the way. I’m concerned about the uptick in numbers in the UK and especially concerned that there has been no reaction to control that uptick. But you can only do those actions that you control which are things like : keep an eye out for idiots, wear the mask and avoid being in situations your risk of plague is high.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Cor, toasty out

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June 14, 2021

5:55 pm

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Hello everyone,

We have that traditional British thing at the moment where it’s flipped over into a bit warmer than the average and we’re suddenly all declaring that we’re melting. It’s the houses …

Meme picture. A big golden coloured dog is lying on the floor, facing us. He's one of the dogs with big jowls that flow down from his mouth and very long ears. They are folded out over the carpet.
Toasty indeed

After a few intense feeling weeks through work to make things happen, I have a week off this week. First one since early April I think. (Can’t remember, must be sign that I needed it !) The work stuff all came to its conclusion last week and while I can’t say what it was, everything worked, we got our Thing done and it actually worked a bit better than I expected. Good times.

It was really toasty though. We were in places that aren’t really designed for the conditions and they’re getting a bit old now too, so not as much ventilation as would have been ideal. It was good to have the day out of the work from home office and see things working nicely.

What am I intending to do on this week off ? I need to do a decent amount of work around the house but am waiting for it to cool off a bit before I do that. I don’t do at all well in the heat so I need it to be a bit cooler. Our places are intended to retain the heat so it’s better in the winter. As an example, my graphics card thermometer is what I tend to go by. 40 degrees C is a nice temperature where I’ll start taking the jumper off. It’s reading 50 degrees C at the moment and my latest fan is saying that the place it’s at is 27 degrees C.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is facing away from camera, all engines firing. The right hand side of the image is all yellow orange sun, which reflects off our ship. There is a small dot in the upper part of the image, it is our enemy ...
Duelling by the sun

Not quite as hot as there. Mining in the Manic Minarr isn’t being too profitable at the moment, so this is me back in the fleet flagship, Tiamat’s Chariot, running cargo missions and turning the tables on wannabe pirates. It’s been good too, 2 kills gave 2.5m credits and some valuable salvage. It’s a nice supplement to trading legs which are about 4m to 8m profit at the moment.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is on the left in a mostly cream coloured tight fitting spacesuit with dirty yellow highlights. She has blue hair and is facing away from camera towards a small ship waiting on the landing pad. It has a mostly grey livery with blue patches and the word "APEX" in white.
Taxi !

I needed to wait for Tiamat’s Chariot to be delivered to where I was though, which meant taking a taxi ride to unlock one of the new engineers for planetary operations.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My character faces away towards a floodlit base. We see the entrance gate with a sign saying "Olowe's Workshop". We see buildings in the background, lit from inside. A thin red line of a targeting laser is going through our character.
I hope that isn’t a targeting laser

The place I randomly chose was a planetary base. I couldn’t get into most of it, didn’t have the clearances. But it was good to be out and about and looking around. Performance of the game has improved markedly since release but it’s still nowhere near what it should be. I’m getting perhaps 20 frames per second while walking around.

But I’m keeping the gaming time a bit lower for now. Pushing those pixels around makes the graphics card make heat and introducing heat into already warm rooms isn’t a good idea.

I do want to get out and about properly over this week. Like seeing something in the cinema again for the first time since Feb 2020. The offerings last year didn’t really appeal too much but there are more promising things at the moment like Godzilla vs Kong, Raya and the Last Dragon and I’d count A Quiet Place II if I’d seen the first one. Cardiff is looking like a potential place. Oh and that would mean a decent amount of time in an air conditioned car too :-).

Now that I have the reading glasses, I need to be getting back to the reading too. Reading makes no heat ! No heat is good.

I’m going to leave it there though before I dive into things like our country likely needing to put restrictions on movement back in again soon. We were doing well for a while with our case numbers going down but in the last week, they’ve started ticking up again. I was kinda surprised that crowds were allowed at the last Test Match plus I think crowded pictures at gigs from oh! 3 weeks ago has a little bit to do with the uptick in that part of the world.

Hope everyone involved in those upticks gets better soon.

I’m going to put the dinner on now and refill the glass with ice cubes before settling down to the latest edition of Sun-Kissed with Tashnarr, Tessachka and Omgvandi being storytellered by TheWanderingInn in a Vampire the Masquerade game. Is good chilled out stuff, much better than your average evening telly.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Upgrades

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June 6, 2021

9:13 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been jabbed ! Again ! Yesterday was my second shot. Last time, I had the bad muscles for a day or so and then Brain definitely wasn’t operating to usual standards for the rest of that week. I might have a repeat of that coming, we’ll see over the next few days, although bad brain today might partly be down to taking a hayfever tablet for the first time in I dunno how long. I have sensitivities to hayfever tablets … but figured it was better to brave those and give my watering eyes a chance to rest up.

Eyes ?

Picture. My red fluffy dwagon is sitting on a wooden nightstand. He has two pairs of apparently identical metal rimmed glasses propped up on him. Both have a small reflection of a window, the lower one is blue tinted.
Eye see an upgrade

So, 5g upgrade yesterday and second pair of glasses appeared on (gosh, think brain is starting to suffer!) Thursday and yes I did need to look that up. The top pair are normal glasses, the lower pair are reading glasses. One of the catalysts for changing eventually was that I was having a lot of trouble reading books with my old glasses, beyond what will become apparent in a picture I’ll show later. The reading glasses have a blue tint on them which, in theory if I use them more, should help with getting to sleep more as Brain thinks it’s night time instead of being confused by monitor light.

Would I go for the same choice again ? No, after the need for masks drops (needed to wear one during the eye exam and fogginess happened), I’ll get some variofocals so I can swap between book reading and watching stream chat.

It’s been a very welcome change … here are the old ones.

Picture. My red fluffy dwagon is in the background, with a black glasses cleaning cloth draped over him. My green pocket dragon with his arms held out like wings is sitting in front and I am holding my old glasses up in front of him. Semi opaque shapes are on part of both lenses.
Danger fingers

There we go. That’s the old pair. You can hopefully see the discolouration and semi-opaque patterning on both lenses near the bridge. These are delamination of the lenses which was steadily getting worse and worse each time the glasses were cleaned. I could still see properly with these but I had found myself looking around the bad patches. It’s good to be able to look straight ahead clearly again.

One thing I do still need to acquire is a pair of shades to attach. One reason I’d held off so long to replace my old glasses was that I wanted to get a pair of the magnet shades that are tailored to the frames. Those disappeared from the shops a long time ago … For those who don’t have to wear glasses much (and can therefore adopt non-prescription sunglasses !) there are three main choices.

Bridge clip ons – these have little arms that grip on to the lenses around the bridge. They take ages to put on and take off the glasses so these are definitely a Really Bad Option for when you’re on the road. (Flip up shades are an option)

Lens clip ons – these have little arms that go on the outside of the lenses and they’re held in place by a springy attachment between the lenses. These are a pretty good option and you can flip them on and off with one hand.

Magnetic clip ons – these have magnets in the frames and shades which are fantastic for pulling on and off with one hand.

I.e. one hand is on the wheel, the other hand is quickly taking the shades on and off. Vision is uninterrupted. Bridge clip ons would mean a certain amount of time when You Cannot See The Road. This is bad.

So yep, one more upgrade to get. Maybe the shades will act as a good antenna for the 5g. And I’m mixing my words up which could bode well for next week at work.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My mining ship is in the foreground. She is roughly diamond shaped, squared off at the back with a pair of engines. The ship is mostly red with gold highlights and we see the top pointing to the right. In the background is a blue giant planet. The top right half of the image (diagonal split) is a white ring with clusters of dark brown rocks. The white ring is shading the obscured part of the gas giant.
Manic Minarr about to get to work

Elite spaceshipping happened last week, with a couple of mining sessions so far in Manic Minarr. They’ve put out a couple of hotfixes so far which improved the performance a bit but it is still way below what I would want for the trickier docking manoeuvre times. I was cheerfully falling in love with the graphics again but the performance of the game and the attitude of the company (as mentioned in last post) leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s as if they, on seeing that their customer relations hit rock bottom, decided to start digging. My blood was boiling this morning when I found out that the Issue that I’d contributed to complaining that I (and many others) couldn’t download the soundtrack had been closed as “Fixed”. It ain’t fixed, we still get the same error and so another cluster of issues have been raised which are getting more names behind them.

Advice – don’t buy any products from Frontier Developments. This includes Elite as well as the Park games (Jurassic Work Evolution, Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster). There have been a number of shady companies involved in the gaming market and Frontier seem to be competing heavily for that crown at the moment. (They need to go a long way to beat the Star Citizen company)

That said, game is pretty. I just think people like Egosoft who make the X games have massively missed a trick by not seeing the Odyssey launch disaster and continuing the discount of the week before. I think I might have skipped internet spaceship games …

Gosh. What else has been going on … XCom 2 campaign finished ! More screenshots at a later date. Maybe. I’ve been playing the Legacy Hub stuff that got added to cover the time between the XCom 1 and XCom 2 games. Oh ! What’s XCom ? It’s an alien invasion game where the aliens have arrived and are attempting to subvert the world’s governments into submitting to them. XCom 1 is set in contemporary times, with you commanding a hidden mountain base. The stakes steadily rise in step with the research into better weaponry for your small squads of soldiers. It either ends with you storming their temple ship and beating them back, or the aliens subverting enough governments to cause XCom to get abandoned.

And so XCom 2 opens up with you as the Commander being rescued from alien captivity. 20 odd years have passed since the first game and in this version, humanity lost badly. The aliens are in total control, as Advent, and they are going forward with something sinister called the Avatar Project. Of course you have to stop them, operating out of a captured alien UFO that becomes your mobile base.

They are legendary games and a fantastic update to the first series of XCom games from the 90s. The movement and actions system got changed from Time Units controlling everything into characters being allowed 2 actions, either a double move or a move and fire. They’re the benchmark games of this type. I wonder if there will be an XCom 3 ?

Hope so. They’re great games and Firaxis make good stuff, including having their games open totally to modding although that’s been marred a little lately by the publisher putting an unnecessary loader in that has adverts and breaks a lot of the mods.

I appear to be a little sparky about some things in today’s post …

More games have arrived ! There was a little steam sale last week which led to the 2 Divinity Original Sin role playing games arriving. Now that XCom 2 is complete, it’ll let me uninstall that and free up space for Divinity. Or I could just install the big hard disc that’s been waiting for a long time. Perhaps next weekend when the cricket is on and Nurburgring isn’t …

That was a bit of a disappointment this year. The 24 hour race ended up being about 6 hours at the start before fog set in and stopped the racing and then it resumed for about a 4 hour sprint this morning. Still good to watch, would be better if the climate around those mountains allowed for the full 24 hours. They have to keep it safe though, so stopping for the fog is a mixed feelings contrast. On one hand, wanna see more racing ! On the other, I remember a couple of years ago where I stopped watching and went to bed because I could see an even more horrendous crash than had happened already coming …

Still, it’s good that they could hold it despite our current pandemic conditions.

I better post and leg it, Tashnarr’s on and I need to rest my brain before it melts more.

Stay safe everyone, be well !

Out and about

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May 31, 2021

8:57 pm

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Hello everyone …

I’ve had that strange thing of being out and about around the country again. Around people. Twice ! All with work, so I can’t say very much about it. One trip was bad, with a poor hotel (which I complained about, I never complain about that stuff) and other issues, one trip was good.

Pretty weird being out there again though. And good to see our people as well instead of just interacting with them over the Skype.

Oh I had 2 covid tests too, both came up negative. It’s a necessary evil of being out and about around people again. It’s weird doing the swabs, I gagged each time with the tonsils part of the thing. But there can’t be any exceptions to doing the testing … and it gives a certain amount of confidence in being able to more freely interact with people.

Ok. That’s enough about work related and plague related stuff. On to the spaceships ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A diamond shaped ship is to the lower right, shaded be the bright orange star to middle left. There is a grey planet centre top with a flat ring that we see as a line. The ship is scarlet with orange highlights and purple engine flares.
Set course for Lave

That’s my latest ship, the Manic Minarr, another Krait Mk II that I’ve set up for mining. All my Krait Mk II’s are named for Tashnarr, a lovely lady who streams the games for us and brightens evenings by being an incorrigible chuckler. Oh, the callsign is -IC3Y- or Icey by the way. Must get Murph into a callsign at some point. I went into the new Elite Odyssey expansion after writing last week’s post and I have VERY mixed feelings about the release. It’s basically come out too early and we were given pre-beta level code. That means that all of the advertised features were included but the code wasn’t in a fit state for customers to be given sight of it. Let’s see …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A white ship with red highlights is sitting on a landing pad inside a space station. Errors in the texture work are giving the ship a tatty, battered appearance.
Bit battered there ?

That’s Tea and Medals, a ship I used for speed running to the Core. I brought her out of the hangar again to pull some modified bits off into storage and … also screenshot. The grey glass doming there should be black and you can probably pick out texture and framing corruption riddling the image. Quick edit for an extra picture :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our white ship with red highlights sits on the landing pad, looking considerably shinier and in better repair than the last version. The canopy glass is black instead of grey.
From a different age

That’s Tea and Medals from before doing another Core speed run, as presented in the Horizons code. You can draw your own opinion from the comparison there. I refused to take a picture of the Admiral Luperza in the state the game was showing me that ship last week because it was just really poor quality. Oh and …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Lower left sees a landing leg which doubles as an entry lift. The body of the ship dominates the upper part of the image. An engine is on an outrigger to right of shot. You can see a white grid of lights through the entranceway to the ship.
Are those the ceiling lights ?

Yep. Those were the hangar lights, through the ship. This one is fixed now but it was just one symptom of how broken the graphics renderer was when this expansion was released. This bug is fixed now and the graphics look awesome again but it’s at a cost of two things :

Apparently the fancy planetary features have been sacrificed in order to get walking and on foot combat into the game. I haven’t seen this yet.

Heartbreakingly poor performance. I was fine doing a bit of mining yesterday but the frame rate dives down to such uncomfortable levels on docking that I was heavily considering putting a docking computer on again. (It costs 1m credits per mining run because the space for the computer takes up space for Stuff to sell). As in, planetary landings looked amazing ….

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A ship looking like an airliner with engines on outriggers (one is hidden behind the body) is landed on a white looking plain. In the background is a base with tower spires and flat buildings.
Aren’t you supposed to land at the base instead of outside ?

That’s how I had the game set up on Saturday. I’m still playing with the graphics options and this is mostly medium plus a bit. The frame rate is still disastrously poor. Oh, the dots by the nose is my pilot for scale. Most of the graphical bugs of release seem like they’ve been fixed over the last week but release was disastrous.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. The ship from before is in a very shiny but dark purple colour scheme. She is landed inside a hangar. The graphics are losing certain of the deeper detail.
Shiny … but not right

You look close and the detailing in some of the non-purple bits is just absent and the crudeness of other textures in there are hidden by the shininess of the purple paint scheme. The Bridge of the ship is apparently absent.

That said though, when I was flying this weekend, I was happily falling in love with the graphics all over again. Just need some actual optimisation in the game and being able to acquire a long awaited graphics card upgrade. I was talking about changing the card this time last year with Deus Ex Mankind Divided … various things (cryptocurrency) mean that you just can’t buy graphics cards at the moment.

Here we go. This is what I mean …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. An orange and white ship is landed on a light grey planetoid. There is some detail in the ship but it is mostly a lightly detailed flat set of textures.
Looking a bit low detail there ?

That’s Tea-89 from the Alpha release of the game. I’ll accept a lack of decals, callsign identifiers and ship names in there because those weren’t in the Alpha. The lack of detail is appalling though and made its way into the release version of the game. Here’s the same ship after patching.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. The same ship from before is sitting in a dimly lit hangar. The orange and white paint scheme is resplendent and this time you can see details such as thruster blocks where previously were blank textures.
Tea 89 is shiny again

What a lot of places doing comparison screenshots are doing is fiddling with the lighting, which to some extent I’ve done there. (Didn’t want to bring that ship out of the hangar this time). The difference after the first week’s patch is incredible, the ships look amazing again. And I did spend a certain amount of time flipping through the ships in the shipyard just to have a look at the increased detail. And there are quite a number of new screenshots of ships on the pad.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A flat ship looking like a blade is on the pad, poised for battle. She is mostly white, with a patterning of purple on her hull.
Ready for battle

That’s the Admiral Luperza again, looking stunning. She’s named for the lovely Margaret Krohn who I must add in a links list at some point. I really must do that before this site hits its first birthday. Maybe something for the list when I get some much required leave in a couple of weeks ! Anyway, the Federal Corvette was descending into a nasty mire of ugh looking before the patch, it’s awesome to see the detail on there again.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our scarlet Krait with orange highlights is sitting on a planetary landing pad. In the distance to the left are mining things on legs, more landing pads and a domed area to top right. The ship has the word "Delacy" written on the hull.
One shield mod, coming up

That’s our Manic Minarr sitting on the pad at one of the engineering bases, getting some work done on the shields. The paint job is a joke by the way. Another massive issue from the first week was frequent disconnections from the server. I was disconnected 4 times in a couple of hours. The most frequently reported error codes by people were Orange Sidewinder and … Scarlet Krait. So I built a scarlet Krait. It does look rather special though. I didn’t get disconnected over the weekend, so improvements again.

But … while I was quite happily falling in love with the game again, the whole disaster of the release of the expansion means I’m highly unlikely to be giving the developer, Frontier developments, any money or support any time soon. There have been design decisions going in which have broken some elements of the user interface (can’t turn in community goal rewards) or which have made elements worse, like the galaxy map, the mission system, the outfitting system and … the destination star doesn’t appear in the list if it’s too far away any more. (Something I used to use all the time but I have a workaround for it).

To release the game in such a poor broken state is unforgiveable, plus there’s a horrific lack of communication coming from Frontier, outside of them throwing their community managers to the wolves with orders to spam twitter and the other places with shiny happy screenshots. It’s a shoddy attitude that starts at the top of the company with people who have indulged in dodgy dealings in the past. And by that, I’m referring to Frontier Elite 2 where David Braben had a deal with Ian Bell, co-creator of the original Elite, to give royalties for any expansions. There wasn’t an expansion, there was a remodel called Frontier First Encounters badged as a new game, so no royalties. That caused a very acrimonious situation and it’s just one more symptom of how the people at the top of Frontier behave. Except this time, they’re doing it to customers as well.

Nuff said on that I think …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship with the two engine outriggers is flying away from shot. The ship is barely illuminated by a sliver of a sun peeking out from behind a black disc of a planet. White engine exhaust flare out behind the ship to the bottom left.
What’s around the planet ?

It is rather pretty still is it not ?

I think that’s it from me. New games have arrived ! I ended up buying some end of last week in a sale, plus soundtracks. More about those at some point. I finished the XCom 2 run today, so that’ll clear time and disk space for the new stuff.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Sleepy Cars

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May 22, 2021

6:50 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been half watching Wheeler Dealer episodes after the F1 qualifying finished and that with another thing gave me the idea for a non Internet Spaceship post ! To be honest, I haven’t been in the internet spaceship since Sunday and game’s got so many issues that the Steam owners have affixed the “Early access” tag to it.

I’m going to go from worst cars owned to best and there is going to be a big Lexus vs The Rest split in here. They’re just well sorted cars that tick all the boxes and set out to do what they were supposed to do. Disclosure note – no inducements of any kind involved, save the things like free servicing and repeat customer discounts. I do feel that I need to pop in a different picture though so that the absolute worst doesn’t get the thumbnail !

Picture. A green dwagon is squeezed into a little red car with a clockwork winder on the back. The car is pointing to the left and the dwagon looks quite excited to be about to drive it.
Brrm brrrm

The absolute worst – a 1992 Rover 420 “Exec Limited Edition”.

Picture. A Green saloon car parked on gravel, pointing to the left of shot.Lush greenery is behind.
Oh it’s broken again

This was a 2 litre engine variant that gave about 140bhp. It wasn’t slow and was actually fairly decent around the corners. It supported me through my early working days and did a decent amount of miles for me. It handled my early hifi and computer gear which were far more bulky than what I have now. But … 30ish mpg was poor for the performance and it broke CONSTANTLY. Reliability is by far, the most important criteria for me in a car with repairability coming second. For a car that was marked Exec Limited Edition, the interior trim was cheap. Dredging up from memory, this car broke the alternator with no warning save for not starting up the next morning. The engine developed a coolant leak which later most likely turned into burnt valves (4 cylinders down to something like 2.5). The alternator broke again. Expensive servicing. And I’ve banished the rest from memory. The car wasn’t great to start with and was constantly breaking.

Other cars I’ve owned have had major mechanical issues but those were usually one hit things like the broken inlet throttle body on the next car. I’ll forgive one thing breaking … but not the repeated breakages of the Rover.

Car 2 – not quite the worst … but nearly. 2002 Ford Focus ST170.

Picture. Rear end of a silver car. The rear window is covered in snow, with a smiley face drawn in that snow.
You wouldn’t be smiling if you owned one of these

One of the considerations with this list is : Does the car do what it is supposed to do ? So a later one will get a free pass on performance that this one definitely doesn’t. This car is a Focus ST170, a 2 litre performance oriented variant of the early Focus designs. It was medium weight, without any real effort in lightening the car to get more speed. Or maybe they did and it wasn’t noticeable.

A minor sin was that it wasn’t nearly as good handling as the Puma I had before. But the biggest one is that to fit an extra gear in to give this car 6 gears, far too many compromises had been made. The 3rd gear had a design weakness that led to awkwardness in engaging the gear, plus there was a big gap between the 2nd and 3rd gear ratios. If you changed up at the wrong time, you had absolutely zero power available. The engine also had a very over protective heating sequence, where engine power was limited to what felt like 50% until the car reached operating temperature.

All that together and it didn’t just lose its Performance Car feeling, the driveability was shocking. It also had very cheap trim that was increasingly becoming detached.

So that’s the really bad cars … The rest have been pretty good ! Well. Maybe this one’s on the verge :

Picture. A little red hatchback car from the 80s. It's a Ford FIesta parked in a field.
Ready to roll, slowly

It’s a Ford Fiesta Mk2 and the one I had was a 1982 950cc Popular Plus. I’m not sure what the Plus meant because the car didn’t have very much included outside the little 4 cylinder engine. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It’s an entry level car that goes from A to B without the rain getting in and you could bring back a bit of shopping in it. Cheap and cheerful. Don’t ask about the 0 to 60 or the top speed ! Things did break on it, including the brake master cylinder on the way home. But parts are cheap and somewhat easy to replace. Oh and it wasn’t a car for going round corners fast.

Not in the same league as any of the other cars in this list for performance, practicality, comfort or toys … but it did exactly what it was supposed to do and was great value. I denigrate this car a lot but it really doesn’t deserve that. Good little car and it owed us nothing when we traded it in for …

Picture. A 1980s hatchback. It's a Vauxhall Astra Mk1 viewed from the right hand side and the front. It's in a curious shade of orange red.
Notify the mechanic ! Something’s fallen off again

The car that replaced my Fiesta was a 1.6 litre Astra Mk1 from 1982 that was the original Buggy. This one had its mechanical issues, like broken springs at the front, headlight glass and a few ignition things but all those got replaced very quickly for minimal monies. Oh and it developed an oil leak at the back that damaged the starter motor. (I think I caused that by overfilling the oil). This is a case where things breaking get forgiven because the car keeps on ticking (oh – alternator failure as well) and fixes were easy and cheap.

It’s a car of its time, which means the 90bhp was in a very lightweight car giving about the same power to weight as the Rover and the Focus. However, because it didn’t have the complex computer control of those later cars, the power is inconsistent. Some days it’s good, other days the carburettor isn’t quite as well sorted and it takes time to get happy. The radio was a thing I put in and I really should have bolted down the speakers behind the back seats.

But ! This car got adopted as our university hall shop van for my second year and was happy lugging deliveries of £500 ish of Stuff from the cash and carry place. It handled pretty much everything I threw at it but it was getting really tired by the end. I joked that it had a beard, this was a vast array of corrosion under the front bumper. Plus it was down on power, perhaps it hadn’t been as adapted to lead free petrol as I thought.

Great little car, this one got me through university.

Picture. 2 very modern and streamlined saloon cars are lined up. The one behind is in red, the closer one is a darker silver.
Shiny in red and grey

On to the Lexuses … The big thing to note with these is higher cost and available technology brings with it far higher expectations. Whereas the Fiesta and the Astra had minimal technology because it wasn’t available, the 2010 onwards cars have to be judged on how they put their technology into practice on the road.

And there are shortcomings with the IS300h’s which is another reason why I was content to switch to a different car and held off when I was being offered to switch to one of the last of the IS’s in the middle of last year. Before I dive into the shortcomings, the IS300h is a very special car. But it could be better ! The handling is excellent and the power train is the hybrid system that combines great power, massive amounts of torque with driveability and economy. I had no issues with the boot and it was lovely having all that technology on the inside like seat heaters and coolers, and bluetooth connections to the rather good hifi. Reversing cameras and parking sensors are also something I would demand in all future cars and the adaptive cruise control is fantastic when on the motorway.

But … the 2013 car had driveability issues with the software. Pulling up to traffic lights in Normal mode would lead to kangaroo hopping as the mechanical and electrical brakes started fighting with each other. The 2016 car was the best of them and fixed that issue. I moved on to the 2019 car because the previous one had a suspected broken power steering pump (also offer that couldn’t be refused). The last one had a definite step backwards with its satnav and it was a victim of plague lockdown with its battery.

The level of technology in the 2010 and onwards cars would have been undreamed of even in concept cars to the 17 year old Sleepy who had just got his driving licence. That technology HAS to work though and it HAS to be sorted out before the customer sees it. Breakages like the battery and the power steering are ok, that’s not a design issue. But issues like the drive by wire software and the satnav giving up before the crucial last mile have to be 100% done.

Picture. A white saloon car points to the right of shot. It has a spoiler on the back and the letters "SRi" on the door. It looks poised ...
Buckle up

I have fond memories of this car, despite not having it for that long ! It’s a Vauxhall Belmont SRi and I got this one as a result of a bit of a shuffle of cars in the family. Before it was mine, it was Mum’s Rocket. And it definitely shifted along. What happened ? My sister’s Astra GTE blew up as a result of faulty maintenance from a garage (a new cambelt broke – engine go byebye), so she got my Astra Mk1 Buggy until a replacement could arrive. The Belmont had really heavy steering (no power assistance) that was hurting my mum, so I got the Belmont and my mum got the short straw of a nasty little Peugeot 205.

I can’t remember why I moved on to another car but it could have been a combination of that lack of power assistance on the steering coupled with me recovering from the dislocated shoulder. It was also still my mum’s car in my mind. I’d have been much better to keep it to be honest as this was one of the last pre-catalytic convertor cars. It was lighter and a little more powerful than the Rover 420 that replaced it. I think it gave around 45 mpg too on the motorway heavy driving I was doing.

It did need to have the fuel pipes replaced and the oil cooler took about 5 Vauxhall garages in Lincolnshire to fix (bad garages saying they had done work that they hadn’t) but with its issues sorted out, this was a splendid car, albeit getting a bit tired on 130k miles. With hindsight, I should have kept it because the Rover that followed it was a shocker.

Picture. Several cars are parked. My old silver Puma hatchback is closest to camera, pointing to the left with a dusting of snow on the bonnet. A white BMW saloon and white Astra hatchback are behind.
Spaceship !

This is the 1998 Ford Puma that I had for maybe 7 years before it started disintegrating on me. This was a spectacularly good little car. It starts as a Fiesta, which then has an uprated engine and improved suspension systems. The result was a little rocket ship that was a dream to drive. It’s a toss up as to whether this should be actually number 1 in this list because it does what it’s there to do in a wonderful style of its own.

The engine is a 1.7 litre engine with a “VVT” or “VCT” label on it, which stands for Variable Valve Timing or Variable Cam Timing. What that means is that with the 1.7 litre engine in a little body, it’s a fast car. When you floor it, the engine changes the timings of when petrol and air go into the cylinder and it becomes a ludicrous car. This was such a fun car to drive, with a well sorted gearbox and handling that had power oversteer, which was brilliant when doing daft things when going round corners.

I think the next two are just Better though.

Picture. We see a dark blue saloon car, parked up. We're looking at the front right corner.
Shiny in waiting

This one is a bit of a floating selection. I haven’t really had the car long enough yet to properly place it in this list but I’ve been greatly appreciating what I’ve seen on it so far. It’s the 2020/2021 Lexus ES300h and although it shares most of the powertrain goodies from the IS300h, the big difference is that it’s been turned through 90 degrees and drives the front wheels.

This gives it a bit of a skittish tendency when going over broken up pieces of the road, like railway lines or joins in the tarmac. Still goes round corners pretty well though.

So – easy to drive, cavern of a boot and the toys are all working very nicely indeed so far. The selection of trips so far have been very easy and it’s nice having a sun roof again. One other thing that puts this above the IS and definitely the Belmont is that the steering is incredibly light at parking speeds. The Belmont’s lack of power steering really hurt it in car parking.

So … what’s the best car I’ve owned ?

Picture. A medium blue hatchback, in a car park. We're looking at it from the front left.
Tardis blue ?

Yep ! It’s my first Lexus, a Tardis Blue CT. This one gets the nod because the hybrid bits made this ridiculously easy to drive, which I desperately needed because the heavy clutch and nasty gearbox of the Focus that preceded it were causing my definite pain in my left leg. That was gone with this car because … no clutch work !

The drawbacks on this one were the limitations of the Prius powertrain that it inherited. It didn’t really have enough power to keep me happy, which led to switching to the IS300h’s. However … the system meant that whenever you asked it the question, this car would give it absolutely everything that it had. Off the line from traffic lights, this car would beat pretty much anything else due to the electric motors, up to around 40mph. It was definitely far more flexible than the Focus with its dodgy gearbox.

Splendid car. Could have done with more power but it more than made up for that with lovely comfort, great start on the technology toys (first car with reversing camera and smart entry) and the more mundane but utterly critical thing of a flat boot floor when the back seats were down. You could probably fit more in there than can go in SUVs.

Gosh, long post ! As a little recap of the order :

Nasty – Rover 420 and Focus ST170.

Cheap and cheerful – Fiesta Mk2 and Astra Mk1

Not quite there – IS from 2013, IS from 2019, IS from 2016.

Best of the older ones – Belmont SRi, Puma

Favourite cars – Lexus ES and 2011 CT.

The family had a bunch of other cars that I drove from time to time … and a couple I refused to (Golf TDi was dangerous and I would refuse to drive it). I can’t remember those too much though. I didn’t like the Volvo because I didn’t get on with its gearbox brain, the MX-5 was lovely, sister’s Saab was another rocket ship and the Mondeo Mundanos did their job well. I missed out on the Mk3 Spitfire that we had.

That’s all for me for today – stay safe, drive safe, have safe fun on the roads, be well.

Galaxy’s Haunted

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May 17, 2021

7:16 pm

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Hello everyone !

I’m trying to think of what I was getting up to over the last week ! I think generally taking it easy and doing assorted gaming while not in work times. The new Elite expansion is coming this week and I kinda wanted to be back before it hit because … expansions to online multiplayer games usually lead to mayhem with whether you can enjoy the game over the week or so of release times.

It’s been an epic trip … and a fairly epic finish as well. But …

Game screenshots. Elite Dangerous. Upper picture has our ship on the lower left, we are looking down on her from the starboard side. On the right is a Coriolis starbase, more in main text. Lower picture has the entrance way of the station on the left and the underside of our ship heading out, the ship is bristling with weapons.
Galaxy’s Haunted

Of course another reason for rushing back was that I had a meme in my head that needed to get out. I’ve skimped a little on the alt-text there because I wanted to expand a little bit for everyone … (plus I’m not really happy with how the text turned out) The station we see there is a Coriolis station, which was carried through from the very original Elite game from 1984. It’s a boxy mostly cubical structure with 6 square diamond sides, connected together by triangles at the corners. There is a mail slot entry port on one of the diamonds, which is how you get inside to the landing pads. The mailslot has a grill thing on the outside that’s called the toaster rack … oh and it’s just big enough for the biggest ships in the game. Searching for Dragons fits through handily for side to side … but you can reach out and touch the top of the mailslot (ish) when you go through.

I couldn’t resist this particular meme … it’s based on the Astronaut one with this version being :

Station : Sierra Foxtrot Delta, you’re home early, everything ok ?

Ship on the way in : Galaxy’s Haunted

Station : Say again, did not copy your last. Over.

Ship on the way out, bristling with weaponry : Galaxy’s Haunted.

It got me chuckling when I thought of it, hopefully people like it. It has been an epic trip around the galaxy, a good escape from what’s been going on out there.

Picture. Galactic Map. We look at the galaxy from the top down, seeing the spiral arms curl around. Our course is marked by white dots, starting at the low side of the picture and making an awkward circle starting going left, going clockwise with a little bit of doubling back along the way.
Do I get space miles for all that ?

There we go ! Big map. The route I followed is available at the Elite Dangerous Star Maps site under the name of The Everlasting Expedition (linky). It’s active for just over another year if you want to try it out. It requires a well supplied advanced ship to complete all of the waypoints, plus a tool like ED Discovery (the source for the map above) to plot a course to the outlying spots. The doubling back spots at Galactic East and Galactic South are where I needed to consult with the waypoint plotting tool to bridge the gap between the arms.

Still, Searching for Dragons did a grand job out there. Ship’s retired now and I’m wondering what I’ll do next, after the Odyssey expansion hits. Could well be a spell of combat. Ship’s seen some sights though …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see our ship in centre screen, she's flat and pointing to the left. Dominating the background is a large gas giant planet, coloured in neon green and purple. There are rings behind to the right.
Dreamer Blush

That was Dreamer Blush, one of the ultra rare Mint Choc planets that will hopefully survive the graphical changes coming with the expansion.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the starboard side of our ship in shadow. The galactic ribbon goes up and right. Behind the ship there is Barnard's Loop, a huge red gaseous part circle with a red cloud in the centre.
Going Loopy

That’s Barnard’s Loop, which is relatively close to where we are and it’s one of the more recognisable landmarks to show when you’re getting close to home again.

There are a heap more pictures as well. I’ll have to do a semi random pulling out of the best ones.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed and we're looking down at the starboard side. The buggy is a tiny spot near the front of the ship. We're on a pale blue mountain overlooking a very craggy reddish plain with an assortment of very tall blueish mountains jutting out that I could see from space on the way in.
Mountain ahoy !

This is the Aidoh’s Platform planet and another curious example of the extremes that the procedural generation system sometimes comes up with. In this case, a small planet with very prominent mountains and chasms.

Pretty place !

It has been a pretty epic trip lasting :

Website picture capture. We see a grid going from left to right, labelled underneath as November to May. A scale is under that starting at 0 on the left with white and 200 on right with a red. Above is an assortment of coloured dots.
Busy

That’s another capture from ED Star Maps, showing how active I was. The redder the dot, the more jumps done in the day. Some days were light, some saw me travel much longer distances. The early gap in November coincides somewhat spookily (nah) with when Mars Horizon came out. The gap in Jan/Feb saw really cold weather that was messing with my muscles, so I wasn’t playing game much then.

There are options for what happens next … and it’ll probably depend on what inspiration hits at the weekend. Let’s see :

Thunderdwagon 2, callsign IR1965 – a Beluga class passenger ship that will see service rescuing people from damaged starbases.

Admiral Luperza, callsign 9001<3 – a Federal Corvette that will do shooting type things.

Tiamat’s Chariot, callsign DL.SDL – an Imperial Cutter for idling around doing missions. I think a return to some ancient grounds at Azrael and Apathaam would be good.

Elysian Payday, BNKR08 – a ship for getting lots of credits from mining.

And perhaps a landing ship for the expansion. We shall see.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed on a cream (dunno!) coloured moon. We see her from the port side, pointing left. The buggy is out front again. The galactic ribbon is going up and a little right from the right side of picture. A large darker gas giant is visible just over the horizon with the rings visible going up and left.
Camping among the stars

That was another randomly found campsite to conclude a session earlier in the week.

It’s probably only a matter of time before I pick a ship and head out there again but I think that time’s going to be different. It’ll involve one of the big fleet carriers and I’ll have a couple of ships along to support. The carrier will need a mining ship to keep it fuelled, plus I’ll do more active surveying.

Later.

Different things for now !

This one’s been very internet spaceship heavy, I need to find more things to natter about ! That’s another thing coming … I haven’t been reading much lately, partly because these glasses have pretty much hit their end. New ones arrive on Friday !

Looking forward to diving into the books again.

Stay safe everyone, be well.