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Upgrades and adventures …

September 25, 2021

10:51 am

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deus ex, gaming, internet spaceship, picture

Hello everyone,

I thought I’d been back to posting more ! Oh well. Been a bit distracted by seeing what the new graphics card can do and going back to Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Prague has got prettier …

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're looking down a city street with high sided buildings on either side. The buildings have railed balconies looking out over adverts on the lower walls. A Police van is on the left with a few other vehicles parked. In the distance is a pedestrian bridge with a person looking out from the centre. They are framed in the centre of a sharply triangular roof of the distant train station. — Prague by day

I’ve never been to Prague so I don’t know how real the map of the city we have in game is or how it compares to the real thing but … the architecture they show off in the game is super pretty. The police get a bit of a drubbing in comparison but they’re a hostage to the increasing rhetoric the game has about prejudice against augmented people.

I’ve taken the opportunity with the new graphics card to turn the pretty options up to maximum (with two exceptions …) So with the not long ago rained level of water on the tarmac, there are all sorts of amazing reflection and even better lighting.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're inside a building. 3 people are dancing in the background, with a DJ dancing away behind a mixer desk festooned with switches and sliders. A 5th person is leaning on the mixer desk. The walls in the background are covered in graffiti and we see the blue lines of light projected on the wall behind and the mixer desk. — 5 Ravers raving ?

This is one of the side quests where you’re investigating a drug that kills augmented people. Side quests in these games usually involve getting loot and experience which makes your character more powerful in the long run. I’m playing a permadeath run where if my character dies, it tags the save game file so that it can’t be opened again. I’ll get all but 1 remaining achievement for the main game in this run, the bank robbery mission lets you save your boss later but you can’t do that and the mission for the achievement I’m missing.

It’s always good being back in these games. Instead of being all guns blazing, you can tackle the game in super stealth mode, slipping through unnoticed and leaving no trace. (Which gets you bonus experience as well). It’s possible to go all the way through the game without firing a shot, although it’s much easier to just knock people out so they don’t raise the alarm while you’re grabbing their stuff.

There are issues though … I had a false start where the game was crashing quickly when I had all of the graphics turned up to maximum. Here goes – search engine optimisation bit :

If Deus Ex Mankind Divided is crashing your graphics card driver, turn off the MSAA and VSync. The MSAA is an Anti-aliasing technique that smooths out any jagged lines and VSync stops the image tearing as you move around. Since turning those off, I’ve only had one crash to desktop during this playthrough, which I’ll put down to the game being slightly less robust than the first Adam Jensen game.

In terms of what’ll come next after Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I have a couple of options.

It’s highly likely to be Mass Effect Andromeda, as I like Sara Ryder as a character and it’ll let me push those graphics options up to maximum as well. This one can be a really pretty game although there is literally too much you need to do in a single playthrough.

The Outer Worlds is another one that has more to give than I’ve seen before … I bounced off this game though without finishing it. Got bored, didn’t like the characters except for Parvati.

Control is a more recent one that has a lot of new graphics techniques that have come to the new cards. But … I look at it and then back to Deus Ex MD and the older game is just a far pretty game compared to Control’s drab environments and repeated enemies. Yep, Control has some incredibly daft full motion video flavour stuff around its story but … while I own it courtesy of Humblebundle (didn’t buy it, just did the old sub), I have no interest in playing it.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down on the front of our ship from slightly above, as she has her stern to a black hole. We see the black hole as a globe of clustered stars, with a clear opening in the centre, like an eye. A cloud is lensed around that spherical not-object in the centre. — Engines to maximum

This was me checking out the Tartarus black hole and having the happy sight that black holes, were indeed not broken in the latest expansion to the game. I’d visited another one and didn’t have all the lovely lensing that you see in the picture there, where the extreme gravity bends the light in wonderful and weird ways. You don’t get the full splendour of it from the static shot, when you’re moving around the black holes you get the stars in the background dancing around.

I’m still on and off in Elite. It’s a sad case where the game is perfectly playable now, although frame rates are really bad when you get close to the surface. The performance is far better since my new card arrived but it’s the 5th best nVidia card you can buy right now. It should be good. However I know that the performance will drop off again when I get back to the populated areas … as that’s what people have been reporting.

It’s gone to a “we’re not angry, we’re just incredibly disappointed”. The latest attempt at a fix came out on Thursday and it apparently brought a bunch of fixes with the logic that runs missions and other things in the game but … it’s done nothing to fix the graphical bugs. Those are the ones that cause the really bad frame rates that make it dangerous to fly low level, the ones that cause massive pop in of terrain* and the one that really frustrates me, the massive change in lighting as you near the surface of planets which turns Pretty And Interesting Screenshot into either bleached out white or everything’s lost in the dark.

*Terrain popup is where you’re flying towards a mountain range or a cliff and what you see of the ground keeps rising in front of you. It’s where you thought you were heading just above the crest of a cliff but instead, more ground pops up and you’re heading for the cliff.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're landed on a dark moon, we're just lit up by a dim sun off to right of shot. Our pilot is centre bottom looking at the camera in a white flightsuit. The purple bodied buggy is just behind and our pink spaceship is landed in the distance behind them. Over to the left, a dark grey planetoid is on the horizon. Behind all that at centre top is one of the neon green gas giants, we can just see the planet's rings. — Camping at Abeonas Blessing

It’s still a pretty game though and the Kamd site is giving me some tasty waypoints to check out, although not all of those are actually translating to the features still being available to look at in the game. I’m also using my own rules to find nice places to stop at. I’ll be looking for ringed gas giants with moons orbiting them that you can land on. Planets you can land on with thin atmospheres are a particular favourite for stopping at. But it’s mostly a question of whether I can set up a pretty screenshot with something interesting to look at.

Oh and they’re going on to Instagram as well now. The world needs more pretty pictures to look at.

I am suffering a little though … My dodgy right arm has been complaining again both from the shoulder end and the wrist is giving me the messages as well on a “be careful” level rather than the actual real pain level. It’s one of those cases where the pain signals I get from it are ignorable without painkiller support but it’s a warning that if I keep going with the piloting and the spy games, I’ll have trouble.

You know what that means …. less game more book !

I think that’s enough for today.

PC upgrades are working nicely – temperatures are well under control, the graphics are pretty and I’ve been enjoying visiting an old friend again.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're standing in front of a shop area. The lighting is subdued but there are a few brighter point light sources dotted around, plus a sigh above the entrance that spells out "Entity" with an arrow in those dot lights again. A masked bodyguard stands outside the entrance. — Shop !

Yep. Visited Entity again. She isn’t in the game very much, with her appearance being limited to a shop in a location you only travel through once. I adore the character though. She doesn’t have much to say but she’s fun and very realistic in what her situation is. She’s in the ghetto because she couldn’t do her old job any more and she knows that it could either be running the shop or being in a brothel. It gives her a flirty attitude which also reflects the “need money by any means in order to live” situation.

I like the character, she’s a fun addition.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Thinking PC market again …

by Sleepypete

September 16, 2021

9:50 pm

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internet spaceship

Every so often, the thought hits me that I need to be checking out the PC market again to see what’s available and how much it would be. I don’t think I’ve done that for a little while, so here goes !

Picture. A brown and white cat is sitting on a computer. The caption is "I had to rebutt your computer." — Indeed

I’ve just done some overdue upgrades to Meltdown, my desktop, and they’ve turned out pretty good. Tuesday saw a rather traumatic upgrading of the cpu cooler from the cheap stock one to a top end air cooler. More on that in a bit although I did write something on the results the other day. I also upgraded the data hard drive from 1.5TB to 3TB and did the copy overnight, so I now have 1.2TB available on that drive up from 150GB.

Yesterday saw a new graphics card arrive, a 3060Ti. Graphics cards are still very pricey but I spotted a good enough deal when I was finishing up my lunch break on Tuesday. So that went in yesterday and there was a little shakedown run in Elite happening.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the rear right of our pink spaceship as we're parked on the edge of an impact crater on a dusty orange moon. The little buggy is behind and to the right. — Before the upgrade

That’s before changes happened …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down on our pink spaceship at the rear right quarter again. The picture is very similar to the last, except a little around to anti-clockwise. There is no buggy this time. — Any difference ?

One thing you always end up doing when doing upgrades is think : Was it worth it ? Did it improve pictures ? I’m not so sure in Elite to be honest. I’ve turned the detail up much higher so the shadows and textures should be much sharper and it’s creating the image at 1.5x what my display can do which has been making the lines look better. The landing I did yesterday was much smoother than it has been before but the real test there will be when I get back to a planetary base … that’s not going to happen for months on my current course :-D.

So. PC building ? The first thing I always say is that if you’re confident enough to pick your own bits and put them together, always do that. Pre-built PCs always tend to come with compromises that bite later. Like shaving £20-£30 off the price by putting in a substandard power supply. If you’re running a system like Meltdown is now, anything less than a 600W power supply (mine is 750W) will start getting strained. If it’s not a brand named supply with protections built in, it WILL damage components when it WILL stop working. My previous desktop, Pumpkin, had a power supply fail (it was in service for 8 years, so that’s ok) but it happily didn’t break anything.

It’s worth sacrificing something like the cpu down a step or two in order to get the foundations right. Yes. I said that :-D. And I meant it too. Graphics is a bit more of a thing there though. Previously, when cards were £200, I’d get that certain price point. Lower would mean losing too much performance, higher was too expensive. That’s out of the window these days and you’re lucky to find graphics cards, let alone having them at an acceptable price.

The second thing I’ll be saying about PC building at the moment is – Don’t. The supply situation has been daft for almost a year now. It’s gone to the point where you have to ignore that advice about pre-builds because the vendor builders have better access to the parts.

So … foundations. I learned something with Meltdown … don’t buy a Bitfenix case (build quality). Case first as that’s what everything goes into. Bigger is better because that means more access and you’ll probably hide it somewhere out of the way. Budget £50 for a case but … you go for your preference because it’s something where looks count, just make sure it’s got room for what you want. Drive bays are irrelevant now as it’s ok to go to dvd or bluray drives that you plug in. You’ll want front panel access for USB sockets though so you can plug in the drives.

Processor and board drive a lot of the build. I’ve been impressed with my AMD Ryzen 5 3600. It’s a good processor. I was about to say that AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600G was a good buy here but it’s out of stock (oh well 😀 ). It’s a bit expensive at £240 but it does come with graphics hardware inside which is important in these days of scarce graphics cards.

This goes in a motherboard and the cheapest suitable X570 (the processor expects certain chipsets of which X570 is one) board is an Asrock at £160. This is an example of being sure what you’re getting, there are a couple of cheaper MSI boards but they don’t have a graphics output. Oops.

Memory goes in pairs and the thing to look for is the telltale “DDR4-3600 support”. The DDR stands for Double Data Rate and the code says how fast it can push the data out. Faster is better … There’s a certain break point though. When I built Meltdown, the advice was that 3200 was good enough, lower was bad. I went for a future proofed 32GB on Meltdown. 32GB of DDR4-3200 is £140 from Crucial (cheaper available but I recognise and trust Crucial) or £180 for 32GB of DDR-3600 from Kingston, as per what’s in Meltdown. One trick here is that you need to buy the memory in pairs as the systems are designed to take in data from both sticks of memory at the same time.

We need a cooler to go on top and I always go for Big Coolers. The idea is that they give better performance and because they’re massive, the fans are barely turning so they’re very quiet. I can barely hear Meltdown’s coolers at the moment. Crikey, looks like they’ve gone up … I have a Coolermaster MA610P and the nearest looking equivalent I can see on Da Vendor Site is the MA620M at £90. I didn’t pay that much 2 years ago. Budget £50 for a cooler and always remember that bigger is way better because a bigger fan pushes way more cooling air with less noise.

Water cooling ? Don’t do it. It has advantages but it also has huge potential of mixing Water and Electronics, which never ends well. You also need fans to get rid of the heat anyway, I just don’t see the benefit of it in the domestic environment.

We need a power supply to drive all that and I’ve been happy with the Corsair supplies I’ve been using for many years. You don’t need modular (you plug in the power cords separately) so you can save cash there. A 750W supply from Corsair starts at £65. Shaving £20 off that for the no-name brands is a false economy.

Graphics is the really frustrating thing at the moment … Between covid hitting manufacturing and cryptominers and scalpers gobbling up the supply, it’s been really tough to acquire a new graphics card. My 3060Ti was an opportunity buy at £470 and the cheapest one at Overclockers is currently £650 or £670 for the one in stock where I bought mine, which was Scan. Which card ? Much of a muchness at the moment but I wouldn’t go beyond the 3060 or 3060Ti cards, or the equivalent from AMD. However, going for a processor with graphics built in means it isn’t crucial that you have a graphics card.

Rounding out the thing is the things you put the data on …

You want two hard discs to run a Windows PC. You need a Solid State Device drive for Windows and hard disc heavy applications. They’re lightning fast at finding the data on the disc because there are no mechanical moving parts involved. I’ve been using Crucial’s SSDs for years and I think the one to go for here would be the 1TB NVME P2 drive at £90. The “NVME” part is important because it means faster access. Numpty here didn’t know that when I built Meltdown, so I have a slower one. A keyword here is “M2”, as these fit into a slot on the motherboard and can go faster. There’s a 500GB drive for £60, that’s the size of the one in Meltdown.

But … speed costs money which is why you need a data drive as well, especially if you’re gaming. When I acquire Horizon Zero Dawn, that’ll take up 100GB of space … Some games would go on the SSD though if they’re cursed with slow loading times (Battletech had to go on my SSD) but most of the time, you’re ok with a big normal hard drive. These are the classic spinning platters things with a reader arm that finds the data. It takes time for the arm to move around, which is why these drives are sloooow. Looks like my “new” drive is still on the market. It’s the Toshiba HDWD130 3TB drive available for £60 now. The keyword here is “7200rpm” as these pull the data off faster than the normal 5400rpm drives can.

And that’s the lot ! You need a bit more to build the PC. Windows 10 costs £100 at the moment for the OEM box. You will need a keyboard and mouse as well, these are very much personal preference. Oh and a monitor so you can see the shiny pictures. The keyword to look for in monitors is “IPS” or In-Plane Switching and it gives you far better picture quality and viewing angles. If you’re off the straight viewing angles on other screens, the filtering starts to have a massive effect. IPS is mostly immune to that.

Oh, speakers as well. Monitors tend to have speakers but they’re really, really bad. Get some powered speakers for your ears.

All the bits pretty much go together as It Can Only Fit In This Hole type things but it pays to read the Stuff through before putting everything together. Things like memory being best in some of the slots and working less well in others. And it’s definitely a Very Good Idea to test fit everything first.

Last bit of advice – electronics are less susceptible now to shocks but it’s very wise to earth everything before opening bags. What I’ll do is install the power supply in the case first, plug it in and very definitely leave it turned off … at the wall. Our UK 3 pin sockets give an earth connection through and with the power supply earthed, it earths the case. You then open the bags when they’re in contact with the case and make sure you have something fleshy (arms will do) in contact with the case as well. Everything’s earthed, no sparks should happen.

Woolly jumpers are not advised :-D.

I think that’s it for me for today. PC building isn’t scary but it definitely pays to research with sites like Tomshardware to see what the optimal bits are going to be. Bear in mind whether they’re trying to sell you something too.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our spaceship is parked on a desolate planet. The sun can be seen a little above the horizon to the left of shot. A thin band of a greenish atmosphere can be seen. The buggy is to the right of shot and our pilot is standing on a little rise to the left. — Sunset campsite

Good night everyone;

Picture. Meme. On the left is a computer monitor with indistinct white text on the classic blue screen of death. The back of a chair is to the right with two black cats looking over the edge, you can just see their eyes. They look worried. The caption is "Dunno what happnd. We dint touch it" — Oops

Hope nothing breaks. (Although I had Chrome crashing earlier while I was editing this post while a Tashnarr stream was on in another Chrome window). Stay safe, be well !

Trauma but Chill

by Sleepypete

September 14, 2021

9:13 pm

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computer, geeky, internet spaceship, picture

Hello everyone,

I managed to get an opportunity buy in at lunchtime today … There I was, finished with the usual Twit/book scan and there’s a little bit of time left before switching the work brain back on again. And one of the vendors has a 3060Ti card for £470. They didn’t last long, disappearing within about 10 minutes … but I’ve got one coming tomorrow. £470 is more than double what I thought was an acceptable price for a graphics card 2 years ago but things have changed there. I’m hoping for a good few years out of this one.

Picture. A cute green pocket dragon is standing on a red button labelled "PANIC". His forepaws are on the button, his back paws are behind and in the air. His mouth is open in alarm. — Don’t panic !

The picture is from someone else but the Pocket Dragons copyright has always belonged to Real Musgrave and co so that’s who I always credit when I nab a Pocket Dragon picture.

Anyway … upgrades have happened today in preparation for the graphics card arriving. I’ve had a couple of components for a good long while but have held off on fitting them for a few reasons. I’d always been able to get by on hard disc space with the 1.5TB drive that was in there before. It’s split 1TB for a data drive that has my games and more on it and 500GB for what got used for video creation. The new drive that’s gone in is a 3TB drive, so I’ll be able to fit in more than double the space for the games drive.

This is kinda important when being able to go for the newer, flashier games because they take up a huge amount more space … I’ve had to manage how much they take up by uninstalling a few as I go for different games. One I’ve had my eye on for a while is Horizon Zero Dawn, a game set in a future with a mix of bows and arrows and machine animals. It’s a fantastic game … and Meltdown hasn’t had the graphical power to handle it until the 3060Ti comes. But it also takes up 100GB on the hard disc which is a lot.

Meltdown is the name of the PC by the way, after it was being rather too hot when it was built on what felt like the hottest day of 2019. And it was getting pretty toasty … This was the situation in February this year when it had been running science sums for a while.

Screenshot. The box is titled "Core Temp" and below is "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core" followed by 3599MHz (100x36.0). There are 6 full bars underneath of varying colour from yellow to violet. A temperature of 88 degrees C is displayed. — Toasty

That was getting a bit too warm and I was getting concerned enough to stop the machine running the Asteroids at Home software which for some reason I haven’t figured out, makes the processor 10 degrees C hotter than the other science sums. 88 degrees C is getting close to the thermal limits and it’s one reason why I stop the machine doing sums over the summer. I don’t need that kind of heat in the room.

Anyway, that’s with the stock cooler that comes with the processor. How about an upgrade ?

Screenshot as before. The box is titled "Core Temp" and below is "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core" followed by 3599MHz (100x36.0). There are 6 empty bars underneath. A temperature of 33 degrees C is displayed. — What name now for Meltdown ?

The new cooler that’s gone in is a Coolermaster MA610P. It’s a hefty lump, almost too big for my case and it comes with a pair of fans blowing air through it. 33 degrees C for an idle temperature is really good. It’s around 20-25 degrees cooler than the stock cooler was on idle. I haven’t worked the system hard much yet. Not feeling like gaming this evening so I’m watching FuzzyFreaks play Deathloop (Twitch Link stream’s finishing now though). Back to reading after I publish this post. I did do a quick test though :

I have to say here that the AMD processor isn’t as clever with showing temperatures as the Intel processors. I’m currently on a chip that has 2 compute units, each with 3 cores within that can run 2 threads each. Whereas the Intel processors show you the temperature on each core, the AMD processor only shows one temperature for the whole chip. It’s not a big difference but the Intel way would tell you if one part of the chip was running hotter than the rest, which would tell you perhaps if the thermal paste was missing. (Thermal paste connects the chip to the cooler)

That 52 degrees C temperature is from Climateprediction’s set of sums. They have a nice long deadline on their sums, the rest of the sums people only give a week or two to get results back, so when you download the work you’re kind of obliged to send it back. That temperature will probably go up to 60 ish with Asteroids at Home. But that’s a test for another day.

One thing the graphics card change will do is let me turn the graphics options up again … Shinier pictures !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our diamond shaped ship is silhouetted, with a bright white neutron star hidden behind it. We see the streamers from the star going up and left and down and right. In the background, a sea of stars with a mottled greenish with orange clouding. — Ride the light

There we go. Searching for Pixels, visiting a nebula with a neutron star at the centre. Another stop on the way to the Core regions where the stars like to come out to play.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. It's night time on a planet. The flat outline of our pink spaceship can be seen on a landing pad to the lower left. Spires can be seen above and behind to the left. Top right, we see a reddish planet with lovely brown rings around it.. — Stopping at Sacaqawae

Nice random assignment of landing pad there with the 07. That’s become text code for a salute around the internet. Picture the o as someone’s head the the 7 being an arm bent in salute. People like the symbology so if I get given pad o7, I’ll usually take a screenshot opportunity. This is one of the planetary bases between our bit of space and the Colonia region, which is 21,000 light years away and a bit West of the galactic core.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship can be dimly seen, with her lights illuminating small parts of a pink hull. Behind and to the left is a circle of a planet with part of a ring system visible. The planet is an odd black in the centre with a light blue circle near the edge tending to white at the outside. — No idea what’s happening there!

As the caption says, I have no idea what’s going on here :-). I think it might well be another of the lighting bugs that are still in the game. One of those times where you see something odd so you stop and take a picture.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink diamond shaped ship is on a rough landing pad at the bottom centre of the picture. The terrain is a light grey/orange. Hills rise in the distance behind the base. In the distance, before the hills, are a set of greenhouse type complexes. We're in the day time and the shadow is on our side of the ship. — Is there tea over there ?

This is where I stopped in this particular session. It wasn’t a main base but one of the additional settlements that have popped up with the Odyssey expansion. It’s good to see a bit more variation coming in. I think this was a Biological site with the buildings in the distance there being greenhouses. Perhaps they were growing tea for the local bases. Or coffee. Coffee is life.

I think that’s it for me for tonight, struggling to put the new cooler in, taking it out to connect the fans, putting it back in again has wiped me out. The thing gave me a scare because I dropped it but all seems good still. It’ll be good to be able to turn the graphics options up with the internet spaceships. I’ve been on a hybrid of medium and high settings, dialing it back from the Ultra that it was on before Odyssey. There will still be frame rate issues in places but the new card has around 4 times the parallel processing capacity of the last one and over double the memory. That means it can handle more complex environments and the parallel processing all goes towards creating the images.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Taps screen – is this on ?

by Sleepypete

September 8, 2021

11:01 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since the last post ! I’ve had a couple of weeks away with work up in Scotland. Somewhere pretty :

Photograph. We're looking out to sea, there is a pebbly beach in front of us. The sun is high in the sky and reflecting off calm waters. A small triangle of a sailboat is near the horizon. There are a couple of occasional clouds visible. — No one prepared me for this

The usual rule applies with work related stuff, I don’t say what I work on here or what it’s about. Which also means being careful where the camera is allowed to point cos when it’s on the internet, there’s no control over it whatsoever. I’ve got a couple of pictures with features that would localise where I was to very little margin of error and from there, you just align it with the dates and you get what I was working on and who I work for.

Always have to be careful with that kind of thing because it can attract attention from people you don’t want attention from.

Suffice to say though, great bunch of people up there for the fortnight. Enjoyed it, got stuff done, learned new things. And it was incredibly sunny too ! We were really lucky to have such lovely benign conditions for our testing.

Oh ! I also injured my knee right at the start, twisting it as I was getting into my seat on the plane up. And then I did 80k steps on it over the fortnight. That’s down to an emergency buy of a knee support and being ultra careful not to aggravate it. I had visions of the knee snapping out sideways if I put too much power through it or if I landed on the leg the wrong way.

Almost better now though. It was good to be out and about though.

I did nearly post while I was out there, even going as far as copying over some Elite screenshots to the laptop. It was definitely a case of throwing everything into the daytime stuff though, not leaving much energy over for the evenings.

(Looks at last post) Erm, yep. Been travelling since that last post there …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. On the left, is a pin sized bright white star, throwing off curly streamers above and below. Our diamond shaped ship is on the right, hull part lit and part in shadow. — Basking in starlight

It’s always curious seeing new things too. Like comparing what I have in the internet spaceship to what we have in reality. I have a pretty decent control thingy now in the X52 Pro. Could be better, could be worse. (It’s a bit too sensitive around the middle due to game settings I can’t influence). It’s things like I have full 6 axis control in the spaceship. That’s pitch, roll and yaw that rotate you around the 3 axes. And a throttle for forward and back plus an up, down, left and right thing for translating around the 3 axes. So 6 axis – 3 see you turning in place, 3 see you moving around. The spaceship doesn’t interact with its environment as atmospherics are minimal in the game, although you do have to fight gravity.

Think of a car though and you don’t go up or down and you’re constrained by where the wheels want to go. An aircraft has to keep moving forward to make lift or it falls out of the sky. Unless it’s a special one like the Harrier or F35 Lightning II that can do Vertical Landing. (Or helicopters). Sea side stuff saw me around boats, which have their own special way of interacting with the environment to make them move around.

I still want to do that thing where I move away from the house and on to a boat. Lots of work to do on the house before I can even contemplate that though.

That’s one thing about the away trip, it forced me out of what feels like it’s become a comfort zone into a far more active mode. And I enjoyed that, partly due to a sense that we were getting stuff done. I’ve gone right back into that comfort zone since coming back though and need to break out of it again. Cos, you know, running low on snacks.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink spaceship is landed on a very bleached white planet. Our purple buggy is parked in front, with my pilot standing in front of both. Everything is pointing to the right. In the background, we can see half a neon green banded with brown planet. It's just peeping above the horizon. — Mint Choc ahoy !

The voyage of the Searching For Pixels continues, looking for the special sights around the galaxy to see if there’s been much change since the Odyssey expansion. That’s one of the ultra rare glowing green gas giants, with this one being the Viridian Dreams system. One sad thing about this picture is that as I was descending from orbit, the planet was a gorgeous sapphire blue. That would have made for an amazing contrast. Sadly though, when I got much closer to the ground, the Odyssey graphics took over and bleached out the planet. Oh well. It does still make a nice piccy though doesn’t it ?

I got to another one of these as well later, which I’ll pop into a future post. It’s actually where I am at the moment and there’s a few more screenies to come first.

Oh, one casualty of the fortnight is one of the hard discs in Meltdown. It’s the ancient 250GB conventional drive that’s been grimly hanging on for the last couple of years. I turned Meltdown back on when I came back on the middle Friday to have a surprise of “it’s been a while, no Windows yet?” and it’s checking the drive for errors. I guess it probably couldn’t handle that time of not spinning and when the time came to reactivate, it couldn’t spin up. It’s no real loss, I’d pulled the data off a while ago because I knew the drive was failing. I do need to transplant in a new 3GB drive though.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see our spaceship from underneath. We're looking at the gently curving horizon of a pinkish planet, with a thin atmosphere at that horizon. The sun is at the top centre. — Pixels on approach

Looks pretty, this was checking out a planet in the Conflux area. It’s a few thousand light years out and there are some abandoned settlements here.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is standing at the lower right, outside an airlock beyond which are corridors of a planetary base with a couple of dome like constructions behind. Our buggy is to the left by a gate and the spaceship is further off and behind. The planet surface varies between green and rusty red. — Anyone home ?

Now that we can walk around, I had to check. Nobody home this time and the doors were locked. I wonder if they left any tea or biscuits ?

I need to go shopping real soon. I’m running low on biscuits !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink spaceship is lower centre, pointing left. To the left side, there is a red orange nebula that looks a bit like spread wings. Under or behind our ship are a set of very fine black rings with the occasional white ring stripe. In the distance to the right is a dark blue planet with tight white rings. — They put a ring on this one I think they liked it

I think that’s it for screenshots for tonight. I need to post more and catch up !

Good couple of weeks away. There’s a few completely unconnected things that were bubbling up in the mind too about things that have been happening in the world. Like seeing the racism feature around the cricket. There’s an increasing problem in the English game with racism. Yorkshire are getting the headlines at the moment but it’s wider than that. People of Colour aren’t getting the opportunities at the higher levels of the game that they used to. We need them in the game. Personally, I love cricket and want more people to enjoy the game, which means getting the opportunities to play it at the level they’ll enjoy and succeed at.

It’s fantastic to see Haseeb Hameed back in the England side and it’s always great to see Moeen Ali in the team. For Hameed, it’s part because he’s come through a trial in his game worse than pretty much anyone who plays the game. It’s great to see him beat that. It was even better to see his joy at being back around the England team. Like how Monty Panesar would celebrate when he got a wicket, it was pure absolute joy.

It’s great to see people like that enjoying the game. (I want to see Jofra Archer back in too, he’d be playing if not for his poorly elbow). But it’s becoming rarer now and a lot of that must be down to something filtering the players who make it to the higher levels. We had it in Lincolnshire where I played my earlier cricket. No one scouted our team. Ever, even when there was this young tearaway guy (me!) taking more wickets than anyone else in the team in just half a season, getting my name in the paper every week and contributing to a side that was winning most of the games and climbing up to second in our league. No scouting.

That’s not an axe being ground away by the way, I got a back injury that season too which restricted my bowling for the next year or so and then the shoulder injury came in a couple of years after that. The real axe to grind would be the university team. Performance in the bar was far more important there than performance in the nets.

I don’t want to be grinding axes though.

Good couple of weeks away. Great people. Good to be back and letting the leg heal up. Need to get out and about again and not just in the internet spaceship !

Photograph. We can see part of the brim of a straw type hat. Sitting on the hat is a blue fridge magnet, with "SCOTLA" visible, with the full word being Scotland. Above that, is a green serpent creature with coils coming in and out of the water behind a face with a cap. The creature is wearing a red and yellow scarf. — NESSY !

Yep. Couldn’t resist bringing this home with me.

Insert Post Title Here

by Sleepypete

August 19, 2021

8:36 pm

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internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

Gosh, a whole week’s gone by since the last post. Where did that go ? Gotta admit, I’ve been focusing on work stuff this week and then occasionally having some energy left over in the evenings that’s been part going on the games, part trying to stay relatively active despite having trouble readjusting to work day hours !

(I tend to slip the hours when I’m on leave, so bed at 2am becomes rather normal)

Oh ! Thumbnail time.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our metallic purple Cutter spaceship is on a landing pad in the foreground, pointing away from camera to the right. In the distance are two tower spires of a planetary base plus a scattering of other landing pads on the surface of a grey coloured moon. — Tiamat awaits

Yeah. Could be an internet spaceship heavy post today. Things are happening with work but you know I don’t tend to talk about that too much here for a collection of reasons. Apart from that, been listening to the music, playing the games and having that crazy thought of going round the galaxy again.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're on a sunlit grey moon again, with a scattering of rocks on the surface. In the foreground, we're looking down on the upper surface of a somewhat diamond shaped dark pink spaceship. The horizon is capped by an orange fading to green atmosphere. — Pixels lives

This was where I went on the shakedown flight in the new ship, Searching for Pixels. The callsign is FUZZ3H after streamer lady Fuzzyfreaks, which is also where the idea for that particular paint job came from. This one is a Krait Phantom, outfitted for very long exploration runs. It’s almost to the level of Searching for Dragons, which had a 73 light year jump range (occasionally 76), this one can do 70.4 light years in a jump. She’s much more nimble too and there is a lot more visibility from the pilot’s seat.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink (with white chequer patterning) ship is on a landing pad pointing away from camera to the right. Behind and to the left is a grey ship coming in to land. In front of us are the buildings of a planetary base with a couple of tower buildings. — Busy port

I think I was going places to finish off the fitting for the ship. (Needed some repair machines to keep the ship happy).

Anyway, this trip is planned to be at least another 200,000 light years and I’ll be looking for pretty places too. Some of them will see me revisiting places I’ve been before. What I’m curious about is seeing what the differences are going to be between what we had before and the new Odyssey graphics (and all of its bugs that are still in the game).

In a very real sense, I’m looking for pixels with this mission and how they have changed in the game since my last exploration trip. (One of those times when a ship name hits you on the nose and sticks as perfect)

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink ship is landed on a sun bleached white airless (no atmosphere at the horizon) moon. She is pointing to the right towards a blocky black ship that's part embedded in to the surface. In the background to the left is a dark blue planet, just on the horizon. The dark blue planet has rings going up and right. — Pixels investigates an unfortunate explorer

The crashed ship there is the Stranded Snake, an Anaconda ship of the same class as the Searching For Dragons that I went around the galaxy in. This is one of the special seeded mystery sites, where we have something custom generated instead of the usually procedurally randomly generated places. In this case, it’s a crashed ship with a rudimentary settlement around it. You can wander around and check out what they’ve added in. See if you can determine what happened.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same sun bleached airless white planet. Our character is standing on the black wrecked ship, looking into the raised section of the Bridge control area. Our purple buggy is pointing in with the lights on. In the distance, the dark blue ringed planet. — No signs of life on the Bridge

One major difference is going to be the ability to get into much tighter places than before, due to having that spacesuit available. I’ll be looking forward to checking that out as I explore and seeing what I can find. So that’s one major plus point to the new expansion. A negative is the performance impact of the changes. It’s not as bad as when you’re around civilised bases but there’s still poor frame rates when coming in to land. But I was ok on a hefty 1.9g landing today.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same planet as before but it's full night so we can't see much in the dark. Our ship's lights illuminate a portion of the aft hull of the crashed ship plus a small radio tower and habitation module. — Bit different in the dark

That’s how I logged in today for what ended up being a short session. Bit different in the dark ! I’ve visited the Stranded Snake before and this is how it was back then. One of the bugs in the game at the moment is in the lighting, so when it’s dark … it’s really dark. (Short session partly because my arm didn’t like a couple of long sessions last weekend, plus Fuzzy and Tashnarr are streaming)

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is pointing towards the bottom left, heading away from a small and very bright blue white star on the right of screen. We can see the rear engine section lit up, the rest is in shadow. — Mission to Antares

The star there is Antares B, a companion to a red super giant star. There’s a screenshot on EDSM showing the two Antares stars together, with them appearing to be the same size on screen despite one being far bigger. (Big star far away, small star close). One of the issues in game is that while I can view the close star :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous, portrait format. Our pink ship is landed on a faded orange (more like cream) planet. There are a few rocky surface features and our rover is parked on one to the left. Above the horizon, we can see planetary rings which reflect the light of the small blue star. — Prepare the camp site !

The super giant star will be around somewhere too … but the lighting bugs mean that it appears black. Hopefully that’s fixed sometime soon although the frequency of patching has slowed drastically (might not be a bad thing, a couple were rushed out too fast). Multi star skies are fun to find. (Pitch Black was a great movie, must watch that again some time).

I’ve got a few interesting spots picked out for visiting as well and the Kamd site (linky) gives ideas for many more. But I’ll hopefully find a few more along the way. For today though …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous, portrait format. We're looking down on a pink diamond shaped ship, looking at the front. Our purple buggy is over to the right, with tyre tracks tracing a path behind. We're landing on a fairly flat area, behind in the distance it's far more rough terrain. Above the surface, we see the rings of this planet. Two more ringed planets are visible. An orange one near the horizon and a dark one near the top of the picture. — Bit toasty

I had a little look around before looking to set up the next hop but enacted the Stay At Home protocol. It’s a bit toasty there ! Think it was 1200 C on the surface and the spacesuit was complaining. It’s ok inside the ship though.

That’s enough from me for now. Bit of an internet spaceships again ! Not done that much outside of that. I should have more of a look at Alien Isolation.

I’ve been re-reading The Martian. If you enjoyed the film, I would thoroughly recommend reading the book too even if you’re just an occasional reader. It has a good light hearted style and has great explanations for what’s going on, diving down into the detail but presenting it in an understandable way. Oh and there’s a few sections that were removed for time from the movie which make a lot more sense in the book.

Reading is good :-).

Nite all, stay safe, be well.

Quiet Staycation Times

by Sleepypete

August 11, 2021

2:50 pm

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Hello everyone,

Picture. A cute red dragon is curled up, asleep on grass. A little bit of drool is coming out of his maw, which is cradled on his front paws. The letters "Zzzz" are above. — Indeed

(Picture credit – Anthony Peltier at the Artstation link. I can’t see anything about copyright there but do check out the link, there’s more than a few lovely pieces there)

Checking in again. I’m off work this week, which currently means trying to chill out as much as I can and generally regain a bit of energy. I’m not sure how much I managed to recover from the long term effects of the extended period of the skin condition that I had which built up a legacy of minimal sleep plus I think my internal resources got depleted while battling that.

And then there’s the suspicion of long covid effects from I heavily believe that I had it around April last year. The trigger for that is someone coming into work with something that would leave him hospitalised with severe pneumonia for a couple of weeks. This is at the start of the lockdowns, before effective testing was developed so we’ll never really know either way, especially with me being double vaccinated now.

Why do I think I had a light touch of it ? Any … and I do mean any above normal physical exercise or exertion would see me retreating to my chair for a lie down, while I waited for my temperature to come down and my breathing to stabilise. Shopping was ok but a bit of a push. I was having breathing difficulties for a few weeks, adopting the lie on your front strategy that I was hearing about (means the nasties come out of your lungs instead of settling within). I definitely had brain fog, plus a few more symptoms that I won’t go into.

I’m still here though, which is what counts, although I feel rather more limited than I think I should be. That might be a long term effect of living with a few problems though.

Enough about that though, what have I been getting up to ?

Enjoying a lot of Olympics for a start. It’s been a great games again, with a rather different atmosphere to normal. There were some crowds and support there, although it was mostly friends and coaches. It was great to see the competitors giving it their all in all of the sports.

I’m a bit mixed though on some of them though … BBC (providers of our coverage) tend to go heavily on Athletics and Cycling, which reflects where most of their presenters and expert summarisers came from. They’ll neglect the more fun and spectacular events to show stuff that I quite frankly, find really boring. I prefer skill in the sports I watch and … athletics and cycling don’t have that. It’s just about the physical prowess or in cycling, it’s about the technology a bit too much.

Sport shouldn’t depend on technology, outside of events like Formula 1 where they’re supposed to be leading the way in technologies that then filter down to the products that we will use. There shouldn’t be a gateway to entry like having a super high technology bike or outfit to use. Gatekeeping is bad in all of its various forms.

In contrast, cricket has an active development going on with the various gear but it’s kept mostly under control, the clubs will help out considerably with making gear available to new players and the better gear is just a minor help, it’s the skill of the players that makes the difference. Joe Root would still score hundreds with a £50 Kashmir Willow bat, I still wouldn’t be scoring hundreds with Millichamp & Hall’s best £700 English Willow bat. (English Willow hits the ball better but it adds a zero to the price). Anyway, if cricket were to come into a future Olympics, you could see teams competing on a tiny budget with shared gear and they’d have a chance to win, whereas you need megabucks to compete in cycling.

Yep. I have opinions on gatekeeping in general and especially in sport. When I was learning the game, I was using the pads and gloves provided by the club. I inherited a pair of old bowling boots from my dad, which did me until I could invest in spikes. That old pink box protector from a couple of posts ago must be over 50 years old. I started collecting my own gear later but that’s because you really don’t want to be sharing boots or gloves from a hygiene point of view (eww sweaty hands) and having all the gear meant I could practice more efficiently. But you could get involved with a club and have fun without having to invest in the gear.

It’s not just the gear though. Watching the Olympics, I was enjoying watching the competitors perform and how they reacted to their own great performances and also how they congratulated their competitors. Especially people like Sky Brown of the skateboarding, being the first to dash over and hug a competitor who had put in a winning routine. It’s great to see. Sometimes you don’t win, despite doing your best, because someone simply did even better. (And then there’s the cycling, which was marred by crashes and terrible behaviour)

Wait. Staycation stuff ?

I had thoughts of heading out again to Cardiff for a little wander around. I might still do that but I’m not sure how much I’d actually pick up there ? Maybe a better thing would be to find a castle to wander around. Fresh air and all that. I’m thinking aloud there … I’m also pondering heading to the cinema again, last time I did that it was in a different country on another continent.

There has been a lot of gaming going on …

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're in Prague by night. The sky is clouded over and we're looking down a quiet street with a single car parked. To the right, the street continues through an arch. On the left, a building front is lit by a series of spotlights shining through the red leaves of a tree. — All quiet

I did manage to finish Deus Ex Mankind Divided again, unlocking the Foxiest of the Hounds (go through the game without triggering alarms) achievement to go with the rest of them. It’s still a great game, I’m glad I went back to it again early. It initially feels a bit clunky in comparison to its predecessor due to changes in the cover and creeping system but once you get used to that, it works well. This is one I’ll keep coming back to. Hopefully the story of Adam Jensen gets a third instalment. Maybe that’s the super secret Elias Toufexis (voice of Jensen) project is that’s due in 2024 …

One thing I had held off on playing because I didn’t think my graphics card was up to it is Alien Isolation :

Game screenshot. Alien Isolation. We're in a spaceship, looking at a lady sitting at a circular messy mess table. A passageway heads off to the top left. The scene looks very lived in with a pack of cards on the table, discarded cigarette ends in an ashtray and discarded drink containers. — A quiet beginning

You may recognise the ascetic there if you’re a fan of the Alien movies. You start off in the Torrens, a sister ship to the Nostromo in the first Alien movie. I’d held off on playing this one for a while, because I remembered how good the graphics looked in the videos. But I’m surprised at how good this actually is for a 2014 game. It’s actually older than my graphics card, which came out in 2016, when the pace of change in graphics hardware was still quite rapid.

I’m a couple of hours in and I’ve already gone into 100% stealthy crouch mode. This is another one that’s all about avoiding getting hit as Amanda Ripley, protagonist of this game (daughter of Ellen), is pretty squishy.

Game screenshot. Alien Isolation. We're in a control room, with angular shaped consoles in front of us, including a green screen monitor. Beyond, a dimly lit room has a model of a structure in the centre, the structure has several towers on top of a flatter base. — We are there

After the introduction, the game is set on the Sevastopol space station and you gradually learn about the near abandoned station and what happened there. It makes for a super tense situation and game, where you’re never sure if you should be talking to people or hiding from them or maybe even tempting them towards the hungry alien thing. Yep. There’s a Xenomorph on the loose …

It does look incredible though, especially for a 2014 game. That might well be a triumph of scale over ambition. What they’ve been able to do is focus the game into very small tiny areas which they can display in fantastic detail, instead of attempting to do the same in much larger areas.

Which brings me to internet spaceships … I’ve kinda had enough already of grinding through in Elite Dangerous, especially with the horrors of the Odyssey game performance. From what I’m seeing of various, even a graphics card upgrade wouldn’t assist there, as the performance is still terrible on higher end cards than I would actually acquire. It’s almost as if the game hits a cap in how fast it can update its environment. The ambition trying to go for far too high a scale than the game can deliver.

Whereas Elite is attempting to render a world as far as we can see, Alien Isolation’s levels don’t exist outside of the walls that we can see. That lessens the load considerably. That said, you’ve also got MS’s new Flight Simulator which does a fantastic job of showing us landscapes on Earth, which puts Elite’s efforts to shame.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're heading towards the circular docking entrance end of a space station. Various adverts flank either side of us on the way to a rectangular shaped docking port. Our Cutter ship is heading in, with purple flares from the engines and the occasional purple tint caught in the metal. — Tiamat arriving

This is me heading in to Newholm station in the Sothis system, with the intention of finishing off the steps towards getting the maximum Federation ranking. There’s no real point to that and no real reward, just another thing to tick off in the game. Oh and the missions will allow more gathering of the unique materials needed to engineer modifications and improvements to spaceships.

But there is that thought that the grinding for that, plus grinding for the top combat ranking plus grinding for the money for a Fleet Carrier ship starts making the game feel more like a kind of work instead of something fun and enjoyable. One thing I like doing in the game is bouncing around the galaxy seeing new places and new things. I get some of that with the Community Goals that are happening again and going for optimal trade routes to semi random locations is good too. But the best thing is finding pretty places in the galaxy to look at. I might well switch to that again and the ship would be the Searching for Pixels, callsign FUZZ3H. Yep, another tribute name again for Fuzzyfreaks who seeded that idea of having an offensively hot pink spaceship.

Game picture. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down from above on a vaguely diamond shaped ship. There is a notch in the nose for the cockpit plus the aft end is squared off for the engines. There are two line shaped constructions pointing forwards from the winds. The ship is mostly pink, with chequerboard white patterns aft and central. — Pink enough ?

That should look good in the screenshots. That’s the thing with the paint jobs I tend to go for … there’s usually a theme behind it (like the blue and yellow of Zoomnarr) but it’s mostly about having a paint job that will show up in the pictures. And light colours are better for that against the black of the void. This one might well see me jetting around the galaxy again.

Oh and there’s been a lot of Mars Horizon and Motorsport Manager happening as well…

About that graphics card … I thought I might be doing some upgrades this week. Graphics cards are steadily coming back on the market and into easy availability again. I had a 3060 Ti in the cart last night for £620. I could get a 3060 card for £480. BUT ! That 3060 Ti card came in at a recommended retail price of £370 and the 360 card should be nearer to £300. Some of those increases are down to cryptocurrency miners driving the price up, some is Brexit, some is Covid but far too much of it is the greed of the OEMs mandating higher prices for their cards to take advantage of that high demand compared to the available supply.

The £620 card (and the £40 sound card) disappeared from the cart. I don’t actually need it, outside of games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Deus Ex Mankind Divided which push my current card beyond what it’s comfortable at.

That’s the thing … if you don’t need to spend the money, keep hold of it. Other things may come along later and need the money instead. Like the series of jobs that need to be done around the house which I’ll need to get outside assistance in to help with.

That’s it for me for today. I might well do a couple of overdue upgrades on the desktop over the next few days when the cricket’s on. I need to get outside the house a bit too !

For now though, stay safe everyone, be well.

Sounds Like A Mission

by Sleepypete

August 2, 2021

9:00 pm

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game

Hello everyone,

Techie stuff today … and a mission. The game Deus Ex Mankind Divided has popped up again in the playlists I use as background and it’s prompted me playing through the game again. This is a bit odd because I don’t usually like to be playing a game I’m watching as it can get a bit confusing. I’m following a guide this time through though and there’s a few things already from the videos and the guide that I completely missed the first time round. Like …

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We see a messy scene, with trash on the floor and shabby containers and worktops. In front of us is a Golden Penguin, with a collection of candles around him. The words "Penguin Prince [E] Grab" are to the right of his head, which is adorned with a crown. — Behold the future King

More of that one later. I’ve had two techie things happening today with the desktop … The first is that I thought I should probably correct the murder that I did on Windows Update … hostile software is definitely more of a thing these days. Oh and the issue meant that I couldn’t tidy up the hard discs with the defragmenting tool. (A defragmenter is something that rearranges all of your files so they’re all in one place instead of having bits of them all over the place).

So techie issue 1 was the Task Scheduler not working, which is apparently how I killed Windows Update off all those years ago. Nothing I tried would fix that, outside of manually allowing Windows Update to do its thing. Which allowed the nasties from Microsoft in that you’ll have seen on your computers already probably. I’ll deal with that at some point.

Techie issue 2 is sound … My ears are bad at the moment anyway (right ear is recovering from being almost all blocked last week, not quite sorted yet) so it’s a bad time to be sorting out sound issues. Apologies if I dive into tech speak too much here by the way …

Loudness equalisation is usually a thing that helps to make sure you can hear everything, it quietens loud stuff and amplifies quiet stuff. It’s really useful for just being able to sit back and watch stuff that has all sorts of different source volume levels, the loudness equalisation flattens it all out. Except when the newer drivers remove the option because it went somewhere else.

I’ll figure that one out, one way or another. (Not yet, the Sun Kissed rpg show is on).

About that Mission ?

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're standing on a ledge, looking towards a brightly sunlit scene. Over to the right, there is the front of a large edifice with the first 7 letters of the word Palisade visible. To the left is a plaza type scene with apparently a big concrete block on top of a dead tree. — I’ll be breaking in there later

This one is set in the future, a near future that’s getting a bit grimmer by the time of the game. Whereas the previous game, Deus Ex Human Revolution, saw augmented people being a pretty common sight, the events of the last game meant that the augments are becoming under much tighter control. The people with them are subjugated and at worst, thrown into ghettos. More on that later. The aim of this one is to investigate a big conspiracy going on in the world, although we just touch on the corners of that.

Save the world kind of thing, although a bit less than the first one. It’s also a challenging game, where if you get caught out then you don’t last long. A lot of first person shooter style games give a massive sense of invulnerability because you just soak up the damage. That’s not really something you can do in this one. Oh and I like it for the main character, Adam Jensen, voiced by the gravelly Elias Toufexis. That’s Prague by the way, looks pretty.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Prague by night. We're standing on the banks of a river, looking over towards the pretty spires of buildings on the opposite side. There is an advert billboard to the left and some kind of large flat lit plate in the sky. — Prague by night

I have no idea what that is in the sky by the way. Anyway, what’s the Mission ? I’m looking to collect more achievements this time around, including some of the weird ones. Like going on an Odyssey with the Penguin Prince. He must be returned to his people.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We see a trash covered metal platform outside. Our Penguin is in the foreground looking at us. Behind him is a group of people, some with their hands up. Police are pointing guns at them menacingly. — Don’t look at the police brutality Mr Penguin

The mission starts in the Golem City ghetto, which is where the augmented people have been sent. Outwardly, it’s to give them a better place to be but really it’s to contain them in the same place away from normal people. Just in case their augmentations drive them into murderous rages again.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We see our Penguin in front of a graffiti adorned wall. The wall has a "Policie" sign on it. We're outside a checkpoint. — Can’t stop the Penguin

On your way across the area, you have to either evade the Police or go in and help out the local contacts.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. A heavily armoured policeman is on the floor, unmoving (we knocked them out). Our penguin is nestled in one of their arms. — Penguin makes a friend

Not all the Police were cooperating with our enquiries … (Don’t feel bad about the knocking out, we left them all alive and they’d been heavily roughing up our innocent contact).

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Our penguin is in the lower centre, looking back at us. In the background a large metal fish sculpture (a shark?) is hanging from the ceiling. — Metal Shark !

Wonder if the shark has laser beams.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We see a shop, with items for sale covering the walls behind. The shopkeeper is a lady currently leaning over the counter. She has dark red/black hair. Our penguin is lying down on one of the counters behind us. — Penguin takes a nap

When my Adam Jensen retires, he’ll come back here. The shopkeeper here is called Entity and she’s only in this part of the game but she’s great. She used to work making biocells with those augmented hands but the Incident in the last game broke them and they don’t work well enough now. She’s set up shop in Golem City now.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Our penguin is sitting regally in front of a door. Above the door is a sign that says "The Throat". — Go for the throat

The Mission is in two parts here … The Golem City part is peaceful, outside of avoiding the attentions of the police. The second half takes you past the Throat into …

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're looking down a corridor with cables running along the floor and pipes against the walls. In the background, the words "Augmented Rights Coalition" can be seen. Our penguin is on an oil drum in the centre of shot. — Penguin is not afraid of the ARC

Here’s the entrance. Your side mission here involves going in to get the leader of the Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC). People think he’s been doing terror stuff. He’s kinda being set up with that though. The ARC people want to stop you seeing their boss though, so you’re in for a fight from here. The sign is a 3d construction thing, with the words only appearing like that if you’re in a certain place. I like the effect.

The general idea with games like this is that if you dive in all guns blazing, you get overwhelmed quickly. The gung ho approach isn’t really supposed to work. So instead, you carefully pick your way through the level quietly neutralising each enemy in turn. (Pacifist approach gets more experience too !) After all the enemies are gone, it’s time to Pick Up A Penguin (do they still make those ?) and head on in.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're looking down a narrow passageway. In front of us, the Penguin Prince. To the sides of the passageway we see more penguins, lit from below. — Could this be ?

Almost there. You don’t need to take the penguin all the way through to the exit of the level. Going through a bypass for the checkpoint is enough. And then you find a vent, with a narrow passageway. And more penguins … I think we’ve found our objective.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're in the passageway again, looking at one of the walls. There are a cluster of golden penguins along the walls, lit from below. Our Penguin Prince is now on a throne in front of us. — The Return of the King

There we go. The Prince is reunited with his people.

There is a point to this in game, outside of the silliness of carrying him through the level. When he’s on his throne, the compartment behind him opens up revealing a Praxis Pack. These are how you get the upgrades in the game.

I still have a decent amount to go in the game. I was originally going to hold off on a replay until I had the graphics card upgrade installed but it’s been good to go back to it a bit early. It’s a challenging game and one I enjoy a lot.

Until next time, stay safe be well everyone !

Crystal Olympic Shard Bugs

by Sleepypete

July 25, 2021

9:39 pm

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books, internet spaceship, olympics

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

by Sleepypete

July 21, 2021

7:24 pm

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internet spaceship, rant

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

by Sleepypete

July 12, 2021

9:53 pm

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buggy, internet spaceship, sport, staysafe

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.