I like exploring in computer games, music, cricket, drawing and pizza and sharing those with people. Oh and I also inherited the name Sleepydwagonman too ! The site is a work in progress at the moment but it's getting there, features will come in over time !
I may have gotten slightly addicted to a game. Yep. Another game.
Will work for noms
The latest curiosity is Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. It’s the latest in a series of games where you take a car, light truck or van in various states of repair and your job is to fix them up to an acceptable state. That is, acceptable to the customer … You know car repairs … you don’t get a car back that’s absolutely perfect, that would cost a lot of money. Especially if there’s like 20,000 miles left on the cambelt or the tyres. They can wait for the next service.
I digress :-D. The idea is to take something like this :
Erm, may have to order in a few parts for this one
That’s after I got it home and stripped everything off the car to see what could be salvaged. Because, even the junkyard parts can be repaired sometimes. And then you put it back together and resurrect it into something like :
Yep. I chose that colour willingly
That’s after completing the rebuild and renovation and perhaps even popping in a little upgrade too with that supercharger popping out of the hood. Looks nice, they did a good one with the graphics. It continues under the skin too although you start seeing the short cuts that turn it from something annoying and into a playable, addictive game.
And by that, I mean commonality of parts. The suspension and engine parts on the car above are the same as in the rest of the cars. Mostly. There’s a little bit of variation in layout but a front spring for the sports car is the same as the spring that goes into the McPherson struts for a Fiesta type car. There are just 3 types of alternator and only 1 type of battery. I’m very ok with that kind of simplification, it’s a huge difference from what a real car mechanic will have to cope with but the simplification makes for a better game. In my opinion :-D.
And there’s some lovely variation in the cars that go into the shop too.
There are many like it but this is mine
Have truck, will travel etc. Every garage needs a shop truck, so this is the first of the rebuilt cars that I kept. I’ll keep the next one too when it’s complete. A game like this tends to go for lookalike type cars due to licensing issues, unless they can cover that through paid DLC. I’ll be looking for the old classic Jaguar E-Type to put in the collection. The current project car is a Ferrari which is in there courtesy of a mod.
That’s one weird thing. With the mods and the gamification, you can find the Ferraris and the McLaren F1’s in the junkyard or barn, waiting to be found and done up. I have been enjoying it though and it’s got me caught enough to keep going back in for more cars to fix. While the variation is limited, it does show you things around getting to the parts to be taken apart and the components needed for the cars to go. Like not forgetting to put the wheel bearings in and that you need to take the caps off the bottom of the pistons before taking the pistons out.
Found this too …
It’s been a while since this has done 88mph
Anyone recognise what that is yet ? It’s from another mod and I had to take it home with me.
All shiny new bits
Steadily coming together here. This one has the engine in the back, just like the real version of the car which was only made for a couple of years. I’ve seen two of them in the wild over the last 35 years so that’s actually, more common than Ferraris or Rolls Royces.
Ok, here’s the end result with a few special modifications.
Set the time controls Doc
Looking shiny. This one is a DeLorean from a mod as well, with the mod including some very special modifications from a classic movie.
Bring back the future lottery numbers please
Yep. I was having fun putting this one back together.
Apart from that, I’ve been enjoying watching the cricket T20 world cup games so far. There’s been some good games and a couple of teams have been surprised already. The saying in cricket is “you are only as good as your last game”. I think more than a few players forget that and turn up with their self proclaimed legend status and assume they’ll have another great game. And then they meet a team working hard to stay at their highest level and get murdered. We saw that with West Indies vs England the other day where it was a rather one sided game. Hopefully West Indies will pick up their game against the other teams. I’m firmly on the Support England side with cricket but I do like to see good games, like the India vs Pakistan game where Pakistan broke a jinx by turning over a record where they’d always lost to India in world cups.
I think it’s time for me to hit post now though and stop typing. My shoulder wasn’t happy with me yesterday or today (too much car poking ?) and it’s really reminding me about that at the moment. Possibly down to also doing piloting earlier. I’m at the opposite end of the galaxy now …
Tower request permission to land
I’m at Beagle Point at the moment, which is on the far side of the galaxy. One thought is to try and get home for a player driven event on the 18th of November. I might have to use my second account as an imposter, this one is courtesy of a freebie week on the Epic store and I’ve never used the account.
One last picture though …
Cat Mechanic knows best
Both the meme pics from today were raided from a site with “interest” in its name, so who knows there with copyright ! Although that last one retained its tag.
That’s it for me for now – have fun everyone. Stay safe, be well.
I’ve been in the downtime phase again. I usually look to grab a week off around October, it’s good to have that little bit of downtime before heading into the Xmas things. One thing I’ve noticed this time around, I think the nighttimes drawing in has affected me more this year, although you wouldn’t know that from some of the bed times that have happened this week :-D.
What’s been happening ? I saw a friend on Friday evening, we met up for board games. It was a fun evening and good to be out and about like that again. That’s a curious thing here in the UK at the moment though. The plague stuff hasn’t gone away. People are just ignoring it. At least that’s the feeling in England anyway. Scotland was a bit more aware and militant about it in the eateries I was in while I was up there. Wales is somewhere in the middle.
Castle !
Yep. Been the Cardiff again. It’s a good city centre but it can be a bit of a pain to get in and out of, mostly due to the roads just before the trunk road start. But … it has :
Antics model shop.
Wally’s Delicatessen.
Troutmark Books
Lego Shop.
Yep. Lots of good things there. I would like to find some music shops to browse in for when I’m there. There’s a decent sized HMV but it’s in a separate area of the city to the St David’s (Dewi Saint) area where I park up and there’s a question between the time taken to walk over there and getting away early enough to beat the worst of the traffic.
I didn’t acquire anything from the Lego shop this time (Ice Penguin was tempting) but there was loot from the other places.
Loot ! And dust !
Yep. Is dusty. I’ll be enjoying the bonbons, fudge and sherbets later. And that is an actual kit wooden dragon. I haven’t started it yet, got a space shuttle to finish first.
It was a good little loot haul yesterday, although I have to admit I was looking for Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. My copy has gone somewhere and I’d like to read that one again. I’ve commented before about how that author tends to not really know how to finish off a story and that’s the case here with the Mars trilogy. They start great, with KSR’s always wonderful world building continuing through the next books … but the story fizzles out along the way. Red Mars is a good one though and I liked Nadia’s story.
The book I’m in at the moment is The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell. Great local author, check him out. His Embers of War trilogy is fantastic and Silversands was pretty good as well. I suspect I’ll end up collecting his various books. The Recollection is set across a whole heap of time zones and it has a good little twist on what we usually take as read from travel across the stars. Without diving too deep into spoiler space, the hyperspace engines that jump the ships across the stars can’t beat light speed. The people inside will zap across in a subjective instant for them but in reality, it’s taken 7 years to jump 7 light years.
And as per usual, he’s dropped some rather interesting characters and situations into that mix as well. Looking forwards to diving through it.
The last book was Network Effect by Martha Wells, 5th in the Murderbot series and another series I’d recommend heavily. I need to read Jurassic Park actually. It was bought at Troutmark Books again, same as the sequel. I just haven’t got round to giving it a read yet.
There has been a lot of gaming happening this week as well.
Odd looking trees
Apparently I haven’t been in Elite since the 5th. It’s struggling for me as a game. The Odyssey expansion was a disaster in terms of performance in the game combined with a lot of promises that just fell incredibly flat. People are now wondering if Elite has a future as a game past the next couple of years. It’s a multiplayer online game that currently has the player base fractured between Odyssey gaming and Horizon gaming (new expansion, previous expansion). The multiplayer was borderline whether it worked before the latest expansion, with trouble getting into the same instance as other players. The big issue there is that the servers are over at Frontier’s place and when the game becomes uneconomic to run, they’ll turn off the servers. So Elite probably has a limited life span at this point.
Oh and there’s a small matter of it causing me arm issues when I play it for too long as well.
Outside of the internet spaceships, there’s been Humankind. That’s a pretty new civilisation type game, although one difference it has it that you’re supposed to change the civilisation you play as you progress through the eras. So, start as the Egyptians, progress through being the Celts and end up as the Italians. Each civilisation has their own special units and buildings. It’s an interesting take on the game system and I’ve been enjoying learning what it’s got.
An older one that I still enjoy is Motorsport Manager.
That’s not supposed to be a thing …
I’ve been continuing my run going through the different types of racing with this being endurance racing. The intention was to keep the team in the lower category, farming the sponsor money until we could afford the Headquarters upgrades that allow better parts to be made. The two categories race together and the lower category is supposed to be outclassed by the higher category. Yet … first race of a season and we’re in front and winning the race … This isn’t really supposed to happen :-D. I think it’s probably down to the higher category having a performance reset which has slowed them down but I also know how to optimise my people getting the best upgrades and there’s an Energy Recovery System speed boost thing that’s very open to abuse where the AI doesn’t realise it should be speed boosting and not fuel saving.
Motorsport Manager is still a great game though, there’s been nothing of its type on PC for far too long.
I may have disappeared down a bit of a XCom Enemy Within Long War rabbit hole as well today. Enemy Within is an expanded version of the first XCom remake, where the aliens are invading and your job is to repel them with your soldiers. Long War is a fan made expansion / conversion which takes a lot of the systems and alters them for a longer and I think more balanced game. I was enjoying playing the early days of it today.
Oh and I reset my Mars Horizon spacepedia as well so I’ll be going through unlocking everything there again.
So … enjoying having the downtime from work. Getting my sleep at the wrong times (need to go back to a more normal sleep pattern again!)
Cardiff was a good wander yesterday, enjoyed the board games. Oh and I got a little bit of research in yesterday. After finishing Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I went back to another fairly recent game :
Outpost !
That’s Mass Effect Andromeda with the graphics options turned up to the maximum. The biggest thing to notice is how much better the shadows are. Texture quality feels better as well. Textures start as a flat image that are mapped on to the objects in the 3d world. That causes loss of quality, so techniques like anisotropic filtering help to get that detail back. The better graphics card lets me turn up those settings, due to more memory and more processing capability and it makes those textures look much better, crisper and more distinct. It also allows huge improvements for reflections and shadows. The earlier version of this screenshot from Jan 2020 has a very indistinct shadow for the spaceship to the right, instead of the crisp one in this screenshot.
I’ve been enjoying the Andromeda story again. Time to hit post though and go back to watching Tashnarr play another game legendary for its graphics … she’s in a Crysis …
I’m still pretty nervous about being around People at the moment. The pandemic hasn’t gone away, it’s just been masked (so to speak) by the lessened effect on those who have been able to get vaccinated. The cases per day are still pretty high here (around 30,000 a day) but less people are needing to be hospitalised.
Still, it hasn’t gone away. And a lot of that is down to people largely abandoning anti plague precautions. I don’t wear a mask around people for me. I wear it for the people who I’m around. I firmly believe I had Covid around April 2020 and probably passed it around to a few people while I was doing shopping before the mask mandate came out.
Oh I’m also wearing the mask and vaccinated for the people who can’t do either of those. I wouldn’t want to harm anyone as a result of my actions or inactions there. I abandoned plans for having take out after my outing on Friday. Reason 1 was the first place being packed out, people queuing to park. Nah. Worse than the petrol stations ! Reason 2 was the only person wearing a mask around the kebab shop was me. So no kebab. Reason 3 is me being perfectly capable of sticking something in the oven for half an hour and it being edible when it comes out.
So … Friday adventure and that title ?
Nom
I had a little collection of objectives for the outing … First was recycling the plastic bottles, which is conveniently by a petrol station that usually isn’t too busy, especially at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon. So I managed to fill the car up as well, then promptly doing 80 miles there and back to get sweeties. I’m not using the car really enough at the moment because of the whole avoiding people thing, so it’s good to give it a bit of a run occasionally. I’ve still got at least 440 miles in the tank, so no need to go near the places where muppets are panic buying petrol.
I skipped it from the alt text because I was intending to put it here but the loot haul was : 2 packets of soft strawberry bonbons. 1 packet of lemon sherbets. 1 plain chocolate brownie. 1 packet of 4 small chocolate brownies. A packet of 8 blocks of shortbread. A packet of chocolate mice. And a packet of all butter fudge as well. Gloucester farm shop services does good loot … but don’t eat anything out of their quick kitchen. It’s bit me in the behind most of the times I have.
And after collecting loot, I was back in the city at an appropriate time for …
Cue the movie !
There’s a reason why I’ll happily go to this cinema rather than the ones which are slightly more accessible or have better eating facilities around them. It’s empty ! No one goes there ! I like this. I watched the latest James Bond film and it was just me and 2 other people in the theatre.
Good times. Although as you’ll see from the picture, the seats don’t have headrests, which is an improvement I’d like them to make.
Good film by the way. If you’re interested in the Bond daft action movie genre, go for it. It works well as a Bond movie and a daft popcorn movie. And that’s all I’ll say about it except that I think we’ll miss Daniel Craig as Bond, he did a great job of it. Wonder who will be 007 in the next Bond movie ?
I’ve been back in the books as well, with Murderbot 5 being the last book, Streams of Silver before then and Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi before then. I’m up and down with the books. I do enough heavy reading at work that I shy away from continuing it after hours. But Martha Wells’ Murderbot series has been excellent and compelling. They’re short novellas (Network Effect is full length) but I think that somewhat works for them. The books kick off at a fast pace, don’t waste any time and rattle through their story while putting you in the space that Murderbot lives in.
I got far more enjoyment out of each Murderbot book than I did out of Rama II or Existence (didn’t finish either, abandoned them as tedium). Oh and I’ll be rereading them at some point too, which is always a good sign that a book was worth acquiring if it’s one you like going back to. Like The Martian, I read that again recently and enjoyed it just as much this time as the other times I’ve read it.
Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore is another re-read. Not so good this time but I remember it being a weaker book the first time I read it. Ghost Brigades was a good sequel, that opened up and developed that particular series.
Prague by night
I finished off my Deus Ex Mankind Divided run as well. It was the permadeath achievement run this time and I managed it with only two occasions where I needed to restore the save file. Oh and there was a bit of reloading as well where fights may have started by accident. This is the same location as a screenshot in the last post by the way. The main part of the game is based in a fictional version of Prague. You visit Prague 3 times and the time and situation shifts a little each time. I won’t go into that much for spoiler reasons but it’s as pretty at night as it is in the daytime. The advanced graphics options allow for far prettier effects and the reflections and lighting are a highlight.
Reflecting on things
It’s pretty but not perfect … I don’t think we should be seeing the windows of the building reflected on the road there with them being shrouded by the green display screens. I did enjoy playing through the game again and appreciating the improved graphics capabilities.
I would thoroughly recommend the 2 Adam Jensen Deus Ex games, if you like story based first person shooter type games.
Oh and I’ve been piloting the internet spaceship as well, being in a bit of travel mode lately.
I’m having to be somewhat careful with my gaming activities at the moment. It’s turned a little colder here, which has been attacking my weakened shoulder. A consequence of that has been a sore elbow (that’s new) and dodginess in the wrist as well. So I have to listen to the signs, find a place to land and put the flightstick away when the pain starts surfacing.
Trees in the distance
This was tonight’s landing spot and I was lucky enough to find a suitable place fairly quickly. The criteria is a moon around a planet with rings, preferably with some surface features to look at as well. This time, a suitable moon appeared on the plot quickly, with an atmosphere as well. When I landed, I could see the tree like objects that can be just about seen below the ship’s engines (left of shot).
Another bug in the game at the moment is that the system that’s supposed to tell you where planetary surfaces are … isn’t working. So it’s pot luck as to whether you find anything in your chosen spot. This time, as per usual it was a case of looking for a landing spot in the sun with the parent plan above the horizon. Sadly the parent planet is a bit dark and hidden in the atmosphere trace here.
Oh ! Job stuff is happening too. No change in the organisation I work for, just a move to a different part of it. Soon.
Looking forward to it.
I think that’s enough for me for a bit – stay safe, be well. Have fun.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
Before the upgrade
That’s before changes happened …
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.
Sunset campsite
Good night everyone;
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 !
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.
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.
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 ?
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 :
What do you call something that ain’t melting ?
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s been a while since the last post ! I’ve had a couple of weeks away with work up in Scotland. Somewhere pretty :
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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 :
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 …
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.
(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 …
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 :
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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 …
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Metal Shark !
Wonder if the shark has laser beams.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
![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.](https://i0.wp.com/sleepydwagonman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/20210731200412_1.jpg?ssl=1 "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.")
