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Advent 2020 Day 7 – Red Mass Trooper

by Sleepypete

December 7, 2020

9:51 pm

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advent, mass effect, star wars

Hello everyone,

Day 7 – what’s behind the door ?

A red trooper today. Apparently this is a Sith Trooper from the last movie. Do red troopers shoot faster ? Does this make them miss even more ? Maybe the red ones are the ones expected to get shot first ?

Yep. The memes might be coming out today

So … about that game ? Mass Effect hit the gaming scene and took it by storm in 2007. Gosh, that long ago ? You entered the game as the leader of the ground marines of the SRV Normandy, a brand new experimental stealth frigate dispatched to check out trouble on the colony of Eden Prime.

The cornerstone making this gaming universe different was Element Zero, a mysterious compound that allowed changes of mass. The science never makes sense but what it really means is characters that can shoot goops of light from their hands and otherwise be a little bit superhuman. Oh and it also helps mass accelerators if the mass is reduced to near zero. Pew Pew and light speed becomes possible.

A previously unknown set of alien entities is uncovered and their purpose is to return every 50,000 years or so and eliminate all spacefaring life in the galaxy. Their reasoning is that they have to prevent some almighty calamity coming in the distant future.

(Maybe they stole that background idea from the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space trilogy, although the reasoning for the AI enemy there is properly explained)

Oh and you get a message from the last remnants of the previous cycle with a map that you can’t decipher.

It was a great series in its day too. The original story went from discovery in Mass Effect 1, to story development in Mass Effect 2 and then all hell breaks loose in Mass Effect 3.

However. The branching storyline was a bit messed up and they couldn’t pull off an ending that satisfied the hype.

I played through the first two games quite a number of times. Loved them to bits. The prologue of Mass Effect 2 was jaw dropping. (I’m not going to say much more because it’s a mammoth spoiler for games that have a remastering coming soon).

But while I did play through Mass Effect 3 once, I tried going back to it and couldn’t stay with it. There are a number of reasons for that, the big one being knowing the ending, knowing the emotional hoops that it puts the player through and knowing that some of the most beloved characters don’t make it.

It’s also because they messed up the continuation as well. Things that should not have been broken were massively broken in Mass Effect 3, like the quest system. The biggest complaint there was that it would send you to places that you just couldn’t get to in the game at that point.

It’s a really controversial opinion but the Mass Effect game I’ll play next is …

Yep. It’s Mass Effect Andromeda.

Pretty game. It arrived in a broken state but patches improved it and it was a very solid, well presented game when I played it earlier this year. And I massively enjoyed it too. I’d thoroughly recommend it to people who like a little (well, a lot) of story with their shooter.

But I think the reason I most like it is that whereas the first 3 games were leading to an apocalyptic future, this one is the opposite. Your people arrive in the Andromeda galaxy after a long voyage to find …

Chaos and mayhem. Instead of golden worlds, we have a dark matter scourge spreading across the Helius Cluster. It has damaged the worlds and you drop on to a planet hostile to human life, with aliens already there who are definitely not interested in having a cup of tea and talking things over.

That sets up the situation pretty well. But it manages to emerge from that doom and gloom to have you fighting for a better future to build from.

I liked that. And I’ll be playing it again sometime probably early 2021. (Deus Ex HR and maybe Prey first).

I think that’s it for today.

Stay safe, be well everyone.

Advent 2020 Day 6 – Elite Starfighter Horizons

by Sleepypete

December 6, 2020

8:04 pm

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advent, games, lego, space

Hello everyone,

I have managed to pull myself out of Mars Horizon (It really is silly addictive) to drop Day 6’s post … What’s behind the door ?

Some kind of triangle starfighter … another variation of TIE brought in for the Rise of Skywalker movie. A curious design … the triangles allow for more visibility up and down to the sides at the cost of a bit of blanking at the level position.

Probably good for combat, not so much for docking up at the end of the mission.

Today’s game is Elite … but I think I’ll be diverting off to other things as well. The original Elite dates back all the way to 1984, for the BBC B Micro. It was a marvel of programming, managing to fit an incredible amount into the limited amount of memory available in that computer while still delivering quite a decent little game.

The graphics were the limit of what could be done at the time, so a bit of imagination was needed to fill the gaps. No worries there. They started you off in a pretty basic Cobra Mk3 and the aim was to trade up to build a ship capable of bounty hunting and then grind up the combat ranks towards Elite.

There’s a bit more about the game here (including pictures that I’m not going to steal). Linky !

Ahh there we go. You’d get a “RIGHT ON COMMANDER!” on screen every time you got 256 kills. You needed 512 kills to get Dangerous ranking. I managed to stay in to get Deadly a couple of times (2560) but always resetted before going on to Elite.

I still like the early game in games like this, even in the new Elite. I’ve been having those temptations to reset the character again and build up from scratch.

Elite’s come a long way since those humble beginnings 36 years ago. I played on the Atari ST as well, which was a nice upgrade to the original with better graphics and some subtle adjustments to the combat model.

I’ve been meaning to do some more flying in Elite Dangerous too, although that’s kinda holding due to an addiction to Mars Horizons. Let’s see what I posted before …

The sparks and vortices around the side of that rocket were not concerning at all.

That was the first shuttle. Oh well.

Someday, Valerian and Lorelei might live there

Must watch Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets again some day. That was a very silly movie but I enjoyed it.

Oh ! There’s my dinner bell going off.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 5 – Razor Crest Bounty Royale

by Sleepypete

December 5, 2020

6:14 pm

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advent, dwagon, games, lego

Hello everyone,

Day 5 ! And …

It’s the Razor Crest today from The Mandalorian. Gotta say, I haven’t watched any of the Mandalorian episodes. As well as the many allegeds about their business practice (check the Alan Dean Foster led likely class action), it’s just yet another streaming service. There are too many of those popping up at the moment and it’s unnecessary expense especially as the only things on their front page of interest are The Mandalorian and Star Wars Clone Wars.

Still, nice functional ship and there are all those Baby Yoda memes that have brought much amusement.

The marshmallow of the day is Candy Floss flavour.

The Lego of the day made me think of small traders or bounty hunters that travel around writing their own story as they go, so I figured two games today : Port Royale (first one) and Bounty Train.

Port Royale has just had a major release of its 4th edition, Port Royale 4. It feels as though it’s been expanded a bit but from videos I’ve watched, I don’t think they’ve moved on the mechanics particularly since what I remember of the first and it still has the flaws and limitations of the first. Well, apart from draconian copy protection that stopped legal owners of the game from playing it. (It clashed with Star Trek Dominion Wars). Copy protection of the time would also interfere with other devices in your system, like a USB hub I had for additional devices.

People complain now about having to install additional launchers for their games. When I hear that, I go back to the days when all games had their own individual launchers. And the issues happening with the copy protections built in where it became more awkward for legitimate owners of games to play those games than it would be for owners of pirated copies.

Having the copy protect built into the launcher and a named account has helped those compatibility problems no end.

About the game ?

Port Royale was a sailing game, where you’d own a steadily expanding fleet of trading and privateer ships. It was a nice concept, although I’d have liked to see wind angle effects come in to the combat layer more. You’d trade or privateer your way around the Caribbean and along the way, there was a treasure map story developing. Nice game. But I won’t be paying much attention to Port Royale 4 because its asking price of £46 for something that seems just an iteration of a 10 year old game is No. Just No.

The other game of the day is Bounty Train …

This one starts you off in Portland of the 19th century. All you have is a very humble little steam engine and a cargo carriage. The massive trading company you were going to inherit has had its assets seized and it’s up to you to figure out what happened and try and get them back again.

Not pretty but she’s got it where it counts

That’s the engine you start off with, the little Tom Thumb. I have to admit I bounced off this one when I bought it a few years ago and, although I’d been thinking about it, I hadn’t gone back. There’s a combat minigame where bandits will come in and try and steal your stuff, that massively turned me off the game. So I’ve essentially turned that off for the playthrough started tonight.

Early days, with just Boston down the coast opened up. The padlocks show where you need to pass quests or pay for licences in order to open up the route. It’s a decent way of steadily working you into the game so you learn how things work and have a chance to upgrade the engine a bit.

But yeah, good little session again in this one earlier. I think I’ll go back in there later at some point although I still have that Mars Horizon addiction, plus Per Aspera looks very interesting too. I managed to get an upgrade in before closing the session. An actually train looking train !

I abandoned my first play of this one a few years ago because I fell foul of some of the mechanics of the game, arrived a little late at a destination and suddenly WANTED Dead Or Alive posters started appearing with my character’s mugshot on them. Oops.

Oh look ! Dinner time.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 4 – Luke and the XWing

by Sleepypete

December 4, 2020

7:21 pm

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advent, games, lego, star wars

Hello everyone,

Before I start, no food was sacrificed in today’s advent picture.

There we are, Luke Skywalker there and a guest XWing at the back.

I’m going to have to investigate the phone too to see if I can figure out the whys and hows of doing off centre focus. Cos the figure tends to be closer and lower and the focus goes on the back.

Oh and don’t mind the discolourations of my night stand table, it’s ancient and those were there when I acquired it.

Not guilty.

Everyone knows what Luke did … Well. In the first movie. He was still off flying X Wings in the later Expanded Universe (true canon) books as well. Usually on solo missions for the burgeoning New Republic or doing Jedi Things.

There was a game for that …

This one came out in 1993 and is thought of as being the impetus for people acquiring many, many PCs with 486 processors. You know, those old 32 bit processors that occasionally came with a math chip added in. The one I got was a 486 DX2/66, which meant it had the math chip and ran the memory at 33MHz and the cpu doubled at 66MHz.

3d accelerated graphics wasn’t really a thing back then. We had 2d cards with perhaps 1MB on board if we were lucky, so the graphics were extremely simple and resolutions were low. This is 640×480 upscaled to my monitor – ish. (Display scaling often reduces it from 1440p).

They start you off in a flight simulator game thing where you fly through the hoops and shoot the occasional targets. There’s a 3d representation, although the models are exceptionally simple. Such as the platforms above having no depth. Other objects will be polygonal boxes with sides 1 pixel thick.

It looked good too when it came out. Note that this is the Special Edition which came out later, using the XWing vs Tie Fighter engine which had actual texture work included. The best that could be done when the games first came out was clever shading.

The game was broken up into small missions, preceded by a briefing. Sometimes it was Admiral Ackbar. Sometimes it was General Dodonna. It worked really well for the time, although nowadays the mission objectives would be spoken in game through voice overlays and targeting indicators.

An early mission where you’re in an A Wing (Y-Wings were also available with the B-Wing coming later) saw you whooshing through an enemy fleet on a mission to identify everything. I think this got copied in a more expansive XvT mission later where you needed to abuse the Need For Speed more.

It was interesting going back to the old game. It’s still nicely fast but also balanced to be playable. The 4th XCom game, Interceptor, made the critical error of attempting to match the XWing flight and control style to an engine that was just far too fast to be playable. It worked pretty well in XWing.

I was starting to make the precision shots as well. The lasers take a bit of time to travel between shooter and target, so you need to lead your shots to be able to hit. Works well.

The story was good too. It starts up before A New Hope and amongst other things, sees you picking up the Death Star plans and eventually, doing the Death Star Trench Run.

However, I didn’t finish XWing back in the day. I came to it a bit later, having been solidly addicted to Tie Fighter, which saw you fighting for the Empire instead, seeing Galactic security from the other side. The way games worked back then was to pad out the content with occasional insane level missions, which acted as a bump to slow down your progress so I never got to the Death Star missions.

I think there’s another game in the middle that I can’t remember but the follow up to Tie Fighter, XWing Alliance, saw you eventually flying a Millennium Falcon type ship.

The last one was XWing vs Tie Fighter (XvT), a multiplayer online starfighter game that erupted on the scene perhaps 5 years too early. It was a cracking game too, although the world of dial up modems and higher pings was not ready for it. The Star Wars starfighter games pretty much died with XvT, although they’re back now with Squadrons. This is what modern graphics can do :

Shiny. I didn’t buy Squadrons though and I understand that even with initial hype, it’s ended up a bit of an underseller. Many, many people were wanting a Tie Fighter 2 or a true successor to XWing, with a strong single player storyline. What we got was a tutorial campaign which unlocked the different ships … and a multiplayer online battle arena game.

Oh and the cockpit displays get in the way far too much (even worse in the Tie Fighters). I thought it was very difficult to pick the targets out of the background clutter too, probably because the modern game can put background clutter in that would just be a starfield in the old game.

It was another one that was good to have a little look at but I sense a recurring theme here will be that Nostalgia is great but going back to the old stuff can end up being a bit of a let down. I was curious that the control mapping had the stick set up to yaw the ship instead of roll it. Brain was going Does Not Computer somewhat at that, although I adjusted somewhat to it.

(I started off in flight sims, where you would roll to initiate a turn. You wouldn’t side slip with the rudder)

One more pic ? Oh go on then. Plus Farcebook demands it :-D.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 3 ! This could be pod racing …

by Sleepypete

December 3, 2020

7:25 pm

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advent, games, lego

Hello everyone,

We’ve made it to day 3. Before I go too far with the post, there’s stuff in the news today about an explosion a bit down the road at Avonmouth. I live quite a distance away (didn’t notice a boom even) so I’m not affected.

What’s behind the door ?

I think that’s one of the desert dwellings on Tatooine and yes, I may well be continuing the theme of using something edible to stand the models on to get a decent angle for the camera with them.

The cookie did not survive.

Tatooine made me think of a pod racing link. (The other one would be something to do with wrong droids). I did enjoy the pod racing sequence in Episode 1, that was probably the highlight of the movie.

And one of the best of the Star Wars games was the Pod Racing game. What’s that ?

They’re basically two massive engines, a pilot pod running behind them and lots of luck to hold everything together. I suspect the image in George Lucas’s mind when he thought of this sequence was to try and pull off something like the Ben Hur chariot sequence.

It worked pretty well as a sequence in the movie and the game was incredible when it first came out. I’ve been having another look at it this evening …

I did get it running in the end, although the Steam version needed an extra file added in (for Google – Star Wars Pod Racer crash on start up solved by adding the Dinput.dll into the game folder). I didn’t manage to get it to recognise my two Hotas controllers (I have no idea where my Xbox pattern controller is !) but it was ok running with mouse and keyboard. It even ran at 1440p.

I tried looking back at this one before, with the copy on the cd (yep, cd !) and found issues with it not knowing where the save game was due to Windows changing how it organised files. Looks like that’s been solved this time.

I’d forgotten how fast it was … Let’s see :

The 462 is I believe, speed in km/h. And the pods go faster in an engine boost mode. I think the speed used to reach 1000+ …

I’d forgotten how much of a rush the game was. Lots of varied courses over multiple Star Wars locations. Places like the deserts of Tatooine, with occasional Sand People snipers. Lava planets … An ocean world where you race across platforms connected by undersea tunnels. And a space circuit with zero g sections.

It’s exciting. I was remembering why I was so addicted to it way back … As you see from the screenshots, the graphics are very simple. But you don’t really notice that as you’re zooming through the circuits.

However, if you’re looking to try it out again, DO NOT buy the Steam version. I’m hoping that the fan project to recreate the game comes to fruition. While the Directx suite should in theory allow older games like this to run, there are issues involved. The game itself came out just as Directx was taking off, so it was looking to use 3dfx Glide libraries to run better via proprietary non Directx hardware. I think that was leading to problems this evening …

I couldn’t get my controllers to work, although got round this by using keyboard controls.

And … I called a halt to play due to the game crashing on me, following steadily decreasing texture quality. I think this is why only 3 screenshots were successful out of the 11 attempts.

There is a saying “You can never go back”. It’s kinda true this time round, although while it was running, it was running very nicely. Everything was nicely presented on screen, even in a much higher resolution than the game would have expected. Of course, that means the low resolution textures look really, really bad in the screenies.

It did work as a game now much better than Jagged Alliance 2 did when I tried that again a while ago. (I’ll talk about that in a later post !)

Good game, hopefully something similarly ultra fast and great will come out at some point. I got the memories from it again of it being huge fun the first time … but with the state of the Steam edition, it’s one for the past.

That’s all for today ! Stay safe, be well. May compatibility with the force be with you.

Advent 2020 Day 2 – Tea and Civilisation

by Sleepypete

December 2, 2020

5:16 pm

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advent, games, lego

Hello everyone,

Shorter one today I think. Maybe. We shall see ! What’s behind the door ?

I do have a list of games to talk about prepared for this advent period but I will shift it around a bit as appropriate … Like yesterday when I wanted to talk about the author Ben Bova, which gave me a convenient link to Mars and space programmes. Spookily, today linked straight away …

Yep. I reckon that’s a tea cup there in his left hand which can only link to …

Civilisation !

I’ve played most of the Civilisation games over the years, although I’ve gone away from the series lately.

Quick check … yep. I do actually own the latest ones. Never installed Civ VI though and I bounced off Civ V. (I must have got them from Humble Bundle bundles or monthly things.

Like, this month’s Humble Choice games and my opinion of them are :

Will acquire : Crying Suns. Space strategy, looks promising. Rover Mechanic Simulator, gets the oddball choice.

Nope for various reasons : Darksiders III, Yakuza Kiwami 2. They just aren’t games I would want to play.

Something I should grab : Imperator Rome. Paradox can make great games like Stellaris but I saw videos of this when it came out and it looked like the mechanics under it were terrible.

Bundle fillers to ignore : Darksburg, Little Misfortune, Smile For Me, Darkwood, Tsioque, Youropa, Townsmen. I have no idea what these are and the brief blurb made me even less interested in them.

But they usually have something that makes the bundle worth it, the bundle comes with a discount across the site and they’re good for charities.

And it makes Tashnarr jump out of her skin when I buy stuff on Humble Bundle using her code (linky) and the alert goes off. Perhaps a bit mean, definitely comical. (Link to Tash’s Stream page) And she gets a bit of the sale price, which helps her keep streaming, which is always a good thing.

I really need to make the links lists happen as well. I’ve been a bit delinquent there :-D.

This is going to be one of those posts where I talk about anything but the subject isn’t it. Those happen occasionally.

Civilisation – you start as cavemen and the object is to nurture and grow your tribe into a civilisation that spans the globe and perhaps, beyond. It was a remarkable entry into gaming with the first one. I played that on the Atari ST.

Simple graphics, well presented for the time. We have a top down presentation on a square grid with ice caps at the top and bottom and a wrap around map. This had all the original concepts of cities, units, buildings and an epoc spanning tech tree.

And spearmen that could occasionally stop tanks.

Civilisation 2 moves this into an isometric pattern. Friends at uni played this but I was still hooked on Master of Magic and Master of Orion. Besides, I knew that it had some blatant AI cheat bugs in it which somewhat put me off the game. (Plus asking price!)

The manual there is for Civilisation III and an expansion. I can’t remember too much about this one. Civilisation IV was the last of the series to allow doomstacks, where you’d have 20+ tanks and artillery on a square that would batter anything around.

Civilisation V re-engineered most of the movement systems and eliminated the doomstack. I should probably know more about Civilisation VI !

Looks pretty. They’ve steadily evolved the gameplay in the series from eliminating doomstacks, including Civic progression, adding a Culture route to victory and expanding how cities work.

I did enjoy playing the original, enjoyed playing MoM and Moo2 more (these will be in a later post)

I think that’s it for this one, the internet spaceship seat is calling. I haven’t done much in the stars lately … it feels due :-).

PS I do like the jumper.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 1 – To Mars via A-Wing ?

by Sleepypete

December 1, 2020

7:02 pm

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advent, books, games, lego

Hello everyone,

It begins … And it seems, as always, where there is a plan, there is a plan that’s undoubtedly going to change immediately ! The Advent Plan this year is going to include the Star Wars Lego Stuff (the calendar looked great this year and had an excellent start) and games. But I’m going to deviate slightly from that already. What’s behind day 1 ?

There we go. Usual suspects in there (covering up the wall !), plus one I made earlier and today’s model which was a dinky little A Wing. They do marvellous things with the advent calendar models. I think that’s actually a better looking A Wing than the bigger one. I haven’t acquired the Ultimate Collectors Series A Wing though, it’s a bit expensive at £180 and to be honest, with the X Wing game, it wasn’t my favourite ship to fly. Still, nice concept with a pilot ideally placed at the centre of rotation and two massive engines for speed.

What’s the book there ? I have a memorium as part of this post … One of the authors I grew up with died yesterday of covid complications. His name was Ben Bova. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of his books, although with all authors as prolific as him, the quality does go up and down. It’s a hell of a bibliography and I’m just realising that there are a lot of books to go there that I haven’t read (linky).

Highlights include the Orion series, which started with a lovely concept of a Protagonist and Antagonist who were at opposite ends of their stories. One was stepping forwards in time, the other was stepping backwards. They would meet at certain nexus points in history, where mankind could have died out if not for an intervention. Central to the series were a race of hyperadvanced Creators, who would be our long distant followers (what’s the opposite to Ancestor ?) Ah ha ! Descendants. To ensure their survival, they had to protect their ancestors … and they made Orion their agent. As he goes backwards in time, he learns more about the origins of the conflict and how his feeling about it develop is exceptionally well written. I think the strongest of these was Orion 3, Orion in the Dying Time, which put Orion in the period where the dinosaurs died out and homo sapiens took over. There are events here on a cosmic scale.

And then there’s Orion 2, which saw our character moving through the stories of the sieges of Troy and Jericho with a little bit of Egypt too. He inherits a mercenary band of Hittite Engineers from an Empire that had crumbled to dust as the story begins.

They’re usually great stories of epic adventure and his specialty was near future Earth, such as the story of the first Moon colony and an incredibly tense race to independence in Millennium. There’s also Messianic Nanotechnology in Voyager and … the two Mars books. (I should read the other Grand Tour books at some point).

There have been plenty of Mars books and they tell their tales in their own ways. This time, we have a multinational, multirace crew inhabiting a temporary base on Mars. Bit like The Martian, perhaps double the size. They have Hydrogen fuel cell rovers and power armour. And a precautionary tale for what can happen if your vitamin supply gets neutralised by pure oxygen … One notable thing is that for the second book, Return To Mars, they convert the rovers to Methane because the Hydrogen leaks out (the molecules are too small) which might be a precautionary tale for the moves to fuel cell technology today …

Anyway. Great author, I enjoyed most of the books he wrote (variance in quality is ok !). I’m tempted to read Mars again and I was chuckling away at a Remember story written by R.A. Salvatore that was posted on Farcebook yesterday. Need to read more of his books.

To the game … I’m still addicted to Mars Horizon. Yep.

I left the last Mars Horizon post with the people getting to the Moon …

I managed to get back there again last night in record time. I’m hunting achievements again … It’s going to be tricky to get all of the achievements but I’m enjoying having them as targets along the way while I play this lovely new game that they’ve given us. It’s a little marvel.

The graphics are a little simplified and cartoony but they look great and don’t get in the way. You could probably successfully play this game on pretty old hardware and it would still look good. It doesn’t need great graphics to do its thing. The gameplay is very simple as well. You choose the research and the missions and there is a resource token puzzle minigame that determines how well the missions go.

It gives you these little cutscenes along the way too. I’ve only played Japan and half of NASA so far, so I’m looking forward to seeing the other rockets and devices from ESA, USSR/Russia and China.

Yes. I will always make that joke given chance.

This made me chuckle as well. It was a tiny little sampling rocket fired off from a Mars lander, designed to bring Martian surface material back to Earth. Could this happen with our science ? Probably not. I did enjoy seeing it in game though.

A curious base. Bit small for my liking. I think the best starter base I know of for Mars has to be the one in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, where engineer Nadia carves out an underground (for radiation protection) base at the landing spot. Of all the stories in the Mars books, that’s the one I enjoyed the most.

The Mars mission in Mars Horizon feels very much one way … but that’s ok for game things. I think the Transit Spacecraft plus Lander Vehicle and Ascent Vehicle model is more like the way to go.

I think that’s it for me for today !

Lovely little A-Wing model;

Sad at the loss of Ben Bova, possibly the author I read most (after Anne McCaffrey) in my teenage/young adult years;

Vastly enjoying Mars Horizon.

Hopefully this will be a good December’s worth of posts and I won’t start burning out on them like I have in previous years …

Stay safe, be well.

(PS I should say a couple of words for the drama in the Vendee Globe over the last couple of days … maybe tomorrow ! Good to see one definitely safe and the other travelling to safety)

Well that was a race … Also, impending advent

by Sleepypete

November 29, 2020

7:18 pm

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racing, trauma

Hello everyone,

I feel I need to talk about what happened in the Bahrain Grand Prix today but that’ll come after a little bit of spoiler space talking about something else. It definitely needs a big caution warning as the pictures that will be on the news, the description of the accident and the potential consequences are grave and distressing but the important thing is that the driver is banged up but ok and I hope he’s racing again next season (only two weeks of this season left!).

It’s almost Advent season …

(this is the point where I’d put the twitter thumbnail pic in but I don’t think pictures are going to be appropriate today)

I have a couple of plans for posts over Advent season. I missed out on getting another Marshmallow Advent calendar but I did manage to acquire another Star Wars Lego calendar. The chocolate ones were looking incredibly tempting in the shops too …

So Star Wars Lego plus … I’ll be talking about games. I’ve got a decent list of games together. I’d intended to be playing a few of them again so I could farm some screenshots. That hasn’t quite happened, partly because mental energy hasn’t really been there to open them up again. But maybe mostly because Mars Horizon came along and it is perhaps the most addicting game I’ve played … Oh and it’s a lovely little space programme managing game too. I would thoroughly recommend it and I’m hoping we see more from the devs, they’ve made a little marvel here.

The Xmas season is going to be an odd one. England is still under lockdown for a couple of days due to ongoing pandemic. (Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland are subject to different restrictions). We should be continuing the lockdown after the intended end on Wednesday 2nd. That’s my opinion. The virus does not care about our individual freedoms. If the virus could feel, it would actually rejoice if we were to go back to normal on Wednesday. A virus only wants one thing, to spread itself to as many victims as possible. And by going out again and ignoring precautions, we allow it to do just that.

The UK is down to 11k cases daily now from a peak of 25k, although the statistics are lower on the weekends with our reporting. We need to be consistently below 1000 for at least a week before we allow the lockdowns to lift. As soon as this virus gets a chance, it’s off again with the super spreading. It’s like a spark on kerosene in an oxygen rich environment.

So yeah, I think Xmas gatherings are most definitely at risk still at the moment. And it seems like Xmas is being seen as an exception at the moment, in a way that the festivals of other religions have not been. (I’m not going to name them all because I’d get it wrong) The popularism should not be neglecting other groups in favour of their core groups. But … that’s the way popularism seems to be working.

Sidenote – one of the most brilliant moments in Babylon 5 came at the end of the A Parliament of Dreams episode where the station has a weeklong festivals of the diverse religious beliefs of the races inhabiting the station. When it came to the turn of Earth at the end, the commander of the station, Commander Sinclair, starts to lead the ambassadors of those races down a procession of representatives of the varied and diverse religions on Earth. Brilliant, symbolic and perfect. And the episode faded out from there giving the impression of infinite diversity of beliefs, all valid.

Caution warning – I’m about to start talking about the Grand Prix incident now.

The reason for that caution warning is that I know that people have their triggers where reading about another incident will cause their trauma to resurface. I have my own unconscious triggers there where if I see certain things or incidents, my mind will retreat behind the barriers.

It’s awkward to talk about that, mostly because I don’t think I have the words to express it. But one of the artists I follow (she does great work and she’s one I’d like to be able to get close to in style and skill) was involved in a fatal (for the driver at fault) road accident that left her permanently marked both physically and mentally. If she were to be exposed to the basic description of the accident at the Grand Prix today, I suspect that she would be retreating very quickly into a psychological armour shell that she would be silently screaming behind and that a lot of her healing since her accident would be undone.

So please, have respect for how deeply you discuss the accident. And some of the below will be too deep for some readers.

What happened ? Romain Grosjean, in avoiding a potential incident ahead of him, ended up tapping the wheel of the driver behind and this resulted in his car going into and through an armco steel barrier at probably 150mph with an immediate flash fire. After seeing it a couple of times, I would attach no blame to anyone involved, they were all taking sensible action.

When pictures were eventually shown, the resulting scene was a car that had been cut in two, apparently around where the driver is. I think this is an illusion and that the bodywork separated from the survival cell which was fully intact. The rear of the car was on the track side of the barrier, Grosjean had to escape the survival cell front end, through a fire and with the track side barrier in the way.

Is he ok – apparently the damage is just minor burns plus broken ribs. That’s a miracle and a testament to the fitness of the driver, the safety features introduced into the cars and the strength of those cars. When seeing it, I was giving it a 1% chance of survival and it’s a huge relief that this time, he’s come out fairly ok.

It’s the worst accident that I have seen in 40 odd years of watching Formula 1 and other motor racing, although memory is fading on incidents like the ones to Gerhard Berger, Johnny Herbert, I wasn’t around to see the Niki Lauda fire and we were away for Senna.

Halo – I was opposed to this when it came in, because I was thinking of the incident that really ended Filipe Massa’s career (he wasn’t the same after he came back). In that case, a chunky loose suspension spring came into the cockpit and clobbered him on the head. The halo wouldn’t stop that.

But what the halo did do was that when the armco barrier was pierced, it steered the broken pieces of barrier around and over him. I was more in the aero screen camp but that method doesn’t have that solid structure down the centre.

The halo clearly saved his life. And one life saved makes it the most valuable innovation to come into motor racing in recent years. The thought is that it has also prevented other injuries from flying wheels and tyres.

I suspect, like on our motorways, armco barriers are likely to become outlawed and replaced with tyre barriers to absorb the energy of an impact or concrete blocks to redirect the energy of the incident.

Should they have raced ? I was finding that a difficult thought, because I really don’t like seeing people get hurt, including the potential for people to get hurt. However, you accept a certain amount of risk when you do sport and you have to recognise that the decision of the people taking the risk is important, your decision to watch is completely separate.

I have skin in that game too. When I had my first cricket head injury, I obviously couldn’t take any further part in that game. My nose had been kinda rearranged and I needed to get properly checked out. I was apparently less coherent than I thought I was. But I managed to get another game in before the end of the season. I think that was critical in order to face off that potential psychological demon before it had a chance to take root and affect my ability to play cricket in later seasons. Oh and the game I got hurt in continued and I’d have been disappointed if it had been called off.

I was relieved when I saw that Artist Lady up above was able to drive a car again, although she said it took a lot to get her to that position and I don’t think she drives in darkness again yet.

So yeah. Misgivings about the race restarting but it’s the drivers taking that risk, it has to be their decision.

You recognise the potential and risk of Bad Things Happening and decide whether you want to be a part of that. In my case again, I thought there was far too high a risk of me, due to my shoulder injury, bowling a ball that could have seriously hurt and hospitalised someone. So I stopped bowling. That wasn’t so much psychological as skeletomechanical.

I’ve digressed a fair bit in this post …

Romain Grosjean, haven’t liked him as a driver (too crashy!) but it was a massive relief to see him in the medical car looking shaken but otherwise ok.

The coverage was great. After the initial incident, nothing was shown of the accident or aftermath until it was absolute confirmed that everyone was ok. It was and will be tough to watch the accident through again in future. This is in direct contrast to other sports, which have allowed high levels of injury detail to be shown in continued replays after the incident. And yes, I’m looking at my beloved cricket there, where replays of incidents like what happened to Steve Smith last year (hit in head, concussion bad enough to take him out of the next game) were shown repeatedly, despite the incident with Philip Hughes (Aussie cricketer) who sadly got the other end of the 1% and died instantly after being hit on the head despite wearing a helmet.

We don’t need in depth public analysis of incidents like that. We need to figure out what happened so that we can insure it doesn’t happen again and doesn’t happen worse. But that doesn’t need to be public or subject to speculation. We don’t need injury to be the subject of sensationalism.

Especially when bringing out all the horrific detail opens up half healed trauma in our friends, acquaintances and neighbours.

And I include me in that as well. With my second cricket head injury, I turned my head away and caught it on the grille over my ear instead. I dread to think what might have happened if both incidents had gone slightly the other way :

Nose Job – my glasses survived intact and probably saved my right eye.

Helmet – if I’d had time to turn my head more, it might have missed the helmet and I’d have been in hospital again.

I still sometimes see a flash of a cricket ball about to hit me in the eye. It didn’t affect me when playing but I think it happens when the sun glare or shadows change. And no one will ever see me do it but I do flinch.

Trauma is very real. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is very real. (I don’t think I have PTSD, or at least it’s very minor if I do)

Discussions of incidents like the one at the racing today could easily open up those psychological wounds again. So my plea is to have respect for the subject matter, those who you’re discussing it with and who could potentially read what you’re talking about.

(that’s why I’m not adding in Artist Lady’s name, that would be cruel making her live through her accident again).

If you’ve gotten to this point, thank you for reading. I’ve let a few bits of myself out here that haven’t been seen outside my head before or I’ve only talked about them with a handful of people, although I hope that none of it is of any surprise to anyone.

Feels weird not playing the Fun Thumbnail game. Be safe, be well, see you for advent.

To Mars … and beyond ?

by Sleepypete

November 22, 2020

2:13 pm

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gaming, internet spaceship, picture, skyrim, space, website

Hello everyone,

I found a new spaceships game … More like rockets perhaps though.

Before that though … today seems to be not such a great day today. I was having trouble getting to sleep last night (probably dust inhalation affecting my breathing) and I’ve emerged today with a headache. So it’ll probably be a quieter day today with less sources of input. Maybe.

Before I dive into rockets – a small thing about being cautious about how you market … The new blog came with a few things that are either useful or I’m steadily disabling as the truth of what they are reveals itself. The latest is OptInMonster. From its blurb :

“Instantly grow your email list, get more leads and increase sales with the #1 most powerful conversion optimisation toolkit in the world.” and they do this through popups, popouts, annoying things on the site (like an abandonment thing when I clicked on another window). Oh and they want money to do this, even for the free trial. They also appear to be heavily involved in botting, even with one of their bots writing in the name of their CEO.

Anyway, I started going through the “free” sign up suggested by their plugin and hit the close tab button as soon as it demanded a credit card number for the free trial. I then get an email purporting to be from their CEO (the bot) with the details that were in the form but not committed to be sent. If you are not recoiling in horror at that, then you should be. Oh and I couldn’t reply to the bot’s email because their reply-to address was a bad redirect and the content of their email was being flagged by the spam filters. I could not demand a deletion of my data on their system without deleting their email text in my reply.

It’s not a particularly rosy look there. If you’re getting someone to do your marketing for you, think very carefully about the image they are going to give you. You don’t want them to give you an image that you find abhorrent.

TLDR – OptinMonster bad, addon now removed from the site.

New game what’s this ? I’ve gone a little further in the Elite Galactic Circumnavigation quest but that one’s suffering a little due to the pain spikes (and Elite needs a little set up so I can’t munch dinner while playing). I went a little further in Deus Ex Human Revolution too and I’m at the point where the DLC comes in. Still not sure if I’ll play that DLC. Another Skyrim character got started …

There’s my warrior lady in front of the next place she’s going to raid. Skyrim is a beautiful game even after 9 years after release. It’s had some work though, I’m now on the Special Edition rerelease that came out in October 2016 and that’s got improved texture packs and weather mods that make it prettier still.

But that’s not the game that has got me addicted since it came out …

You may need to zoom in a bit to find the thing on the pad. One very nice feature I spotted follows on from something I said about Elite in one of the discords :

The comment on Elite was about some of the neutron stars that are epilepsy inducing. Their rate of rotation is incredibly fast, which means they become nasty flicker on screen. While I don’t have the epilepsy triggers to make me react dangerously to those, it’s still a very unpleasant surprise to come out of a jump at something I find difficult to look at due to the violent flickering. It was good to see options like these in an Accessibility section, even in a game where these effects are very minor.

Disclosure note – before I go on, I would HEAVILY recommend this game with the obligatory disclosure thing being that it is a copy I paid money for on Steam.

So what’s the game about ?

You start off in the late 1950s, as one of 5 space agencies and the aim is to get a manned base on Mars. It’s fairly open ended, although you want to get to the milestones along the way quicker. Cos it’s a game and you want to win, having fun along the way. The agencies involved are USA, Russia, ESA, China and Japan, although you can customise one of those to your liking with boosts and handicaps. My agency is the Dragon Space agency.

You start with sounding rockets and then move on to bigger and bigger things. It feels like it follows other games like the Buzz Aldrin game but it has its own very easy and simple gaming loop. Every spacecraft has an upper stage and booster below and each need to be beefy enough for the job in hand.

This was the first attempt at going to the Moon. The rockets have scaled up a bit since the sounding rocket. Sadly despite the great conditions, this one was also my first rocket to go boom (screenshot above). RIP Computer Astronauts.

One more thing about this game, it’s also teaching the resource management. You have Science, Money and Support as the aspects that let you advance faster. Science leads to newer and better facilities, missions and rockets. You need Money to build the rocket. And increased Support leads to more monthly funding, although you can’t rely on the monthly funding alone.

One thing that the original XCom game and others taught me was that if you spend all the money early on frivolous items, you have to wait longer to do more fun things and waiting is no fun. So my people were a couple of years behind history in getting people on the Moon.

But they made it in the end. One curiosity …

I wonder if the licensing fell through there. As Japan, I’m seeing familiar rocket names appear like Atlas, Titan, Delta. Ariane is available for ESA and I suspect China and Russia have their own distinctive names. That’s something for a later run. There is no Wyvern Heavy by the way and the space shuttle has a different set up.

If you’d like to watch more, what sold me on the game was Aavak’s livestream which he’s uploaded to his second channel (playlist link). He’s a lovely chilled out guy to watch with a very relaxing voice too. Nice fella. Beware, watching those videos may lead to buying of game.

But yeah ! Highly enjoying that one, learning its systems, going through the missions, figuring out optimal play. I’ll definitely be back for further runs because it’s one of those where you can play in a more relaxed style and those fit well with me when my arms aren’t happy.

It’s one that should be a cracker educationally as well for :

The resource management aspects I mentioned before. A close resemblance to historical space programmes. Easy to figure out gameplay loops. A wealth of Spacepedia information that I haven’t looked through properly yet. And it looks nice too.

The same publisher also has a Bush Flight Simulator game coming which I’m going to keep a very close eye on. There’s actually a few really promising looking games coming. Per Aspera will follow on from Mars Horizon by setting you as an AI building the first colony on Mars. Flight of Nova is an aerospace flight sim and there are a couple more I have my eyes on.

Actually feeling a little better now that I’ve done a bit of typing ! Hope you all have a great day, stay safe, be well.

More views from lockdown and beyond

by Sleepypete

November 15, 2020

10:36 pm

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birthday, games, picture, stayathome

Hello everyone,

2020’s going on for a while isn’t it ? I’ve been doing birthday things (not much), advent things (some), gaming things and … working from home things. So nothing unusual there then.

I had cake. It was a couple of lemon cheesecake slices. Plus I also acquired lemon slices that came in packets of two. That’s almost an obligation isn’t it …

One thing that changed from previous years is that I actually had my birthday day off. I haven’t done that since I can remember. It’s a bit different with it being in lockdown. I’d usually nip off at some strategic time in the morning and acquire cakes and other munchies from the supermarkets next door to where I worked prior to this year.

And then I’d hugely enjoy people coming up to the desk in search of cake. Good times. Hopefully that tradition will be back next year. And if the birthday was on a weekend, I’d just bring them in for the sister’s birthday which is actually today (two days after mine).

Happy birthday sister !

Cake is good. I’ve probably been spending too much time in the games too … Let’s see. It’s been :

Kamd told me about a nice little cluster of gas giants, all within visual range of each other.

Kamd also told me about this place, a moon with geysers orbiting an Earth like planet. Kamd is a site that lets you know if anyone has reported things worth taking a closer look at. When I acquire a links list widget (it doesn’t come as standard with WordPress), I’ll add Kamd to the list. In the meantime, Linky !

Oh, I’m also trying something new with the images that will hopefully make them open in new tabs so you can have a better look at them. I wanted to get a bit more traveling in and along the way was a neutron star :

That was the first megajump in this ship. In the early days of the game, 35 light year jumps were about the limit. That jump was 289 …

One thing about getting away from the established areas is the chance of finding something new, like the water world above. Only 0.05% of the galaxy has been visited by players yet …

Including this, which was my stopping point for that leg of the journey. I have to say, the purple highlights on the grey hull works really well, especially with the yellow / orange highlights.

One thing players like to do is to customise the head up display colours away from orange. I actually like the orange … it’s easy for me to read. I like it in the Deus Ex games too … I’m still working my way through the first Adam Jensen game. The last time I left it, we were through the first visit to Detroit of the near future. I’ve moved on a fair bit since then.

Turns out the people who attacked your company were working out of a government facility and you find yourself going on in there to get more answers.

Steadily made my way through there. One odd thing is that I know in previous run throughs, I was able to clear the areas completely through stealth and non lethal takedowns. I’m having to resort to leaving a few of the enemies up this time. I’ve probably forgotten the optimum routes through, it’s been 8 years since I played this one last.

Some of the AI visual lines of sight have always been a bit odd though. One of the criticisms of the game when it came out was that your hand was forced when it came to the boss characters. There was no way to win the fights while leaving them alive.

There wasn’t much left of that one. Still, they did tell me where to go :

Yes, that’s a city on top of a city. More about that in a later post. I’m actually a fair bit behind, I’m on the last set piece area before leaving Hengsha for the second time. There was a DLC expansion pack called The Missing Link with another small chapter but I don’t think I’ll do that one this time.

As well as Deus Ex Human Revolution, there has been more Motorsport Manager. It’s an easy game to play as it’s mostly hands off with only a few interventions needed. And it manages to do that while still being compelling. My team is winning everything at the moment but the strength of this game is that you have to get the right strategy still to make that happen. And you can affect that by intervening with early out of sequence pit stops to get your driver out of traffic that’s slowing them down.

I haven’t done much at all in Star Trek Online lately, although I’ll go back there for more of the episodes. I think I realised that I wasn’t enjoying doing the daily mayhem mission every day and as soon as you find that you don’t have to do that, it’s easier to just stop grinding and do something enjoyable. There has been Stellaris happening as well, a brief abandoned game with the Nomnivorian Swarm (was hemmed in) and the current one sees me looking for the Mechanist achievement. I’m not enjoying that one though so I’ll close it as soon as I get big enough for the achievement.

One thing I do need to do more is the drawing. The only things I’ve done lately are modifications. I still have that Dwagon Rock Band to finish. And the alphabet too.

Back to work tomorrow though. Or rather, back online tomorrow. But … Farcebook demands tribute in the means of a thumbnail pic at the end so :

Cake ! Stay safe everyone, be well.