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.
(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 !
I’ve been jabbed ! Again ! Yesterday was my second shot. Last time, I had the bad muscles for a day or so and then Brain definitely wasn’t operating to usual standards for the rest of that week. I might have a repeat of that coming, we’ll see over the next few days, although bad brain today might partly be down to taking a hayfever tablet for the first time in I dunno how long. I have sensitivities to hayfever tablets … but figured it was better to brave those and give my watering eyes a chance to rest up.
Eyes ?
Eye see an upgrade
So, 5g upgrade yesterday and second pair of glasses appeared on (gosh, think brain is starting to suffer!) Thursday and yes I did need to look that up. The top pair are normal glasses, the lower pair are reading glasses. One of the catalysts for changing eventually was that I was having a lot of trouble reading books with my old glasses, beyond what will become apparent in a picture I’ll show later. The reading glasses have a blue tint on them which, in theory if I use them more, should help with getting to sleep more as Brain thinks it’s night time instead of being confused by monitor light.
Would I go for the same choice again ? No, after the need for masks drops (needed to wear one during the eye exam and fogginess happened), I’ll get some variofocals so I can swap between book reading and watching stream chat.
It’s been a very welcome change … here are the old ones.
Danger fingers
There we go. That’s the old pair. You can hopefully see the discolouration and semi-opaque patterning on both lenses near the bridge. These are delamination of the lenses which was steadily getting worse and worse each time the glasses were cleaned. I could still see properly with these but I had found myself looking around the bad patches. It’s good to be able to look straight ahead clearly again.
One thing I do still need to acquire is a pair of shades to attach. One reason I’d held off so long to replace my old glasses was that I wanted to get a pair of the magnet shades that are tailored to the frames. Those disappeared from the shops a long time ago … For those who don’t have to wear glasses much (and can therefore adopt non-prescription sunglasses !) there are three main choices.
Bridge clip ons – these have little arms that grip on to the lenses around the bridge. They take ages to put on and take off the glasses so these are definitely a Really Bad Option for when you’re on the road. (Flip up shades are an option)
Lens clip ons – these have little arms that go on the outside of the lenses and they’re held in place by a springy attachment between the lenses. These are a pretty good option and you can flip them on and off with one hand.
Magnetic clip ons – these have magnets in the frames and shades which are fantastic for pulling on and off with one hand.
I.e. one hand is on the wheel, the other hand is quickly taking the shades on and off. Vision is uninterrupted. Bridge clip ons would mean a certain amount of time when You Cannot See The Road. This is bad.
So yep, one more upgrade to get. Maybe the shades will act as a good antenna for the 5g. And I’m mixing my words up which could bode well for next week at work.
Manic Minarr about to get to work
Elite spaceshipping happened last week, with a couple of mining sessions so far in Manic Minarr. They’ve put out a couple of hotfixes so far which improved the performance a bit but it is still way below what I would want for the trickier docking manoeuvre times. I was cheerfully falling in love with the graphics again but the performance of the game and the attitude of the company (as mentioned in last post) leaves a lot to be desired.
It’s as if they, on seeing that their customer relations hit rock bottom, decided to start digging. My blood was boiling this morning when I found out that the Issue that I’d contributed to complaining that I (and many others) couldn’t download the soundtrack had been closed as “Fixed”. It ain’t fixed, we still get the same error and so another cluster of issues have been raised which are getting more names behind them.
Advice – don’t buy any products from Frontier Developments. This includes Elite as well as the Park games (Jurassic Work Evolution, Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster). There have been a number of shady companies involved in the gaming market and Frontier seem to be competing heavily for that crown at the moment. (They need to go a long way to beat the Star Citizen company)
That said, game is pretty. I just think people like Egosoft who make the X games have massively missed a trick by not seeing the Odyssey launch disaster and continuing the discount of the week before. I think I might have skipped internet spaceship games …
Gosh. What else has been going on … XCom 2 campaign finished ! More screenshots at a later date. Maybe. I’ve been playing the Legacy Hub stuff that got added to cover the time between the XCom 1 and XCom 2 games. Oh ! What’s XCom ? It’s an alien invasion game where the aliens have arrived and are attempting to subvert the world’s governments into submitting to them. XCom 1 is set in contemporary times, with you commanding a hidden mountain base. The stakes steadily rise in step with the research into better weaponry for your small squads of soldiers. It either ends with you storming their temple ship and beating them back, or the aliens subverting enough governments to cause XCom to get abandoned.
And so XCom 2 opens up with you as the Commander being rescued from alien captivity. 20 odd years have passed since the first game and in this version, humanity lost badly. The aliens are in total control, as Advent, and they are going forward with something sinister called the Avatar Project. Of course you have to stop them, operating out of a captured alien UFO that becomes your mobile base.
They are legendary games and a fantastic update to the first series of XCom games from the 90s. The movement and actions system got changed from Time Units controlling everything into characters being allowed 2 actions, either a double move or a move and fire. They’re the benchmark games of this type. I wonder if there will be an XCom 3 ?
Hope so. They’re great games and Firaxis make good stuff, including having their games open totally to modding although that’s been marred a little lately by the publisher putting an unnecessary loader in that has adverts and breaks a lot of the mods.
I appear to be a little sparky about some things in today’s post …
More games have arrived ! There was a little steam sale last week which led to the 2 Divinity Original Sin role playing games arriving. Now that XCom 2 is complete, it’ll let me uninstall that and free up space for Divinity. Or I could just install the big hard disc that’s been waiting for a long time. Perhaps next weekend when the cricket is on and Nurburgring isn’t …
That was a bit of a disappointment this year. The 24 hour race ended up being about 6 hours at the start before fog set in and stopped the racing and then it resumed for about a 4 hour sprint this morning. Still good to watch, would be better if the climate around those mountains allowed for the full 24 hours. They have to keep it safe though, so stopping for the fog is a mixed feelings contrast. On one hand, wanna see more racing ! On the other, I remember a couple of years ago where I stopped watching and went to bed because I could see an even more horrendous crash than had happened already coming …
Still, it’s good that they could hold it despite our current pandemic conditions.
I better post and leg it, Tashnarr’s on and I need to rest my brain before it melts more.
I’ve had that strange thing of being out and about around the country again. Around people. Twice ! All with work, so I can’t say very much about it. One trip was bad, with a poor hotel (which I complained about, I never complain about that stuff) and other issues, one trip was good.
Pretty weird being out there again though. And good to see our people as well instead of just interacting with them over the Skype.
Oh I had 2 covid tests too, both came up negative. It’s a necessary evil of being out and about around people again. It’s weird doing the swabs, I gagged each time with the tonsils part of the thing. But there can’t be any exceptions to doing the testing … and it gives a certain amount of confidence in being able to more freely interact with people.
Ok. That’s enough about work related and plague related stuff. On to the spaceships ?
Set course for Lave
That’s my latest ship, the Manic Minarr, another Krait Mk II that I’ve set up for mining. All my Krait Mk II’s are named for Tashnarr, a lovely lady who streams the games for us and brightens evenings by being an incorrigible chuckler. Oh, the callsign is -IC3Y- or Icey by the way. Must get Murph into a callsign at some point. I went into the new Elite Odyssey expansion after writing last week’s post and I have VERY mixed feelings about the release. It’s basically come out too early and we were given pre-beta level code. That means that all of the advertised features were included but the code wasn’t in a fit state for customers to be given sight of it. Let’s see …
Bit battered there ?
That’s Tea and Medals, a ship I used for speed running to the Core. I brought her out of the hangar again to pull some modified bits off into storage and … also screenshot. The grey glass doming there should be black and you can probably pick out texture and framing corruption riddling the image. Quick edit for an extra picture :
From a different age
That’s Tea and Medals from before doing another Core speed run, as presented in the Horizons code. You can draw your own opinion from the comparison there. I refused to take a picture of the Admiral Luperza in the state the game was showing me that ship last week because it was just really poor quality. Oh and …
Are those the ceiling lights ?
Yep. Those were the hangar lights, through the ship. This one is fixed now but it was just one symptom of how broken the graphics renderer was when this expansion was released. This bug is fixed now and the graphics look awesome again but it’s at a cost of two things :
Apparently the fancy planetary features have been sacrificed in order to get walking and on foot combat into the game. I haven’t seen this yet.
Heartbreakingly poor performance. I was fine doing a bit of mining yesterday but the frame rate dives down to such uncomfortable levels on docking that I was heavily considering putting a docking computer on again. (It costs 1m credits per mining run because the space for the computer takes up space for Stuff to sell). As in, planetary landings looked amazing ….
Aren’t you supposed to land at the base instead of outside ?
That’s how I had the game set up on Saturday. I’m still playing with the graphics options and this is mostly medium plus a bit. The frame rate is still disastrously poor. Oh, the dots by the nose is my pilot for scale. Most of the graphical bugs of release seem like they’ve been fixed over the last week but release was disastrous.
Shiny … but not right
You look close and the detailing in some of the non-purple bits is just absent and the crudeness of other textures in there are hidden by the shininess of the purple paint scheme. The Bridge of the ship is apparently absent.
That said though, when I was flying this weekend, I was happily falling in love with the graphics all over again. Just need some actual optimisation in the game and being able to acquire a long awaited graphics card upgrade. I was talking about changing the card this time last year with Deus Ex Mankind Divided … various things (cryptocurrency) mean that you just can’t buy graphics cards at the moment.
Here we go. This is what I mean …
Looking a bit low detail there ?
That’s Tea-89 from the Alpha release of the game. I’ll accept a lack of decals, callsign identifiers and ship names in there because those weren’t in the Alpha. The lack of detail is appalling though and made its way into the release version of the game. Here’s the same ship after patching.
Tea 89 is shiny again
What a lot of places doing comparison screenshots are doing is fiddling with the lighting, which to some extent I’ve done there. (Didn’t want to bring that ship out of the hangar this time). The difference after the first week’s patch is incredible, the ships look amazing again. And I did spend a certain amount of time flipping through the ships in the shipyard just to have a look at the increased detail. And there are quite a number of new screenshots of ships on the pad.
Ready for battle
That’s the Admiral Luperza again, looking stunning. She’s named for the lovely Margaret Krohn who I must add in a links list at some point. I really must do that before this site hits its first birthday. Maybe something for the list when I get some much required leave in a couple of weeks ! Anyway, the Federal Corvette was descending into a nasty mire of ugh looking before the patch, it’s awesome to see the detail on there again.
One shield mod, coming up
That’s our Manic Minarr sitting on the pad at one of the engineering bases, getting some work done on the shields. The paint job is a joke by the way. Another massive issue from the first week was frequent disconnections from the server. I was disconnected 4 times in a couple of hours. The most frequently reported error codes by people were Orange Sidewinder and … Scarlet Krait. So I built a scarlet Krait. It does look rather special though. I didn’t get disconnected over the weekend, so improvements again.
But … while I was quite happily falling in love with the game again, the whole disaster of the release of the expansion means I’m highly unlikely to be giving the developer, Frontier developments, any money or support any time soon. There have been design decisions going in which have broken some elements of the user interface (can’t turn in community goal rewards) or which have made elements worse, like the galaxy map, the mission system, the outfitting system and … the destination star doesn’t appear in the list if it’s too far away any more. (Something I used to use all the time but I have a workaround for it).
To release the game in such a poor broken state is unforgiveable, plus there’s a horrific lack of communication coming from Frontier, outside of them throwing their community managers to the wolves with orders to spam twitter and the other places with shiny happy screenshots. It’s a shoddy attitude that starts at the top of the company with people who have indulged in dodgy dealings in the past. And by that, I’m referring to Frontier Elite 2 where David Braben had a deal with Ian Bell, co-creator of the original Elite, to give royalties for any expansions. There wasn’t an expansion, there was a remodel called Frontier First Encounters badged as a new game, so no royalties. That caused a very acrimonious situation and it’s just one more symptom of how the people at the top of Frontier behave. Except this time, they’re doing it to customers as well.
Nuff said on that I think …
What’s around the planet ?
It is rather pretty still is it not ?
I think that’s it from me. New games have arrived ! I ended up buying some end of last week in a sale, plus soundtracks. More about those at some point. I finished the XCom 2 run today, so that’ll clear time and disk space for the new stuff.
I’m trying to think of what I was getting up to over the last week ! I think generally taking it easy and doing assorted gaming while not in work times. The new Elite expansion is coming this week and I kinda wanted to be back before it hit because … expansions to online multiplayer games usually lead to mayhem with whether you can enjoy the game over the week or so of release times.
It’s been an epic trip … and a fairly epic finish as well. But …
Galaxy’s Haunted
Of course another reason for rushing back was that I had a meme in my head that needed to get out. I’ve skimped a little on the alt-text there because I wanted to expand a little bit for everyone … (plus I’m not really happy with how the text turned out) The station we see there is a Coriolis station, which was carried through from the very original Elite game from 1984. It’s a boxy mostly cubical structure with 6 square diamond sides, connected together by triangles at the corners. There is a mail slot entry port on one of the diamonds, which is how you get inside to the landing pads. The mailslot has a grill thing on the outside that’s called the toaster rack … oh and it’s just big enough for the biggest ships in the game. Searching for Dragons fits through handily for side to side … but you can reach out and touch the top of the mailslot (ish) when you go through.
I couldn’t resist this particular meme … it’s based on the Astronaut one with this version being :
Station : Sierra Foxtrot Delta, you’re home early, everything ok ?
Ship on the way in : Galaxy’s Haunted
Station : Say again, did not copy your last. Over.
Ship on the way out, bristling with weaponry : Galaxy’s Haunted.
It got me chuckling when I thought of it, hopefully people like it. It has been an epic trip around the galaxy, a good escape from what’s been going on out there.
Do I get space miles for all that ?
There we go ! Big map. The route I followed is available at the Elite Dangerous Star Maps site under the name of The Everlasting Expedition (linky). It’s active for just over another year if you want to try it out. It requires a well supplied advanced ship to complete all of the waypoints, plus a tool like ED Discovery (the source for the map above) to plot a course to the outlying spots. The doubling back spots at Galactic East and Galactic South are where I needed to consult with the waypoint plotting tool to bridge the gap between the arms.
Still, Searching for Dragons did a grand job out there. Ship’s retired now and I’m wondering what I’ll do next, after the Odyssey expansion hits. Could well be a spell of combat. Ship’s seen some sights though …
Dreamer Blush
That was Dreamer Blush, one of the ultra rare Mint Choc planets that will hopefully survive the graphical changes coming with the expansion.
Going Loopy
That’s Barnard’s Loop, which is relatively close to where we are and it’s one of the more recognisable landmarks to show when you’re getting close to home again.
There are a heap more pictures as well. I’ll have to do a semi random pulling out of the best ones.
Mountain ahoy !
This is the Aidoh’s Platform planet and another curious example of the extremes that the procedural generation system sometimes comes up with. In this case, a small planet with very prominent mountains and chasms.
Pretty place !
It has been a pretty epic trip lasting :
Busy
That’s another capture from ED Star Maps, showing how active I was. The redder the dot, the more jumps done in the day. Some days were light, some saw me travel much longer distances. The early gap in November coincides somewhat spookily (nah) with when Mars Horizon came out. The gap in Jan/Feb saw really cold weather that was messing with my muscles, so I wasn’t playing game much then.
There are options for what happens next … and it’ll probably depend on what inspiration hits at the weekend. Let’s see :
Thunderdwagon 2, callsign IR1965 – a Beluga class passenger ship that will see service rescuing people from damaged starbases.
Admiral Luperza, callsign 9001<3 – a Federal Corvette that will do shooting type things.
Tiamat’s Chariot, callsign DL.SDL – an Imperial Cutter for idling around doing missions. I think a return to some ancient grounds at Azrael and Apathaam would be good.
Elysian Payday, BNKR08 – a ship for getting lots of credits from mining.
And perhaps a landing ship for the expansion. We shall see.
Camping among the stars
That was another randomly found campsite to conclude a session earlier in the week.
It’s probably only a matter of time before I pick a ship and head out there again but I think that time’s going to be different. It’ll involve one of the big fleet carriers and I’ll have a couple of ships along to support. The carrier will need a mining ship to keep it fuelled, plus I’ll do more active surveying.
Later.
Different things for now !
This one’s been very internet spaceship heavy, I need to find more things to natter about ! That’s another thing coming … I haven’t been reading much lately, partly because these glasses have pretty much hit their end. New ones arrive on Friday !
I need to get back into the habit of posting more often again ! I’ve won something …
Mouse acquired !
I won it in a giveaway run on Tashnarr’s channel (Twitch link). Tash is a lovely lady and I’ve been watching her streams for a couple of years now. She rapidly became one of those people who I’d switch over to her stream as soon as she comes on. She has a blast playing the games and it’s infectious chilled out fun that brings a great community along as she goes. And Tash has fantastic engagement with that community. It’s not just Tash having fun with the games, it’s Tash enjoying us having fun watching too and joining in with daft things in the chat.
Mouse ? I set it up this evening after closing the work laptop down before having a play with a little photo editing there. So what I did for this one was :
Set up the jumper (including attempting to remove all wrinkles and folds for this mark 2 version !)
Make the pose happen. The mark 1 had the dwagon too low, hence propping him up on the mouse cable this time.
Tricky bit … Set phone camera to a 10 second delay …
Hold a pen light in a suitable place to banish the shadows from the sun coming in the window …
Juggle phone camera and pen light while the countdown is happening.
Sorted ! I think it came out ok. Oh and don’t worry about the framing when juggling the pictures like this. Modern cameras have a ridiculous amount of pixels so if you capture stuff outside the border you want, just crop it to size. (Also rotate and scale). I use GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), it’s free and does what I need on the photo editing, although it does have its usability quirks.
The ouchie though is one reason why I’m not doing any gaming tonight. (That’s ok, am enjoying the Tashnarr stream). My shoulder was starting to complain through yesterday’s Elite internet spaceship travel session so I wasn’t going to be in there today. But my back has apparently decided to join in as well today. Not as in big pain but more like that promise of deep pain and being on the floor after an injudicious movement. So I’m being careful in how I move again and how I’m sitting. (Probably perversely brought on by sitting more normally this afternoon !)
Spaceship ?
Shadow camp
This is me starting off from the Fire and Ice system over in galactic south east. There’s been some epic trekking going on …
Almost there !
That’s the latest travel map from yesterday, which saw me reach the furthest extent of the Outer Arm Vacuus. That’s the spiral arm that’s next out from the one we’re on. There’s a curling back of the line again where I had to circle around in order to find a region of stars that were navigable between the two spiral arms. Limited hop range and all that and not enough stars to hop between. Next stop will be to the south with the faint green line showing the intended course. Oh and ignore the red line, that’s from the map software picking up a hop done in the Elite Odyssey alpha. Definitely ignore the faint spreadsheet type thing over to the left hand side … Caught out by a partially transparent map !
Glasses ? Yep. New glasses coming. I had the eyes tested on Friday and they both went back in ok. I need to switch to two pairs of glasses, one set for reading and one for more normal long distance but I was expecting that. I’m getting to That Age you know. It’s a shame to lose the magnetic clip on shades thing but no one seems to do those frames any more. A pity because it made it far easier to choose new frames. Instead of looking at a whole wall of frames, all I needed to look at were the ones with built in shades. I’ll go reactalite adaptive instead because I don’t really need to control the shades/no shades like in the cricketing days.
I’ll do a suitable picture at some point when they arrive. I was already having thoughts about how I could get the dragons involved in that.
Australis Ferris Wheel
That’s the Australis Ferris Wheel and was well worth a stop on the way. The planet in the background has a moon that has just enough inclination in its orbit to put it above the ring system. So instead of seeing a thin line of a ring, it stretches out before you like in the picture. Is pretty.
Does my ship’s bum look big in this ?
After taking a similar picture from the Odyssey alpha, I had the idea to do this one as well. You can’t walk around in the main game yet but if you could, the pilot could walk under the gap in the middle of the aft landing legs and reach up on tiptoes to touch the underside. Scale is a fun thing :-).
Playing interstellar fireworks again ?
That’s the view back from the Semotus Beacon, which is the furthest point reachable at the end of the Outer Arm Vacuus. No more traveling away, it’s all towards home now. (Shoulder and back permitting !)
Sun bathing
This is Red vs Blue, a pair of stars of which one is a Herbig Ae/Be star. That’s a protostar, very early in its life. The game representation is probably not too correct, they’re supposed to have gas dust envelopes for formation or discs of matter. They look great though in game, although I was nervous about coming out of the jump around a twin star. Too many stars close up lead to the ship getting too hot.
An Eock Hypue campsite
This is where I left it yesterday after probably too long a run. Maybe. 🙂 (I was close to the next waypoint and wasn’t finding any promising candidates to stop at).
Oh and then we go figuring out the way to the next waypoint, which needs a couple more boosts to get there. The route I’m following was intended for people with Fleet Carrier support, those can go 500 light years in a single jump. Searching for Dragons currently does 73 light years to a jump, with options for 91 and 109.5 light year jumps. (I don’t have the bits for the longer jump). So I’m a little restricted compared to that. It’s felt like an achievement being able to get to the places I probably shouldn’t have been able to get to … but it’ll be good to get back to doing something different in game.
That’s what the spreadsheet behind the galaxy map was for, it’s my route to Amundsen’s Star at the southern tip of the galaxy.
But that’s for another day, hopefully when my back has settled down a bit !
We just had our May Bank Holiday weekend, which meant … more time off work ! I spent mine variously looking at the Elite Odyssey Alpha and motor racing. There was nearly a peek at more remote control car models but that can wait a little bit and I don’t think I know enough about them yet. Oh ! I have an eye test booked in for next week, which is massively overdue.
First … thumbnail pic ? Hope it works this time !
Dwagon does not know how to skate
It’s one of the Lego VIP models that came with the Space Shuttle. A smart little construction underneath there too. There are another set of cogs underneath, so if you turn the lower cog that’s sticking out, the dancers go around the rink and twirl around.
I did the deed with the Elite Odyssey expansion and bought into the Alpha … I’ve had a little look at it over the weekend but honestly, I don’t see how much is there for me plus it needs a massive amount of work before it can be considered for release. Hopefully that’s already been done because apparently the build we’re playing on is at least a month behind the one the devs have. (They must be testing the netcode out)
Mustn’t bump my head
The scale of the ships is impressive. This is the latest expansion and the Alpha allows us to walk on planets, space stations, landing pads but not inside the ships yet. The game didn’t let me walk under that landing leg but it was fun seeing that the gap there meant I should have been able to stand under it. The detail is curious. Some of the Alpha stuff has incredible detail, some is …
Tea 89 on an Odyssey
The quality is still amazing but the ship should be better … and you see the difference in levels of detail when you’re close up. Could be bugs, it’s probably me having special livery items that aren’t properly in the alpha version yet. Like the “TEA-89” identification labels that should be very visible. I tried a couple of missions involving retrieving an item from a base (no screenie apparently, game must have lagged out the pressing of Button.) and getting into a wrecked thingy.
Time for salvage !
This was me looking to retrieve an item from a crashed satellite and running into one of the issues … Cut off the access panel and the access panel falls into the hole and you can’t get it out. Oops. There’s also terrible performance which is apparently down to the game attempting to render too much, although it felt like that improved when I turned supersampling* down in the second session. Oh, the thing to look for in the detail is the edging between ships surfaces. It looks positively crude compared to what’s in the current state of the game.
*Supersampling – creating the image at a higher resolution than it is displayed at. This leads to better detail at a cost of performance. I play at 2560×1440 pixels. Supersampling at 1.25x means the game creates (renders) the image at 3200×1800 pixels.
So that’s me walking …
He’s missing the action !
One thing that’s caught attention is this fella, dubbed Peter the Sleeper, which makes me a little more relieved again about the choice to move my name on from Sleepypete and make Sleepydwagonman the more consistent online name. (Plus there are a bunch of Sleepypetes and only one Sleepydwagonman).
More stuff that was going on was the return of World Endurance Championship racing. It feels like this series might be dying off, although it was good to see the debut of the hypercars. The race had interest all the way through, although the organisers are probably contributing to the series dying by locking the coverage of it behind paywalls. IMSA provides a superior product with better racing across all classes, better commentary and you can actually watch all of it, rather than the paltry amount that the Eurosp…. people deign to show. It’s sad because it’s selling short the efforts of the people bringing the cars to make the races happen.
Oh and then there’s F1, which had a decent race this weekend too. I’m looking forward to the Nurburgring 24 hour race coming up in a month. That’s always got interest going all the way through the field as cars fall back for repairs and then come back through.
Jumping ? I carried on with the quest to circle the galaxy, today’s trip was a bit more convoluted because it needed a bit of careful navigating and boosted jumps to hop across the gap between spiral arms. Back to the main game !
Admiral Luperza in the Odyssey shipyard
That’s the Admiral Luperza (named for Maggie Krohn) in the Odyssey shipyard ship selection screen …
Admiral Luperza awaits
If the Odyssey release sees the ships having the detail of the one in the Shipyard picture, instead of the detail that’s in the main game, something will have gone seriously wrong. Still, it’ll be nice to have another dimension to the game and I’m anticipating fun being the getaway pilot with a little ship that’s set up to get into places and then quickly make an escape, while the people keen on the ground stuff have their larcenous fun in bases.
Visiting the Reginleif
Stopped off and repaired at the DSSA Reginleif carrier today, before heading on to :
Earthrise ?
That’s where I stopped tonight, a surprise Earthlike planet to check out a couple of jumps away from the carrier.
Didn’t really mean for it to be a week and a bit since the last post but there we are ! Oh well. A couple of things to mention from the last post … it was one of the more obvious April Fools posts but I had enjoyment typing it up and doing the simple (and not so simple) modification for the Dwagon in Black pictures. I did do the thing you’re not supposed to do and cut a watermark off one of the pictures … But that was someone claiming a copyright they don’t own. The Pocket Dragons are the copyright of Real Musgrave and their now defunct organisation (link to wiki), so someone else putting a watermark on them is the equivalent of the people stealing art for the new Non Fungible Token fad.
Credit your artists wherever you can, hopefully that means they get a little bit more back for their art which means they can afford the expenses that goes into making that art which means they make more art.
I’ve been off work this week, needed a break and some time away from it. I’ve been mostly in the games although I am enjoying watching the end of the Masters today. There’s also been lots of stream watching … a lot of it blurring into the early morning. Oops. Mind you, there’s been a bit of Mars Horizon addiction feeding into that too.
Will this be the thumbnail today ?
Yep, Elite’s happened as I steadily make my way around the galaxy. I’m in a curious spot at the moment where I need to make my way around a gap between the spiral arms of the galaxy …
Helm, Set the Satnav
That’s the path needed to get where I’m headed … You can’t bridge the gap between galactic arms by going direct because there aren’t enough stars there, so I started picking up the advanced planning at the left circle. The map above is from the Neutron Star Route Planner, which is giving lots of waypoints to go between. I’m mostly not going by that … although I have been using it as a guide. There’s another change coming as well because I’ll stop off at another carrier along the way. (The other tabs there are EDSM Elite Dangerous Star Map pages with my waypoints plus there is one for the Neutron Star Plotter, EDDB’s Stations page and my current location)
Putting a ring on it
Seeing the sights along the way too, although I kinda want to be doing other things in the game now instead of travelling. I’ve been doing that in the game for quite a while. Oh and there’s an expansion coming soon as well, I have very little interest in the Scifi Space Shooter aspects that have been brought in (more on that later) but it will be good to get out and walk on planets instead of just taking the buggy.
A quiet campsite
That’s where I left things yesterday. Still lots of travel to do, this is at the lower part of that path where it started going to the right.
Talking of satnav … I did a bit more out and about in the car on Thursday. The main objective was to do something about the empty plastic bottles that have been getting out of hand … I take these to recycling bins but the usual one got taken away. (There’s another one, sorted !) And I wanted to get hold of a magazine about remote control cars too, to learn a bit more about those before I look into actually shelling out cash on them. You know, figure out what you should put the money towards and learn what to avoid spending money on.
That’s a future likely hobby again. I could do with having a place to work on them (too much junk taking up space that I need to throw out !). This is kinda sparked off by the new Lego remote control buggy … Lego’s great but I don’t have much confidence in it staying together as a buggy going over jumps. It’s time to go for something a bit more sturdy there. But which one ?
One thing I did see on the roundabout route back was an empty skating park … Brain saw that and thought it would be ideal place to play with a remote control buggy at. Will have to do more research there.
It was good to be out and about in the car, learning more about it. Handles nice, although I did manage to wake up the traction control on there. (I was behaving … mostly) The mpgs were going up steadily too. I’ll look to be out and about more as the lockdowns steadily lift. One curious thing, it’s odd to be hearing the rattles of the bus in front (it had a badly malfunctioning turbo I think) as you’re going along at a little under 40mph.
To Mars !
Yep. Been playing Mars Horizon again. It’s still a wonderfully addictive simple game to play and I hugely enjoy it.
The colony grows
I had a little look at Planetbase again last week too. This is one of only a few games where I have all of the achievements. It’s a simple one to play, with external objects like power generators (solar panels and wind turbines), power batteries, water collectors and landing pads. Inside the base are botany farm domes for food, production domes, sleeping domes, canteens and exercise areas, labs and medical domes. It’s strength is also a weakness … if you can see the signs, then you can make the decision to stop the colony dying out due to lack of food or other crisis. But you can also have things happen like all your medics die because they were going outside in a solar flare storm which leads to radiation poisoning which doesn’t end well if you aren’t making the medicine because that’s coded out of the AI.
Yep. Game has issues … but I could understand them, play within those issues and still enjoy the game. Whereas something like Banished would suddenly murder your colony in a death spiral for which you would have no understanding of the cause. (May need to look at Banished again).
Colony builders are usually nice chilled out games and good for a bit of relaxation. I should get back to Per Aspera and Surviving Mars at some point, plus Aven Colony was on my wish list for a while, I now own that courtesy of Humble Bundle.
Talking of more travel …
It’s one small step for gaming …
I’ve been enjoying Mass Effect Andromeda again, in its early stages. It’s a fun game, probably goes on a bit too long though and I’m a little frustrated that it gates your progress. The reason for that is in spoiler space but the brief summary is that as you go on, the planets become more habitable and you can reach places you couldn’t before. Like quest markers that are literally 10 feet beyond where you can go. That’s frustrating …
But as said, it’s also a huge fun game and I like the various characters. Especially Sara Ryder. It’s a much more fun themed game than the earlier Mass Effect games, definitely not taking itself particularly seriously. The Mass Effect trilogy remake is coming later in the year. I have mixed feelings about that but might well get it anyway. I hugely enjoyed the world set up in the first two Mass Effect Games, I didn’t enjoy seeing that get torn down in Mass Effect 3.
Anyone seen my ship ?
Early days. Looking to enjoy the game more. The graphics can be better … I’ve been kinda holding off on playing the prettier games like this until I could put a graphics card upgrade in. Those are in incredibly short supply at the moment as demand has vastly outstripped supply. As in, you cannot get graphics cards of any kind at the moment outside of paying massively over the odds to people who lurk in the supplier websites and then resell for a profit.
Other games have included :
Stellaris – I’m nowhere near as much a fan of this as in the early days. Not sure. It’s got too many bugs in there now and I just find other games more satisfying and enjoyable to play.
Motorsport Manager – I’m closing in on winning Phase 2 of my Win Every Championship campaign. My manager is 61 years old though, I wonder if there is an upper enforced retirement age limit.
XCom 2 – a little … a couple of fights happened but I’ve been in Motorsport Manager and Mars Horizon more.
Music has happened with a Morcheeba album, an old All About Eve concert cd and Christine and the Queens appearing. I’ve been enjoying those.
But I can hear that dinner bell going off now so I think it’s time to (check what I’ve written for a change) hit post.
Good restful week off, there’s been a few headaches along the way (probably need more fresh air), did get out and about … missed the cheap leftover Easter Eggs, lots of games, lots of stream watching to enjoy.
Hope you all had a great week, stay safe, be well.
