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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)

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.

Round the world, round the galaxy ?

by Sleepypete

November 8, 2020

8:37 pm

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futuristic, games, internet spaceship, mental health, picture, sailing, stayathome

Hello everyone,

Me stuff first … I think I’m in one of those slumps at the moment. You know, where you think you should be doing things but the things end up not happening and then you get more disappointed in yourself due to not doing the things and it becomes a self reinforcing issue.

My psychology tends to be like that. I’ll enjoy the times when I’m flying but people with this issue can’t really control when they’re in the slump and it’s really tough to get yourself out of said slump.

Don’t worry about me too much though. I’ve got a good bunch of people around who I can natter to. I’ve got a good focus of things to aim on at work. Having focus is good. It gives you a steer and a direction to go in when your mind thinks you should be doing Things but doesn’t think much of the options on hand. The thing with work is that you’ll usually have a series of things that you absolutely must get done, which leads to that focus.

Yep. Still working. UK has gone into lockdown again but the circumstances for me and my team haven’t really changed. We’ve been working from home, taking advantage of remote working connectivity and skype to stay in touch and keep things rattling along. That’s been happening since the original lockdown in March. The only thing that has changed is that we won’t be doing an away trip this month. The activity is still happening but less of us are going due to the lockdown.

Talking of going places …

It was the start of the Vendee Globe round the world single handed yacht race today. I’ve been looking forward to this since the end of the last one.

That’s Sam Davies of Initiative Coeur waving farewell. The next time we’ll see them will be in about 2.5 months. May they have fair winds and swift, safe sailing.

This is one of those ultimate sporting events. Yep, there’s a lot of technology involved that makes the boats fast but the sailors are all at the mercy of the weather and random objects in the water. Technology like foils to lift the boats out of the water (makes them go FAST) helps but it’s the better sailors who will go out in front. And then there’s no small amount of luck too with the weather and those objects in the water. I follow the Brits especially closely and the site I’ll be following the race on is Alex Thomson’s site (linky).

It’s early days so far and apart from one, they’re all within 23nm of each other. Hopefully that lasts for as long as possible. I’m sure we’ll get an exciting race.

Looking forwards to it.

Part of that slump has involved the internet spaceships as well. I really don’t like the combat in the game and definitely didn’t enjoy the conflict zone community goals. I nearly did a bit more mining but was finding other things to do that were more enjoyable. Like …

That’s Cloudpunk, a game with a very Bladerunner-esque vibe where you play a delivery driver in a futuristic city. There’s an exaggerated pixelated look to the graphics which I think works nicely.

The soundtrack is excellent too. It’s had me chair dancing a couple of times.

And there is a dog AI. I definitely enjoyed my first little session in the game last night. However …

New ship ! And a new mission. She’s the Searching for Dragons, callsign K080LD and her mission is to circumnavigate the galaxy.

There was a bit of preparation work to do first though, including visits to a couple of engineer bases.

Trying out the new paint job there. Looks good. This is a free gift to everyone who owned the Horizons expansion that enabled planetary landings, the expansion has been rolled back into the main game in preparation for the next one coming early next year. It’s an interesting move. I like it, it’s a nice gesture plus it collapses the code base down to one variant which should make for easier and more reliable coding. Or less bugs for us players.

My engineer sense getting the better of me there. One fun thing of the game is looking at the detail aspects. How are the ships put together to make them work as spaceships. So on the Anaconda above, there’s a command area up top, weapons below and it looks like big box shaped areas which will be where the cargo would go. I’m always curious about the landing gear too and how people are expected to embark and disembark. I’ll have a closer look at that at some point when I find interesting planets to land on.

Or you lighten the ship up, put in the big hyperdrive and zoom off around the galaxy. That shot is in the livery I picked out a while ago. Looks good, hopefully there will be a good few screenshots coming in the next couple of months.

Last one coming in a bit … Other things I’m looking at currently are :

Advent stuff – I missed the boat with the marshmallow advent calendar (all sold out) but I have a list of games to talk about with the Advent things. There are many games on the list. I will need to play some of them to get screenshots. I know, tragic.

More upgrades – I’ll probably be upgrading to a nVidia 3070 based card when stocks become available and the price gouging relents. (They’ve gone up 10%+ since announcement). Or I wait for the rumoured but not announced 3060 card. Either one will be a massive upgrade on my 1060 card. I won’t be waiting for the AMD graphics cards.

And house stuff that I should be doing.

Last picture for tonight. That was stopping off at the Iris Nebula Visitor Centre. Found base, not found nebula. Yet.

It was good being back in the game. I dropped The Outer Worlds due to being bored with the story and the gameplay. Star Trek Online has been scaled back to me just playing the episodes occasionally. I’m thinking about going back into Final Fantasy XIV, I need to see how my arms decide to behave.

I am still having to limit things though. I was feeling tightness in my arm earlier which I need to monitor.

Probably need to add mattress to that House List. And a chair ! Mine is getting old and rocks more than it should in angles that it shouldn’t.

Oh well. Getting old, like me. Birthday soon !

And on that note, goodnight everyone, stay safe, be well.

Felt like starships

by Sleepypete

October 26, 2020

7:46 pm

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games, internet spaceship, star trek

Hello everyone,

Been back among those stars again. I had more thoughts too but first … will this be the thumbnail !

Game screenshot. A spaceship with a tubular main hull is coming towards the camera. It has a pair of engines on outriggers at the back. In the background is a small bright white star with two cones emerging. — Tiamat’s Chariot at a White Dwarf star

The pondering is because the thumbnail system seems to have a few Interesting Quirk things to it. Last time, it showed the Star Trek Online pic as the thumbnail, instead of it being the first pic. But I think that was down to the first two not coming out of my Google Photo bank properly. I wonder …

Game screenshot. The Imperial Cutter starship from before is landed on a pad. It has a copper hull and is catching the light from spotlights at the corners of the pad. — Landing at Black Hide

Nope. Didn’t work that time. I added in another widget that lets me choose pictures from that Google Photo Bank without intermediary steps. Looks like it might need more work.

I need to add in a lists widget too so that I can copy over the lists from Blog Mk 1. And I need to tidy up all of the extra things added in with the import. Later 🙂

There may also have been Star Trek happening. I left it last time with the Sylvia Tilly … Since then there’s been the Amna Patel :

Game screenshot. A Star Trek ship is coming towards the camera to exit off the right side of the screen. It has an elongated triangular main hull with 4 warp nacelles at the back.

Watchers of Voyager may recognise that as a Prometheus class ship. The name comes from one of the earlier episodes of Star Trek Online, Amna Patel appears in (spoiler deleted). The latest ship is the Drake :

Game Screenshot from Star Trek Online. A small but powerful looking ship with 4 engines has a large starbase behind it.

Looks a bit ugly doesn’t it … Should be pretty punchy though. This one arrived yesterday and because I’m having to heavily ration my game time at the moment, not much happened with this one.

What’s happening outside of the games ? Bit of catching up with series like Away, The Witcher. Actually watched Avengers Endgame again tonight, it’s just finishing up at the moment. A suitable conclusion to that particular saga.

Plus I’m making my way through Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds as well. That future universe has spaceships too and the biggest ones belonging to humans are the lighthuggers, starships that cross the interstellar gaps at near light speed (faster than light isn’t something they do in that universe). Objectively, it takes years but subjectively, only weeks or months. Hopefully that’s the right way round for the way that works.

Anyway, the lighthuggers feel like they’d look like massively scaled up versions of the Imperial Cutter … a cylinder, tapering at the ends, with a pair of engines mounted on spars to each side of the hull.

Game Screenshot - Elite Dangerous. The Imperial Cutter starship is on the landing pad. We are viewing it from the port side. The ship has a long mostly circular fuselage with two engines aft, extending from the hull to the sides on outriggers. The ship is in the copper colouration and is catching the light from pad spotlights.

There we go from another angle. It’s a pretty ship. The lighthuggers would be scaled up considerably from there. The Elite Imperial Cutter is a chunky 192.6m long. The lighthuggers would vary in size but would typically be 3-4km long, with space for crew, weapons, cargo, parasitic craft (bigger than the Cutter) and room for all sorts of other shenanigans in there too. Way too big for landing on planets like the Elite ships.

One random thought that got in though would be … if I were actually living in these science fiction universes, what would I be doing ?

If it were Elite, I’d follow the player path and start in the cheap loaned ship before making my way up the scale. I’d be living by my wits, travelling from place to place, following the trade and missions. I’d be chief engineer, pilot, captain, CEO. Unless someone came along who would share that captain, CEO role.

It feels kinda like it might if I switched to living on a Dutch Barge here, although I don’t think going from place to place, trading out of a Barge is particularly viable economically any more. Perhaps you might get some niche out of videoing trips and monetising that … but I’m not convinced that would gain a significant enough audience.

In the Alastair Reynolds universe, I’d probably end up as a starship mechanic. I’d be quite happy with that. Same for Elite too, it’d be good working on the various spaceships out there.

Star Trek ? Probably an engineer on a starship again.

One difference would be the connectivity. We benefit hugely in our time from the internet, although even that is perhaps in the last 10, maybe 12 years or so. The internet in its current shape has been around for decades now but the big change for me has been the increase in video and streaming media. Youtube took a while to take off, the oldest subscriptions I tend to see on Twitch go back about a little over 6 years. Netflix didn’t start streaming until maybe 2007.

Things have changed a fair bit. The internet model works for our planet, as lightspeed delay isn’t a factor. But when you have an interstellar civilisation, or even interplanetary, that light speed delay would cut into the immediacy of communications. If the Netflix server were on Earth and you were on Mars, it would be between 3 and 22 minutes for the “I want to watch The Witcher!” command to be received and the same time for the signal to come back, depending on whether Earth and Mars are on the same or different sides of the Sun. Or it would be years for a lightspeed message to go between stars.

Maybe that pilot, chief engineer, captain, CEO set of roles would expand to become interstellar postman.

You’d file a flight plan to say that you’re going through a sequence of interstellar jumps and they’d load you up with the mail, to be sent on at each jump.

Might well work too ! Back to an interstellar equivalent of the Stagecoaches.

On that note, time to dive into book again after hitting publish and doing the necessary on the various sites. (Actually – time to dip into Star Trek Online to do today’s daily mission !)

Away in a Seaquest

by Sleepypete

October 19, 2020

9:01 pm

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book, games, holiday, ouch

Hello everyone,

I was about to say “good week off last week” but suddenly I’m not entirely sure about that ! Not something I can put my finger on there, perhaps it’s something more than me, perhaps it’s a world situation thing.

Still, I wasn’t in the house all week last week, not quite.

Picture. A rural scene. In the foreground, an empty weather beaten bleached wooden table. It's mostly covering a stone path. Beyond are trees and green covered hills in the background.

I wonder if that’ll work. I’m attempting something with Google Photos … My phone will upload the pictures it takes to Google and in theory, they should be accessible from there. (If it doesn’t work, I’ll go to a Plan B and reupload the post !) (Update – I went to Plan B !)

I disappeared off to the Mall to pick up this year’s Star Wars Lego Advent Calendar. I also had a look in PC World for keyboards as I think the patience is running out with this one. (Keyboards on display but none of the ones I wanted were in sale boxes)

I also took a trip to the Bookbarn …

Picture. Loot from the farm shop, plus books. The books are the old Battlestar Galactica novel, plus Bill the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison. Sweets include a tasty brownie block, a large chocolate teacake and packets of strawberry bonbons, lemon sherbets, kola kubes and fudge.

Books happened … also more loot later when I went up the motorway to the farm shop place. Some of the loot has already disappeared … Oh and I don’t think I’ll be going back to the Bookbarn in the near future. It’s a shame really, there just aren’t enough books on display there ! There are actually more books packed into the Cardiff Market book stall than there might be on display at the Bookbarn.

I’ll hope to be able to make another trip into Cardiff at some point, although that’s heavily dependent on the world situation at the moment.

We shall see.

I’ve been watching some more of those stories lately … When I was at university, one of the things I’d watch when back for the weekends was Seaquest DSV … Whereas most of the scifi programmes were going into outer space, Seaquest was going under the sea with a hyper advanced submarine. The first series was ok, within the limits of its production values. I’m kinda glad I missed the second series when it came out because it was … a bit rubbish. The writing suffered tremendously.

And then it was rebooted for a third series, where Seaquest returned 10 years after they’d been abducted by aliens. Did I mention bad writing ?

The third series actually isn’t that bad. I was surprised to recognise the name of Naren Shankar on the opening credits (in big letters of importance too). He is the co-showrunner of The Expanse series and they’re doing a fantastic job of converting the books to the television format. I’d highly recommend watching The Expanse.

I may have found myself binge watching the second half of the series of Away too, where a group of 5 astronauts are looking to find their way to Mars. The intent was to stop at 3 episodes and leave the last 2 for later in the week but I just wanted to know what happened.

I’m finding that with Star Trek Online at the moment …

Game screenshot from Star Trek Online. A chaotic scene around a mushroom shaped starbase. Explosions are going off everywhere.

Looks a bit hectic doesn’t it …

The gaming might be why I’m having the not so good week feelings from last week. I’d like to be able to dive into seeing what they’ve written in to Star Trek Online (plus I’d like to finish The Outer Worlds too) but my body isn’t cooperating there.

I’m having to strictly limit the time in game due to my arm and shoulder looking to erupt in pain if I’m in there too long. At the moment, it’s just the scenario in the screenshot above, where you’re looking to scramble to rescue civilians by beaming them up and on to transports. It’s very hectic. There should be loot at the end, although I need to stay with the scenario for another 11 days I think to get that loot.

It is ouchy though and I’ll have to a) look more at why and b) consider if it’s a game I want to continue playing. I haven’t actually been back into Final Fantasy XIV for about a month now as it was causing similar shoulder issues.

It’s annoying.

But it’s not stopping me diving into books at the moment :-). The two that appeared from Book Barn were :

Battlestar Galactica – the novelisation from the original film. I’ve read this one before (a couple of decades ago probably !) and while it followed the film fairly closely, it added in its own bits of detail too. I liked the original film, it kept a fun aspect and it wasn’t part of the whole depressing grimdark aesthetic that the new series pioneered.

Harry Harrison’s book – never read any of his books, saw it, thought I needed more book !

So – didn’t do much in the week off. Thought about work a little but managed to not open the laptop up. Set this new page up ! Needs more work. Hurt shoulder … oops.

Got to the point in Absolution Gap (Alastair Reynolds) where it’s starting to pick up momentum.

Time to hit post I think ! Have a great week everyone, stay safe, be well.

Smuggling Cigars and Otherwise Trekking

by Sleepypete

September 28, 2020

10:00 pm

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games, internet spaceship, stayathome

Hello again,

It’s been a week again ! Must post more often. Noot that sure why I’m not, perhaps it’s a sense of wanting to isolate from the world, even more than just staying inside.

Lots of nasty news out there at the moment, whether it’s the virus situation or the various political situations. I’ve been steadily unfollowing a few people who I’ve kept an eye on for a little while. The world’s changed and they’ve changed with it. People write about doomscrolling and if all the people posting do is post Doom, that can be really bad for your mental health.

If it’s getting you down, cut it out of your feed and your life. We see that sort of stuff from all over the place, so Fear Off Missing Out doesn’t really apply. I’ve temporarily muted a couple of the Farcebook people, especially when they go overboard with the political stuff and into broken record territory. I used to follow George Takei on the Twitter, he was legendary for jokes and memes … now totally overly political.

That’s not to say that people shouldn’t use their voice … but if they become the cause, they’re not what made them fun to follow any more. Authors like James S.A. Corey and John Scalzi definitely have a great balance there. They’ll occasionally talk about the world situation but they’re more about their work and keeping to Fun Stuff.

Apart from that … Nurburgring 24 hours motor race was last weekend ! I got set up to watch the whole race this time, with pizza … And then rain happened ! The two 24 hour races got shifted from June to September this year. Le Mans got away with it, the threatened rain never erupted and it was a dry race, despite some juicy footage of lightning from near the venue. Nurburgring Nordschlieffe was another story though. They got some dry running in but they had to red flag the race overnight, calling a pause due to fog and heavy rain.

There had been a couple of damaging crashes for the leading cars in the half hour or so leading up to the red flag, so it was a good decision.

Only 1 Lexus in the race this year. I like following the RC F’s because they’re reasonably similar to what I have. Except for the coupe bodyshell, strengthened chassis, uprating all round and … oh … 5 litre engine. They were doing ok overnight, although I didn’t see what happened to them in the morning after the restart.

The coverage up the field is good, via youtube and there’s a good timing site which lets you track all of the cars … but the coverage isn’t great at keeping up with perhaps 2 thirds of the 97 car field for this year.

Still, it was good to watch and the treacherous conditions were keeping the result in doubt all the way to the end.

In real life stuff, I got me some ear drops … which have somewhat brought my head state back a bit ! I think the ear got so blocked, it was causing pressure on the rest of my head along with the tinnitus and one ear only hearing. But the ear drops have been improving.

Spaceships ? I’ve been enjoying the X52 Pro stick. It feels easier to use compared to the old one. I’m not too sure why, I think the action might be a little damped so instead of you putting a force in to move it and stop it, the damping stops it. I could do with the throttle being looser though.

I completed the trip back last weekend and along the way, visited one of the Guardian sites which have been left behind by a long dead race. Was that their high street ?

Is that a way in ?

This was a fairly extensive site, although I didn’t find a puzzle here. I must come back and do the Ram Tah mission chain, which apparently tells you much more about the Guardians.

I didn’t do the trip all at once, this was a stop off at the Eagle Nebula facility.

It was good to be back in civilisation though and Tiamat’s Chariot looks great in her new livery.

Someone mentioned that they needed a zebra prop though, which gave me a demonic idea … That’s ~~photoshopped~~ Gimp’d, although there is a Dazzle Camo paint scheme for one of the smaller Imperial ships.

That’s a fun thing that the stick can do. It’s a bit limited by the display size (3 addressable lines in the middle, that’s it for such a big area) and I needed third party software to make it do anything but having the landing pad instructions was cute. And about the most useful thing I’ve managed to get out of it so far. Maybe combat will be different.

The Community Goal for this week is one that deals in small quantities of good though, so as Tiamat’s Chariot isn’t really suited for that, Zoomnarr gets a little more flight time. There’s an Imperial shipyard near the collection site too with a couple of capital ships …

Also, some rare goods may give you more than you bargained for. They’re actually looking for beer, caviar, cigarettes and shiny fire opals.

Outside of Elite though, I was checking out other internet spaceships last night …

That’s from Star Trek Online. A curious mix of ground pounding combat like other MMOs and space based combat. It felt like Star Trek should feel, with phasers on the ground and something that feels similar to the Starfleet Command games in space.

But … it’s a 10 year old game that looks like while it’s had lots of story content for it over that period, it looks like a 10 year old game. It was making me think of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and the other games of that era.

A promising start though. That I might not be able to continue for the same reason as FFXIV ! My hand and arm aren’t a fan of me today after a couple of hours in STO last night.

A pity.

I’ve also been in Motorsport Manager 🙂 Sleepy Dwagon Racing were smashing the competition in the lowest league, so it was time to promote and they’ve got the points they should need to stay in that league already … after 3 races. I’ve got a definite formula for How To Win in that game, which makes it pretty much a certainty that I’ll eventually get them winning in the next league up … but you have to be on your game in order to keep winning. The AI doesn’t handle transitions between wet, dry and back to wet, which is a weakness that can be exploited.

I must get some screenshots from MM.

Oh, techie buying may well be adding another thing to the list … a keyboard ! The Steelseries M800 that I got 4 years ago was a wonderful keyboard for feel … but is feeling increasingly prone to mis-keying and double tapping of the keys. I’ll be looking at Logitech, Corsair or … (shock horror), the cheapie own brand one from PC World that actually felt really nice to type on.

Although that would mean going outside more …

That too.