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there's a frog in my snake oil
Reminds me of my time in Forza Horizon 4 (which I have 170 hours in now, according to GOG Galaxy) and my 7 1982 Porsche 911s.

Horizon 4 is the first 'live' game that I've become invested in, and call back every few days to do my dailies and weeklies.

Installing it on PC a few days ago relit my fire - It runs flawlessly at 70+ fps/Ultra settings with my now aging 980ti; a noticeable difference from the locked 30 on Xbox.
I wish I could even claim I've tuned them up

The fancy one is all pimped out with jump jets and such. And one of these is all lead-lined for a trip to the gas lands.

But the others are... decoration?

(I guess I'll kit out a base with clanking sentries at some point, for as long as the batteries last...)


Ah yes, that reminds me, I should fire Fallout 4 up again to make sure all my stuff is still there.
Dogmeat definitely smashes his dog bowl around when you're not there. No manners!
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The People's Republic of Clogher
I wish I could even claim I've tuned them up

The fancy one is all pimped out with jump jets and such. And one of these is all lead-lined for a trip to the gas lands.

But the others are... decoration?

(I guess I'll kit out a base with clanking sentries at some point, for as long as the batteries last...)




Dogmeat seems to smash his dog bowl around when I'm not there. No manners!
I tuned one, kept one stock ... then bought another and tuned it for a different class, even though you can save and swap tunings on the fly.

Then I saw some going cheaply in the in-game auction and put bids on them, only expecting to win one.

I won them all.... and don't want to sell them.
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The People's Republic of Clogher
The Outer Worlds is looking more than decent, and not far off now.



It's available Day 1 on Game Pass (console and PC) so it's a no brainer for me, because I'd have bought it anyway. The Microsoft acquisition on Obsidian probably came too late to give them the cash to throw at the usual myriad of bugs their games tend to have on launch, but hey.

It's part of their charm.



Awesome. Yeah, very excited. Seems like it'll be more "open" in the sense of allegiance and style, and not as much in the "just walk wherever" style. That takes a little edge off it for me, because I think it's the latter I love more, of the two, but I'm still crazy excited about it and if restricting the movement a bit here and there allows them to make a really focused, faction-based experience with lots of ways of progressing, it's well worth it.

Definitely day one for me, too. One of my most anticipated games.



The People's Republic of Clogher
Awesome. Yeah, very excited. Seems like it'll be more "open" in the sense of allegiance and style, and not as much in the "just walk wherever" style. That takes a little edge off it for me, because I think it's the latter I love more, of the two, but I'm still crazy excited about it and if restricting the movement a bit here and there allows them to make a really focused, faction-based experience with lots of ways of progressing, it's well worth it.

Definitely day one for me, too. One of my most anticipated games.
Yeah they've said it'll be a 20 hour kind of experience rather than a Bethesda style behemoth which was a little disappointing at first but they were a small indie studio up until a few months ago. It was probably the maximum they could do in their budget.

I'm probably more excited for what Obsidian do next, especially since the established big two of RPGs, Bioware and Bethesda, are moving further and further away from the games which initially brought me to them.



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
Isn't this just reskinned Fallout?



The People's Republic of Clogher
Isn't this just reskinned Fallout?
Not really. It's by the New Vegas developers and is a Sci-fi rpg and is definitely targeting that Bethesda audience but, crucially, it's being made by a studio with actual writing chops and is made on the Unreal engine and not the ancient Gamebryo.



Bought Crash Team Racing...it's no Mario Kart, but it's a fun ride



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
RDR2 is now showing its ugly side.

Tacitus' comment on controls about a hundred pages back was no understatement. Horses do have minds of their own. Add to that the constant invisible wall I slam into (lightly sloping mountain paths, gaps between trees and rocks, or just a random temporary horse stepping in the way) I get tossed around quite a bit. The weapons wheel has a mind of its own, too, constantly resetting my weapon slot preferences. Random encounters with town folk or passersby on the road pull their gun on me yet the law comes after me if I retaliate. I would understand if I drew first but this is the wild west of sorts. The character shows as a red blip on the map so there is some variable behind the scenes flagging him as hostile. You would think the obvious step would be to let that same property affect the law's or local witness' handling of the situation. If character is green, lawmen attack, else if red it's a fair fight. I do hate getting chased out of a town because someone else drew down.

Also I've noticed inconsistencies with my weapon stopping power. For example, 3+ pistol shots are required to take anyone down so far. Alright, so I just need to use Dead Eye for a headshot. But now I'm noticing shotguns have started requiring multiple shots as well, which is really weird to me. Hunting only involves my Springfield Bolt Action with a Medium Range Scope. Great combo, IMO. But even that has stopped taking animals down with headshots. For example, last night I stumbled into the Legendary Coyote (or whatever it was) area. First shot was a Dead Eye headshot while it was sniffing around a carcass. Down it goes!! But wait! He seems to be having a second wind, and off he runs. I figured at least it was critically wounded and I would find it bleeding out just over the hill, but no. He must have been part ninja because there was NO sign of his trail anywhere. Several minutes later I see him sprinting full speed in a circle around his zone. I use Dead Eye again for a body shot. The thing tumbles, yet continues on like he tripped over a rock and vanishes again. Third encounter I saw him running away from me across a railway bridge. I'm thinking he's got a bullet in the gut and one drilling farther into his skull with each leap, so surely one more should do it. I use Dead Eye one last time and fire. Down he goes again, tumbling along the track just on the far end of the bridge. And he's not getting up so that's a good sign. As I ride over to claim his hide a train appears. With only time enough to get off the track myself, I had to abandon my kill to the mercy of the steamy apex hunter. It did drag my kill a bit down the bridge, but I was eventually able to finish the job.

My point is, that things are just WEIRD in this game. There are minor details that feel like they could have been ironed out. I see forum discussions on many of these problems, but nothing seems to be done for them. It is enough that I'm now looking for a replacement for my casual gaming unwind.

I thought Ghost of Tsushima would be out later this month but last I checked I saw a 2020 release =\ I'm also looking for a decent RTS. I thought about the Battlestar Gallactica: Deadlock. Anyone touched this one?
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The People's Republic of Clogher
More so than enemies levelling up with you, the thing I noticed was how they appear to nerf DeadEye as you progress. When you unlock the 'paint the target' style it seemed to take a lot more bullets to down someone than the previous one-at-a-time DeadEye.

If ever there's a company who won't respond to consumer pressure, it's Rockstar.



there's a frog in my snake oil

If ever there's a company who won't respond to consumer pressure, it's Rockstar.
I swear to god I've never once got their bug report site to work. It always bugs out. (I'll also swear that it's entirely deliberate )



Decided to pick up Kingdom Come: Deliverance since there was a HB sale. Just started it yesterday and already rage quit because riding a horse in this game is pure torture. I keep dying trying to ride to Talmberg. It's not even the fact that I have to double tap shift in order to sprint while riding (though, come on, if holding down shift is good enough for my character then the freaking horse can manage). No, it's the fact that for some reason someone decided it would be asking too much to have an adequate field of view while riding your horse. My horse turns left, my guy is looking right, I get the horse straightened out and my guy decides to go spastic. I finally get everyone on board and bam! I bleed to death. This is the beginning of the game, guys. I mean...

At least I helped what's-her-face. That was a bit of a boost.

Don't even get me started on the combat.

I'll try again tomorrow.



The People's Republic of Clogher
I think I died 3 or 4 times on that ride too. Eventually, I figured out that going full speed for as long as possible but then leaving a bit of stamina in the tank for the final stretch was the best strategy. I was playing with a controller so didn't have the problems you seem to be having.

The game's ... well it's got lots of good ideas but it's a bit charmless.



there's a frog in my snake oil
Liking this dirty dev fix:

QA complained that the car handing was subtly different from the other versions of the game. It just didn’t feel quite right. We couldn't find any problem, so we invited one of the testers to our office to discuss the issue. He played the game there and confirmed that the problem did not occur in our office, though it did occur in the QA build.

We started to try to narrow down the differences between the QA build and our development build. After some testing, we found that the difference in handling was related to the frame-rate counter that we were printing in the corner of the screen in our dev build. With this disabled, as in the (master) build we supplied to QA, the handling did indeed feel slightly different. Better, in fact. We spent some time blind testing (covering up the frame-rate counter, switching it on and off) to convince ourselves that this was the case. The difference was subtle, and difficult to pin down exactly. But it was clear – printing the frame-rate “fixed” the handling issue.

We spent a couple of weeks, on and off, trying to track down the cause of this problem. We inspected the physics code, which was supplied by the team working on the other versions of the game, looking for uninitialized variables (which could be affected by the stack state left behind by the font print routine) or possible timing issues. We tried initializing memory. But we could find no cause or fix.

As a last resort we investigated whether moving the frame rate counter around the screen affected the car's handling. It didn't seem to matter where the frame rate was printed, or even whether it was on or off the screen, for the fix to be effective.

It was during this last test, on the eve of submission, that we realized the solution to the problem – if not the cause. We shipped the game with the debug frame-rate counter permanently enabled, printing the frame-rate just off the right hand side of the screen.

The invisible squirrel timers & the silent sound we're good too



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
Anyone taking part in the World of Warcraft: Classic coming out later this month?



there's a frog in my snake oil
Never got into WoW. Now I feel safer that way

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More off-street dev shenanigans...

This is an older one, but Force 21 was an early 3D RTS which used a follow cam to observe your current platoon. Toward the end of the project we had a strange bug where the camera would stop following the platoon -- it would just stay where it was while your platoon moved on, and nothing would budge it. The apparent cause was random because we couldn't find a decent repro case.

This went on until, finally, one of the testers noticed that it happened more often when an air strike occurred near your vehicles. Using that info I was able to track it down. Because the camera was using velocity and acceleration and could be collided with, I had derived it from our PhysicalObject class, which had those characteristics. It also had another characteristic: PhysicalObjects could take damage. The air strikes did enough damage in a large enough radius that they were quite literally "killing" the camera.

I did fix the bug by ensuring that cameras couldn't take damage, but just to be sure, I boosted their armor and hit points to ridiculous levels. I believe I can safely say we had the toughest camera in any game.



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
6 days? Sup with that?
I'm still sticking it out with RDR2. I've gotten back into the missions to change the pace. That's helped some, but wow can they drag on!

I noticed a PS Store sale this weekend. I think it ends today. If not, I guess I missed my chance, but I saw Witcher III for like $15 US with DLC included. Figured if it's still up tonight I might give it a go. I also noticed a sequel to Mirror's Edge. Interesting. Anyone try that? Or CCP's Eve: Valkyrie? That was one of the earlier VR games that has since been made playable without the VR requirements. I can't remember if it was online or mission-based. If online PVP then I imagine it's a ghost town at this point, but I did want to try it.

Meh. I'm just avoiding other threads now. lol.



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
Came here for the Gamescom newsplosion... Wait...