LadyCrimson

They're not on horses, but I guess they could qualify as smexy men. Ignis has apparently discovered how to make invisible coffee mugs, as well. Ppl been asking for black chocobo's for ages, so they put them in ... the Comrades DLC. Pfffft. Getting the outfits of chrs. from main game in Comrades is expensive. But worth it! Still have to get the bro's tho.

Woke up, at 9am FF-XV unpacked and installed in about 1.5 hours for me. But then I had to grab the 4K texture pack and it's another 63GB so here I am, still waiting for that to download. 1.5 hours to go. But fishing on the new boat (console) is pretty cool. I mean y'know, it's just more fishing - but ... I'm on a boat! But sadly no smexy man on a horse. The new Comrades additions are also decent, but leveling up the chocobo's is annoying. I probably won't do too much with that. About to check out the new Insomnia I guess. I feel oddly unmotivated to do that on console...maybe I'll just eat and nap instead.

Started my FFXV pre-load at midnight. 4 hours left. And in the morning, guess what ... another 2.5-3 hours since the 4k texture pack is a separate download/added on. At least the console will likely only be 6-10GB and I can play that while I'm waiting. Tried playing the demo in 4k resolution again. 30-40fps and that's not a nice smooth 35fps. Nope, can't play like that. Some might tolerate it, I can't. Sure looks pretty in 4k on the bigger TV tho. Is it morning yet?

Well from what I've seen, the new Royal/Windows XV content is fairly minimal in terms of time added, so now I'm wondering if I should skip spending the extra $15-$20 on console and just play savefile catch up on PC. But that would mean console saves wouldn't be "complete" anymore. Decisions, decisions! The new (free) update to Comrades DLC last night was fairly substantial tho. Doesn't make me want to grind for 10+ hours to do/get everything but at least it helps make the dlc feel more solid. The mission with the 4 bro's should've been in the main game tho - covers a badly missing section near the end-game that would enhance main-game playthru a lot, but noooo, they made it part of the co-op MP dlc (it's also how you get their character-editor usable clothes/features, have to do it 4 times to get each bro's look). Marketing.

Wanted to defrag my C drive. Program told me it couldn't defrag a file so I went to see which one it was, I know sometimes little windows files don't like to be touched. But it's some 18GB sized file. WTF. Discovered it was the Windows hibernate file. I've heard of it taking up some GB of space but I don't think I've ever seen it be that huge/defraggler has never spotlighted such before. I have all the hibernate options set to off (my pc is either on or off I never hiberbate), what a stupid design and don't know why it suddenly became so ginormous. Found a command prompt to truly turn it off. I feel better now. I am so cranky this week/today etc. Everything is making me rage. Well ok, not rage, but...gah.

If that's the one from the early 2000's ... this is generally how I feel about 98% of Ben Affleck movies. He has such a bland presence, for me. Although Morgan Freeman is always nice to see.

Well, I guess only the RAM is really locked into the PC in terms of upgrading. I can always take a SSD with me to a new build if it's still kicking. We looked some more and found 24RAM that's faster than my old sticks for about $270 so just going to go with that for now (and the cpu cooler). I think I mostly just want it to be good enough to wait until the market/tech settles and/or changes again, if I can. Plus when I do build a new rig, this one goes to hubby to be one of his many (he doesn't need "gaming power") so it's not like it'll go to the trashheap even then. Thanks for the Win7 link. I'll take a peek/keep it in mind. Wish I could find something on Amazon tho - I don't like purchasing online too many places. Hubby had a story about his client trying to install Win7 on a newer mobo/chip - it installed no problem but Windows kept popping up a message every hour to remind that Win7 is no longer supported or some such pestering. He wasn't saying it would always be like that, but it was kinda funny. The client ended up giving the thing to hubby.

Square revealed today that PC-FFXV will have Denuvo and that's caused a ruckus. Won't stop me, however. Not that I like DRM. But ... Pre-loading on Steam apparently = can't play the demo anymore, so I'm not doing that. Having too much fun with the Ansel screenshot feature. I decided I'd install geforce Experience for the first time ever ("create an account" - sigh, of course) to see if their video-recording thingie was decent (still love Fraps but XV produces extraextra huge fraps raw files...). But I can't get it to work/record. The fps counter works and the screenshot works, just not video. Grrr. Side benefit - installing Experience seems to have made it so Ansel does not cause the game to lag-out/hitch. So I guess I'll leave it installed for now. The XV demo still runs pretty good - I run it at 1080 with 150% scaling + 4k textures and that makes it look super crisp. It's totally awesome.

Finally, all the screens I want, and they aren't all blurry. But they do tend to get large. I snapped a 7680x4320 "super resolution" and it was like 30MB. I think I'll stick to 1080 and 4k sizes. >.> Clipping through the ocean. 4096x2048 - 360/VR screens: Someone with a VR viewer said they loved them. Wish I could see. Most of the time they just look weird to the eyeballs, but sometimes they still look pretty cool even without that viewer.

^ Oh ... I'm hoping the GPU thing will calm down after a while and manufactures catch up with the notion or some such. But I'm glad I bought the 980ti when I did - since I'm in no hurry for 4k gaming it should work for me for quite some time still. Those 4K textures in FFXV if you set them to highest possible sucks up all your vram like mad - maxed out the 6GB on my card even at 1080, although I suspect that's in part because the game just sees what you have and takes it all whether it truly needs to or not. Had to put it back to High and not Highest. Heheh.

We were looking at my mobo specs and RAM this evening and it looked like it'd be around $80 for each 4GB stick (that was the cheaper ones, some were $140), I have 6 slots so if I filled all of them for 24GB. Ram has become a little pricey I guess. (edit - note I'm talking about replacing the entire Ram, not just adding more - the six slots are currently full with six 2Gb sticks and I don't like mixing) I have an OEM version of Win7 that would likely not appreciate being installed into an entirely new rig and I have yet to find a new packaged Win7 that seems reputable - although in that case it's partly because I'm not very trusting. A lot of the ones I see being sold have lots of comments from buyers saying the keys were used and that kind of stuff. The SSD yes, about $300-$400 depending on brand and all of that. The one hubby likes was $500 tho. He's had bad experiences with some SSD's and he's become rather picky because of that I guess.

Note: by upgrading I don't mean I expect a ton of improvement, only that I want to maybe delay building entirely new for a couple years So, I'm constantly surprised by how well my old i7-920 still does, at least when paired with a decent GPU like the 980ti. I can often still get 50-60fps in games with High settings and 1440 if I want, although I may have to turn off special effects like Gameworks. Often seems to work better than some people with far newer (but lower grade) CPU's. Anyway, main block for new rig - Windows 10. And of course right now prices are inflated. So if I was to "ugprade" this old rig, it'd be like this: --better CPU cooler in case I want to OC it to 3.2 --16 or 24 RAM instead of 12, where it would still be D3 but maybe a little "faster." More importantly, just more since games are becoming more RAM hogs. --1 TB SSD This would add up to around $900-$1000. If I built an entire new rig it might be $2500+ not including a GPU or monitor if I wanted to buy those. I want to avoid Win10 as long as possible. I don't play tons of "new, intensive," online or shooter games but would like to have the possibility of running them at least ok-ish @ 1080 if I did want to play one. Main question mark would be whether $1000 would really work for the next couple years or if I should just grin and bear it with Win10. What do you think is the better course of action for me at the moment? P.S. - it's amazing to think I built this entire rig 8-9 years ago for around $1100 (initially - gpu upgrades over time, of course). Now that just barely upgrades it. Sheesh.

All antsy lately, waiting for PC release FFXV. Not interested in "playing" the demo since I know the game inside and out already and the demo save doesn't carry over, so...it's the waiting game. Which means I pester hubby even more than usual (he says I'm like a cat peeking around a corner...), bake brownies, scrub the floors, pick lint off the bedroom carpet, try but usually don't succeed at watching TV, organize stuff, dance to silly music, and so on. Maybe I should take up habitual drinking.

I expected to see a lively discussion about all the cool new OLED screens or something. I was disappointed. I don't think I mentioned this one yet: Have been slowly watching the "Electric Dreams" anthology series on Amazon - they're based on Philip K ****'s stuff. The great thing about anthology series is you can skip around to any episode since there's no continuity issues. So I've only watched the ones with the well known actors in them, so far - Steve Buscemi, Bryan Cranston, Greg Kinnear. They range from ok to pretty good, but most of the appeal was from the actor vs. material. Supposedly the best episodes are ones I haven't watched yet but overall I'd say it's watchable, or at least some episodes are. It's nowhere near as good as Black Mirror, but it passes the time well enough if you have nothing else to watch and don't want story-commitment. I hope more anthology series are made now and then, vs. being almost totally forgotten. No one will ever beat original Twilight Zone but they can keep on trying.

You can use Ansel mid-combat. And clip everywhere. I am so happy. it's a bit rough on the HDD tho, when you're triggering it every few combat frames to check things out/clip around for 10 minutes, repeat.

OK ... this Ansel snapshot mode is the bees knees. Forget "playing" the game, I'm going to be running around like Prompto trying to figure out what will make awesome screenshots.

Not playing but testing out the FFXV demo. I shoved it over to the 4K TV and played it at 1440 everything High and max quality texture assets (4k textures I guess), to start with, out of curiosity. It was largely like in the benchmark (even with Hairworks off) where 50-60ish fps but sometimes tanks down to 35ish. And the 6GB of GPU ram on the 980ti basically ran always maxed out with the 4k textures. Heh. if I drop it down to some Average, some High settings and turned all the Gameworks off, 50-70fps became more the norm, with no drops. One notch lower in texture quality = 70% of gpu ram eaten. So I think a lot of people could run it ok at 1080 with some mixture of settings, since this was on my ancient i7-920. My CPU temp didn't go up that high either, I was surprised by that. At higher resolutions it looks pretty sweet graphically and lighting-wise but at 1080 with a wide mix of average or low it looks worse than the PS4-Pro, imo. Especially if you turn the AA off.

If you mean cause you have a smaller SSD ... just install it on a cheap huge HDD then. The load times on my 7200 HDD are improved vs. the Pro by about an average of 20-40 seconds. So main loading screens are 40-50 seconds instead of 70-90 seconds, so far. That's not that bad, imo. The PS4 has slow HDDs. Fast Travel isn't very long loading anymore either, at least in the demo. It could get a little longer in the larger open-world section or FT from one to the other.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about this 1st person mode thing ... Although, it does work. But it's weird, at least in this demo and my starter weapon + you're not used to it yet. Most of the time can't see weapon itself, it just pops in and out at times. Which is good for screenshots but looks weird at times. Some linkstrikes shove you out of 1st person, some don't. Too bad you can't ride chocobo's in Chapt. 1, I hear 1st person is good with them at least. (will be fuzzy in 480, ok in 720)

Was cleaning out/organizing my drives in prep. for the PC version and these are some of the wee moments, glitches and misc. things I found amusing, from the past year. No fancy editing/slapstick, just fave moments semi-randomly put together. If you're bored (and you know the game/chrs, ofc) it might provide a couple chuckles. There are no story spoilers, it's about 7 minutes long, and your humor mileage may vary. Most importantly, my drives are all organized now. I'm ready for that Windows Edition!

Spending the past few days clearing out HDD space for all the game videos I'm anticipating myself making soon. Tempted to buy another internal HDD so I don't have to do this so often but ... nah. External drives will make do. But that next rig (that I keep claiming I'll build one day) I'm going to have a 2TB SSD and three 4TB internal HDD + a couple external backups. That might be enough. Maybe.

Congratulations! I'm afraid I don't have any advice either. Hubby and I always just went for simple silver or silver-toned type bands and for quite some time now neither of us even wear them most of the time. You keep taking them on and off when you do heavy task work then forget to put them back on and ... but I occasionally wear one when I want to display my marital status for some reason. I've considered getting us some new titanium bands but haven't done so yet. LOL ... Abyss?

it's now seeming like the demo of Chapt. 1 will have side quests disabled - likely meaning the Hunter quest chain would be unavailable. Still, that isn't a huge time aspect in Chapt. 1, so if one wanted to just fart around in the available areas you could waste a lot of time if you felt like, leveling and experimenting with Techniques and combat on the wildlife, etc. Still a decent demo.

No one knows the actual download size. He's using the stated install size/requirement as a the reference. 100GB - non-4k install, 155GB - 4k install. Although I'd suspect the download itself will still be over 70-80GB. And no, they're not good with optimizing this game in general. The way they load the world is the dumbest thing ever, but nevermind. The console version so far is around 90 GB installed. (all updates, all DLC) The demo is actually very generous - you can finish Chapt. 1 in 30-45 minutes if you really want but you can also goof off around in it for multiple hours if you really feel like it.

"With (FFXV's new) first person mode, this will be the closest thing we get to Half Life 3." --- a post on another forum