Humanoid

After dallying for half a year, decided to get onto the job of finishing my NAS + rebuild HTPC project by ordering the final parts required. Italicised old, salvaged parts. The goal: NAS: AMD A4-4000 Silverstone AR01 HSF Gigabyte FM2A88XM-D3H 4GB G.Skill DDR3L 128GB Sandisk Ultra Plus SSD (might rethink this if I'd rather use the SATA port for another spindle, can run OS from USB stick) Fractal Design Define R4 case Seasonic G360 PSU (Don't know what OS yet, Nas4Free, FreeNAS, unRaid, OpenFiler, etc.) ^ Will just run JBOD, don't need redundancy as no critical data stored, just media. Bought a couple new 4TB WD Red drives to start this off, partially migrate some of the ~20TB of data I have on the HTPC to it, then move some of the HTPC drives to the NAS over time. HTPC has 2x4TB and 4x2TB drives currently, plus 2x3TB externals. Desktop has another 4TB which I may no longer need as well. Final tally might be 3x 4TB WD Red, 1x 4TB Hitachi Deskstar, 1x 4TB Seagate 7200.12, 2-3x Seagate 2TB various models (depending on whether I opt for the SSD, board limited to 8 SATA ports currently). View to replace 2TB drives with 5/6TB drives in future. HTPC: Intel i3-4130 Scythe Big Shuriken HSF Asus H87M-E 4GB Kingston DDR3 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus SSD 2TB WD Green HDD LG BD-RW Antec Fusion Black Seasonic G360 PSU Spare box (just the rehomed old HTPC parts): Intel i5-2400 Gelid Slim Hero HSF Asus P8H67-M 4GB G.Skill DDR3L (up to, might have a dodgy stick) 128GB Crucial m4 SSD BitFenix Prodigy Micro White case Corsair CX400 PSU

I've always preferred the Roche path, even though it's objectively less content. It has less explicit exposition of what's going on, fewer sidequests, and you gain fewer levels at the end of it. But it feels more like a proper siege situation rather than a standard CRPG town, and the information that's withheld is done so appropriately, involving things that you couldn't have reasonably known in that situation. Because of that last thing, I also feel it's the better path to take first if intending to play through twice. Anyway, it's been a full week since I last turned my desktop on. I think that's a record for any period where I haven't been away. Part of it is probably that I finally have a decent laptop that's pleasant to use and can use while vegging out on the sofa, but it does mean I haven't played any game since last Friday. It's not for lack of games, there are a good number that I'd started but have on hold - Dragonfall, Stick of Truth, Banner Saga, Broken Age, plus longer-term on-hold saves of older games. But I haven't been in the mood for anything cerebral. Maybe it's time for my annual Privateer binge again.

Mattel vs Bratz, which seems superficially similar to me, took something like eight years to resolve (finally in Bratz's favour). Wonder if Oculus will even have a shippable product out in eight years.

Huh, usually a memory bug looks more like this:

Tides of Numenera, I expect. Blah, I keep typing Numenara. I've almost completely forgotten about the game at any rate since all the focus is justifiably on Wasteland. Heck, completely forgot I had the PnP rulebook from the backer tier, I saw it lying on my shelf the other day and took a while to recall where that thing came from.

I've only meaningfully encountered it in WoW, and in a guild of say 30-40 people, I reckon only about a third used the term. That said, as co-GM I could boot anyone who dared do so.

Could be, just like any other subscription based game these days, but Wildstar is clearly build from ground up for ex- and current wow players and there was, what, over twelve million of them at it's prime? If Wildstar succeeds luring a good chunk of them over they won't be having to worry about going F2P anytime soon. But if that doesn't happen and if ESO also starts losing subbers, I wouldn't be surprised if subsciption based games would be a thing of the past soon. I don't think anyone is luring a chunk of players anywhere these days, some of the paint has worn off from MMO's after WoW... especially with subscriptions. The thing that stuck me first when I was looking at the wildstar website is that the game seemed geared towards younger players.... who may be the last social group to have regular subscription money available. But then, what do I know. What you can do is trade ingame money for gametime, like in EVE. So younger players, who often do have the luxury of time, can buy their subscription from other, time-poor players. Basically instead of gametime being credited directly to your account when purchase it, it turns into an ingame item that you can either use or trade. I don't think the game will succeed with it, but theoretically the model is decent enough. EDIT: http://wildstar-online.com/en/game/features/business-model/

True, real men put it in autoexec.bat P.S. Real men also don't load DOSKEY.

Put a shortcut to the game in your Startup folder, then you won't have to fire it up.

I'm not so sure about the whole positioning thing. I mean, I loathe the infiltration of the role trinity of MMOs into single player games as much as anyone, but bluntly, the potential alternative of having to micromanage my positioning every few seconds to keep safe is even less appealing. Even the use of chokepoints and such is overstated I think, collision detection is only the beginning and only simulates moving around concrete pillars as opposed to actual combatants. Consider sports such as basketball or any flavour of football, just getting past one guy on a wide-open playing field isn't trivial in itself, and that's with the defender being limited in what actions they're permitted to take. (Someone tries to dribble past you? Punch them in the gut as they go by.) So what I'd be looking for is some kind of abstraction of the act of actively blocking an enemy's movement. Attacks of opportunity are only half the solution, it penalises them some health for moving, but often is not a meaningful penalty given a sufficient number of hitpoints to burn. And typically it'd be a lot as opposed to one or two hits worth, a critical problem introduced by the HP inflation talked about earlier. Give up 10% of my HP in order to be able to squash that mage? Easy decision. I don't have a definitive solution for this - most of what comes to mind does tend to come with potentially irritating downsides. At the extreme point you'd have 'sticky' fighting, where once engaged in melee combat, there is no lateral movement - either stand and fight or fall back. Think Zone of Control mechanics in the earlier Civilization games. Perhaps toning it down, you could have a severe movement speed penalty in the same scenario - at say 25% speed, the enemy that tries to run past eats four times as many attacks, which in most systems is something to think about and ought to be far from trivial. A different approach might be an toggled ability by a character to enter blocking mode, which might do something like trade an attack penalty but keep one designated target in place.

And yeah, each enemy has X number of block *chances* per turn - they get used up regardless if the attack actually succeeds or not. I think fully levelled Daggers plus Dual Wield is seven attacks per turn, versus three for swords.

Prior to the DLC, you'd budget for about level 30 - in reality you'd get another couple levels or so further, but you'd be stuck inside the final dungeon by that point and won't be able to properly use those skill points. 30 levels at 3 points per level means 90 points to spend. GMing a skill is 25 points, plain Mastery is 15, so the rule of thumb is that you got to GM three skills total and master one if you fully focused your skill points. Someone who's played through with all the new post-release dungeons would have a better idea of what the new effective level cap is.

I would've thought that Original Sin would be the opening gambit of that scheme.

Bladedancers are just as powerful with daggers as they are with swords, perhaps moreso given the utility of chewing up block charges. Not that you shouldn't have taken the scout - you probably ended up with the better balance as a result. The Crusader being committed to the shield means they'll fall away rapidly midway through the game as a damage dealer, they are very definitely healers. Aside, you'll probably find you won't have the points to really push three magic skills on each spellcaster, I'd focus on two for the majority of the game as to not spread yourself too thin.

Interesting, because I feel the most common switch is actually the MX Brown since it's marketed as an all-rounder. I believe Logitech's mech keyboards use them, which probably makes them the most readily available option for browns. Only properly used brown and black myself, at home and at work respectively, the latter further dampened with O-rings. I don't like the black, with or without the O-rings, but it's just a cheap Rosewill (Newegg's house brand) so not a big investment. Really want to try out a Topre RealForce, but at about double the price of Cherry switch keyboards and being very hard to source locally, I've been reluctant to pull the trigger.

I think they're only 2-key rollover - or at least the originals were, which would make them pretty poor gaming keyboards.

The other thing is that there's often a fear about allowing one class to get significantly wealthier than the others. God forbid a thief actually be able to steal stuff worth anything. Playing a bit of TOR back in the day as a smuggler, the first act has you acquire a fantastic treasure worth a fortune as a final reward. Except that it isn't worth anything and you end up with the same amount of cash as that altruistic monkjedi who has spent exactly 0% of the game pursuing material riches. Sure, that extreme measure of equalisation tends to be associated with MMOs, but it's also prevalent in most single player games to some extent. Dragon Age for example gave out a few unique items, but a pittance in gold, and the items sell for mere pocket change. As absurd as it sometimes gets, I respect the Elder Scrolls games for at least allowing you to take anything and everything to feed your personal fortune.

Mainly a problem for people who were weird and bought a Pro Audio Spectrum or Gravis Ultrasound instead of a Sound Blaster.

Atari famously buried most of their inventory of infamous E.T. video game, often called the worst video game ever made, in a New Mexico landfill some thirty-plus years ago. Well, those games have been found.

Would be happy with an almost complete rewrite of SWTOR...

Not really advice, but brings back memories of the hyped Quake-killers of the late 90s. I think the big ones were meant to be Unreal, SiN, Prey, Half-Line and Daikatana. Unreal and Half-Life obviously did pretty well, SiN somewhat less so, and Prey had an almost Duke Nukemish development cycle and released in 2006. Daikatana is just a punchline. But yeah, I'm not much use since the last FPS I can honestly say I genuinely enjoyed was NOLF2. EDIT: And some old news headlines from 1998 verify my recollection: http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/jan98-3.html Some familiar names on the page there, heh.

The switches themselves are made by Cherry, not SteelSeries, and are commonly available - the vast majority of mechanical keyboards will have Cherry switches in them (some no-brand boards will have knock-off switches of the same design). The advantage of this is that you can therefore replace both the switches and the caps (since they're generic) individually. A place like WASD Keyboards sell individual switches and caps which you might want to look into (I've used them personally with no issue shipping to Australia). If your switch is damaged and not just the cap, then it's a bit more of a tricky fix which might need additional hardware (potentially messing with solder), but it's still within reason as long as the electronics of the keyboard aren't shot.

My experience with IWD2 was that I started with only two characters, and got to up around the ice palace-type level (no memory of what that place actually is), at whiich point it got a bit too hard for my tastes and I added two more to finish the game with.

Shouldn't the game be named Lost Beta then? I'll get my coat.