Bartimaeus

In contrast, I used to be just merely O.K. with Miriam in Raiders...but the more times I'd seen the movie, the more I loathed her. Willie from Temple of Doom, on the other hand, was incredibly annoying the first few times I watched the movie...but after more rewatches over the years, I actually grew to like her the best out of the lot, and I actually like Temple of Doom the best out of the three movies.

I really like some elements of that movie (...I have a little bit of a soft spot for classic Bruce Willis action flicks), but I also really dislike others. It's really hard for me to sit through the entire thing as a result. 12 Monkeys is more my kind of jam, to be honest.

But...I mean, I don't really get how that's clearly "mixed signals". She hung out for a while - so what? Do friends not ever see each other off when they leave? Do friends not ever hang around to talk for a bit? To me, this all seems like pretty normal, spur-of-the-moment stuff that people, friends, whatever can do depending upon the situation and what's going on. I get your frustration, and I'm not trying to say it's like invalid or anything, but, I mean, I gotta chalk this one up to two people simply not being on the same page in regards to their relationship with one another. Gotta move on if it doesn't suit you, all there is to it,

It can be a little difficult to be totally honest with your intentions in regards to somebody when you know it might very well hurt and/or offend them...particularly when you're really trying not to do that, isn't it? Probably why people, including this person, generally prefer to send "mixed signals" instead of just always saying the truth outright.

By the same token, if you don't want to be friends with someone, you can just tell them or even merely just begin to ignore them, too.

The Browns just have so very little quality depth, and some of their starters are pretty questionable, too. I can see them winning maybe a few games in the beginning of their schedule, but it's hard to see them finishing the season well (relatively speaking) after injuries have piled up on their better players.

Hm, if they bring that to EU4, I might actually play it again...

Well, we're going off on a tangent here, but from my limited non-software engineer perspective (I only took some CS classes in uni), I'm not sure it's so simple. If the data is encrypted or otherwise protected in memory (i.e. the game doesn't simply read a byte that tells it how many of X you currently have), Cheat Engine would not be able to do anything. Code/memory injection-type attacks are a thing, and countermeasures exist. You'd have to reverse-engineer the protection first and then write a custom application to inject the desired values. Essentially, a second crack. Did they even bother cracking the Keep thing for DAI? And that wasn't even "encrypted" AFAIK. Realistically, I don't know how much effort it would take to hide/encrypt/protect the game from such fiddling, especially if the decision to implement the microtransactions was more a management meeting thing after the basic design had been laid out. edit: yes, to lock you out, the game would indeed have to dial home. The problem is, encryption in live memory becomes increasingly complicated (...and not really worth the effort) when you have tools like Cheat Engine provides at your disposal. So the real value you're looking for is encrypted, O.K., fine. Are modifications to that value encrypted as well? Is the game constantly switching around where it's reading the value from in your physical memory? For the game to realistically pose any true difficulty for Cheat Engine to be able to find a given value, it really has to do all three of these things: be unpredictably encrypted in the first place, unpredictably encrypt any changes to the value in question (for example, if the original encrypted value is....5000, but is encrypted to be some random value, the encryption then must encrypt, for example, a +100 change to not be detectable as a +100 change), and then furthermore, the game must have the value changing where it's located constantly. Why is the last one important? Because even if you do the first two, it is still remarkably easy for the player to deliberately and predictably cause a change in the value they're looking to edit (for example, for the most basic thing typically being money, selling or buying something repeatedly), which an experienced Cheat Engine user will be able to notice rather quickly if they know what they're doing...and in the Cheat Engine community, it only takes one person knowing what they're doing (and there are a relatively decent amount of these people around) and pinning down a path to the true value to create a table that everyone else, experienced user or random shmuck, can use with relative ease. And even then, if all of that is done, I'm sure there are probably other ways I'm not aware of/experienced in to figure out how to bypass the encryption. I am not in any way - not even close - a Cheat Engine expert and I've dealt with the first two things I've described with varying difficulty (it depends on a case by case scenario - sometimes it's pretty easy, sometimes very difficult) and have yet to see a real implementation of the third. A true calling home feature, on the other hand, is probably less performance-decreasing than that sort of live encryption would be (as so much would have to be encrypted and swapped to prevent easy vectors of attack from an experienced Cheat Engine user) and much easier to program...but on the other hand, it requires the player to always be online, because if it allows for an offline mode, then the player can always just use Cheat Engine in the offline mode before coming back online, because the call home will then have no real choice but to accept that what the client is saying is true.

I don't know, lock you out of the game for disassembling the code or whatever. If they are pulling this and their engineers aren't completely ineffectual, the savegames and even the way the game stores in memory how many of X you currently have, will be encrypted to prevent people from giving themselves billions of dollars worth of consumables with Cheat Engine. Between this news and the previous comments about further consolization, you guys have effectively killed my interest in this game, saving me at least 10€. Thanks, Obsidian Forums! Encryption of the save files doesn't really matter, the only thing that matters is if the game calls back to the servers to match the save games - aka, if the game is online-only. Otherwise, no matter the encryption, a memory editor like Cheat Engine will make, at the very least, basic cheating (money, quantity of items, health, etc.) ridiculously easy. It's not like a hex editor which is often times extraordinarily difficult to use depending upon the game - a memory editor reads the game's memory directly, and makes cheating a breeze.

Stein is like the crazy aunt version of Sanders...anti-GMO, anti-vaccines, anti-nuclear...and why? It really just comes across as pandering to her support base. I probably agreed with maybe - maybe - about 75% of Sanders' positions...with her, it's probably more like 70%, but the extra 5% lost is some crazy basic stuff that makes it hard to respect or support her.

They get nothing. Bosa, on the other hand, is relatively in the clear after that. He probably won't be selected as high...but probably still somewhere in the first round. Additionally, they're not allowed to re-select him. The lesson here? Don't treat the overall #3 pick like crap for months on end, and then try to make up at the last second after they've already decided you're not worth playing for anymore.

Based on announcements today, it seems extremely unlikely that Bosa will ever be a Charger.

When I think of a "cheap" PSU, I think of a decently reviewed bronze-rated ~500W PSU that will almost certainly last you 5+ years as long as you aren't pushing it to its full wattage, which, if you're using an Intel CPU and a single GPU setup, you never will. It's not like we're looking at Cougar or Kingwin or Raidmax garbage, which is probably what most casual buyers would look to when thinking of "cheap": these are still halfway decent units. They're not $20 off-brand pieces of junk.

Yeah, I'll be sure to do that with my

@Bokishi: I mean, without knowing the actual OEMs involved, neither a generic "Cooler Master" nor a generic "Corsair" are much of use in deciding what to do (since neither of these two make their own power supplies).

I am pretty sure they're different platforms, though. I agree with the end conclusion, however - there's not that much of a difference between the two, and they're both 'merely' fine. I wouldn't want to put either into a serious build would be my issue - even though you're right about the Seasonic unit being older (...I'm actually rather surprised it's still being sold at this point), I would feel more comfortable with it than either the Cooler Master or Corsair units. The Cooler Master unit has build problems while the Corsair unit has quality control issues - not deal-breakers in a vacuum, but I would be hesitant to put either of them into someone else's main PC. I'm happy I was able to get an FSP Aurum 500W for a mere $20 new off of Amazon (no rebates, either) back when I built my PC. Even with its mild age, it's pretty hard to beat that.

Heh. The biggest negative about that power supply is that it uses mixed capacitors, some of good quality, some of average, and some of low. Though the warranty is 5 years (2 years longer than the Seasonic), you ideally want it to actually last at least that, and those capacitors are a definite concern. I would pay the extra 5 Euros between the two for the Seasonic...but I'd probably consider other options first, depending on availability of other PSUs (the Rosewill Hive*, for example, would be an all around better option than the Cooler Master). *But this probably isn't available outside of the U.S., and if it was, the price probably isn't that much different from the Seasonic, so again...

It always feels good to be successful where others aren't...unless or until it's supposed to be a task handled by multiple people, and it ends up with you being the perpetual 'go-to' that everyone else uses as a crutch. This unfortunately seems to happen way too often in workplace environments.

Is there any way you can skip the 120€ copy of Windows 10? Aren't they still allowing free upgrades from Windows 7/8, or did they finally actually stop that? It's hard for me to recommend anything without seeing your specific store(s). If you can get an equivalent WD Blue HDD, or Hitachi, for the same price, you should probably do that. SSD is kind of a big deal for normal Windows usage...running Windows on an HDD kills that HDD much faster than if you were just using it for storage, and it's so, so much slower. If you can find even like a cheap (40€) 120GB option, I couldn't recommend it enough. The only thing that raises a flag (again, without being able to see where you're purchasing...) is the Seasonic PSU. Yes, Seasonic PSUs are nice...but they're overpriced for what they are, and you're paying extra for the brand (or so I presume). Besides that, I can't say much about the specific parts and their prices - everything seems compatible.

No, that doesn't sound viable at all.

Given that Human Revolution practically screamed "console game" when I played it on PC for like the two hours I bothered with it, I can't imagine how bad this new one is.

What was the mechanism for that, do you know?

Not really, friendly fire was implemented/ignored in RPGs according to whatever worked for that particular game since the inception of the genre. I'm more worried about Obsidian dropping 6 member parties and Josh Sawyer mentioning on several occasions that combat in Pillars of Eternity was confusing due to the party size, which quite frankly seems ridiculous to me. Honestly I thought it was a mess in PoE. There were so many abilities and spells scattered across so many characters that I gave up micromanaging early on. I'd prefer smaller parties. In D&D I don't remember having so many abilities for melee and ranged folks, meaning I could just micromanage the magic ones. That was certainly true for Baldur's Gate: for the low to mid levels, fighter-type characters had remarkably few abilities. In regards to party sizes, I've always played the BG series with only 5 characters, which I feel is the optimal amount in a number of ways...particularly seeing as most quest and all creature kill XP is split across your characters...so you gain XP 20% faster with only 5 party members...but then again, I also use a mod that reduces all quest and creature kill XP to only 50% of its original values, so I don't feel like I'm cheating by doing all of the optional side content that gives you oodles of XP and makes you overleveled. From what I could see, even in BG1 + TotsC, the game gives you roughly 1.5 million total XP over all the content (with maybe as much as 100-150K more than that that I am not counting), which split over 6 characters is 250k...or about 90k over the normal XP cap. Did Pillars of Eternity split XP on a number of characters basis? I can't recall.