Zoraptor

No ex Obsidian dev has used their work accounts to post after leaving so far as I am aware. The only ex Obsidian staff I'm aware of posting after leaving are Cant/ Eldar who already had a forum account and Matt Rorie who was marketing (and that's iirc, and only one post after leaving). If Roguey is to be believed dev forum accounts can only be used on site anyway. He has a better argument for having his account deleted. Even then iirc it's a non trivial task to actually delete an account/ posts instead of locking them and hiding the posts, and there's no obligation to do so unless it's legally required. Indeed, there's no obligation to allow anyone to say anything here or on any other company forum, let alone allowing a disgruntled former employee to vent their spleen using an 'official' account.

Whatever else, Chris should not be dragging other people into this. If John Gonzalez is highly successful let him be successful and don't drag him into your personal feud to make a point (worse, to make someone else not involved until you criticised them look bad), that's extraordinarily uncool. Also, hating management roles and not being good at them means your management ideas are highly unlikely to be valued because, well, your management roles have been a mess which strongly implies your management ideas result in said messes. Say what you like about Feargus but he's kept Obsidian going for 14 years, one suspects that for all his expectation setting processes Chris would not have managed 14 months. They'd no doubt have been an extremely aspirational 14 months to be fair, but... It would have been an extra 3 months though, not 6. Given release state I very much doubt they could- or should have even tried, really- have got the droid planet in, though the droid factory must have been close to inclusion even with the short deadline. Given Chris's tendency toward being over enthusiastic in content production we may simply have got a larger, but equally 'broken' release if he was not reined in. Unfortunately, given his recent behaviour and despite admitting that he doesn't like/ isn't good at management he'd likely be using that as another stick against Obsidian as well. Ultimately, Chris's problems as a designer/ manager/ writer all seem to stem from the same base issue, he just plain overproduces content. That's a better flaw in theory than underproducing, but it's still a flaw since it gums up the production pipeline and that stuff has to be implemented/ cut/ proofed/ edited etc etc. For that reason it's worse, practically, than underproducing if you're producing far too much. And, critically, he did it in PST and was still doing exactly the same thing 15 years later when it came to PoE time. It's all very well to be self critical but it's another to act on the self criticism, and even if Chris's word were gospel it certainly would not be only Obsidian not learning from their mistakes. Ubisoft owning the rights was the critical thing, if Derp Silver or Nordic had picked up the rights things may well have been different. IIRC they implied they were more or less happy with Obsidz and said that the main reason for the delays in SoT was their continual tinkering with the script. Having said that, the Ubi San Fran (which still amuses me, given the Smug episode of SP) sequel did not seem to have the same problems.

Sorry, I meant that Chris was implying they tried for a 'non compete clause', not that you were implying it but reading again I can see how it read the other way. That's what I would assume as well, lacking any other information. The firing implication is extremely tenuous, given Chris basically said he left after he'd paid off his debts, to whit: The last bit definitely implies he only quit after saving enough to clear whatever debt there was so there was no more 'leverage'. If he'd been fired it would be a massive coincidence if it was exactly at the right time for his debt to have been cleared. Sounds to me like he either worked out his contract or handed in notice as soon as it was viable, nothing more or less.

Gog released Star Wars Ep 1: Racer. Yippee This is where the fun begins I've been looking forward to this etc etc.

Like Valmy pointed out, we have to see the issue from Obsidian's perspective as well but still, that sounds extremly hostile to me. Why would they want to revoke his rights to work on any RPG and how is that even possible?! Non-compete clauses are something pretty commonly attempted by companies. If you'll recall the creator of Ark got into trouble over this a couple years ago. Apparently they're not enforcable a lot of places, but it's still a way a company tries to protect itself from getting staff poached by direct competitors. I doubt it was a genuine 'non compete clause' as implied, I'd suspect that if Chris asked out of his contract then the reply was "fine, but you cannot work on RPGs until its term runs out/ time x" which is far more reasonable since an early release is doing Chris a favour so quid pro quo should be expected. He essentially seems to be asking for such favourable treatment while still expecting to have benefits of employment- like medical insurance- maintained which would be rather on the nose. That's why I'm extraordinarily skeptical of Chris's claims being accurate, they're not internally consistent and read far more like an internal rationalisation. To be fair though, the whole thing is like a river flowing around a submerged boulder- you're judging what and where by the ripples rather than seeing it so it's speculation, and may be unfair speculation. But Chris is making it very easy to assume that he was the problem, especially since Obsidian hasn't been publicly contributing to the river at all. The issue of any ownership stake is a lot more murky, but there isn't even enough information to speculate on that, except what no legal action from Chris implies.

I'm reminded of what happens in a lot of air crashes- pilots train and fly for literally thousands of hours then end up crashing and killing everyone on board because they're stalling and despite all their training and experience the most basic of reasoning kicks in: "I want to gain altitude so I have to point the plane's nose up". Yet every pilot knows and trains for the fact that in a stall you have to point your nose down to increase speed first, and hence to overcome the reflexive logic of pointing your nose up to try and gain altitude. Dude shouldn't be a police officer/ security guard any more for sure, but part of the reason for training is to find those who cannot cope or will freeze. On the positive side, it's a lot less likely that guy would have randomly shot a black guy for having a 'dehumanising gaze' or cellphone or failing to obey mutually contradictory instructions etc as seems to happen an awful lot when police do act reflexively, decisively and instinctively.

Trouble is, as always, that Chris's recollections don't fit what everyone could see, to whit (1) Obsidian didn't make any real comment about him at all, and no negative ones and (2) they didn't have a restrictive employment agreement when he was actually working for them- since he was off working and being a stretch goal on multiple projects outside Obsidian, even prior to leaving. If they wanted to leverage debt to 'control' him all they had to do was stop him working independently. He either didn't have a contract anywhere near as restrictive as made out or he was allowed to work independently to get that money and remove the 'control', which I rather suspect was just a standard employment contract, as below. Indeed, that freedom to work on FTL, Wasteland 2 etc allowed him a natural lead into and exposure for his work for the Larians and Bethesdas. It looks far more like he asked for an early contract release and didn't like the terms offered for it so took that as being 'unfair' and leveraging whatever his situation was, and worked out his contract doing stuff for other people. If he wanted an early release from a contract then he has to accept that the company he works may want something in return- and that's especially true if you're obviously going off to work at the opposition. That isn't a personal slight, it's standard practice since you've made an agreement, you're asking to vary its terms and they're not obligated to indulge you in any way. Indeed, depending on how the company is set up indulging friends to vary their contracts may well be exactly the illegal/ unethical treatment Chris rails against. I actually started out supporting Chris as well, but everything he's said since has steadily reduced that support to the point I wish he's shut up about anything other than rpgs, if only for his own sake. I say it every time, but he comes across as That Guy At Work who thinks management hates him and everything is set up against him and everyone else at the company hates him too. They usually do- because he wanders around seeking support for his grievances and basically not doing his job while making it unpleasant for everyone else. He usually has a point with his grievance, but blows it out of proportion. I have some personal experience of that sort, my dad always ranted about how his employer was crap and the management was crap etc. I ended up working with him for a while (because no one else would, which is a bit of a spoiler) and you know what? Management was crap and incompetent and was actively trying to get him fired or to resign. You know what else? My dad made life unpleasant for just about everyone else there whether they were management or not and was deliberately and pointlessly obstructive all while claiming he was fighting the good fight. He did do his job, more or less, but spent so much time arguing with management that he'd stopped doing it well. Just a reminder, by Chris's own admission he had one friend left at Obsidian, out of 150ish employees. That's not a number that says that management was the only problem. More like nice work Fairfax, or maybe nice work Sensuki. Infinitron's just the newsbot.

Bibi's presentations are always meme gold, and fact dross. Only thing missing from his powerpoint slides was use of comic sans/ impact font instead of boring old default times new roman. I presume the stats commentary is that you kind of have to have a sensible set of questions to be statistically accurate about. If you ask a load of loaded questions the mathematical statistical accuracy doesn't matter in the slightest because the questions are bad so anything got from them is bad as well.

I'd say that Stalker feels like an RPG because it's extraordinarily immersive and does excellent world building/ atmosphere which are usually found in RPGs and other story heavy genres- but if you leave feelings aside it is clearly a shooter by any objective criteria. Despite character advancement being a central facet of RPGs Stalker with its dozen or so weapons and 8ish armour types manages a feeling of character achievement and advancement that few RPGs attain with all their stats and levels even if it's still exactly the same Mr S wandering around, just with a Vintorez and stalker suit instead of a Makarov and paper maché suit. I'm actually playing Mass Effect Andromeda at the moment- not far in, maybe a couple of hours and it's OK. The animations etc are fine so far, it's a bit Dragon Age Inquisition with lazars and fewer stats combined with the old ME staples of plink plink weapons and pervading cheesiness but that's more or less what I expected. So far the most annoying thing is the graphics giving a strong uncanny valley vibe, technically it's great and my theoretically underpowered 580 is coping with near 4k resolution well, but there's this rather odd feeling that everything looks... 'artificial' for want of a better term.

I presume that should be 'the agreements made by the US should --not-- be binding only so long as the next election'? They haven't changed their heart, I don't think there's any chance of a genuine Road to Damascus moment. They have changed their behaviour because they've achieved what they wanted/ needed- they have nukes, and missiles able to hit basically anywhere in the world. That was their one strategic aim as it gives them security no matter what. All the stuff they're rolling back so far is cosmetic, or would have to happen anyway. The nuclear test facility they are shutting is by most reports either fundamentally ruined or nearly so already, for example, so there's no real concession in shutting it down when it cannot be used even if they wanted to. It does make a nice gesture though. For all that Trump is patting himself on the back for his approach 'working' all he's done is make sure that North Korea relies more on China (and Russia) to selectively apply sanctions. While neither has any desire to see fighting in Korea, quite the opposite, neither has any desire to help the US and weaken North Korea either. If anything Trump's approach got the DPRK to full nuclear power status faster even if the underlying reasons date back to previous administrations, and his unpopularity overseas and tendency towards unreliability and intemperateness makes Kim's attempts to look reasonable far, far easier.

Difficult to see how he could have played it better. Everything he's conceded is trivial while he's made lots of cosmetic gestures so most of the world will reflexively blame Trump if their talks fail. Only thing he's been a bit lucky with was Park being a corrupt cultist so the far more amenable Moon was elected in her stead. If he actually gives up nuclear weapons I'd be very surprised, verging on vowing to eat my keyboard if it actually happens surprised.

SOHO, though that was eventually fixed and iirc is still operational today. The most famous outright failure from conversion error is probably the Mars Climate Orbiter where the satellite pancaked into Mars. Non space, but there's also the Gimli Glider incident which is 100% worth reading about (or watch the Mayday/ Air Crash Investigation ep) just because it's a pretty awesome story.

I knew it was Tesla and wrote Apple for some reason- apparently he did work at Apple for a time, just not recently. And since I mentioned Intel's problems, their earning call for their financial results confirmed that bulk production for their 10nm process is now slated for some unspecified time in 2019 having been initially expected in 2017- and that would be 3 years after initial production started. The competition for Ryzen 3 may well be yet another 14nm skylake iteration.

A bit peripheral to Ryzen itself but, Jim Keller who was perhaps the most important contributor to the Zen architecture (and earlier K7/8/Athlon/ x64) has joined Intel after finishing work at Apple. Which is exceptionally good news for them since their main line CPU division seems to be having some significant problems. Yeah, the RAM prices are cartel pricing, at some point they'll get smacked by Europe again or provoke the Chinese to start producing large scale. Lots of gpu oversupply rumours going around now, but I'm not expecting too much since high RAM prices inflate GPU prices as well. Should be some 2nd hand bargains though, but mixed in amongst some overworked dross.

Thing about the lootboxes is that after all the complaints Battlefront 2 was found to be the only game out of four complying with Belgium's gambling rules. Ironic, EA could get busted for FIFA18 but not for the game everyone actually complained about. They already do that though- that's basically what PEGI is, applying rating laws (the censor) to video games. We have some games outright banned here such as Manhunt as they didn't pass the censor. Even in the US there's a lot of 'soft' censorship from Walmart/ MS/ Sony Ockers now have a refund facility that isn't limited to 2hrs either thanks to their ACCC, and the refund facility only exists at all due to Euro/ Aus/ NZ consumer protection laws being habitually broken by Valve.

Almost certainly has supplied them already given 500+ tons of freight has come into Hmeimem/ Tartus over the past few days. S300 isn't meant for defence against cruise missiles though they can do it, they're for shooting down planes and will replace the ancient S200s which had (even under the Russian/ Syrian scenario) exactly a zero percent success rate against cruise missiles- but somewhat better recent success against Israeli F16s. They're also not fixed but mobile, unlike the old S200s, so a lot harder to hit while hiding behind Qalamoun* since you can drive them off. As for risk, Avigdor Lieberman threatening to blow up Russian manned SAMs if it happens shows how seriously Israel takes it, even if Lieberman is basically Israel's Zhironovsky/ Trump. *If Russia really wants to mess with Israel specifically they'd give the systems to Lebanon, not Syria, since most Israeli airstrikes are launched from there. The Syrian systems with the theoretical high success rate (~90%) against CMs were pantsirs, which are about as modern as you get SAM wise.

Ryzen 2 have been out for a couple of days now, and it's a decent improvement but not game changing. Lots of minor improvements to memory latencies, a decent bump to clock speed and the X processors coming with a (pretty good, approaching 212Evo class) stock cooler are the main changes, and a positive is that many of the new benefits are on the chip itself so will work on 300 series motherboards. The 2700X* is within 5% of a 8700k in gaming with expensive RAM and some fiddling, and given that you can get its performance without an expensive cooler and delidding- plus use a cheap MB and still get overclocking/xfr2 if you want- it's also a decent amount cheaper. It still hits a voltage wall, but at least it's approaching 4.4Ghz rather than 4.0 and XFR2 will boost to 4.35 automatically making overclocking unnecessary for many use cases. *practically, a 2600/X would be better value for money for most people anyway Definitely won't be upgrading my 1700, not enough improvement so I'll wait for Zen2/ Ryzen3.

To be honest I don't think TWD has had great production quality post S1, and hasn't striven for excellence since then either. It's mostly due to AMC being exceptionally cheap, they infamously cut the budget yet doubled the episode count in S2 resulting in more than half the scenes using the same set across the entire season. I wouldn't put TWD up as looking like an expensive show, unlike GoT. Even no budget early Peter Jackson and almost no budget Ash vs Evil Dead F do decent zombies. Their problem is not just production quality, it's just about everything short of Andrew Lincoln's acting- their storytelling is the worst combination of lazy, repetitive, predictable (on the larger scale) and incoherent (on the smaller scale), their characterisation goes around in circles (Rick, Carol and Morgan crises over whether to murder everyone version xyz...), they're just plain stale and AMC has run them into the ground as a cash cow and left it until ratings have collapsed to try and fix things.

What are you talking about, Stephen Ogg took out The Garbage earlier this season in TWD, showing once and for all that he is not typecast as a bad guy. And it's perfectly reasonable for every single person to load up with new ammo from a single source who used to be friends with the people you're trying to kill and when said ammo has been tested precisely once via a gun you were handed by said turncoat, while standing in a long battle line like it was Waterloo or something. TWD is a case study in how to ruin a show by not listening to constructive criticism and deciding that because everything is going well, now, it will be going well forever so you don't need to change anything. Except maybe get rid of actors who will cost more as they're turning 18. Funny thing is, if Game of Thrones went on for a few more seasons I could see the same thing happening there as it has all the same symptoms, but they have the huge advantages of a set ending and fewer episodes per season.

Longstreet also had an alternative plan for day 2 of Gettysburg that would probably, with hindsight, have been better than what Lee delivered. To be fair to Lee, I always thought his conduct at Gettysburg was based on a fairly accurate interpretation of strategic reality- the Confederacy was going to lose unless they managed a spectacular victory; so he tried far too hard to get them that victory. Napoleon made almost exactly the same mistake as Picket's Charge at Waterloo for the same general reason.

1080Ti was announced Feb 28 and shipped March 10 last year. 1080 was May 6th announcement, release May 20 the previous year. So about 2 weeks. Both had FE releases first with general availability a bit later though. AMD's experience with HBM2 is definitely a cautionary tale on early adoption of new memory as well. I don't think they've got the 1000MHz HBM2 Hynix promised them even now.

What does that have to do with the American Civil War? Completely different time, place, and circumstance. Not really, if you're talking about memorials to people with... questionable morality and whether they should be removed or not. It's probably one of HD's more immediately relevant contributions. Indeed, Cromwell is a lot, lot worse than Forrest. Cromwell alone turns the Parliamentarians from good guys to bad guys, because no matter how much people in theory may love the idea of parliamentary supremacy you cannot separate that from what was actually got instead- dictatorial mass murdering genocidal brutality dressed up in the veneer of religion and extraordinary self righteousness. He's the british Mullah Muhammed Omar, yet still get fetishised by, frankly, morons who put the 'fought for parliament' part above anything else and ignore that he was so committed to Parliament that he abolished it. At least people with a hard on for Churchill can point to his political/ inspirational personal conduct in WW2 to offset all the racism, advocacy of gassing arabs, consistently moronic military plans and starving millions of Indians; Cromwell has the same redeeming features as Iosef Dugashvili, minus literally fighting Hitler.

I don't disagree with any of that since nVidia has the performance advantage, not much point releasing new cards until AMD do and they (supposedly, though there were placeholder pages for new Vegas) won't for up to 18 months. 1080Ti itself was only released because release of Vega seemed imminent and... ...the original rumours for the 2080's (sic) release reported on by wccftech etc was literally now, with 10 series cards already having their production stopped back in Feb/ March. Guess if you throw throw rumours at the wall eventually you get one right by sheer number.

It's certainly meaningless as a practical demonstration of real world performance, yes. But they have to use 1080p low details with a 1080Ti if they want to test the CPU, it's the only way to make the CPU the bottleneck and even though it isn't in any way a real world scenario. When they test 4k there is very little difference between most mid to high range CPUs because it would be the 1080Ti limiting performance with a few exceptions where thread limits and the like are hit (eg Farcry 3) on i5s especially the 4 thread ones. In the wccftech article case the 1070 would be limiting performance even at 1080p for both CPUs. Alternatives like synthetic benchmarks have their own set of problems with being 'real world', of course, since they're synthetic. And the focus on single thread performance is starting to get a bit old, while it is still mostly relevant now programs will only get more multi threaded, they'll never get less, and the fewer threads you have the quicker your CPU will choke.

1700 is 8 core and 65W since that's what I have. You could probably get away with using the stock cooler as well, even with the 8 cores that 1700 is under 40 degrees (ambient +20) at normal use and barely touches 60 for most games. So much better than the shredded coke can screwed onto an aircraft turbine that was my old stock Intel cooler. The 2700x vs 8700k tests were done with a 1070 as the graphics card, so not the usual methodology and the test set up will be gpu rather than cpu limited. Having said that, a 1070 is a more real world scenario than testing 1080p low details on a 1080Ti or a Titan as is usually done. Given indications are of a roughly 10% boost in performance for Ryzen 2 it will probably still be a little behind a fully overclocked 8700k due to the remaining clock disparity, though Ryzen's IPC will be higher if the meltdown/ spectre patches are applied on the i7.