majestic

Oh, you did? What did you learn. Or ar planning to learn?

Maybe... most software engineers are terrible at their job. So there's a lot of potential overlap between software engineers and people on the internet. The correlation certainly is there, keep digging to see if there's some causality behind it. Want to hear the funniest support call I ever got? I swear 'tis true. Phone rings, I pick up and the guy says: "Every time I delete an e-mail it's gone afterwards, why, is this normal?" I had no idea what to reply without making this even more awkward than it was, so I said I'd call the Exchange administrator and ask. Hung up, laugned a couple of minutes, then called back and told him that this indeed is the intended behaviour of the delete function in Outlook. What he was really asking about was why the deleted items folder is purged every other day because his private mail client at home doesn't do that, so he got used to "archiving" mails by deleting them. It still requires being completely oblivious to the meaning of the word delete but it's not the dumbest question I've ever had. Just the funniest. The dumbest question so far was when someone called and asked why he's still missing exported orders from a client. He "told" the system to export the orders from "today" three days ago by setting a future date in the "export orders created on" date range, so they should have been in the export three days ago, right? RIGHT? Whoever said there are no dumb questions, only dumb answers needs to spend a year in first level support. Join the dark, cynical side, get cookies... or watch your mind break. Your choice. What's the topic of this thread again? Uhm... yeah. Game news. Eh... *runs*

Don't worry Bruce, there's no indication at all that politicians will ever come for you (you as in bankers, scourge of the earth ever since the Iron Curtain fell). If that happens it'll be torches and pitchforks from a mob.

I'd love to no longer be my own 1st, 2nd and 3rd level support but in this case we were chasing intermittent slowdowns that happened for no immediately apparent reasons after a major release change. DB load and query execution time was fine, the application servers were bored, memory usage was fine. Then we went on to measure round trips between clients and servers, code execution time. Everything said "this is fine" but it wasn't. Found out what was going on by stumbling upon a seemingly unrelated but no less hilarious issue of some code working most of the time and failing some of the time, but absolutely never when debugged. A classic Heisenbug. Turns out that the login system was the cause. Too many logins and the application server is stuck being busy logging people in an puts everything else on hold. That was no real problem for local logins, but web users had a nice little page available that would log in directly in a loop through selected records, with potentially disastrous results if the users caused a larger amount of records to be collected. Which they did. Still do. Heh. Damn thing.

Wait, what in the what now? Time's Arrow wasn't a bad episode by a long shot.

Best part of the chicken on grilled chicken. Not sure about fried chicken skin though. Yeah, that doesn't sound too appealing.

Come on, it's not that bad. Nothing beats the thrill of having an encroaching deadline, way too much left to do, crunch to get it done somehow, then work 72 hours straight right before release day, have somthing break at 3 past midnight, barely fix it in time and then have to deal with people complaining your ear off. Crunch makes you dead inside. It breaks your memory. It breaks your recollection of events. Everything becomes a blur, one day blending into the other, endless pressure, endless demands, seemingly endless work days with absolutely no end in sight, and once the project is done and released you'll end up having an inderterminate time of support duty because heaven knows, no matter how much testing you do, no matter how much you think something's working or safe or easy to use, the users find some way to break it. Sometimes, just sometimes you get stuck on an issue that seems completely impossible to resolve because you don't even have the slightest idea what's wrong. And it goes on, and on, and on. And you have people calling. Every day. Complaining. Every day. And then the next day someone new calls and says: "Hey, I just wanted to ask, is this ever going to work properly or do we have to get used to the miserable performance of the program?" At that point you finally realize why people commit suicide or run amok. Or do both.

Potentially. When you play PnP with dice rolling you often end up with sub-standard stat spreads. Sometimes the results are hilarious. One of the players of our old regular group once rolled an INT 5 barbarian who was barely capable to articulate himself. That was a fun game, but the DM canned the entire campaign after just two sessions. Not because of the barbarian but... eh. Turns out his planned storyline did not play well with a group of players using the attack on their home village to plunder everything and try to run away instead of fighting the attackers off. The stats of the BG1 NPCs would have been fine if they had just given everyone else rulebook based stats just as well. But no, monsters and enemies have highly optimized, sometimes perfect stats. Sure you wouldn't make a fighter with 9 CON even with a bad roll or a cleric that wouldn't be able to cast more than low level spells intentionally in PnP... guess Bioware figured out that WIS was a mostly useless stat even for clerics even before Gromnir came up with his character to complain about wisdom not doing anything. Heh. I seem to recall an interview where MCA stated that he read much - if not all - of the Star Wars EU in preparation for writing for KotOR 2. And yes, he couldn't deny it even if he tried. Kreia wasn't just based on Vergere, her philosophy and ideas regarding pratical skills and how the Jedi are limited by relying on the force too much comes directly from Mara Jade in the NJO books. As far as annoying NPCs go I seem to have really high tolerance. I don't mind Carth, Kaidan or Alistair. Or even Annoymen. The only NPC that ever really bothered me was Aerie, and to be honest that had more to do with the incredibly terrible timing of her whining-triggers in my first Baldur's Gate 2 playthrough than being straight out annoyed by her whining all the time.

@Amentep I guess that one's for Grounded...

My external backup disk has a folder for each partition I had. C through S. Well... I had three disks and was a firm believer of not wasting precious space by making partitions too large way back when FAT32 was still a thing. Good old times.

Imagine for a moment that this very board's company had one of the most egregious cases of mods that make a significant difference in the history of gaming. Wouldn't that be something?

I had an idea like that and even put in in the feedback thread, but then you'd just have trolls carrying the day all the time. I'm uncertain if that's a good idea. Probably a good thing I got ignored hard, and, quite frankly, if I can manage to have a "win" or two, everyone can. I'm usually dead last in these popularity contests. If that sound bitter then that is....

To be honest either way it's going to be fun. You either will see people who literally spent hundres of millions on a promise see it all be for nothing or you'll see half the internet naysayers eating their own words. I have a hard time deciding what would be more fun, and I say that as someone who backed Star Citizen and who really likes Chris Roberts' work. Except that damnable movie of course. Ugh.

Everyone, good sir. Everyone. And I'll be laughing at you when it comes out and it will be the only game you'll ever need. No, really, but... I mean, realistically, it's probably either NOT going to live up to its promise or never really come out beyond what is already there, but let's assume for the moment it would. Star Citizen could very much be the game I dreamt of having ever since the first time I played X-Wing and Wing Commander. On the other hand I'd just as soon settle for Squadron 42.

Everspace 2 is going into closed beta. I'm looking forward to giving it a spin or two soon.

My sore throat has been replaced by a deadly man-cold that snuck in while my body was dealing with acid burn recovery. I'm probably not going to survive, so fare well fellow posters, it was nice knowing you all. *sneeze* *blows nose*

I'm patiently waiting for Star Citizen, it's going to come out any day now, I'm sure of it!

I don't play them any more as much as I... load them up with cheats enabled and skip the missions and simply enjoy the story/dialogue. That reminds me I still have Wing Commander Saga to play through. But that's... uhm. I know it's just a mod campaign but it really is 5 minutes of gameplay and an hour of reading Wing Commander fanfiction.

I suffered through a terrible heartburn episode the entire night. It's still not entirely gone. When I speak I sound like Bonnie Tyler after ten packs of cigarettes and a night full of booze. My throat feels like it was washed in acid... well... not much of a surprise since that's pretty much exactly what happened. I haven't had heartburn for a while now. Certainly not to a degree where I could feel the acid reflux just below my larynx. Ugh. It's still not entirely gone. When I lie down I can feel it creeping further up. 'twas probably the peanut and chocolate mini cakes I indulged in. At least I hope it was, because the only other thing I ate today and yesterday were lintels... and I love lintels. More than chocolate and peanuts, really. If it doesn't go away soon I might go and snatch my mother's GERD medication the next time I go and feed her, uhm, yeast culture. She's got plenty left over from after her gastric sleeve surgery. Hell knows what would happen if I went to a doctor complaining of a sore throat and a cough right now. Eh...

Huh, how did I forget Wing Commander and Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi. Must be getting old...

Even at the risk of sounding like SonicMage117 StupidSeal here them early 3D Shooters with no innate mouse look are hard to play these days. So go ahead and count them as classic even with with mods. I wouldn't play say Dark Forces without the upgraded engine to have mouse look. Sure it is strictly speaking not necessary because it was developed without mouse look in mind after all but ugh. That's like going back to tank controls in early survival horror games. Oh, that brings me to another classic that I love and replay every now and then: Alone in the Dark. Graphics haven't aged too well but the atmosphere is still tight.

Mega Man 2 on the NES. Donkey Kong Country on the SNES... the first X-COM games on PC. JA2 is probably also up there. If we expand the the late nineties we get two of the best games ever: Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and Planescape: Torment. Although I don't replay either. Feels like blasphemy to do so.

The pay raise I put in for in March was finally approved after a lockdown induced hold. I didn't specify any amount during my talk with my boss (we do that once a year, have lunch on expenses and talk about work, what's up, what's good, bad and potentially ugly) but I did mention that it's not really pay as much as a monthly insult. He was a bit taken aback and apparently immediately panicked and thought I want to quit. Which in fact I don't, I'm more than happy to trade being a little underpaid for the other advantages of my job (short commute, great work/life balance when the world isn't ending due to a pandemic, interesting things to do, etc.). Underpaid in this context means that I would get more for the same job at other companies (i.e. not being part of an in-house development team but a dedicated software company), not that I wasn't already paid very well already compared to average and median incomes in our region. I thought I'd get a bit more. Turns out I was wrong...

I almost wanted to ask what disaster Doom 3 was but then I noticed... well, never mind then.