What are you Playing Now? I name all the operations that go down in Taipei.

[Humanoid]

I have Stellaris installed, and have had for several years. Haven't played it since within a month or two of its original launch. I've even added several DLCs to it via Humble Bundles since then, but still have no particular intention to play it.

[Chilloutman]

I too have it installed for years now but I am still waiting for some features before I start new game

 

mainly:

- Exploration - Its irks me that your science ships are useless after first 50 years of game - they need to add something like improve sensors and levels of system exploration so you can find more interesting things in late game - I love their anomalies I want MORE!

- Better and more interesting leaders - maybe as in MOO - traveling/adventuring leaders with more traits

 

Minor ones:

- trade lanes and maybe logistics and associated pirate raids and more interesting system security statuses

- improve infiltration

- more varied tech - going from red lasers to blue laser is REALLY boring (and it might impact improving combat somehow)

 

Edited May 25, 2022 by Chilloutman

[Malcador]

More hull types would be nice, as well.  Hm, maybe I should just go replay SEIV.

[Labadal]

I booted up Unlimited SaGa on an emulator. I have already beaten the story for one character, but I am now doing my second run. This game looks really beautiful with all the graphical enhancements that emulation allows.

[Keyrock]

More thoughts on Swansong:

At its core this plays like The Council; you walk around, collect information by overhearing conversations, examining items, making deductions (if you have the necessary skill), etc. Occasionally you will get into a confrontation, this takes the place of combat in this game. A confrontation is usually a test of will and cunning between characters. You can use skills and disciplines but so can they. You can focus a skill to increase chance of success, but so can they. Using skills and disciplines is not necessarily the key to victory, I have won confrontations by using regular dialogue options where I had the choice to use a skill and/or discipline. 

Willpower seems easier to manage than hunger, but that comes down to me using auspex quite a bit. I'm trying to avoid feeding if I can help it. Even if I could manage to lure a human to a secluded location, feeding still raises suspicion (more if you do it out in the open). I'm not sure what happens when suspicion gets too high, but I bet it's not good.

Leysha is my favorite of the 3 protagonists so far. Her relationship with Halsey, her daughter, is really touching. I'm going to be super bummed out if anything happens to either of them. Given how suboptimal this first playthrough has been, there's a real possibility of just that.

Edit: I've been going sort of jack of all trades with my protagonists. It's becoming clear that this is probably a mistake on my part, but I'll stick with it for this first playthrough to get the feel of how useful the skills and disciplines are.

Edited May 25, 2022 by Keyrock

[Amentep]

Old thread:

 

[Chilloutman]

I love that thumb pic xD

[melkathi]

It really ties the thread together.

[Chilloutman]

32 minutes ago, melkathi said:

It really ties the thread together.

Effing A

[HoonDing]

Is that a chastity belt?

[melkathi]

If Bruce started downloading mods from Loverslab instead of Nexus, it may very well be.

[Keyrock]

I'm afraid to google "Loverslab" to find out what it is. I don't want to wind up on a list.

[melkathi]

I find out the darkness of the web so I can stop you from straying there. It is the cross I bear for my friends.

 

Also, that's what duckduckgo is for.

Edited May 26, 2022 by melkathi

[Bartimaeus]

10 hours ago, melkathi said:

I find out the darkness of the web so I can stop you from straying there. It is the cross I bear for my friends.

 

Also, that's what duckduckgo is for.

duckduckgo doesn't prevent your ISP and government from seeing what you searched for - the search you made is literally included in the URL that you're accessing when you make the search. DDG is just promising they're not tracking and selling what they could figure out about you to third parties. Which is better from a "these corporations are trying to track and/or advertise to you" standpoint, but certainly not much privacy in the grand scheme of things.

Edited May 27, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

Biomutant - per usual these days I've barely played it but I did get past the tutorial type beginning and into the real world. Killed some big beastie as required then roamed around for a bit first, gathering some waypoints, seeing what's what, stealing loot from unattended crates. Have it all max at 4k with the usual (for me) 50-60fps and performance feels fine to me. Not overly demanding.

The combat is simple enough, with the basic attack, dodge, and those (too many...) combo and special moves ala "Square, Square, Circle, L1" type stuff as well as seemingly a lot of items/crafts for temp. boosts and the like. Having to remember finger-tying combo sequences all the time isn't really my thing so I put it on Easy and just flail or shoot away like a 3 year old having a tantrum. Seems to work.  

I can see why the "narrator" aspect annoyed some - but at least they have settings to reduce or even turn it off now.
Roaming around the world seems kinda fun. Seems to be plenty of villages and tribes/forts which I assume are quest hubs. Anyway ... not expecting some grand experience but it seems cute/involving enough for casual mucking about in, at least for sale price. At least there are funny/cute outfits to collect.   We'll see.

[Zoraptor]

48 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

duckduckgo doesn't prevent your ISP and government from seeing what you searched for - the search you made is literally included in the URL that you're accessing when you make the search. DDG is just promising they're not not tracking and selling what they could figure out about you to third parties. Which is better from a "these corporations are trying to track and/or advertise to you" standpoint, but certainly not much privacy in the grand scheme of things.

That's why you carry out the search behind 7 proxies as well. Everyone knows the government can only penetrate 6 proxies.

Though I do find it somewhat amusing to think of someone using Tor to do their searches for hot mudcrab mods because they're worried Mike from the NSA may be having a chuckle about it.

[melkathi]

I still don't believe TOR is this magic thing that guarantees anonymity.

Regardless of how many times you split and rerout my data packages, a request for data still has to leave my computer and get to whatever website. And then data has to get back to me.

It should just be too much of a hassle for the NSA guy to go through for something trivial like a "what the latex turtle is he doing googling a site that includes mods for realistic lactation in Bethesda games?"

(Disclaimer: I do not know if there is a realistic lactation mod out there. I wouldn't be surprised if someone was working on one though. There have been weirder things coded.)

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

That's why you carry out the search behind 7 proxies as well. Everyone knows the government can only penetrate 6 proxies.

Though I do find it somewhat amusing to think of someone using Tor to do their searches for hot mudcrab mods because they're worried Mike from the NSA may be having a chuckle about it.

Yeah, not advocating for/against DDG* or the necessity of privacy for searches like that...just that people should be aware that there still isn't any from just using DDG. For browsing, pay for a reputable no-logging VPN or use Tor while also maintaining a separate sandbox with agent/fingerprint spoofing to probably reclaim some semblance of privacy. That should certainly be enough for non-illegal activities, since nobody's going to try to put together a complete picture of what happened where and when to be able to connect it to you if the activity wasn't Serious Business levels of illegal to begin with. And if it was...well, that's probably beyond my level to provide useful advice for (and I wouldn't want to anyways - for me, it's a strong "yes" to a reasonable degree of privacy, but an equally strong "no" to platforms that sell drugs, weapons, confidential information, and/or people).

*Though if DDG's search operators and results weren't hot garbage, it sure would be easier to advocate for them. Their horrible, no good, very bad Bing-derived results are...well, just that.

Edited May 27, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[melkathi]

Their map searches are worse. They don't use geolocation (properly) so if you put in the street name of a street 200m away, it may find a random street of the same name somewhere in the world.

[marelooke]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Yeah, not advocating for/against DDG* or the necessity of privacy for searches like that...just that people should be aware that there still isn't any from just using DDG. For browsing, pay for a reputable no-logging VPN or use Tor while also maintaining a separate sandbox with agent/fingerprint spoofing to probably reclaim some semblance of privacy. That should certainly be enough for non-illegal activities, since nobody's going to try to put together a complete picture of what happened where and when to be able to connect it to you if the activity wasn't Serious Business levels of illegal to begin with. And if it was...well, that's probably beyond my level to provide useful advice for (and I wouldn't want to anyways - for me, it's a strong "yes" to a reasonable degree of privacy, but an equally strong "no" to platforms that sell drugs, weapons, confidential information, and/or people).

*Though if DDG's search operators and results weren't hot garbage, it sure would be easier to advocate for them. Their horrible, no good, very bad Bing-derived results are...well, just that.

In all fairness, Google's searches have turned into hot garbage recently as well. All these algorithms certainly seem more of a hindrance than a help...

I generally just use both (defaulting to DDG), depending on how hot the garbage served by either search engine is...

As an aside, for those that might not be aware, you can search Google from DDG by prefixing the search with !g, same for bing with !b, making it quite a bit more convenient to repeat your search in another search engine.

 

Anyway, on the subject of the thread. After my Subnautica Below Zero stint I've been mostly playing Conan Exiles (Isle of Siptah, and yep, still going ), and slowly picking away at my second Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough.

Such a shame it appears CDPR is giving up on CP2077 already, and on their engine too. Seems the beancounters finally took over. Oh well, it was a good run while it lasted...

Edited May 27, 2022 by marelooke

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, marelooke said:

n all fairness, Google's searches have turned into hot garbage recently as well. All these algorithms certainly seem more of a hindrance than a help...

Google has excellent search operators that I can't seem to find elsewhere that make it the only option for highly precise/specialized searches - searches that only yield a total of 1-100 results. That is my primary use for Google searches and why I have to stick with it for the time being. Stuff like "history of the Roman Empire" or "best ways to fry and season chicken thighs" can be looked up on any search engine, but particular program/OS errors written in a very specific way, exact checksums, media catalogue numbers et al. that you're trying to look up online all get the most relevant results on Google, whereas for the life of me I can't seem to make DDG behave when I try to make similar searches there.

1 hour ago, marelooke said:

As an aside, for those that might not be aware, you can search Google from DDG by prefixing the search with !g, same for bing with !b, making it quite a bit more convenient to repeat your search in another search engine.

Man, I was hoping that was going to result in DDG doing the search and serving the results - I created a Google search that only had 6 total results, and then did the same search on DDG and got garbage, then prefixed it with "!g" and it literally just sent me to Google, .

[Keyrock]

I played a chapter with Galeb in Swansong and I was absolutely nailing it. I figured out several puzzles (credit to Big Bad Wolf for including legitimately tricky puzzles that will no doubt infuriate some people), took the time to find and complete all the optional objectives, won all the confrontations, I was acing this chapter. Then it all went horribly horribly wrong at the very end, quite literally the last scene of the chapter. I am tempted to go back immediately and replay the chapter, but I will stay the course and let things play out before trying to get the best possible result in a subsequent playthrough. I'm pretty sure that I'm heading toward a bad ending.

[marelooke]

14 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Man, I was hoping that was going to result in DDG doing the search and serving the results - I created a Google search that only had 6 total results, and then did the same search on DDG and got garbage, then prefixed it with "!g" and it literally just sent me to Google, .

Yep, it does, but it allows me to just use DDG on my home page but still use Google when DDG fails me...

[Humanoid]

Y'know, I think I registered on the BIS forums back in June of 2002, and I have never actually started a thread on that forum or any of its successors. But now it looks as if I have, even if I wasn't actually responsible for it. So after 19 years and 11 months, the streak is broken, thanks Tepid.

 

Anyway, continuing on with the FM21 Touch adventure. I've now played 3-4 seasons in the Eredivisie, sticking with Excelsior. To be fair, only one other club has tried to poach me away, and I turned them down as they were a mid-table side, a distinctly sideways move despite them offering to triple my wages. I wish the game would let you do stuff with your personal money, like buy a Ferrari or something. That said, it's hard going because it takes a long time for a yo-yo club to improve their finances enough to compete with the established top division club. Especially true when in two seasons running, the board decides to upgrade the stadium instead of allowing any meaningful transfer budget.

Actually, worse than the transfer budget is the wage budget - I'm trying to play a "realistic" game with proper delegation of responsibilities, i.e. scouts and the Director of Football find me players instead of me trawling the database looking at hard numbers. But there's a problem in that the game is essentially set up to find what it thinks are an appropriate level of ability without regard to finances. So the vast majority of recommendations are for players who cost double my entire transfer kitty, and who demand triple the maximum wage I can afford to pay them. Thanks guys, very helpful.

Finally, being in a league with VAR for the first time exposes the game's rather primitive implementation of it. Offside call? Always offside. Penalty call? Always a penalty unless it's a question of whether the foul was in the box, in which case it's always outside. And for those penalty calls, play is always stopped, and the ref always jogs slowly to the pitchside monitor to review it himself. I might think the real-life implementation of VAR leaves a lot to be desired, but Football Manager takes it to the next level of pointless awfulness. The sad thing of course is that FM Touch has now been discontinued, so I can't even look forward to future improvements to the system, once they get it right in 5-10 years. If I ever start a new game I might just do one of those where I use Instant Result for every match.

Edited May 28, 2022 by Humanoid

[Gorgon]

Wasteland 3, it's the shiznit