Shurimal

How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.

Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.

The main reason I don’t like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don’t have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.

Best strategy game I’ve ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don’t have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your “villagers” standing around idle because they can’t figure out there’s a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.

Plus you’re there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.

Vortex is not a launcher, it’s a mod manager. And you don’t have to use it, there are alternatives. But you should use a mod manager, manual installation/uninstallation is really bad practice that can and will break things.

This is good. Modding can turn into the deepest dependency hell ever and not having access to a specific version of mod A can make mod B that you really love unusable. See: Skyrim VR and Unofficial Patch.

I find cartoonish moustache-twirling “evil” boring. Playing as morally grey characters is most compelling. Whether my character is a hero or a villain depends on whom you ask and at which point in history. Damage one faction and help another, when it’s ambiguous who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. Steal, rob and assassinate for what you believe is a “good cause”. Set up dictators to avert death and destruction, then betray and terminate the them with extreme prejudice when they have served their purpose and become a liability. And so on.

Or just go full mercenary; everyone hates you, believes you have no principles and thinks they have the moral high ground, but at the end of the day everyone needs your specialist expertise. Every client is one missed payment away from becoming a target and every target is one bribe away from becoming a client—unless the target is eg slavers or pirates, because you actually do have principles.

For example, in X3:TC I single-handedly brought peace and prosperity into the universe: fought off Khaak threat; contained Xenons and completely denied their incursions into human and alien space alike; set up industry that boosted the economy at large for everyone; hired a lot of people for very good salaries. But, I had the monopoly in most industries; a fleet of warships capable of steamrolling everyone else if I wished so; literally owned a whole sector; controlled trade routes via the Hub; set up alliances with the pirate factions letting them roam free, trading illegal goods with them, building infrastructure for them. In short, very much a shady dystopian megacorps🙃

Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:

1. Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.

2. No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).

Oldskool FPS. There. That’s the correct term. Now, who’s up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

Just getting a session orchestra in to riff on Holst and Wagner is boring.

Most often it’s not even a real orchestra, but Vienna Symphonic Library.

But on the contrary some games have adaptive music, and interestingly it’s a bit more like John Williams’ view on movie soundtracks : it’s made to adapt to what’s happening in real time. When it’s done right it’s everything but boring.

Elite: Dangerous does this extremely well (IMO it has some of the best sound designs out there, not only music but everything else, too, including the dynamic range). The music is never this generic bombastic horn sections, and it’s different in different environments and situations, always somberly haunting at the edge of consciousness and enhancing, not overpowering, the gameplay.

Everybody gangsta until the panman logs in…

Wouldn’t any off the shelf temperature+humidity sensor work? I use Sonoff and Aqara ones with Sonoff Zigbee coordinator and Zigbee2MQTT, both are somewhere around 15€ a pop, integrate painlessly and do the job. Aqara is a bit smaller and has air pressure sensor, too.

Set up Tailscale as exit node to your local network.

Make sure that your network is not standard 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x IP address range, but something like 192.168.101.x so you don’t have IP conflicts when accessing from a friend’s house or workplace wifi.

Set up Nginx to redirect your home server IP (eg. 192.168.101.5) to the correct port for your dashboard like Heimdall or Dashy.

That’s it. Works like a charm for me if set up this way.

Addendum: if you have trouble on Android, disable MagicDNS.

Maybe I’ll give it a retry at some point in the future. If I can recall my forgotten Epic login credentials, that is. Too busy with the thargoid war for the next few years, though.

Control. Liked it despite being in 3rd person view up until the mezzanine fight an hour or two in, then realized that the enemies are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges, the PC is a low DPS squishy and fighting from a cover or any other tactical approach I’m used to doesn’t work.

EDIT: There was also a spellcrafting mod for Skyrim where the endboss was immunebto all magic and would teleport away as soon as you got too close while summoning a bazillion powerful minions. At level 50…60 it was litwrally impossible to figjt the bastard. After many tries I just console killed the bugger and was done with it.

Did they have a leveling system, class system and virtual dice rolls (explicit or implicit)? If they did, then yes, they were CRPG-s.

To be honest, Freelancer was kind of “meh”. Graphics and character animation were very nice, but ship and station design was weird and the combat felt shallow and one-dimensional. In short, too arcade-y. No joystick support was the real downer, space ship combat never feels good with mouse.

For the perspective, though, before Freelancer I played and modded the absolute crap out of Independence War 2 and that is still the pinnacle of space combat that doesn’t feel like WWII dogfight arcade in space while still being rather accessible and intuitive.

I’m an Elder Scrolls veteran (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), I know quite well what Bethesda games do well and what not. And they have always clicked for me, even though all of them are flawed in different ways.

As for ship combat, as long as it’s comparable to X3, it’s fine. I’m not expecting Children of a Dead Earth or Independence War🙂

tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerd

As one of those space nerds, I’m glad we have games like Elite: Dangerous, Starfield, X series, Independence War etc. Choice is good and I, along with many others, love 1:1 scale sandboxes to fly a virtual spaceship in, fight , trade and explore. There are plenty of fast action games including space shooters like Star Wars Squadrons for those who don’t appreciate the emptiness and loneliness of space and don’t want the travel-and-life-in-space part in a space game.

Starfield is the only new game from past 5 years I’m excited about and going to buy once I upgrade my GPU. It’s a life-in-space sandbox that complements E:D well by doing things the latter does not.

object space is a complete mess

Starfield has, what, 1000 planets, and each time you land the engine basically auto-generates a new approx. Skyrim-sized worldspace. The reference system has to have departed significantly from previous games for it to work. Even Skyrim was gently pushing the limits of how many objects can be referenced with the 8-digit refID (roughly 16 billion entries per .esp for all world objects, NPC-s, weapons, armor, outfits, consumables, spells, magic effects, markers, helpers etc etc since absolutely everything has to have a refID).

Of course Starfield is a mess coming from the simple refID scheme of the older games. The reference system in SF must be some sort of convoluted hierarchical system to be able to place probably hundreds of billions of objects over 1000 planets and retain persistency. It won’t be easy to reverse engineer.

Most mechanics are only surface level and don’t actually affect much of anything at all outside of combat, if even that.

Correct. That’s exactly my point. Mechanics have never been the strong point in any of the Elder Scrolls games. But the worldbuilding is something else altogether, that’s where all the depth is, and it doesn’t stop going deeper and deeper.