Author: Nimgimli

My tech nightmare

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week I offended some ancient technology demi-god somehow, and I paid the price.

It all started Wednesday when folks were talking about LOTRO. I was wondering if my old characters still existed so I fired up Steam and installed the game. When it finished installing through Steam I fired it up and it did that thing where every damned Steam game seems to need to install C++ libraries and assorted other things. In this case ANCIENT versions. Then it had to patch. Then I let it download high-resolution textures.

When it was finally done I started the game, with the intention of literally taking a screen shot of my characters to share on Imzy. I had no intention of actually playing the game. LOTRO started, my primary monitor when black. Stayed black. I could hear sounds but they were broken and stuttering. So I jumped over to monitor #2 and right clicked LOTRO and picked Close Window and nothing happened. So I hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and nothing happened. Task manager wouldn’t come up. Vexed, I held down the power button on the machine to kill it. And that’s when trouble really began.

When I restarted the machine it blue-screened with an error of BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO. Someone suggested this could be a video card issue, so I dragged the system out and swapped it with an old card I had. No help there. Swapped it back and started googling solutions. Tried various things for the next day or so. Some of them, like an extended chkdsk, took hours and hours to run. Tried to restore but Windows said it couldn’t find any restore points.

Finally found this solution online and it got me back to the desktop. Basically you’re replacing a bunch of files in C:\Windows\System32\config with backup copies.

So now I was at my desktop but my Start menu wouldn’t come up and everything felt really slow and sluggish. Virus maybe? Ran a bunch of checkers but found nothing. That was another few hours gone. Ever since installing LOTRO when the system starts up, about 20-30 seconds after I see a desktop, one of my monitors goes black for a few seconds. I see a ‘loading cursor’ and then the desktop appears, but with limited functionality (no Start menu, can’t open more than 1 file explorer window from the task bar, and some other stuff). I kind of feel like whatever this is, it’s undoing my fixes.

But at least I could get to my files. First thing I did was check to make sure my backups were up to date and…my backup system had quietly stopped working last June! Nothing since then was backed up. OK well I decided to back stuff up manually. Starting copying stuff to an external USB drive and it was going at like 18 Kbs and was going to take two days to copy, then it crapped out completely. USB was apparently out, but I could still copy across my home network to my Linux server. But first I had to clear out a bunch of stuff from that to make room.

I had to blow away a bunch of dev sites but freed up the space and starting copying my files to the Linux server. That was going to take a couple hours. 25% of the way through, I get an error that the PC can’t talk to Linux any more. I look at the Linux box and it was frozen. It has never done this, and had been running flawlessly for months. NOW it decides to crap out. So I reboot THAT and when I get it back online, the PC can no longer see it.

Interspersed with all of this I’m trying a bunch of things to repair the Windows installation but nothing is working. OK time to Reset the machine. By this time it’s about 4 pm Thursday. I start the reset process. It gets about 40% done and reboots to a black screen with a circle of dots indicating some process is happening. I let it sit like that for 7 hours. At about 11:30 I manually restart the machine and I get a “Loading Windows…” screen. Yay! I go to bed. In the morning I find that same black screen with the circle of dots. I reboot again and I get “Restoring files” and when that finishes I’m right back to where I started. The Reset failed.

At some point you start trying crazy shit. I read somewhere to unplug all USB devices. I do that and try the Reset again and it fails again. And for some reason when I re-attached the external USB drive I plug it into another USB port and… it works perfectly. So apparently one of my USB ports is blown. At least that means I can backup my files, so I do that. Now the pressure is off.

I try to reset or restore the system through a bunch of different techniques and none of them work. Half-way through this process, my main monitor stops working. Now to be fair this monitor has been a little wonky for a while. It would get stuck in standby mode and I’d have to cut the power to reset it. Now it’s frozen and won’t come back, but the thing is, it APPEARS to be working. So now I start to wonder how many times in the past days I’ve thought Windows was frozen but it’s just the monitor freezing. Anyway I crawl under the desk and disconnect that, and switch the backup monitor to the port that main monitor was using just to be sure it isn’t the video card connection.

So count so far: 1 fubar’d Windows OS, 1 fubar’d USB port, 1 fubar’d Linux service, 1 fubar’d monitor. All in the course of 3 days. AND my laptop has been acting up; the cursor keeps going nuts. Oh well.

Finally I just give in and install Windows from scratch. This works but I see a lot more partitions than I expect to see. There are 2 System Restore partitions, one that’s a few hundred megs, the other and about 3 GB. Then there’s another UEFI partition, if I recall correctly. Not being as up on Windows as I should be, I leave them all be. I hope I don’t regret that.

So now I’m re-installing apps and I’ve confirmed that my backup is actually running again. I ordered a new cheap monitor (money is tight right now or I would’ve just gone and bought a new system…this one is 6 years old) and a new video card because my Spidey Sense is telling me that my current card might have had something to do with this issue (sometimes when I start this machine it reports that the card’s supplementary power cable isn’t attached…in fact I replaced the power supply because of this not too long ago).

Hopefully it won’t take me too long to get everything back where it was. I’m going to have to re-create those dev sites on the Linux server, and I need to get all my tools re-installed on the PC and pull down all my work repos. And then the next thing I am not ever going to do is reinstall LOTRO! In fact I don’t think I’ll mess with installing games on the system again. I don’t play PC games and I just don’t need these kinds of headaches. Maybe games from the Windows Store since they are sandboxed and can’t bork your whole system.

Now I’m going to go give my game consoles a big ‘ol hug!

No Man’s Thursday: Keeping the troops happy

Posted on by Nimgimli

It has been a crappy week here at Dragonchasers HQ. One of those weeks where every piece of tech you touch decides to go belly up. My main PC is down, my laptop is acting weird and my Linux box suddenly started crashing. Ergo no blog posts for the last few days.

By yesterday evening I decided it was time to step away from it all and enjoy No Man’s Sky since I skipped No Man’s Thursday last week. Of course the first order of business was remembering what I was in the middle of. Now that I have a base and some employees that’s easier than it used to be. I just ask them what it was they wanted.

You could certainly call these tasks fetch quests but in a game as open as NMS I actually appreciate having some specific things I need to do. Each of my employees needs a different exotic element, and none of them was available in my home system. So off I went in search of.

I wound up in a system that had been discovered by someone else back in August but ~gasp~ that person had discovered the system but not the planets inside it. Must’ve been one of those people determined to ‘finish’ NMS as soon as possible. His or her loss, I’ll be happy to collect the credits from discovering these planets and better yet one of them was a snow biome (I named it Christmas Village) that had the Coryzagen my armorer needed to cure a disease he’d contracted.

Of course before I went to collect that I had to save a Freighter that was under attack, then docked and drank rum with the captain and got some flush rewards (well ok, pretty minor rewards). I don’t know why these pirates keep picking fights with me. I guess they can’t see the 100 hash marks on the side of my ship until it is too late.

Christmas Village was a lovely little planet and gathering up the Coryzagen was a pleasant enough task. Next I needed Candensium and that, I’d been told, I could find on radiated planets. Luckily enough there was one of those in this same system and I’d already crafted the Haz-Mat Gloves I’d need to collect it. Still this was a tough challenge as my exo-suit was not set up well to fend off radiation. I had to recharge pretty frequently, and then a radiation storm hit and things just got ridiculous. I nearly died. I can’t recall the last time I died in No Man’s Sky, but it’s been a while. In the end I got back to my ship and hung out until the storm blew itself out. Then I quickly gathered the materials I needed and hit the skies again.

There were a few more planets to visit in this system; I couldn’t just leave any undiscovered. A few more space battles, a few gathering excursions and it was getting late. I zipped off to the system’s space station and teleported back home. I LOVE teleporting home since the galactic map is so damned confusing. Knowing I can just jump back to base from any space station means I can just roam around star systems without worrying about getting lost.

The end result of my trouble was a new ship weapon blueprint, and I learned to make non-ferrous plates which I need for circuit boards. Circuit boards I need in order to make automated mining systems. Of course getting the blueprints is one thing; now I have to gather materials again. That’ll be next week’s goal.

Firewatch, start to finish

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday I mentioned needing a gaming palette cleanser to put between two somewhat similar open world games. I found it in Firewatch.

I’m probably the last person to play this game, which is available on Steam & GoG for Mac, Windows and Linux, as well as on PS4 and Xbox One. I’d heard lots of great things about it which made me skeptical because I’m just inherently contrary like that.

Turns out I was wrong. It was pretty good. I’m not sure it’s a game… I guess it’s what some folks call a walking simulator. It’s more like a story that you have to turn a crank to hear. And by turn a crank, I mean walk around in this world. Since the whole game is the story I don’t want to say too much about it, other than I really was interested to see how things turned out.

It was a perfect palette cleanser because yesterday was cold and rainy and I wrapped myself up in a blanket on the couch and played through the entire thing, with just a break for Lola walking and to have dinner. I didn’t time myself but howlongtobeat.com says it’s a 4 hour game and that feels about right to me.

Now the bad news. I played it on the PS4 Pro (where it runs at 4K) and performance wasn’t great. There was a lot of draw in, frequent stutters and some items you interact with could be needlessly fiddly. Y’know the drill, you’re moving around to get the little “Activate” prompt to pop up. None of these were crucial problems because there’s nothing that requires reflexes or anything, but it just took away from the aesthetics of the experience a little bit. I wish they’d given us an option to run at 1080P with a smoother performance.

Still, really glad I played it. Wasn’t completely happy with the ending but hey, some stories don’t turn out the way you expect them to or want them to. I think the biggest praise I can give the game is I wish I could learn more about what happened with these characters after the story ends.

One note about price, I paid $10 for this on sale, I think it’s normally $15, so about the same as buying a new movie digitally. I would welcome more short, narrative driven experiences for around this price. If Firewatch had been 20 hours I would’ve gotten so bored with it; the 4-5 hours it took me to play through it felt perfect. Now I’ll put it on the shelf and maybe take it out and replay it in a few years in the same way you pull out an old movie for a re-watch. Seems like an awesome niche to me.

Weekend Recap: Lots of frittering, little progress

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I didn’t accomplish much at all this past weekend. Part of the reason is that Lola was sick and we went on LOTS of walks so she could frequently answer the call of nature. Every time I sat down to do something she’d be there, sitting in front of me and beaming “NEED TO GO” thoughts into my brain.

But even the gaming time I did carve out wasn’t too productive. I mentioned that I finished the storyline for Rise of the Tomb Raider last week, and whenever I finish a game like this I enter a period where I feel a little adrift, grasping around to find the next game that is really going to click with me.

So I spent time checking out the holiday and limited time stuff I wrote about last week. That was mostly disappointing to me. The multiplayer mode of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare still makes me anxious. I wrote about Elder Scrolls Online’s New Life festival on Friday. I haven’t felt any desire to go back and do more of that, and in fact it has somehow turned me off TESO completely (temporarily, I’m sure). I installed DC Universe Online but you have to be level 10 to partake in that game’s winter holiday event and I was level 7. I started leveling up but the game is just so janky on consoles…I couldn’t deal with it. I played Trove a few times and that felt like enough. It just starts feeling really repetitive really fast; I’m assuming it gets more interesting if you stick with it so don’t take this as a bad judgement of the game. I’m just not ready to put in the time to get to the good stuff.

I fired up Destiny but I might be done with Destiny. I think I have a whole post about that so I’ll save it.

In the end I spent a lot of time back in Tomb Raider trying to 100% the game (which is way different than 100%ing the trophies). I’m up to 92 or 93% now. I think I was around 70% when I finished the story. In this context 100% means you’ve found all the collectibles, done all the side missions and challenges, solved all the tombs and stuff. I have all the big stuff done, now I’m mostly hunting collectibles and finishing up challenges (challenges are tasks like “Cut down 5 Soviet flags” and usually the trick is finding the objectives since they don’t show up on the mini-map).

I also started Far Cry Primal, which a friend of mine is really enjoying. This is a game I snagged for cheap during a Black Friday sale — one of those “I’ll get this now and play it during a gaming drought” — titles. (Do we really still have gaming droughts?) Anyway I was really enjoying the bow combat in Rise of the Tomb Raider and there’s a lot of bow combat in Primal too, so I downloaded it. I think I’m really going to like it some day, but for now maybe going from one “open world semi-stealth bow-combat wilderness adventure” game to another is too much of a good thing. I might need to find a palette cleanser between Tomb Raid and FC Primal. I’ll give it one more shot before a back burner it though.

So here it is Monday, and I have the day off, and I still don’t know what to play! #FirstWorldProblems Maybe I should watch movies all day or something.

The Elder Scrolls Online’s New Life Festival

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I skipped No Man’s Thursday last night in favor of checking out some of the limited time events I mentioned yesterday. I tried my hand at Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s multiplayer mode and that went about as well as expected (in other words, it was a disaster). Why can’t game companies do matchmaking right? The match I was in, and I believe it is 5 on 5, my side had two level 1 players (me and another guy) and we were short a man. The other team had 5 guys level 40+ (our other two guys were also 40+). Needless to say we lost, badly. Though honestly I got more kills than I expected to.

Anyway, then I logged into The Elder Scrolls Online to check out the New Life Festival. I’m not sure what to think of it so far. Maybe what I think is that rushing to do these the first day isn’t the best idea. For me, I’ve only explored one of the 3 factions in TESO, and the quest began with an NPC (Brega) deep in the Ebonheart Pact area. So step 1 was riding through three zones trying to find a path the the NPC (there’s probably some way to teleport there but I couldn’t find it). Once you find the main quest giver she sends you off on a series of sub-quests to see how the different people of Tamriel celebrate New Life Festival (which is essentially New Year’s Eve, so no decorated trees or anything).

First quest sent me back to the Daggerfall Covenant lands so I took a wayshrine to where I needed to go and did that. (I had to perform for various crowds… simply push a button in the right place.) Then back to Brega for a box ‘o loot and my next quest. Number 2 took place right near her so that was simple. The next took place along the trail of wayshrines I’d tagged on the way to starting a quest. After that I had to go to Grahtwood. I had no idea where that was but after a bit of scouring the map I saw I could take a boat from Wayrest to Grahtwood, so I did that. The Grahtwood quest actually involved a tad of combat (the earlier ones are basically go somewhere and click a button to perform some task) and the poor mobs barely spawned before they were slaughtered.

After talking to Brega again I was sent to Shadowfen, another place I’d never been. I couldn’t find a shortcut to get there so more riding across zones. For this quest I had to do some fishing, and this is where things got ugly. There’re a couple of areas where you can catch the event fish and the first one was packed!

People were selling the needed fish in chat for large sums of gold. Other people were shouting they wanted to buy fish. And a third faction was cursing out the people selling the fish for ruining a Christmas event (reminder: not a Christmas event) by their greed. I decided to move on to the second spot to fish in. It was much less crowded and after maybe 5 minutes I had the fish I needed. Turned them in and back to Brega who sent me off to Betnikh for some big party. At that point I’d had enough running back and forth for one night so I left the rest for another time.

Each completed sub-quest got you a box of stuff. Some event motifs, some recipes, some silly trinkets like fake swords so you can do a sword swallowing emote, and some materials for making the holiday crafted items. I dunno what happens when you get through all of Bregas stuff. I assume there is one per race so I should have 4 more to do.

Its kind of sad that these events can bring out the worst in people. The folks who need to have EVERYTHING as soon as possible just seem to get crazy at the start of events. I don’t understand why anyone would care if someone was selling those fish. Personally I don’t see the point of buying stuff…I mean catching the silly fish is part of playing the game. But I guess for some people the point is to Have All The Things rather than to play the game. Or possibly they’re crafters who want to have all the motifs so they can sell holiday-themed gear for major amounts of gold.

Anyway, it all kind of turned me off the event. People shouldn’t be getting so angry about a game; games are supposed to be fun.

Also, I watched Tipa streaming some of the Final Fantasy XIV holiday event and from the few minutes I watched (I was at work, shhhhh) it seemed much more narrative-based and much less “OMG GET STUFF NAO!” than the Elder Scrolls one. TESO’s event felt like “OK we wrote some lore about this festival, now let’s dole in out in bite sized chunks via isolated simple quests.” while FF XIV seemed like it was telling the player a story. I’m a little bit jealous of FF XIV players right now.

Too much good stuff!

Posted on by Nimgimli

There’s so much free stuff (some of it add-ons to games you’ve already bought) going on in console gaming that I decided I needed to make a list of stuff I want to check out in the next week or three. I’m going to break this list into two parts, the time-limited stuff and then the permanent additions.

Time Limited

1) Destiny’s “The Dawning” update brings some kind of holiday-themed events as well as Sparrow Racing. I’d point you to Belghast for details, he’s on top of the Destiny stuff far more than I am.

2) Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is free to play for 5 days starting today. You can play the first two levels of the singly player campaign and I guess all the MP and Zombie stuff

3) Microsoft is giving away Lost Odyssey on Xbox 360 and Xbox One (via backwards compatibility in the latter case). I had no luck ‘buying’ this on the Xbox One so here’s a link to it on the web store.

4) DC Universe has some kind of Holiday event going; I just re-installed that on my PS4. I think I’m level 5 or thereabouts; I’m kind of a big deal. Anyway, here’s the official post with all the details.

5) Mentioning this for others because I don’t play, but Overwatch has a holiday event of some sort. I still wish Overwatch was a single player game. I LOVE the characters but hate arena-based competitive stuff like this.

6) The Elder Scrolls Online has it’s first “Nondenominational Winter Holiday Based Event” called The New Life Festival

7) Neverwinter has the Winter Festival of Simril starting today.

Permanent New Stuff

1) Trove just entered beta on Xbox One and PS4. Since I never really played it on PC I’m excited to give it a try. They call it beta but they’re not going to have a wipe for launch.

2) Uncharted 4’s “Survival” mode just launched. Play solo or co-cp against 50 waves of enemies. Earn CHEEVOS. PROFIT!

3) There’s a new update for Battlefield 1 that adds both a map and a custom game mode, Standard Issue Rifles.

4) I still haven’t played the cheerful (that’s sarcasm, it’s super violent and gory) free-to-play Let it Die on PS4.

And I think that’s everything. Or is it??? (Let me know if I missed anything, console-wise. I know virtually every PC MMO has some kind of holiday thing but I’d be here all day if I listed all of those!)

Of course in addition to all of the above, I just gave in to temptation about bought Gravity Rush Remastered and Darkest Dungeons from the PSN Holiday Sale Week 2 and I’ve got peer pressure telling me I should grab Firewatch, too.

Reindeer Mount from TESO

Rise of the Tomb Raider: The End

Posted on by Nimgimli

I finished up the story mode of Rise of the Tomb Raider last night. What a great game that was. If you’re not a Playstation owner and ever wondered what all the fuss about the Uncharted games is about, the modern Tomb Raider games are quite similar in a lot of ways. A fun mix of climbing around and exploring, solving puzzles, and combat. I love the Uncharted games so I guess its no surprise I love the Tomb Raider games as well.

I thought the mix of these three pillars was pretty good, but keep in mind my bias of enjoying the climbing and the combat a lot. I’ve heard some complaints there weren’t enough tombs to explore (I believe there are nine in all). Of course there are also what I call exploration puzzles. Lara is here, she has to get there, how’s she going to do it?

One of the nice mechanics is this kind of “Lara vision” that you can activate at any time. It shows you were you need to go next and highlights objects you can interact with and nearby collectibles. Lara will also give you hints if you’ve been in the same place too long, and this hint system is really good because they really are hints rather than explicit instructions. “I need to free this gear before that lever will work.” she’ll say, and then if you still don’t make progress. “Maybe if I got up higher I could find a solution.” In other words progressively more helpful hints.

RoTR is semi-open world. You have to move through the story to unlock new areas (or obtain new gear that lets you access previously inaccessible areas) but then you can fast travel back in order to do side quests or search for collectibles. I did a lot of this; I took my time playing. Maybe because of this I was over-leveled a bit. Lara earns experience points that she spends in various combat and survival skills, and she can craft better weapons as she collects more stuff. Whatever the reason I actually found the combat pretty easy on the “Tomb Raider” difficulty level, which was the default setting (there’s an even easier level called Adventurer). That was fine for enjoying the story (and it was a decent story) but I think it’ll be fun to play again with the difficulty bumped up.

I’d love to be sharing all my great screenshots from the end of the game but I was SO engrossed I forgot to take any!!! LOL

My post-credits save file says I’m 84% complete and I’ve barely scratched the surface on Trophies so there’s still a lot more to do. There’re also other modes, like a Survival Mode and Expeditions, which are replays of chunks of the game for high scores and stuff (at least that’s what I think it is, I haven’t tried those modes yet).

After the story is over you can jump back in and keep exploring and collecting and doing side-challenges and stuff. It’s a big game. Great value.

Overall, very very happy with this one.

Combat in Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force

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Last night was Fairy Fencer F night! I started the night by doing some grinding but then things really picked up. Added two new Fencers to the party and got to enjoy some really silly cut scenes. I thought I was just weird finding this game funny but Angela was in the room and I heard her chuckle a few times too, so it’s not just me after all. I also had my first tough boss fight. Y’know the deal…you beat, or nearly beat, the enemy and then he moves into a whole new, much stronger, style of combat. Complete party wipe the first time, but fortunately they give you Save Points just before boss battles. Got him on the second go. We also uncovered some mystery about one of our characters…but learning more about that will have to wait for next week!

I wanted to describe the combat system this week. FFF is an old-school RPG. Almost everything is completely turn-based (I’ll talk about the one exception below). You move around on a dungeon map, then when you encounter enemies (and at least they’re not hidden) you move to an encounter map (which is just an empty space, there’s no terrain). Your party and the mobs take action in order according to their agility (and any modifiers).

When it’s a character’s turn to go, they first move around the map; how far they can move depends on their movement stat, and they can’t clip through each other or enemies. Early on movement is pretty rote but later when you have a bunch of characters and some mobs get AOE attacks you’ll want to start putting some thought into positioning. Basically there’ll be a circle around the character, the radius dependent on the Movement stat, and you can push them around in that as much as you want before confirming your move.

When movement is finished the character can attack using either weapon abilities or skills/spells (both of these draw from the same SP pool). Of course you have to be in range of the mob. Characters unlock various weapon abilities as they progress and you can set up “Combos” of these abilities. This basically means binding abilities to face buttons on the controller. I’m still puzzling out the benefits of combos, but one aspect is clear. Certain abilities will launch an enemy into the air, and certain abilities are designed to do bonus damage to launched enemies; so you want to chain these two types of ability. This is the one place the combat isn’t turn based. If you use an ability that launches an enemy, it’ll slowly sink back to the ground. You’ll want to hit it with a bonus attack before it lands, but even here it’s not exactly reflex-based…it takes a few seconds for the enemy to land so you have plenty of time.

If you don’t want to use basic melee abilities, you can use Skills or Spells. I don’t think there’s a practical difference between these two; they both use up a characters SP (what we’d call mana in the west). Skills are unique to a character so there’s that, while different characters might have the same Cure spell, for example. You open up a menu to cast skills and spells (or use items for that matter). Again, old school. One of my gripes is that some skills can target more than one enemy via a cone or wedge and lining these up just right can be kind of fiddly. You use the analog stick to do it and it would be great if you could use the D-pad to nudge your target area around.

Each character also has a special ability unique to him/her. Fang’s special is “Serious Face” where he does extra damage but uses SP with every attack. Harley’s is Analyze, which she uses to expose strengths and weaknesses of an enemy. Self-centered Tiara can cast Barrier, a shield around just herself (let everyone else fend for themselves!) and Galdo has…the name just went out of my head, but his ability does increased damage but has a lower chance to hit.

And finally characters have a “Tension Meter” that fills up as they dish out or take damage. When it gets high enough they can “Fairyize” (these terms kill me!) which lets them transform into something that looks like, well, a transformer, as imagined by a child. Along with the transformation you get a cheesy 80’s rock anthem theme song and a ridiculous animation that shows that character being impaled by their Fury before transforming. When you get tired of watching the animation, holding the R2 shoulder button will speed you through it (this works almost any time, making it easy to blast through fights against trash mobs). In Fairyized mode characters just seem to be more powerful. There’re also a few Skills that you can only activate in Fairyized mode. These tend to do good damage at some cost.

And that’s about it for combat, aside from something called Avalanche Attack that I’m still trying to figure out. So far I’ve had no need of it but I’ll revisit if and when I suss out how it works. Right now it just triggers from time to time and I’m not exactly sure why! It has something to do with a Guard Gauge that only started appearing late in tonight’s session after Harley upgraded her Analyze skill.

If you’re a gamer of a certain age this combat system will feel like a comfortable old pair of slippers. If you didn’t game your way through the turn-based era, you might find it all horribly slow and boring.

Here’s a couple of short videos showing combat against a group of low level foes, and against a single (slightly) more powerful foe.

Weekend recap

Posted on by Nimgimli

In terms of “stuff to blog about” this was a pretty boring gaming weekend. I’ve let Final Fantasy XV go for now in order to focus on Rise of the Tomb Raider. I like FFXV well enough, but I’m hooked on Tomb Raider and just couldn’t bring myself to put it aside in favor of FFXV. I also got sucked back into Elder Scrolls Online, as happens fairly often. I even fired up Destiny briefly to see if I remembered how to play. I have this idea I might log in for the holiday event that starts Tuesday but we’ll see.

Saturday night is movie night for Angela and I. We usually buy or rent some ‘new to digital’ movie. This weekend Angela had a hankering for Chinese take-out, and since we’re trying to cut down on spending I went looking for a movie to watch for free so we could get the take-out. I landed on Spectral, a new movie on Netflix. It was kind of fun in a ‘bad movie’ way. The plot was basically a bunch of soldiers vs an enemy that appears to be ghosts. It has some decent special effects and…that’s probably the end of things to recommend about it. Assuming you have a Netflix sub already, if you’re looking for something kind of mindless with lots of explosions and stuff…then maybe.

When the movie ended we weren’t quite done lounging on the couch with bellies full of Chinese take-out, so we watched the first episode of White Rabbit Project, also on Netflix. This is the new show from the Mythbusters team of Grant Imahara, Tory Belleci and Kari Byron. We really enjoyed this. They’re doing the same wacky experiments they did on Mythbusters. In the first episode they were deciding which super hero power was most practical (mind control, ice, lightning, flight and maybe I’m forgetting some). It was funny as heck, the experiments were crazy, and it was just a ton of fun. We’ll be watching the rest of this.

Speaking of TV (I know it’s out of fashion but I love TV) season 2 of Colony is coming in January. You probably didn’t watch season one, but if you can find it streaming somewhere, check it out. It takes place in a world where aliens have invaded and conquered the earth. What remains of humanity has been herded into separate city-sized zones. The twist is we don’t really know why the aliens invaded and we never see them. Instead the show focuses on the struggle between the resistance and collaborators. The obvious thought is that the resistance are the good guys but it’s not always so clear, which adds to the show. We really enjoyed the first season and can’t wait for season 2.

Elder Scrolls Online HDR patch

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of the reasons I was anxious to get a PS4 Pro as soon as they launched was that I’d heard The Elder Scrolls Online would support the new hardware with improved resolution (or ‘enhanced details on 1080P screens). It was one of the first games I tried on the new console and when I saw the difference I knew I hadn’t made a mistake. Now don’t get me wrong, it was still TESO, but the increased resolution meant more details ‘popped’ and the improved draw distances made the world feel even more alive. Mostly this is all aesthetics though I can spot harvest nodes from further away now.

Of course me being me, soon after I drifted off to other games, but I always come back to TESO eventually.

I did that yesterday and was surprised to see “An HDR video is playing” pop up on my screen when I loaded the game (that’s my TV’s awkward way of indicating it is receiving video from an HDR source). Turns out a recent update added HDR support to the game. I was delighted until I logged in and found the cave I’d happened to log out in was dark. I mean really dark. Dark to the level of having to navigate via the map because I literally couldn’t see the walls.

I went online and found I wasn’t the only one having issues, and in fact even people without HDR TVs were complaining about the game being too dark. So I think Zenimax is going to have to adjust things. That said, for me it was just a matter of tweaking some settings.

Here’s the thing about HDR. First, it’s impossible for me to show you how awesome it is unless you have an HDR display and even then I’m not sure how I, personally, can capture HDR data to share. It’s kind of like 3D or VR; without the right hardware there’s no way for you to see it. Second, it’s still pretty new tech and tends to be fiddly. You see a lot of people talking about how it’s too much trouble; these comments, I have to assume, are coming from people who haven’t experienced it. It is very much worth the few minutes it (sometimes) takes to get it right.

In my TV’s case (a Samsung KS8000) I found that I had to turn on Dynamic Contrast, which is something all the pundits tell you to leave off. With the new patch there’s an “HDR Brightness” slider. With Dynamic Contrast turned off this didn’t appear to do anything. With Dynamic Contrast set to high, moving the slider resulted in noticeable changes though it feel more like “how HDR-ey do you want this” more than an actual brightness slider.

But with Dynamic Contrast set to High I could see in caves again. Given, again, that all the pundits hate Dynamic Contrast, I then tried it set to Medium and still had good results. On Low it’s a wee bit dark. It’s dark in a way that actually feels cool in terms of immersion but maybe too dark to do group dungeon content, not that I ever do group dungeon content.

Anyway once I’d done this….WOW. The Elder Scrolls Online looks like a whole new game now. A lot of colors are brighter, the lighting is amazing and everything just feels more “real” something. It’s really hard for me to articulate what HDR does, but I really like it. Now I’m running around the world and sometimes something will catch my eye (the rays of the setting sun on water, maybe, or a shaft of magical light coming from a relic) and I’ll just stop and gawk. At one point I was looking for the source of glare on my TV screen for a few seconds before I realized it wasn’t glare, but the light from an in-game torch was just THAT bright.

I’m really looking forward to when HDR is more common and less finicky; I can’t wait for more people to get HDR religion :). One of my biggest issues now is, I’m not a TV professional and there are a lot of settings to play with. I generally look up the settings for a TV from some site like rtings.com and use those. But for this Samsung I keep getting conflicting info, and then there are settings for HDR and settings for regular video, AND then there are a few settings on the PS4 that you can mess with. So many variables! I finally say “Heck with it” and I’m letting my eyes decide. Rather than worrying about if the picture is correct or accurate, I’m worrying about whether it is pleasing to me. Still, there are a LOT of settings to tweak and it can be really confusing. I hope it gets easier over time.

Still, totally worth it though. HDR is the real deal.