Re: Lets talk some games

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This stupid thread got me snooping which made me aware of The Witcher III. That would almost certainly require me digging the old PC out of the garage to determine its specs which would almost certainly lead me to buying a new video card and more ram which would almost certainly lead to me being holed up in the room with the spare tv for hours on end which would almost certainly lead to an issue with the family's neglect. I should just not look in here again.

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featureless wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:03 pm This stupid thread got me snooping which made me aware of The Witcher III. That would almost certainly require me digging the old PC out of the garage to determine its specs which would almost certainly lead me to buying a new video card and more ram which would almost certainly lead to me being holed up in the room with the spare tv for hours on end which would almost certainly lead to an issue with the family's neglect. I should just not look in here again.
Nah, you get the family to play the game with you. You each take turns driving the mouse and you collboratively make decisions about what to do in the game. The family that games together stays together - usually all night until someone realizes that it's 4am and you guys really should have gone to bed hours ago.
106+ recreational uses of firearms
1 defensive use
0 people injured
0 people killed

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Eris wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2019 4:48 pm
featureless wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:03 pm This stupid thread got me snooping which made me aware of The Witcher III. That would almost certainly require me digging the old PC out of the garage to determine its specs which would almost certainly lead me to buying a new video card and more ram which would almost certainly lead to me being holed up in the room with the spare tv for hours on end which would almost certainly lead to an issue with the family's neglect. I should just not look in here again.
Nah, you get the family to play the game with you. You each take turns driving the mouse and you collboratively make decisions about what to do in the game. The family that games together stays together - usually all night until someone realizes that it's 4am and you guys really should have gone to bed hours ago.
:lol: Great sales pitch!

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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019 ... -worked-on
Most people know Pratchett as the author of Discworld, the famous fantasy series about a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants. However, what many people don't know is that the knighted author was also a massive fan of video games - so much so that he actually worked on mods for Oblivion, most of which were spearheaded by a Morrowind modder named Emma.

After making the transition from Morrowind to Oblivion, Emma sought to create a companion for herself. This resulted in the creation of Vilja, a Nord alchemist designed to keep Emma company as she traversed the world of Oblivion. While Emma originally created Vilja for personal use, even voicing the character herself, she eventually released her to the public with the help of fellow modder Charles "CD" Cooley. Vilja received a lot of admiration from avid players, but a particularly intriguing email titled "Praise for Vilja" came a few months after Vilja 1.0 launched.
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"The first letter from Terry arrived in March 2010, only three months after the original release," Emma told Eurogamer. In this message, Pratchett mentioned how enamoured he had become with Vilja, specifically mentioning his appreciation for the way in which she would acknowledge small gifts such as strawberries. "He also praised the modding community as a whole, mentioning how impressed he was by the effort put into mods, and how much he enjoyed using them."
After reading this article I want to play Oblivion again. I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan, and I played some of Emma's mods in Morrowind, so the Vilja mod sounds really appealing!
106+ recreational uses of firearms
1 defensive use
0 people injured
0 people killed

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just thought i'd mention that after playing morrowind (still my fave) for the umpteenth time i've switched to oblivion lately. i'm currently running a khajiiti (what else?) of indistinct class, emphasis on stealth, alchemy and marksmanship, with a side of blade, armorer, alteration and illusion. a generalist in other words. forts full of bandits fall to my poisoned arrows as i pass, unseen, pausing only to gather the loot. the anomaly this time is heavy armor. alchemy is mostly for potions and poisons, but also a good source of revenue early in the game. i built this character with growth in mind, tired of topping out too soon. diverse skill set is the key.
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

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playing morrowind (ESIII) again for the umpteenth time, and stumbled on something new to me. if you press your nose firmly against the ghostfence, you can kill things inside it with your bow. yeah, big hairy deal, but this is testimony to how deep this game is, i must've played it dozens of times all the way through and yet never noticed this.

i sometime wonder about the gameplay changes between morrowind and the later games. i assume they were responding to player complaints about lack of realism. this in a world where it is actually possible to buy stuff 24/7, but we can't allow that in a game with elves and dragons, but shops being open round the clock would be unrealistic. and what happened to mark and recall? levitate? they worked in morrowind but not in in cyrodil or skyrim?
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

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lurker wrote: Wed Jul 03, 2019 1:00 am playing morrowind (ESIII) again for the umpteenth time, and stumbled on something new to me. if you press your nose firmly against the ghostfence, you can kill things inside it with your bow. yeah, big hairy deal, but this is testimony to how deep this game is, i must've played it dozens of times all the way through and yet never noticed this.

i sometime wonder about the gameplay changes between morrowind and the later games. i assume they were responding to player complaints about lack of realism. this in a world where it is actually possible to buy stuff 24/7, but we can't allow that in a game with elves and dragons, but shops being open round the clock would be unrealistic. and what happened to mark and recall? levitate? they worked in morrowind but not in in cyrodil or skyrim?
I was thinking about reinstalling Morrowind, and it looks like the newest patch removes the need to play with the disc in, so you should be able to play without the disc with no need to install a pirate crack.

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lurker wrote: Wed Jul 03, 2019 1:00 am playing morrowind (ESIII) again for the umpteenth time, and stumbled on something new to me. if you press your nose firmly against the ghostfence, you can kill things inside it with your bow. yeah, big hairy deal, but this is testimony to how deep this game is, i must've played it dozens of times all the way through and yet never noticed this.

i sometime wonder about the gameplay changes between morrowind and the later games. i assume they were responding to player complaints about lack of realism. this in a world where it is actually possible to buy stuff 24/7, but we can't allow that in a game with elves and dragons, but shops being open round the clock would be unrealistic. and what happened to mark and recall? levitate? they worked in morrowind but not in in cyrodil or skyrim?
24 hour shops don't make sense to me in a medieval type setting. That's really a modern phenomenon made possible by eletricity.

I don't know why recall was taken out, but levitate was removed in Oblivion because the cities were separate world spaces to improve performance. If you actually went over the city walls in Oblivion all you'd find were some placeholder buildings to make the rooftops look right from outside the walls - no NPCs, no decorations, no working doors, etc would be present. The same is true of the cities in Skyrim.
106+ recreational uses of firearms
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0 people injured
0 people killed

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Bang wrote: Sun Jul 07, 2019 3:58 pm
lurker wrote: Sun Jul 07, 2019 2:41 pm i'm about to take a stack of (mostly) RPG game cds to goodwill with the graphing calculator, if anyone wants some or all, lemme know.
What are they and how much to ship them?
don't worry about shipping. no guarantee they'll run on your version of windows. pillars of eternity, dungeon siege, dungeon siegeLOA, DS BW, flight sim 2002, myst, 1l2 sturmovik 1946, sacred, flight sim 2002, morph studio, black hawk down, COD goty, conflict: desert storm, ori and the blind forest. and an os2 warp install set for you os2 geeks. maybe some more, need to go thru the drawer. some of these i've never installed.
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

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I remember the demo for Dungeon Siege was a lot of fun, so those would be great, if you're really going to just give them up. I've never played Pillars of Eternity, but it did sound fun at the time.

I have to get a PO box here in Washington, so if you're willing to hold on to them for a week or so that would be appreciated.

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Bang wrote: Sun Jul 07, 2019 12:05 pm
Eris wrote: Sun Jul 07, 2019 4:57 am Unless you really want the physical copy, I'd say ignore the used one and get it from Good Old Games.

https://www.gog.com/game/icewind_dale_2

It's only $10, and you also get some goodies like the "Adventurer's Pack" expansion, the soundtrack, some wallpapers, etc.
I don't pay money to download stuff, I'd much rather spend $3 on a CD than ten dollars on "intellectual property."
As you wish. For my part I'd rather pay money that goes to the creators for a product that I know is going to work, than pay money to a third party for something that may be useless.
106+ recreational uses of firearms
1 defensive use
0 people injured
0 people killed

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Bang wrote: Sun Jul 07, 2019 5:34 pm I remember the demo for Dungeon Siege was a lot of fun, so those would be great, if you're really going to just give them up. I've never played Pillars of Eternity, but it did sound fun at the time.

I have to get a PO box here in Washington, so if you're willing to hold on to them for a week or so that would be appreciated.
no hurry.
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

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solved a long-standing mystery of the universe! well, sorta. local map clearing glitch.

in elder scrolls 3, aka morrowind, the local map starts blacked out and gradually fills in with the local detail as you move your character about. there are two glitches that i know of, one minor, one not so. the minor one is that the cleared path is not centered on your cursor, so the cleared path is wider on one side than the other. the other is that at seemingly random points in time and seemingly random durations, the path stops clearing, so you end up moving about on a blacked-out local map.

both of these issues become a problem if you engage in a practice known as "lawnmowing", sweeping an area in a regular rectilinear fashion to expose the entire map. the off-center bug is a minor annoyance, but the path-clearing glitch is a major PITA, because it's entirely possible to stroll right past the bandit cave or mages hideout where the big loot is, and you'll never know it.

i still don't know exactly why the path-clearing glitch happens, but i've noticed some things about it: it can be precipitated by a monster attacking, or sliding down a slope in a direction other than the way your pointer is oriented. but tonight, i hit upon the big thing: it varies by your direction of travel. you can go left to right (east) or bottom to top (nort) as much as you like, but if you go east or south, the map glitch is gonna happen, just a matter of time. i haven't been all over the map to try this everywhere, but it's very consistent in the eastern half, molag amur, azura's coast and the grazelands.

i suspect that this is an artifact of the way the map coordinates are handled, possibly going negative for south and west. apparently there's a limited range which resets at the edge of a "cell", because you can save up a small "credit" by going north or east before you turn south or west. fast travel (intervention or recall resets it as well) and the thing doesn't just quit path clearing, the area being cleared jumps to a location (generally north from what i've seen so far) disconnected from the original path, often out of view by panning the map.

i've been looking for a description and/or solution for this without success off and on for years. now i know what it is. back when i was a coder, this would have been bread and butter. now, it's just interesting. it may even be that it behaves differently on the western half of the map.
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

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