Video Games Randomness - Prioritize specific game threads!

[jztemple2]

Not to say that The Crew 2 isn't a lot of fun, especially for $4.99 USD . You do, however, need to have Ubisoft Connect. Frankly I've never had an issue with it, but I've heard some people have.

Thanks for the heads up. Racing games are something enjoy but never get into too deeply. But at such a discounted price, I'm pretty sure I'll get my money's worth. Will probably try it out this afternoon.

There is a Steam demo as well.

[Max Peck]

If you're into Warhammer and real-time strategy games, there is going to be an open beta for Frontier's Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin this weekend (July 7-10).

Sign-up page: https://www.aosrealmsofruin.com/beta

[jztemple2]

I'm subscribed to the official Playway Discord channel and I always fine it interesting to see what new game they have in development. Many of the games I'm not interested in, but I've found real gems in titles like Contraband Police. And now they've announced a new title, London Cab

[Rumpy]

Hah, that's fascinating. I'd certainly play it.

[Anonymous Bosch]

I'm subscribed to the official Playway Discord channel and I always fine it interesting to see what new game they have in development. Many of the games I'm not interested in, but I've found real gems in titles like Contraband Police. And now they've announced a new title, London Cab

I wonder if they'll implement 'The Knowledge'?

The Knowledge
The London taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger's request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio. Consequently, the "Knowledge of London" is the in-depth study of a number of pre-set London street routes and all places of interest that taxicab drivers in that city must complete to obtain a licence to operate a black cab. It was initiated in 1865, and has changed little since.

It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need to pass at least twelve "appearances" (periodical one-on-one oral examinations undertaken throughout the qualification process), with the whole process averaging 34 months to pass.

Course details
Three hundred and twenty standard routes through central London, or "runs", are defined in the Guide to Learning the Knowledge of London, which is produced by the Public Carriage Office. In all, some 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross are covered, along with the major arterial routes through the rest of London.

A taxicab-driver must learn these routes, as well as the "points of interest" along and within 1⁄2 mile (0.80 km) of each end of those routes including streets, squares, clubs, hospitals, hotels, theatres, embassies, government and public buildings, railway stations, police stations, courts, diplomatic buildings, important places of worship, cemeteries, crematoria, parks and open spaces, sports and leisure centres, places of learning, restaurants and historic buildings.

The Knowledge includes details such as the order of theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue, and the names and order of the side streets and traffic signals passed on a route.

There are a number of Knowledge Schools that provide books, maps and classroom tuition which help Knowledge students to learn the 320 runs and points of interest. There are separate, shorter courses for suburban London, with 30 to 50 runs, depending on the sector.

"Knowledge boys/girls"
During training, would-be cabbies, known as Knowledge boys or Knowledge girls, usually follow these routes around London on a motor scooter, and can be identified by the clipboard fixed to the handlebars and showing details of the streets to be learned that day.

Taxi-driver applicants must be 'of good character', meeting strict requirements regarding any criminal record, then first pass a written test which qualifies them to make an "appearance". At appearances, Knowledge boys and girls must, without looking at a map, identify the two points of interest in metropolitan London that their examiner chooses and then choose the shortest and most sensible route from one to the other. For each route, the applicants must recite the names of the roads used, when they cross junctions, use roundabouts, make turns, and what is 'alongside' them at each point.

[jztemple2]

From PC Gamer, Here are the 7 city builders coming out before the end of 2023 I'm most excited about

I hope you've got your hardhat and blueprints ready, because the second half of 2023 is shaping up nicely for city builder fans. We're in the midst of a city building boom, and there are a lots of exciting new city builders on the horizon, with a whole bunch of them launching before the end of the year.

(Unless, as sometimes happens both in construction and gaming, there are some unforeseen delays. We'll cross our fingers there won't be.)

The next six months are packed with a variety of city builders, from modern skyscraper-filled skylines to muddy medieval villages and even fantasy realms filled with werewolves and witches. If you're looking for strategy, survival, or just some casual challenges, this golden period for the genre probably has you covered.

[Hrothgar]

So I tried the WrestleQuest demo. A Wrestling homage RPG sounded worth trying out. It's a RPG in the style of Super Mario RPG. It goes for the 16 bit aesthetic. It clearly references a lot of 80's Wrestling stars. I'm not sure how many are actually licensed vs. inspired by. Clearly this is a labor of love and meant for kids of the 80's and 90's. It's worth checking out if that sounds like you. It felt a little too throwback for me, but I was never big into professional wrestling. The actual game is scheduled to release in early August.

[jztemple2]

I was going to wait till July 20th when One Military Camp came out of Early Access, but I needed some gaming time this week so I picked this up.



This is basically a business sim in a way. Your country has been overrun by the evil Dragan and all that is left is one province where there is an abandoned military camp with no buildings except a recruiting center. Your goal is to provide buildings that produce power and other services, like a mess hall and an infirmary. You also build barracks to house the new recruits that show up. You also build four basic training buildings for Intelligence, Strength, Speed and Accuracy skills training. You assign recruits to these to build up their skill level in one or more of those four areas. Then you set a goals for each recruit for a specialty. For instance, an artillery soldier only needs a certain level of the strength skill, while a spy needs intelligence and speed. Later you'll have soldier types that will need three or even all four skills developed. At this point the soldier is specialized in one of those areas and goes to a building that focuses just on that job, like tank driver or aviator.

There are also a lot of other things going on. You'll need researchers working in research labs to build up research points to unlock more of the tech tree. You'll need maintenance workers to keep buildings in shape and reload stockpiles, like food for the mess halls. And you'll need medics to staff the different medical facilities.

All this is building up to prepare you to send your soldiers out on missions to recapture the country. And you can see it is a pretty good sized country. Each of those flags is a mission you'll have to complete and they all have requirements for different categories of soldiers. The better trained and experienced soldiers you send the more likely you'll succeed in the mission.


The store page estimates a forty hours completion time for the main campaign and I can believe that. I've put in four hours and I've barely scratched the surface with a lot of the tech tree still locked and only a few missions on the map completed. So far I'm having fun.

[Blackhawk]

Once again, I'm reminded of why so many people stick to consoles.

I'm trying to make an old game (that I'm not even sure I want to play) work nice with Windows 10. According to the PC Gaming Wiki, I need to set it to single core affinity. They provide a link with multiple options.

Every option assumes you have a degree in computer science. They tell you what to do, but not how to do it. And I then spend 15 minutes trying to use my little bit of remaining 1980s DOS knowledge to work in a 2023 command prompt.

[TheMix]

Silly rabbit. Just ask AB. Why make things difficult for yourself?

[Blackhawk]

Command prompts are the bane of my computing experience. They're 101-level skills for people who are trained, so any instructions (and many, many utilities) just assume that you know how to use them, not realizing that they actually quite a bit of syntax and usage that is completely opaque to any user not specifically trained with it.

I eventually said screw it - I'll just set it with the task manager every time I launch.

[Kasey Chang]

Command prompts are the bane of my computing experience. They're 101-level skills for people who are trained, so any instructions (and many, many utilities) just assume that you know how to use them, not realizing that they actually quite a bit of syntax and usage that is completely opaque to any user not specifically trained with it.

I eventually said screw it - I'll just set it with the task manager every time I launch.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... b537c4780a

[Blackhawk]

Command prompts are the bane of my computing experience. They're 101-level skills for people who are trained, so any instructions (and many, many utilities) just assume that you know how to use them, not realizing that they actually quite a bit of syntax and usage that is completely opaque to any user not specifically trained with it.

I eventually said screw it - I'll just set it with the task manager every time I launch.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... b537c4780a

I had followed that one earlier. I tried about a hundred variants of it, and it always told me it was invalid. No worries, I'm just going to stick with what I was doing.

[Anonymous Bosch]

FWIW, in my experience, the simplest way to permanently assign single core affinity to fix older games was to use the free ImageCFG utility.

1. Download ImageCFG.zip
2. Extract it to the same folder as your older game's main executable.
3. Open a command prompt, and CD to the same location, i.e. the same path where you just extracted ImageCFG.zip.
4. Create a back-up copy of your game's original main executable from the command prompt (replacing "Game_Name" with the appropriate executable for your game) e.g.

   Code: Select all

   dir *.exe
   copy Game_Name.exe Game_Name.bak

5. Now enter the following commands in the command prompt:

   Code: Select all

   imagecfg -u Game_Name.exe
   imagecfg -a 0x1 Game_Name.exe

6. The executable file for your game has now been permanently modified to use only one CPU.

[Blackhawk]

Thanks. I may give that a go tomorrow. That was one of the methods I tried, except that the instructions said, "Open a command prompt and change to the install directory." They didn't say how to do that. I kept trying to figure it out with the 'CD' command (which is the only command I recall for navigation from my DOS days), but apparently I was missing something - it kept responding with errors. And since the instructions were so incredibly sparse, there was no way to figure out what I was doing wrong.

It's a problem you see a lot when experts try to give instruction. Far too often the experts assume that everyone knows things that are, in fact, specialized knowledge. They work with those skills so often that they forget just what someone who doesn't deal with [subject] every day does and does not know.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Thanks. I may give that a go tomorrow. That was one of the methods I tried, except that the instructions said, "Open a command prompt and change to the install directory." They didn't say how to do that. I kept trying to figure it out with the 'CD' command (which is the only command I recall for navigation from my DOS days), but apparently I was missing something - it kept responding with errors. And since the instructions were so incredibly sparse, there was no way to figure out what I was doing wrong.

It's a problem you see a lot when experts try to give instruction. Far too often the experts assume that everyone knows things that are, in fact, specialized knowledge. They work with those skills so often that they forget just what someone who doesn't deal with [subject] every day does and does not know.

Gotcha.

When using the CD command, don't forget to enclose your directory location with speech marks, and then you should be good to go, e.g.

Code: Select all

cd "C:\Program Files\Steam"

[TheMix]

Man... DOS... that was a long time ago!

I can't remember. What is the command to verify your current path/location? You always start at C:/, right?

But I'd totally forgotten about "" being necessary.

[Smoove_B]

My ability to grok command line instructions ended somewhere around Load "*", 8,1

[gilraen]

I can't remember. What is the command to verify your current path/location? You always start at C:/, right?

To verify your current path, you just type
cd
with no parameters (since it doesn't just stand for "change directory", it also stands for "current directory"). However, in a standard Windows command prompt window, that's usually redundant since by default every line starts with your current directory path. Normally you start in your local user directory (e.g. when I launch my cmd window, it's immediately sitting at C:\Users\myname)

dir is the command you run to get a listing of the files in your current working directory. If you are trying to change directory to any folder that contains spaces in the name, you either have to use double-quotes, like AB pointed out, or sometimes you can get away with auto-complete: start typing the first few letters of the folder name and hit Tab. If the letters are unique, DOS will finish the name for you, quotes and all. E.g. if I'm sitting at the C:\> prompt and I start typing
cd pro
and hit Tab, it automatically expands it to:
cd "Program Files"

[Isgrimnur]

My ability to grok command line instructions ended somewhere around Load "*", 8,1

[Anonymous Bosch]

My ability to grok command line instructions ended somewhere around Load "*", 8,1

Heh, that was where my CLI fondness began…

[Blackhawk]

Frustrations aside, I actually did have a fair amount of computer training. I had a couple of years of BASIC, a year of computer math (basically an advanced, math-heavy programming class), a year of PASCAL (shudder), a semester of graphics design, mostly on PC, then worked for a year in the early 90s as a 'computer lab consultant' at ISU (basically training all of the incoming students how to use PCs - that, and unjamming dot matrix printers.)

The problem is that all of that was pre-Windows (actually, we had three or four PCs in the 'lab' that ran Windows 2.x or 3.x, but they were rarely used.) Almost none of the technical knowledge I gained during all of that has any real application whatsoever today, not to mention what 30 years does to unused skills. Except for remembering a handful of DOS commands.

[jztemple2]

In college I took one semester of computer programming, which involved writing simple BASIC programs on punchcards which were then complied and run on a mainframe

[TheMix]

Entertaining quick read: https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-fea ... le-3464041

I know there are a few others looking forward to Xenonauts 2 as well.

[Hrothgar]

I finally completed my white whales from the Playstation Vita. Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Tearaway are complete. It only took a decade. I have a few more Vita games, but those were the two I was "meaning to get back to." I'm a bit surprise the tearaway.me servers are still running. I'm sure I could have finished them sooner, but there was always something new and shiny. Plus I started to have corruption on my Vita memory card. I seem to recall the plan was to finish the uncorrupted games on the card and then do a wipe and start on the corrupted games. I didn't actually get around to that wipe until last year.

I was impressed at how well the old Vita holds up. The load times are a little slow, but everything else was pretty great. I thought some of the touch and tilt controls in Tearaway were a bit fiddly, but that more a design problem than a control problem. Ok, the PS store my games list still sucks. I might make one more attempt to find a gem in my library before I hand the Vita over to my kids.

[hitbyambulance]

My ability to grok command line instructions ended somewhere around Load "*", 8,1

Heh, that was where my CLI fondness began…

i'm shocked that in several of my last few job searches, it seems a large reason i was hired was because i actually knew just how to _navigate_ (much less actually use) the *NIX command line/terminal. (and so many people i've known in my career who didn't ever want to know to use any оperating system besides whatever was provided by Microsoft or Apple, depending on what they were trained on)

[Daehawk]

In the early 80s when I got my Atari 800xl I used to have a sub to Byte magazine of something. It came with simple BASIC code you could do at home on your new computers. I remember making animated rainbows and sound effects. I always hated when I got ONE little thing wrong in the code and would have to go back over 20 - 50 lines of it to find the culprit. I cant imagine what programmers thought of having to pour over thousands of lines of code to find an error.

[Isgrimnur]

[coopasonic]

In the early 80s when I got my Atari 800xl I used to have a sub to Byte magazine of something. It came with simple BASIC code you could do at home on your new computers. I remember making animated rainbows and sound effects. I always hated when I got ONE little thing wrong in the code and would have to go back over 20 - 50 lines of it to find the culprit. I cant imagine what programmers thought of having to pour over thousands of lines of code to find an error.

We have IDE (integrated Development Environments) with debugging capabilities and logging to help us troubleshoot issues and unit test to help us avoid introducing new issues. We also don't typically deal with thousands of lines of code all at once. We break them up into classes (or files) and methods and we can see what is happening each step along the way. The things we build are massively more complex than they used to be, but so are our tools.

[hitbyambulance]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development

[coopasonic]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptanc ... evelopment

[Blackhawk]

I thought I'd post this here. I've been answering some questions in the Fallout 76 thread, and this came up. It's something that's come up in the past, too. I thought it might make good discussion.

But all my posts and stuff just remember Im having fun.

Absolutely! Play the way you want to! I have no intention of dictating how you build or play. I'm just pointing out the causes/solutions to some of the problems you mention.

And that goes for suggestions I make for any game, ever, here or in person. I'm not telling people how to play, I'm usually just pointing out/suggesting why something isn't working well.

I used to like playing by the seat of my pants a lot more. The truth is that a few people like to spend absurd amounts of time learning how to optimize their builds/gameplay. They enjoy the math and theorycrafting as much as they enjoy the game itself. Then another huge chunk of people (probably a majority) like to find the guides that the optimizers produce and copy them. In the end, a majority of players end up with a build/approach that puts them high in damage/effectiveness/etc.

The problem that causes is that it forces developers to balance (combat, resources, progression rate, etc) under the assumption that people are going to play that way - because most of them are. The few of us who are left who prefer to make it up as we go and do what feels good, then, sometimes get stuck with what feels good having huge balance issues, be that combat effectiveness, skills that just don't seem to work well, or running out of resources. It tends to be a much bigger issue on multiplayer/co-op games, as they often adjust everybody's difficulty based on the number of people, and they expect that those people are semi-optimized. If they're not, then you take "somewhat weak", multiply that by a number of players on the same team, and turn it into "why can't we win?"

I hate having to play that way. It makes it feel less like I'm playing the game, and more like I'm following instructions. But the truth is that some games just aren't designed to be fun if you don't. And yeah, that sucks.

FWIW, some tabletop games have the same issue. Try playing some Shadowrun Crossfire with people who don't want to 'optimize' the group's builds/strategy.

[Daehawk]

The only time I like to really get in deep with stats and builds is in a deep RPG still. A 6 character party rpg. Ill spend an hour building each of the 6 characters, rolling and rerolling their stats to get them just the way I want them before venturing out to smith evil bad guys.

[Jaymann]

The only time I like to really get in deep with stats and builds is in a deep RPG still. A 6 character party rpg. Ill spend an hour building each of the 6 characters, rolling and rerolling their stats to get them just the way I want them before venturing out to smith evil bad guys.

In most games the bad guys show up without you having to forge them.

[Daehawk]

Smith smite on into the night yay verily the Thundercats rode.

[Kasey Chang]

I have a degree in EE with a minor in CS, and have designed and programed circuits from logic gates to FPGAs, programmed from x86 Assembly to BASIC to Python, C, and Java, Node.js, full-stack webdev, and more. My current job is teaching seniors how to use their iPhones 90% of the time. The other 10% of seniors actually brought in laptops and whatnot. Well, a job is a job.

[hitbyambulance]

I have a degree in EE with a minor in CS, and have designed and programed circuits from logic gates to FPGAs, programmed from x86 Assembly to BASIC to Python, C, and Java, Node.js, full-stack webdev, and more. My current job is teaching seniors how to use their iPhones 90% of the time. The other 10% of seniors actually brought in laptops and whatnot. Well, a job is a job.

maybe a side question, but... why didn't you go on with electrical engineering - or even front-end coding - as a career? unemployment and money issues would not be a thing.

[Blackhawk]

This is why I'm getting a bald spot.

I own Elite Dangerous. I've yet to play it, but I've been planning to. When they do Twitch campaigns, I grab the freebies for it. This time, though, I'm having an issue (possibly related to the game, not Twitch), so I try to contact Frontier support.

I sit there and go through the entire form, write out everything that's going on, fill out all of the fields, and hit submit. Whoops. An empty data field. It needs my FID.

What's an FID? A special ID code that's only accessible from the main menu of the the game. Which I don't have installed.

55 gigs later, I launch the game. It wants me to log in with my Frontier account. I do so. It wants a code it will send me in my email.

Sigh.

Five minutes later I get the code. I put it in. It pops up a yellow exclamation point and says, "Please Check", which is supremely unhelpful, but I assume means that the code is wrong. I double check. I copy-paste. I double check again. Same result.

So I research. Some people say that if you have it on Steam, you have to link your account first. Ok. I go and check how to do that.

There are two ways. The first is to go to the site and link it via a certain page. That page no longer exists.

The second is that you can link it after you log in to the game. Which I cannot do.

So, in order to put in a support ticket, I have to log into the game, which in turns requires that I make a support ticket, which requires that I log into the game.

Oh, wait - their support has a Twitter account. Ah, but they haven't posted on it in a couple of years. I'll send them a message.

Must be verified to send messages.

Who the holy fuckballs designed this system?

[Anonymous Bosch]

This is why I'm getting a bald spot.

I own Elite Dangerous. I've yet to play it, but I've been planning to. When they do Twitch campaigns, I grab the freebies for it. This time, though, I'm having an issue (possibly related to the game, not Twitch), so I try to contact Frontier support.

I sit there and go through the entire form, write out everything that's going on, fill out all of the fields, and hit submit. Whoops. An empty data field. It needs my FID.

What's an FID? A special ID code that's only accessible from the main menu of the the game. Which I don't have installed.

55 gigs later, I launch the game. It wants me to log in with my Frontier account. I do so. It wants a code it will send me in my email.

Sigh.

Five minutes later I get the code. I put it in. It pops up a yellow exclamation point and says, "Please Check", which is supremely unhelpful, but I assume means that the code is wrong. I double check. I copy-paste. I double check again. Same result.

So I research. Some people say that if you have it on Steam, you have to link your account first. Ok. I go and check how to do that.

There are two ways. The first is to go to the site and link it via a certain page. That page no longer exists.

The second is that you can link it after you log in to the game. Which I cannot do.

So, in order to put in a support ticket, I have to log into the game, which in turns requires that I make a support ticket, which requires that I log into the game.

Oh, wait - their support has a Twitter account. Ah, but they haven't posted on it in a couple of years. I'll send them a message.

Must be verified to send messages.

Who the holy fuckballs designed this system?

Dunno if this will help, but you may want to try posting about your difficulties on their community forums instead. Because their form for forum sign-up seems fairly simple and straightforward in comparison to what you describe above.

[Blackhawk]

I'm probably going to have to, but going to community forums for support is always the *last* thing I try. It is rarely a good experience, as it usually just results in a few elitists trying to tell you what an idiot you are.