Posts made by Packrat

I have been playing Cyberpunk on my oldish (3 years old) but high spec desktop and whilst I have definitely run into bugs? A lot fewer bugs than many other 'Triple A' games.

Performance has been decent and the game looks gorgeous whilst having largely well written and well acted plots in an amazingly rich and interesting world. Some of the very RPG mechanics stuff like levelled equipment and enemies suck and run counter to the immersion but overall I am having a great time.

Also I admit I do not see where anyone is coming from who is talking about lack of positive representation for LGBT individuals? Outside of the rightful indignation over some of the initial marketing. One of the best characters who is integral to the plot is lesbian and there is a side character who I only recently found out is a trans woman. She has a whole set of side missions where you hang out with her and she is pretty awesome.

One thing which always struck me as wrong in Dragon Age was in the first game where you visit... That town, I forget the name, the one where the lord's son was a mage who had lost control and this lead to the entire place being taken over by the undead and the entire population of the (gigantic) castle turned into skeletons and ghosts.

So apparently one child with mage powers losing control could literally slaughter thousands of people and wipe out a major settlement. If mages are this dangerous? Well the arguments for the circle system become a lot more reasonable especially given the state of the circle when you actually get there. If anything it is amazing that humanity has not been literally wiped out due to one untrained mage losing control apparently being able to overwhelm essentially anything.

But the world is also literally full of myriad independent mages who are 1) Not turning everything into a hellscape and 2) Not even particularly more dangerous than a guy with a sword? Not much consistency. It is not as if they remarked upon the lord's son being exceptionally powerful or something which would have been easy enough to write in.

It was very much 'This is why they do this horrible oppression!' then never backed it up in the setting ever again.

@Reason Some kind of abstracted lifestyle code can work really well actually.

Basically write a paragraph for each 'level' defining what it means in practice and for RP purposes, then also perhaps set out areas and styles people can live in the city with different lifestyle spending.

Then? You can further reduce admin and busy work by allowing people with certain lifestyle levels to automatically be assumed to have stuff and equipment of X and Y costs provided they are not permanently giving it to other characters. So somebody is spending the equivalent of a million dollars a year on lifestyle? Let them just pose having a sports car or use one in high speed shennanigans. If they want a panic room full of regular non fancy guns to bust open when techno ninjas attack their party? No need for them to have gone through whatever system is in use for equipment to secure fifteen sub machine guns.

But the person spending a thousand cyber dollars a year on lifestyle and living in a cardboard box probably has to individually buy sub machine guns, or fancy outfits suitable to attend the party which is going to be crashed by techno ninjas.

A much more general thing but, just in principle, a game where characters can start off as capable, experienced individuals. Virtually all games seem to love making starting characters essentially useless before they then rapidly grow in power over the next X number of months, or perhaps indefinitely forever. That growth can be in stats, equipment, etc and I hate it when it works like that.

Quite often the only way to convincingly make a character who is say a capable 40 year old to be taken seriously is if you do it immediately after the game launches. One of the things I did like about some of the old Fading Suns games is that if you came out of character generation with a goal of 16 in something? You were about as good as anyone got with that skill, maybe there might be somebody around with a 17 but only if it was a popular skillset.

Older characters would absolutely round out their abilities, get higher stats, etc, but that only went so far. I had a fresh out of character generation person challenge my character to a duel on Vargo and you know what? It was a pretty close duel despite my character having been one of the most active in the game for almost four years and being combat focused. She got disarmed at one point and only won because this was a known risk in duels and so I had her carry huge knives as backup weapons following prior experiences.

Given that their character was also combat focused and had presumably not sprung out of the ether the moment they started being active in the area of the universe covered by the game? That was fine and good.

Personally I would l would love to make a new Fading Suns game and have gotten fairly far with it in the past, to the point where I had most of a grid in place.

But in practice? I absolutely will burn out long before finishing something like that and would definitely not have the time and energy to run a game. From experience, the longest I can keep personal momentum going on something like that is about a month and a half.

Also I cannot code and trying to learn how again turns out to be much more difficult than when I was in my teens.

Artemis decided to use my work laptop whilst I was at lunch, I am not entirely okay with her apparent plan to convert documents into cats.

I have been regularly playing D&D online through lockdown using Roll 20 and Skype and whilst a little clunky it seems to do the job well enough. D&D Beyond seems pretty great for tracking characters but buying (rebuying) all of your books in it is unnecessarily expensive if you want to do it properly.

Witness the grace, refinement and elegance:

So my current employers have some very highly placed covidiots.

After multiple instances of positive tested Covid cases in the building, my actual boss has told me and everyone else (he is the safety and compliance VP) to work from home unless completely necessary. Additionally it is required to wear a mask at all times when in the building.

The senior program manager and program director though? View people working from home as slackers and essentially refuse to wear masks in meetings, they also keep asking when I will be in the office and only vaguely accept my 'when this stops and lockdown is over, or when I come in for individual days to give in person training to hanger floor staff'. It is just idiotic, I know people at work who have had immediate family members die to this disease and yet the top level on site managers do not take it seriously at all.

Fortunately I have just been headhunted by another company who want to offer me a twenty percent pay rise, six more holidays a year, a 12% pension match, better sick pay, private medical care and permanent work from home. I was not actually looking for another job but I am definitely going to let them know what lead to me talking to the recruiter in my exit interview.

That is one of the (several) things I am severely jealous of my little brother for. Him and his wife (mostly his wife) own their business and so he just takes his dog to work with him. As a result this is not a dog who is used to ever being away from his people, he just hangs with his family all day every day.

I am working from home today and somebody apparently has to make it difficult to concentrate on writing PowerPoint slides

Also, this weekend the lockdown in the UK started to ease up (too soon but meh). As a result my mum got to spend the weekend visiting and she brought along her nine month cockapoo puppy, Tinkerbell.

Tinkerbell is the most ludicrously adorable thing ever and apparently decided that I (like everyone she meets) was her best friend within a few hours of becoming acquainted:

@moth said in Critters!:

The embedded image is not working (for me at least?) but the link is, also that is a very pretty kitty!

Here is the cuter of my two cats, looking cute. She has spent the last three months during lockdown mostly following me around or sleeping next to me but is apparently terrified of all other humans.

@AeriaNyx said in Favorite Youtubers?:

Cream Heroes - One of my cats watches this show intently. It is bizarre. She legit watches it. I love it. Plus my god, Lulu. Don't forget the subtitles unless you speak Korean.

Apparently this channel has been stolen from the woman who makes the videos by some jackass company who also tried to bully her into giving up her cats to them (?), or some similar drama. They are super cute though and she set up her own channel where the revenue actually goes to the creator.
Kittisaurus

Also Coco is obviously the cutest of the cats.

@Ganymede Slightly late to this, but I was really into the competitive online scene for Homeworld when the original released. I do not know if they have incorporated the same factors into the remake but in the original engine?

Vertical attacks did not just completely throw people for a loop mentally but ships also had differing levels of armour on difference facings. The front was heaviest, the back lightest, but the top and bottom had lighter armour than the sides. Additionally most of the capital ships were better at firing 'up' than down so swinging your fleet under that of the enemy could be really decisive.

Of course the original Homeworld's engine also let you rapidly issue formation and stance commands to fighters so that they would vibrate in place whilst constantly firing and throwing off enemy gunfire that tried to predict for their oscillating movement. That was generally considered a dick move but telling your fighter wings to shift between sphere and claw formation whilst maneuvering them behind enemy capital vessels could be utterly devastating and looked amazingly cool.

@GreenFlashlight But surely Level 4 is something to aspire to? At this point you have completely adapted to our new existence and have sufficient supplies of toilet paper that you can conspicuously consume it, demonstrating you have secured the resources to survive the new world.

@Auspice The cat thing in specific? Not at all, that is just the most recent example I can think of. It particularly shook me up given that I have been isolated for about a month now and so most of my 'personal contact' is with my cats. The cat in question seemed pretty chill with the situation and hugged my hand with her paws whilst I scritched her chest and she sleepily blinked at me, probably wondering why I was being weird and had woken her from her sleep.

@Auspice That does sound terrible, I am on my medication (albeit the dose should probably go up with all of the shit happening) and I have been getting anxiety attacks regardless. Wednesday I woke up really early and lay in bed with my mind spinning, then I started to worry that the cuddlier of my cats who was curled up next to my feet might be dead? For some reason. She is two years old and completely healthy.

Of course when I panicked and crawled down to look at her she chirped and half rolled over to show her tummy before purring happily away as I petted her, but I was still a mess for the entire morning.

I have been Bannerlording some.

Also wow, I was a hell of a lot better at this when the original came out, I can do archery, at close or medium range, but melee combat? Hah! Without a shield I am completely helpless and I can get attacks off in the direction I intend maybe 40% of the time? Then again the AI sometimes goes weird in sieges and lets you stand behind a mass of soldiers chopping them in the head and killing dozens of them, which makes up for my gross incompetence. Occasionally.