The Gaming Den

I've discovered the wonders of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's cool. I'm still mostly playing fighters, because casters require more management. Demonspawn Monk FTW!

Remember the "hostile take-over" of the official subreddit for PGI/IGP's fail of a star citizen clone and the backlash it created and where they claimed to have the WingCommander IP as well?
Turns out that was a lie (not surprised) and EA still has the IP(not that much better, but i'll take it) and is not very amused about PGI/IGP making such claims.

Ubisoft claims that 30 fps is much better for gaming than 60 fps. 30 fps gives games "a cinematic feel"

I'm pretty sure that once you get up to 30fps, you're good for standard gaming, although apparently with the Oculus Rift the difference between 60 and 30 is the difference between an immersive and fun experience and spending several hours bent over the toilet.

But for normal gaming you might be better off sticking with 30 and making fancier frames, depending on your graphics pipeline. You get to spend twice as much time on each specific frame, which means you can do more crap on a per-frame basis.

Also, there's no reason to have new frames more often than you have things actually happen, because then you're just drawing the same thing twice. And you don't want to update the displayed image until you complete a cycle of having everything in the scene do stuff, because then some things in motion will have moved while others won't have. And making that a fixed rate instead of a flexible one lets you track time without checking the clock. You can keep this rate fixed by setting it to the highest speed you can definitely maintain and throwing the processor a bunch of noops if it finishes early, or just not minding being off by a couple milliseconds.

Then you can break everything horribly when you port to the PC and people have different processor speeds and you can't predict how long everything takes.

name_here wrote:I'm pretty sure that once you get up to 30fps, you're good for standard gaming, although apparently with the Oculus Rift the difference between 60 and 30 is the difference between an immersive and fun experience and spending several hours bent over the toilet.

But for normal gaming you might be better off sticking with 30 and making fancier frames, depending on your graphics pipeline. You get to spend twice as much time on each specific frame, which means you can do more crap on a per-frame basis.

Also, there's no reason to have new frames more often than you have things actually happen, because then you're just drawing the same thing twice. And you don't want to update the displayed image until you complete a cycle of having everything in the scene do stuff, because then some things in motion will have moved while others won't have. And making that a fixed rate instead of a flexible one lets you track time without checking the clock. You can keep this rate fixed by setting it to the highest speed you can definitely maintain and throwing the processor a bunch of noops if it finishes early, or just not minding being off by a couple milliseconds.

Then you can break everything horribly when you port to the PC and people have different processor speeds and you can't predict how long everything takes.

Obviously, no one spends additional time on "making individual frames look better" on consoles. Consoles run at 30fps because they are incapable of running 60fps.

The reason to use 60fps, is because it makes the action smoother (which is fixed by the omnipresent motion blur in console games), and makes the controls more responsive.

Then you can break everything horribly when you port to the PC and people have different processor speeds and you can't predict how long everything takes.

That only happens when stupid people tie the game speed to the framerate, and don't lock the framerate.

Longes wrote: Obviously, no one spends additional time on "making individual frames look better" on consoles. Consoles run at 30fps because they are incapable of running 60fps.

Did you read the article you linked? The Playstation line, at least, is capable of running 60fps. However, that would require spending 1/60th of a second on each frame instead of 1/30th of a second.

That only happens when stupid people tie the game speed to the framerate, and don't lock the framerate.

Locking the framerate is not actually a thing you can do. Completing a frame takes some number of processor cycles, and if the game's thread doesn't get allocated 30*cycles per frame in a second, you can't do 30FPS. You can waste any number of extra cycles, but you can't add ones which aren't there. This isn't a huge deal on consoles, because you know exactly how many cycles you're going to get and can just never make a situation where you need more than that. On PCs, however, that's not fucking happening.

People can just have slower processors, or they can run other stuff that also eats cycles. Worse, it turns out processors aren't actually identical internally. The same general instruction, or even the same ISA instruction, can take different lengths of time on different processors with the same clock speed.

name here wrote:I'm pretty sure that once you get up to 30fps, you're good for standard gaming

Think of it like this: if you step down from 60fps to 30fps, you are increasing the time between frames from 16.7 milliseconds to 33.3 milliseconds. In certain situations in certain games, that will make the difference (when combined with other sources of delay) between "comfortably responsive" and "feels a little off."

It's similar, but not identical, to the reason people bitch about v-sync; unfortunate timing creates huge input delays. Of course, without v-sync a lot of games automatically assume you want them to render "as many frames as they possibly can," which means they will use up your entire GPU drawing hundreds and hundreds of frames unless they hit some other bottleneck first. And at the point you are drawing 300 frames a second you definitely aren't getting anything extra out of it and you are reducing the lifespan of your card.

Film is a media without input, so it obviously doesn't have to worry about any of this.

How am I both annoyed and pleased that Civ Beyond has downloaded to my computer, but I can't access it until tommorrow at 9 pm?

Judging by the Beyond Earth's opening Ghandi nuked everyone after all. Also people are put into criosleep in the same dirty clothes they came to the spaceship.

First impression: Civ BE is kinda bland. Especially in comparison with Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri had fluff blurbs everywhere, nice flavorful factions, etc. BE doesn't have that. Factions (here they are called "Sponsors") don't even have a description blurb. There is nothing to them, beyond the name and a bonus.

Yeah, the 1 hour total bisquit youtube movie did neither make me want to buy nor play it x.x
Same with the Yogscast stuff actually.

Whereas with Civ5 including Gods and Kings and Brave New World 2 videos were enough to make me buy the complete package.
and i am still playing it, mainly to get the achievements but also to try out some interesting sounding mods.

Fun fact for anyone still playing Dragon Age: You can totally kill the Harvester on Hard by equipping your three humanoid characters with bows, instructions to auto-attack anything boss rank or higher and to drink a potion when injured, telling the golem to spam Group Heal, and just having Snug the Bronto run around taunting. There is nothing that's fast enough to catch him and the harvester and the adds will just chase you around. Also, having everyone use ranged auto-attack on the Harvester in phase 2 works because it doesn't have a lot of HP, and it mostly defends itself by being fast and not standing there while you auto-attack in melee.

"Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments" is very good. It's main flaws are its terrible engine and the fact that it's not a Dostoyevskiy crossover. However, the game will gleefuly allow you to come to a wrong conclusion and blame innocent people for the crime, which is absolutely great and is something I've never seen quests do before.

I was thinking of playing dragon age: origins again, with a mage, but am unsure how best to build it. Would being a blaster actually work, since it's a video game? Is there a way to build a nuker whose primary type of damage is spirit damage, since it's less frequently resisted? Or would I be better off picking spells from other categories?

Archmage Joda wrote:I was thinking of playing dragon age: origins again, with a mage, but am unsure how best to build it. Would being a blaster actually work, since it's a video game? Is there a way to build a nuker whose primary type of damage is spirit damage, since it's less frequently resisted? Or would I be better off picking spells from other categories?

It depends on what difficulty you are playing because Friendly Fire exists, and it's a true bitch. If you're just playing it on easy then you don't have to worry about it; if you are playing it on a higher difficulty then you run the very real risk of killing your allies (you'll spend most of your spells on crowd control still, as what you need to do with your best spells is to root a group, then throw one of your big spells on it while instructing the rest of the party to move away).

Sleep, Blood Wound, anything that keeps a large group from moving will be needed (not only that, those spells don't have friendly fire, so feel free to send the tank in, gather up the mobs, drop your snare, then tell your tank to beat it while you drop you big spells). If you are going spirit, then Walking Bomb and Virulent Walking Bomb should be your first answer; nothing clears out mobs like Virulent Walking Bomb but it pulls tons of aggro (if the root breaks, be prepared with a backup because it's coming for you, and when it detonates it will probably take you out as well). Not that despite what the tooltip says, walking bomb and virulent deal spirit DoT rather than Nature (verified by people more skilled than I with programming who checked the code)

For stats, you are going to want to emphasize spellpower (which, incidentally, is what I recommend every type of mage to do regardless). I would recommend that you ignore Willlpower in favor of more stamina, as you are going to take Blood Mage specialization as soon as possible. Blood Wound is an awesome crowd control/DoT that covers a HUGE area, lasts for a long time, and has no friendly fire, it's like Improved Crushing Prison. Blood Control will be great for when your walking bomb breaks free and runs at you, you can send it right back.

Finally, keep your friend's AI to a minimum, as you will want to babysit them to keep from killing them (also keeps their talents ready to go if you need them). Make friends with the pause button, because you will micromanage everyone to a great degree. Hold Position too, you don't want your bros to run screaming into the Storm of the Century you just dropped on the bad guys: because unless you tell them not to THEY WILL. Even Ranged characters will get entirely too close to the bad guys for my liking.

EDIT: sorry, computer demanded to restart for updates RIGHT NOW and I had to submit what I had or lose it.

Anyway, as far a specializations go, your first is always going to be Blood Mage because blood wound is that awesome. For your second, I recommend Spirit Healer, it gives a passive +2 to magic (always helpful), and it's the only other specialization you can actually use while blasting (Arcane Warriors have to deal with tons of fatigue increasing their costs; also without mods you have to deal with sheathing your weapons, then pulling them back out for a lot of blasting. Arcane Warriors are awesome, but not as blasters. Shapeshifters aren't useful unless you specifically build around them, and even still I wouldn't recommend being one). I would recommend at the very least taking the first 2 talents of Spirit Healer, as well as at least picking up the first healing spell.

For party members, I recommend Leiliana (archery talents at the high end tend to have friendly fire issues as well that you are already dealing with), Shale (use her Rock Mastery aura to boost her and Leiliana's ranged attacks; also she has area effect ranged attacks with friendly fire that take a LOOOOOOONG time to aim and having your Warden take care of that helps), and take along Alistair or Loghain as your meat shield (Spec them both Templar/Champion, put in just enough str to wear heavy armor and to be able to use all of their high-end shield talents then EVERYTHING ELSE into Dexterity).

As far as spirit damage, your options are limited. Walking Bomb, Crushing Prison (great single-target spell, will work even on bosses if your spellpower is beefy enough), Blood Wound, Mana Clash, Entropic Death (a more advanced effect, this happens when someone with the Death Hex walks into the area of a Death Cloud), and Nightmare (when a subject affected by sleep gets hit with a Horror spell). You may not have lots of options, but the most of ones you do have are all spells I generally recommend all mages learn if they possibly can. Don't forget to boost spellpower whenever you can (the end of the Arcane tree gives you a boost, spell wisp gives you a boost, the Blood Mage and Spirit Healer specializations give you a boost, Spell Might gives you a boost).

It can be very effective. Here's someone killing Gaxkand on Nightmare with Wynne using Mana Clash and Vulnerability Hex with one hit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WsT4ceTrw4

Note that anything your party does, your warden will do better due to better stats.

(Note: multiple edits as I think of more things to say, and to re-word things so they make sense to people who aren't me)

You are required by law to have one of your mages take Mana Clash. That isn't up for negotiation.

When I played DA:O, my default spell for both my mages was Cone of Cold, followed by that Rogue talent that auto-crits. It worked very well for almost any situation. I was playing an unpatched version, though, and I think that Bioware nerfed Cone of Cold pretty quickly. So I don't know how viable this strategy is anymore.

Blicero wrote:When I played DA:O, my default spell for both my mages was Cone of Cold, followed by that Rogue talent that auto-crits. It worked very well for almost any situation. I was playing an unpatched version, though, and I think that Bioware nerfed Cone of Cold pretty quickly. So I don't know how viable this strategy is anymore.

Cone of Cold was nerfed to not work on anything Lieutenant rank or higher (or rather, the Shatter combo no longer works, you can freeze them if spellpower is high enough).

It's still pretty good, since it lets you whale on them without retaliation and can interrupt attacks.

Yeah, it's still definitely worth grabbing for at least Morrigan. She has all the prerequisites anyway.

So, my (Direct2Drive) copy of Oblivion is kaput, for reasons that are officially beyond me. Every time I try to launch the software, it crashes usually right before or right after the Bethesda logo appears. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

I have tried everything within my admittedly meager skills to solve the problem, and yes, that included trying to uninstall and then re-install. However, every time I tried that, a message popped up saying the uninstall program couldn't be found. I tried to do it manually through the "Programs and Features" thing on the Control Panel, but when I got there, it listed Oblivion as having already been uninstalled, which lead to much confusion, anger, and a broken computer screen. And of course, since D2D is also kaput, there's no chance of me just re-downloading it from them.

Anyway, I've decided "fuck it" and have more or less given it up for dead. However, I do have one question: If I downloaded Oblivion from Steam, would I then be able to play the game with the same files and whatnot from my old copy? Or does it not work that way?

I know that when I bought the full versions of Dragon Age from steam, it can still access the mods and save files from the free origin version just fine. It might work.

You could easily copy your saves and mods to the new appropriate folders. I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Yeah, I was thinking something similar just now.

Alright, that's all I need. Except for the $24.99 needed to purchase it...

Started up Shadows of Mordor. Petty gripe: the intro has someone speaking black speech then saying part of the ring poem in English. That feels kind of silly.