I bought a new computer, hoping that it will motivate me to start some real work on some graphics/video projects I have in my head.
First thing i did was installing FO4. And it was terrible. I didn’t know what it was at first, but the game now looked very unimpressive. Then I realized – it was running too smoothly, the high fps count made it look like a Venezuelan soap opera. I need to find a way to cap fps.
I never owned a computer that could run recent games at maximum setting, so that’s all new to me.
So I bought the Witcher 3. What’s the point of making a beautiful detailed open world if you’re forced to play in third person? This totally kills all immersion for me. Trying now a mod that changes the camera, but it’s not perfect. At last you can cap fps to 30 in the menu.
First my Battle.net account was automatically locked when I logged in with my correct password, because my “login pattern” had changed. By which I guess they mean I logged in at all.
Then resetting my password was about an 11 step process involving 4 emails, a code phrase, many warnings, a “Battle Tag” I didn’t recognize at all (probably from total disuse) in the subject line of an email I was warned to ignore if I didn’t recognize… but if I had followed that advice my account would still be locked… on and on until finally my account was unlocked, I was invited to pointlessly log in on the Battle.net webpage, and then when I finally made it back to the Diablo III client, I got this:
“Thanks for trying to play our fucking game, here’s your punishment.”
FFS. You folks mock console gaming but I’ve never had to deal with this level of Keystone Kops fuckery on my XBox.
Building modular chunks to craft an evil science lair from. Progress is slower than I’d like, but should improve toward the weekend, I hope.
And then the six year old struck and this is all I got done for the rest of the day… LOL:
Also looks like they are much closer to Retail release than I thought.
Patch notes here:
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=b6896bca5de420860e7f4c200&id=55d0fb040b&e=db17ae0499
Realizing that Microsoft would never leave me alone, I decided to drink the Kool-Aid (which should be spelled Cool-Ade, but it’s not).
I don’t exactly hate it, but I’m not crazy about it. It’s all very borderless, smart-phoney, and white, except for the grays and blacks. As I imagined, the big emphasis is on tracking and monetizing users. I didn’t expect this to be so unapologetic and in-your-face. It’s everywhere, but it seems to apply more to Windows “apps” than to anything else, especially those you buy in the Store. Since I don’t use any yet, I just turned off whatever system things bothered me, which were surprisingly few in number. Number one irritation was the peer update thing, so I dumped that fast. I think Microsoft can afford the bandwidth to force updates on me.
I miss little things, like the old-school calculator, better defined scrollbars, and some other “3D” things that made earlier Windows interfaces easier to use. I haven’t bothered with Cortana and have no plans to use Skype. I don’t mind Edge, but until I get used to it, I made IE the default browser. (Where is the Home button in Edge?)
I installed Win 10 Home on two machines — my school one and the gaming computer. Since I had 8.1 on the school one, I just did an upgrade and all went well (at least I think so). The gaming one had Win 7, so I decided to do a clean install. The Media Tool made this pretty easy. Restoration of backed up Steam games and Diablo 3 went smoothly. Diablo 3 wouldn’t start at first, but after seeing the word “protocol” in log errors, I knew I had to get proper Nvidia drivers instead of the basic ones Microsoft installed. All was jake after that. Oh, the sound didn’t work either, but Realtek drivers did the trick. All this was on the gaming machine. The school one worked right out of the “box,” probably because Microsoft didn’t mess with the drivers already in place. Even though I’m impressed by a nice clean Device Manager after both installs, I pity the average Joe Walmart trying to get his laptop to work with no clue about driver software.
In sum, the whole thing went pretty well, and while I don’t see any big advantages to Win 10, I guess it could be worse. At least this is Microsoft’s focus now, so I feel like a second-class citizen instead of a third-class one.
Well, I paid a 2D environment artist what I’d consider pretty good money… and he screwed me. I don’t even think it was intentional, he just sucks. Despite his portfolio not containing specific examples of what I wanted, he showed a good skill level over all and I’ve worked with him before, so I went for it.
Well, next time I’ll insist on specific examples. Fuck.
That said, now that I’m forced to produce my own assets, I’m changing to a voxel format, which is not only easy but pretty popular and is already making the game look better. I’m just on a crash course marathon for the next couple of weeks to keep the campaign on schedule. Woo!
The new and improved protagonist, still a work in progress:
My bear person doing the things. Bare bones dynamic lighting at 0:30!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g31i_Gi9MwM
Remember V-GER from the first Star Trek movie? In case you don’t, the idea was that the Enterprise had to intercept an extremely powerful alien anomaly that liked to eat Klingon vessels and Federation space stations. The entity turned out to be Voyager 6, which had collected so much data that it became a sentient eater of planets. That’s sort of what happened to my silly little alt wizard, which I originally created as a mule to tote my main wiz’s extra items. Entirely by experimentation and accident, the mule is now V-GER, eater of monster armies.
ILA, mn, and I decided to brave the environs of Torment 10 last night, where I must say we all comported ourselves with satisfactory professionalism. I was especially surprised by my freakish mule, who managed to eat huge quantities of monsters while barely staying alive. She has a ways to go, as T10 (at least for a sub-600 paragon character) is very unforgiving, but I have hope that she will do great things (or, as Anthony Hopkins says in The Wolfman, terrible things, Lawrence — terrible things).
Image credit to this guy: http://scrooge0.deviantart.com/art/Diablo-3-Wizard-321629182
Well, they never really go anywhere.