Bill Borre wrote on Nov 21, 2013, 21:41:
lol. Most players can prolly finish the game over the weekend.

Assuming the download finished before the weekend does...

Parias wrote on Nov 19, 2013, 13:23:
I'm curious about the technicalities of this though - is it as simple as specifying a flag like "CanSaveAnywhere = Yes" (in which case, why not make it an engine-default), or do you actually have to alter the entire logic structure of your module to make this actually function?

Sounds a bit unusual for something that's normally a core game engine function rather than something modders need to specifically design around.

As I understand it, it's pretty involved and was not a trivial change to the engine.


That said, I didn't really feel like it needed a save anywhere. I only ran in to 2 missions that I felt I wasted some time getting back to the spot I didn't do well on, so I guess it wasn't really a big deal to me that it wasn't there.

Rattlehead wrote on Oct 21, 2013, 18:31:
What is Garry's Incident

Garbage

and besides this fiasco should I care?

No.

Blue wrote on Sep 13, 2013, 11:31:

InBlack wrote on Sep 13, 2013, 11:21:
Blue here is an idea, youre not going to like it but here it is anyway. Have you done a clean Windows (re)install after your last hardware upgrade? I make it a point that I format the boot sector and do a clean OS install every time I make a significant hardware change.

I did a clean install a couple of months ago. The only hardware change since then was changing the RAM, PSU, and switching NVIDIA cards. If a video card upgrade now requires an OS reinstall I think I'll just give up.

One last thing to just look at, is find the chip on the motherboard that manages the PCI-E bus. If it has a fan, verify that fan is clean and turning. If not, see if that chip is extraordinarily warm. As I mentioned the other day, a bad chipset fan caused all kinds of graphical errors and crashes in a previous machine that persisted through video-card and RAM swaps.

The symptoms in my case were periodic geometry and texture corruption as play sessions became progressively longer/intense. I'd end up with massive spears coming out of models and stripey rainbow textures on some things and eventually everything. It was pretty trippy.

I have had similar problems when my motherboard chipset overheated due to a faulty or inadequate fan/heat sink.

Do you sometimes see weird geometry corruption where giant spikes come out of models?

The limitation that I think most people will run into is that only one person can use the library at a time.

IE, You're playing Counter-Strike from my library, and I log in to play Skyrim, you will get booted off.

I think it'll still be good for "Hey, you have got to try XYZ game!" or if you're a 2 PC household and one person is at work and you want to play the new game they just got without using their computer.

It's a (good) marketing tool and could be good for giving kids access to games for fixed periods of time without having to buy games for their account directly.

nin wrote on Jul 3, 2013, 09:44:

For me, at least, there is a blank where the embedded video should appear.

OK, I thought that was just on my end, or I would have mentioned it sooner. Been seeing it for about a week or more now...

What browser(s)? I've been having this problem on multiple sites (including youtube) with Chrome, but no problems with Firefox.

PropheT wrote on Jun 25, 2013, 16:38:

m00t wrote on Jun 25, 2013, 12:42:
What I don't know for sure is if the cookie is tied to a specific machine, made non-transferable by some technical method. (overcome if you use a custom login program because you just lie, but prevents it from being copied and used with the normal launcher)

My understanding is that it keeps an encrypted cookie (if that's the right term here I guess) locally stored to the machine, but the system still requires IP range verification in order to region lock the account. Even with the cookie stored locally the account still requires authentication if you move outside of the network range where you originally set the check file, so if you live in NY and someone tries to access your account from Oregon, for example, it doesn't matter if that cookie is there or not; it forces authentication for the account to confirm ownership.

Blizzard still denies that people with authenticators are getting accounts compromised, and just by the way the tool works it's hard to see how they're wrong. The only way I can see it not being secure is if you use the mobile auth on a jailbroken/non-rooted phone.

Basically true, yes. I think there is an unavoidable local flaw if your machine is compromised. They don't have to run the WoW Client, there are almost certainly malware apps that can connect and issue commands as though they were the client and the person on the machine wouldn't even notice.

If windows users practiced (and were not prevented from practicing by the design of windows) good security practices by not browsing on a full privilege account, it'd be a lot harder to have a meaningful client breach.

Speculation on how authenticators work: Specifically in the case where it doesn't require it every time, I believe it leaves an authenticator cookie on the local machine, so if you try to log in with a different machine, it'll still ask you for it. Now, if your machine is compromised, you're screwed either way. If you have a cookie, they probably can just take that (or use malware on your machine to utilize it directly from there), or next time you log in and enter your authenticator, they block the log-in attempt from reaching Blizzard servers and use the auth key, login and password to do it from their machine.

So, authenticators are good if they haven't compromised your machine but they know your login/pass (lazy / bad password management), but as with most security, anyone with full access to your local box can do whatever they want.

What I don't know for sure is if the cookie is tied to a specific machine, made non-transferable by some technical method. (overcome if you use a custom login program because you just lie, but prevents it from being copied and used with the normal launcher)

RollinThundr wrote on May 29, 2013, 13:27:

m00t wrote on May 29, 2013, 12:12:
Good to see the MRA-tards out in force. Thanks for outing yourselves!

[IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img35/7840/righte.jpg[/IMG]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Just gonna leave this here.

Weird, in 1995 I distinctly recall many women playing the same games I was and they were every bit as good as the men playing, in spite of the constant flood of abuse they received.

As to the "loser" quotes, that wasn't women, that was most of society and continues to this day at varying levels depending on which games you're playing.

Essentially all that image tells me is that you are socially inept and feel hurt that people are calling you out on your misogyny.

Maybe you just need a hug.

Good to see the MRA-tards out in force. Thanks for outing yourselves!

Cutter, sorry you won't get to play it. I work with the guys who were running that show and they're sorry, too.

Flatline wrote on Apr 26, 2013, 16:15:

jdreyer wrote on Apr 26, 2013, 12:55:
A couple of good articles. Interesting to hear Julian's thoughts on XCom. Sounds like he had a lot of the same design issues we did. Funny he had trouble finishing it though.

Yeah, adding multiplayer to a story-driven single player game makes no sense. I can see multiplayer in a sandbox style game like Skyrim, maybe, but even there totally unnecessary.

Yeah good interview. I don't think the changes he was talking about would have degraded the game or made it less popular. Pseudo-random maps (bricks of pregenerated buildings put together, and set missions can be hand-designed). The Satellite system was weird. You could easily game it pretty hard, especially mid to late game, deploying satellites where needed only when terror levels hit certain heights. I miss selling stuff you manufacture. Badly. In the beginning you're so cash starved that selling off a few extra gizmos you make would be alluring, not to mention once you get a set of plasma weaponry there's no point in having lasers any more. My first game was a disaster because I built ten laser rifles, figuring to keep 5 and sell 5, and realized to my horror that I didn't have the ability to sell my weapons!!!

Multiple bases (or at least outposts with a main base- you farm out troops to the outposts) would have made losing your troops less painful, since you could train/transfer around troops.

Random, agenda-driven aliens would have been kickass.

And finally, I wanted to see other environments. Snow, desert, jungle, a terror mission in a favela, where your plasma weaponry was especially destructive, would have been awesome.

Yeah, I felt pretty much the same way. They could have maybe formalized some of the strategies that developed from the original. Instead of actually building and then selling mfg'd stuff, you could just set the production to produce money at a certain rate based on your tech level instead of having to micro-manage it. That's the kind of efficiency and improvement I'd like to see on the original. Not gutting major features to replace them with pretty but very thin veneers.

Expand and polish the interesting elements of the original, basically. Less cop-outs and weak design.

Agreed, Beamer. It felt like they didn't know what they actually wanted to do with it and rushed to get something that looks "okay" but plays badly because they didn't have time to do a real base system. That's my impression, anyway.

Prez wrote on Apr 24, 2013, 13:52:
... stuff ...
EDIT: Oh, to address the complaint about the aliens repositioning once found - they did something similar in the first game if they avoided moving and stored all their action points in reserve. There was admittedly an initiative check that allowed high level soldiers to be able to keep going without an alien interrupt that has been done away with but since the new game is all based around cover that was taken out to avoid it being too easy.

No, in the original (and best) game, they could not. The aliens could only do reaction fire on your turn. They could not actually move.
Also they did not "spawn" at random around your troops as happened on almost every mission in the re-make. All aliens that survived the crash / landing were present from the beginning of the mission. The only way you could get new ones was for a human to be taken over by a Chryssalid.

Additionally, in the original game, the Alien team had an actual agenda and missions it had to accomplish. It wasn't some silly linear script with a handful of pre-set landscapes. If you intercepted the alien craft attempting a mission or part of a mission, they could fail their mission and their score would go down. It was like playing against a real opponent. The new "X-Com" has none of this.

The new "X-Com" was a decent game, but it was not proper X-Com. It was simply missing too much of the deep gameplay and interesting choices.

One of the reasons the original X-Com was so good is that you frequently lost team-members which was painful (and taught you to be more careful), but it didn't cost you the game each time it happened (unless you lose your commander amongst a bunch of rookies, but I digress). The new game, the squad sizes are so small and you invest so much into each squadmember, losing one guy puts you on a downward spiral that is much more difficult to recover from. This teaches you that you have to play *perfect* and never make a mistake and hope that the random rolls don't fuck you over and that it doesn't spawn enemies on your units. It's too binary and frankly much less interesting or fun. Even 2 or 3 more guys in a squad would have made a much better game. More of a gradient of success/failure instead of a binary Perfect Success or Eventual/Immediate game ending failure.

And wtf was with the ant farm shit? Building bases and organizing them into defensible configurations was a big and fun part of the original. Totally lost on the silly side-view presentation.

Certainly cuts should be made, but they should be made not because of the debt or deficit, they should be made because they're just downright wasteful. Bloated military programs that continue for years or decades without any progress, for example. Subsidies to businesses that are reaping record profits (and have been for decades). But we need to spend more in other areas also in order to keep up growth long term. We have to improve our education system and that costs money no matter which way you look at it. Certainly lots of things we're doing now aren't effective, but they don't change by having less money available in the system as a whole. Likewise expanding infrastructure spending saves money and generates revenues in the long term. We need a high-speed transit system that is affordable and efficient. Maintaining the highways is extremely expensive and has a lot of secondary costs that go with it. (real) High speed rail with dedicated right-of-ways would benefit freight and personal transit. It doesn't have to be like Amtrak which is a dying relic. It can be faster, cheaper, and easier, but we have to invest now. And finally we need to fix our power infrastructure. Dependence on oil and coal is crippling us and will be the weight around our neck that sinks us. We need to stop funding them and make sure functional alternatives are in place. Solar (PV and thermal) is viable, even at current efficiencies. (Current technology) Nuclear is safer and ultimately cheaper as a provider for base-loads, but we have to get rid of the NIMBY attitude and approach it rationally, not as a favor to industry pals.

More and better health care reform would have a significant effect as the cost of it is far too high and the ACA doesn't actually deal with that in a meaningful way. The key problem is the insurance companies have every incentive for prices to go up and such make no effort at controlling them. This forces people into a Faustian bargain where they must take insurance to avoid paying the rate-sheet prices but are still being charged 10x - 100x more than the services actually cost to provide. On top of that the insurance industry adds a "moving money around, but mostly into our pocket" tax for facilitating the transaction. A single payer public system would be able to control prices and would cost *substantially* less than both what we're paying now in total as a society AND less than just what we pay into Medicare now. To cover everyone in the country. This means a lot more money to spend on real goods and services instead of invented schemes that add zero value. Providers would compete on service and people would have real, open choices as to who to visit for their care.

But a lot of this doesn't really mean much or have a chance of happening if wages aren't raised to match the increase in productivity over the last 30 - 40 years. For decades wage levels followed closely to productivity increases, and then in the 70's "magically" stopped. Productivity increased greatly but wages stagnated. If wages were closer to what they should be relative to productivity the tax base would increase immensely and we'd almost certainly have a surplus even at current tax and spending levels. But as it is now, the majority of people (in the "developed" world and the US) have less and less money to spend each year which means businesses have fewer customers and are more likely to go out of business. This ultimately shrinks the economy and puts on a path of ruin. When most people have no money to spend on anything but food and shelter, any business that doesn't go directly to that will be unsustainable. When most people start having to choose between food and shelter, I suspect we'll start seeing a lot more riots and violence which does good for no one.

/rant

Certainly the debt is a concern, but it's not an immediate one. As in, it won't kill us tomorrow, or the next day, or even the next year. After WWII, we had a debt ratio of over 110% and paid it down over the course of 30 years, so the current level of ~75% is clearly not "life threatening", as it were. Now if we use the debt as an excuse to cut services and enact austerity measures, then yes, that's a problem as it will contract the economy significantly. The real issue that will cause significant long term damage is the vast inequality in the economy. People with significant sums of money simply spend less of it as a total percentage than people with more "middle" amounts. They tend to hoard it in various ways. The poor (but not utterly broke who obviously have *no* money) and middle classes have to spend a large % of their income or holdings to survive and spending goes up as their net worth and income go up (to a point) keeping money in the system and increasing fluidity, causing the economy to grow (and in the long run, reducing our debt / gdp ratio). Everyone benefits. Even the rich, it's just not as immediate or direct as they'd like. Think of it as a trickle-up economy... The current distribution will ultimately harm them, too.

US Debt ~$16.8 trillion according to wikipedia

Depending on when you asked you might get slightly different numbers
$1.2 trillion (~8%) - US GovInfo.about.com
$1.1 trillion (~6.5%) - wikipedia
$~1 trillion (~7.5%) - Forbes

Which is also about as much as Japan holds.

China holds 26% of all *foreign held* debt. Not 26% of ALL US Debt.

So... all of their asses seem to be in the realm of 8% (or less, generally).

I've heard people check their email now and then.

Or a phone call. Or text message. It's unlikely his phone number isn't on file. Violating someone's security interests to tell them they're reaching some ridiculous arbitrary cap is a pretty piss poor idea.

RollinThundr wrote on Mar 18, 2013, 17:35:
*snip*

But hey lets "amend" the 2nd, and remove the right to bare arms. That worked oh so well for the people when Hitler took all the guns away, Or Stalin or Mao. Don't worry! The government will protect you! They then killed millions of defenseless innocent people.

*snip*

Took away all the guns, you say?
"Gun restriction laws applied to all guns and ammunition. The 1938 revisions introduced restrictions specifically reiterating the prohibition for Jews to hold firearms, but made it easier for one party nazi regime to gain acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as was the possession of ammunition."[4]
The legal age at which guns could be purchased was lowered from 20 to 18.[5]
Permits were valid for three years, rather than one year.[5]
The groups of people who were exempt from the acquisition permit requirement expanded. Holders of annual hunting permits, government workers, and NSDAP members were no longer subject to gun ownership restrictions. Prior to the 1938 law, only officials of the central government, the states, and employees of the German Reichsbahn Railways were exempted.[4]
Jews were forbidden from the manufacturing or dealing of firearms and ammunition.[4]"


As if owning a gun would have deterred any of it. They'd just be dead in their homes instead which may or may not have been an overall better outcome, I'm neither Jewish nor old enough to have been there so I can't judge that. There was more wrong in Germany than the '38 gun law.


As for Soviet Russia, Stalin came in to power in part due to extremely lax gun control laws that allowed the *massive*, open, importation of firearms. When the Bolsheviks took power they only banned fire arm possession by non-party members. Plenty of people owned firearms during WWII and many of their best snipers grew up hunting in the mountains.

And finally, there's little evidence that gun control laws played any role in Maoist era policy making. More people died due to starvation (IE bad regional planning) and you can't eat guns (not that they could afford them anyway), so... not sure what your point bringing up Mao was.

Really the theme here is un-equal application of the law creating two distinct classes of citizenry, not blanket controls.