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jeffnz

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Posts posted by jeffnz

  1. Posted

    1 hour ago, Nmenth said:

    I don't remember if oil was unlimited or not, but regardless, the only way you could properly fund an army was to play aggressively and establish forward bases at alternate income sites, which were just more supplies and oil deposits. This made virtually any defensive tactics obsolete, and it was more of a race to see who could capture the most resource sites the fastest. 

    That sounds like every strategy game these days. I learned last week that CnC 3 is all about rushing to the middle of the map and building 10 harvesters. 8-bit has a similar issue when the initial resources are depleted - the player has no choice but to attempt controlling half of the map to gather the spread-out resources. Generals did it well I reckon: USA can pinch supplies with helicopters, GLA has kill bounty and black market, and China gets hackers. None of those methods require territory expansion (bounty requires attacks but nothing serious).

    Having extra resources wouldn't be a bad thing if they were easy to control - if they were near, then players could save up and launch a huge attack. I don't like how RTS has become rush-oriented, where harassing the enemy at every opportunity is encouraged. All my happy RTS memories involve base building for ages, followed by The One Big Attack. Extra resources should never be the whole point of the game because it leads to absurd amounts of skirmishing. Generals had it right with a few oil structures placed around the map, it created some benefit without tipping the game completely in one person's favour. The idea of oil as a third resource sounds absurd, why not also have a quarry for gathering stone, and gazelles to hunt? LMAO

  2. Posted

    13 hours ago, Nmenth said:

    While I no longer remember the long list of failings it had, one of the things that most stood out to me at the time was the forced tactics. The game was designed to be played a very specific way, and if that wasn't your style, that was just too bad, because that was what the devs were aiming for.

    Please elaborate because I'm unsure of what you mean. How was it different from Generals, for example?

  3. Posted

    2 hours ago, Plokite_Wolf said:

    Go educate yourself under which circumstances the project was being developed. http://cnc.wikia.com/wiki/Command_&_Conquer_(2013)

    Yeah so officially it was cancelled because of "community feedback" but really it could have been a great game. There was a hiss about free-to-play but then it was decided that there would be a single player campaign. Maybe EA Games takes message boards and complaints too seriously?

    At least Petroglyph released their game. That's something EA could re-learn one day in the near future. EA must have spent at least a million dollars on Generals 2 but they don't even release it because some people complained, then game was thrown into the "too hard basket".

  5. Posted

    As it appears on Steam Store:

    http://store.steampowered.com/app/544550/Stationeers/

    A back story about how I discovered RocketWerks:

    I discovered RocketWerks while searching online for "game developers". I'd restrict the search by region or by *.nz domains only and I found articles about Dean Hall. The best part for me was reading about his battles with the immigration department and slow internet. I petitioned against Telecom's monopoly back in early 2006 so when I hear of someone criticising internet speeds in New Zealand, the person's name always stays in mind!

    If anyone here (who isn't a New Zealander) has heard of RocketWerks then it's probably because of Day Z.

    Stationeers development / a bitch and a whinge about my PC

    Stationeers is currently in Early Release and I'd be following it very closely, if it weren't for my PC being a piece of junk. For 'Stationeers' it is recommended to have a NVIDIA GTX 980. I look that up and the GeForce web site says "The GeForce GTX 980 is the world’s most advanced GPU" ... um ya, maybe in a few years I'll upgrade. I never expected to run Windows on my PC and then beyond that, I never expected to run games. I thought stuff that's made by smaller companies would run on cheaper hardware but I find that I can barely run 8-bit Armies even on modest settings. Eventually I'm going to upgrade to a larger place, then I can have 2 desks and 2 PCs set up, one desktop PC for Linux and another for Windows 10 and high spec.

    Anyway, I haven't got a clue how this Stationeers thing plays, but it's made by a studio in Dunedin and the studio began with plenty of experienced programmers from other countries. See Dunedin on the attached map, at the bottom of the South Island :)

    Reminder to self: watch this half-hour video presentation this weekend

    nz_map.jpg

  9. Posted

    17 hours ago, TaxOwlbear said:

    VR is a gimmick. 

    Pretty much.

    VR is good but not if you're an earlier adopter of the technology. PS4 has a racing game called Drive Club which supports VR; but at the cost of its nice graphics. Plus if you get queasy it's really bad, though good developers will do things to ease that problem.

  10. Posted

    What's the deal with the game settings on this monitor? There are settings like FPS-1, FPS-2, RTS and MOBA. If I use RTS mode, it wrecks the colours and makes everything blurry. I'm going to guess that in 'movies' it displays more black shades, and in FPS maybe it has higher brightness. RTS mode remains a mystery!

  12. Posted

    Good news lads, I'm buying a View Sonic with a 5ms refresh rate, 1440 vertical resolution and 80,000,000:1 Contrast Ratio. I thought that anything new was good, but that isn't true. There's a massive difference in quality so I'm getting a good screen this time. It's a 27". I'm told that support from View Sonic is good - if orange starts to display as yellow, they will simply give you a new screen. I was going to buy this yesterday but the shop told me that it's impossible to carry, probably due to lots of packaging and polystyrene. It's only 6 kilograms but the size of the box makes it impractical to carry. View Sonic may be considered average by some gamers but so long as I don't get headaches or eye-strain then I'm happy. I don't plan to play any really fast action games so I'm less concerned about refresh rates and more concerned about colour quality. Refresh rate is only one spec to measure.

    I bought an A-Data solid state drive while at the shop and everything is really fast now, I notice a huge difference in 8 Bit Armies including when the game world initially loads, there is no laggy delay for 5 seconds while things are still loading - when you see the HQ and your load-out units, it has actually finished loading.

  13. Posted

    I used a Media Creation Tool backup one time and it said it couldn't proceed because it was missing drivers. Apparently the fix is to unplug the flash drive or take out the disk, and then reinsert (the disk I created with the original ISO didn't have this problem). The first time I installed Windows 10 it said that my version didn't match the version connected with my serial number, though that issue resolved itself.

    The benefit of having reinstall media included is that it works without these stupid quirks. Also if a new computer broke then the last thing I'd want to do is use my second PC to do the disk burning and downloading, I'd rather use it to continue with my work. I found how to cheat the Media Creation Tool - get on a Linux PC and visit the Media Creation Tool download page, then Windows will say that your OS doesn't support Media Creation Tool, and it lets you download the latest Windows 10 ISO instead of the Media Creation Tool :)

    I wouldn't pay to have my computer restored but many people would.

    • Downvote 1

  14. Posted

    My plan - sit at my computer(s) because I have to learn databases :P

    We had a little sermon thingy at the course yesterday. One of the funnier guys in my class went downstairs while the speaker was talking, then he posts to our Slack channel via his phone: "I just wanted some hot cross buns ... what have I gotten in to!" - then after class I got some home made hot cross buns from my mum's mum, yes that's right, none of that cheap crud from a factory bakery. Make your own with yeast and raisins! I also got some fair trade chocolate.

    chocolate.jpg

  17. Posted

    This evening I set my PC to get updates from the LAN and any PC on the internet. I plugged in the laptop via ethernet cable (same with the desktop PC) and suddenly my Windows updates were heaps faster. I'm on an unlimited plan now and I doubt that Windows Update uses that much bandwidth - it mainly uses up my hard drive access speed, which causes instability.

  20. Posted

    My flatmate has a Sony Bravia, I don't know how old it is but oddly I managed to get sound to it, from a Playstation 3, but not the video. It's useless to me! I'll take your word on Samsung. In a few years I'll have to reassess the cheap stuff that I own and get a dual monitor configuration for gaming/programming (complete with 2x swivelling monitor stands). I suspect the trick is to avoid large stores, partly because they tend to specialise in stocking 60 inch TVs that they market to yuppies. For a PC screen I reckon order online, otherwise Oliffs or Dragon PC.

  23. Posted

    I'm not bothered by people talking about their small projects. A few weeks ago I sat through a talk about an indy/small budget game and no-one there got into a debate about the developers or suggested that the developers were "trying to prove something". I left about about an hour, only because I was falling asleep after a long day on the course.

     

    What AZ-Stalker is saying could be applied to operating systems too: "it's not about the size of your OS but how you use it". Linux has its own merits without needing to compare its philosophy to Microsoft's philosophy. Indy games and low budget games have become really trendy in recent years, I want to take it one step further by making free (as in free beer and as in liberty) native Linux games with c++ and Ink Scape. The sterile and hopeless corporate shenanigans of EA Games are an initial motivator for me but if I focus on that alone it's just a waste of time. I'm not sure if my goal is to make good propaganda for Linux or to do educational stuff and training. Maybe my goal is actually to break into the industry and I just haven't acknowledged it to myself yet ;) 

  25. Posted

    I'd like to hear if there are many software developers in Hamilton. I think that if I'm serious about finding work (once the course is over) that there's only 4 cities to be in, but that isn't entirely true. This week I heard about a seed company in Ashburton that was looking for a programmer - possibly a one-off I suspect!

     

    Wikipedia cites a 2016 survey which says that Hamilton + the nearby region has a population of 161,200. It sounds better than Timaru's population. Fancy finding a job there, it must be hell!

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