HM, have you played Dave the Diver?

There's a Flash emulator called Flashpoint that comes with a huge archive of old Flash games from the internet. Many, many of them are hilariously bad. And some, I assume, are good games.

thanks, Obama

Happy Monkey, when I built a new gaming rig in 2009, and asked for suggestions, games with beautiful graphics, you suggested either Oblivion or Fallout 3. I still tell this story, because I've spent the next 15 years playing and extensively modding the Elder Scrolls series, from Daggerfall to Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.

Recently, Bethesda broke Skyrim mods again, with another meaningless software version that forces modders to update the code for thousands of mods. They JUST did this in 2022, and I spent a few weeks, back then, fixing my Skyrim. THIS time, some mod authors are refusing to work on this stupid problem, and I'm scrambling all over github for DLLs, trying to get everything compatible. I spent a few days and couldn't get my save file from 2022 to load. So I downgraded my Skyrim version and tried to re-load my 2022 mods, but this wasn't working either, so I decided, this is not fun anymore.

So anyway, now I'm playing Fallout 3. lol

Last edited by Flint (4/15/2024 3:54 pm)

Maybe in 15 years The Elder Scrolls VI will be out.

What do you think Bethesda will do as far as the game engine? Do you think Creation Engine be forklift upgraded to a modern engine that can cull physics objects, or do dome other resource management to avoid the Starfield problem of having a ten-year-old looking game that has to put everything into tiny boxes separated by loading screens?

The whole thing is very depressing. A game that hard-requires an SSD in order to run slowly and boringly.

Ah well, so the Fallout series it is. Which is for the best, I'm really enjoying it.

My favorite bit of FO3 so far was Tenpenny Tower. There was one resident I couldn't get to be okay with Ghouls moving in, so I went away and put points into my speech and personality, but when I tried again, her dialogue options were "locked" ...so I went into the tunnels to explore the other option-- killing the Ghouls (which I didn't want to do). After talking to the Ghouls and them being cool guys, like I suspected, they told me they had a plan for breaking in to the tower and taking it by force. Now, some of the residents were cool, but as a community they were kinda bougie a-holes. So since it was the only thing left to do, I went back to the tower, chatted up Dashwood to get the key to the basement, opened the security gate and let the Ghouls in. Cool battle ensues, they give me a Ghoul mask. I loot the tower for everything I can carry and manage to make a few trade runs while everything is loot-able (before ownership of the tower/objects switches over).

Hilariously, life in the tower continues exactly as before, with the Ghouls simply swapped into the "bougie" role.

The only negative effects are, some of the containers will never be open-able, because the owner/key is gone, and it looks like I'll never be able to get an apartment there.

But.. I'm satisfied that I made buddies with a cool Ghoul in a motorcycle helmet, and he's now running a nice shop that always has ammo. Michael Masters. I'll never get tired of hearing him say, "Go live your life, kid."

...

eta: the main point being, there was a THIRD way to complete a "two options" quest, that the game didn't even suggest was possible until I role-played my characters ethical dilemna, and then it opened up. That's what an RPG should be like.

Last edited by Flint (4/17/2024 12:52 pm)

cool. I love proto-graphics

glatt wrote:

I'm enjoying the NYT Connections game.  It's a single daily game and takes anywhere from 2-3 minutes to being impossible to solve (all day).  I don't have any patience for the various word games where you fiddle with letters to make/guess words.  Connections is more about the various meanings different words have, and how your brain organizes information it has accrued in your lifetime.  It's a trivia game, but also a vocabulary game, and a pattern recognition game.  You get 16 words, and the puzzle creators have established 4 categories that they want the words to fit in.  So you look for patterns among the words and just group similar words together.  It's very simple, but can also be very hard.  It's a knowledge game, but can also be a visual game.  You often solve a puzzle by being creative and brute force logic will almost always fail.  It can be delightful. It can also be infuriating.  I dig it.

Today's puzzle was impossible for me.  Maybe you check out today's puzzle and it will be easy for you, because your brain is wired differently and you care about different subjects.

Sadly, often quite American-centric

Last edited by monster (7/28/2024 10:27 pm)

No.  Very few Stanley Parable achievements have anything to do with the story.

Also, that room is from the "Ultra Deluxe" version, where "Go outside" is twice as hard.
 

that one keeps coming up as an example of [some weird artistic quality that someone needs an example of]

cool, thanks. I think so, too

If anyone was ever looking to get back into Minecraft, there's been a game-changing mod developed.

Distant Horizons is an LOD (level of detail) mod. Minecraft is not polygon based, it is voxel (3d pixel) based, and it renders the world in "chunks" --the more chunks (16x16x384blocks) rendered (up to 32, in the base game), the more CPU/GPU intensive it is (your FPS goes down). NOW with Distant Horizons, you can render WAY further into the distance with increasingly less-detailed chunks. With modern GPUs and other optimization/performance mods, it is possible to see up to a limit of 4 THOUSAND chunks. Basically "as far as the eye can see"

What I am doing is a base game render of 12 chunks, followed by an LOD render of 64 chunks. Then, I configured the fog. By 25% of the LOD, the fog starts, and by 75% of the LOD, the fog is fully opaque. So, 12 chunks of full resolution, 16 chunks of lower resolution, 32 chunks of a fog gradient, and a final 16 chunks that is per-loading the world beyond the fog. At that farthest extent, you can see the silhouette of mountains in the fog.

This truly transforms Minecraft into a "Skyrim" type experience, where you can stand on a moutaintop and see the landscape stretching away into the distance. There's NEVER been anything like this in Minecraft, it is mind-blowing.

I'm using the Fabric loader, Sodium/Lithium/Indium (Optifine is completely obsolete), Distant Horizons, and Terralith + Tectonic for terrain. Also I recommend Dungeons and Taverns, and ChoiceTheorem's Overhauled Village. Next--shaders. I'm going to try Iris/ Bloop, which are Sodium/DH compatible and have a real "Morrowind" effect with volumetric light and mist.