Jump to content

efaardvark

AF Member
  • Posts

    2,437
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    214

Everything posted by efaardvark

  1. I do that kind of thing a lot too.. just play an easy game like stardew valley or minecraft and veg. Or I'm a builder so I'll often do something like get into the VAB (vehicle assembly building) in KSP where there's no time limits or anyone shooting at you and just goof off designing things. Another DH + Bliss screenshot.
  2. Got yet another pin for my collection. This one marks the end of the CloudSat mission / spacecraft, which is shutting down after almost 20 years in orbit and quite a few discoveries about how clouds affect the Earth's climate. This one is a pretty nice one, with good detail on the solar panels and spacecraft body. Two metal layers, the upper one fitted into a dug-out area on the lower one, give the pin a lot of texture too, as well as a bit of heft.
  3. Which days are the strongest? Saturday and Sunday. The rest are weekdays. Did you hear about the guy who was afraid of hurdles? He got over it.
  4. Did you hear about the cheese factory that exploded? There was nothing left but de brie.
  5. I finally got all my minecraft mods dialed in and working the way they should. Or at least as good as it's likely to get on my hardware. (Though having said that I see in this pic that java is using all of its allocation of memory. I might try bumping that up a bit. I've got 32G in the system so setting it to 4 or even 8GB wouldn't be a problem.) Screenshot taken while on an early morning exploration and mapping expedition ....
  6. Welcome! Sorry, I’m twice that old and I don’t really do cosplay except maybe at Halloween. (Even that assumes I have the time and energy to do it right.) But don’t be afraid to say “hi” if you see me around the forums.
  7. I'm still interested in it. I kind of lost a bit of enthusiasm for it however for several reasons. Oculus being bought and assimilated by Facebook (Meta) is a big part of that. Price is another big deal, especially with GPU prices during covid. I mean, the most capable VR gear is still in the $1k+ range. Add to that a $500-$1000 gfx card and that's basically a deal-killer right there. Then there's the actual computer. For me personally my "old" computer here would also need to be updated to do VR well so I've been tempering my interest until I can do my next major system upgrade. I'd also like to see some sort of "killer app" before I take the plunge, at least at current prices. There's VR mods for games like Minecraft and KSP that I play, and people have talked about hi-fidelity VR recordings and broadcasts of things like concerts but is that kind of thing worth the cost of entry for the gear and the hassle of setting it all up? I'm sure VR would be fun for a techie like me to play with but I really can't justify the expense, both in terms of money and time. Bottom line for me is I still really like the idea of VR but most of the cool gear is too expensive and/or locks you into some proprietary ecosystem without a clear, gotta-have application to justify the purchase.
  8. "Flow" is back.... now with distant horizons!
  9. I had a free evening so I decided to go a bit out on a limb and grab the most recent dev versions of the Distant Horzons mod, Iris, and the latest version of the "Bliss" shader. (Bliss is a modified version of Chocapic and one of the first to be able to work well with distant horizons.) I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised. This stuff is coming along nicely. If you had shown me these pics a couple years ago I'd never have believed it was Minecraft. A few visual glitches still, but pretty solid even at alpha and pre-alpha github-latest-at-your-own-risk level. By the time all this gets to official releases it's going to be awesome.
  10. Updated all my minecraft mods to current. Not much different but a few bugs between Iris and the Distant Horizons mod were squashed. Shaders are a little more usable now, though there's still a distinct visual change at the boundary where the built-in and DH rendering meet, especially when you're looking down from a height. Still quite playable, and it doesn't require an expensive GPU to make it work. I've got a Radeon RX 6600 in my system for instance and this is what my game looks like @1080p.. A still screenshot doesn't really capture it though. If you haven't seen DH in action, take a look at this....
  11. I think I’d actually be more likely to first notice the grenade itself, then in finding someplace to hide from the blast. Not the sort of situation where I’d be spending a lot of time looking around and wondering who threw it.
  12. Symphony X - When All is Lost Wilson Philips - Release Me Simon & Garfunkel - The Sounds of Silence The signature harmonizing of this classic duo always blows me away.
  13. Inspired by this thread I decided to go looking for some of my old gaming materials. After taking appropriate precautions (mask, flashlight, food for a week, signal flares, holy water, etc.) I dug through my closet. Remarkably, I did manage to not only survive and find my way back but I even came back with a few of the desired items. This in spite of being ambushed and distracted by a box of books I hadn't seen in ages. (I set a couple of them aside for later. ) Fun times.
  14. I used to play a lot of tabletop RPGs, like D&D, though not that ruleset so much as the Fantasy/Hero rules. Also Space Quest (Tyr, not Sierra) and especially Traveller when we were in a SF mood. I also owned pretty much every MicroGame that came out. My favorite there was Ogre. (Plus the sequel/update GEV and the lighter Rivets.) Unfortunately all that pretty much ended after ‘82. I graduated HS and the gaming crowd I played with dispersed into adulthood and went their separate ways. This was well before the ‘Net became generally available - not even email - so that was kind of the end of the tabletop gaming era for me. Personal trivia fact.. my “efaardvark” handle is a holdover from those times. “Bersig” was usually my main character name in fantasy RPGs and “efaardvark” was for the SF ones like SQ. When online gaming became a thing I started using “efaardvark” because it was usually available.
  15. Oh no! I almost forgot! Thanks for the reminder, though unfortunately that means another load of laundry.
  16. Reading about some of nvidia's next-gen GPUs. 1000W!
  17. Feeling tired and rushed. Weekends are never long enough anyway, but here we do that daylight savings nonsense so I lost an hour of sleep last night. Feels like a lot more. I just finished my morning coffee and here it is already noon. I want to relax and maybe do some gaming but I have adulting to take care of before the weekend is over and I have to go back to work.
  18. Ack! Thbbft! The earworm! The 80s! The hair! The clothes! Sorry. Don't mind me. Just a moment of insanity. Carry on. As you were......
  19. So I've been using the distant horizons mod for a while now. I think it's a keeper. It really changes the game, especially if you like to explore. I find I don't get lost nearly so easily for one thing. Wandering around is a lot easier when you can use distant objects such as mountain peaks for navigation. The mod doesn't really hurt performance either. In fact, I find I can boost my FPS since I can drop the built-in render distance into the single digits and let DH take care of the rest without sacrificing anything but a trivial amount of quality in the distant chunks. For example, as you can see in the screenshots I'm using a built-in render distance of only 8 with the distant horizons mod's render distance set to 512 and I'm still getting >60fps @ 1920x1080 with a x64 texture pack. I'm using the x64 version of the popular "Faithful" textures. Actually I've set the DH render distance as high as 2048, though at that point it does create significant performance issues. My system isn't crazy powerful either. I've got an 8/16 core CPU from a few years ago (2nd-gen Ryzen 7 2700X) and my GPU is a Radeon RX 6600. They say a picture is worth 1000 words so check these out... Finally here's one zoomed-in on an area of transition from built-in renderer to DH-rendered blocks. Again, note the tree leaves and grass in the bottom part of the frame and the lower details in the upper part. You can also clearly see where the texture of the stone surface changes. (Sorry for the blue streaks.. It started raining. )
  20. I also thought it looked interesting but I have only seen the first 3 episodes. I binge-watch stuff after the season ends.. I'll go back and finish it then.
  21. It's that time of year when my car starts looking a bit like a Rose Parade reject.  (Those white specks are flower petals from a nearby tree.)

    rose2.thumb.jpg.44288a2a5952d7363133b2707a78759c.jpg

    1. Animedragon

      Animedragon

      I had that problem, but my car was white and the leaves on the tree were maroon and when they got wet the colour washed out, so I had a white car with maroon spots all over it!! ☹️

      I got though several tins of T-cut cleaning it because a normal wash didn't touch the spots.

    2. Bulletje76

      Bulletje76

      Well it is always better than the dutch pigeons

×
×
  • Create New...