neonrev

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    201

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by neonrev

  1. Posted

    I mean, I would also much prefer that have been just a 'nah fuck the laws' sort of establishing moment for her, but it does also work as an establishing moment for Burke in the game's very grey-grey morality. It's been a good while since I played it, but as I recall, all your allies are somewhat likable, deeply flawed jerks who don't actually like you. Never finished it though, really buggy for me after a while.

    In an ideal world, that line is about one of the swamp people types, because that's for real where hunting laws stop mattering for some people and places and it is entirely thematic and works as a good line still, but it wasn't. Still a game that goes some places AAA doesn't basically ever.

     

  3. Posted

    The devs did a weekly Q&A radio show/podcast about their MMO KOL for many years, and made a West of Loathing focused one that is very open about the development process, who did what, financial and sales matters (they wildly exceeded both expectations and what they considered the 'necessary' sales for the game to be a success for them. Basically, since they have the MMO and part of this game's cost was creating an engine that makes creating new content very easy, they don't have to break even for them to be able to keep the studio together and maybe even hire on another person.), and some puzzle design stuff without getting too terribly spoiler-y.

    http://shows.kingdomofloathing.com/The_KoL_Show_20170817.mp3


    Personally, as a huge fan of these guys for more than a decade, it's hugely gratifying to see them find some decent success in the indie scene and to know that they are energized and eager to work on some DLC, add free holiday event updates and new games in this engine. Their last major game was a pretty serious flop for them both financially and creatively and they seemed really beat down by it, it's good to see them feeling so great about this one.

  5. Posted

    1 minute ago, SecretAsianMan said:

    I would be cool with that.  Again, I think the difficulty would be in coordination.  Ideally it would need to be something that would be better with multiple people but not require a lot of them at once.  Personally I find the combat part of Minecraft to be completely uninteresting but if I could assume a role of weaponsmith/base builder I would gladly play the gadget guy.  Actually that sounds kind of awesome.



    It is difficult to coordinate, and you kind of need a critical mass of players to keep the ball rolling, but I think we'd figure out how to make even asynchronous multiplayer pretty fun. If you can combine resources when you need you can get to the later, cooler stuff faster.

    That kind of specialization is one of the things I thing could be coolest about a multiplayer server. I also am not terribly into the combat, but I am into the mining/ore processing/machine side of things. At a certain point I usually get frustrated because now I have to go out and do a bunch of fighting I don't want to to get some resource, and it'd be cool to have help with that from someone who enjoys it.

    Also there are a lot of modpacks with a mod called Ars Magica, which I think is exactly what you want. It also has an RPG system for leveling up your magics. 

  6. Posted

    Regrowth (which is easily downloaded and run through Curse) is a modpack I recommend pretty heavily, it's a magic and agriculture focused modpack where you grow all your resources with magical crops and slowly rebuild a destroyed world overrun with mobs. Either of the Project Ozone modpacks also sound very much up your alley, and all of these have quest books that help guide you through basic progression in the new mods in addition to NEI which can show you the recipe for any item so you aren't looking everything up on a wiki and flailing about wildly.

  7. Posted

    12 minutes ago, Twig said:

    I know in the past I've expressed hesitance about modded servers but that's because I'm an idiot.

     

    How reasonable would it be to request a mod/modpack that makes us worth together to fend off the hordes of enemies? As opposed to all of us going off on our own and building whatever. I think maybe I'd be more into playing a version of Minecraft that doesn't focus on the creative aspect, 'cause I think I'm just... tired of building things. :P


    That's a pretty common element to almost all mod packs actually, increasing the difficulty of mobs and the general danger of the world, and then giving you a series of tools to unlock and develop to combat that threat. There are a lot of modpacks that basically try and give jaded minecraft players the feeling of danger and discovery that vanilla gives you at first, before you figure it all out and end up building things to look cool and burning out.

    This is generally much less of a thing in skyblock modpacks, since you're the one creating the spawning surfaces and presumably are making it safe as you go.

    When we had the vanilla server up and everyone built all the community farms and stuff in like a single day or two, it made me a little sad because it would be so much cooler to have a community power plant or community ore processing center, or to just have a reason to group together more for longer, or to have longer term goals. I'm also pretty sick of just creative building for it's own sake.

    My specific pitch to you @Twig is that most modpacks focus more on the production and practical side, where you're spending more time on your resources and making more efficient ways to use them, and that can be either machines or magic or combat or exploration. There is really a modpack for any desire.

  8. Posted

    Oh, timing. Yes there is at least a deep burning desire for a modded server in me at least.

    So we've been thinking about and half-planning to reboot the IdleMC server as a modded minecraft server for a couple months now, and there seems to at least a little interest in it now. Evilskillet just took down the old server and archived it and last we talked would be very much down with hosting a modded IdleMC.

    There's a number of different mod set-ups I think people would like. Skyblock can work multiplayer, but it's not ideal. There are modpacks like Regrowth and Crash Landing that replicate a lot of the slow build-up of sky block packs with having a generated world and more hostile enemies. There are much more guided modpacks with quest books and rewards and instructions that help people learn mods which I think could be neat for the community, and there are my favorite modpacks, the fuck-it kitchen sink packs that just include everything that fits.

    Depending on people's computers and interests, there are a ton of options for running a community modded minecraft server and we've talked about it enough that it should happen. I'll post in the slack and the other forum and everyone should talk about it. I've always wanted to play that way.

  9. Posted

    I also felt overwhelmed and confused by the combat system in the first 1-3 hours, but once I figured it out and leveled up enough to have more tools to use with those controls I ended up really enjoying the game to the point of finishing it and all the DLC. It really opens up after a while, but you are pretty dis-empowered in the beginning using just the basic combat system, but that's also thematic. 

  10. Posted

    STALKER is my favorite game series by far.

    I can third the recommendation of the Complete mod, I wouldn't really consider playing the game in it's base state anymore simply because of weird bugs and instability and unclear quest text, and complete fixes those and doesn't really add too much out of line with the original game.

    SoC is an inspired game if you can get into it. It oozes ambiance and has the best story of all of them. I actually like Clear Sky a lot more than most people, it's probably the most ambitious in terms of the A-life system (all the npcs are walking around doing stuff and looting and trading even when you're not around) and the faction system, while buggy to the point of pointlessly broken, would add a ton of vibrancy and life to the world. There were raiding parties going out to attack camps. There are some mods (there is also a clear sky complete mod, I believe all three have one) that smooth out most of the rough edges and fix and implement some of the systems that were cut. Clear Sky had so many ideas that just never made it into the game and it shows. Originally they intended there to be vehicles, if I recall, and parts of the main quest that require you to cross the entire map over and over were designed with that in mind. It's a tragedy it ended in such a sorry state, because it had the most potential of any of them.
    CoP is by far the smoothest and cleanest game as a vanilla product, and the story, while not as weird and interesting as SoC (clear sky is pretty meh) still has some fun moments and choices and your actions can have consequences down the line. The end game in Pripyat is the tensest open world experience I've ever had. If you're finding SoC kind of hard it's not really for you, but CoP also has an utterly brilliant mod for it, the Misery Mod. It's brutal, it expands on and adds many systems without feeling out of place, it's my favorite mod ever. It creates an FPS, STALKER themed Dark Souls meets DayZ. It's fucking amazing. I cannot recommend it enough to people who like the whole STALKER world and gameplay, and it's also extremely polished.

    I'd also tell you to do plenty of side missions, it's good way to get some knowledge of the map and where camps and patrols are likely to be which can be a big help in the main storyline or for just random emissions. Also, yes, that backpack and most stashes it tells you about are hidden nearby that marker, not on it (I think, they all blur together and it's been forever since I played a vanilla stalker game.) and that's pretty normal for most things. 

    For bonus immersion, I'd watch Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, which this game takes a ton of inspiration from, and also read Roadside Picnic, which all of it is based on. Fair warning, Stalker the movie is more of a '15 minute slow pan over a water covered tile floor while a man talks about futility' film than a film about a guy with a gun. But it has bolts you throw at anomalies and that's pretty good.

  11. Posted

    So my dad called and I guess we're trying to plan a rare family vacation to the long-fabled land of disneyland/world this christmas break, and it's almost certain I have to opt out because it's impossible to get time off around holidays if you don't have kids. Spent about 45 minutes trying to talk my dad out of his massive excitement for finally, after years of promises, being able to take us to Disneyland, which was always the height of incredible vacations growing up in rural SD, just because I know that even with 6 months of warning, someone will want to take their kids to the grandparents a week beforehand for Christmas and that will always trump anything going on in my life. I don't disagree with that, I don't want to fight them over that, kids should have good holidays, and that's why I no longer celebrate any, I always have to work on them to cover for the child-havers.

    Dad has finally broken into making money commensurate with his work, having a minor management position, and I know he now has money enough to not only support us like he always has, but also to have saved up enough to take us all to Disneyland, and my little sister is graduating with a teaching degree that winter. I felt like crying the entire time he was going on about planning flights and getting a travel agent to plan it all and which one to go to because I knew the entire time it wasn't going to happen. I don't even want to go to Disneyland/world, I don't care about it more than whatever slight environmental stuff I'd pick up that the Thumbs and VGHD folks talk about. I feel like I'm going to end up disappointing my dad again because the sort of work I ended up doing doesn't allow me the sort of freedom of holidays that an office gig or teaching does, and I resent that it's entirely because of other people's kids being inherently more valuable than anything involving my family or my parent's feelings. I feel bad doing it, but I do, I don't ask for time off otherwise and I work every other holiday period they also need off, and I cover for them when a kid is sick or has a concert, and that gets me exactly shit when I actually want it.

    Edit: Also, my dad is a fucking saint, his only hobbies outside work are home improvement, going out to the farm to do chores, and hunting (for food to eat and because it's a family event anyway). I have literally, honestly, never seen him be mean to a person or ever say anything cruel about anyone. He's a hick who does his best to learn PC trans-people lingo despite being a complete hick because I had a friend who was trans. Had to mention it once. The man does nothing for himself, ever, he works and eats and sleeps because he's built that way, and he asks nothing of anyone. The least I can do is this, help fulfill one of the dreams that must motivate him, and I don't think I can.

     

  12. Posted

    It's less that video games made me do anything and more that it provided direction and intensity to things I was already up to.

    Skyrim was a big one, specifically the crafting system. I've always been a huge sucker for a resource collecting/crafting system, but there was something to that one, at that time in my life that made me want to use and expand on the basic sort of leatherworking knowledge I already had (one of my grandfathers repaired saddles and related horse gear and taught me as much as my stupid child brain could be arsed to pay attention to at the time) to the point where I could make something real, and a couple years later I was able to make a decent bit of money on the side doing custom work for hunting gear, mostly cheek-pads/round holders, when I was working at a sporting goods/bait shop/bulk fuel retailer. I haven't had the space to ever actually use it, but it's also the reason I now own a small anvil, kit for a small propane furnace and ~30 pounds assorted iron scrap. 

    Outdoors activities are another one. We camped a lot growing up, but that mostly meant a fishing trip with tents, we didn't hike or anything like that. It was some number of open world exploration type games that made me ever think hiking or rock climbing or backpacking could be fun at all, and it turns out it is.

    I grew up shooting guns just as a general leisure activity, but not really caring beyond knowing how to use them safely, but it was specifically Silent Storm and Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl that made me start considering them as a historical interest and as an engineering/ballistics interest, respectively, and it was that side of the hobby that kept me away from the more toxic side of that community, which probably helped me not become a worse person at least.

  13. Posted

    Well, that confirms what I already knew, which was that my job (Optical Lab Tech) is for sure going to be automated very, very soon (97%), which isn't surprising considering that there are labs that are automated in the US already, they just cost a lot to set-up. They aren't entirely automated though, they do still need a minder to calibrate and monitor the machines and to fiddle with the one-off things the machines can't do. Probably the actual best course of action for people working in soon-to-be obsolete manufacturing fields is to learn how to maintain the machinery, since it can't do that itself (yet).

  14. Posted

    I don't know that I'd call it arrogance, but it's for sure an example of a pretty common trend amoung people who hit it fairly big online making 'goofy' or 'dumb' comedy as a personality, which is a tendency towards self-indulgence at times, especially in people who view their own work as silly or dumb, and especially in younger people. This is probably the most common reason I stop consuming various online media, self-flanderization and indulgence. 
    I don't exactly know how popular MBMBAM or TAZ are, but I think in the millions, and that's a lot of people to be paying attention to you to not have problems like this.

    I feel like Griffin (who is my favorite nonetheless) has more problems with this because Justin and Travis either had or have had much more serious careers and their outside work is more grounded, where as far as I know Griffin is 24/7 goofs, and also (at least from my perspective) incredibly more popular than them. I feel like that's why he had such problems with criticism of TAZ, that one of his goofs turning into something more serious and important to him and that's new ground for him.

    I feel weird saying this because I think I'm assuming a lot about their careers and shit, but I've noticed it to, and I've seen it in other people. I do think that they are handling it very well, and that it's not a big deal or anything, and that the quality hasn't dropped, but yeah. 

     

  15. Posted

    My box canyon mosaic work is mostly completed, at least from the intended viewing point. It features basic knitting patterns and a slouchy tryzub, but it's somewhat impressive. My main goals there now are finishing out the dirt embankments, planting realistic looking trees around it and possibly topping it off with glass, though I don't like that idea so much.
    I03Gl6h.png
     


    I also redid the spawn area, making it more of a fully featured base/community use area. I moved the enchanting table from the farm area and made an enchanting room/anvil room inside, added a bunch of chests for newbie stuff and stocked them as best I could, just needing more food and torches at this point I think. From here all I want to do is add an observation tower, a link to a future subway hub, and some general interior decorating.
    1NPVp5S.png

  16. Posted

    Honestly, I don't think there is a single feature I've found in vanilla after a years long absence that isn't either replicated or done better in a mod for 1.7.10, except perhaps some of the more baked-in world gen stuff. Playing vanilla now feels incredibly limited to me, which is interesting in its own way.

    There are a number of mods that have made the jump to the current version, not nearly as many as there are for 1.7.10, but a lot of those are basically abandoned anyway. The Microsoft sale did weird things to the mod community, but it's recovering now.

  17. Posted

    If ever people want a modded minecraft server, I could create a modpack that people could just download, or it could live on technic or curse or something as a private modpack. I was just thinking today that there is some quality of life stuff that I miss, and that there might be a good balance between the kitchen sink approach and vanilla where it's just fleshing out the late game, maybe adding stuff after iron tools that isn't just magic (I think enchanting tools and making potions being the only late-game tech is bullshit) to increase productivity. 

    So if it's ever just a matter of it being a pain in the ass to install mods, I know a way where it's just a install button on a mod loader, and you don't have to worry about updating mods or anything. I used to roll my own modpacks because I used to have very strong opinions about mods, it's simple once you know how. I'm told that modded minecraft on a server is a ton of fun, it can allow people to specialize more than in vanilla, where eventually everyone has the exact same stuff and it's everything.


    Also, thanks to whoever magicked those name tags into my inventory, pigmen watch continues. I will save him.

  19. Posted

    Photographers, lend me your ears and ideas. I have realized a new way to play at work, but I need your help to know how to do so. I can totally supply some weird-ass lenses for messing with light and creating natural distortion, probably for free I bet?

    I make lenses for a living, and I have like a whole shitload of scrap to play with. I'm talking single vision lenses of all magnification (and whatever the inverse of that is) and cylindrical (this is the 'twist' of the light if that makes sense) powers, and bifocal, trifocal, the odd and elusive quadrifocal and circular-progressive, pure progressive (no line bifocals) of all types and magnifications, and I can manufacture custom real weird stuff like biconcave lenses at a 2 base curve and other oddities.

    These I can do in both plastic (better clarity) and poly (like some weird color aberrations a computer will notice but not most normal eyes because brains are weird) and also apply some anti-reflective stuff to bounce non-direct light (snow photography?) and some photochromic stuff that slowly darkens in UV light (timelapse?). Additionally, I can make lenses up to a 10 prism, which I don't think translates well to non-optical measurements but is pretty intense.

    I can also tint any of this a wide range of shades, darknesses and colors, and I can create gradients between either 2 or 3 colors, or between one and clear. I can do some really nuts stuff with tints, I used to play at work by creating new sunglass tint combinations.

    I can make lenses both by themselves, raw, or I can also manufacture them custom to fit at least some basic camera filter mounts, the smaller ones, less than 80mm. I know that you can hold weird lenses between light sources and the camera lens, but I don't actually know how photography works at all. Give me some good ideas, and if there's something your heart desires, hit me up and we'll talk. I can get a whole lot of stuff done in this realm, and I really want to mess around with this stuff more.


    Also, I can do some really weird stuff not on purpose. A lens that comes through bearing surface marks will randomly bounce light bi-directionally across a spirograph pattern of grooves and is really, really hard to look through for seeing but could be fun for photography. A plus prescription run on the wrong tools will create a magnifying glass that has blurred spots that merge smoothly into magnified, I can really do basically anything that involves transparent surfaces.

  20. Posted · Edited by neonrev
    spoilers

    Man, I think I accidentally speedran my first time through the Holiday Bonus DLC. Text in white since I don't know how to spoiler tag. Started as AV crew, first guy alone in a room a little ways away on my floor, walk over there, close door, headshot from behind, leave. Second guy walking around the basement, spend a minute figuring that out and how to get down there, guy is in locker room, wait a moment till he leaves and walks down an empty hallway, strangle and neck break, walk back a room to exit, leave. 
    Total time, 2:34, and about a minute of that was spent figuring out that the second guy was in the basement and not on the stage floor.

    Hopefully they change where they spawn?

    Edit, Just realized that if I'd just shot the second guy I probably would have gotten the never noticed bonus as well as the no bodies found one. I guess it makes sense that that guy noticed me choking him to death before he died though? Doesn't seem like it ought to matter though.

  21. Posted

    I won't accept killing this elusive target by any manner other than poisoning, but I'm pretty certain she never eats/drinks anything so it's looking like I'm going to  have to try and peel off some of her guards and see if they get replaced, and if not then try and hit her with a lethal syringe.

    She'd be easy by sniping, there are multiple traps in the alleys I've noticed, but all I want is to feed her some rat poison and drown her in a toilet bowl filled with her own vomit and I can't figure how.

     

  22. Posted

    I wish so badly that Danielle's Boston(?) accent didn't make me want to claw my eardums out because it's a really funny bit when she does it and I'm loving that Dungeon World segment, but the moment I realized people were going to use different voices I knew it was coming and I dreaded it. It's way too effective at the obnoxious part of the "obnoxious Boston(?) accent" thing for me. 
     

  23. Posted

    12 hours ago, Upthrust said:

    I actually got in to the Giant Bombcast through Idle Thumbs as well. The full genealogy of my gaming-related pod-listening goes as follows: The Kingdom of Loathing Podcast > Video Games Hot Dog > Idle Thumbs > the Giant Bombcast > the Giant Beastcast > "VICE Gaming's" New Podcast*, with a couple branches off Idle Thumbs for Three Moves Ahead and Idle Weekend, a branch off the Beastcast for Friends at the Table, and a totally separate tree for Cool Games Inc and The Adventure Zone, by way of MBMBAM and Judge John Hodgman.


    Absolutely identical path for me as well. Eerily so.