Security_Tubbs

Here I am, for the final time tooting my own horn (until someone else starts posting as well, or there's some notable news). So, despite my crashing problems, both literal crashing of rockets and the figurative crashing of software, I've managed to reach two planets, the Venus-like planet Eve and the Mars-like planet Duna. The Eve mission was actually an unmanned probe, but the Duna mission was a full on kerballed endeavour. Here are some screenshots from the Eve mission: Approaching the planet (after having encountered the tiny asteroid-moon, Gilly) Deep within the atmosphere already Parachutes have opened, relying completely on them It was nighttime when/where I landed, and the place is so much more beautiful in daylight Here's the better documented and more significant Duna mission: As I approached Duna, I had so much fuel I decided to land on the moon Ike. Here goes. A risky landing, and I'd be lying if I told you I managed it on the first try. This place also resembles the Mun very, very much. Last approach on the final destination, the planet itself: Duna. That huge crater looks like a good place to land. The atmosphere is very thin here. I'm below 14 km and the atmosphere isn't very noticeable yet, so I'm going to have to do a partially powered landing. I do have parachutes, but they would open and deploy too close to the surface, possibly pulling the craft apart. Parachutes opened, but I'm below 9 km Running low on fuel and cutting it pretty close. Maybe I shouldn't have landed on Ike How did the brave Kerbals do? *dun Dun DUN!* Here he is, the Kerbal of the Hour: Jerbald Kerman. My first kerbal to set foot on another planet (not counting moons). Small steps, giant leaps, etc. "Dude... Guys!!! GET OUT HERE, QUICK!" "See that?" "Wow! It's fucking nothing" *Ba-boo*, the wizard, horsebag, [credits roll].

Goddamnit, attempting to reach another planet is like trying to throw a strand of spaghetti through the keyhole of a moving door with one eye closed. Using computer assistance (read: MechJeb) might let you at least use uncooked pasta and open your other eye. This version has really punched me in the gut. I considered myself at least a somewhat accomplished rocketman, but now I feel like a mere video game baby. But, as it has been said, we choose to go to the other planets (and do the other things) not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Also, it seems there might be some memory leak issues with the new version. I just assumed it was my shitty computer and bit my tongue as much as I could, but there are similar reports by other people on the KSP forums as well. My game tends to crash at least once per four or five launches, sometimes even more often. When you're talking about Kerbal rocketry, there's going to be a lot of launches, and restarting the game isn't the fastest process, either (for me at least). At the moment, I stand defeated. Hopefully whatever problem there may be with the game gets fixed, so I have a better chance of once again conquering the ever expanding Kerbal universe. If the problem turns out to be with my computer, well, space shall remain unexplored on my part for a much longer time. Final thought: this thread seems to be pretty much my personal KSP blog at the moment.

Holy shit guys! Version 0.17 is here! Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh. Unfortunately the Squad servers blew up, so I haven't been able to download it yet. Which, for me, is almost ideal as I might still be able to go to bed tonight. This game is once again going to totally destroy my productivity for at least half a week. Changelog: Several new Planets and Moons, for a total of 14 Celestial Bodies. Multiple game saves support. Tutorials and Scenarios. Several new Parts, including a NERVA Engine (*). Internal Cockpit Views on several cockpits. Center of mass, thrust, lift and drag visual cues on the construction scenes. Physics Warp: An alternate time-warp mode where you can accelerate time to 2x, 3x and 4x without putting the sim on rails. Much improved visuals in space. And more! Notice: Tutorials and scenarios. I don't quite yet know what they're like, but I think it could make this game a good option for an Idle Thumbs weekend stream. Someone should let the Thumb Lords know, wink. (*) NERVA is an acronym for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. This is going to be fun! Alternative title for video: Squad server admins during 0.17 release http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYNX_PwDLm4 Update: 15 hours later, servers still down. Starting to experience tremors. Unable to form long sentences. If anyone reads this, please, send video games. Brain reverting to primal state. Is this real life? Am I in a nightmare? What is game? Please, send "Video Games". Send "Video Games" Rodkin.

Here's another creepypasta story I quite like. It's about a mysterious Morrowind mod. [Ghost noises] http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Jvk1166z.es

I've had a minor itch to get FTL after hearing a lot about it on the podcast, and seeing my friends on Steam play it. I realized I have an extra copy of Terraria sitting in my Steam account, so I'm proposing to trade it for a copy of FTL for anyone willing. I can heartily recommend Terraria. To say it's "Minecraft in 2D" is somewhat fair, although Terraria is a lot more focused on exploration and hunting for gear and artifacts (and less on building stuff). Tons of weapons, armor, accessories to find, loads of monsters to kill and several bosses to slay. My steam account is: http://steamcommunity.com/id/retales Pardon for the slightly off-topic post, I'll edit in stories about failures in FTL after I get it.

Kind of late to the party, but I was wondering if there's still three trustworthy thumbs who haven't pre-bought the game, but would be interested in doing so? If you buy the 4-pack, you can get the game for ~14 € per person, as opposed to 19 €.

Holy shit, I'm at a loss of words. Never could I have imagined the game is going to be this good. I don't think I have anything bad to say yet (...yet ). I guess the soldier voice acting is quite a bit over the top, but I can just roll my eyes and take it as a "evil military jarhead" caricature. I also had a hilarious physics bug. A security guard stepped on a lamp and got attacked by a physics kraken. He quite literally exploded in a splattering of blood and body parts. The scientist in the screenshot demonstrates how she has a much better understanding of physics, and knows never to divide by zero.

So, I'm a backer now. Idle Thumbs will always hold a special place in my heart, but I have to back other projects too! It seems like a reasonable assumption that they'll reach the 1.8 mil goal, and that's the main thing I care about. ~28 k$ to go, and that apparently doesn't yet include what people have donated through PayPal. edit: Hot beans! I got up this morning, checked the kickstarter page, and BAM! 1.82 million dollars pledged.

Oh my stars. The kickstarter is at about ~1.63 million right now, with three days to go. The Galactic Wars single player campaign is at 1.8 mil. I said that as excited as I am right now, I'm not going to back the kickstarter, and instead I'll buy the game when it comes out. But if it starts to look like it's going to reach the 1.8 million stretch goal... Damnit, then I just have to pledge.

If you can get into orbit, it's actually pretty simple to get to the Mun. No math required. 1) Orbit Kerbin around 70-100 km 2a) If you're orbiting the same way the Mun orbits, accelerate when the Mun rises above the horizon 2b) If you're orbiting in the opposite way, accelerate when the Mun sets below the horizon 3) Accelerate until your apoapsis rises to the height of the Munar orbit (your orbital velocity should be somewhere around 3000 m/s) Now your flight path projection should show an encounter with the Mun. As for your ship spiralling out of control, adding some SAS modules often works. Also, big is not always better. For my first attempts at getting far away from Kerbin, I kept trying to add more and more boosters and engines. Eventually I started over, and instead of tons of engines, I had less engines with more fuel tanks. I reached escape velocity pretty easily.

Cockpit views/IVA's (Intra Vehicular Activities) are all nice and good, but I'm figuratively shitting my pants about the other planets that will be added in the next version (I think). Going through well over a hundred pages of forum posts is beyond what I can do right now, but apparently there is going to be 4 new planets, and possibly some moons around them: "Lava planet", Charr "Venus planet", Eve "Mars planet", ??? Kerbal homeworld, Kerbin "Gas giant", ??? Getting to those planets is going to be Fun.

So you're not only the swine who besieged my fort, but also the one responsible for that flag? I'd throw down a gauntlet if Minecraft had them.

The game sounds extremely compelling to me, and I kind of feel like I should pledge. But I know better than that from experience: I just cannot play RTS games online. Plus, there are a number of financial and hardware factors I need to sort out. Chances are I will buy this game later, after it has been released. I'm really glad to see that the kickstarter campaign reached its goal and is doing well, but Idle Thumbs shall remain only pledge for now.

I'm fairly sure more people ready'ing will reduce the timer further. The timer starts at like 150 seconds when only one player is ready, and it goes down by some amount for every ready player after that. There's always that one clueless guy who never presses F4.

So I played MvM for the first time. Played for 2-3 hours, beat all three maps and it was really fun. Playing it is quite 'passive', so I realize not everyone is going to like it. Since you're playing against bots that more or less follow a pre-determined path, you don't need to be on your toes quite as much compared to regular ol' TF2. I played as an engineer with the mini-sentry item most of the time, plus I bought the "extra disposable sentry" upgrade. In addition, I had the Frontiersman shotgun (that gives you crits for kills and assists your turrets had scored before they were destroyed). That one map had a wave of 150 scouts. My sentries were well positioned and I kept replacing them as soon as they were destroyed. At the end of the wave I had over 40 crits in store. I was ready to give the next wave a world class fuckin', but of course I got sniped before I could spend all my crits.

I lost pretty much all interest in TF2 with the MannConomy update. And I was initially pretty "meh" about yet another game with yet another "horde mode". But then I remembered it was Valve we were talking about, checked the TF2 site for the MvM update and now I'm totally stoked. Or even super-stoked. Definitely super-soaked.

"The subject did not survive interrogation" That really struck me. They didn't make you wonder and speculate what happened to the captured captain. And they made it clear that they didn't treat him "nobly", like locking him for the rest of his life or something similar.

I remember Beyond Good and Evil fondly, not only because it was a great game, but also because it has a great soundtrack. The first one is a great theme for epic battle and the second one really makes me think of bovine bartenders and sharks with sunglasses on. Also one theme that has stuck with me ever since I first heard it is the Ground Control 2 menu theme.

I do love roguelikes. The first ones I ever tried were Nethack and ADOM. More recently I've played a bunch of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. My interest with roguelikes follow a pretty predictable path: 1) Get an urge to play a roguelike 2) Play through a bunch of characters just for fun 3) Get more serious about actually beating the game 4) Eventually reach the point where I read guides, create a million characters just to get the one with good enough stats, savescum if possible 5) Fail sooner or later despite my efforts and lose interest for a while

I'm a big consumer of any sort of tower defence games. I tried the first OMD demo, but ended up not buying it since it didn't have multiplayer. My first impressions trying the demo were "This is going to be amazing in coop!". I've also tried OMD2 demo, which seemed just as good, but with coop. I'll probably pick it up when it's on sale, or when my financial situation improves.

No atmosphere. Low gravity. Astronaut footprints. Science update: I managed to get a space station in orbit. It has (literally) tons of excess fuel, and room for a total of 9 kerbonauts (3 in the primary module plus 6 one-kerb pods around it). The very kerbal aspect of this whole project is that I have 6 tanks of RCS fuel, but no thrusters. Originally I had thrusters as well, but I had to move the engines around a bit and forgot to re-add the thrusters. Brave Sherry Kerman on a spacewalk. Second update: I decided to decommission the space station and launch an upgraded one before populating it with brave kerbonauts. That, however, was quite an ordeal. I managed to get my recovery craft within 5 km of the space station, and the spacewalk was pretty scary, but went without a hitch. Only after all three kerbonauts were aboard the recovery craft, I found out that I couldn't control the space station through the MechJeb module. I had to send brave Sherry Kerman back to the station to try a true hollywood space movie stunt. He went onboard, turned the station retrograde, fired the engines and jumped out. He got out fast enough to get back to the recovery craft with his jetpack. The space station plummeted into the ground (too bad I couldn't see it as I was guiding Sherry). The recovery vehicle de-orbited, opened the parachutes on each of the pods and decoupled them all. All pods landed safely into the sea east of the Kerbal Space Center. Hurray! Update: My Munar operations. The rocket car served well until now, but the wheels are experiencing some weird bugs, making it unusable for driving around. I could fly with it though.

The new version is gnarly indeed. See that Mun-arch in the screenshot above? ... I love this game.

Only games I bought from the sale were Terraria (tons of fun to play with friends and siblings), and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. I'm still not sure about the latter one. I played through the demo three times. It got a little less confusing the more I played it, but all the more compelling. I guess time will tell if I regret the purchase. I'm by no means expecting a perfect, smooth or non-confusing game, so maybe something will come of it.

Probably my favourite puzzle game ever. I've gone through the entire campaign, but I have one optional mission I've never come around to finishing. It's one where you have to create several types of 4x4 (or larger, can't really remember) molecules. The DLC campaign that introduced the quantum-teleport thing is also pretty damn difficult. I like how the puzzles are really goddamn hard, but the game system allows for different types of solutions. My solution to the very final level sort of made me proud. It was in no way optimal or sophisticated. On the contrary, one errant push of a button would've jammed the system and [RETRACTED]. But in the end, it worked.

I played it with all settings on Low until I reached the Hell levels. At that point, despite the lowest possible graphical settings, the game started lagging, slowing down and speeding up. Therefore, SMB is on hold until I get a better computer. I did love it though. One of the great things is the really short time it takes to respawn. If I had to sit through even a short loading screen, or select "Continue", the frustration of dying at the same spot for the 50th time would certainly increase. Having an almost instant respawn doesn't give you (much) time to start throwing things around.