Rxanadu

I'm looking for a computer within the $300 - $350 range with same or higher specs presented in those Potato Masher videos so far (e.g. looking for Witcher 3 running at 30 fps on 1080p at high settings, runs GTA V at 60 fps on 1080p at the highest settings). Unfortunately, the parts for the Potato Masher are not as cheap as initially stated in the video introducing the rig right now. Here's a link to the video: Luckily, I've found a few builds for the same price or cheaper on YT and PC Part Picker which look to have similar parts comparable to the Potato Masher (PM) build, but I'm not sure about how they would run compared to the PM. I also wanted to dabble around with some game recording to archive some moments in game design I liked in specific games for future reference. Note: I'm not looking to stream games, low- or high-end games included. I have a TV I'm using for a makeshift monitor which runs up to 1080p, so I can generally run most games at a good framerate at that resolution based on the PM specs. I also have a basic keyboard and mouse for use in other games. For reference, I'll post the PM parts here: -Case: Cooler Master Wavemaster -CPU: Intel i5 750 -Cooler: Arctic Silver 11 GT -Motherboard: Asus P7H55 -Power: EVGA 430w -Memory: 4gb OCZ DDR3 -HDD: 320gb Samsung Spinpoint -GPU: MSI GTX 760 Below are some builds for similarly priced builds that I want to know are closed to the PM. All of the builds' prices have been vetted for: if they say "$300" or "$350" they are currently around that price. Some of these builds were initially advertized as costing $350, but the parts are currently dramatically lowered - some down to under $250! Some of the builds only use an AMD APU for all the grpahics processing, but I kept them on here just to get some feedback on them. -$300 build 1 http://pcpartpicker.com/p/MY4dVn -$300 build 2 http://pcpartpicker.com/p/ksvGZL -$300 build 3 http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xCP4kL -$300 build 4 http://pcpartpicker.com/p/v4MpkL -$300 build 5 http://pcpartpicker.com/p/tyK2cf Which one should I get for a similar or better PM experience? I'll be buying them during the weekend to get started on the build some time next week.

Anyone know of any books/shows/movies/games that tackle the subject of the world after the acceptance of 'the other' (e.g. sentient robots, all races, cyborgs, what have you)? Got this spark after finishing Read Only Memories, and I kind of want to see what the world may be like if people actually got past all fears of 'the other.' I think the Star Trek series is a good candidate, given the emphasis on gathering individuals from all kinds of race on the show. Aside from that, though, I can't think of anything in particular.

I actually thought of another piece of media where most fear of 'the other' is quelled, if not considered: Futurama. From what I remember from over 7 years ago, the cast of the show tends to be OK with a lot of other races and cultures. All forms of life, from different races to robots and extraterrestrials, are considered important. I'm not sure how the show has changed over the years of being cancelled and reinstated, but hopefully that small piece of what I'm looking for in a story about how life is with acceptance of 'the other' is there. P.S. I may be completely wrong about the series, though, so I'd appreciate any corrections on this matter.

@Merus: Thanks for the input. I'm not particularly looking for stories where the conflict is "Not Xenophobia/Racism/etc." I'm not even looking for any stories with a form of conflict. I'm looking for a story that deals with a world without Xenophobia/racism/etc. in order to get a better grasp at what that would even look like in our own world. That is one of the ultimate goals for world peace, after all. I'll check out Farscape just to be sure, but, as stated above, a story with a different form of conflict is not my main concern.

I keep thinking about previously wonderful people like Bill Cosby and the Elmo voice, and I'm so scared we'll find out in about a decade that Mr. Iwata was doing something terrible or was connected to some horrible thing. Please, someone tell me about any odd scandal Mr. Iwata was involved in, if any. I really don't want to hear about that one time Mr. Iwata maybe diddled a child while developing Kirby at HAL; I just want to make sure it didn't happen. P.S. I also hope Mr. Miyamoto didn't do anything weird or scandalous when he envisioned his ideas for Mario and Zelda.

I need to take a taxi to someone's house today, but I can only find Uber and Lyft to get to the house. I've heard some scummy things about both companies that I don't want to get into right now. Ultimately, which one is less scummy when it comes to the driving experience? If anyone has any stories of scummy or less scummy experiences from either one, I'd love to hear them.

TL;DR: Can anyone here tell me who owns the licenses to these freeware Midway games before I go pirating them? Recently, I've gone through a whole ringer of trying to download the 2005 Midway game Area-51 released for freeware around 2009, when Midway was shut down. I've unfortunately gotten through the ordeal of downloading the game only to find out the game's servers have since been shut down. The issue with this is this version of the game was ad-supported, which ultimately means the game required an Internet connection to play it. The unfortunate issue here is the servers which are hosting games have since been shut down. As a result, I've now been looking around for any services which just let me download the game for cheap. However, no service seems to hold the game. Not even GameTap. No one uses GameTap, but I checked it just to be sure. Also, GameTap is still around. As a result to all of these issues, I've considered pirating a non-ad-supported version of the game. Before I go to do this though, I want to know one more thing about Area 51 and all of these other Midway freeware games (The Suffering, Psi-Ops): who owns the licenses to these games? I wanted to know in a last-effort attempt to stop myself from inevitable pirating an illegal game I just want to mess around with. If anyone knows who owns the licenses to these games, please let me know. If nothing else, it will be intellectually interesting to know who owns these licenses.

Hello, everyone! I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to start off by saying how awesome this event is. The idea of an entire community coming together to create games is awesome, and I hope these sorts of events continues for years to come. With introductions done, I'd like to tell you what game I'm making. I'm using the Idle Thumbs episode title "Shoot That Pizza" as inspiration. I'm creating what would basically be pitched as "Killer7 with cameras (and pizzas)," where you take pictures of sentient, invisible kamikaze pizzas to kill them off. You have to flash the pizzas to make them visible, then shoot the pizzas with your camera to harm them. What I've got right now isn't indicative of what I intend it to be at the moment (I just started yesterday), but it's a start. I've set up the camera view, the ability to turn to each 'lane' the pizzas will come through, and the ability to zoom in the camera. I may not be able to get as much done through the weekend, as I'm also participating in the upcoming Ludum Dare. Today, though, I hope to get the picture taking set up. Until then, talk to you later.

I'm making a game which rewards players with special abilities after killing enemies, similar to the Mega Man series. The thing about these abilities is they're defensive in nature. For example, the first boss rewards the player with a shield ability to protect from projectiles, while another boss gives the player the ability to deploy a decoy to distract enemies. Unfortunately, I've hit a bit of a rut when coming up with new unique abilities (i.e. no duplicates or slight variations of previous abilities). The game I'm making is a twin-stick shooter with an emphasis on manipulating AI during combat, similar to the upcoming Galak-Z (aside from the aforementioned Mega Man-like abilities gathering system). While the game will have different weapons (earned by defeating mini-bosses in levels), the game also allows the player to complete the entire game without picking up any new weapons. Thus I included the defensive abilities to alleviate any stress doing a one-weapon run of the game. However, despite having numerous ideas for different weapons and their uses on the battlefield, I've been struggling to make any other defensive abilities for quite some time. The best I can think of is making the player temporarily invisible, but that's just a variant on the aforementioned decoy ability. What kind of other abilities can you guys think of to fill up the roster of defensive abilities in my game? I'd like to know, as I don't want my game to be nothing more than a brain-dead shoot-em-up.

I've been developing a game for about a month, and I wanted to start talking about it. However, I wanted to start a dev blog to explain how I design different features in the game. Unfortunately, these features are all 'pie-in-the-sky' mechanics now; they haven't been implemented at this moment. My game's still in the prototype phase (i.e. cube prefabs make up the environment, basic player movement is set up), so I'm not confident enough to show off any screenshots of the game so far. As you can tell, however, a part of me still wants to go ahead and start talking about it. I know I'm being cagey about what my game actually is, and that's the problem. I want people to know more about what I want to put into the game (e.g. how I want to handle enemy AI and earning experience, what the player will be able to do through the game, how I'm handling death). Should I listen to my gut and talk about my development process, or should I keep quiet until I have something to show to the readers?

I do like the idea of writing one major paper talking about the improvements on my game. I can barely remember what I did the other day when working on the game, so writing something down saying, 'I did these things, and this is why' may help me out with processing what I want to do with my game. I tend write specific descriptions of changes when committing changes via SourceTree to my BitBucket project, so I could figure out some sort of small story to tell myself about my own development process. However, I tend to write things in lists, since I'm too scatterbrained to write things out in narrative format for too long. This sometimes makes writing things I've done down problematic, as it causes me to ramble about subject irrelevant to the piece. I'll try at least write these small lists of things at the end of each week from now on. Thanks for the help. And, thanks, @Dewer for recommending the Idle Thumbs' dev forum.

@clyde: I'm not at all sure what Glorious Trainwrecks is. From what I saw from it, the page looked like it fell out of the 1990s. I'm not sure if that's the right place for me to place my thoughts on my game. The main thing I'm looking for is some major feedback. I've actually been having a small conversation on YT (I know right?) about how to design roguelikes - a genre whose elements I wanted to integrate into my project. One of the people in my conversation actually helped me decide to include items reminiscent of the Bastion idols to improve a player's stats at the expense of increasing the difficulty of the enemies in the stage. I want more of this type of discourse, but I also want it to evolve from occasionally rambling on game dev forums. For the time being, though, I may have to go with @Dewer's solution and try my luck speaking about my game on Idle Thumbs' game dev forums. I took a look, and it seems like a good place to talk about my game without that much fear of feeling like I'm pushing it on anyone. Yes - I know of the whole plugging forums in the Idle Banter forums. I want to save that for later. I just want another way of unofficially talking about parts of my game without much fear. Edit: I just took a look at my avatar, and it still evokes how I feel about how little I know about game development despite working on this game for over a month. I dunno. It's just a thought.

I have an urgent dilemma: my sister's moving out of state, but she hasn't told my parents about it. She tells me they're against the idea, and given my experience talking to them in the past, I believe her. She seems determined to leave regardless of the circumstances (most of her stuff is already at the apartment she's moving into) , and she's set up an entire plan to leave without them noticing. It involves me to a high degree, however. I have to take her to the airport, come back home and pretend she left on her own after dropping off at work. I'm wondering how I should handle this situation: should I tell my parents she's moving out of state, should I play ignorant, or should I do something else entirely?

Thanks for all the help and encouragement here. It was pretty stressful on my end, but I think everything is working itself out.

I helped her move last Sunday. She's all and well in her new home. My parents were initially livid over the whole ordeal, but they're coming to terms with the fact she's moved out.

I'm about to sell my Xbox 360 for some cash, but I'm not sure where to sell it right now. I've looked into selling it on Amazon or Ebay, but I don't have enough cash on me to afford shipping (even if I get the buyer to pay for shipping). Thus I cannot sell my console online. However, I have two retail options around me: a local pawn shop and GameStop. I know GS is going to take all they can from the trade-in, but I'm even more cautious about the pawn shop. I've been inside once or twice and noticed an Xbox 360 and a Genesis with a controller, so they seem to accept consoles. I'm just not sure how to haggle with the clerk if it comes down to that. A 250 gb 360 is about $130 on Amazon, so that's my reference point. Given my experience with GS in the past, I'm expecting $50 - $75 at best. However, I assume I could get around $110 from the pawn shop if I haggle well enough. The reason I came here, however, is to confirm if my theories are correct about selling my 360 at retail around me. If anyone has any pointers for selling my 360, please let me know.

We're both above the age of 18. She's staying with a friend where she's going. I don't know what's going on in terms of her personal finances (our family tends to stay away from asking about each other's financial situation), but I think she has a job lined up where she's going.

I guess I've lived so long with it going on I just assumed it was normal. I'm still having issues with transportation, however. I don't have much money to drive her to the airport and back, but there is a transit system around where we live. However, I think she's taking a suitcase with her, so it could be awkward riding in a bus all the way to the airport. I'm also thinking of an airport shuttle, but I'm not sure where to have it pick her up.

I don't know about Craigslist. I don't have any friends nearby that could lend me a hand, and asking relatives and family could feel awkward at best and lead to annoyed refusals at worst. I have a Barnes & Nobles nearby, as well as a few restaurants, but I don't trust anyone around to even bat an eye if someone made away with the console.

I wouldn't call it abuse, but I would assume it has something with my parents constantly asking for money to pay the bills to the point that she's unable to really get out and do things on her own. They tend to get very angry whenever she refuses and yell at her constantly. Nothing physical has happened, though.

I just got a request to implement a character customization system in C# by someone on the IndieDB forums. They specifically need help converting their current character system from Java to C#. However, I've never implemented something of that caliber in any of the games I've made. I do know of numerous tutorials for the system in Unity3D, but I'm not sure how it would work in C# straight up - probably just use enumerations for each class and skill set, while writing the stats to a file which will be opened whenever the game is started. The person didn't say whether the game would be made with Unity3D or in XNA or anything. However, I need help in selling that I can do this or at least learn how to do so rapidly or without much headache. I honestly don't know much of C# outside of Unity3D API. Anyone have any tips? I really want to help with them, regardless of the task. However, I may not have much time to respond before they move on.

I don't know how to.break it to someone that I no longer care about working with him on a project. The thing is he's already made a public announcement that I'm on his team, along with others. True, not many people may have seen it, but I don't want this to bite me later in my career. I don't want to burn any bridges with him. I need to express I've been under a lot of pressure from personal lite to work on the game anymore and that I need to straighten out my life before working with him again. If anyone has any tips on this sort of thing, please let me know ASAP. He just sent me a PM on Skype, and I don't want to say something I may regret.

I've recently been thinking about it, and realized I've never had a hero to speak of. The closest person I could think of is my father, but, to put it plainly, he's disappointed me to such a degree that I can't see anyone looking up to him now. I've always tended to visualized an idealized version of myself as someone to aspire to be. Technically, I guess I've always been my own hero. I never looked up to anyone in the game industry, as I either didn't know enough about the industry to have a reference or never saw someone like myself in a position of power. I still don't, mostly because I still don't see anyone like me in a position of power or importance (e.g. a lead developer, head of a game studio). I can't decide if that's weird or not. To rectify that, I want to start a small discussion about our personal heroes. Did any of you have heroes when growing up? Just anyone you looked up to or wished to be?

The team lead for a game I'm working on just asked me for my Steam name out of the blue. We're not close, so I doubt it's for playing a match online. I think he's trying to find out if I'm slacking off (which I haven't been, for those wondering). I'm not sure how I'm going to tell him to refrain from asking about it, but I don't intend to tell him. He's already looked me up on Linkedin to find out which state I reside in (for what reason, I don't know), so that's more proof this is some sort of way to snoop into my personal life. What I'm really asking around for is whether anyone here has had any of their employers ask for their Steam username (or any other social/personal information) recently. I read this was illegal in some states, but I just wanted to know if I should bring this up in a meeting with him, or if I should be worrying at all. Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid.

I'll try asking him about the Steam thing. He's trying to enter into the Indie Mega Booth, so I think it may be.