mkenyon

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Posts posted by mkenyon

  3. Posted

    I thought about this guy during the recent episode that had a discussion about Destiny and the Moon Wizard. I'm surprised I never mentioned him before, because he personifies Idle Thumbs.

    Esoteric, crazy music, Wizard garb, and general wackiness. His name is a combination of Moon and (Big)Dog. I mean, look at this guy.

    From Wiki:

    Moondog, born Louis Thomas Hardin (May 26, 1916 – September 8, 1999), was a blind American composer, musician, poet and inventor of several musical instruments. Moving to New York as a young man, Moondog made a deliberate decision to make his home on the streets there, where he spent approximately twenty of the thirty years he lived in the city. Most days he could be found in his chosen part of town wearing clothes he had created based on his own interpretation of the Norse god Odin.[citation needed] Thanks to his unconventional outfits and lifestyle, he was known for much of his life as "The Viking of 6th Avenue".[1]

    Please mock if I'm LTTP on this, but I had to share.

  5. Posted

    If I were to rate my experiences, my worst have always been with people who couldn't or refused to speak English.

    I look at it like this.

     

    In Dota (or any competitive game outside of basic TDM type stuff), you need to communicate. That skill is equally important as last hitting, or knowing what character to pick based on team comp. If you purposefully choose to play in a region where you know you won't be able to communicate, you are screwing over your team from being able to play well.

     

    Spanish, I can accept as there's at least some cross knowledge and understanding of languages in the social zeitgeist. But Portugese, Russian, Ukranian, Malaysian, etc? C'mon. 

  6. Posted

    I feel ya, and I don't think you are incorrect. I think it's just too early to know for sure. Heck, will any of the initial games even be built on new engines?

     

    I, for one, can not wait for the release of whatever UE4 game comes out, just so it can start to answer questions of what to recommend people!

  7. Posted

    I know it's not your intent, but the internet is currently filled with "Hardwre gurus" giving out advice on how to build computers for next gen games, and their only knowledge is a couple benchmarks from HardOCP based on cross generational games built with last gen consoles as the min spec. Rather than, let's say, the Xbox One and PS4 in mind. I'm just hoping to give people better advice than that, as Jon Cole pointed out all you need to do is look at Battlefield 4's recommended specs to see something close to the lines that people SHOULD be thinking about.

     

    This is way off topic, but it's rather disingenuous to say that you have the answers, base them on speculation, and then deride people who have empirical evidence to back it up.

     

    I get what you're saying, as things may change, but I find the conclusions a bit simplistic at best. "Those CPU's have 8 cores, therefore having more cores is good!". When the total power of said CPUs is more in the realm of a single Intel Sandy/Ivy/Haswell core, it feels like jumping to conclusions.

     

    I know it's hard to say, but "I don't know" is the only real recommendation we can give at this point :P

  8. Posted

    Talking about next gen man, not console ports of this generation that stick to optimized 512mb, Vram doesn't do anything for performance in terms of size, but you need for bigger games sitting on the PS4/Xbone.

    Maybe. Any evidence we have right now is still saying no. It's not definite though. Scott Wasson, from TechReport on the subject:

     

    I don't have any data from my latest high-res testing that we did for the 7990 review, there were some comparisons in there where we had some 2 gig cards, like the 690, and I don't believe we ran into any problems with current games even at really high resolution, high AA, high texture quality, as much as we could crank it, on a single 27" display, and I didn't notice a single improvement from 2 gig to 3 or 4. I would say that right now, you are safe with 2 gig.

    Now, if you bring in the question of 4K, that is very different from driving a [1440p] monitor. At 4K, I'd say get as much memory as possible, at least 4 gigs.

    In terms of the question, 'would I be safe for springing for a 4 gig variant?', I think the answer is definitely yes. But, I am not sure that you will really realize any benefit from it. You'd be safer, but I don't know if we are going to run into a limit. That's a tough thing to say, because it really comes down to how developers choose to use the PC. That's a guess. We're not to the point yet that they aren't using 4 gigs, but that doesn't mean we won't be in 2-3 years.

    The consoles have unified memory, and they have to use that for everything that they do. It's probably unlikely that they are going to use more than 2 gigs just for what would the role of display memory uses in a PC discrete video card, in part because the consoles are targeting 1080 resolutions, so you only need textures so big, etc etc.

    But, it is possible with 8 gigs on the PS4, they could make a very pretty game that is really smart, and use more than 2 gigs for assets. It's a guess, but that is a factor.

  9. Posted

    Actually I'm not sure whether to go for streaming only or something that can play more demanding games by itself as well. If I built a real gaming PC I'd go for something high end and then I definitely wouldn't afford XBone or PS4 for a while. Anyway, haven't even gotten a TV yet.

    The size of the box I probably don't care that much about, main thing is that it should be quiet.

     

    http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=600246

     

    For something that is at home next to a TV:

     

    http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=65541586&postcount=3

     

    My two cents there: if you were already thinking of buying an Xbone or PS4, you should just go for it. They'll never be more exciting than they are at the beginning and the state of PC gaming will undoubtedly be in flux around their release. Even though they don't promise to be wildly more powerful than PCs, the moving target of how games are developed, how much video memory they'll use and whatnot will be decided in the next year or so and you'll know for sure if a $300 4GB GPU is actually a worthwhile investment or if multithreaded CPUs are going to benefit gaming meaningfully (they haven't, despite threatening to this generation).

    This would probably be really great advice in the past, but this time around things are really different. The CPUs in the xbone and PS4 are more in line with the new iPhone CPU's (kid you not) than they are desktop processors. Even assuming 100% scaling on the 8 cores, it puts the total power just over a single core of a Sandy/Ivy/Haswell i5.

     

    Graphics, again, you can have all the VRAM in the world, but you need the ability to render said data. The APU that's in the consoles isn't anything to really write home about.

     

    This isn't like when the PS3 or 360 came out when they were challenging the best of the best PC's at the time.

     

    That's just on a hardware level. Once you start to look at the possibilities of where SteamOS can go, it's a really exciting future.

  10. Posted

    Ehhh, I'd move to at least a six core Athlon, next gen games should be heavily multithreaded (8 cores man! 7 useable by games) and the big thing is video ram, which devs are gonna eat up if it's a high end game. GTX 760 4 gig would be much better.

     

    I'm personally disappointed by the announcement. I've no interest in Steam OS as my laptop (and almost undoubtedly any future laptop I get) has HDMI out already. I don't need a dedicated HTPC when I can just plug my laptop in (and when I end up getting a dedicated console at some point or another anyway). Hey Valve where's a game, ANY game? You do still make games right?

    Video RAM is, of right now, very overblown. Some comparative testing of Kepler cards between the 2GB and 4GB variants are showing no difference in performance, even when the VRAM is loaded up to the max. They've only been able to do this by cranking AA levels and/or downsampling though.

     

    Low powered APU in ITX form factor being served up by a proper tower in a closet seems like the ultra-nerd way of the future.

  11. Posted

    Input? That might be problematic, but then OnLive probably works and it's much further in the network.

    It works fairly well with the Shield as well, even over wireless. In non twitch type games, the input lag isn't even noticeable. I know that Valve is working to build the OS around minimizing input lag as well, which is great to see.

     

    In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.

  12. Posted

    Excuse me, I mean server in the loosest sense of the word. As in, your main gaming machine which is doing the workload and serving video to the client.

     

    From: http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-interview-steam-box-future-of-gaming

     

    The next step above that is whatever we want. One of the things that’s interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors. We think that right now the PC scales from laptops up to mainframe.

     

    Do you envision a Steam Box connecting to other screens outside the living room?

    The Steam Box will also be a server. Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simultaeneous game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors — now we’re saying let's expand that a little bit.

     

    This kind of theory seems implied with the marketing information as well.

  13. Posted

    I'm wondering if the SteamBox is actually not a Valve assembled PC, and is instead just the codename they had for getting pre-built PCs made with SteamOS pre-loaded onto that.

    They confirmed this at CES earlier this year, IIRC. Maybe it was the year before.

     

    I'm *really* interested in how the server side of the streaming service handles workflow. With so many games being as CPU dependent as they are, how is this all going to play out if you were streaming multiple games at once?

  17. Posted

    I'll probably end up playing a ton of Halo 4 online though. The Halo community has by an average been pretty decent for a good long time now, I think CoD kind of magnetized the assholes away.

    Dota/HoN/Dota 2 did that for PC! (as did the 360)

    I think ultimately, when you have a group of players come together, and their level of fun is entirely dependent upon the group of guys that they are playing with, you're going to get assholes and emotional flaring. Competition just brings that out of people, definitely a double edged sword.

    Smite made one of the most brilliant choices I've seen. There is no ability to chat to your team in game. You can use a very comprehensive global chat menu born out of the Tribes VGS system to alert players to what is going on and organize. As a result, there's not a ton of hate. The most you can do is ping spam.

  19. Posted

    Sean was talking about highly polished competitive games on the ruination cast, so I thought I would create a thread about some titles that I've played in this vein. My group of buddies primarily plays competitive games, been this way for 10+ years starting with Tribes and Q3A. One of the things that has always been the difficult part about getting into these games is that dropping in a random public server leads to inherently unbalanced gameplay. Between stacked teams, players dropping in and out constantly, and a system that is designed for a smaller amount of players in comp (5v5 CS for example) is filled with 15+ players.

    Adding in the ELO/ranking system for matchmaking really helped bring competitive play to folks that otherwise wouldn't organize with a group of players to play set matches. This one characteristic is what makes Lords Managements so successful, in my opinion. Every game you step into is a scrim, which is pretty awesome. That rush, that excitement, that huge play that changed the tide of the game is what makes comp play so exciting. When you jump into a 16 man game of CoD, CS, or whatever, that never really exists because of the chaotic nature of it.

    As much as CoD gets crapped on by the Idle Thumbs community, I am truly excited for the inclusion of an ELO/ranking system in BLOPS 2. Really, is the core gameplay any good in Lords Management? Would you consider jumping into a random public game that is 10v9, then 8v10, and 9v9 throughout the game? Are the mechanics and system of interaction good enough to make that enjoyable? Of course not. The joy of playing those games is entirely about the competition. Even the system of interacting with the game world and your 'Lord' is extremely obtuse; it's something that you're always fighting against.

    So, just throwing out my recent favorites in terms of competitive games that are in this vein.

    Tribes: Ascend

    QuakeLive (of course)

    Warsow

    Smite (Lords Management with nothing but skill shots, love it just on that premise alone - this is the one you need to try out Sean)

    Firefall (if they follow through on the matchmaking/ranking promises)

    Dota 2

    CS:GO

    APB Reloaded

    I was also quite into Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2. The fact that SC2 came out and crapped all over the communities of both of those games is a travesty. They were such an advancement in RTS design. DoW2 was almost like Dota meets Company of Heroes. Pretty rad game.

    *edit*

    Totally posted this in the wrong forum. I'm ashamed. Can a mod move it?

    Also, #ESPORTS

  21. Posted

    As in, don't store anything that isn't immediately disposable on the SSD, or if you do, make sure it's being automatically backed up. Keep around exe's of downloaded games, and backup your Steamapps folder. That allows you to just drag and drop it.

    When you start to store things everywhere, the task of reformatting becomes not only a dreadful act, but incredibly time intensive.

    I think my time from reformating to having my computer all perfectly the way I want it is like an hour at this point.

  22. Posted

    Yeah, but dealing with customer service and RMA's can be a headache. Generally you're going to be fine, but there are a *lot* of horror stories about OCZ in particular. Just because they're legally held to it doesn't mean that they will do anything in a timely manner.

  23. Posted

    Most comprehensive build guide on the net.

    Updated monthly, buy the 'Excellent' or 'Enhanced' on there.

    Also, truth about SSDs. But Intel's newest stuff is pretty bad. 320 is the most reliable, but slower than current gen SSD's. There's no reason to buy anything other than the Samsung 830 or Crucial M4.

    The instakill-permadeath mode of SSD is reason enough for me not to use it. I'd rather go for an SSD Caching solution where writes are backed by a harddrive.

    SSD + RAID/Fileserver/NAS. Have the backup solution in place to protect the SSD. Get smart about usage and then you'll even find it easy as pie to reformat when you need to update video drivers.

    Anecdotal, but I've not had a single SSD fail, even out of the ones I put in the office workstations. That's a total of ~21 SSDs between home and work, not a single failure. I've stuck to Samsung 830s for work, Crucial M4s and Corsair Force GT's on my home workstations. My media center and custom router are running off of Vertex 2's that have been going strong for almost 2.5 years now.

  24. Posted

    Hardware and PC building is a hobby and partial occupation (do custom builds and some sponsored stuff). The guides put out by the big sites always seem to be a bit lagging or hastily put together for some clicks.

    www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=493301

    This thread has the most amazing and comprehensive information you could ever need when considering building a PC. Hazaro and myself spend hours making sure that each part listed is the best possible buy for the money. It's a project of love since neither one of us get paid for it, so there's nothing but real talk.

  25. Posted

    You're still eligible to win stuff if you don't get 10 friends. It's like 3 giveaways in one. What I *didnt* notice when I posted this as well as had some of my other friends sign up, is that the basic giveaway is more or less some Razer tchotchkes. Sorry. :(