Month: May 2019

Shadowbringers – Give It a Try

Final Fantasy XIV has done something I have never seen a game do before – At least for an MMO. They have provided a DEMO of their new expansion. They are calling it a “Benchmark”, but it is really a demo of their new maps, job skill animations and character classes.

You don’t need an account, or to sign up for an account. Just download the demo and give it a try. You don’t play it, you just watch it. But it’s the real game engine running the real game content on your machine. And you get to create a new character to watch in it. It’s not a video, but the actual game engine. And you can run it as many times as you like with different choices.

How They Did It?

Cut scenes in FFXIV are scripted game footage that the engine renders with your character in the mix. Unlike some other games the cut scenes are not pre-rendered as videos for FFXIV.

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Armor 30 / Core i5-4570S System For Sale

Post backdated by one year to keep off the Front Page.

ThermalTake Armor 30/ Intel Core i5-4570S System For Sale

  • Including 8GB Ram, 120GB Sata SSD, Linux Mint 19.3 installed and updated.
  • CPU / Motherboard Natively supports VGA, DVI and HDMI graphics up to 4K.
  • Does not include: Monitor, keyboard or mouse.

Ready to Go for Office / Business Work

  • Suitable for business / office work without additions.
  • Will run Windows 10 [ License Purchase Required ].

Can Be Enhanced for Video Gaming

  • Slots available for additional memory.
  • Slot available for a graphics card.
  • With Graphics card, more memory, suitable for playing most modern video games.

Linux Mint comes with LibreOffice and has many other office / business apps available. Most free of charge.

Original Package Included

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This page is linked from the Craigslist Ad for additional information.

 

Protect the Solar System from Mining?

I just saw this on SlashDot. And then I did some searches.

Ok. The asteroid belt is pretty small, compared with, say, the Moon. But do we get how mind bogglingly big these things are?

The reason that I did a search for Titan is that I remember a movie Outland, from way back in 1981, with Sean Connery, that included the premise that humans were mining on Titan. Not sure it was ever clear what they were mining out there.

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Games Wanna Be Like Movies

I’ve been watching some Youtube channels that talk about the Demise or just Problems of a few games recently and wondering what’s up. And then I saw a video about “Games as a Service is Fraud” and finally something has clicked for me. Here’s my theory about what’s happening in parts of the Game Industry.

Anthem Collage 02.png

Game Studios want to be like Movie Studios. Games have not, traditionally, been like movies. When games come out, they have been designed to be played for years, and that’s not surprising because making a good game takes years. Leave aside MMOs for the moment which take much longer, but there is a lot of person hours in creating a game. If you watch the credits for movies, you see 1000s of names, but not nearly that many folks are marshaled together to build a game, so it in the past making games has taken longer. Movie studios and the surrounding special effects and catering etc etc services are all geared up to put massive effort into a movie for a short time. Game Studios [Art and Software folks] don’t work like that obviously.

But this is a problem for Game Publishers – the ones doing the Business, not the ones doing the Art, Story and Software.

Continue reading “Games Wanna Be Like Movies”