Tera Redux

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The Other Sexy Game

So, FFXIV has been down for 24 hours for the Shadowbringers expansion maintenance, so I needed something to do. I checked in on Tera. It has been a while since I’ve been there and I’ve missed out on an expansion, increase in Level Cap and some other things. The patch for NA region was called Skywatch: New Heights, and is covered briefly here. Here’s a review that someone else pulled together.

But when I updated I saw immediately that there is a new Race/ Class combo, so I fired up one of my open slots as a Popo / Brawler to see what had changed.

In just a few hours I went through the streamlined Main quest line, took a side trip to get Sparky the Raptor mount, and leveled up to 36. Things have been even further streamlined to allow easier leveling. Clearly this is a game focused on “End Game”. One begins to wonder whether they will soon just do a skip to level 70 so you can play the end-game dungeons which is where they are clearly putting what little energy they have left to develop the game.

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Got a New Mount from the Moogles

There is currently an event called the Moogle Treasure Trove going on in FFXIV. It ends when Shadowbringers launches, so only about three weeks left.

If you do dungeons to collect their special tomes, then you can get some mounts, minions and other items. But it takes 30 tomes for a mount, and 50 tomes for other cool items, so it takes a long time. Stop by an Itinerant Moogle in the capital cities to see what they offer. After two long days of spamming the low level dungeons with a few level 50 MSQ Dungeons tossed in, I was able to get a mount that I’ve been wanting – The Ixtal Dire Wolf.

And like almost all the mounts, it flies too.

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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.

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Alienware Aurora R8 – You Have Got to be Kidding

I just saw a review for the new Alienware Aurora R8 and I was shocked. This is a premium system. At least it has a Premium Price and is touted as having Premium Specs. Here’s the review.

Digital Trends Aurora R8.png

Ok. So it’s a mid tower case. Not just a square box, but not like the Alienware Designs of Old to be sure. This case has as few angles as possible, and still have anything but 90 degree angles. Not very exciting. Slightly Trapaziod on some sort of “Stand”.

But things have changed out there since 10 years ago when it was ok to not powder coat your case metal. Everyone is coating “Premium Cases” in black these days. But look at the back of the new Alienware Case!

Digital Trends Aurora R8 Backside.png

Cheap Tin is no longer a Thing DELL. Get with it. Your metal should be powder coated BLACK not just galvanized Tin. Or bare Aluminum? A while back I built a new computer using a Glass case and it cost about $1000 less than this new thing from Alienware. All the parts of the case were coated black. That build cost about $1400 with a nice graphics card, a sweet processor and a nice lit up motherboard and lit up RAM modules. There is no way to show off the interior of this Aurora R8 case since the power supply is folded over the motherboard, which makes the case fatter of course.

But, they can’t even powder coat what shows in the back? Sigh. Why have a black motherboard connection surround if you are going to leave bare metal all around it?

Looks like Alienware is just a meaningless name now. A Brand without Distinction of any kind. Nice going Dell.
:ww

Thanos Didn’t Do the Math

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I keep tripping across this flawed thinking in the Marvel Universe. And with the new movie coming out recently, maybe it’s time to remind us of the flaws. I’m not rushing out to the movie. I’ll see it when it comes to Netflix. But, as far as I can tell, Thanos is an idiot with no math or astronomy skills. Here are some of the reasons I say this:

If you HALVE the population of any critter in a constrained environment – and apparently Thanos’ “snap” halved the population of all critters in the universe, according to this account – then it doesn’t really take that long for the population to recover. Most populations follow a Leaning “S” curve, this is because growth slows as resources are depleted. So, if the population is suddenly reduced by half, it will make a sudden jump in growth rate to compensate and if the resources available are the same, it will recover to the same level. So snapping only has a short term effect. And I’m not even talking about the Avengers returning from the Phantom Zone or wherever they went. But then what?

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Qt Static Build Confusion

Backdated by a year to get it off the front page.

I’m building an App on Windows and Linux. I was able to make a zip file containing the app and DLLs for a simple deploy on  Windows. Now I’d like to link the app statically for a simple deploy on Linux.

Starting here: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/linux-deployment.html

I’m confused first of all by this procedure:

Qt for Linux X11 BuildQtStatic.png

Searching for .configure found it here:

QtBuildStatic_WeThinkTop

And this I did this:

QtBuildStatic_WeThinkCropped

But when this finishes, I can’t find the prefix I chose anywhere. I presumed from the web page that it was going to make another tree with a static version of Qt in it, but I can’t find it anywhere.

  1. So what happened?
  2. What did I do wrong?
  3. And when I do it right, how do I use it to build the static app.

The web page is not clear on that. I can’t find a way to “Configure” my app in QtCreator to use another build method, or do I do it manually. They seem to use some example app, but that dir path does not match anything that I have for my app. Here is my app tree.

QtCodeDir.png

Anybody help me build this app statically for easy deployment on Linux?

Thanks
:ww

Update: I guess I forgot to do a “make”. But when I did that ran for over 2 hours and I still can’t find what it produced or figure out how to use it. I’m giving up on “Linux Static Deployment”. It is apparently only designed for folks with more energy than I have.

Irfanview Capture Bad Cursor

Backdated by a year to keep it off the front page.

Looks like a bug in Irfanview Capture for Windows 10 Home 1903.

Left is what Irfanview got. The Right is what my phone shows. Looks like Irfanview doesn’t get the size or position of the Pointer.

Windows has a maybe new feature to increase the size of the pointer larger.

Here’s the Irfanview I’m using. Latest as of a few minutes ago.

IrfanviewCaptureOptions