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Sunday, March 29

Blog

Sorry About The Site Glitches

Our statistics database filled up. This wasn't immediately obvious from the logs, and since it was due to a size limit being set too low rather than running out of server resources, it wasn't obvious from the state of the server.


It's been addressed now, the server processes have been restarted to clean up any hung connections, and all should be well with the world.

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Saturday, March 28

Rant

Dear IGN

Please find the twat that reviewed Pillars of Eternity for you and throw him off a cliff.

Thanks.

Dear everyone not IGN: Never read IGN.  They employ twats.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:54 PM | Comments (58) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geek

Azunyan Update

So, Cities Skylines at 4K and max settings on a low-end notebook GPU is not a good experience.  Turn down the settings and set the resolution to 1920x1080, though, and it's not too bad.  Not silky smooth, but playable.

The new version of IntelliJ IDEA, my IDE of choice, just came out, and features HiDPI support.  Tried it on my CrazyHiDPI notebook...  It Just Works.â„¢

It's a lot heavier than Chika, but then Chika weighs all of 2lbs, so a 15" notebook with touchscreen and dedicated GPU would be expected to weigh a little more.

Screen is glossy, which is great for colour but not great for working in a brightly lit environment. 

So far, it works, it's fast, it has 4x the RAM and 2.5x the free disk space of Chika, and I'm very happy.

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Rant

Canaryception

This blog service has not yet been charged for offences relating to the "warrant canary" provisions in the Australian government's 2015 data retention legislation.

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Tuesday, March 24

Cool

Then Along Come Three All At Once

Icewind Dale 2 came out in 2002, and that was pretty much it for high-budget 2D fantasy RPGs.  Until Kickstarter came along, and people realised that if you had a team, an idea, and at least some history of actually delivering games, the internet would throw money at you.

It still takes a while to build a full-scale RPG.  But after a successful Kickstarter campaign late in 2012, Pillars of Eternity, a spiritual sequel to the classic Planescape: Torment, ships this week.*


Torment: Tides of Numenera, a literal sequel to the classic Planescape: Torment and another big Kickstarter hit, has a planned release towards the end of the year.*


And there's Sword Coast Legends, which wasn't on Kickstarter and kind of appeared out of nowhere, but doesn't look too shabby and is also due out this year.**


Typical.  Spend 13 years waiting for a bus and then along come 3 all at once.

* On Windows, Mac, and Linux.
** On Windows and nothing else.  Way to let the team down, guys!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:33 PM | Comments (108) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, March 23

Geek

Azunyan Est Arrivé

I checked this morning and it hadn't shipped yet.

In fact, I checked just now and it hasn't shipped yet.

But it's sitting on my desk right now.  Apparently Star Track Express use a tachyon drive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:10 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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World

Stupid Facts

So for some reason I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for the geography of the Northern Territory.  Blah blah blah, largest lake is Lake Amadeus, with an area of WTF km2.

There's a lake of over 1000 km2 in the Northern Territory?!  I know the northern parts along the Gulf of Carpentaria and Timor Sea are positively soggy, but most of the state is arid, and I'd have noticed a lake that big on a map just by casual inspection.

Oh.

Right.

Salt lake.

Most of the time, dry salt lake.

Like Lake Eyre, which is the largest lake in Australia, and the 18th largest lake in the world....  When it has water in it.

Or the Todd River, where the annual regatta had to be cancelled in 1993 because there was water in the river.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geek

Six Years Counts For Something

So Azunyan will be showing up tomorrow with any luck, and I was wondering just how her GPU will hold up.  It's a Radeon R7 M270, which is a slightly tweaked R7 M265, and not a very fast chip.  It's roughly in line with AMD's better integrated graphics, or Intel's very best, but with the benefit of having its own 4GB of dedicated RAM, and drivers that work.

But according to this comparison, it delivers 80% of the 3D performance of my recently retired Radeon 4850.  And 80% of the 2D performance of my current Radeon 7950, which has no trouble at all with my 4K desktop monitor.

That's better than I expected.  I played Mass Effect 1 and 2 and Dragon Age (the original, accept no other) on that 4850.  Not at the full 2560x1440 resolution of my monitor of the time, but with full graphics details otherwise.

So at 1280x720 up to maybe 1920x1080, depending on the game, it should be adequate.  I'm going to give Cities: Skylines a try at 4K just to see what it looks like; it's not a graphically taxing game but I still expect it to over-extend the M270.

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Friday, March 20

Cool

Colossal Order For President

Cities: Skylines


Oh yeah, Windows, Mac, and Linux.  And only $30.  And it's on Steam, so if you're short of cash, you can just wait a little.

Two more points.

First, I was going to say that the cities look too clean to be real, but then I learned that the developers live in Finland.

Second, this review: I named a dog and just followed it wandering the streets for a bit. It didn’t wander far, but made me appreciate the level of detail.

You can currently grow your city up to a population of 1 million.  And you can name a dog and watch it explore the neighbourhood.

I played Sim City 4 back in the day on a 1.2GHz Athlon with 512MB of RAM, running Windows... ME?  I think.

I now have an 8-core 4GHz AMD system with 32GB of RAM, not to mentioned a graphics card with 3GB of RAM and a 3TFLOP GPU, so a hypothetical city builder game that took advantage of all that power would probably look something like this:


Or maybe this:

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:25 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, March 19

Rant

Blarglezarglewargle

TPG is buying iiNet.

Blah.

Not the end of the world, not even close to the end of the world, not even the end of the street, but blah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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