Random Stuff

[Dwip]

Man, I know, right? My friend brought over some Star Wars Legos he picked up for pieces in our SWRPG game, and they were totally badass. My inner nine year old wants a ton of them.

[AndalayBay]

Have you guys seen the new architecture series? Hubby and I have marked off those for our birthday and Christmas lists :grinning: We just have to make sure we're clear on who is getting what...

[Dwip]

Yeah, those are pretty cool too.

[Thomas Kaira]

I think now I'm seeing where the logic was for Arthmoor's switchover to AMD.Google "nVidia TDR bug" for a good idea why.Me? This is happening when I'm browsing Firefox and only when I'm browsing Firefox. I'm going to try a few things to see if I can minimize these problems from occurring. First experiment: setting my GPU to prefer maximum performance while I'm using Firefox. If that works out, I'll then try returning to adaptive and disabling Firefox's hardware acceleration.If that fails, I am going to switch to using Google Chrome for a bit, since for some people the problem is exclusive to Firefox.

[Arthmoor]

Heh. nVidia and bad drivers? Say it ain't so!That said, AMD isn't immune to bad drivers. They had to issue several updates specifically to reign Skyrim in. Though once they did things settled out nicely and there hasn't been any more trouble.The main reason I switched though was because ATI/AMD cards deliver better performance for less money. Same was true of their CPUs up until about 2 years ago, but word has it they've utterly dropped the ball on that since. I despise Intel in every conceivable way but I have a feeling my next hardware purchase will involve a full scale switch over to something Intel based.

[Thomas Kaira]

Okay, I've set up Firefox's profile and have also bumped up the fan speed a bit in nVidia Inspector, so the GPU is averaging at about 45 C right now (which is icy cold compared to my old one).If this fixes the problem, I will know for certain the problem is on the software end. If it does not, I will keep looking. If I am certain a hardware fault might be the case (which I am doubtful of that right now), I will RMA the card.But hopefully it won't come to that.

[Ysne58]

Okay' date=' I've set up Firefox's profile and have also bumped up the fan speed a bit in nVidia Inspector, so the GPU is averaging at about 45 C right now (which is icy cold compared to my old one).

If this fixes the problem, I will know for certain the problem is on the software end. If it does not, I will keep looking. If I am certain a hardware fault might be the case (which I am doubtful of that right now), I will RMA the card.

But hopefully it won't come to that.[/quote']I don't think I'm familiar with the abbreviation RMA. What does that mean?

[Thomas Kaira]

Return Merchandise Authorization.Means if I can prove that the card is defective, I can send it back to EVGA to have it replaced.

[Arthmoor]

So Dwip, what do you know about Civ 5 mods being available through the Steam Workshop? First I've heard of it. Wondering if you had any insights?

[Dwip]

This is the first I've understood that Civ 5's ModBuddy stuff was actually Steam Workshop integration. That said, that guy's post is square with how I understand Civ 5 modding to work. I haven't actually done any, since using mods in Civ 5 breaks achievements, and I want achievements more than I want the mods; also Civ 5 has a pretty good slate of DLC.A couple things:1. I can't speak to the ModBuddy tool at all, though I believe the guy when he says it was PITA - this is true of all Civ mod tools going back to the dawn of the time, and seriously you don't even want to know the kind of bullshit I used to have to do with .gifs. It is almost certainly true that the sad state of the Civ 5 tools is not indicative of what we'll see with the Skyrim CK - I'd expect that to look more or less like a CS or GECK evolution.2. One of the things you can do with Civ 5's Steam Workshop integration is browse and download mods through an internal interface in-game. Given that the Civ mod community doesn't really have a good Nexus equivilent, and that your other choice is basically hunting down that one post by that guy on Civfanatics where he attached a unit zip to a forum post, that's a good thing. As internal tools go, Civ 5's is relatively decent - ok search function, etc, and unlike the internal shit we saw with DA:O, worked flawlessly or next to flawlessly straight out of the box, unlike many other things in Civ 5.I don't recall hearing about any functionality of this sort for Skyrim, so I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work. I imagine a new launcher button, since Bethesda doesn't seem to buy the whole "in-game" thing, but I really have no way to know.3. I'm not entirely clear on the packaging angle for ModBuddy, but I think it's some form of straight up zip file rather than anything convoluted like .omod, etc. In practice, mods live uncompressed in a Mods dir in your Documents/My Games/Civ 5 folder (which is a Civ oddity, not a Steam one), and you can edit them yourself if you want - Civ files are mostly just XML. I'm fairly sure this is a better way to roll than either OBMM or the new Nexus tool is for us.4. It's important to note that ModBuddy isn't the only path to getting mods (or map scripts, etc) for Civ 5, and if you want to rock it olde schoole, you can still download zip files out of some dude's CivFanatics post and install manually. I did this just the other day, in fact, and no problems.5. Also worth noting that there's no Civ equivilent of Bash - Civ handles this internally so far as I know, and the whole concept of load orders and such doesn't really exist, nor does the idea of third party tools, particularly. Obviously, none of that applies to us, and the TES community is dramatically more advanced than the Civ community in terms of tools and understanding.6. It's also important to note that ModBuddy isn't anything like the Steam store. You basically need your copy of the game and an internet connection. Steam is running in the background, of course, but it was going to do that anyway. No account creation needed, no credit card, nothing of the sort. You boot up Civ 5, go into the mod browser, and start downloading and installing stuff.That said, regular Civ 5 DLC IS handled through the Steam store (and I believe only through the Steam store), and that's it's own thing and not involved with ModBuddy/Steam Workshop in any way.7. How does any of this relate to Skyrim? I'm not sure, since the whole ModBuddy thing is basically Firaxis doing their own thing. ModBuddy is a Firaxis tool, not a Valve one. The in-game stuff is all Firaxis, not Valve. So far as the Civ 5 player is concerned, Steam is nowhere to be seen in any of it.What I imagine is that we'll wind up with something like this for Skyrim's implementation - some sort of CK functionality for packaging and distribution, some sort of Bethesda tool or launcher option for actually getting mods into the game, vs. somehow via Steam itself, since Steam itself isn't really set up to do that.I'm further going to hazard the guess that what we end up with in terms of file formats is going to be less disruptive and not as much of a PITA as OBMM or the Nexus manager. That is to say that I don't see it killing Bash in any way. No matter the packaging format, I think it's almost certainly going to wind up in plain old .esps in the Data Files dir like we're familar with.I can try to talk more about the in-game thing and drop some screenshots if that would be helpful.

[Dwip]

Quick clarification, since I don't think I was clear:- Instead of just the CS/CK, Civ 5 comes with a complete SDK, including ModBuddy (the full editor, for stuff like new units, techs, etc), WorldBuilder (the map/scenario editor), Nexus (some sort of art tool), and a Lua console. Civ 4's SDK actually gave you access to the main game exe, but I'm not sure if you can do anything similar with Civ 5's.- ModBuddy (the external tool) is a distinctly different thing than the in-game mod browser. When I mention anything in-game, I'm talking about the browser (what players see) rather than ModBuddy (what modders work in).And that probably confused the issue even more, but.

[Arthmoor]

That all sounds like stuff integrated into your product, not into something on Steam. The Workshop page only lists TF2. I have to assume if SW was also taking Civ5 mods that Valve would want to promote that.You've regaled us with tales of Civ modding in the past and I can only wonder in awe at how anyone produces anything at all when faced with manually hacking a bunch of ugly XML files and using Nifskope as the only viable modeling tool. ModBuddy sounds like heaven compared to what you've said about the process before.Still, I think the guy on BGS was simply misunderstanding what that whole post on the forum he excerpted from was all about. Which means everything everyone is whinging about over there is based on exactly nothing. Trying to draw meaningful comparisons of any sort between Skyrim and TF2 is laughable.

[Dwip]

Yeah, I actually had to go Google Steam Workshop to figure out what we were talking about, and I've never seen anything like that when dealing with Civ 5. It's all stuff Firaxis built, which either means it's not for real Steam Workshop, or they hid it really, really well.No idea how SW works for TF2, and I don't feel like downloading my copy (thanks, Orange Box) to find out. Unless I get really interested in the doing it for science aspect of this, this is likely to remain the case.I had a look at ModBuddy a while ago, and Jesus Christ, I'd probably rather go back to hand editing rather than what looks like Firaxis taking a copy of Visual Studio 2010 and hacking the shit out it, badly. Literally, that is what they did. Looks like the most overbuilt XML/LUA editor ever, though I didn't spend much time in it so maybe I'm overreacting. Suffice it to say that TES modders probably don't know how good they have it.I confess that the only thing I read in that link you posted was that one guy's post, and I accepted the assertions of Civ 5 being tied to Steam Workshop as legit. If that's not the case, then insofar as mods go TF2 may be the model. Dunno. What that model looks like, dunno. That said, insofar as mod integration goes, since TF2 is the only thing going on SW, it would appear to be worth checking out.Of course, based on what little I know about how Source engine game mods work and how TES mods work, there's only so much conclusion I'm willing to draw there, but.

[Dwip]

Well, ok. I actually read that thread, and I think you owe me something for that part of my life I'm never getting back. Christ that was dumb.However:- Insofar as the discussion seems to be primarily about copyright (sigh) and not the actual technical implementation of the system, let us say that I would be very, very, very surprised if Bethesda attempted to push something like the TF2 Steam Workshop agreement on people. For one, everybody would hate them, for two, wholly different goals between TF2 and Skyrim (multiplayer vs singleplayer primarily).- If I hear one more person ranting about how "Steam is going to own all my mods" there's going to be a murder spree. It's one thing to argue about the finer points of EULAs Bethesda almost never enforces anyway, quite another to not even understand what the conversation is or what you're even talking about.- If the actual Steam Workshop page is anything to go by, and there's not some form of in-game browser (or in-Steam client browser, for that matter) or categorization or anything, I think Nexus is probably safe. As a way to get TF2 hats, that's probably fine. As a method for downloading actual complex mods for a game, it's suicide by paper cut. Somebody's going to have to take some serious effort at upgrading that before launch, or they're all going to look like fools and nobody's going to use it.- Source engine architecture and TES architecture are so different, I'm not sure we can speculate at all about mod packaging and distribution.

[Arthmoor]

That's one nagging issue down with the post box. No more losing cursor position when using bbcode

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Heh. nVidia and bad drivers? Say it ain't so!

That said' date=' AMD isn't immune to bad drivers. They had to issue several updates specifically to reign Skyrim in. Though once they did things settled out nicely and there hasn't been any more trouble.

The main reason I switched though was because ATI/AMD cards deliver better performance for less money. Same was true of their CPUs up until about 2 years ago, but word has it they've utterly dropped the ball on that since. I despise Intel in every conceivable way but I have a feeling my next hardware purchase will involve a full scale switch over to something Intel based.[/quote']Funny you should say that - I've been looking at new PC's from my guys in Devon, to try to get an idea of what they're building.http://www.cc-sw.co.uk/website/viewcategory.php?Category=lapAll Intel cores (i5 and i7 there). There new "Gamer's Extreme PC" will probably be the basis of my next rig in six months or so, with double the RAM, naturally.

[Thomas Kaira]

Yup, ever since Sandy Bridge came out, AMD has been struggling to catch up to Intel.Also, I was right. Firefox on Adaptive power management was causing my black-screening and TDRs (just like a whole bunch of other people).That's sort of good news, because it means there are no faults with my card. For me, this is the usual suspect for the problem: bug in the drivers.

[Arthmoor]

That's probably one of the side effects of Mozilla having tied Firefox into the D3D subsystems. Browsers really have no need of being there.

[prettyfly]

Ages ago I did the NV quest where you invade the prison compound with the NCR and make a mess of the powder gangers on a PS3. There was something like three or four NCR troopers helping me.I just did on PC, and this time there were eight NCR troopers helping out. Am I seeing right? Has this quest actually been tweaked for different platforms?

[Dwip]

Wait, the NCR helps you clear that place? How?

[prettyfly]

You can betray Eddie when he sends you out to find out about the impending assault on the facility. If you get the NCR guy at Primm to talk about it you can tell him that you want to help out. He'll send you too the gathering point, the officer in charge gives you a briefing, the NCR soldiers blow a hole in the wall and you get to go on a shoot em' up with them.It was a lot cooler with the eight soldiers on the PC.

[Dwip]

Why do I have absolutely zero idea what you're talking about?

[prettyfly]

Did you do the quest in the correctional facility with Eddie? Maybe you're mixing it up the Correctional Facility (big above ground prison) with Vault 19.

[Dwip]

The last time I did Vault 19 was some time during the Neolithic, which would probably explain my lack of comprehension.

[Dwip]

Well, Civ 5 devs, good to know you never did fix that bug where the AI can get certain achievements for you. Thanks, Harald Bluetooth, you totally just saved me from playing an entire game just to get a ski infantry up to a snow tile.Now, Elizabeth, if you could get on that sinking 357 ships thing for me, that would be great.