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Getting lost in the zone again. Surprisingly I feel like "Anomaly" is a good way to replay the game after spending a lot of hours with "Call of Chernobyl" mod. The addons hosted bring a lot of tweaks I like for a survival sandbox.

I took a few pictures with my merc buddies that got me through some rough patches when the spawning system doesn't play nice and drops a bunch of mutants that can shred you to pieces in seconds whether you're running an exo or not. My first squad went down to only a single member left, who had the best survival rate and I ended up letting him go, so he could continue his own adventure and keep climbing the rankings on his own.

It's actually pretty cool when some of the AI you meet or have a good relation with tend to send messages through their PDAs that you can read at random moments. It reassures me that some of them haven't bit the dust yet.

One time I unlocked a lead-lined heavy duty box that had a sentient anomaly sample inside that promised me riches if I open it... I opened it in a public place and the chaos that ensued was hilarious when the thing also laughed and started burning everyone in the bar. Of course, nobody could establish any causality between me opening the secured container and the flying anomaly of fire and death appearing out of nowhere.
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Getting lost in the zone again. Surprisingly I feel like "Anomaly" is a good way to replay the game after spending a lot of hours with "Call of Chernobyl" mod. The addons hosted bring a lot of tweaks I like for a survival sandbox.

I took a few pictures with my merc buddies that got me through some rough patches when the spawning system doesn't play nice and drops a bunch of mutants that can shred you to pieces in seconds whether you're running an exo or not. My first squad went down to only a single member left, who had the best survival rate and I ended up letting him go, so he could continue his own adventure and keep climbing the rankings on his own.

It's actually pretty cool when some of the AI you meet or have a good relation with tend to send messages through their PDAs that you can read at random moments. It reassures me that some of them haven't bit the dust yet.

One time I unlocked a lead-lined heavy duty box that had a sentient anomaly sample inside that promised me riches if I open it... I opened it in a public place and the chaos that ensued was hilarious when the thing also laughed and started burning everyone in the bar. Of course, nobody could establish any causality between me opening the secured container and the flying anomaly of fire and death appearing out of nowhere.
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Hadn't seen this, or forgot! Thanks, downloading now :D
 
Getting lost in the zone again. Surprisingly I feel like "Anomaly" is a good way to replay the game after spending a lot of hours with "Call of Chernobyl" mod. The addons hosted bring a lot of tweaks I like for a survival sandbox.

I took a few pictures with my merc buddies that got me through some rough patches when the spawning system doesn't play nice and drops a bunch of mutants that can shred you to pieces in seconds whether you're running an exo or not. My first squad went down to only a single member left, who had the best survival rate and I ended up letting him go, so he could continue his own adventure and keep climbing the rankings on his own.

It's actually pretty cool when some of the AI you meet or have a good relation with tend to send messages through their PDAs that you can read at random moments. It reassures me that some of them haven't bit the dust yet.

One time I unlocked a lead-lined heavy duty box that had a sentient anomaly sample inside that promised me riches if I open it... I opened it in a public place and the chaos that ensued was hilarious when the thing also laughed and started burning everyone in the bar. Of course, nobody could establish any causality between me opening the secured container and the flying anomaly of fire and death appearing out of nowhere.
View attachment 217541View attachment 217542View attachment 217543
Starting as a Loner (free Stalker) reminds me of 2007 again. One of the last PC-only games with amazing (and sometimes crazy) AI.
o_O
 
I played about 30 hours total of Magic the Gathering Arena from Friday night until this morning...

I hope I break this addiction soon... but its been 20 years and still going... so...

Doubtful... LOL :roll:
 
Starting as a Loner (free Stalker) reminds me of 2007 again. One of the last PC-only games with amazing (and sometimes crazy) AI.
o_O
The AI in Anomaly is tuned a bit differently, they tend to shoot at walls (Also bit wallhacky because 90% of the time they know exactly where you are, even if you were using silent weapons and it takes a long time for them to get out their "wallhack" state back to alert, stealth is almost impossible without mod addons), when in the script files there's literally a comment saying: "If you mess with this, the AI will shoot at walls". It doesn't happen too often, but some of the NPCs tend to target the ground or something, but that's general funny X-ray engine jank. Most if not all AI are extremely accurate if they stand, crouch and use aiming sights at the same time.

The biggest hurdle early on is trying to get over enemies that can see you far before you see them, leading you to load save games often, which I am not a fan of. Hiding in bushes to exploit no longer works as well. So lush areas like the great swamp are very dangerous, where mutants will rush you while you are unaware, and AI will take potshots all the time, it's frustrating but rewarding to get through the first nights hunting to improve equipment and getting by everyday until you're comfortable heading into new areas.

You can still pull off deadly head-stabs if you're feeling brave enough to bring a knife to a gunfight. But, spinning around a pseudogiant is not as easy as it was before. Especially when mutants are a significantly more deadly and aggressive in this mod.

I had toned down the AI to make them slightly less accurate overall, though taking off that 10-15% is a drop in the bucket compared to how accurate they already are. Even though I got used to the "spider-sense" enemies. I'm pretty sure other difficulty modes do not affect detection/accuracy, only health and damage amounts.

A lot of times if you're in the same area and you have a "kill task", AI will finish the objective for you if there are any near. Making it easier to earn money or get stash locations.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. "Anomaly" is using an enhanced and fixed up version of X-ray engine, compared to the patched versions of the game, it crashes very rarely and I think it only happened during a long session without closing the game. In "Call of Chernobyl" mod, I had to reset really often, especially if the playthrough has been going for a long time.

I call back to "CoC" often as it is still fresh in my memory on how it worked, I've only played vanilla, MISERY and CoC before.
 
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Been playing Doom 64 after having a go at actually finishing and playing Doom 1 for the first time along with beating the first three Streets of Rage games, stuff has been really fun and innovative, got me into a wide ray of fan content and genre that I didn't know of before so it's been a ride.
 
Not sure where to put this, but last night I started watching this documentary, Not A Game, on Netflix about gaming. It meanders all over the place, but in the end I think gaming came out quite well, generally, more for its effects on the less well off and disabled people.
On reflection, I probably play about three to four hours on a normal working day and perhaps double that over the weekend.
I then hit NFS HP with a vengeance.
 
The AI in Anomaly is tuned a bit differently, they tend to shoot at walls (Also bit wallhacky because 90% of the time they know exactly where you are, even if you were using silent weapons and it takes a long time for them to get out their "wallhack" state back to alert, stealth is almost impossible without mod addons), when in the script files there's literally a comment saying: "If you mess with this, the AI will shoot at walls". It doesn't happen too often, but some of the NPCs tend to target the ground or something, but that's general funny X-ray engine jank. Most if not all AI are extremely accurate if they stand, crouch and use aiming sights at the same time.

The biggest hurdle early on is trying to get over enemies that can see you far before you see them, leading you to load save games often, which I am not a fan of. Hiding in bushes to exploit no longer works as well. So lush areas like the great swamp are very dangerous, where mutants will rush you while you are unaware, and AI will take potshots all the time, it's frustrating but rewarding to get through the first nights hunting to improve equipment and getting by everyday until you're comfortable heading into new areas.

You can still pull off deadly head-stabs if you're feeling brave enough to bring a knife to a gunfight. But, spinning around a pseudogiant is not as easy as it was before. Especially when mutants are a significantly more deadly and aggressive in this mod.

I had toned down the AI to make them slightly less accurate overall, though taking off that 10-15% is a drop in the bucket compared to how accurate they already are. Even though I got used to the "spider-sense" enemies. I'm pretty sure other difficulty modes do not affect detection/accuracy, only health and damage amounts.

A lot of times if you're in the same area and you have a "kill task", AI will finish the objective for you if there are any near. Making it easier to earn money or get stash locations.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. "Anomaly" is using an enhanced and fixed up version of X-ray engine, compared to the patched versions of the game, it crashes very rarely and I think it only happened during a long session without closing the game. In "Call of Chernobyl" mod, I had to reset really often, especially if the playthrough has been going for a long time.

I call back to "CoC" often as it is still fresh in my memory on how it worked, I've only played vanilla, MISERY and CoC before.
I can agree with all of that. Its like you are playing against the Zone & The X-ray Engine and I like it anyway. Its the awesome atmosphere and ambience that
gets my circulation going at a higher rate. Cheers. :fear:
 
My stepson is moving out soon and he just gifted me his Max Payne limited edition figure, so I'm quite chuffed by that! I shall of course have to dust him off tonight and see how many bullet holes he can survive this time :)
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Off to Far Harbor.
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I need to tweak the weather a bit for this place. The sun is a weird pink relative to everything else. I could change that via enb but it's global for all weathers at that time, so my commonwealth and nuka world suns will look weird if I change it.

I found a little script mod that triggers the little floating rad particles around you semi-randomly. The fog spiracles that show up in certain places work the same way. Basically there are zones all around the world, spots in cells where scripts can trigger little environmental things. It's really simple, dumb scripting. There are some date/time/area/density settings available but it's still a bit overdoing it for me. I'm gonna have to look at it and see if I can't work it into the weather mod. If I can figure out that, I can have spiracles, which I've really wanted for some snow weather, and maybe a thunderstorm or two. And of course there are a few different particle modes for radstorms. Spice em up a bit.

There's a lot to play around with when it comes to the weather system, more than it looks like when you first go into the editor, which gives you a lot right in the interface. It's intimidating. I see why there aren't that many for this game. I'm dodgy about it myself. Kinda easy to bork stability. This one already has some minor stability issues I haven't sussed out. Sadly, I identified them AFTER heavily altering it into what is becoming a new mod of its own. Fortunately nothing game breaking, and maybe actually related to other mods. It's hard to really say,

I'm just tired of the weather mods available. None of them have really been 'it' for me when it comes to a balance of actually seeing the fucking game well enough to play and looking nice in screenshots. And the main ones are grab bags of all of these random weathers and features. They can get pretty heavy. Thing about them is... ENB for FO4 doesn't have the weather module fully working... that would allow you to set all of your fog, sky, ambient light, direct light, sun/moon, so on ENB parameters per weather. Skyrim has it and it's what allows for much more dynamic weather changes that work with ENB enhancements. Without that, you can't throw too many drastically different weathers in a set. One of them will come out looking very wrong with the ENB that otherwise works. FO4 ENBs rely heavily on ENB's adaptive lighting to try and force around it. It's awkward as hell, it has to be pretty aggressive. I prefer to level things enough to use almost none. But then, every FO4 ENB preset I've ever used uses the engine's color correction instead of ENB's. Never got it. It looks immediately more colorful and better contrasted, but what you want is neutral, which ENB's is. From that neutral point, you have more swing to adjust parameters further out, without clipping, especially if you want to grade it with LUTs. It looks flatter to start, but ultimately has more dynamic range. You can have that same color and contrast, plus more and have it look cleaner...

I'm too in my ways with how I think think things should be, so I figure if that's how it is I'll re-style a dead one that's closer to my liking, build new weathers off of the existing ones to create an expanded set. If it ever becomes good I can probably release it. Just a boring as shit weather mod with a consistent look across all of the weathers. Got a ways to go. I go in spurts with it and then pretend it doesn't exist for months.
 
Off to Far Harbor.
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I need to tweak the weather a bit for this place. The sun is a weird pink relative to everything else. I could change that via enb but it's global for all weathers at that time, so my commonwealth and nuka world suns will look weird if I change it.

I found a little script mod that triggers the little floating rad particles around you semi-randomly. The fog spiracles that show up in certain places work the same way. Basically there are zones all around the world, spots in cells where scripts can trigger little environmental things. It's really simple, dumb scripting. There are some date/time/area/density settings available but it's still a bit overdoing it for me. I'm gonna have to look at it and see if I can't work it into the weather mod. If I can figure out that, I can have spiracles, which I've really wanted for some snow weather, and maybe a thunderstorm or two. And of course there are a few different particle modes for radstorms. Spice em up a bit.

There's a lot to play around with when it comes to the weather system, more than it looks like when you first go into the editor, which gives you a lot right in the interface. It's intimidating. I see why there aren't that many for this game. I'm dodgy about it myself. Kinda easy to bork stability. This one already has some minor stability issues I haven't sussed out. Sadly, I identified them AFTER heavily altering it into what is becoming a new mod of its own. Fortunately nothing game breaking, and maybe actually related to other mods. It's hard to really say,

I'm just tired of the weather mods available. None of them have really been 'it' for me when it comes to a balance of actually seeing the fucking game well enough to play and looking nice in screenshots. And the main ones are grab bags of all of these random weathers and features. They can get pretty heavy. Thing about them is... ENB for FO4 doesn't have the weather module fully working... that would allow you to set all of your fog, sky, ambient light, direct light, sun/moon, so on ENB parameters per weather. Skyrim has it and it's what allows for much more dynamic weather changes that work with ENB enhancements. Without that, you can't throw too many drastically different weathers in a set. One of them will come out looking very wrong with the ENB that otherwise works. FO4 ENBs rely heavily on ENB's adaptive lighting to try and force around it. It's awkward as hell, it has to be pretty aggressive. I prefer to level things enough to use almost none. But then, every FO4 ENB preset I've ever used uses the engine's color correction instead of ENB's. Never got it. It looks immediately more colorful and better contrasted, but what you want is neutral, which ENB's is. From that neutral point, you have more swing to adjust parameters further out, without clipping, especially if you want to grade it with LUTs. It looks flatter to start, but ultimately has more dynamic range. You can have that same color and contrast, plus more and have it look cleaner...

I'm too in my ways with how I think think things should be, so I figure if that's how it is I'll re-style a dead one that's closer to my liking, build new weathers off of the existing ones to create an expanded set. If it ever becomes good I can probably release it. Just a boring as shit weather mod with a consistent look across all of the weathers. Got a ways to go. I go in spurts with it and then pretend it doesn't exist for months.

I've been in far harbour about 8 hours ish, enjoying it, never been here before. It's far bigger than i realised
 
I've been in far harbour about 8 hours ish, enjoying it, never been here before. It's far bigger than i realised
Far Harbor is a cool location. Bring Nick Valentine, it's worth it.

Looks smaller on the map, it feels pretty big when you're actually trying to explore it. I think it has way better atmosphere than the commonwealth. Worth exploring, though the monsters are tough. The island has a lot of secrets.
 
Far Harbor is a cool location. Bring Nick Valentine, it's worth it.

Looks smaller on the map, it feels pretty big when you're actually trying to explore it. I think it has way better atmosphere than the commonwealth. Worth exploring, though the monsters are tough. The island has a lot of secrets.

I'm using ada, not found any others apart from the dog. Ada has the awesome face laser thing.

Finally giving Metro: Exodus the attention it deserves. I've given this a few goes before, but it seems to have clicked this time.
Also, rippin' right along under Linux.


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Finished this, really enjoyed it.
 
I'm using ada, not found any others apart from the dog. Ada has the awesome face laser thing.
Dang! I didn't know you even could go to Far Harbor without at least meeting Nick! I see you are the adventurous type. :laugh: I respect it. I won't say more about him other than it adds some things to the main story quest. He has a story there, too.

Ada kitted out is a MONSTER. You can basically have an immortal, souped-up sentry bot follow you around. Though the sentry legs snag easily. Ehh.... two gatling guns and a kamehameha face cannon are still pretty good traits for a friend who never dies.

Glad yall enjoyed Metro Exodus. For me, that's become one of those game franchises that I have a specific mood in my brain for, where only that is good. That game will suck me in for hours, constant background limbic activity going on. It's just emergent enough that you can never fully get on top of what's going on no matter how many times you play. It looks great, it feels great, it has a great story. I hope it's not the last great Metro title. That one was really something, and left so many loose ends!
 
We a couple of states to the east, have Bar Harbor, now we got Far Harbor, LOL!
 
We a couple of states to the east, have Bar Harbor, now we got Far Harbor, LOL!
It just so happens that Far Harbor is based on the town of Bar Harbor, Maine. Off on Maine's largest island, Mount Desert Island.

Easily my favorite DLC for the environment alone. Well... it really has trees, which already puts it way ahead :laugh:
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@Splinterdog Max Payne 3 is one of my favorite games of all time ever played. (and I played a lot)
We won't get this anytime soon...maybe I am on the blindside, and if I am, you guys are my people and you should let me know

May Payne 3 comes from a place where multiplayer games were growing rapidly. And it is one of the final titles to hold its ground as it was.
A single-player exclusive not afraid to call names and make offenses

We live in a world where single-player games don't make money. The publishers need growing numbers and they are demanding this from the developing companies. Sure you will hane a Valhalla, but you also have a store where you can buy cosmetics, and it's never enough ....
The publishers need multiplayer everything + cosmetics + constant new features to keep the player's attention.

Max Payne 3 had the best lines in the entire gaming scene. We will never get a dialog like that. Since nowadays it's all about inclusion and everyone gets offended May Payne has no place calling Mexican cartel gringo is illegal

Don't get me started why we have a black person on the cover of a World War video game, where 70% of the people who were on the front were white men and 0.002% were blacks mostly on the french colony front where the French were using blacks mostly forced on the front to defend their colonies. Where African Americans were nowhere neer the front serving as slaves not free people fighting a white man's war.
The comedian Chris Rock remembers that his grandfather was a slave and his grandfather was a young boy when the world war 2 began in 1939
Inclusion is the name of the game, and Max Payne is everything but inclusive. Max Payne is the most amazing and exclusive game character ever
=================
fk it now i'm sad ....hers a picture of Czarina

cezar.jpg


It's the female version of Cezar....but because of the weapons' high damage and accuracy i thought the deves were thinking about "cesarean" ...since it opens you out quick and it's precise .....
Em i funny or just misogynist...
But seriously ....Czarina....cesarean. Get it?! :roll:
 
The comedian Chris Rock remembers that his grandfather was a slave and his grandfather was a young boy when the world war 2 began in 1939
Try great-great grandfather, his grandfather was a cab driver and preacher in NY City:
Revealing Roots: Chris Rock Uncovers the Ancestral Source of His Drive (theroot.com)
Going back a generation further, we were able to identify James Tingman's parents — Rock's great-great-grandparents — Eliza Moultrie and Julius Caesar Tingman. Both were born into slavery in South Carolina, Julius in 1845 and Eliza sometime around 1850.
 
i play genshin impact currently
still wondering why i spend so much time on this game tbh
 
@Splinterdog Max Payne 3 is one of my favorite games of all time ever played. (and I played a lot)
We won't get this anytime soon...maybe I am on the blindside, and if I am, you guys are my people and you should let me know

May Payne 3 comes from a place where multiplayer games were growing rapidly. And it is one of the final titles to hold its ground as it was.
A single-player exclusive not afraid to call names and make offenses

We live in a world where single-player games don't make money. The publishers need growing numbers and they are demanding this from the developing companies. Sure you will hane a Valhalla, but you also have a store where you can buy cosmetics, and it's never enough ....
The publishers need multiplayer everything + cosmetics + constant new features to keep the player's attention.

Max Payne 3 had the best lines in the entire gaming scene. We will never get a dialog like that. Since nowadays it's all about inclusion and everyone gets offended May Payne has no place calling Mexican cartel gringo is illegal

Don't get me started why we have a black person on the cover of a World War video game, where 70% of the people who were on the front were white men and 0.002% were blacks mostly on the french colony front where the French were using blacks mostly forced on the front to defend their colonies. Where African Americans were nowhere neer the front serving as slaves not free people fighting a white man's war.
The comedian Chris Rock remembers that his grandfather was a slave and his grandfather was a young boy when the world war 2 began in 1939
Inclusion is the name of the game, and Max Payne is everything but inclusive. Max Payne is the most amazing and exclusive game character ever
=================
fk it now i'm sad ....hers a picture of Czarina

View attachment 217714

It's the female version of Cezar....but because of the weapons' high damage and accuracy i thought the deves were thinking about "cesarean" ...since it opens you out quick and it's precise .....
Em i funny or just misogynist...
But seriously ....Czarina....cesarean. Get it?! :roll:
Agreed. The banter between Max and his partner (Paso?) is pretty cool and yes, the game hasn't been dumbed down to satisfy woke sensitivities one bit.
Having said that, it's a bloodbath most of the time in single player and I never play multiplayer anywhere at all because of the twats out there.
 
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