cucubits

2.5 hours in So far I like it. Graphics are very nice. Still in the prologue sort of. It's more like a very long, linear, story driven tutorial. Not sure how much is left until the game actually starts and I'm let loose. I've taken my time and explored everything I could. I know they like to hide goodies very well (remember Excalibur and the Korek Machette 🙂 ). On my laptop running I7-8750h with a 2080, it's very smooth, most settings on high. No obvious bugs so far.

Whoa, looks like they are doing a global launch time so in the US it's going to be available today. In about an hour. I'm weak:

Just a few days before launch Techland announced that they've included the latest version of Denuvo DRM in their game. While understandable with regards to stopping early piracy, Denuvo has a very bad track record of ruining performance especially on buggy launch periods in many games. I'm still going to buy it but I'm not happy about this decision. My machine is not the latest and fastest so even a small performance drop will hurt. https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/reveal-of-dying-light-2-denuvo-drm-angers-fans

No time to die ...I'm still mad.

Those who joined laptopforum even with all the warnings and red flags 😎

I started one today, posted some info and pics:

I recall well this exact scenario. We must be close in age. I was in high school and would spend evenings and weekends in an internet cafe, on IRC and we would play Quake 1 on LAN for hours and hours. The rocket launcher was my favorite.

Vampire Survivors Spent a couple hours on this today. It's unexpectedly good, simple and draws you in to play again and again. The player only controls movement (wasd), nothing else. There's auto fire and it's all in the abilities and perks you find and level up. Bob and weave through increasing hoards of enemies.

Thanks for mentioning spoilers... I'll hold off for now on reading detailed reviews. If it's really a disaster, we should find out by Friday. Otherwise I'll probably pick it up, I know me, I won't resist.

Since this came up in the hobbies thread, let's go into a bit more details here. Maybe there are others interested as well or just curious about what can be done with the current amateur technology. I'll do my best not to ramble on too long and I'll post pictures too. Intro: While I've been interested in this topic for a long time, I got somewhat more serious (as many others) at the beginning of the pandemic with Comet Neowise. I started devouring youtube videos, joined an astronomy forum and I fell head first into the rabbit hole. I couldn't stop reading and learning about this and it was completely mindblowing to me how much hidden detail can be extracted from even the most light polluted cities. There are many directions one can take in this hobby: - visual astronomy: sort of old school IMO, where you have eye pieces and just look through a telescope. This is not really doable unless under some really dark skies. From the city, everything is washed out and very hard to see even on the bigger telescopes. - astrophotography: this is my chosen path. It's incredible how much detail can be squeezed out by imaging for crazy long times. Essentially you expose the same spot of the sky for many hours by taking lots and lots of "sub-exposures" which are then combined in software, the noise is more or less discarded and only real signal is left. Deep sky objects like Nebulae, Galaxies, Clusters, Planetary Nebulae (supernova remnants) can be seen with great detail. Over many hours of exposure, you're essentially fishing for real data signal and even the faintest and rarest photons slowly add up and build the image. Gear: Gear is important but not critical at first. With the correct techniques, even a regular camera on a tripod can get unexpected results. On the other end of the mentioned rabbit hole, there's the more expensive telescopes with extremely precise glass, a mount which counters the rotation of the earth with incredible accuracy. Most often this mount is the most expensive piece of equipment out of everything else. The accuracy needed really is borderline unimaginable. For example, when imaging at an average "zoom" level, it needs to point the telescope in a fixed spot in the sky with an error of under 1 arcsecond. One arcsecond is 1/3600 of 1 degree. This is the equivalent of the width of a human hair at 10 meters away. Or the diameter of a coin at 2 miles. For now I won't go into too much details but things get complicated fast here. The choice of the telescope type is important according to desired targets, then there are specialized astronomy cameras which are much more sensitive than regular "earth" cameras 🙂 Power requirements, control software, cabling, specialized filters, optical correctors, spacers, focusers. Additionally, besides the main imaging telescope, most setups have a 2nd small telescope piggybacking on the main one with the sole purpose to guide it. What this means is that small telescope, with a separate camera looks at the star positions around the target and tracks the motion of the mount. Through dedicated software it sends very small correction pulses to the mount to have it track very precisely. This is how we reach that accuracy explained above. As expected, capturing the data is only part of the whole process. It can take many hours in all sorts of imaging software to bring out the details and stack the captured images. (big range from free to photoshop to dedicated astrophotograpy options) There are so many things that can and do go wrong so when starting out, inevitably there will be more troubleshooting nights than actual imaging time. It's part of the fun for me 🙂 But when things do work, and you find the target, start imaging and start seeing those invisible details, it all makes sense and the satisfaction is amazing. If you made it this far, let's go through some actual results. Currently I use 2 telescopes. One "smaller" 80mm refractor (385mm focal length) for deep sky objects and a big one (8 inch diameter) that I designed and 3D printed (1000mm focal length) to use on planets and the moon. This is the small one imaging away on a random night next to our apt complex: The big one, testing after I put it together. I still can't believe what details we're getting on the moon with it: The great conjunction, Jupiter and Saturn: The rest of the images are all with the smaller telescope. Total exposure times range from 1 - 7 hours per image. M13 The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. Pretty amazing to see hundreds of thousands of stars clumped up so close: NGC2244 Rosette Nebula. Made up of clouds of Hydrogen Alfa and dust. The hydrogen Alfa particles emit this deep red light (around 656nm): M16 Eagle Nebula. This one should look familiar. The Pillars of Creation. It's the most famous Hubble image. I still can't believe I got to see it with my tiny telescope. M27 Dumbbell Nebula. This is a so called planetary nebula, created by the death of a star which pushes out incredible amounts of material. In the center there is a white dwarf. NGC7000 North America Nebula: Lastly, also incredible to me, I've actually captured some surface details on Mars. There are much better images out there but I did not expect to see something like this with my gear:

This is one of those questions where the first thing that pops into your mind is probably the correct answer. In my case it's Half-Life (1). It had the most impact on me and I've enjoyed it the most. Close 2nd are the DeusEx games. Edit: I can't believe I forgot about Gothic. Yeah, top 3 is now complete.

Great, I will open one and prepare some materials for it. Good idea.

lol, by "accident" it looks like some retail copies were let loose in the wild earlier than the release date. I'm almost tempted to go check out the local game stops and best buys 🙂 https://www.pcgamer.com/techland-asks-dying-light-2-fans-not-to-play-the-game-early-please/

Absolutely. I was a complete wimp. Even worse, during the prologue there's the first mission when you go out and as it's getting evening time, you're getting called back to the base. Purely by chance I discovered that time does not advance during that time. If you don't go back and progress the mission, it stays that nice evening forever. I explored the map and gained a bunch of experience at that point, I'm not even ashamed about it 🙂

I thought about this for a little while. From the options you have there, I'm not sure which is better between deletion and do not sell. I chose delete my data but it may be tricky. Just to comply with the law they may delete but that's not stopping them from acquiring the same data again, maybe they have some sort of regular sync with another source database when they just replace the accounts which requested to be deleted.

In sort of the same category, for me it's people who must use their phone on speaker, for no reason, in public, in the parking lot next to our apt and they talk louder than I can scream. I see more and more folks with zero common sense and consideration for others. We have one neighbor who likes to go out on her balcony, in the middle of the night and scream at her phone, on speaker sometimes for hours...

I did manage to save a screenshot of my profile. I was sort of hoping the forum we end up on, would import some of that data and maybe we could show the date we joined NBR, rep, post count, etc.

2, in a little home unix box, running mirrored. It has all sorts of purposes: - runs as a NAS (the drives are 2 x 3Tb WD Reds) - surveillance (used to store recordings from the garage). I say used to because for some reason wifi signal is not reaching there anymore, I just can't get reliable connection and I have no way to wire the camera. I ended up sticking a micro sd in the camera and hope the bad guys don't yoink it. - it's also connected to the TV running Plex (not really using anymore since we have a Roku stick)

I still haven't picked up GoW and will probably skip this one. Loved the old ones and this does seem spectacular but I wish they hadn't taken the route they did with integrating the kid in the gameplay. Maybe one day a mod will come out to remove him 😋

Not sure how helpful this is but at least in my case, I want nothing to do with techtarget. I found a link on the bottom where you apparently can fill out a request to have your data deleted/opt out of sale. If there's a chance I can do this and they will make a few cents less money, I'll do my part 🙂

Adding to my more and more excessive amounts of car care products. I find detailing therapeutic and a great way to disconnect temporarily from all the tech that's taking over our lives. I like Ammo NYC products a lot and lately I've been getting more and more involved, including paint correction and applying his Enamel Coating. The fact that I don't have a car now is just fuel to the fire and make me keep working on my wife's car all the time. I just traded mine in and the new car doesn't get here for another 10 weeks or so. The wait is killing me so I can't stop polishing my wife's Beetle 🙂

Unfortunately so far the only thing that seems to help is drinking excessive amounts of coffee. Afternoon naps make it worse as then I stay up even longer that night 🙂

Both great options. I've been thinking of CP2077 a lot lately. I might be ready to revisit with a proper playthrough. I miss Judy.

I also voted no and will probably avoid for the near future. Aaron's post sums it up well. On another note, I'm currently mad at microsoft for rolling out KB5009543 recently which broke the default VPN client. I had to play the uninstall game a few times as it would sneak it back the next day.

I was also hoping we get one last day... instead what do I find, they send us to reddit, linus, and tom's hardware. This is BS, the least they could've done is coordinate with NBR admins and put the actual successor list there. I'm mad.