Messages

91

Games / Re: No Man's Sky studio silent and empty - Community Manager is gone?

« on: October 10, 2016, 12:40:27 PM »

No Man's Sky is better than MBA because it has laser guns. MBA took all the guns out because they wanted to appeal to the liberal crowd.

It's because Obama faked the moon landing and took away the guns for the videos so we won't be able to have the 2nd amendment on the moon!!

92

Off Topic / Re: MLB Postseason 2016 [RIP TEXAS]

« on: October 10, 2016, 12:38:51 PM »

Can you guys even imagine how crazy it'll be if the Cubs were to win the WS?  Like it's literally a historic event if you think about it.

93

Off Topic / Re: 2016 USA Presidential Race News & Discussion: Who won the October 9 debate?

« on: October 10, 2016, 12:37:46 PM »

but if anything is going to be the downfall of Hillary's campaign,

This is implying she's going to lose.

Did any of you catch the first half?  Annoying Orange was acting like a borderline child, he at one point complained "it's 3 on 1 tonight," continuously interrupted Hillary, and blew his entire talking-points-wad on the first question going off about literally everything he wants to do (CIA, Obamacare, etc.)

Hillary is going to win, these debates are helping to solidify it easily.  She literally has to just sit there at the debates and she'll win.

Clinton said that Annoying Orange never apologized for anything despite Annoying Orange apologizing literally five minutes ago for his locker room banter. And of course, I don't recall her getting a single zinger off on Annoying Orange, while Annoying Orange pulled the most insane bomb drops off on Clinton than in the rest of the entire election.

Valid point, but can any person actually take his apology seriously?  The only reason he apologized is because it's such a horrible thing to say, he doesn't genuinely feel remorse deep down.  He goes on and on about Bill Clinton's alleged victims (read: alleged, no verdict), called Anthony Weiner a sick man, yet asks us to accept his apology and understand he's a "changed man".


The producers of The Apprentice are reportedly sitting on footage of Annoying Orange dropping the n-word, but the validity is uncertain tbh.  In any case, his campaign is toast and even his campaign manager was caught expressing regret (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/10/campaign-manager-conway-says-shell-stick-with-Annoying Orange-until-the-bitter-end-unless.html?_source=facebook).  The GOP as a whole is facing it's demise, which can be disastrous if there's no other major party to keep the democrats in check.

94

Off Topic / Re: Russia preparing for nuclear war. Americans worried about Kim kardasian.

« on: October 10, 2016, 12:29:23 PM »

My question is where the hell is all this Kim Kardashian stuff coming from I haven't seen a single headline involving Kim K in the past 48 hours, only the debate and Annoying Orange/Clinton mambo jambo.

Next question is how can anyone even believe this bullstuff?  You can say Russia's got nukes too and all that but if it's all going down NATO is going to come full force at them, and maybe China and Iran might help but probably not because who the hell wants to be nuked?  The US has nukes within range of literally everyone's capital and major population center.

95

Off Topic / Re: create a "forumula"

« on: October 06, 2016, 03:14:36 PM »

a / l = t

a = accounts banned in past
l = length of "i'm new!" post
t = time until banned

I think it would be more like:  l / a = t.


Let domain D represent the users in this thread, x be a particular user, and P(x) be the proposition that user x is a little bitch.

Then,

96

Off Topic / Re: WER ReportQueue directory taking up WAY too much space

« on: October 06, 2016, 03:06:07 PM »

If you've had TONS of memory dumps of your whole memory + page file, that may have been the cause.  I have 16GB of RAM and ~16GB pagefile solely for Cities Skylines because that thing eats memory like its what it was made for, and any crashes I've had just take up chunks of my SSD.

Or it could be logging literally every single warning and error in Windows and you have a lot of them which you may want to look into.

It also depends on how long you've had this installation for and how many errors you've gotten really, but 370GB is absurd.

97

Games / Re: who's gettin civ 6??

« on: October 06, 2016, 03:01:57 PM »

yeah i'm sure it probably will have workshop support since they already did that for civ v and they made a point to talk about modding briefly.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-vi/civilization-6-interview-strategy-mods
http://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-vi/civilization-vi-team-think-we-ll-go-nuts-when-we-see-the-amount-of-modding-power-in-the-new-engine

hope we hear more within the next week or so

That's good news, we'll definitely see some mod tools not too long after release then.



I'm still just super iffy about the pricetag,  GMG isn't even discounting it yet.  I'm not Jewish but I don't want to spend more than $40 on a game unless I really feel my soul tugging towards it, and Civ6 isn't really doing it for me.

98

Games / Re: who's gettin civ 6??

« on: October 05, 2016, 11:48:17 PM »

It looks cool, but if it follows the Firaxis DLC model (make a decent game, then release the DLC to fully flesh it out) then I'll probably wait for that DLC.

If they've managed to de-lobotomize the AI, I miiiight get it on release if I know other people who are getting it.

All the stuff that came to Civ5 in expansions (late game government focus, religion, etc.) are going to be in the base game of Civ6.


I'd honestly only buy it for maybe like $30 just because I admire Firaxis, but even then I'm iffy.  I'd love to hear about any news on Workshop support because I'm sure people are aching to replace textures for this cartoon.

99

Off Topic / Re: how the forget am i supposed to write in MLA format?

« on: October 05, 2016, 11:34:56 PM »

Then just write it as you see it, don't double space because those lines are big enough to be easy on the eyes assuming your handwriting isn't total stuff.

Do the usual upper left stuff, put the last name page number up in the far right corner kinda smaller (I think it's in some edition 7 or 8 that you don't need it for one page papers), title, and begin writing.

100

Off Topic / Re: Might go to homecoming: UPDATE: I now know what to wear (pg 2)

« on: October 05, 2016, 11:32:41 PM »

If you want to go for the basic white frat man "formal", you can't go wrong with khakhis, a button down, tie or bow-tie, and blazer.  Loafers / boat shoes or dress shoes.

If you had more than $70 to spend I'd say go get fitted for a two piece suit assuming you have proper body proportions to pull it off.  A fitted two piece is the most right thing you can wear to any formal event, and it looks so good nobody is gonna be like "way to overdress" because they're gonna be admiring how sleek your suit is because it's fitted.

101

Off Topic / Re: MLB Postseason 2016 [Baltimore Orioles vs. Toronto Blue Jays]

« on: October 05, 2016, 11:30:00 PM »

blue jays have the worst fans in the mlb. not close. this is absurd.

Literally the worst possible people, not to mention they starting pissing themselves and standing when anything remotely interesting with a Blue Jays player.  Didn't think Canada would harbor some horrible people like that but either way nothing was worse than watching the Orioles forget up so hard in the most Orioles way possible.


So typical for the O's to choke at a moment like that coupled with Buck making probably one of the worst mistakes of recent years.  Offense suddenly had limp richard and couldn't hit anything besides grounders close in and swung at ball 4 like it was their only job, and our lineup was all of our best hitters which is absurd.

I'm willing to bet Buck will be canned.  The O's owner will probably do it just to cash in on a World Series win with the whole "fire Buck, win next year" trend.

102

Off Topic / Re: [NEWS] Philippines to Obama: "go to hell"; threatens to dissolve alliance

« on: October 05, 2016, 12:55:17 AM »

and the philippines get a new presdient in 3, 2, 1

"That's a nice presidency you have there, would be a shame if a coup were to... shorten it."

103

Off Topic / Re: DLC is getting ridiculous - The rant

« on: October 03, 2016, 12:24:52 PM »

(this post kind of runs alongside 99% of what McJob said)

You guys ought to read this blog post Creative Assembly wrote regarding day one DLC and DLC in general.

I put it in big letters so people won't glance over this and not read it, because honestly it's a very critical insight into why these kinds of things exist.  In particular, near the middle of the post.

Context:  Creative Assembly is weeks away from releasing their biggest, most expensive Total War game yet, Total War: Warhammer.  Most expensive because not only are they doing huge technical work (64-bit, hired AMD to help w/ DX12), they're doing an entire universe of new assets (textures, models, sounds, music, etc.), PLUS it's not even their intellectual property (Warhammer is owned by Games Workshop and both parties made a deal to make a kickass game) so they had to pay for that.  The game's coming with 4 of the many races in the setting, humans orks dwarves and vampies, and then Chaos Warriors (arguably the main antagonists) are announced as pre-order bonus/day 1 DLC.  CA goes on to explain why it's so in a blog post to the community because they're probably so loving tired of getting yelled at by the community (read:  Rome 2 release and its day 1 DLC) and just want their customers to be happy.

tl;dr:  People got pissed that one of the main antagonists of Warhammer was made Day 1 DLC, CA does damage control and gives transparency on their side of the story.

Now I'm going to massively oversimplify this, but here's the problem…

A full game’s-worth of development resources (time, money, people) can only support a certain amount of content. In this case it works out as four playable races. There’s so much depth, breadth and variety in them, these races really are a huge investment to make above the factions of previous games.

DLCs also support a certain amount of content, less than a main game of course but big enough to add more playable races, or add extra stuff to existing races in the case of smaller DLCs.

Additionally, DLC's that come out in the first 6 months get even more resources (as they will sell a lot more), and a good value pre-order incentive increases sales of the main game, allowing yet more content to be added into the main game.
And we try and over-deliver; because we’re making the game we want to play.
To release DLC within that 6 months after release, we have to start on it well before the game is finished. It’s outside the scope and budget of the main game, but it’s developed in parallel. We hired a whole extra team to do this because in total it's almost as much work as the original game.

If we were to add this extra content to the main game, we’d be operating at a loss, which we wouldn’t do.

So in TW: Warhammer’s case, we had our four main playable races sorted, and we’ve planned for Chaos to have a big role to play later in the trilogy. But we really wanted Chaos Warriors in the main game, even without DLC – to give a big, bad end of game "boss" enemy Race for all players. But we couldn’t do that within the resources for the main game. So we added it as the pre-order incentive that also gets sold on day one – making Chaos Warriors fully playable but also giving us the extra resources to add them as an Ai race for everyone.

tl;dr above:  They're given X money to make X, but to make Y that they really want to do they have to get funding for Y from the publisher and not have it at a loss in order to offset the cost of making it (because no matter how easy you think development is, whether artistic or technical, it still costs money).

"How expensive is development really??  They just want our money!!"

From http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221533/Game_Developer_Salary_Survey_2014_The_results_are_in.php:

In 2013, salaried game developers in the U.S. made an average of $83,060 last year, down 2 percent from the year prior.

...

Business and management: $101,572 // "corporate" of the company, essentially.  Executives, managers, HR, PR, etc.
Audio professionals: $95,682 // building your own sound effects and music isn't cheap
Programmers: $93,251 // QUALITY programmers aren't cheap, and in the game industry you need to be quality (check any job listing for a mid-high level developer e.g. Bethesda, CA, etc.)
Artists and animators: $74,349 // art degrees pay off here finally, but mostly 3D/technical art
Producers: $82,286 // moreso of the project managers
Game designers: $73,864 // someone needs to come up with the game, balancing, and more
Quality Assurance: $54,833 // and someone needs to test it

Now imagine there's teams of tens of these workers, plus in many cases the company has tons of nice things to offer their employees like overtime, amenities, retreats, etc.  Games are flat out expensive to make period, and publishers (who may or may not know their richard from a screw in a computer case) see games as a huge risk every time unless they absolutely know and trust the developer like a life long friend to make a quality game.

"Why are indie games usually so cheap?"

Non-salaried solo independent game developers made an average of $11,812 (down 49 percent year-on-year) last year, while individual members of an indie team made an average of $50,833 (up 161 percent). (These averages do not take into account indies who made less than $10,000, or over $200,000.)

Probably because they're literally starving (possibly both food and financially) and will take as many customers as they can.  If a game is super cheap and seems kinda fun, why not get it right?  That's the logic of Steam Sales in a nutshell.  Hell I bought Darksiders 2 Deathfinitive Edition just because it was $6.70 on GMG, only because I loved the game + wanted a slightly more polished version to replay with all DLC + wanted to show my support for a bankrupt developer, but I never would have bought it for any more than that (sorry this isn't an indie example but this follows the same principle more or less).

"What risk is there in developing Z for the game?"

That depends ultimately on two things:  how important that is to the customers (which is hard to predict in most cases) versus how well you actually make it.  For CA this means putting in 200% to their paid DLCs to make them at least worth it for most people.  With every paid DLC for TW:W, they've gone above and beyond just making new models, animations, and etc.  They add more varied quests and challenges to new factions and etc. to make them different and have a unique playstyle like each of the base game factions already do.  On top of that, they also release freeLC here and there and alongside paid DLC.  In many people's eyes (at least on /r/totalwar), CA is doing mostly right with their method of making DLC.


Now of course this doesn't speak for every other developer out there.  Let's look at EAXIS (modern Maxis, post Simcity 4 because everything after that was loving trash) and their "bundle packs" for the Sims.



Yeah that's pretty stuffty, I agree I'm not gonna lie, but more specifically I think it's stuffty of just how much they've put into Sims 3 and then moved on to Sims 4 anyway, but that's just money whoring.  Let's step back and consider the market demographic for the Sims though (and we're only going to talk Sims 3 here, see the last sentence re: Sims 4).  In a very general sense and just as a very rough yet semi-educated guess, the type of people mostly playing the Sims are younger players and those who want to do all sorts of cool stuff in the Sims.  And of course the developer teams in EAXIS working on these require wage to do their job of making these bundles for customers that want to keep playing the game with new content.  So they put a pricetag on that.

It's simple financial in/out.  Developers do need money, now maybe the true cost to even-out would be around $10-12 depending on the volume sold of all bundle packs but realistically the publisher wants to maintain a profit if it can, so the price is around $20 which for a kid with an allowance or anyone with a medium-rate income is not that bad of a pricetag depending on how much stuff is in those packs (I'm assuming a fair amount is in those packs, nothing unreasonable).  Even more, some of these probably add functionality alongside new assets (pets, seasons, etc.).  You could argue that these deserve to be in the main game, but I'll just point you to the part of the post above about getting a finite budget from the publisher and having to make a plan to develop more stuff with an extra cost.

Lots of the big name AAA games that are on a "copy/polish/paste" cycle a la Call of Duty and Battlefield 4, because they know that people will see the super cool dubstep-laced first look trailer for any of those games that all of the customer's friends play and jerk off to and will buy it and buy its DLCs down the road.  Hell they know I'm going to be buying Battlefield 1 because all my friends are too and it does look super cool but boy I'll be forgeted if it does suck.  My friends and I almost fell into the pitfall of Battlefront until we played the beta and realized how devoid it was of any depth early on.


tl;dr:  Software is expensive to make, way more than it was 20 years ago.

104

Off Topic / Re: US Law Help

« on: October 03, 2016, 11:31:47 AM »

You're going to need to look into the agreements of your shareholding of the company.  You cannot stop the sale of the company most likely, you may or may not be able to retain your 25% share however with the buyers or they may opt to buy your share as well.  Logically, it's probably legally required that you are notified of the sale and to whom and that all of you must get into contact with each other regarding the sale.

105

Off Topic / Re: Xanax

« on: September 24, 2016, 07:29:20 PM »

OP's full of stuff unless he pops these once in a while as is.