What are you playing? Options

[Decrepit]

I might have a Transport Fever video ready for upload within a week. It won't be part of my Scenic Excursions series. As mentioned, I've no new fully detailed routes to film, and don't expect to any time soon. Instead, it'll be a Work-in-Progress video, showing detailing along the Henley ConMat Facility to Eastleigh Rail Line. Much is already in place. Enough for an interesting ride, imo. Truth to tell, I had no thought to upload an in-progress route until 'filming' the run this morning for my own amusement. I found train spotting and interactions so enjoyable I decided then and there to share it.

I've attempted several TRS19 passenger runs these past few days, for can't hold focus long enough to finish 'em.

[Sakiri]

Started a Skyrim playthrough. Not sure how far I'll get, as I'm playing something I've not done before... a thief. I'm afraid of pickpocketing because failure sucks, and I don't usually steal stuff.

Bare fisted khajiit. Might have to light armor it. I need the perks. Perk mod has unarmed bonuses in the light armor tree.

I'm back to Skyrim as well, with occasional glimpses to the Commonwealth. I'm returning to established characters, for now an idea of starting a completely new playthrough doesn't sound too appealing. I installed a mod The Brotherhood of Old, which expands the Dark Brotherhood questline once the vanilla one concludes, so I'll be staying in Skyrim for a while.

My existing characters all have mod list issues. I uninstalled Ordinator in favor of Vokrii and haven't respecced my perks on them.

I'm not attached to many of them. One was more or less complete.

[Lopov]

My existing characters all have mod list issues.

I suffered from CTDs too, which surprised me, because in 2018, when I was playing Skyrim for the last time, I didn't have CTDs with this character. Turns out, that I installed a newer version of Visual C++ for another game in the meanwhile. Installing an older version seemed to fix the CTD bug. At least until some orphaned script will kick in.

[Sakiri]

Lol. That's strange as crap.

You wouldn't think that'd do it.

[Lopov]

Lol. That's strange as crap.

You wouldn't think that'd do it.

There's no way I'd figure it out on my own. But when it crashed, some error code popped up, and googling it lead me to this solution.

[Sakiri]

Huh.

At least you fixed it!

[mALX]

I finally sold my soul out to the mainstream and downloaded Steam just to get Galactic Civilizations III. Stuff was at a vastly reduced price compared at GOG (19.99 vs 7+ bucks for the base game). It’s downloading now with 4-xpacs that I added in for a value price and yeah.

#UnlimitedPower and #IAmTheSenate here I come.

"And now you are mine; MINE!!!!! BWAAHAA!!!!"

[Decrepit]

Other than a few Daggerfall Unity sessions, recent gaming activity has centered around creating a new Transport Fever Scenic Excursions episode and uninstalling / unsubscribing from a number of TpF mods. As to the latter, they are mostly non British steam locos I no longer run and don't plan to use again. Sad to say, the deletions don't help my super long load/save times or increasingly stuttery game play. As to the SRA episode, my fear is that YT compression won't treat it kindly, most so that with my last several uploads. We shall see.

[Decrepit]

With some hesitation I unleash a new TpF Scenic Excursion. We travel between a Facility near Henley to a Receiving Station at Eastleigh Outskirts, delivering ConMat. Unlike common practice, the route is not fully detailed start to finish. Nor does YT compression treat it kindly. Still, enough detailing exists to justify an upload, and we get it decent train spotting:

Transport Fever Scenic Excursion ep26 - ConMat for Eastleigh, unfinished work-in-progress

[Dark Reaper]

Played a little of the free open Beta for Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Needs some minor tweaks to the camera control but so far I love it.

[Decrepit]

My TpF project to remove all non British steam locomotives nears an end. No such locos are seen on the map. Most are removed from my load-order. Many are unsubscribed to at Steam Workshop, or if non Workshop have been deleted from my TpF mods folder. One exception: a Mikado mod, no longer in use, won't allow the map to load when switched to inactive. And there are of course some vanilla steam locos that can't be gotten rid of.

Moved Time Warp from 1932 to 1937, making available several worthwhile British steam locos. When creating the map, I originally thought to set it to 1928. Decided I'd miss out on too many nice locos, so have been running at 1932 until now.

Added scenery between Eastleigh and Morley. I'm satisfied with some of it. Some I'll likely nuke and start afresh.

[Sakiri]

On going Skyrim bender interrupting my regularly scheduled WoWing.

Hehe.

[Decrepit]

Had you asked this morning, I'd have said I'll likely not have anything worth filming for a new Scenic Excursions episode for a month or two at the earliest. Yet here it is mid-evening and I've a completed episode in-the-can, barring unnoticed text errors. It's a short freight route I've considered filming off-and-on for months, but always considered too unpolished.

That I filmed it today is a fluke, nothing more. Intended to add scenic detail along a whole other route. Only, nothing added pleased me. Eventually gave up. Decided to relax riding a train or two. Selected the route in question. Selected one of its two trains. Selected my standard loco-side camera position. Began ride.

It did nothing for me. Was gonna call it quits. Out of sheer boring I clicked through other camera positions. Stopped at one with the camera positioned in front of the loco, slightly to its right, pointing toward the loco nose. Didn't seem all that appealing for a 'lengthy' ride. Gave it a go anyway. To my very pleasant surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Enough so, I filmed the entire run in that position. Playing back results several times. Decided to make it the central segment in a Scenic Excursions episode. The rest is history.

Likely won't be uploaded for another day or two. Need to write description and create YT thumbnail.

Speaking of YouTube, researching video TAGS I was surprised to learn YT doesn't place much emphasis on 'em. According to them, a clip's written description is far more important to search results. Bearing this in mind, I translated several TAG key words that rarely produce search results into description text. BINGO! A search with those words now finds my videos.

[ghastley]

I played a bit more Belzebub, the HD remake of Diablo I. I finally got my archer down to level 12, where the Succubi start to appear. That triggered an extra quest (Belzebub adds a lot of new content) to find and kill Andariel, who was added by Blizzard in Diablo II as a somewhat different character. This one is just a large Succubus mini-boss. My version, in the mod I'm making for Skyrim, is perhaps half-way between the two.

The other thing Belzebub did is increase the spawn rates of enemies in general, so even normal difficulty is a grindy challenge. It's often necessary to quit and restart, as the mobs are camping the entrance to a level, and there's no way to survive the swarm. On the other hand, repeating the higher levels so much boosts the overall experience gained, so you're stronger when you do move on.

[Decrepit]

A new Scenic Excursions episode, utilizing what is, for me, unorthodox yet effective camera positions. It is less afflicted by YT compression than my vids tend to be. Otherwise, its YT description says what little needs be said:

Scenic Excursions ep 27 - Food for Sittingbourne

[SubRosa]

I have been planning on buying Assassin's Creed Odyssey for a while now. I have just been waiting for it to go on sale. UbiSoft now has it for %60 off. So I bought the gold edition (the standard game + season pass) last night. It took about 12 hours to install it (over the web of course). It is over 80 gig!

So now I need to buy a new hard drive. Best Buy and Micro Center have 2 TB ssds for $200 and change, so tomorrow I will go get one. Unfortunately I do not have enough ports left on my motherboard to add another drive. So I am going to have to swap one out for the new drive. My smallest one is a 256 Gb ssd. So that one will go. I'll have to move everything off that drive first however. Then make sure I assign the new drive the same letter, and move everything back. Then I'll reinstall ACO onto that.

I currently have ACO on my C: Drive, that also has Windows. But it just about takes up all the space I had left there. I would prefer to keep that drive clear of games. But last night it was literally the only drive I had with enough free space. I don't really plan to start playing ACO just yet. I am still in the middle of doing Morroblivion with January. I just bought it because of the good sale.

But I did start ACO up and played it a bit to get a feel for it. The controls are confusing. I have no idea how to do any of the fighting, and there is no real tutorial on what buttons do what. You play Leonidas for a bit, but all the game tells you is the left mouse button is a light attack, and the number 2 is a charge. I spent most of my time just mashing buttons until the 'tutorial' was over. When I do get down to playing it seriously, I will have to look up some guides to see how things work.

OTOH, the game is gorgeous. I love how the world looks. It is so colorful and detailed. That was one reason I bought it. It was actually reviewed on an Archaeology podcast I listen to. There is a Discovery Tour that lets you just visit the sites in the game without really playing, just to see them, and hear about their history. I tried that a little at looked at the Akropolis in Athens. Wow, just breathtaking.

[Sakiri]

I'm not sure, but if you can, try it with a controller perhaps? I had to cave and get one for mh:w because the pc controls were just bad.

[SubRosa]

I found a page about the PC controls. Even with just a cursory glance over it I am seeing several differences between what the page says, and what the game itself was telling me while I was playing it. For example, the game told me the right mouse was a heavy attack. This page tells me it is aim. Which probably explains why it was not doing anything in my melee fights.

So I just have to look for some external sources to tell me how to play the game.

[Sakiri]

You might be able to change the controls too. Might want to check into that.

[SubRosa]

I bought my hard drive yesterday and swapped it out. Going from 200 some gb to 2tb made plenty of room. I redownloaded ACO on the new drive last night. Again, it took about 14 hours. The game is 89 gig and change! Because it's on sale now, it also came with Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered, and AC3: Liberation for free as well. So I am downloading them both now. That is only 35 gig.

If you are interested in the game, now is the time to buy it. 60% off Odyssey and AC3 for free. I bypassed Steam and bought it straight from Ubisoft. Even if you buy it off Steam, you still need the Ubisoft front end manager Uplay. I did not see the point in having 2 DRMs for a single game.