Quote from: E on October 14, 2024, 06:43:55 PM

Quote from: FatherlyNick - fuck putin on October 14, 2024, 02:54:25 AM

Quote from: E on October 13, 2024, 08:45:32 PM

Quote from: FatherlyNick - fuck putin on October 07, 2024, 02:32:06 AM

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

Not sure why people are getting their hopes up so high about that. That studio rebrand is like cutting off somebody's face, putting another over it, and calling them a different person. I don't think it's got good chances of panning out.

Pure hopium at this point. Though they did do a 180 with MCC so they are capable of  making something good.
The switch to UE is positively received because new hires won't need to spend a lot of time understanding the legacy engine.

I am betting you the MCC is going to get shut down at some point. Maybe not on PC, but I feel like as time goes on, the likelyhood of servers getting canned on consoles goes up. That only makes more sense if we take a muh profit approach. So you've got the rebrand of the studio conning some people, you've got the switch to unreal to attract graphics coomers, and I'd be willing to bet in order to make a couple extra bucks, pull the plug on the MCC to shove what's left of the Halo fanbase onto the new launch because there won't be anywhere else to go unless they divert over to PC.

Or, god help us, they remaster MCC for unreal engine and sell it again as MCC:R, simultaneously chopping the legs off the old games with the plug pull and leaving them to the dustbin while funnelling everybody into the new games, which can now be as bad as a port/remaster as they want. (Which to be fair at the beginning MCC had all those issues and still has some)

Killing console servers is an inevitability, that's part of the push that made me get into PC gaming. I think a lot of console producers (except Nintendo) have realised this since publishing and re-releasing games out on Steam or on their own PC Launch Platforms.

MCC on PC kicked up because of the Halo Online ms23 piracy that was going on that released Halo 3 MP for PC before MCC was even out. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to re-release MCC in UE eventually, but not for another few years, possibly a decade. Maybe by then they'll add a microtransaction thing to buy all the Spartan Points you need to unlock all the MCC Catalog content.

No more microtransactions man. I know it wasn't the most balanced system, but I really miss the halo 3 era where armor was tied to achievments. You actually had to put some work into doing something that might've actually taken a bit skill or just dumb luck instead of grinding an endless xp mountain. Once you got it, you got it and that was it.

Didn't mind spartan points, but it still felt like a monotonous grind after a while. We really need a reversal on the corporate tactics in games.

Kinda funny if you think about it, isn't it? Remember when everybody was bananas for recon before it was unlockable? And now all these years later it's just on some dude's console or account that's no longer active.

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

Not sure why people are getting their hopes up so high about that. That studio rebrand is like cutting off somebody's face, putting another over it, and calling them a different person. I don't think it's got good chances of panning out.

I went back and started the Halo 4 Campaign.

I can't quite place exactly what it is, but the feeling of it is so radically departed from earlier games. Playing roughly in-game chronological order made a jump from 3/ODST to 4 so massive, and it lost the goofiness to some over the top seriousness in a lot of aspects.

I don't think the massive art style shift helped the gap either. I didn't mind the story so much, as if you read up on it the lead writers where basing the story of Cort's descent into rampancy on their own life experiences with family who had dementia. So at least there, the story had heart behind it even if there was flaws.

Halo is a pretty dark series if you look at it, and the novels aren't afraid to go there for sure, at least some of the earlier ones. You know what I think was missing about 4? Three key things. Mystery, wonder, and scale.

Look at the og trilogy, odst, and even Reach. In these stories and environments there's a lot of room for exploration, and the gameplay gives you room to do that with environmental storytelling. It gives you room to ask questions you won't have or get all the answers for.

By contrast, 4 has three fucking novels behind it so that you even know who or what the Didact is. Didact as a character only existed in terminals in Halo 3 that you had a maximum of 30 seconds to read. We only got to know that he was Forerunner, and that he was the one who fired the rings at the end. Huge amounts of room for interpretation and questions never answered, which gives off a feel of depth that's always hidden. 343 has this lame tendency to fill in every single nook and cranny with information, and it shows in the art style and everywhere. You start off Halo 4 with a question. What happened to Chief's armor? Nanomachines son.

What was Halo multiplayer before 343 showed up? Nobody knew why a bunch of spartans were killing each other on maps all over the place. That was fine, because multiplayer's purpose was fun. You didn't need to know. And that always gave Halo multiplayer maps in the bungie era a unique quality. Even if they weren't all fun to play on, they were interesting to look at thematically because it was a glimpse of something and not the entire picture.

And scale matters here. CE had scale by introducing you to this big fucking ring that's ancient. 2 and 3 had scale because they were thematically built around a concept while uncovering some of the mystery of Halo. In Halo's world, Chief may as well be jesus. Especially in 3, they dialed this theme up. Chief's a walking legend they'd tell stories about for thousands of years afterwards. You as the player get to play his feats. ODST had scale by throwing you into the middle of a city being decimated while looking for your squadmates. Reach had scale by showing what happens to a planet when the covenant pull up.

What did 4 have that could thematically 1 up the trilogy? Honestly, it didn't have anything. Chief's story at the end of 3 was the end. 4 cracks the coffin open, removes the scale and basically re-introduces you to this thematically legendary person by putting him in a walking simulator, and his first contact with any other human beings isn't "Holy shit it's the chief," it's "I thought you'd be taller" and a ship captain treating chief as an old man even though he was in cryo. The didact, with 3 books of lore buildup and retcon canon, is blown up in qte and never heard from again in the games even though he keeps resurrecting elsewhere in the media.

Get what I mean? Bungie's development mindset with Halo was action, biblical themes to further add to the mystery, a dark tone, and an aura of a legend happening in progress. 4's tone strips the mystery down, dials the dark up but not the stakes, and just leaves you hanging around afterwards with a restarted story that was already previously finished. And that just got worse as the games moved on. The three games that 343 made could be considered an anti-trilogy because they had no themes in mind that linked everything. Just the name of the series and whatever they could try to throw at the board that they thought might stick.

Which sucks because I don't mind 4's story, and although the graphics don't match Halo, they still made some beautiful 3d assets and dumped a lot of effort into detail even if it was misplaced. It just wasn't a fit for Halo. And maybe, that wouldn't have been the case if they'd gone with a different story not involving Chief. But we can probably thank microsoft for that.

Quote from: Cheat on September 09, 2024, 07:48:03 AM

I frequently tell family who ask how I'm doing that I don't really wanna be here anymore (in a joking tone but still). I can't really relate except that I used to be somewhat nervous about death and now I'm more or less ready for it (I was going to use the word stoked, but that seems like the kind of thing you get worried about someone writing).

What happened was that I took a large dose of weed, plugged in headphones and listened to those gateway experience tapes that are supposed to take you out of body, and I experienced some weird out of body shit that I couldn't explain. And along the way I had what I later learned was an "ego death", which I had no idea could happen on just weed, but ... yeah. It was temporary, of course, but I still have the memories and TBH it really helped.

It's possible to experience ego death simply through meditation without the use of any substance. Though, if the brain does produce DMT on its own, then I wonder if that has something to do with some people's experience.

There's a gland somewhere near the base of your brain in the lower regions. It's one of the most protected parts. Anybody who's dying or who has died will have had this gland fire at maximum and release all of its contents in one shot. It's potent shit. We're talking about the longest drug trip anybody could ever have because the type of chemical dilates the perception of time. The manmade version of the stuff is super illegal just about everywhere.

I think this is the only major time this gland does anything, other than possibly releasing very tiny doses of what it produces during sleep.

Well, here goes. I'm no stranger to near death. Two suicide attempts a very long time ago. I wasn't knocked close to being dead, but the closest I ever have been was heart troubles during a clot. I went out on the table for a bit and they had to use a defib. You know what I was when I came back? Disappointed and tired to be back here.

I am your inverse. It's not neccessarily that I can't see things worth hanging on to. It's the gnawing dread to me that life, specifically human life, is an unbreakable cycle of patterns that are non-negotiable. Those patterns are a prison. Everything we do is built around them, and therefore any attempt to free ourselves from them is just in homage to those same patterns. It means that no matter what I do, I am not free.

But, I can understand your view. What keeps me tethered to life are two promises. I promised my significant other, and I promised a friend I'd watch out for his family. So while I want my peace of mind, to finally be free of all this, I have a duty to fulfill. I can't do this if I'm dead. The possibility that I could die would mean that I cannot fulfill my promises, and the people I try to watch out for would be left in trouble without me.

That does concern me. And I know what life is capable of. People don't see it. I think only people who've come close to death or clinical death and revival do. Your life is a razor thin wire that can be cut at any moment, by anything. Stepping out of your bed in the morning has a chance of killing you if you fall and land wrong.

The harsh reality of death is that when you are gone, the people in your life will continue. They'll have to, as they have no choice in the matter. What you're really afraid of is the black. Where you are, and where you're going. Death as a concept defies the human mind because we can't imagine what lies beyond. We can't imagine non-existence. It's like childbirth. You don't remember how you were born. One day you just appeared from nowhere with your memories, and everybody told you the story that you had to imagine, that you where born.

That doesn't solve your problem. What will? Challenging your belief structure. You're afraid of the black because you don't what's beyond it. You don't know if anything is beyond it. It's the ultimate fuck you to anybody with an ego. Some poor fuck on the street, or some wallstreet baller who owns half a country, death renders all of their accomplishments null.

I'll tell you something buddy. I think it would help you if you thought of death as a shadow. Like real shadows, they can be so dark that you can't see anything. But that doesn't mean nothing is there. It doesn't mean something lies beyond them. There's a lot of shit in this world we can't explain and we probably won't ever have the answers for. I believe we're more than the sum of our parts.

Want to hear something funny? If you're a private investigator, or an undercover cop, part of training comes with a well established rule. When you're tailing somebody, you do not watch them directly with your eyes, even if their back is to you. You keep your peripherals on them. Why is this? It's documented somewhat loosely. People know when they are being watched, without knowing they're being watched. They may not even have a feeling. They'll just turn and make eye contact with you.

This can tie back to the oldest theories about vision. Early thoughts about eyes theorized that we produced a force that was projected outwards that allowed us to see. We learned that our eyes take in light in order to see. But the grey area and the unexplained phenomenon behind why people know they're being watched still exists.

That's not going to help you with death. I'm just saying everything around us is a web that defies comprehension. If you're afraid of the black, the only way to beat it is to believe that something exists past it. That, or make your peace with it. It's part of the unbreakable cycle. When time is up, that's it. You'll take the longest nap you've ever had, and then maybe one day, you'll wake up and everybody will once again tell you a story you'll have to imagine because you can't remember it, that you were born. Either way, there is an answer at the end. For me it's whether or not I find peace from this shit. For you, it's whether or not you're still you, and if there's anything at all.

We all end up in that same state though. When it's really time to go, time may not work there as you perceive it in life. You could end up there and find all your friends and loved ones too. A second in there could be lifetimes out here. If you want to take a very hardline, clinical stance on it? It'll be exactly like being born. You won't remember it. You won't know that you don't exist.

Belief changes reality. You need to find something strong enough that you believe with certainty. I don't mean religion either. They'll sell you lies at best, and at worst, when you die and get the wheel of fortune of religons wrong, it'll have meant you were a slave for somebody else's bullshit. You need to find something intrinsic to you that seems to resonate with you. Death's always resonated with me because I see it as a color I cannot describe.

I'll leave it at that for now.

I built this fucker today. All I need is to make a water pump with a crank that attaches to the wheel so it sends some water back up as it works, and some shower curtains so I don't get fucking water everywhere.

I did today what's taken months for other things all because I found way to put a wheel on something that had no latch point for a wheel. If I'm lucky I can get this up and running soon.

Quote from: E on August 08, 2024, 03:16:10 AM

I'll give it a shot then. I'll drop updates as I go.

I'll probably make it a wide spanning overhead shot, sort of like the preview images if you were loading the map up, but there will probably be room for detail, so do you want anything happening in the pic? Make it look as close as I can to a Halo 3 multiplayer match going on?

I'll get started on the base and then we can iron out the details.

Nowbthat you mention it, if you were able to also provide some "multiplayer shots (like what we would see on the back of a Halo case cover)

That would be awesome.

I may start on those smaller shots first to see how good my pitching arm is. Easier to build than the entire map.

One more thing. I can probably dig up old ports of CE blood gulch and try to retexture them with Halo 3 graphics, but it'll all still look a little flat. You want any kind of theme going on? Like space elevator in the background on earth kind of deal as if it were blood gulch moved to Earth or something?

Or just give it a nice sky with the good old halo ring?

Quote from: Dan on August 06, 2024, 09:46:15 AM

Bing image generator took my prompt and decided to turn the master chief into a pelican

Master Chief? You mind telling what you're doing being a pelican?
*engine noises*

Imagine the brohammer fanfics you could write.

There you go lads. Proof of concept. This cell generates power through moisture in the air. It's not fully functional yet as I should clamp it together, and I probably should use sponges as the separators to help with picking up moisture.

Right now it's 5 volts. I'd like to build it to around 20, or just for the hell of it, stack it as high as possible to use as an accelerator for the dirt cells I built.

Here's today's fuckery. I had the idea of using clothesline as a cable for pulleys since it can't be broken by hand and it's built to work with a little tension. It's got the benefit of being industrial strength but stupid cheap. The cable works, but not exactly as I intended. I failed to take into account how the clips holding it together act under pressure when rolling. They flexed slightly. So I can't spin those two roller bars without adding tension.

 The plan is bolt a piece of wood where the stick is, fit a small wheel into it, and tie a weight to it to act as a tensioner for the cable. After that, all I need to do is find a way to rig the bike wheel to the upper roller bar, and fit another pulley to make the falling weight do its thing. Spinning this by hand with the cable, I can get 40 volts DC or AC, and somewhere above 500 milliamps since my meter can't read that high.

 As is, if I stuck a falling weight to it now, I could charge batteries and run small appliances and tools, and light up a few LED strings. Getting there.

I don't sleep well anymore, so I usually spend nights awake working on stuff. My body's physically dunked but my head's alert. Tool's usually got good long jams I can just fade into and work without focusing on pains as I go.

I'm a skeptic of most relationships, but if it helps, I hope yours doesn't end up being like every common story out there with a divorce after a few years, or a decades long thing involving affairs.

Real shit's rare in this world. I hope you're sitting on the real deal, Ian.

Quote from: maverick on July 02, 2024, 10:50:54 AM

Quote from: dahuterschuter on June 30, 2024, 04:55:05 PM

Who's the autocratic candidate?

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/02/trump-2025-imperial-us-presidency

TDS.  Trump was in office already for four years and was just a guy.  He had decent economics, good foreign policy, mid domestic affair handling like COVID.  Please stop terrorizing yourself with people's insane fanfic tier writing like this.  If you truly believe these things I can do the full explanation to you why you can rest easy on this fearmongering point by point, because this article seems engineered only to try to horrify low information voters and can be fixed by just learning more about current events.  On its surface, we should find it hard to believe that "autocracy" is the fear here if they're not criticizing the Biden DOJ targeting political opponents to jail them leading up to the election when this article hysterically cries wolf about Trump abusing or circumventing the justice system when he didn't even follow through on, "Because you'd be in jail" during his first presidency.

Quote from: XSEAN on July 02, 2024, 01:24:04 PM

Our boy JT ship is sinking and the narcissists thinks he the chosen one going to lead Canadians.


I cant wait for the next election.  I want his ego to take a dam good kicking.

Unfortunately, it only take about 30% of voters to get him re-elected again, and again, and again, and again, and again...

Daus, if you could get me two nuclear warheads, or two airburst warheads equal to that, I guarantee you I could get Canada's pm to immediately resign and forfeit his pension with no chance of ever getting it back.

Nothing major, just a curve ball. I don't think I can make my generator run for the same amount of time as a grandfather clock because of speed. Grandfather clock mechanisms run as long as they do because they don't need to run fast.

So clearly, the answer to build a self winding pendulum. At first glance, I don't think this crude little sketch violates any laws of physics. As the pendulum arcs outwards, it'll spend some of its energy on pushing against the secondary top spool, winding the weight back up partially.

I could be totally wrong here, but at worst, it slows the fall of weight partially so that I get more run time on things. Self winding clocks and watches already exist, but their blueprints are for lack of a better word, impossible to find.

So I guess my dumb ass has to figure it out without help.

Here's the infernal binding of salvaged garbage I managed to make today. I think it warrants a todd howard seal of approval for just working.