October 2018 – Page 4

Boy…

October 19, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I decided to test out the wireless ethernet thing a little further, this time focusing on the official Sony Playstation Remote Play app, to see if the connection improved its functionality. In the past it had behaved a lot like Parsec was where it had momentary blips of connectivity, where the sound would drag a bit while the stream was trying to catch up. In truth it happened an awful lot more than Parsec normally does, generally happening every couple of minutes. That said the entire time playing the Remote Play app felt very obvious that there was a bit of lag introduced into the system. For example I could not really stand playing Destiny other than material farming, because I had to lead the shots by a significant margin to try and actually hit anything. As such I only really played RPGs in this fashion that didn’t require me to do much in the way of fine motor skills.

With the connection change however it is not really noticeable that I am not sitting at the Playstation 4 upstairs. Sure I am only able to stream back 720p due to the fact that I don’t have a PS4 Pro… but apart from that one constraint it felt like I was actually upstairs playing the machine natively. I spent most of the evening playing Dad of War… sorry that is all this game will ever be called to me personally. I will comment a bit about the game itself later, but as far as the gameplay experience over Remote Play I put in roughly three hours and never once had a bobble or a hiccup in the connection or anything I could possibly attribute to slowdown or input lag. In fact the game felt silky smooth and largely made me forget how I was doing some nonsense in the process of playing it.

As far as the game itself… it reminds me an awful lot of the way that Horizon Zero Dawn felt in ways that I am not entirely certain if I could explain. Basically Dad of War is Horizon Zero Dawn if you instead were playing as Rost, and spent all your time running around with young Aloy. There are so many ways in which Kratos interacts with Atreus, that remind me of those early interactions between Rost and Aloy. Sure the core of the games themselves are very different, whereas HZD was a big open worldish exploration game… and thusfar Dad of War seems to be largely following a predetermined path with various objectives adjacent to said path. The short period of time I have been playing however makes me feel like playing HZD again.

Even though I generally hate the term Toxic Masculinity, not necessarily for its intended meaning, but more the negative reaction that I tend to have mentally to hearing it… and translating it to “being male is bad”. Dad of War is very much a game about Toxic Masculinity. Kratos wants to be a better “father” than he is capable of being. The game takes painstaking effort to show you all of the times he has the instinct to embrace his son, but for whatever reason cannot and instead focuses on something Atreus did wrong instead of comforting and assuaging his fears. He wants his son to grow up “strong” like he is, and it reminds me so much of every time I saw a father trying to relive their own glory days through their kid via sports. I’m sorta afraid that if I had kids I would feel something similar about all of the geeky things that I did along the way growing up, and wanting to try and force said kids into loving the same things I do.

I have some feelings about how this story is going to play out, but I am going to keep them to myself for now. I just feel like we are telling the final tale of Kratos, and witnessing the birth of the next figure that the series will focus on. I have a feeling that the game as a whole will be a very unexpected emotional trip. Ultimately yesterday I realized that since I am not currently engaged in an MMO that is sapping all of my time… that I should spent some time catching up on the single player games that I either never attempted to got distracted while playing. Example I made a significant amount of progress into Assassin’s Creed Origins but got distracted by some other shiny MMO flavored object that crossed my path. For now I think I am going to spend most of my time playing through Dad of War and after that… probably set my sights on another single player game that I failed to play… maybe loop back around and finish up AC Origins.

Wireless Ethernet

October 18, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things I have talked about in the past are the odd constraints that I have on trying to be fully functional gaming in two different locations. One of the things I learned early on is that for martial bliss I need to be able to game from the living room without actually taking control of the television. My wife and I are the sort of people who are completely happy doing different things, while in the same room… occasionally watching something on television together while doing these different things. So she will be on her end of the sectional cocooned in a blanket fort messing with her laptop, and I will be doing roughly the same on my end of the sofa playing on my laptop.

The only hitch in this setup is that gaming laptops do not stay relevant for long. Mine for example is from 2015ish with a 4th Gen Core i7 and GTX 960M dedicated graphics, however it performs considerably lower than that as is the case with pretty much every laptop designated for gaming. Generally speaking you can effectively drop every component by a generation, so in this case it probably performs similar to a Desktop 3rd Gen i7 with a 750 graphics card. Effectively there are a lot of things it plays fine… like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV… but a lot of things it simply cannot handle like Monster Hunter World. Other things like Destiny 2 it just doesn’t play well enough to make it worth trying to play.

So essentially I am left with the decision… do I shell out another $1500-$2000 on a gaming class laptop that is going to be irrelevant in another two years or do I look for other options. This has lead me down the path of trying to remotely stream games off my desktop upstairs. So many of the options have issues, like Steam Link for example seems to have a high instance of stranding the game running and locking me out of remoting in to try and fix it. Splashtop works great if you are wanting to stream to your mobile device, but in dealing with 720p or higher it is just too laggy input wise to play games on. This lead me to Parsec and I have talked a bit about how great that service is in the past.

The only negative is that still I run into issues where there are “hiccups” in the stream for various reasons. Like things are going smoothly for a good long while, and then all of the sudden the music hitches and the control input lags for a moment while the stream catches back up. I don’t necessarily blame this on Parsec itself, but on the fact that I am streaming over a wireless network, and this becomes especially bad if we are watching something off Netflix or streamed back from my Plex server. So I started thinking about alternatives to try and get a more stable connection between my desktop that is wired into my router with Gigabit Ethernet, and my laptop that is downstairs and has no clear path to run Ethernet to.

Powerline Ethernet was the first option I looked into, but there is a problem that I simply do not have a free power outlet near my router since I have so damned much hooked up in that vicinity in my office. The thing with powerline is it has to have a direct connection to the power outlet because I have heard horror stories about folks who tried to hook that up and get it running through some sort of a power strip. While I would love to get conduit run with multiple gigabit Ethernet drops in every room… that just isn’t in the cards and is an extremely expensive proposal to retro fit it into a house built in 1980. This lead me down the path of trying to determine ways to improve my wireless signal enough to make the process viable.

I have the nonsense TP Link spider looking Archer C5400 router upstairs that has three separate channels for wireless, one in the 2.4 ghz band and two in the 5 ghz band… one of which I have already dedicated for nothing but my gaming devices. So I opted to look into TP Link repeater devices, several of which have a built in Gigabit Ethernet port. I ultimately decided upon the AC1750 device and rather than simply relying on it as a wireless repeater am effectively treating it like a nonsensically powerful wireless modem. It is bonded to the 2.4 ghz general network and the 5 ghz gaming network, and then I have Ethernet running from that device to my laptop. Sure this is a silly solution, but it seems to do exactly what I was hoping it would… provide me completely lag free parsec streaming.

Almost all of my Monster Hunting of late has been done across this connection from my laptop, without running into issues where I need to twitch move out of the way of an attack and hit a lag spike. Similarly I can play a game like Destiny 2 over the connection without running into issues now. Previously it worked well, but even at its best I could still tell I was remotely playing the game. With this setup it feels like I am legitimately just sitting at my desktop upstairs from my laptop downstairs. Again I think I am probably the only person who tries to game in the fashion that I do… but I thought I would write about this today just in case anyone else out there is looking for an option to make things feel more like sitting at the gaming machine. Tonight I plan on doing some experiments with the native Playstation Remote app to see if that feels better now than it did, since I would like to play some Dad of War at some point.

This isn’t exactly a cheap solution. The device in question costs around $45 on Amazon for a refurbished model, and about $70 for a minty fresh factory sealed one. There are likely cheaper options as well, but effectively what you are looking for is something in the AC band with a Gigabit ethernet port built into the device that bonds to the 5 ghz signal. The end result however works extremely well for me personally, and you can even use something like Photoshop and the brushes all feel responsive. Sure you are tethered to a wireless repeater, so it isn’t exactly the best option for wireless play. I do however want to do some testing without the Ethernet connected to see if the signal is stable enough without the physical connection. The biggest test however is that we can be streaming something from Netflix and the gameplay seems completely unphased by it, as was the case Monday when I was off work hunting monsters on the laptop while streaming shows through the Roku.

Turtles and Tunnels

October 17, 2018 by Belghast

I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning. I seem to be sliding into another deep turtle mode, and a pretty good indicator of that is that I have been playing a significant amount of Minecraft lately. I don’t have screenshots to go with this post so it is going to largely just seem like a giant wall of text. There are lots of different ways to play Minecraft, but I am a base builder. What I mean by that is I extend my reach out into the world crafting safe enclaves that keep me from having to ever deal with the monsters that inhabit it. As such I craft vast tunnel networks that allow me to move around without ever leaving the safe zone. Sure I occasionally venture out purposefully to go collect resources, but I tend to bring with me this umbilical cord like network of safety from area to area.

It is though Minecraft that I realized how much I would love to live underground. Things feel so safe there, and I think this is why I keep returning to the game when I am going through periods of stress. I almost always start the same way… for my first nights shelter I dig into a hillside and hollow out a little chamber, that serves as my first foothold into the dangerous world. From there I start expanding this warren until I have a firm base of operations. From there I decide which direction I want to expand and build my first outpost, and then start digging a 3×3 tunnel in that direction until I decide it is time to pop back out of the earth. I tend to dig a staircase upwards and then build some sort of a tower like structure that will serve as the anchor of that outpost.

Last night for example I spent a good deal of time hollowing out a hillside next to where I popped back out of the ground, crafting three block high levels moving slowly up towards the top of the hill where I started crafting an external structure. I tend to build all of it out of cobblestone at least as a start, and as I get access to better looking materials I start swapping pieces of it out. My tunneling nature however pretty much guarantees I have plenty of cobblestone and dirt to do pretty much anything I can dream up. Similarly the bulk amounts of rock that I end up clearing means I am bound to find a ton of coal and steel which helps to feed this machine.

Another thing that I regularly do is dig a staircase down to bedrock, and which point I start digging mine shafts in search of diamonds. My first diamonds this time I found as I reached the bottom without much effort, but I spent a chunk of last night clearing things out, trying to avoid the magma and an underground lake that I found. Magma is always the real challenge when you get down to the bottom level of the world, because if you dig long enough you are going to eventually encounter it and risk it flooding your tunnel network with fiery death. I crafted this tunnel network underneath my first cave base, and in the second outpost I am slowly crafting my way downwards by building a series of rooms and a ladder network.

It was through this ladder network that I broke into a cave complex that goes potentially all the way down to bedrock on its own. I managed to clear my way down to a ravine in the middle of the earth, but that is as far as I went because I was running short on torches. I could however see magma down at the bottom lighting the structure up so in theory that is another network to explore. I need to spend some time clearing out the cave structure to craft a more deliberate path downwards so that I will not get lost down there. That is always a problem I have in cave structures and I have tried to adopt a “torch on the right” methodology so that I can sorta see which direction I should be going based on the side of the cave the torch is on.

I think ultimately I find it relaxing reorganizing a chaotic world and crafting safe little areas for me to live in. You know that feeling you have when you are bundled up in a blanket but it is raining hard outside? That warmth and safety is how I feel when I am wandering around my tunnel networks. It is a safe world that I ultimately crafted for myself… a bubble that lets me explore without ever placing myself in danger. I know I play Minecraft way different than a lot of folks, but my methodology feels calming and relaxing. Which ultimately is apparently the thing I am seeking out when I go into one of these turtle modes and return to the game.

Glutton Axe

October 16, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I had the day off and spent a good deal of it playing Monster Hunter World. I allowed myself to get distracted by seeking out a weapon that was shockingly easy to craft. Essentially I had been trying to determine which of the switch axes I would go after first. The clear obvious choice is the Diablos one… the problem there is I really don’t want to go right back to grinding Diablos nonstop to get the parts I would need for it… which are again are Majestic and Black Spiral Horns. Instead I decided to set my sights considerably lower, on something I could probably farm up in my sleep.

The Jagras line doesn’t exactly have a ton of amazing weapons, but in the switch axe department it is a pretty reasonable option. Its low point is it is only a Rank 6 weapon, but based on its stats it should probably be Rank 7? It has hidden elemental sleep, and when transformed into sword mode has exhaust damage. If I remember correct that means that when hitting the head the exhaust damage can KO the monster. All that it really required me to do was kill a nonsensical number of Great Jagras… since that isn’t exactly a monster I hunt on the regular. However with minimal farming I managed to get the switch axe crafted and play around a bit with it. It will at least hold me over until something awesome drops from Kulve Taroth at some point.

The other mission is still very much active however, and I did kill several Rathian yesterday, enough to I believe get all of the Spikes that I needed. Now I just have to wait for a Rathian Ruby to drop before crafting that final Gunlance. As Ashgar posted yesterday, I do probably intend to make the Zorah Magdaros one as well, since I have already crafted the first version of it. I believe I just need another Zorah Gem before being able to craft the Rank 8 version. That would give me Long 4 and Normal 4 to play with and get used to both. Then again I hope I get a decent Wide 4 weapon to drop during Kulve Taroth. I fully expect to be farming the hell out of that event when it finally goes live. I think hammer is going to be a much better option to breaking things than Longsword was on the console.