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Vagrant0

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  1. Not actually that much of an issue. IIRC there were scripting methods and settings in the cell to prevent fast travel in those specific situations where the player was in a forced location. Kinda like I described above, it was more of a technical and bugginess reason why it was disabled in so many cases. Have to remember, the fast travel system in Oblivion was based around the path grid, so things that were disconnected from the path grid needed some way to resolve the disconnection.
  2. Play TES:Oblivion. Head to Bravil. Compare the exterior of buildings with the interiors. Sit and rock in the corner for the next 14 hours about walls, doors, and windows not maching. Realize that of all the people who have played the game, nobody paid much notice to it. Continue that realization by thinking how it doesn't matter because it's all visuals and most those places you never enter anyway. Come to understand that being OCD is only a problem because you decide it to be one. Also works with the subways in Fallout 3, the mages guild (in general) in Skyrim, and pretty much everything in Fallout 4.
  3. On the bright side.. R. Kelley is still locked in federal prison during all of this.
  4. The gatcha on that end is that the cartridges they give you with a new printer are often much smaller or contain far less ink than buying the ink. Oh, and many models also dump a portion of their ink into what is essentially a giant sponge of 'waste' ink every time the printer warms up. In some models, this is every time you turn it on. And printing very light colored dots on every page to use up just that one color so you have to buy the full set sooner.
  5. There is a technical limitation, just not one that generally applies to PC players. In Bethesda games made within Gamebryo or Creation, interior spaces were their own disconnected area. With Oblivion, there were also more worldspaces which were not physically connected to the standard world. This led to calculation issues when it would try to simulate how much time a travel action would take, and in several cases cause players to become stuck in perpetual loading screens. Much of this was eventually fixed or covered up between patches and having hardware better than the base Xbox 360. The limitation was left in with newer games because of both wanting to minimize this issue before patching, and eventually because they forgot why they added it to begin with.
  6. Those kinds of text boxes in older games also tended to be VERY specific as to what were valid entries at any given time. Even with a list of acceptable verbs, at any given time you could have thousands of potential things to try when stuck... With some of those things actually preventing you from being able to continue. It basically made the game have too many possible solutions where most of those solutions did absolutely nothing but take your time and frustrate you.
  7. Hopefully... - Some review on company sick-leave or supply chains and greater interest in keeping CDC and other agencies funded. - Planet has a chance to catch its breath due to factories and air pollution diminishing because of decrease in human activity. Might be a wake-up call to look to cleaner industry. - People have the cleanest buttholes they've ever had after buying bidets and using up the surplus toilet paper that is occupying a large part of their living room and isn't worth much else since it is produced locally. - The obsessive use of hand sanitizer, sprays, wipes, ect helps keep other germs at bay. - After a month of mostly-isolation and people staring at their phones, or sitting around with Netflix/games, people get cabin fever and renounce social media for a few months. - People who work in utilities, healthcare, and distribution get more recognition for keeping things running.
  8. Most of it is really that the development was under extremely tight time constraints near the end of release and at one point they essentially had to gut the game of hundreds of resources in order to fit onto a single standard size DVD (requirement for Xbox). The most clear evidence of this is in how the voice variety is very limited and in some cases broken (people changing voice mid dialogue). But other resources and clutter were also likely never made because time ran out. There are a handful of quests which were not fully, indicating that there was more variety in some encounters planned. Conjurers in particular were likely added as a desperate afterthought because they wanted more variety than just necromancers, goblins, and bandits everywhere.
  9. The long-short of it is that making a game when you have few skills to build from is going to take time and effort. Anything of reasonable complexity is going to take an extremely long time even when you know what you are doing. You can still hold onto your grand game idea, but will need to start seeing it as several million tiny milestones instead of being a thing you can just put together (at least until you become well versed in a game language and it becomes only a few million milestones). Even something simple, like a minecraft clone, has hundreds of components just to allow a player to walk around a generated world and place/remove blocks. The key to not becoming overwhelmed is to try and work on each of these components one at a time whenever you can. Although I would say that Unity is probably the easiest 'mainstream' engine to get into, for the person who is completely new to any kind of scripting/coding, I would actually suggest looking at Twine/Sugarcube. It is a platform typically used for Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type content, but also allows conditional states, objects (things that have properties), and supports Javascript, among other things. It's something you probably havn't heard about but is not without its merits for the fresh-faced coder. The advantage with this is that it is fairly easy to put something like an escape room together by making use of conditionalized text and passages. The other advantage is that in addition to being able to run in any recent browser, most of the things made with Twine can have the coding opened and looked at to see how an already existing game does a thing. The disadvantage is that you deal with a mess of artsy/unusual stuff as it is a completely free and open platform. https://itch.io/games/made-with-twine/tag-twine Additional links: https://opensource.com/article/18/2/twine-gaming http://www.adamhammond.com/twineguide/ The point of all this is to get you into a mindset of taking one part at a time, dealing with variables, conditions, and be more familiar with being able to look at code which can be spread between multiple places to see how things work or construct new things. Even at the end of everything, Twine can end up being useful for other things since you can quickly throw together an outline or set of storyboards for larger projects done in other engines. Or if you want to just try jumping into Unity. https://learn.unity.com/project/john-lemon-s-haunted-jaunt-3d-beginner https://learn.unity.com/ https://www.udemy.com/course/learnunity3d/ Sebastian Lague's Youtube channel Don't get caught up in needing to learn how to make your own resources... The hardest part of any game development is learning to code and make those resources function. There are also plenty of free resources out there designed just for use by people learning to make games. Yes, it may look like garbage, but it is your garbage.
  10. The biggest problem with torrents as a means of serving mods, or files of any kind, is that you need someone to act as a seeder for anyone to get that mod. Although setting up some kind of 'pay to seed' system might solve some of this; knowing people, it is unlikely to work since people would be more likely to pay into it for popular mods instead of obscure mods that they just can't seem to find a reliable download for. Mods would still need an initial seed (authors may not be willing to do this, and tying up a server for every new file may be outside the practical scope of your network), and that seed would need to be present long enough for it to spread to others to fill in for seeding. This later part becomes a problem as users tend to just leech when it comes to torrents, so without a server or some indentured party working as a reliable seed, torrents are likely to be dead or very unreliable. The next biggest problem is that torrents don't work well in cases where you are have files that are constantly being updated. Even with seeding taken care of, you run into the problem of old (possibly buggy) mod versions being shared just because it has the most active seeders. Every new version would essentially start back at 1 seeder, so people wanting the latest version will have a harder time downloading it than the most popular version. If a mod author updates a mod several times within the course of a month, there could be several live torrents for various versions of that mod, making it a nightmare for the mod author when it comes to tracking down any lingering bugs. This is one of the reasons why, in the past, torrents only made sense in the case of downloading the resources used by a mod (BSA files), as these tended to change less frequently while being the bulk of a mod's filesize. Although trackers can be disabled, once it gets out in the wild and other trackers start being added as a backup, this becomes more difficult. Then there is the problem of mods being uploaded without the original authors permission (or knowledge), and being yet another site that a mod author needs to make their rounds with updates, bug reports, answering feedback, ect. Assuming of course that people aren't going to use it as a way of spreading malware, mods with questionable content, or worse under the guise of it being a popular mod. If being an uploader requires little to no vetting, then people don't care about breaking rules; if being an uploader requires a lengthy process, most probably wouldn't even bother. Best suggestion is to narrow your focus towards some niche that your site can specifically cater to, and do it better than other options out there. The advantage of torrents is that you can provide access to rather large files, or collections of files, for example. But you kinda have to be willing to enforce rules and continually push it the whole way in order to make most anything like this work (eg, can't just half-ass it by setting up a framework and sitting back collecting server money).
  11. Only suggestions I would make... - Instead of going with a large solid state drive for everything, consider going with a small solid state drive for the OS and some 7200rpm mechanical drives for storing most everything else and temp files. You will still have enough space on the SSD for games that you want to have lightning fast load times, but will have a slower drive for things that don't necessarily benefit but have a good amount of data requirements (like APEX). 2tb may sound like a lot, but runs out quickly once you start installing games, 4-5tb storage split between 3-4 drives usually works best in my experience. - Consider trying to go with 32gb RAM. Going forward with your build, RAM would be your main bottleneck, particularly if you are wanting to heavily mod games. More RAM can also help offset slower drive speed as more game resources can remain in memory instead of being pulled and unloaded frequently.
  12. Most of those things listed were just superfluous skills that served relatively little purpose but made the act of figuring out how to level up and still be capable a bit of a mess. The leveling system in TES games has always been pretty broken. Gaining character levels is somewhat detrimental as it makes more difficult things appear, but gaining skill levels gives you better abilities that let you smite your foes effortlessly. The problem, skills like climbing stairs, running, jumping, and the various language skills potentially had as much impact on your leveling progress as combat skills. Meaning that you can quite easily start out with your class being little more than a language expert, but working up every other skill through repeatable actions, become an unstoppable force of destruction, and still only encounter low level enemies. The majority of us mastered (for the most part) the skill of holding our bladders until we were able to evacuate them in a socially acceptable environment... But nobody puts that on their employment resume. Why? because it is assumed that some level of competency exists among adults and therefore does not need to be tracked and graded. For other things, as the combat mechanics changed, it became less necessary to do hidden dice rolls (dodging, backstabbing, blocking, hitting a target with a melee weapon, ect) as the player was able to do this themselves.The first few moments of Morrowind for example was often met with some frustration when players tried to kill their first mudcrab using a dagger... poking at it for hours trying to hit what is essentially a mostly stationary thing. It's a matter of streamlining the game and making it more approachable. Having dozens of skills that are used in very few places does not make a game better, it just makes your game have to track more values, have more cluttered UI, and brings with it balance and progression issues. That said, there are still people who use 1st edition D&D rules. But, catering to the minority does not pay the bills.
  13. 4x the pixel density. 1 pixel becomes a block of 4 pixels. Beyond that it matters on the size of the screen, how close you sit to it, and how clearly your own eyes can make out a single pixel. Most of what you would normally see on a 4k TV is actually upscaled from 1080 or 720. The upscaling process typically blends the differences between one pixel and another to make things seem less blocky, but this would not be happening when using a different display resolution on your computer.
  14. We did this before a few times, back in the early days of Minecraft (before the nether was even added). It didn't end well. Servers were prone to griefing. A whitelist-only server defeats the point of trying to type it to a community (might as well just do a server with a few friends). An open server ends up where people are either completely unable to do anything until vetted (so why even log in), or falls quickly to griefing, and other stupidity. Even with the better server tools available these days you would still have this kind of problem.
  15. Generally speaking: An NPC is something which exists within the game world as a visible element or which has some measure of agency within the game environment but which is beyond the player's direct control. The purpose of this is usually to have some other elements working within the game world other than the player to help or hinder the players actions. A voiceover is just an audio element which comes from a source which is not present within the current environment. This can be a narrator narrating, or a voice commenting on the player's actions, or someone on a recording that is triggered by script or player action (audio logs) or similar. The purpose of this is usually for artistic reasons, to provide a lore or instruction dump (bunch of information), or to provide hints or context to the players actions. If an NPC is speaking directly to the player when that NPC is present within the environment, it is not a voiceover, it is just voiced dialogue. When an NPC is talking in a room and being overheard by the player, it is not a voiceover, it is voiced dialogue or voiced monologue. If the source of the sound is localized to the environment, it is not a voiceover, it is either ambient audio or voiced dialogue depending on where it is localized. A voiceover has no location in the environment associated with it, but rather seems to come from the player themselves. An NPC can still have the same voice actor or even the same dialogue as what might be played during a voiceover, but the deciding factor is where the voice comes from. These terms, afterall, have their roots in writing, stage, and movie production just with minor changes based on the medium of choice; so they all have similar applications and usages.
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