Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Optifine and Nostalgia Shaders

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Good Morning Friends! I spent most of my evening playing Destiny, but for a little bit in the early evening I resolved to get something working that I had thought about for awhile. I do not have an RTX series graphics card and as a result I cannot play Minecraft RTX. That said my preference is the Java Client and I don’t believe the RTX shaders work for that anyway. However there are a number of community supported shader packs that provide a very similar experience. I’ve installed this sort of thing before in the past and form what I understood it was a much simpler process these days. As a result I sat down and sorted it out, and the results are phenomenally cool. I thought this morning I would share the process.

This entire adventure begins with a little utility known as Optifine. I’ve been using this for years because it greatly expands the graphical options available to Minecraft and tweaks the way that textures are applied to the blocks. For example instead of rendering glass as a bunch of individual panes, it will instead render an entire wall of glass blocks as a single seamless mass of glass. Essentially this is a JAR file that once double clicked acts as a guided installer much like that of a standard Windows wizard installer. It is going to attempt to find your Minecraft folder, which in theory should be auto populated but if not type %AppData% in the windows run prompt and double click the .Minecraft folder and then copy that entire path and paste it into the Optifine installer.

Once this has been installed successfully you should see a new profile show up in your Minecraft Launcher. For example I have three in my drop down, Optifine for 1.16.5, the latest release which will always update to the most current client, and then an older legacy edition of Forge 1.14.4 which is a similar mod manager. If you want to use Optifine or any of the shader options, then you will need to launch Minecraft under this profile. In theory it shouldn’t negatively impact any of your existing saved games but there will always be the little caution icon indicating you are playing a modified version of Minecraft from that point forward.

Next we will need to grab the Nostalgia shader, which for sake of this discussion is the RTX replacement we are going to go with. Thing is there are a bunch of different Optifine compatible shaders and if you are curious about other options check out this Rock Paper Shotgun article. I personally went with Nostalgia because it is reported to have a minimal hit to performance. Some of the shader packs will cause a dip in performance and given that the Java client already performs worse than Bedrock aka the C# client… I didn’t want to take a lot of chances. Ultimately this time you are going to download the shader zip file and hold onto it for a few minutes because you are going to drag it into a specific folder shortly.

Now you are going to launch Minecraft and make sure you have selected the Optifine profile. From there you need get into game, hit escape, choose options, choose video settings and now finally choose shaders. You should be staring at a screen that looks very similar to the one in the above screenshot. From here click the Shaders Folder button, and this is going to pop open the folder where Optifine is expecting shaders to be stored. Copy the zip you downloaded from the Nostalgia website into this folder and within a few moments it should show up in the list of selectable shaders. Select it, click done and you should now have Nostalgia shaders installed and impacting your game visuals.

The difference in how the game looks is not subtle. The world becomes significantly darker, but the lighting effects become more meaningful. You can see that were are getting realistic looking water reflections on this screenshot taken from the dock on the back of my multiplayer realms base. Additionally as I have placed torches around the perimeter, you see them all casting their own halo of light.

Similarly look around the torches in this screenshot, you can see the rain that was pouring down being illuminated in a somewhat natural manner. The game still feels like Minecraft since I have not done anything to tweak the block skins, but it feels like a more naturalistic view of the same game.

Things got really trippy when I went down into Grace’s undersea base area because we were getting block a reflection from the surface of the glass as well as a ghosting reflection from the water.

The transition between water and land represented by her waterfall entrance to the ocean from the sea base ends up looking like a portal to another world. This was taken from me standing on the sea floor staring back into the base.

This however is looking the other direction out into the ocean floor… as some of the underwater plants are now apparently flagged for bioluminescence. The ocean in general because a much more dark and foreboding place.

Finally we have the Nether which also becomes significantly more dangerous because everything is much darker. It would be SUPER easy to walk off the edge of a cliff and fall into a morass of lava in this version. I do really like the way that the lava has a glow to it however.

This mornings post is largely just show and tell and explanation of how to get to the same point yourself if you are so inclined. I’ve used these sorts of shaders before, but the install process was considerably more tedious. I already had optifine installed, so for me personally it was just a case of clicking on the folder and dragging the zip file into place. I am probably going to experiment some with other shader packs to decide which one I like the best. I do really like the warm glow that Nostalgia has.

Most of the screenshots I have included were of night time, because that is when the difference is the most dramatic. Daytime however looks very solid as well and gives you a sort of depth of field experience fuzzing out the far distance and giving you more naturalistic shadows. The one thing of note is with these sorts of shaders it becomes a bit harder to tell if something is sufficiently lit. When I am running this sort of shader I often times pop open the debug menu with F3 so I can check the actual lighting levels for the purposes of spawning monsters. I honestly think the part that I enjoy the most are the more smooth clouds, because Minecraft clouds have always bothered me.

Whelp folks that is it. I just wanted to explain how one gets shaders in Minecraft these days and that it is much easier than it used to be. On that note going to close the post and get on with my morning.

Steelfeather Replacements

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Hey Friends! So yesterday I was talking about the “inbetweensies” and one of my working theories as to why I bounced off Destiny Monday night was the impending reset. This more or less seemed to be correct because last night I pretty much played nothing but Destiny and had a grand ole time. I wish I could shape my mindset because in theory anything that was able to accomplish on Monday would have been a bonus, but instead I only saw the looming deadline that came with the weekly reset and resigned myself to not even try. This is what my brain does when you tell me something is a limited time event or something that is eventually going away. In theory it SHOULD get me to fly into action and do the things before the deadline, but it ends up having the opposite reaction.

This has been the case anytime something comes into game for a limited time. I think that I will buckle down and farm before the deadline comes up, but instead I end up bouncing under the anxiety of maybe just maybe not being able to get everything I wanted out of the event. The same is true with timed content in games. If you tell me that I am on a timer I will fuck up endlessly, but if you just sorta hide the existence of the timer then I will breeze through whatever it is. Anxiety is a thing and the older I get and the more removed from constant group interaction…. the more I find myself struggling with it. Like maybe it is just that my real world daily life is full of more high pressure interactions than it used to be, that I just do not want them at all in my gaming life.

This is the beloved Steelfeather Repeater that I have talked so much about in other posts. The roll that I ended up with that I considered a God Roll has Feeding Frenzy and Multikill Clip and I have loved this weapon so damned much. So one of my goals moving forward with this season has been to find a viable replacement for a Kinetic Auto Rifle. Pretty much I always have an Auto Rifle slotted and then alternate the other weapons around this, so as such I need something in that first slot to go along with my Gnawing Hunger which is my Energy Rifle of choice. I did a bit of research into some of the options and then last night I happened to get a few of them to drop.

I did not play at all during the season when Seventh Seraph weapons were actually dropping. As a result this Auto Rifle is completely new to me. For starters this appears to be based on the Khvostov which is one of my all time favorite weapons in Destiny. I got what I would consider a reasonable roll with Fourth Time’s the Charm and Vorpal Weapon. Looking however at what is actually available to roll on the weapon… it seems that I got one of the better rolls that I could have. The only thing that I guess I would have really changed were the barrel and magazine options. I guess this weapon can roll with Rampage so maybe I also want to see a copy of that weapon drop as well.

I did play when False Promises was a weapon that was dropping during Season 11, but for whatever reason I never really liked it that much. This is in a very slow archetype and it just doesn’t feel like it shreds in quite the same way that other Auto Rifles do. However last night I pulled a pretty solid roll that I am going with for now as I keep trying this weapon out. Feeding Frenzy and Rampage are solid, but I would have rather had High Caliber rounds in the magazine perks slot. It is a fine enough weapon and sorta reminds me of a Suros Regime on the slowest fire mode, which again was not really a thing I enjoyed that much.

Another thing that I managed to pull last night was the new Gambit exclusive Hand Cannon, or at least new to me. I remember once upon a time being desperate for a void Hand Cannon when I was grinding some past achievement, but I don’t know if that is still a gap in the itemization. It seems to hit really hard but could use a slightly larger number of rounds and faster reload speed. I have a feeling that Rangefinder and Multikill Clip are far from optimal for this weapon. Rapid Hit seems like a better choice all around since you are probably going to be firing off the full nine rounds anytime you are using it. Wellspring apparently can roll on this weapon so that might be interesting as well.

Finally I got a Seventh Seraph hand cannon, which again is new to me since I did not play during that season. I love the look of this thing but don’t so much love the way it plays. I wish it was a little harder hitting. The even rounds makes me think of the Hawkmoon, but this thing does not really hit terribly hard which is unfortunate. It was fun playing around with it last night but ultimately I would probably use the Gambit option to this one. The God roll appears to be Corkscrew Rifling, Appended Mag, Threat Detector and Feeding Frenzy. Maybe I will see something a little closer to that as I continue opening engrams.

This week is apparently Shadow Price in Nightfall Ordeal so I am probably going to spend some time in the coming evenings attempting to farm one of those up. Even if I don’t get an optimal roll it should at least tell me if it is going to be a weapon I like or not. I tend to have a pretty visceral reaction to weapons in Destiny, where I either like the thing they are doing or don’t at all and it comes down to a mixture of weapon look, animations and weapon sound. You could hand me the most optimal weapon and tell me it is the perfect roll but if it doesn’t “feel good” to use it… then I simply won’t and it will rot in my vault. So far of everything I have gotten I find myself using the Carbine the most, because it “feels” right.

Fort Bel, Outriders and Destiny

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Morning Friends! Surprising to no one I played an excessive amount of Valheim over the weekend. We talked a bit about it on the podcast but I am quickly realizing that for me it is just a different sort of gaming experience. Like when I have played Minecraft in the past, the adventure is fine… but at the end of the day it always ends up being about the building. So since I am slowly moving on past my first foothold in the shared server environment, I thought I would at least talk about it a bit this morning. While my foothold has evolved into something that everyone just generally refers to as “Fort Bel” the truth is it started out as me trying to stay out of everyone else’s hair since I was further progressed.

I posted a walkthrough video of Shade’s Folly aka my starter place on the island. The goal was to run down the coast and sorta do my own thing while everyone else caught up, and as a result I never really assisted much in the building of what became the main town hub for our island. What was originally the building shown on the lefthand side of the screen, I eventually added the second building… and then proceeded the erect a giant stone wall around the entire compound and build further structures directly connected to that wall. This also caused me to create a more shared crafting area and open up my storage reserves to pretty much everyone on the server.

The longer I have been here however the more stale it has gotten. There isn’t that much more I can do with my current location because I risk taking up more space and encroaching upon the territory of those who built around me. Additionally I am on the border of the nearest entrance to the Black Forest and I don’t want to “unwild” that region any more than it already is. As a result I have gone out onto the ocean in search of new areas and at some point I will probably do other walkthrough videos talking about each of them. The biggest of these is Dawn’s Rest or what folks are just mostly universally referring to as “Castle Bel”.

I also played quite a bit of the Outriders demo this weekend, and hit the level cap. I could in theory do like the YouTube community has been doing and grind their faces off against a tiny amount of content trying to farm things… or I could just stop playing. I am likely going to more or less stop playing. I’ve spent a tiny bit of time trying out the other classes but I am pretty certain that Devastator is the class for me. So far my second favorite is Trickster… but they both sorta do the same thing where they are up close and personal with targets which seems to fit my enjoyment pattern with aggressive gameplay and bad decision. Really looking forward to the launch of this game at the end of the month.

The thing that I was NOT expecting this weekend is that I ended up firing up Destiny 2 and playing some of it last night. It is amazing how much more enjoyment I get out of the game now that I know that the weapons I am earning won’t be irrelevant now that the gear Sunset has officially been called off. Unfortunately one of my favorite Auto Rifles is in the sunset, so I will be trying to find a new favorite Kinetic Auto since Steelfeather Repeater is already sunset. Anything that is not currently sunset should be fair game however, so I am hoping to get a few Shadow Price variants to see if I like that weapon. I vaguely remember it from Destiny 1, but not extremely well.

Like every weekend it went entirely too fast. Time moves extremely strangely in the time of the self imposed lockdown. What did you get up to this weekend? Did you check out Outriders? What were your thoughts.

Outriders Demo Impressions

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Yesterday the floodgates opened on a new game vying for our attention in the emerging Looter Shooter genre. This morning I am going to talk about my impressions of the almost four hours I ended up playing last night. This will be in no way an adequate representation of the game because I just haven’t spent enough time with it to be certain about how anything works yet. Since this demo is freely available to pretty much everyone at this point… I highly suggest you just skip this post and go make your own impressions. So as such I will lead off with download links so you can do just that. There will be spoilers for the story ahead, or at least some broad summarizations of plot points. Be warned.

I am going to be honest one of the biggest challenges with Outriders is that it is going to need to carve its own identity because out of the gate it feels like a remix of a bunch of concepts we have already seen before in various forms. I was jokingly referring to it as Gears of Destiny yesterday because it feels HEAVILY inspired by the Gears of War franchise. On top of that there is a heavy mix of Guerilla Faction, Defiance, Rage, Killzone and the Mass Effect multiplayer engine. Ultimately the question is does this blend work? Yeah I think it mostly does and the gameplay feels extremely fluid and enjoyable, enough that I went ahead and purchased the game after experiencing the demo.

Why did I go ahead and plunk my money down for this ride? The truth is that the game is telling me a story that is cohesive and understandable. I love the incomprehensible nonsense that is Destiny that has forced me to dig hard to get the little information that I have, but in a new franchise that I am not already sold on and that also seems like an assemblage of parts that I have seen before… they need to hook me on a narrative. So far it seems like legitimately this is a game you can play entirely for the single player story and it will be an enjoyable ride. The thumbnail for the story is that at some point in the future we have destroyed the Planet Earth. The story doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about this but I figure it will probably be something teased out over time.

In order to survive there are two colony ships loaded full of folks and sent towards what appears to be an inhabitable planet. While in transit something happens to one of the ships and it explodes leaving you as one of the last remaining members of what appears to be a law enforcement/expeditionary force type group called the Outriders. This seems significant but we aren’t given a lot of detail about what it means. You are part of the first group to make landfall and at first things seem to be just as idyllic as the postcards made it out to be. However the longer you are planet side the more things go south because apparently the planet is effected by giant storms of some sort of energy that straight up disintegrates some things that it touches… others it leaves changed but it will be awhile before the game elaborates on that fact.

Some events transpire that end up with you being stuck back in a Cryopod… and shocking to no one you wake up much later than originally intended. During the almost forty years that pass things have gone from bad to worse as the planet is essentially divided into two groups: The original expeditionary force that is dwindling in numbers and a group of separatists that appear to have gone full on Fallout raider and I strongly suspect are cannibals by what could only be described as “meat cages”. You wake up on the wrong side of the lines and in your attempt to escape you realize that you have become “altered” and with that comes special powers.

Queue the class selection screen. It was around this point that I alt tabbed out to YouTube and watched a few videos summarizing the classes. More specifically I watched the video that Ginger Prime put out some time back. Based on my limited understanding of the classes the break down goes a little something like this.

  • Technomancer – Ice based Long ranged support/gadgets lone wolf that almost has a pet class rhythm to it because I believe it can eventually drop turrets. Heals based on long ranged encounters.
  • Pyromancer – Fire based medium range engagements and lots of elemental damage synergy and crowd control abilities. Heals based on kills of things with its elemental debuffs on it.
  • Trickster – Time ability based short range assassin type character that gets in does a lot of damage and gets back out. Gets healed and shielded when killing something at close range.
  • Devastator – Earth based tanky short to medium range engagements that heals based on killing encounters that are in short range.

After looking at the various options I ended up going Devastator since I like being Tanky, but I also like a run and gun up close and personal style. I spent most of the night running around with an Assault Rifle and a Shotgun and shifting in and out of close and medium range using the abilities of the class that I will get into shortly.

Each class has a talent tree system that allows for further customization. From what I understand regardless of the class there is a tree that is a bit more tanky, so that everyone can tank in a pinch. The trees that are open to me with Devastator are Vanquisher, Warden and Seismic Shifter. From what I understand Warden is my very tanky, very focused on having more health and taking less damage tree. Vanquisher seems to be focused on piercing armor and interrupts so might be more team/support focused pending you are not taking the role as tank. Seismic Shifter appears to be about doing big AOE earthquake damage and taking out lots of stuff at the same time. Being who I am… I am probably going mostly down the Warden path.

In addition to talents that give more passive tweaks to your other abilities, there are some active class skills that unlock as you go through the game. You can have three of these equipped at one time and can mix and match them as you go. Right now I have unlocked exactly three, the first being Earthquake which sends out a field of rock in front of me and any mob that it touches causes spikes to shoot up from the ground dealing significant damage. The next is Golem which gives me a rock based overshield causing me to take 65% reduced damage for 8 seconds. Gravity leap is really interesting in that it causes me to jump up into the air… turn into floating rocks and then go slamming down on whatever I target with the left mouse button dealing a large amount of AOE damage when I come slamming down. I use that one a lot as a gap closer on whatever mob is giving me the most grief.

What I am finding most interesting about my class is that in reality… I am not a boss tank. Like bosses are the one thing that I seem to struggle with the most because most bosses punish you severely for close range encounters. What I want to do instead is draw the hate of all of the little guys because each time I kill one of those I heal myself back up significantly allowing me to sustain that action pretty much indefinitely being a roaming bullet sponge. I am hoping to get some time to test this theory over the weekend with some group play, but I am thinking that really is going to be the synergy. You have your dps focus on burning the boss from cover and your tank causes mayhem running around like mad picking up the ire of little packs that I then smash to pieces for health and profit.

Based one what I am seeing gear wise, it seems that when you pick up something blue or better you start getting ability modifiers. This leads me to believe that the end game of Outriders is going to involve some Diablo 3 style builds that abuse specific attributes on your gear to buff abilities and make them significantly more powerful. If I had to guess probably when you get purple gear they are going to start giving you more than one modifier at a time. What I don’t know however is if these modifiers are completely random or if it is fixed like Diablo so you can seek out specific items to fill specific slots. I am honestly hoping it is the later because fully randomized gear may present the same problem that Anthem did of giving you a bunch of items that are potentially useless.

So I have talked about a lot of positives, so we are going to throw out a negative. Sometimes character creation systems end up being unintentionally racist. I feel awkward saying this given that my skin tone can only accurately be represented by the pink crayon in the Crayola box… but like representation is really important in video games. While creating my character I noticed that the skin tone offerings were entirely dependent upon the face that you chose. This morning I pulled together an example of this where I selected the darkest available tone with every single face and then edited them all together. There is exactly one face type that is allowed to be dark brown, with a second being allowed to be more medium… and then everyone else looks like they have just been using bronzer. The folks at People Can Fly can do better and I hope they do as the game goes on. Thankfully it appears that cosmetic changes are free so if they do add in more options folks can re-customize.

Like I said above I enjoyed the game enough to go ahead and purchase it. I only did this because I wanted the cool skin for my vehicle, which I assume gets unlocked for usage later in the game. I think it is going to be enjoyable to at least play through the story and solo around a bit. I am hoping it will be enjoyable for group play because what I have seen so far makes me think that there is going to be a lot of party synergy going on. I hope to get some time in this weekend trying something group based, but it also appears that you can pretty much complete all of the game in co-op mode for those who are inclined to do so. So since this is an impression piece… other than the melanin slider woes… my impressions of the game is pretty solid.