Tales of the Aggronaut

Remote Gaming

August 19, 2015 by Belghast

Distractions

This morning is not going how I expected to go in the least. About 3 am a massive storm blew in, and with it thunder, lightning and torrential rains. This of course woke me up, because rain sometimes means bad things. We have some issues with our wooden siding right now, and it is causing two leaks to happen when the rain is particularly vigorous. We have contracted someone to come out and fix all of this… but that won’t happen until sometime in September when their next available slot is. In the meantime each time it rains I either dread the potential for a leak, or like last night have to listen to the constant dripping from the top of our bedroom window. Needless to say I did not exactly get an amazing nights sleep after that all started. As a result I have been moving around this morning extremely sluggish and easily distracted. I set out with the simple mission earlier of trying to find out what my Wizard 101 account name was… and wound up playing for about fifteen minutes. The distractions are real, and plentiful and I am getting a very late start writing my morning post.

Then to make matters worse when I actually sit down to start writing, I find out that apparently WordPress has released its 4.3 patch, and I now have eleven updates waiting on me. Instead of waiting until AFTER I have advertised a post, I decided to go ahead and update everything right then. It is surprising how long twelve updates take when one of them is a new wordpress version, and a major version at that. It is going to be an interesting day I can already tell it. I have a cat on my desk right now stalking me, because she thinks she is hungry and the kitten playing around behind my monitors which always freaks me out a little bit. Thank god for coffee is pretty much all I can say at this point because otherwise I would surrender to the desire to curl up in a ball like my cats…. and join them in sleep. The cats are absolutely not helping the distracted part however, because they are both being adorable. This may or may not be the worst blog post I have written in years.

Remote Gaming

I guess in the grand scheme of things I should have known this morning would end up like this, because last night was equally spastic. Instead of gaming, I spent a lot of time “trying to game remotely”. I have this dream that someday I will be able to play games on my less than stellar laptop downstairs, from the gaming machine upstairs. I know at this point you are preparing to interrupt me with “but steam in home streaming!” but quell that for the moment. There are a huge number of games that I play that do not run, and ultimately don’t work right through steam in home streaming. I know… I’ve tried. One of them for example is Dragon Age: Inquisition that is locked behind the layer of bullshit that is EA Origin. So instead last night I started trying a different route, namely Splashtop. Some time ago I watched a video from Linus Tech Tips about creating a “Ghetto Shield” to play games from a phone/controller combination. This is all fine and good… but I don’t want to play games from a tablet or mobile interface. I hate touch screen interfaces with a passion, and all I really want is to be able to treat my laptop as a thin client for gaming purposes. The dream is simple, because in theory it would allow me to stop caring about getting a “gaming laptop” and instead just get a decent office type laptop and stream through my gaming machine. The problem has always been that there is enough lag that it ultimately ends up pissing me off.

Last night I managed to get Dragon Age Inquisition largely working, but I ran into two issues. I was running fraps on both my gaming desktop upstairs and my laptop so I could see the FPS of the two systems. My gaming machine was running DA:I around 60 fps just fine… Splashtop on the other hand was running in the 15 to 20 fps range which pretty much wrecked any playability. To make matters worse, for whatever reason whenever I attempted to move “mmo style” while holding down the right mouse button to turn… the mouse input lagged to painful levels making me pretty much abandon the mouse and start keyboard turning. I kept trying this over the course of roughly two hours, and even tried to figure out a way to get it running smoothly through Steam Streaming without much luck either. The reason why I was sent down this path yesterday is the updates to Windows 10 streaming from an Xbox One console. That is cool enough, but for the love of god… will someone make it work between two windows machines without issue. The last attempt was to try and figure out how to install the Splashtop gamepad driver, so I might try that again tonight. Everything I have read online is that the mouse support in Splashtop is just bad. I guess they are emulating the input instead of simply passing it through to the other machine…. which seems insane… until you realize that the software was designed to allow people to connect from tablets to desktops… and not necessarily desktops to desktops. I will say however it already out performs any remote desktop tool that I have played in the past. I booted up World of Warcraft as a litmus test and it ran flawlessly. There was some strangeness with the mouse cursor updating slowly, but the movement was nice and smooth.

Revisiting Tristram

I am not entirely certain if it was my recent foray into Hellgate London, or my recent railing on click to move as a control scheme… but for whatever reason I have had an undeniable craving to play some Diablo 3. Last night ultimately turned into a night of updating drivers and things, and in the process I installed a new Nvidia driver. One of the things I do periodically is flip through what it is suggesting as my “optimized setting”. Some of the suggestions are pure crap, because out of laziness they really have not tested any of the settings. However every now and then you get one that is really well optimized, and that seemed to be the case with the configuration it was suggesting for Diablo 3. My newest video card is capable of doing the spiffy trick where it renders the game at 4k and then down-samples it back to 1080p. Nvidia Experience ultimately suggested this mode for Diablo 3 and I have to say playing like that is absolutely gorgeous. I am not sure if you can actually see the difference in the screenshot but in game it just feels smoother than traditional anti-aliasing usually does. On a whim I decided to create a Season 3 character, even though Season 4 is only a couple of weeks away. Not sure what I am hoping to accomplish because I doubt there is any way in hell I will get a character to 70 before the season ends.

I made it to level six and the blacksmith apprentice quest before ultimately deciding I needed to log for the night. I could have likely stayed up for a few more hours playing, but I was hoping to prevent the level of groggy that is already well underway this morning. Either I am getting better at click to move, or I am getting lazy… because in truth I didn’t really do that much clicking last night. I mostly ran around with my left button held down allowing the game to auto attack most of the mobs, occasionally throwing in a shield slam. I am still not a huge fan of the control scheme, and the announcement yesterday of Marvel Heroes 2016 introducing game pad control was welcome news. That said I am maybe okay with playing it every now and then. I have been feeling terribly disconnected and Diablo is the perfect kind of soloing but still having people to talk to type gaming experience. I booted up Wildstar and attempted to play for an hour or so last night, but ultimately felt horribly lost in the expanse that is Whitevale. Diablo 3 provided me tight and constrained corridors without much thinking, and that seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Tonight however I will have to put on my productive adult cap, as it is raid night and we are likely going to be doing more tries on Ravana.

Ravana Attempts

August 18, 2015 by Belghast

Unbreaking Google+

Last night I had a message from a long time friend of mine, asking me why I was no longer posting my daily posts on Google+ to which I kinda gave a head tilt and went “huh”? I had certainly seen my posts making their way to G+ anytime I checked my messages over there. Then I took a closer look and saw that they all said “shared only with you” which kinda defeats the purpose of syndicating posts in the first place. It turns out that nothing I have posted since July 28th has made it to G+ which is more than mildly frustrating. I un-linked my account from Jetpack Publicize and relinked it a few times, but I never saw the prompt that I once saw asking me to select what type of sharing level for my posts. So I took to the search engine to try and figure out what was happening. Sure enough it seems like Google did something to change its policies with what level of access external apps have access to your account. You apparently need to go into Settings > Manage Apps & Activities and then find the WordPress app or whatever else you are using for syndication. This will allow you to edit the permissions for how it will be sharing to your feed, and like I said before apparently the new default is “Only You”.

After posting about this last night it seems that this pretty much happened for everyone universally. I thought I would take a quick moment and at least explain how to fix it. As far as syndicating my posts… I tend to take the approach of broadcast what I write pretty much everywhere. Each of the social networks kinda has its own vibe and while I greatly prefer using Twitter, there are folks that read my content that equally greatly prefer G+ or Facebook or even Tumblr. My goal has always been to deliver my content as in as painless of a manner as possible for folks to read. I personally am not a huge fan of Facebook, and in fact I went through the crazy process of deleting my personal account once upon a time because it annoyed me. However when I started blogging I signed up for an account just for the purpose of reblogging my content because I know there are people who do prefer to use Facebook. Granted it might get annoying as shit if you follow me on multiple platforms to constantly see duplicate postings, but I guess that is a chance I am willing to take because I don’t want anyone to feel excluded or left out of the process. Maybe this is strange but my daily posting thing… feels like all of us are taking a journey together and I don’t want to leave anyone behind.

Ravana Attempts

As is always the case last night was we gathered up the Monday team and did some eight player content in Final Fantasy XIV. We started the evening by burning through all four parts of Alexander Normal for the folks who are not running it and capping out early like I am. At this point my Warrior is sitting at level 190 and I have everything I can get out of Alexander other than the chest piece. So as of today I will be largely running the place to help out the gear on my Dragoon. At some point I hope to get the chest piece but largely for cosmetic reasons because the Alexander gear set looks amazing. Last week we managed to burn down Bismarck Extreme and now both the Monday and Wednesday teams are keyed for the next primal encounter. As such instead of beating the sky whale again we decided to make attempts on Ravana Extreme. Now going into this place we had heard horror stories about how rough the encounter was and how it was another Titan Extreme where you had to move exactly at the right time and keep repeating a pattern. Honestly I didn’t see that at all. Instead I saw an encounter with a repeatable pattern but significantly more wiggle room to adjust as we went.

We made some serious progress last night, and I think more than likely we will be able to defeat him next week. Each attempt we kept creeping closer to the goal, and essentially what is going to be the make or break moment is dealing with the Final Liberation phase. If we can learn that particular dance we will have the encounter, and it honestly did not feel like we were too terribly far off from that process last night. Granted at this point we are significantly better geared than the first groups that attempted the fight, but my hope is that we can get in and start farming this guy so that folks can get the really awesome weapons. In truth I hope that we can farm both primals because there are absolutely weapons that come from both of them that I would like to see. We had the two handed sword drop from Bismarck last Monday and it looked amazing. It is the stupid things like getting glamour items that motivate me, and at some point I want to organize 2.0 extreme primal farming runs so that we can start to get folks their ponies. As it stands we only have a couple of ponies in the guild, and I think my Leviathan pony was the first. We need to figure out a method because really I would like to make sure everyone gets at least ONE primal pony before other people roll on it. Granted eventually it would be awesome to have people get a full set, but I would be happy with having everyone with just one as a starter.

Entering Whitevale

This morning I am having one of those mornings when I am easily distracted. The cats are tearing through the house chasing each other like they have gone mad. There is a dog barking and it sounds like it is coming from my back yard… even though it is really across the green belt. I keep flipping over to twitter, and having to force myself to put my fingers back on my keyboard and type in my WordPress window. Largely since this is Blaugust I wanted to include this little tidbit because it absolutely happens to me too. There are days when you cannot keep your train of thought, and I have learned to just go with it. Start writing the things that seem most natural and eventually somehow you will get back on track. Last night was one of those nights for me as well, and I flipped back and forth between games quite a bit as the evening wore on. Before the raid I spent time over in Wildstar with the purpose of trying to “finish Galeras”, which is a bit of a daunting task because there are a silly number of quests in that zone and many of them you will never actually find unless you go wandering around aimlessly. Bit by bit however I explored the regions of the map that had yet to be explored and I am now relatively confident that I have at least gotten most of the quests out of the way.

That now means the moment I have been dreading is upon me… and I had to take the flight out to Whitevale. I guess in part the reason why I have been avoiding doing this is that Whitevale ultimately was the zone that broke me when I played the game at launch. I am not sure entirely what it is about the place, but it felt like moving slowly through molasses. I think in part it was due to the fact that Dominion side there simply were never that many players in the zone, meaning that I could never get a group to do any of the group objectives, and the mob density meant that it was super hard to move anywhere without having to fight a dozen mobs. The zone also seemed to have a higher concentration of the challenger and superior difficulty mobs than the other zones. It seemed like I could not move anywhere without seeing one of those horrible flashing red shielded mob types that I had to try and chew through in vain. As a result I have honestly been scared of getting to this zone because it was my fear that once again it would break me. I have actually been enjoying the content so far, and finding playing the game refreshing. So hopefully maybe I can make my way through Whitevale because supposedly everything on the other side of it… is significantly better.

Social Robots

August 17, 2015 by Belghast

On Introversion

Every so often I hear something that makes me stop in my tracks and evaluate my own personal feelings about something. For awhile now there have been a chorus of folks warning us about the evils of technology and how we are losing our ability to relate to other human beings by replacing face to face conversation with a combination of text messages and email. This has honestly disturbed me a bit, simply because my life is actually so much richer thanks to the ease of non-face-to-face communication options. You probably don’t think that someone who can rattle out a post every single morning is an introvert, but in truth I am happiest when in my home with only my wife, the cats and the ferrets to keep me company. I suffer from a truck load of anxiety when dealing with people out in the real world. I do fine in social situations, but I also suffer from an irrational amount of stress leading up to it. I know deep down inside that I will enjoy myself when we go out to dinner or a movie with friends, but up until the moment we are actually leaving the house… every instinct in my body is telling me to call… cancel… and stay in the comfort and safety of my home.

There are times when I get this irrational fight or flight instinct, and I have learned over the years how to trick myself into ignoring it. The problem is it is still there and no matter how minor.. face to face interaction and using the phone… both stress me out beyond reason. If I need to make a call, like something as simple as making a doctor appointment… I will put it off until I have almost run out of time to do it. So when I hear people talking about how non-face-to-face communication is degrading the fabric of society… I get more than a little defensive. The ability to chat with friends over instant messenger, or hang out with folks on Teamspeak… give me a way of reaching out and hanging out with people without triggering all of the anxiety of sitting across the table from someone. I am by no means frozen by my fears… because I get out every day and talk to people, and put on my best friendly southerner act. The problem is I can only handle so much of this before my buffer of civility is drained and I need to get the hell away from other people.

Social Robots

So while listening to NPR over my lunch break, I thought I was preparing for yet another speech on how we just need to sit down and hang out together more often. It was then when they threw me a curveball. This discussion was about how we are interacting more with devices and how folks love talking to things like Siri or the new Amazon Echo. They talked about how we are on the cusp of having “social robots” in our lives that interact with us. Largely the discussion was about the dangers of interacting with things that have no empathy can have no ability to actually care about us as human beings. They talked about a study where they introduced a child to a what they kept terming a “social robot”, essentially one that mimics and mirrors human behavior. There were technical difficulties and after a few minutes of interacting the robot shut down. The child saw this as rejection… as this device “not liking her” and was extremely distraught.

With more and more AI entering our science fiction, with movies like Her, and the television show Humans… this is going to come up and ultimately we are going to have to deal with issues we have never dealt with before as a culture. The problem I have with this whole line of thought though, is that she kept saying that robots were incapable of empathy. As a programmer by trade I think maybe I just have a different line of reasoning behind this. What is empathy but essentially our way of decoding a series of inputs from another human being. What we call empathy is realy not that unlike what computers do with every single decision they make. They read in a set of data points, and then make a decision based on a predetermined matrix of possibilities. Without realizing it we are doing this every time we determine what someone is feeling or thinking… we are unwittingly taking posture, facial expressions, vocal intonation, and comparing to our own experiences to break down that sequence of data into a “feeling” or an “emotion”.

Human Machines

I would go so far as to say that essentially we are machines in the most basic sense of that word. Granted we are exceeding complicated machines, but every single function of our bodies is a system built upon a system built upon the encoding that we received at birth through our genetic make-up. We consume nutrients to power the cells in our body that are then programmed to behave in certain ways just like the code of a computer. While we have yet to delve into genetic hacking on a large scale, it has been happening in the lab for over a decade to produce new medicines. While there are ethical dilemmas standing in the way, I feel like by the end of my life time we will be treating diseases by rewriting segments of our internal “code”.

All of this said… since we are basically machines running custom hardware, executing custom code, and reacting to a lifetime of custom data inputs… doesn’t it seem naive to think that robots will forever be incapable of empathy? Machines are good at analyzing data, making assumptions on that data, and then reaching a decision. Since what we think of as “empathy” is essentially us doing exactly that thing… I cannot believe that eventually we will have machines that can mimic those processes that we consider as “unique” or “special”. I know this is a strange topic for a gaming blog, but every now and then one of these topics happens and I want to write about it. For ages these topics have just gotten filed away in my head for a later discussion… that never actually happens. Since this is Blaugust the month of pushing people out of their comfort zone I thought to myself… go for it, post it. Futurism is a past time that I love to indulge in, and I had an excellent discussion about it while recording one of the Bel Folks Stuff episodes. I think dreaming and envisioning these ideas helps us to formulate ways to deal with it when it ultimately becomes a reality. I would love to hear folks thoughts about this… or honestly if you just want me to shut up about these side topics and stick to game blogging.

[Edit]

Real quick edit to embed the Aspen Institute talk that inspired this post.

Herald of Andraste

August 17, 2015 by Belghast

Endless Faffing

It is funny how a conversation can set someone down a path. During the Saturday night recording of AggroChat 70, we got onto the topic of Ashgar playing Mass Effect again, which not surprisingly lead to some discussions of Dragon Age as well. For whatever reason I have struggled to play Dragon Age Inquisition, and in truth I had the same issue getting started in Dragon Age 2. It was a good year and a half after the release of that game before I finally managed to play my way through it, and I was beginning to wonder if the same would be true for Inquisition. At face value the game seems like the perfect mix of Dragon Age storytelling with Skyrim-esc open world exploration. The problem is the mixture together seems to be a confusing mess for me personally. Even though every single person I have talked to says to leave the Hinterlands… I struggle bringing myself to do this. The Elder Scrolls player in me wants to wander about seeing what all I can find in this nook or that cranny. Which means I have spent twelve hours so far playing the game and have not really accomplished much. Yesterday however I started trying to force myself to knock things off my quest list rather than wandering around and seemingly gathering up an endless number of them.

Not surprisingly as you can see above I am playing a Dwarven Two-Handed Warrior. That pretty much means I will always be grouped with Cassandra, because of the two tanky options I have encountered she is preferable to Blackwall. I don’t mind the character of Blackwall at all, in fact I kinda like it… but compared to Cassandra… well there just is no comparison. For most of last night I ended up playing with Vivienne as my mage, and quite frankly… I think I am switching back to Solas. Vivi apparently disapproves of my whole wanting to help the Mages thing, which is something that happens while I am playing Dragon Age. Normally I am more than happy to see Mages slaughtered by the dozens… but this game mythos actually makes them into characters I can sympathize with. It feels like they have simply drawn an unlucky lot in life, and are oppressed for it. Those Tevinter however… I am still more than happy to slaughter them by the handfuls. I guess ultimately last night I turned some sort of a corner and managed to get into the game just enough to make me want to keep playing it. Previously it was a pretty if not slightly awkwardly controlling Skyrim clone… but last night it finally became a Dragon Age game for me.

Herald of Andraste

I did not mention my favorite party member yet I guess. You can see in the background Sera, the awesome elvish archer you pick up in Orlais. She is sassy, irreverent… randomly shakes her ass at Vivi… and is having absolutely none of my shit. Grouping with her reminds me of the many nights Tarantella has hung out with us on voice chat, and I mean that in the best possible way. I’ve reached the point finally where I just want to play more of the game, and I had to pull myself away from the screen last night in the middle of a big action sequence because otherwise I would be non-functional this morning. The only negative is that the next few nights are largely spoken for. Tonight I have my original Final Fantasy XIV raid team, and Wednesday I have a second Static… with Tuesday sandwiched in between which I have been attempting to devote to some Wildstar play. My fear is that if I wait too long I will lose the momentum that I have going right now. I am not sure why this game in particular has been such a struggle for me to get into. I think part of it honestly has been that generally speaking I play single player games on my laptop downstairs. Dragon Age Inquisition will functionally run on said laptop, but it looks like shit and suffers from the shiny hair syndrome that occurs when you attempt to play the game on crappy hardware.

Instead I need the firepower of my full gaming machine upstairs to do the game justice. I am just not used to playing 50 to 100 hour games on my desktop. I guess in the grand scheme of things I am going to have to get used to it, because Witcher 3 suffers from pretty much the same issue. My laptop while more gaming oriented than a lot of them, is just dated at this point. It will run most of the MMOs I want to play decently, but the GTX 660m card in it just cannot handle the PS4/Xbox One era of gaming. At some point I will upgrade it and everything will be fine, but for as little as I have actually used my laptop of late… I just can’t see that as a sensible expense. I have a fairly checkered past when it comes to laptops. I’ve owned several “gaming” laptops over the years and each one dies a fairly spectacular death after a year or two of use. As such I pretty much have resigned myself to picking up cheap second hand laptops, because each time we have spent full price on one… it has lasted just long enough to get out of warranty before suffering some catastrophic and largely un-repairable error. The laptop I have now has been a trooper and in spite of it having a dated video card runs most everything that I want to play. It will run FFXIV in DX11 at around 40 fps which has made up the bulk of my recent game time.

Blame Origin

I am honestly not really sure why it has taken me this long to boot up Dragon Age Inquisition, and why it required the AggroChat show to remind me of its existence. I think part of it is the fact that it is on Origin, a client that unlike Steam I never actually have running. When I have a game on steam, I see it sitting there in the list mocking me… so I end up booting it up periodically. Origin however is in a completely different client that only really has Bioware games for me. I have been going through this down cycle lately where I am largely keeping to myself. Inquisition would have been the perfect game for this sort of activity, but out of sight out of mind. Honestly Origin works perfectly fine from what I can see, but as a testament to how little I use it… I had not actually added a single person to my friends list until last night when I imported my PSN network. I only did this because at some point we are going to try both some Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and some Dragon Age Inquisition Multiplayer. In spite of Origin doing a fair job, it still annoys me that I have to use it at all. Steam for me is a value add, because it gives me quick access to all of the games I want to play and represents a generally cheap and ubiquitous portal for purchasing them. Origin however falls in the same category as UPlay… as that piece of software that I am required to use but constantly frustrated by.

Last night I actually took some time and poked around the Origin store, and I came to the stark realization that honestly… the only EA games that I care about are the Bioware games. For the most part everything else is either a franchise I have grown out of like Battlefield, or one I have never quite gotten into like Sims… or a string of sports games that I have never had any interest in. EA largely produces games that I don’t care about, and I guess that is why having my beloved Bioware games blockaded behind the service feels so wrong. The funny thing about it is that the supposed core reason behind EA pulling out of Steam, was that they did not like having to discount their games on a regular basis. It seems that EA is having to discount their games even further than Steam generally did to get people to nibble. I noticed last night that Titanfall, the game that was supposed to herald in a new era of Xbox One supremacy… is down to $10 for the Deluxe digital collectors edition that once sold for $100. The only real positive however is that Origin also has cloud sync, so when I installed Mass Effect 3 it synchronized all of my save game data from the Bioware servers and it remembered everything that I had unlocked. All of this Origin ranting aside… I expect my solo gaming to continue on for a bit longer as I get some more Dragon Age Inquistion gameplay in. In truth I have reached a good pausing point in Final Fantasy XIV as I have essentially finished getting gear on my Warrior from Alex normal (minus the chest piece) and have upgraded every slot on my Dragoon to 180, giving me two viable characters for endgame shenanigans.