Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - Spectere

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 14
16
News / Admin approval is now required for all account registrations
« on: January 07, 2019, 10:05:08 AM »
I honestly never thought the spam situation would get bad enough for things to come to this, but I've had it with this bullshit.

It doesn't help that SMF's development is pretty much glacial at this point, to say nothing for the plugin ecosystem, so trying to combat this by tweaking the settings or installing an addon has been pretty much futile. The methods that I used to use no longer install cleanly into 2.0.15 and I was pretty much over manually installing mods all the way back in the arch0wl.com days, so this is about the best "compromise" I could come up with.

All in all, I suspect it's going to be way easier to mass-delete inactive accounts every few days than deal with "hot fortnite xxx cock pussy creampie viagra" threads popping up daily, so that's the route I've decided to take. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

17
Song of the Day / [Prog Metal] Devin Townsend - Kingdom
« on: December 03, 2018, 12:01:20 AM »
Wait, I didn't post this yet? Let's fix that, shall we?

Here's the album version (audio only):



And here's a really entertaining live performance that he did for EMGTV (which exemplifies why I freaking love Dev):



Those freaking vocals. Holy shit.

18
Gaming / RIP TotalBiscuit
« on: May 24, 2018, 07:53:21 PM »

Best wishes to his family and friends in these difficult times.

19
Computing / Found pics from my 2003 PC build!
« on: April 27, 2018, 03:47:15 AM »
Found a bunch of pics from one of my old builds and it really brought me back, so I tweeted about it at length. Twit thread starts here! Click the date to see all the tweets!


INCLUDES EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF SPECTERE'S FIRST STEPMANIA RIG.

20
Gaming / NVIDIA Tegra X1 BootROM Exploit
« on: April 24, 2018, 08:43:57 AM »
So there's a "little" exploit in the Tegra X1 SoC that allows users to bypass its protections and load arbitrary code into its trusted zone. This is a pretty huge exploit, allowing devices with the Tegra X1 to be pwned pretty thoroughly. There's no real way to fix this, either, since the issue is in the chip's bootloader.

So, why is this in Gaming? Simple: the Switch uses the Tegra X1. If you have any interest in Switch homebrew, you're probably going to want to pick one up before NVIDIA releases updated silicon.

Now even though arbitrary code execution is unpreventable, bear in mind that Nintendo can still put measures in place to detect any shady activity and ban hacked users from their online services. If actual homebrew picks up in a big way after this I'll probably grab a second Switch for licensed gaming and use my first generation hardware strictly for homebrew.

21
News / Discord Server?
« on: April 16, 2018, 11:43:28 PM »
I've been thinking of setting one up for this little place. Obviously you could would be more than welcome to invite friends and such.

Whatcha'll think?

22
News / Song of the Day Forum Added
« on: April 13, 2018, 11:19:04 AM »
In case you somehow missed it, I created a place for us to recommend fun, fancy musikz.

Direct linky: https://spectere.net/forums/index.php/board,16.0.html

23


Before Machinae Supremacy released Into the Night World I wondered how they could possibly top Hubnester Rising, the final track on Phantom Shadow. From the very first time I heard The Last March of the Undead, however, I knew that they'd managed to do it. Like Hubnester Rising, The Last March of the Undead is the closing track of its respective album. MaSu seems to have a knack for putting their best work at the end of their albums.

The instrumental work is great as always. The guitar solo near the end, coupled with the percussion during that bit, practically beg for some headbanging, with the rest of the song being fairly energetic (which is basically one of MaSu's staples).

The lyrics and how they're delivered stand out to me. It shares the bleakness from the previous March of the Undead titles ("Come watch with me / As our world burns"--strange appropriate in this political climate), but carries with it an air of defiance ("I will not let you go for anything / Screw balance, I want more / A life worth living for").

While I think that Phantom Shadow as a whole is a better album, the bookends of Into the Night World (the other one being My Dragons Will Decimate, another amazing track) are some of the best songs that the band has on offer to date.

24
Song of the Day / Rules
« on: April 13, 2018, 11:16:29 AM »
We all like music, right? Right. A lot of forums have "whatcha listening to" threads, right? Right.

But we're not like other forums! We're way deader SMRTER, and in our case we now have a whole forum dedicate to it! In this forum, post a thread with a song that you like, ideally with a link (or YouTube embed) so that the rest of us can have a listen (if one is available). Additionally (and this is where our rampant SMRTS come in), tell us a little bit about the song. It can be a sentence or a few paragraphs. Let us know why you like it or why we should check it out.

To keep things consistent, please use the following format for thread titles:
  • [Genre] Artist - Title

25
Gaming / Skyrim VR
« on: April 11, 2018, 11:21:13 PM »
Yeah, I bought Skyrim again. Totally fucking worth it.

I only got about 90 minutes in before my legs just didn't want to stand anymore (side note: I need to play more VR) but yes. Yes. Yes yes yes. Yes. It feels so good to play. Big thank you to Zenimax for not trying to punish Rift users because they're butthurt about losing Carmack, might I add (they tried to intentionally block Rift users from playing Doom VFR, but Valve patched SteamVR to break their block--kudos to Valve for that!).

About the only things that I have to complain about so far are as follows:

1) Tilting up on the thumbstick moves you where your offhand controller is aiming. I prefer being able to control where my player's body is facing (i.e. HMD movement is totally separate from the player's body). I don't usually physically rotate my body in games with free locomotion.

2) It's based on Skyrim:SE, but the textures are still fairly low res. This can be fixed with mods, but I'm a little surprised that Bethesda is still riding on a "high resolution textures" pack that dates back to when 2GB of VRAM was considered a lot.

3) Their implementation of positional audio is pretty lousy. Kinda seems like they rolled their own instead of using a library designed for VR. The problem is that audio positioning is very harsh. If you're talking to someone and turn your head 90° to the left, you will only hear them on the right side. That's...not at all how sound propagates through the world, and it's extremely jarring in VR in particular. Apparently there is a mod that fixes this and further improves the game's audio.

4) Performance is better than vanilla, but it still stutters occasionally on my rig. That's kind of shocking, honestly, considering my system specs and the fact that I'm running it from an NVMe SSD. It wasn't enough to get me sick, but from what I've read it seems like I'm far more resilient to the effects of motion sickness than most people are.

Creating your character in S:VR is pretty magical. There are no controls to putz with the camera. No, instead you walk up to your avatar just look at them. The scale feels pretty close. Canonically, Argonians max out at right around my height (I'm 1.85m/6'1" tall) and I was more or less looking at him face-to-face.

OH YEAH, and the scene where Hadvar tells you to stay close to the wall, then Alduin mounts said wall and starts YOL TOOR SHULing everyone? AHHHH IT WAS SO COOL!

Aside from that, I wish that the game had something like Immersive First-Person mode built in. I want to look down and see my lovely Argonian bod, dammit. I kind of worry about using one of the S:SE mods that do that (if any exist--I've never played, let alone modded S:SE) since a lot of them like to throw in head bobbing. Yeahhh, head bobbing is definitely something you don't want to have in a VR title.

All in all, it's a much better showing on so many levels compared to Fallout 4 VR. FO4VR feels like a $60 beta in a lot of ways. Is Skyrim worth buying a headset for? Yeah, probably!

I'm probably going to throw some visual and QOL mods at the game and see how that goes. Dis gonna be fun.

26
Gaming / Far Cry 5
« on: April 08, 2018, 05:31:40 AM »
So the game was pretty damn fun. Probably the best Far Cry game since 3, IMO.

Then the ending hits and it's at least as bad as Mass Effect 3's. Like, holy shit.

The only things that kept me from uninstalling the game on the spot and shoving it into my "Complete Shit" Steam folder is 1) the DLC looks interesting and 2) Far Cry Arcade looks interesting. I have no intention of ever playing through the campaign again. The ending is truly that bad that simply knowing that it exists is enough to undermine the rest of the game, and I type this without a hint of hyperbole. I was planning to 100% the game and now I don't even intend to do that. The campaign is completely dead to me.

27
Random Chat / Hey guys!
« on: April 05, 2018, 06:53:35 PM »
This is the 40,000th post on this revision of s.net. Wooooooo.

</spam>

28
Gaming / DJMax Respect [PS4/PC]
« on: March 05, 2018, 09:29:29 AM »
The North American release is finally arriving tomorrow. Who else is grabbing it? ;D

If anyone is on the fence, I played on an imported copy a couple of months ago and it's seriously incredible. As far as I can tell, all of the UI elements and videos were rerendered in HD. I didn't even see the slightest hint of pixelation. It's clear that a lot of love and RESPECT (derpderpderp) was put into this.

29
Gaming / Twisted Mettle - An "Accidental" Fundraiser
« on: February 21, 2018, 08:52:03 AM »
A couple friends of mine wound up having some serious automobile-related misfortune over the past couple of weeks. All of that happened on top of trying to save money to build a house, etc etc. In light of this, we're going to be doing a bit of a fundraiser. A nice excuse to play games, make bad jokes, and raise some funds to help cover some of the mounting expenses (one car was totaled, the other's fate is still undetermined).

On Friday we're going to be playing the new Metroidvania title Mike Dies and on Saturday we're (naturally) going to be playing a bunch of car games, including Burnout Paradise (for maximum cartharsis). Full schedule is available here:

https://horaro.org/twistedmettle

Should be a good time!

30
Gaming / Community Keyboard Megapack - Volume 3 - The Lost Steps
« on: February 09, 2018, 08:22:06 PM »
No, you didn't misread the subject. I've had this shit on my hard drive for almost 12 years. It's time that more people actually got to fucking play it.

https://files.spectere.net/stepmania/CommunityKeyboardMegapack3-TheLostSteps.zip

A few things to note:
  • It's completely unvetted. This contains every one of the 151 files that the arch0wl.com community picked for inclusion.
  • It has T-1000. Why the fuck did you assholes vote for that? <3
  • Sync is probably all over the place. I was originally going to sync everything so that the pack would at least be consistent, but I lost the drive to do that when a0.com died.
  • No folder art. I remember some was provided (I think Reach made it) and I'm fairly certain I still have it, but finding it would be a pretty monumental effort.
  • I had nothing to do with the CKBMP3 and CKBMP4 packs released on stepmaniaonline.net, though I appreciate the people that put them together! That CKBMP3 and this one do have some overlap, but that one has a few files that this one lacks, and this one has a loooooot of files that the other one doesn't have.
  • SERIOUSLY, T-1000?!
Enjoy!

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 14