Recent Posts

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Gaming / Re: wut specturr'z playing

« Last post by Spectere on February 27, 2021, 01:18:33 PM »

I ended up earning the Lazy Bastard achievement in Factorio last night. Basically, that stipulates that you have to launch the rocket (thus winning the game) while only manually crafting 111 items. This is actually more stringent than it sounds, as every single component (including stuff like iron gear wheels) counts toward this total. There also isn't much wiggle room, as you need to to craft 104 items in order to bootstrap automated production and get your first assembler. I also upped the ante a bit by refusing to use any of my stored blueprints (kind of a mixture of my own designs as well as efficient setups I saw online and liked).

The beginning is definitely the hardest part, as you basically have to keep changing that assembler to craft whatever you need at the time, but it gets easier as you build up little mini-malls, but then it starts to get tedious as your base expands. When everything is small and compact, you just walk over to a chest and yoink whatever you need, but as soon as you have to start covering more ground, you find yourself having to go farther and farther away just to get some conveyor belts. Then, later on, you unlock the logistics system and it goes back to (mostly) being a typical game of Factorio.

But yeah, all in all, that's a nice, shiny gold achievement for my Steam profile, and at this point in time I can call myself a 2.7%'er. Honestly, out of all my Steam achievements right now (of which I apparently have 3290), I'd say this is the one I'm happiest about.

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by Spectere on February 25, 2021, 02:56:45 PM »

Will do! Kinda looking forward to it, honestly. I never really spent much time in classic b.net, so being able to do lag-free, single-player uber hunting and rune word tomfoolery sounds pretty awesome.

And hey, no shame in respeccing. I was thrilled when Blizz patched respecs into D2 and bummed when I saw how limited they were. I'd argue that one of the things that Blizzard really nailed with Diablo 3 was the experimentation aspect (though they went and fucked that up by introducing grossly overpowered sets that demand specific builds).

Besides, we're (sort of) adults now. We don't really have time to scrap an endgame character just because we realized that they weren't tuned well in the middle of a Hell run.

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by vladgd on February 24, 2021, 08:59:28 PM »

I'm also kind of curious as to whether D2:R is going to retain the direct TCP/IP multiplayer option of the original. That's becoming less relevant as time goes on, I suppose, but it would be nice to see a LAN-party friendly game come out for a change.

I'm going to have to guess "probably but not guaranteed" on that one. I clearly heard it mentioned in the Q and A, but wasn't 100% sure how serious the guy was.

Tell me what you think of plugY after you got a few hours into it. I've leveled at least...40-50 characters, maybe more over level 50 in diablo 2 over the years, and having a mod that let's me just do things is nice. I was playing a sorceress a1 normal using charged bolt, wasn't having a good time...just reset my skillpoints in the UI and went fireball instead, much better. Ohh a piece of gear that is a big upgrade, 50 strength, I only have 20...lemme take some points out of vit, dump into str, GOOD TO GO. Fire staff I was using on my assassin that I no longer need, dumped it into the shared stash easy access for my sorceress to pick up when she hit 19.

Cheating? yeah sure, but who cares, it's single player, I played enough d2 as is, it's just fun. In like 2 days I have a 14 necro, 20 sorc, and 51 assassin...they don't make em like they used to.

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by Spectere on February 24, 2021, 11:44:57 AM »

Yeah, that was my other point of concern. I already have my Diablo II/LoD installer backed up (along with the latest patches) just in case, as well as still owning a copy on CD, just to be on the safe side. Assuming they follow through with those promises, I'm glad they actually learned a lesson from that debacle.

In generally it sort of feels like they're promising less than they were with W3:R, which is probably a good thing in this case. They promised a lot of improvements with W3:R and wound up delivered a product that was inferior to the classic game. With D2:R (getting some real DDR Extreme vibes up in this bitch) it feels like they're advertising it as the original with prettier, upscaled graphics (no small feat given that it's all sprite-based!) and the odd, LCD-unfriendly 25fps cap removed. This may seem like an odd sentiment, but I also like that the upscaled (might be more fair to call them "uprezzed," seeing as it doesn't seem to just be run through a filter) UI graphics are sort of ugly when you look at them from a contemporary lens but they perfectly fit the late-90s/2000 style of D2.

If they make the online system more similar to Diablo 3, I might actually partake in it. I diddled around with D2's Battle.net stuff and...ugh. What a pain. It's still not great that some runewords are online-only, but if they can be modded into the single player game it's not really too much of an issue, I suppose. I'm also kind of curious as to whether D2:R is going to retain the direct TCP/IP multiplayer option of the original. That's becoming less relevant as time goes on, I suppose, but it would be nice to see a LAN-party friendly game come out for a change.

It's a little annoying that it's not coming to macOS, at least not initially, but since they're supposedly still using the original engine that's probably not too surprising (macOS has been pure 64-bit since Catalina and I'm sure the engine still has a lot of little bitness-specific gotchas baked in). I'm sure it'll probably run fine under my Windows 10 VM, but it would have been nice to have a native port.

Also, thanks to the link to plugY! I'll have to check that out later.

I think whether or not plugY will work with D2:R depends on what sort of mods D2:R is meant to work with. PlugY hooks into Diablo 2's internals, so if D2:R changes too much or adds some sort of anti-tamper solution into the mix (and given that we're talking about Activision, I wouldn't be surprised) it's going to make things difficult, if not impossible. It's more likely that their goal is to support stuff like Median XL, which, IIRC, only touches the MPQ files.

The problem is that the term "mod-friendly" is pretty vague. It's just as likely that they're explicitly adding in mod support (like a loader that would allow you to have multiple gameplay mods installed and switch between them) as it is that they're leaving things as-is so as not to break existing gameplay mods. I guess we'll find out more as it gets closer to release.

I did sign up for the technical alpha, so if I get picked (and there isn't an NDA on the whole shebang) I might be able to offer more info later. I do have a history of actually submitting bug reports instead of just treating it as an early demo (especially during the Cataclysm beta cycle) so I guess we'll see!

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by vladgd on February 23, 2021, 03:33:31 PM »

Worst case scenario is at least better than Warcraft 3.

One of the issues I have gameplay wise, I have probably played a vast majority of my diablo 2, single player offline. There exists very powerful runewords in the game that are LADDER ONLY, not for normal battle.net characters OR for single player characters. I understand locking them behind ladder ONLINE, but offline, that's just straight horseshit. Even more that they doubled down on keeping them ladder only in resurrected to "incentivize" people to play ladder. Which the main incentive to play ladder is to start fresh with everyone online, not to make that runeword or two to play with for a few months before season ends...

(I feel a need to explain why singleplayer and not b.net. Battle.net characters are deleted after 90 days of not logging, I can go years without playing this game so thats one nope. Ladder lasts 6 months afiak, then you're booted to nonladder, so that character you worked so hard to gear, no longer has ladder gear, NOPE number 2. Mueling gear between characters requires trusting other players, so that's nope number 3)

But uhh since they aren't killing the original diablo 2, I found this here mod which is going to make me play even more diablo 2 than I intended. I rarely play mods, but this is more of a QoL update to the base game if anything. Single player only, can craft ladder runewords offline, infinite stash space, a shared stash between characters that is also infinite, amongst other QoL things. So you can play offline, magic find with a character...and transfer those items to other characters that can use that gear...without exiting the game and using an external file reading tool to drag and drop items between characters. IT IS AWESOME HOWED I NOT KNOW IT EXISTED EARLIER.

They also talked about being mod friendly, so theres a possibility that this thing could be ported over to d2r. But even if it can't be ported, the vanilla game aint going anywhere. So if the single player is like vanilla d2, and can't be modded to have ladder stuff, I may just play d2r for multiplayer only, and play this plugY mod on vanilla d2 for my offline characters.

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by Spectere on February 22, 2021, 10:22:27 PM »

It looks promising so far, but we'll see...fingers crossed and stuff.

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by vladgd on February 22, 2021, 08:32:04 PM »

So like Blizzard is kind of bad now a days, but I just can't NOT be excited for a diablo 2 remaster. I may have reinstalled d2 and completed normal difficulty already...

Just dont fuck it up this time blizzard, we remember war3.

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by Spectere on February 21, 2021, 01:22:55 PM »

Yep, definitely makes sense. I guess one bit of silver lining here is that there are a decent number of good cans that can be driven with anything.

As far as your earbuds go, it helps that they support aptX/AAC. Not sure if you've ever had the "pleasure" of hearing SBC, but it's godawful. Nonexistent highs, muddy lows, and compressed mids. Blargh. I'm sure they also sound better than the ATH-M50x (seriously, I prefer my Apple buds over those).

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by Bobbias on February 21, 2021, 04:06:19 AM »

Well like with keyboards, I'd like to branch out in the future when I can afford it. I haven't had much chance to listen to other decent quality cans. The only other pair I have is these RHA MA390's, which I use with my phone. I will say they weren't as bad sounding as I expected, but that was a pretty low bar.

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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness

« Last post by Spectere on February 20, 2021, 09:55:19 PM »

If you plan to stick with the Grados for the foreseeable future, I'd say that an amp would be wasted on them. Based on both personal experience as well as other anecdotal reports it doesn't seem to do much for them, if anything.

That said, if you're looking for a DAC/amp to get around a noisy analog jack (which stillseems to be a common issue with laptops for some stupid fucking reason), I'd recommend one of FiiO's offerings. I used one their E10K when I was still physically going to work and it seemed to do a pretty solid job. I only drove IEMs with it personally, but I've heard that it can handle HD600s with no problem. Not bad for US$76 (looks to be $100 in maple leaf bucks?).