The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Some weeks ago I think it was Sammy said win 8.1 you still will not have the option to have or create a start button, here is a link on some of it's new navigational sequences, I didn't fully understand if they are giving you that option or not.

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-8-1-blue-features-release-date-download

 

Hi Fred - they don't. The "start button" does the same thing the start button on the charms bar does now. It does not give you a start menu that does anything useful, as per Windows 7 and prior versions.

 

Thanks Sammy

 

Well, after the PC component store I used to visit in london entered liquidation, I'm now back to ordering things online. Since we currently have no means of accepting deliveries at work, I thought I'd try out the UK's iterations of delivery drop boxes. Here goes - maybe should have started with something less valuable than a £360 disk controller!

 

Well, good luck Sam on getting that disk controller. I hope you enjoyed your golf outing, Stevo.

So, Jeff, Christa is her name - and she plays video games too! Great! Always nice to have things in common, especially really important things - like VIDEO GAMES!!! (And I'm not joking.) Next you need to take her out on the rifle range.

One time some years back I recall reading that the world's best CS player at the time was a girl - she had twitch reflexes and was a true Annie Oakley - she would roam around the map killing anything suspicious.

I interviewed a girl to be an assistant one time (I always employed high school honors students) who was just as addicted to CS as I was at the time. Needless to say she had the job - but she had borrowed her parents' car for the interview - and she for some strange reason had a bit of a hard time finding the office. So she had parked the thing outside our giant free parking lot in a street parking area that had limited parking.

After the interview wherein we mostly talked about Counter Strike, I drove her to her car and there was no car.

So I drove her home, and she called the next day and said she was in trouble, and that she was not allowed to take any job at this time. (The car had been towed and it cost her folks a couple hundred to get it back.) I guess it was just as well, because while she was a great CS player with a 1:1 KTD ratio, she obviously lacked common sense, hahahaha.


Jeff, I took your advice on Assassins Creed III and made sure I had the latest drivers - for some reason I thought it was an older game, but it came out only about 8 months ago, at the time I last installed drivers. Anyway, the new non-beta are 13.4 - so as of April - and I'm still not getting super great fps, but passable - I only notice lagging a few times. (But I'm not in snow anymore, so we'll see what happens later.)

Before I start complaining, let me say that this is another "astonishing" game - the horse riding is superb, the countryside is absolutely gorgeous. I thought Far Cry 3 was a pretty game - mostly I loved the water reflections - but this game is far prettier.





For another thing, the naval encounters are stupendous. I apologize for this one single screenie - I was too busy trying not to get sunk. If you look at my mini-map, that one guy approaching from my port (left) front side - the little boat with the red circle meaning enemy - is but one of about a dozen enemies - all the red are toward the front starboard side, or directly starboard. Once I learned about the pause menu dna button, I went back and played an earlier naval battle, but this one was far harder, since one of the ships was almost as big as mine, almost as fast, and had just as many cannons as I had.





I have sailed from time to time, being a member of a sailing club in Newport Harbor for several years - it's a small monthly fee and then you pay when you charter a boat. I like to sail a 30 footer - they are cheaper than the 36' boats, but just as much fun - you have a nice several-ton chunk of beautiful wood under your control. But in the game it's a 120' sloop, and it totally feels realistic - the movements are very authentic, and you can call for half sails to make faster turns, or full sail to mostly outrun the other boats.

Lining up the ship to shoot a broadside of cannon shot is tricky - I still haven't gotten that one right - and then with the right-mouse button you can shoot the swivel cannon which is good for smaller, like the one heading toward me in this screenie.

Most of the google tips, by the way Stevo, including the most helpful of all, are for using a controller - since the game is ported to every device known to mankind, including cell phones, lol. So if you prefer controller over mouse and keyboard, this might be the game for you.

The graphics everywhere are mind-blowing. The townspeople are always doing something to make the game seem more real, and the animal animations are first rate, including the hawks and eagles, plus also butterflies, rabbits, deer, except possibly for the bears which are done better in Far Cry 3 - but I usually stay well clear of them anyway.


I will say, that this game badly needs a hint system. Or maybe I'm just a dummie. I'm reminded of the trouble that Kevin had in the Far Cry 3 menus - but in my case I just ignored all the troublesome icons and played along without knowing what I was doing, haha. But it made the game much harder for me than it needed to be.


For example, I first ran out of arrows doing my little hunting bit, and played about 10 hours without any arrows, wondering when the game was going to give me some more - meaning I had no range weapon at all - and the whole time I wondered why the game was so goddamn difficult. (I passed wagon after wagon and never knew they were a store.)



I also didn't know about holding the right mouse and the left mouse at the same time, to activate the "killing frenzy" mode - so I was astonished at how badly my player fought (making me feel like I was back in Sleeping Dogs getting my karate ass kicked.) I ended up having to escape most of the time and rely on the drop assassination on a one by one basis. (That is really cool by the way - like Max Payne bullet time - but it's a short slow-motion QTE that always results in one dead guy.) However, the one-by one drop method takes a long time, with much greater chance of being involved in one-on-one fights where my guy isn't so great a fighter, versus charging right in and killing 5 guys in a row.

SO WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY IS, DON'T BE A DUMMIE - GO READ SOME TIPS OR YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE THE GAME!

I finally found the journal and read through most of it - that was after doing some google research - like the 10 most important tips. Interestingly, there was only passing mention of the travelling wagons. It isn't obvious that they are where you buy stuff.

How about a game tip such as "Jump on top of a caravan wagon - you can buy or sell without being at a general store." I discovered that by accident.

There are no game tips. I'm going to write ubi support and make the tip suggestion. Of course, they've sold 55 million of the franchise, so they have the right to tell me where to stick my "tip" idea, but I think I have a point. LOL

Rich

 

So difficult for me to choose a game :S I have countless at my fingertips! And yet I choose Angry Birds so easily LOL!

It may be time to dust off GTA IV!

 

Disk controller is home safe - Amazon Locker was a doddle, will probably be using that a lot in future. Now I just need to wait for the cables to be ordered in from the US to Span - a bit more of a trek to pick those up (15 miles each way, the other side of london to home), but still cheaper than paying £13 to ship some already very expensive cables (and they should be ready to pick up at the end of the week, versus next week if I had them delivered). SFF-8643 may be the standard, but UK stock of them is point blank non-existent, and at £20 each for 1m cables, believe it or not that's by far the cheapest price out there! Server equipment don't come cheap... :/

Still, I suppose you can argue they do handle 4 drives each, so £5 a disk, £80 total. 16 1m S-ATA cables that are any good might not be much more than that.

 

I'm currently selling multiple items on ebay, to raise funds for the device I'm building. If all goes well, I should be able to post about the device in a month

 

I see, wandering about London are we these days? Let's see, would that be by motor car, (on the wrong side of the road - sounds dangerous) or by - is it.... the tunnel? as I seem to recall (meaning subway?) Come to think of it, a tunnel sounds pretty dangerous too! Now I know why we fought the revolution - you guys are just too dangerous to leave in charge of things!!

Well, I'm writing my little suggestion to Ubi as we speak, about putting some tips into Assassins Creed III - so if you see that come up in a game patch, it was ALL ME, like the natives love to repeat endlessly in Far Cry 3 after every victory "This was ALL ME."
Haha.

Rich

 

Sam, I have a friend who spent a few months in England last fall. He spent quite a bit of time in and around the London metropolitan area. You are lucky to live so closely to a densely packed city. The simple proximity of things eases a great many issues.

Ha she's interested in going to the range. I need to be careful not to bring anything too scary or any shoulder-breakers. So the SKS and Lever-action 30-30 might be okay but the AR and Magnum 12 gauge should stay safely locked away for the meantime. When you don't grow up with them constantly around, some of them can be pretty intimidating. I still carry a healthy amount of paranoia and caution when handling any of mine, more than many. I treat my firearms as serious tools.

I'm glad you are so entertained by Assassin's Creed! The first one is basically entirely forgettable, but the rest of them are very high quality games.

It's sad the same can't be said for the latest Operation Flashpoint games, Dragon Rising and Red River. They are fantastic games but are let down terribly by their technology. I highly enjoyed the gameplay but the chokingly narrow field of view gives me motion sickness and spoils the pretty graphics by leaving you permanently zoomed into everything you look at. It's prevented me from further playthroughs and really enjoying them as they were meant to be. Months and months of searching for an answer have turned up nothing as the community for both games is very small with almost zero mod support. Tools have been released to force a new FoV but only support certain versions of the game or are no longer available to download due to poor community project support.

 

You wouldn't drive in London if you had any sense
No, I've commuted by train ever since I started working in London back in 2011 - Only recently since moving to the new location three weeks ago have I actually needed to go underground every day, not that it bothers me.
The previous office was located near a DLR station
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway )
which is a contrast to the traditional London Underground as apart from being driverless, it also doesn't have any of the history, as most of the places it serves were brownfield sites when it was first built.

The route I use now (once in the london area) is this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_line
Also automatically driven, but driver-supervised. The eastern section I travel on is also fairly contemporary, only having been completed in 1999.

 

Mind the gap.

 

Sorry to disappoint you, but that's only said at stations where there's an appreciable gap to mind. Since both the DLR and JLE were built with disabled access in mind, there aren't any gaps to speak of Nonetheless, that recording is still commonplace on the majority of the rest of the network.

 

Get here the Five-SeveN, it's expensive but has tons of power, little recoil, and a lite gun to carry. I will be getting one of these bad boys in a riffle and hand gun some time down the road but like I said they are expensive to buy and shoot but well worth it as they are accurate and lethal. The fully automatic riffle is awesome!

 

The 5.7mm is a "new-age" concept round that was only fully realized when the company that designed it, designed the firearms for it as well. The Five Seven pistol and P90 were both designed in-house for FN Herstal for the express purpose of showcasing this round. The Five Seven round(or 5.7 x 28) is lightweight, high velocity, accurate, and high penetration. It can defeat most known body armors due to such high penetration. It's an excellent round but, as you say, somewhat hard to find and pretty expensive to shoot. They are priced like rifle rounds.

If that interests you Rich, you might also want to check out the 7.62 x 25 pistol round. It is very similar in concept to the 5.7 x 28 but was designed pre-WW2. It has very similar characteristics; light weight, penetration, defeating most known body armor, but is somewhat hard to find due to its age. Usually only obtainable in Cold War bulk, from specialty arms mfgs, or you can make them yourself with the right reloading equipment.



Boy this thread has gotten off track. Any new hardware developments lately?

 

About as stagnant as my wallet

 

Where are you from DDP? It's a billfold. A wallet is often made of leather, to store cash and/or credit cards, personal information, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallet

What I meant, was PC technology is about as stagnant as my financial savings LOL!

 

I guess I can appreciate that. However, I don't keep much cash on me, I still have a wallet It houses my license, and ATM card. Which is as good as cash.