Videochat February 2018

[Ross Scott]

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

 

 

 

Here's the February chat with fans. I'm mostly recovered from my sickness, except for my voice, it got to be a real strain towards the end. Work is progressing on the videos in almost every other way except voice acting, so I should be well prepared once my voice fully returns.

 

There were a lot of announcements this time related to the movie and future videos. So if you're a modeler, animator, composer, coder, pc gaming enthusiast, linux enthusiast, or 3d printer, there are different announcements I wouldn't mind feedback on for each category; those are all towards the beginning. More videos once my throat fully recovers!

 

COMMENTS

[Roygbiv]

Good to see that you're recovering. Regarding music, you're always free to use any of my tunes.

[grizzlyxjim]

As far as games that used to work on an older OS that no longer work on windows 10 Neverwinter nights one and two and Empire Earth. I Love those two games with all my being and they are no longer playable for me on my windows ten machine. Would love to see a game dungeon on either of those too! Thanks for the Update Ross. I don't comment much but I always follow the vids and such. Look forward to your projects and get well soon. Not sure if they have it in Poland but Throat Coat tea is a life saver for anyone that makes their money with their voice.

[Meelis13]

As far as games that used to work on an older OS that no longer work on windows 10 Neverwinter nights one and two and Empire Earth. I Love those two games with all my being and they are no longer playable for me on my windows ten machine. Would love to see a game dungeon on either of those too! Thanks for the Update Ross. I don't comment much but I always follow the vids and such. Look forward to your projects and get well soon. Not sure if they have it in Poland but Throat Coat tea is a life saver for anyone that makes their money with their voice.

huh- empire earth is very much playable on windows 10. playing it quite often these days

[Obsidian]

If you have hardware that supports it, OS virtualization under Fedora with IOMMU passthrough (basically hardware passthrough) may be something to consider. You'll want 2 GPUs, 1 for Fedora and one for your VM, but you'll also want to make sure the GPU for your VM is compatible with older OSes (finding XP drivers and such). Nvidia tends to suck for these set ups because their drivers will detect if you're running a VM and refuse to load if they do, but there are changes to the VM settings you can make to get the driver to load and run. There's a small penalty performance-wise, but the experience is WAY better than trying to run the VM through something like Virtualbox, Fusion, or using Wine, especially for graphically intensive applications, IMO.

 

The major cons here is making sure you have the appropriate hardware. You'll want a good CPU with a decent amount of cores and RAM (like with other VMs) in addition to the two GPUs, but also a CPU+Motherboard that supports IOMMU.

 

There's a lot of tutorials on Youtube to set it up, and plenty of reddit posts with further details (obligatory Level1Techs mention). I run a setup like this myself, except my system has 3 GPUs, one for the host, one specifically for XP, and one for modern gaming. I've been able to run any game I'd like without worrying about OS compatibility. You can even set up an OSX guest if you want to mess around with Mac for some reason.

 

If you want to go nuts and throw some money at an option, you can also checkout Unraid (SpaceInvaderOne on Youtube has a lot of helpful videos for working with Unraid), which can do the same thing but does not require a GPU dedicated to the host. Which, given the GPU shortage, may not be a bad idea if you don't have a spare GPU laying around. Unraid is geared for much more than hosting VMs, but it apparently does an awesome job for that as well.

[Mr. Nestlé]

For Wine, if you just want to try games and see how well they run, I'm pretty sure that using Ubuntu is perfectly fine as you don't really need the latest kernel and software for that. You just need to make sure you get the best driver for your GPU installed and running. For whether games work on Wine, their own database is pretty much the best way to collate information. I'm afraid I don't know anything about forcing anti-aliasing with Wine, though.

[GordonFreeman]

Hey guys, I send Ross an email telling him to get in touch with my brother about automating his requests for manual review- hope he gets it and sees it.

[Diem]

"Dead Game WARS"

 

That'd be a fun, odd idea for a little fictional series.

[Cybershaman]

Real Engineering (A YT channel run by a guy from the Netherlands w/ just shy of a million subs) just posted an interesting video about why Bitcoin is not working. Very interesting if anybody is interested in that sort of thing.

 

Basically, (if I understood the material correctly) between the mega-miners (which will probably drop out of the game when the last new "coin" injected into the system is mined because their income will come solely from the transaction fee) and those involved solely from an investment standpoint (they don't really "use" the currency and are causing the value to be extremely unstable), Bitcoin will likely fail.

 

The video also touches on how much of a resource hog Bitcoin is. (With the exception of possibly those located in Iceland where they use geothermal energy and the naturally cold air to cool the racks of equipment.) It's staggering to see how much energy Bitcoin actually uses overall. Currently, Bitcoin mega-miners require a staggering 30.1 TERAwatt hours per year to function. Put in perspective, that's the same amount the country of Serbia uses per year or 0.8% of what the entire United States uses*. Then, when you take into account that Visa which uses 0.19 terawatt hours per year, this is where it really starts to boggle the mind, especially when you compare the number of transactions that Visa does each year (111.2 billion) to Bitcoins (100 MILLION or, for decimal point's sake, 0.1 billion). If I'm doing my math correctly, that means that Bitcoin uses 15842% more power than Visa does to do 0.09% of the amount of transactions. That's just...insane. Am I doing my math right here? :/ That means that the amount of power that would be required to process Visa's number of transactions alone would be (as of 2014) %150 more than all of the countries of the planet combined. (Holy crap. Again, am I doing my math right???) I guess that's assuming if the mega-miners were still running. Would bitcoin even work without them now? I think it would, it would just take much longer to process transactions. My mind has already melted so I do not want to go there just yet. We'd have to get numbers for how many "normal" individual computers it would take and what their average power consumption was and... Sorry! That's it. My mind just blew up.

 

Anyway, I hope this video is really as interesting as I thought it was! Take care, everybody!

 

*I don't know where Real Engineering got their power usage figures from, but I used Wikipedia to find out the worldwide figure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption.

[Cybershaman]

I may have made an error in assuming that the number of mega-miners would scale with the usage of Bitcoin. But...did I really? If Bitcoin got that huge, there would certainly be more mega-miners. Considering that one Chinese mega-miner (from the video in question) spent $80k a month on electricity but was turning a 1.5 MILLION a month income from mining, I would think that even more miners would want to get in on the action. So, while the number of mega-miners wouldn't scale linearly with more usage, it would certainly increase. BTW, I sure am glad I bought my Asus GTX 1080 Ti Poseidon video card before all of the insanity happened this last year. Did anybody here get screwed out of getting a new video card by this? I have a couple of friends that did. I also posted a comment under the video about what's going to happen when mega-miners start dumping their cards onto the market. Or will they just use them until they burn out? I know from experience that if a component lasts more than a year or two, it will probably last a long time. But, then again, I wouldn't want to buy a card that, say, had been running 3DMark Extreme benchmark tests for over 2 years. I would be interested if anyone had some comments or thoughts about that. Should "caveat emptor" be even more of an issue when buying used video cards in the future? Hmmm... Food for thought!