Heliocentrical

@Connectamabob yes I agree 100%. It is my belief that software should as simplistic to use as possible. I'm pretty certain that most CLI commands could be GUIfyed(horray for making up words) and thus be more approachable to the average user. I would love to work with people who follow a similar philosophy but Sadly there doesn't seem to be much incentive to make Linux more user friendly. Linux has a very passionate community surrounding it and they treat Linux like their baby. So if the community doesn't want something it's not going to happen. Each Linux distro caters to a very very specific audience, only that specific audience and that's a huge fault. On top of that most average users would rather stick with OS they already have. There's plenty of circumstances as to why isn't Linux is popular and unfortunately they're not likely to change.

That CHOISE is what annoys me. As far as I'm concerned I should get CHOISE choice to turn fast travel off in the options menu so it's not in my face. Is that so hard to ask for? Um no I didn't, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I complained about Open World Design. I'm in favor for a purely Open World game over one that awkwardly mashes both a fast travel system with open world design. Look if you like fast travel that's fine and I don't hold it against you. But I have a right to express my mind for any specific feature I dislike. If you have a problem with someone's opinion who isn't imposing it on anyone else then I'm afraid I can't help you. I even said getting rid of Fast Travel entirely was far too harsh as it has it's own strengths as does pure open world design. I just don't think they should be occupying the space and should be their separate individual system.

Open World Design and Fast Travel don't play to each other's strengths. Open world wesign strength is immersion whereas Fast Travel's is convenience. If you're going to have fast travel why even have an open world in the first place? Why not just make a purely Fast Travel based game if that's what you care about. That way you wouldn't have to worry about the Open World Design. Likewise if you want to do an open world game just do an open World game. Sure you can avoid it to some degree in Bethesda's RPGS. But it still gives you the prompt to fast travel when you hover over a mark. But with the Witcher 3 you have use signposts due to how the game was built. You can't boat from Novigrad to Skellige if you wanted to. Also how do you know where each town is in Skyrim? Outside of the area you start in you shouldn't know where any other areas are because you haven't been told where they are.

Then developers should include an option to turn it off in the options menu. I wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't completely your face with no way of turning off outside of cheats or modding it out. Witcher 3 doesn't even have mods to remove the damn signposts. It's obnoxious and developers put it in without considering how immersion-breaking it can be. Also Open World Design and Fast Travel do not compliment each other. Neither systems' strengths are used to their fullest. For instance Open World Design's strengths are length and immersion whereas Fast Travel's strength's are being instantaneous and convenient. Utilize both systems in your game and they wind up compromising/countering each others' design since both of them come from opposing design philosophies. IMO They don't mesh well together and they would work much better if only one system was being used rather than awkwardly combining the two. I was probably a bit too harsh with wanting to ditch Fast Travel entirely as I prefer a pure open world. As I said Fast Travel has it's strengths. But utilizing both a Fast Travel System and an Open World Design in the same game is just counter-intuitive.

Fast Travel should go die in a fucking hole. It's in my face and it ruins my immersion. Having Fast Travel is not an excuse for barren open world maps. There's got to be stuff in between where you currently are and where your heading too. I know you want talk about how big your map is but if it's empty then it's not a very impressive map now is it? Maybe you should scale down your map so that it isn't so hollow. Oh but who am I kidding? Open world games have been nothing but map size waving contests for years. It doesn't matter how big your map is it's how much stuff in your game that matters. I'll take small maps full of stuff over gigantic maps with nothing in them thank you very much.

But that uncertainty is why I feel it's closest to the truth. With theism/atheism there's isn't anything more you can explore because your already believe god does/doesn't exist and therefore you take comfort in what you believe to know. It depends on what you want to get out of the thing you believe in. I personally would rather be immensely uncomfortable than wrong and if I'm wrong then I'll just change my opinion to whatever is the right answer if such an answer exists. @SelfSurprise would Ignostic be an accurate description of someone who believes that whether god does/doesn't exist is irrelevant or that it can't be known?

I have an FX-8320 with a hyper 212 EVO, Cooler master thermal paste and 3 fans. One fan in the front of the case, another attached to the cooler itself and the last one at the back. I've made it so both the front fan and the fan attached the cooler function as intake while the back acts as exhaust. Theoretically this should create this long chain of cool air being pulled from the front and out the back. My CPU is currently running at 35 degrees Celsius. I Also clean my case once every two weeks. Thought this might help Ross since our setups are pretty similar except he has an FX-8350 as opposed to an FX-8320.

Undertale One hell of a shmup with exceptional writing and characters. It doesn't quite top Planescape:Torment but goddamn is it close. Undertale puts all the usual tripe video game writing to shame. Could we please have more of games with good writing pretty please? That reminds me I need to finish Witcher 3 at some point.

I don't know what to say Jeb, if my emotions were balanced/healthy I would probably agree with you. But my emotions have always fluctuated in intensity from seeming like I'm dead to seeming like I'm high and when I'm on that emotional high it's so unpleasantly intense it feels like I'm losing my mind. Being emotional numb is the only way I've found to ground myself and I've grown to hate that emotional high because it feels like I have no control when I've experienced it. It's far easier for me to simply not experience a particular emotion than to experience it and try to calm down. Emotionally dead probably wasn't the right choice of words since I still enjoy video games and have the occasional laugh. But outside of that I choose not experience much else because I find them to be far too dangerous. There are some emotions I just don't handle well or am physically unable to due to their intensity. You've got a point, the one thing humans have over computers is their Dynamicism. I have yet to see a truly dynamic computer and I don't think one could be made since all the information they pull are from static sources.

{"ScottD.Betson uses triple entendre on BTGBullseye"} {"It's super ineffective"} OT: "I Guess my cousin Jesse needs a job, if only he wasn't a sex offender it would be so much easier to find something for him." Freeman's Mind: Episode 1 I crack up each time I hear this. It's so bad.

I really should get back to GW2. I had a great deal of fun while I was playing it.

Well I don't exactly like being human Jeb. Ideally I would be some sort of computer.

TACOS ARE GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fuck emotions, why do we insist on making them sound so complicated and deep? They aren't you fucking hipster, they're just chemicals in your head that make you react a certain way and no love isn't an emotion it's a concept at best. Fuck me why couldn't we have turned out like the Vulcans from Star Trek? That would literally solve all our problems, dumped all of the stupid baggage that comes with being a human and who knows how much scientific progress we would've made.

Then how do you distinguish between enjoying something and doing it a lot from being chemically addicted to a drug? They seem quite similar. You'll still experience some form of a withdrawl purely from turning something into a habit and then reverting it back into not a habit. That withdrawl is your brain adapting to a new circumstance. I don't know, from my perspective it's a chemical addiction not unlike drug addiction. Hormones are chemicals and if we didn't have them we wouldn't be compelled to have sex. All sex is purely for continuing the species and nothing more than that. If you eliminate that aspect from sex it acts in a similar fashion to drug addiction. Now I'm not saying that's bad thing. if we didn't have that compulsion then our species would've died off. Chemical safeguards are important. But sex still uses us and we have no control over it. You said that commercial promotions use the promise of more/better sex in order to promote their products. In order to do this they use large female breasts and exploit that fetish. Outside of demonstrative purposes and most commercials I've seen don't demonstrate how female breast functions I can't really think of why else they would be present or have the camera focusing in on them. But is that necessarily the same as a real life sex partner? What makes you think that people with this level of convenience would want to transition over to a real life human which isn't as convenient?

I agree, there are only so many times I can replay a game before I start losing my mind. I hate that sense of deja vu you get from doing multiple playthroughs. To some extent walkthroughs reveal way too much. I only read the bits I need and then if I'm really concerned I'll read the rest the walkthrough. I think maybe the best way to go about this is to write down some sort of checklist/strategy for myself and only progress when I'm comfortable with doing so . But man, some of those older RPGs/point & clicks can use some of the most obtuse moon logic I've ever seen. Planescape: Torment in particular has a lot of moon logic. "Make sure to talk to the old lady, have her remove your intestines and lose some of your permanent HP otherwise you won't be able to finish a large quest chain for one of your companions." I hate things like that and in PS:T it's especially egregious because stuff like what I've just described feels like a total gamble. If you weren't following a walkthrough for all you knew the devs could just be fucking with you by giving you an option to remove your intestines. For games with moon logic I would say following a walkthrough is essential. BTW the reason I started this thread in the first place is because I'm thinking about playing Fallout 2 without a walkthrough. I've stopped play FO1 since people seem to regard it as the weaker one of the two classic fallout titles and I hate it. If FO1 is just mediocre then judging the whole classic Fallout series by my experience with FO1 seems rather unjust to me. From what I understand there's less combat in FO2 than in FO1 so I'm willing to give FO2 a shot purely because of that. I still stand by what I said about the combat being a godawful mess but maybe if there's less of it maybe I won't mind as much.

It isn't a chemical addiction but a mental one. The overweight people I know seem to have this irrational fear that they'll run out of food if they don't eat it or see food get thrown away. It throws them into a panic not unlike a phobia. Now that I think about it might be more accurate to describe this phenomenon in America as a phobia of not constantly eating rather than an addiction to food itself. Again it could be a phobia of not having sex rather then addiction to sex itself. Isn't that what addiction is? A disease which causes the subject to become dependent upon the drug they've consumed? Also weed is a drug people can take for recreational purposes. So yes drugs can be taken recreationally unless you don't consider weed to be a drug. Again I'm not so sure you and I are on the same page here. When did I say sexualization was linked to sex drive? Sexualization is an artificial economic construct attaching itself to the concept of sex. Or you might suppress the desire entirely. It depends on the intensity of one's sex drive and this can vary from person to person. While you might say that you can't possible expect to speak for everyone because you can't. Yes it is a fetish, a fetish normalized by society but a fetish nonetheless. If an object with no inherent sexual functions is considered sexual by someone this person has a fetish for said object. Large female breasts do not have any inherent sexual properties so anyone who finds female breasts sexual has a fetish for female breasts. If anything I would tend to say the opposite is true, that the interest in artificially looking female form has increased dramatically over the years with the introduction of VR porn and sexualized robots.

So this was an interesting question that passed by me today. How do you prefer to complete a game? Multiple playthroughs where you find everything on your own or walkthroughs where you find everything in a single playthrough? I honestly prefer walkthroughs. I can't stand not finding everything in a single playthrough and it drives me crazy if I know that I missed something or that I thought I missed something. I've had to tell myself that it was okay when I missed something multiple times. I know finding stuff on your own is much more organic but the alternative of playing the same game over and over again is like a Sisyphean hell to me. I would do multiple playthroughs anyway either because I miss something and couldn't go back to get it or because my character build was slightly flawed. It is not fun.

I don't think we're on the same page here, I'm referring to recreational activities that can evolve into addictions such as eating, having sex, taking drugs not necessities like clean water and power. Our brains are hardwired to participate in these activities and since we derive pleasure from them they have a high tendency of becoming habitual. Once they become an addiction it can mentally harm the addict if said addict was unable to fulfill his/her addiction. While moderation of these recreational activities isn't impossible I have yet to see it in the western world. But you would've been used to feeling like crap at that point so feeling like crap wouldn't impact you on a mental level because you're used to it. This the form of mental immunity I was talking about. If say chemo made you feel really good you would've instead developed a sensitivity to feeling like crap rather than an immunity and possibly an addiction to chemo. It's basically what it sounds like. Anything can be fetishized and as long as there are fetishized objects there will be an industry specifically tailored to facilitate this newly formed market. The demand for said market can then be amplified via the media. Take large female breasts in the western world for example. Nothing inherently sexual about them and they serve an important function to breast feed infants. Well at some point large female breasts became fetishized and then that fetishization was then amplified by the media. large Female breasts then became viewed as shameful and slutty for simply existing. It's also worth noting that repression plays a key role in the fetishization process. Shortly thereafter a market for large female breasts cropped up and as result industries such as the silicon breast implant industry and the bra industry were formed to cater to this market because they served to enlarge breasts or make them appear larger. I also believe female ankles were fetishized at some point as well but I don't have enough information to go off of since that fetish died out a century ago. I would also take what I say with a grain of salt since these are assumptions based off of what I've observed in these newly formed markets. But I still think my theory of self-fulfilling markets holds some weight. Anyway just some food for thought.

I have played FEAR 1 and it's expansions. It's jumpscares are particularly dumb. Not only were they not scary FEAR gave away most of it's jump scares before they even occurred effectively killing the one strength jump scares have. "This our setpiece jump scare, be scared."

I actually didn't know what a soundfont was till you mentioned it. I did some digging and apparently the default MIDI soundfont for Windows XP is located at c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\gm.dls . I'm on Windows 7 and the file is still there so it will probably still be there for you as well. That's all I got though, sorry. As I said I literally just found out what a soundfont is moments ago. Edit: Okay so gm.dls isn't Soundfont it's DLS. You have to convert it soundfont using a sample converter. I honestly have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm going off of what this person posted here over at Superuser http://superuser.com/questions/107255/wheres-windows-xp-standard-midi-soundfont .

*Jump Scares I fucking hate jumps scares, they're just cheap excuses for developers to be lazy rather than putting some actual thought into their game by building a dark and immersive atmosphere. Could we please go back to the Quake I style of horror where the game purely by design is intense and exhausting to play? I don't care what people say Amnesia:The Dark Descent isn't terrifying in the slightest.

#27 Comforts Lead to Weakness I believe that when we indulge upon comforts it weakens us and leaves us susceptible to addiction. All Comforts are habitual mechanisms, it's in their nature to have you return to them as much as possible. As such it's important to subject ourselves to as much discomfort as possible so that we're mentally hardened rather than weakened. So that when we're deprived from a comfort we can endure that deprivation or possibly become immune to it entirely. This philosophy can be applied to virtually everything the modern world has trouble dealing with such as overeating, oversexualization, procrastination and countless others.

You could say the exact same thing about people who become Vegan as means of protest against the meat processing industry. That their missing out on the nutritional qualities meat has and that they won't make a difference. But you see they care about the larger picture and my case is no different. People shouldn't have to put up with cumbersome DRM just to play their game and since exe cracks are being branded as illegal the only legal alternative are DRM free digital distribution platforms like GOG. GOG has made some incredible progress over the years so I'm not willing to give up 5 years a boycotting Steam just because Steam has games that might interest me. 5 years ago Valve decided to arbitrarily ban my account and I haven't been able to get it back since. I lost access to all of the games I had attached to that account and I'm sure as hell not falling for that trap again by making another one. I think that's primarily due to basic cel shading. Cel shading makes the model's texture look like it's 2D even though it's in a 3D space so on a visual level not much has changed. But if you apply shaders that don't suit the model well that's when it becomes uncanny. Like for instance have you ever seen one of those anime models imported into the source engine with the source engine shaders applied to it? Those look very uncanny.

Unless not supporting Valve directly affects Ross (which I don't see why it would) it's not ironic. Also the Valve Games / Valve Stuff board is practically dead at this point so it's not exactly relevant anymore. Anyway back on topic. *Cartoonish 3D Models Whenever I've seen a game with 3D models with cartoonish proportions it comes across as uncanny as fuck. 2D proportions do not transfer well to a 3D space. Unless you're deliberately trying to weird out the player like Psychonauts you should stick with regular proportioned models.