Dipping a toe back into gaming...

[KGIII]

Another 50 hours to play the game.

I suspect it took me longer than that. I'd play while inebriated and only have a couple of hours at a time. So, I'd forget all sorts of stuff and be lost. I'd end up having to check a walkthrough to find my place again.

Also, I guess I kinda gamed in the meantime, but not for terribly long. I played a silly online game called Kingdom of Loathing. That was more a social thing than a gaming thing.

 

[KGIII]

Oh, and I had to do some work to get Baldur's Gate II Expended Edition up and running. It needed a dependency that had been updated. I was able to get that downloaded and installed - but I fear a newbie wouldn't have a clue how to do this.

It involved starting the game from the terminal, finding the error, finding the appropriate .deb file, and then being fortunate that it didn't lead to dependency hell, Nowhere online were the directions to do this. I did make a quick post on the GOG forums that might help someone in the future.

 

[KGIII]

So, I played Pillars of Eternity for a few hours last night. It wasn't all game play, a lot of it was figuring out things like the controls. It's a good challenging game to use as a refresher on gaming. I have the game wound down to an easier level, which does make combat easier. I still have to figure out the rest, but combat doesn't seem to immediately kill the party.

I think I need to refine my understanding of the combat system, as right now it's just largely automatically hacking and slashing. I assume there's more to it.

I think I may take a look at Steam after all. We'll see...

 

[Deleted member 147986]

Steam is pretty good these days. Proton and Wine keep improving at such a rapid pace it won't take long before Linux gaming is awesome for any game which isn't bogged down with some weird anti cheat software.

 

[KGIII]

Steam is pretty good these days.

I have yet to play with it.

We do have a game that was given away here on the site, but I didn't ask for a free key. It's on sale for like three bucks, so I may install Steam and give that a test drive.

I do have some questions that amount to personal questions - meaning, I have actually important tasks to complete and need to know that I'm not going to waste too much of that precious time gaming.

And, well, if I'm 'gaming' then what level do I want to be on. I've been told that I can (and research suggests I can) just build my own gaming rig and come out REALLY good for under five figures. Instinct tells me to go for the professional racing sim setup, but then you're paying for updates constantly and newly/freshly digitized tracks aren't cheap. I guess the physics engine they use is also expensive on a per-car basis and they really only create the cars that are legitimately going to be raced. It'd be fun to race an accurately modeled F1 car, but I think I might have more fun ripping an old CRX around the Nordschleife like a maniac. I give up a tiny, tiny percentage of realism for more fun (and a whole lot less money).

Meh... We'll see. I plan on returning to the game tonight to see if I care enough to spend more time playing.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

Not familiar with professional racing setups, but if you can't build a gaming rig for 2000-2500 dollars I would be asking questions for sure. That gets you near the best PC gaming has to offer today. Yeah I get that a good steering wheel and pedals will cost 200 or so, but still that's a far cry away from 5 figures. You don't need to aim for the absolute maximum in every single aspect to be able to have fun.

 

[KGIII]

You don't need to aim for the absolute maximum in every single aspect to be able to have fun.

I also only want to buy it once. Also, I want the best of the best, for longevity and warranty sake. It will have a real Recaro seat, for example. I plan on going for the hydraulically activated seat and a few monitors to wrap around. I have a room in my basement that is unused and I intend to turn the whole thing into a racing sim.

I was at one point looking at some real F1 chassis with built in sims, but the company ghosted me just as the pandemic got real. I still want to go in that same direction. The steering wheel alone is 4 figures.

It's a combination of liking nice things AND not wanting to have to replace much of anything from there on out. I expect it to last the rest of my life.

Unless I go for the sim setup with Windows and like ACC and GT. I expect to have to replace that every few years, though I should be able to keep most of the hardware.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

Totally respect the wanting the things you buy to last part. Replacing hardware sucks. At the same time it is inevitable as physical parts wear out. Part of the hobby I guess.

Do manufacturers in the racing scene provide spare parts like some in the flight sim scene do?

 

[KGIII]

Totally respect the wanting the things you buy to last part. Replacing hardware sucks. At the same time it is inevitable as physical parts wear out. Part of the hobby I guess.

Do manufacturers in the racing scene provide spare parts like some in the flight sim scene do?

Absolutely, at least if you go with the big companies. Like, you can get replacement parts for Fanatec steering wheels. You can also take that same wheel (in many cases) and use it on a real car. Assuming you're using it on a car that supports it, the buttons will work on that car and the RPMs will accurately display in the color bar across the top of the wheel.

I did consider a flight sim and something I've learned is that some of the hardware is similar. It's similar enough for you to be able to swap stuff out fairly quickly and just go with it. But, if you think racing sims can get expensive for a setup, you should see what the top-end of flight sims cost. Holy garbanzo beans, can flight sims get expensive.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

For sure. Can't justify the expense, but would love to have dual VKBs. Even at 400+ dollars that's considered a mid range option not even close to the high end. High end flight sim gear is off the charts expensive.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

For games where 17 buttons on a joystick is not enough I use Numen to map voice controls to keyboard buttons to extend it.

Numen Voice Control

Voice control for handsfree computing

numenvoice.org

 

[KGIII]

I use Numen to map voice controls to keyboard buttons to extend it.

I'm gonna hope that I never reach that point, that is the point where I have to use voice controls.

Who am I kidding? It's likely to happen. Just like there have been attempts to force touch controls on things... So to will come a time when voice controls are required. My daily driver actually supports both. You can also use hand gestures for some things, like ending a phone call, moving to the next track, or changing the channel on the radio. You just kinda wave your hand in front of the infotainment system and it deals with it.

My daily driver is the M6 Competition. You can even tell it to fetch itself and, in theory, it'll back itself out of a parking spot or the like. I don't actually use these features, they just exist. The resale value is going to be REALLY good or REALLY bad. It all depends on how the tech holds up. There's even a cell phone app that will fetch the car from the parking spot.

I don't expect the tech to hold up, but I do expect the performance to hold up. So, I'm optimistic about resale - except I might just keep it. It doesn't get that many miles.

Anyhow, back to gaming...

I have Steam downloaded and it confuses me. It doesn't like my wireless connection. It refused to connect until I connected to an ethernet connection.

I then bought the game that was once advertised here. That seems to have worked, but it's barely downloading now that I've switched back over to the wireless connection. I am not impressed, but it's still very new to me.

Also, it only appears to recognize internal disks. I can do something about that, but I'm not sure which route I'll take. I should be able to grab an SSD with a few TBs for not much money, but I'd like to go with a smaller NVMe and then a big regular SSD. I'll need to do some research.

This whole gamer thing is pretty new to me.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

The internal disk thing is easily circumvented by making a symlink for the steam "common" directory on another drive.

Steam has options for where you want to install a game. If those are not enough, or if it's just easier, just symlink the common folder to somewhere else.

It holds 95%+ of the data. If it becomes a problem for the operating system drive, just offload it to another drive.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

My daily driver is the M6 Competition. You can even tell it to fetch itself and, in theory, it'll back itself out of a parking spot or the like. I don't actually use these features, they just exist. The resale value is going to be REALLY good or REALLY bad. It all depends on how the tech holds up. There's even a cell phone app that will fetch the car from the parking spot.

I'd prefer to be in the car as opposed to some automated system running over a kid because it's too dumb. Instead of a smart car I prefer a dumb car that just works.

 

[KGIII]

I'd prefer to be in the car as opposed to some automated system running over a kid because it's too dumb. Instead of a smart car I prefer a dumb car that just works.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than you.

I don't actually use the feature, but I know of no accidents from the system while human drivers run over kids with some degree of regularity - as there are generally ~32.4k deaths due to car accidents (this includes pedestrian deaths).

I don't actually want a self-driving car, but they don't have to be perfect - they just have to be better than human drivers.

 

[KGIII]

Steam has options for where you want to install a game.

Yup. I eventually found that option.

Amusingly, it doesn't want to connect over my phone but will connect over ethernet. That'll be my next Steam challenge.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

So how is gaming these days, enjoying the fun or still looking at hardware choices?

 

[KGIII]

So how is gaming these days, enjoying the fun or still looking at hardware choices?

I've had a few gaming sessions - where I spent a few hours playing. In fact, I'm hoping for some free time to do so this weekend.

As for the hardware choice, that's a long one. There's a company that makes professional sims but they don't have a real showroom or anything like that. So, I need to fly out and test various things before committing to that route. I may go the simpler/cheaper route as the company I speak of has been pretty slow to communicate with me in the past few weeks.

If I'm spending that kind of money as a regular person, I'm gonna have a lot of questions. I'm also going to want to try it before I buy it, and that means trying different configurations.

If I'm reading between the lines correctly, they pretty much are still at the stage where they're built to order. This means they don't have a showroom with a bunch of setups for me to come try at once. That's contrary to what I was told early on. So, I'm likely to keep digging.

This isn't something that will be decided all that quickly. I've been enjoying Pillars Of Eternity. I'll hopefully make the time to play tonight.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

If you do end up spending silly amounts of money on a gaming setup, at least post pictures of it.

 

[KGIII]

If you do end up spending silly amounts of money on a gaming setup, at least post pictures of it.

It will be a dedicated racing sim, not a generic gaming rig. (If I'm spending that kinda money on it.)

I'll share pictures, though maybe only in PMs.

Man, there was one company that has ghosted me entirely that had the front end to real F1 cars, like four of them, and were willing to build a sim into them. I've tried to get in touch just recently and they've completely ghosted me.

They're the ones who build specialized sims and don't have a showroom like one might expect. They won't answer my emails and I haven't even bugged them in an unreasonable manner. I can afford their product well enough, but they refuse to reply.

It's a bit annoying as I could have spent that time researching other companies. They're not entirely unique. I guess that's what I get from taking advice and leads from Reddit.