Quoting: foobrewI've been using OpenRGB for around a year now and it was very hackey in the beginning. Seems like it's improved quite a bit so, hopefully, I won't have to mess with manual kernel patching anymore. So far, I've just used it with some Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro RAM sticks and it works great. The nice thing is that once you set them how you like, they retain that setting indefinitely since it's stored in the device's non-volatile memory.

Totally OT, but seeing your avatar I can't help but ask, "It comes in pints?!"

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General Horse? Does this have something to do with Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog?

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Quoting: KimyrielleElder Scrolls is still the newest of its kind

I suppose it should really be called Younger Scrolls.

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Quoting: PatolaThe wine puns finally exhausted!

Tapped out, I guess. Towards the end he was scraping the bottom of the barrel rather.

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One Hand Clapping, huh? I wonder what the soundtrack on that one is like. :whistle:

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Is it just me or does it feel like a bunch of older open source games are being revitalized lately?

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I like the way he phrased it. Someone who understands that Windows and Linux both run on PCs.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library GuyLet me just stop you right there. I like some RTS. I spent a good deal of time back in the day playing original Starcraft; it's fun. But, despite the word being in there, they are not strategy games, they are tactical action games. My claim does not apply to them. I am perfectly capable of imagining ways in which VR could be applied entertainingly to RTS games.

So, Real-Time Strategy is not Strategy?

No, it's not. Just like "strategic voting" is actually, and very specifically, tactical voting--when you vote "strategically" you are actually making the decision that in the particular case, the strategy of gradually building the electoral movement you prefer is outweighed by the tactical issue of the outcome of the current election. Mistaken terminology is common. And doubly common in game genre naming.

The point is, strategic games are in the end largely about abstraction and ratiocination. If you need reflexes to win, it's not a strategy game. (That is of course not a sufficient condition--there are lots of kinds of games that don't need reflexes to win)
At a basic level, it's unlikely that VR will do much for them in the same sense that it's unlikely VR will do much for crossword puzzles. VR is useful for immersion in a reality. Strategy games are not about immersion in a reality. Strategy games fundamentally need to present interesting mental challenges. At the UI level, what they need to do is arrange things so you can easily see the nature of those challenges and spend not too much of your time doing things unrelated to them, like moving between different UI bits or repetitive micro-managing, while still preserving the mental challenge itself rather than glossing over it too much. The main goal is not for the UI to be immersive, but to be clean.
Sure, a bit of glitter doesn't hurt, some feedback when you accomplish something and so on. And yes, VR can provide glitter. But basically, virtual reality is not fundamentally oriented towards doing things that strategy games need--contrast, say, first person combat where VR is thoroughly and obviously oriented towards doing exactly what it needs. There's a continuum; some genres are clearly drastically improved by VR, some can be improved by VR a fair amount, and some can be improved by VR very little.

Quoting: PatolaNo, not at all. First, let's look at this statement: "nobody ever does anything else but use the limits of their own imagination" does not inform anything about something being true or false -- it's a fallacy (Argumentum ad Populum). Bad habits used by the majority of people do not justify their use by you in a debate. And that is the same thing with using the lack of imagination as an argument -- it's another registered fallacy, with latin name, wikipedia page and all: Argumentum ad Ignorantiam [External Link]. What that means is that you can't use it to logically advance a point, because there is no relation of implication.

I suppose I was using the term "imagination" rather broadly, since after all you were projecting it onto me when I hadn't actually used the word. But you're missing the point. It doesn't matter how nice it would be to base arguments on things we can't even imagine, that's impossible to do. People are limited by the limits of their imagination. That certainly includes you--no matter how much you complain about the notion of only describing, arguing about, or otherwise discussing what one can imagine, that is all you are, or ever can be, doing. If you can't conceptualize it in some way, you can't talk about it. It's useless to complain that my partaking in the human condition is poor argumentative form; when you yourself become God you can put me down for it.
Granted, you can talk about things you can't imagine very well--but even deliberate contradictions can be imagined, you imagine this sort of fugue state, some kind of weird rapid unstable alternation between is and is-not.

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat's all very fine, but not every tool is suited to every job. Just by the by, I also can't imagine how someone could use Microsoft Bob to improve strategy games, nor do I think a really good IDE for the computer language R would improve strategy games much. There may be smart and creative people out there who could show me for the foolish philistine I am on these topics; I am satisfied to remain deluded until they actually make a great strategy game incorporating an IDE for R.

Creativity/innovation does not mean randomly making very unrelated things work together -- although some times it does just that, and these examples outshine others because of their excentricity. Your example just show some directions which have very low likelihood of working, and I could similarly cite a few directions which have some high likelihood of working, but in the end, you can't forecast the innovation.

So you're saying you're arguing with me even though you have no idea whether I'm right. But the thing is I'm precisely saying strategy is a genre which is basically unrelated to VR-ness--thus VR really enhancing a strategy game would be "randomly making very unrelated things work together".

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo for instance, with VR it would be easier to do a 4X space game with a genuine three dimensional galaxy, where you'd walk around the stars and stuff. But what I'm not at all sure of is whether that would actually make it a better game or if it would just be a distraction from the decisions that make strategy games interesting.

Yeah, you're not sure, and this is formally a pseudo-argument.

Half of what you've been saying is claims about stuff being fundamentally unknowable, and then you turn around and complain when I fail to evince perfect certainty. Fine, let me rephrase: I strongly suspect that such things would just be distractions. Happier?

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Personally, I suspect a major reason piracy on PC games has declined has little to do with better DRM as such, which as far as I know still gets routinely hacked. Although DRM does work more effectively for online multiplayer, so it probably has a fair amount to do with that.
But probably Steam has more to do with it. Steam makes non-pirated games nicer to own than pirated ones. I can't imagine trying to keep track of a buttload of pirated games instead of having Steam keep track of my games for me, and it's kind of nice to have various elements of the platform there, forums, tutorials, achievements, mods, whatever.

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Quoting: tuubiI'm not claiming to know one way or the other, but the lack of independent studies confirming your claims should at least be noted. You can always find anecdotes to support any hypothesis, but that's not the same as data.

Well . . . despite the old aphorism, anecdotes are in fact data. Not well sampled data, definitely far into the "qualitative" rather than "quantitative" end of things, but still data.

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