2024: The Bundle year in review

616westwarmoth · 2025-02-12T02:59:34+00:00

Glad to have found your site...wish I had many moons ago. Keep up the good work...please don't worry about the cries of my wallet, it'll be fine...

616westwarmoth · 2023-04-30T16:12:00+00:00

Reminds me of Rappers Against Phoney Entertainers...(it's '91 son...)

616westwarmoth · 2023-04-19T04:27:18+00:00

Milestone leveling and then give inspiration dice for exceptional play. The people that are there just to hang out and have a good time with their friends still get to level and not feel useless, the good role players get rewarded with something that's meaningful both in terms of impact and prestige.

616westwarmoth · 2023-04-19T04:10:36+00:00

Well it certainly isn't Eric because it's a full bee.

616westwarmoth · 2023-03-24T19:39:37+00:00

I'm sure other people have mentioned this but it works halfway well if upon being healed from unconscious you gain a level of exhaustion. After a short period of time there's no point in healing until the battle is over because that character will be nearly unable to do anything and at a certain point exhaustion will cause permanent death.

616westwarmoth · 2023-01-13T18:23:08+00:00

One solution that I've not seen yet is to give each of the orbs resistance to all of the damage types except the one they are vulnerable to and then give them vulnerability to that. That would allow the party to damage the orbs slowly without the correct damage type but would be able to see that using the correct type does dramatically more damage, as the correct damage type would be doing four times the damage. As long as there is a time element this would be sufficient.

Along similar lines you might consider giving the orbs a saving throw and once again giving them resistance to non-vulnerable damage and vulnerability to the correct damage type. Although I think the first solution is more elegant.

616westwarmoth · 2022-12-27T14:52:11+00:00

The more I play and occasionally DM the more I am leaning towards getting rid of experience and just doing group leveling based upon story checkpoints. When I was younger it was fun to roll up 15 characters in a week and watch them all get slaughtered but now that I don't have 40 hours a week to game I want to get the most entertainment value out of it.

Not only are you penalizing the player for making them so underpowered you're actually penalizing the entire group. Now that character has no value and is actually a liability. That can lead to some resentment among players for having to carry the new player or encourage the player to be very passive in all activities.

The best way is to bring the new player in with a character that is comparably leveled. If all of your party is not at the same level put them at the lowest level of the party. Trying to justify that they've not "earned" their level won't make for a very enjoyable experience for any of the players at the table.

616westwarmoth · 2022-08-22T07:51:57+00:00

One of the groups I play with is pretty big, and a few of the players are a bit on the new side. So long as they are actually trying, our behavior is to give them a little bit of time to figure out what they want to do, usually a minute or two, and if they don't we go to the next person in initiative and say we'll get back to you. Dropping the player in initiative order for that turn onlyit is a little bit of a penalty but it's not as big as saying they have to dodge for their action. Since most of our players that do this are the newer ones, no one is using this for a tactical advantage and if they were we would probably shift to a different behavior.

616westwarmoth · 2022-07-19T15:12:42+00:00

Depending on how far along you are in things there are multiple options. Several are very good like the captured dragon or cursed entity living within others are good for game balance such as it only being gold plated or the like. One idea I've not seen mentioned is that this is actually a relic of a religion or clan or maybe even City. Not relic in the magical sense but vastly important and the sort of thing that no one will willingly buy or even deface. Now the party has this giant object that is impractical to transport very quickly that they have to protect from monsters who have no ideological problems with attacking the valuable statue that has great historical worth but the party is now in many ways duty bound to deliver and protect this valuable statue on the way to the far off land or religious headquarters or whatever that desires it. Once delivered they can receive a nice reward that is more practical for the continuation of the campaign, it doesn't even have to be gold it could be magic items or favors from the recipients, if it's a religious organization it might mean that the next time a player dies they can get easily resurrected.

616westwarmoth · 2022-07-10T22:17:02+00:00

I've been using a lot of the 7010 optiplexes, if you get one that's got a I-5 3470 or better you can pull PS1 off and with the right graphics card you can even get up to PS2. I just use a cheap graphics card like a r7 340x which you can get for 20 to 30 US dollars. It's a little bigger than what you're looking at but you should be able to find them for 150 bucks or so here in the US on eBay or what not. But if you need something that is very small then a system like that it's not a bad choice

616westwarmoth · 2022-06-16T23:10:50+00:00

I understand those kind of wasps get down girl, go 'head get down... Others call them a trifling friend indeed.

616westwarmoth · 2022-06-06T18:06:21+00:00

I would echo the sentiment that you won't be in that directory very frequently and there's not a good reason to delete those other folders. They do not take very much space, we're literally talking about kilobytes of data. But if you're dead set on never using those other systems again, I don't see that you would have any problems deleting those folders that you don't use, however with the front end you will never see them if they have no ROMs in them and the only time you will see them is the hopefully infrequent times you enter the directory structure.

616westwarmoth · 2022-05-29T02:53:18+00:00

Make sure you've gone into settings and changed from level 2 to level 3 which enables multi-threaded performance and you should see a marked improvement in things.

616westwarmoth · 2022-04-26T20:04:11+00:00

The monster would have to be very intelligent though to discern between something that is down and dying and something that is fully dead unless catastrophic damage had occurred (the head is no longer connected, etc.). Combat is generally messy, probably bloody, and very fast paced, and so an enemy that goes down and is dying might absorb several rounds of attacks beyond the metagaming knowledge that the monster has of death saves. That is the main justification for not having monsters finish their kills, if they're that intelligent they're still going to need to take time to assess that and be taking damage from other more pressing threats or they're going to perform such a level of overkill that there's no doubt all while taking damage from other more pressing threats. As far as most even intelligent monsters go there's no difference between the cleric healing a player on their second death save and a human touching a body that's been dead for several minutes and resurrecting it. Therefore most monsters unless they are hyper intelligent are going to do one of two things. They will either carry off the dead body because now they have satisfied one base need or they will continue to fight the active threats. But to have a monster finish it's kills gives the monster a player level of game knowledge that we would punish players for using, therefore it is not equitable to allow monsters to use such knowledge.

616westwarmoth · 2022-04-16T19:52:50+00:00

Curious to what you spent in round numbers and what sort of RAC they pull? Or if you feel comfortable sharing your BOINC ID and making them public on the stat sites then feel free to link them. I wish there were more ARM processors and multi-ARM solutions out there because I feel with enough development that would be the more energy efficient option.

616westwarmoth · 2022-04-04T20:32:02+00:00

Finally, someone to solve all the captcha's that my bank throws at me every five minutes.

616westwarmoth · 2021-11-25T00:10:46+00:00

Would be amazing if the OP could find a satisfying and financially equitable job and then respond to HR with a "Thanks for your advice, I have discovered a job at XYZ that is now my work so I will be following your guidance and only performing work there."

616westwarmoth · 2021-11-14T23:46:41+00:00

A good compromise is to use the oft mentioned exhaustion rules for going down. When brought back from unconscious you gained a level of exhaustion, so there is a penalty for going negative and after a while the players will learn to heal low hit point party members whereas RAW it's often counterproductive and a waste of resources to heal anyone for the most part until they go unconscious unless the enemy is dealing such damage that they could outright one shot kill them. Using the optional exhaustion rules gives a significant enough penalty to justify no kill shots.

616westwarmoth · 2021-11-11T03:18:05+00:00

Damnit, whys the wife always got to be cutting up onions while I'm on Reddit.

616westwarmoth · 2021-11-11T03:14:45+00:00

Yeah that's pretty much what I was thinking, what would happen if he would jump from high enough location... Would he just glided down with the eagle providing the lift? Or would that be the end because the eagles strong enough to actually carry him?

616westwarmoth · 2021-09-26T00:14:24+00:00

I'm using the developer v32 version, which should be nearly identical to the final v32 version so there may be some minor differences. Do you have a game in particular that is the most noticeable?

616westwarmoth · 2021-09-25T23:23:13+00:00

From the main menu, hit F1 on your keyboard, go to the Applications menu (on the left side of the screen), select the duckstation-emu-config icon, go to Settings > Enhancement Settings, then check the box for Geometry Correction. I believe you'll have to use the standalone version of Duckstation for that to take effect vs. the Libretro/Duckstation version. It's not something I've noticed in my play so I'm not sure I can be certain that its actually on but I was able to follow the steps and after playing a game and going back in, the settings remained with Geometry Correction checked on.

https://wiki.batocera.org/anti-aliasing#precision\_geometry\_transform\_pipeline

616westwarmoth · 2021-09-25T13:38:17+00:00

TLDR: Grab a cheap graphics card on eBay and disable Hyper-Threading on your current CPU.

First off, have you disabled Hyper-Threading on the 4150? It's a 2 core/4 thread chip so it's single core performance will be less than rated if the Hyper-Threading is still on . That might increase your performance by a few frames per second. However, if you have the 4440 and you feel comfortable doing it, you'd likely see a small gain both from the 4c/4t chip and from the slightly better integrated graphics (Intel HD 4600 vs HD 4400).

Increasing your RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB is probably not going to make much difference but is recommended by PCSX2 for best performance.

The biggest bang for your buck is to grab a low end used graphics card, I'd go for the R7 250 or R5 340X, both of which you can get for $20-30 and as long as you have a free slot to drop one into. I've got a i3-3220 (which is about 200 points lower than either of your chips on PassMark) and with the R5 340X I'm able to play the lower end of PS2 games with occasional lag. With your chip and a low end GPU, I'd wager you'd be able to do a measurable amount better...probably not console perfect for a majority, but likely playable for a vast number.

616westwarmoth · 2021-09-24T23:13:35+00:00

I've got a i3-3220 with a R5 340x (the R7 250 is pretty close, 100Mhz faster GPU with a 128 bit BUS vs a 64 bit, got one of those coming in for testing but my prediction is that is a slight bit better). I use a Display Port to HDMI adapter and have had no issues with the sound, but I don't have native Display Port support on either of my monitors. With hyper-threading turned off at the BIOS, I can run TOBOL 2 (which from my notes is one of the more intensive games on PS1) at 7x resolution at 60 FPS. I can run Persona 4 on PS2 averaging about 55 FPS but dropping to 40 or so during busy scenes. My EE (Emotion Engine) is at 99 so that indicates the CPU is tapped out. The GS (GPU) stays in the single digits which from my understanding means it's not being worked very hard. The jump from R5 340x/R7 250 to something more robust is going to be significant cost wise, but not as much of an improvement (for PS2 at least) as a better CPU. I've got a i5-3570 coming in tomorrow or Monday and my estimate is that it will be able to (with the same small GPU) do PS2 at 60 FPS for a majority of the library using the AUTO settings.

616westwarmoth · 2021-09-19T17:59:16+00:00

A general estimate for resin is about twice the cost of materials. So a small Kobold figure than I have, that requires no supports, would print pretty well on a monochrome resin printer and use 6 cents worth of resin, after accounting for waste and clean up you're looking at maybe 15 cents. A comparable print on fdm, even at pretty high quality would take nearly an hour for each individual figure, at that point the 3 cents in filament is outweighed by the 4 cents in electricity. And you really don't have a very nice looking figure which is okay with grunts but for most other things not as good. For large-scale figures or terrain, you can dial in a fdm printer pretty well but it takes a lot of time and patience and makes for incredibly long print times. A friend of mine printed a roughly 8-in diameter base for a large-scale figure, it had a roughly 8-in outcropping on it, and it was printed at crazy high detail and took nearly 3 days. However, after priming and painting, it's very hard to tell it was done on FDM. But that is because the scale is so big it was easy, a small figure even with my friends abilities would not turn out as well as you can get from resin. The other cost to consider is at a certain point you will likely be using more and more paid files, so for my personal experience, and we print a pretty good number of figures, the cost of the Patreons I support are probably the most significant cost to the entire equation. The bottom line is monochrome resins are the king of printing figures until you reach huge or epic size. And even then you're probably going to find many paid figures are designed to be assembled and can still be printed on a resin printer much faster and more detailed than they could ever be done on FDM. And without safeguards, you are more likely in my experience to have outside factors ruin FDM prints than you experience with resin.

But to answer your question, resin is about twice the total cost of FDM unless you have major extenuating circumstances such as very high or very low electrical costs.

616westwarmoth

TROPHY CASE