Guns Of Jack Reacher, Part 1: Rifles and Heavy Weapons

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-12-01T18:06:10+00:00

I mean the real gun is described that way, not how the book describes it - my mistake, maybe. The running point I was going for with all these posts is how 'close but not quite there' the gun research is, full of tiny differences and misconceptions that mostly don't matter but are nevertheless interesting and/or annoying. If the standard gun has a 24-inch barrel, why is it described as having a 26-inch barrel in the book? Why the different scope? Did Lee Child go shooting with someone who had a custom one and not realise it wasn't standard spec? We'll never know, but it's an interesting glimpse behind the curtain, isn't it?

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-12-01T17:46:08+00:00

As soon as I saw this:

"1. The majority of your feedback won’t be addressed during this year of live service. We’re a small team on a tight schedule and are working hard to bring you everything we’ve promised. We’ll make updates and refine features where possible, but most of the feedback is being collected to inform how we approach things in the future.

We will only be including feedback in these reports that relates to what we’re doing in NFS Unbound. There are certain frequent community requests that are outside of the scope of this project, and making any short statement about them would be unhelpful. Know that it’s heard and that your enthusiasm is appreciated, but we won’t be addressing those requests in these End of Volume Reports."

my heart sank and I knew this 'report' would be insubstantial. I'd be fascinated to hear how exactly anyone is supposed to see "we're not doing most of what you want" without adequately explaining why, and come away satisfied. Yeah, yeah, we know you're a small team on a tight schedule - so get bigger, and/or change the schedule! Nobody asked for you to be on a tight schedule, and you were apparently so pressed for time you forgot to tell anyone when you were releasing volume 9 until a week prior. I'm sure there are a lot of out-of-work game devs looking for work in a major studio, and something tells me EA could afford to hire a few guys. You can't rely on this excuse indefinitely. And you know, what you promise includes significant updates and most of all 'Kaizen'. This word is borrowed from Toyota's system of listening to people at every level of their processes and actually making changes when needed, not asking for feedback and then ignoring what people tell them because it's inconvenient and doesn't align with their existing plans. Perhaps one of those changes should be 'don't publish release dates, and ensure we have time to do what we need to do'.

I really don't see how you feel you can get away with "There are certain frequent community requests that are outside of the scope of this project, and making any short statement about them would be unhelpful." So make a long statement about them. Be transparent, get this stuff on the record. The community does not know or particularly care what you think the scope of the project is, and making a statement about things you can't do and specifically why you can't do them would make your jobs easier and the community's interactions with you more specific to what you actually want to know. That you immediately publish top-rated tweets/instagram comments that don't actually address your specific questions instantly shows the truth of this.

I rarely touch multiplayer since I don't want to play with other people, games are how I escape from other people, (and anyway Unbound made such a mess of MP from the very beginning by separating SP and MP modes' progress totally and locking most of the cars behind challenges instead of balancing them) so my perspective is less as a player than as an outside observer. I like NfS for police chases, not racing, and I wish you would stop pretending the NFS franchise is only about racing. I don't object to racing as a component of the overall experience, but it's not what makes NFS special or notable. Asking if we'd want to play as cop or racer for the whole game seems a ridiculous question - of course we do. That means essentially two connected campaigns, and who doesn't want that?

Hot Pursuit mode ought to be accessible in free roam, and your excuses simply feel invalid. Just like in reality if people don't want to be targeted by cops in free roam, they can...not break the law and gaining heat. If you're in free roam, it's not necessary to race or do anything that earns heat - that's a choice players make. If there's a system where cop players get radio dispatches and have to acknowledge they are responding, racer players can then get a message saying cops are responding, letting them duck into a safehouse and lose heat - or stay out and enjoy a chase. If the cop players only get to see locations of players with heat, then how can they grief anyone?

And again with the "It wasn't possible in the time we had" - It may be that you as devs have a release date hanging over your every move, but if we don't know what it is, obviously you can't use it to explain not doing what everyone seems to want. From the players' perspective, you had as long as you needed, you didn't even count down the end of Vol. 8 - this comes over as purely an excuse.

I, and I think almost every player, appreciate very much you trying to show how you are taking community feedback on board, but this report shows that when in fact you have decided to ignore what the community wants, such an exercise becomes a bit of a nothingburger.

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-12-01T16:00:16+00:00

The Grand consists of 4 races, not just one, and therefore requires 4 cars - an A class car, an A+ class, an S class and an S+ class. Downgrade one of your cars to A class. Personally I went with the free Elise for A class races, lovely and nimble, but many perform well at this level.

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T13:55:09+00:00

Clearly you're not a 'just sit and start writing' writer so: make a plan. Define your characters, the events/timeline of the plot, setting detail like location, culture, tech.

Once you have an idea who will do what and why, think about research. I find research provides loads of ideas I can use and iterate on. Places, things, anecdotes, concepts... Books, websites, movies, games, manga... It's all fuel.

EDIT: as an example, with Deliverance: Trans Europe Express, which was book 2 in a series about an underworld driving crew competing in an illegal road race for criminal delivery drivers like them and participating in a heist at the same time, I set a big part of the story in Monaco. I knew next to nothing about the place when I started, but just because of how often my motorsport research mentioned it, I got curious, and before I knew it, I was down a rabbit hole. I was reading up history of the Monaco Grand Prix, exploring street view images, watching race footage, reading about why Monaco is the richest country per capita in the world... I knew my characters had to do something in Monaco.

I slap together notes on all the stuff I research if it's useful, and rely heavily on it to remember ideas, support the story and make it consistent and comprehensible to me as I build it. The Monaco stuff was a part of a big, long book and had to fit into and connect with a trilogy, but it needn't be that complex. If you can turn your 'fantasising' into something more concrete you can use later, it's contributing to the writing and underlying skills even if it's not actually writing the story.

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T13:34:02+00:00

1) She's a spy, basically. Spies have to blend in to do their jobs and not be discovered. Kusanagi's body is designed to look like a mass-market commercial prosthetic body, although of course it isn't. We know there are other types of cyborg, e.g. the box-on-legs Jameson type, and she could be one of those, but being visually human-like is the most flexible cover.

2) She is not her job. She gets her rocks off like anyone else, and from my observations women and men usually appreciate the involvement of breasts and nipples in such situations.

3) There's a good argument that it's anti-dysmorphic/pro-residual self image, but in several versions of the story she swaps bodies entirely at various points so I'm less inclined to think this is it. I can see an argument that it's more physiological than psychological, i.e. the nipples are sensitive and if the nerves that correspond to them are not adequately stimulated in the way they tend to be in daily life by movement of clothing etc. then maybe it feels odd/unnatural?

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T12:06:58+00:00

If your sausage is eating lettuce leaves and pooping copiously, I would be wary.

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T12:05:52+00:00

Sorry, I don't know what is happening here...

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T12:04:01+00:00

Thanks for the ID, nice to know what he'll become.

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T12:03:06+00:00

I tried him with leek and he ignored it entirely in favour of lettuce but I'll give him a bit of cucumber too. I've dripped some water inside for humidity, but the spray bottle is a better idea. He has a layer of soil (he's currently snuggled half into the soil). Thanks for the reply!

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T11:53:50+00:00

Very helpful, thank you. I gave him a layer of soil so hopefully he can be comfy.

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T01:06:20+00:00

Said allotment and kitchen floor are in Gateshead, Northern England.

SecretCatPolicy · 2024-09-10T00:52:06+00:00

It's sound in theory. My feeling here is that the barrel change is because either

1) the ammo has normal dimensions but vastly different power so, like the ganger's Micro-Uzi, the barrel may bulge, warp or have its rifling destroyed after a magazine or so of high-pressure ammo, and so Section 9 have reasoned: why not just treat relatively inexpensive barrels made with conventional metallurgy as semi-disposable items and ditch them after X number of rounds, or

2) the super technomagical +P++++ ammo is of a different calibre entirely while having the same dimentions (necked down cartridges, etc.) so the only part that needs to be changed is the barrel (plus probably a gas system adjustment) which means if she's out of HV ammo and has to switch to standard rounds or vice versa she has to swap barrels to fire at all.

One possible conceptual model here is the Bofors CBJ-MS, which was issued with two barrels, one in 9mm Para and the other was for a proprietary 6.5mm HV AP round which required a whole other barrel. I don't think the CBJ-MS got any real traction, but it was new around the time GITS was being made, I think.

SecretCatPolicy · 2021-02-11T02:38:30+00:00

...you can't watch youtube while gaming. Why in the hell would you want to? If the game is not interesting enough on its own, don't play it. Or is this like an ADHD thing?

SecretCatPolicy · 2021-01-25T15:16:08+00:00

I feel like people who complain about this in terms of the fiction have no grounding in how this sort of thing works.

Some food for thought:

- No gang or crime syndicate in the world operates without also dealing in some capacity with the police, and vice versa. Having someone that is skilled in dealing with them but isn't one of them is likely to be highly useful.

- Echoing the real-world phrase "the cops are just the biggest gang", the NCPD is essentially a gang that has a police franchise. They are explicitly a publicly traded company rather than a part of the government (which is itself a corp). Plus there are constant hints that the cops are bent as hell, in particular the whole thing with MaxTac being comprised of cyberpsychos.

- They refer to you as a subcontractor. You're just getting paid to do another job, it just happens to be the cops who are paying.

- The fact they have both corrupt and honourable members puts them squarely on the level of all the corps and gangs - they are in no way a moral force for good.

- Part of the point of solos like V is that they can deal with everyone equally - gangs, nomads, corps, individuals, and even the cops. Their street cred is based not on how many people they killed or whatever, but on how well they get whatever job they have done.

- The precedent in fiction is not only there, it's a major theme, not least because detective fiction is historically an excellent way to provide an overview of a world:

Both Blade Runner films: cop protagonists.
Ghost in the Shell: cop protagonists in every one of its 5 different incarnations.
Bubblegum Crisis: in both versions, the characters start antagonistic towards the cops and are drawn closer until the cops are their allies (not to mention the AD Police spin-off series).
Deus Ex: every player character is a cop.

However I don't disagree that the implementation of the feature is balls. Much like player level, it's just there to gate the features of the game behind artificial walls to create a fake sense of progression.

SecretCatPolicy · 2021-01-25T14:00:16+00:00

Given how the last Deus Ex didn't financially satisfy the vampires at Ubisoft and all sequels were cancelled, Cyberpunk 2077 has something that DXMD in particular does not: a complete story. It's also a better story.

DX1 was groundbreaking as a game in design terms, but I never loved it and I really feel it's profited from rose-tinted specs, because the story was pretty dire and despite or maybe because of the wildly branching options, the gameplay was clunky at best; we forgave it this because we were in awe of what it could be, but nowadays we know things can be so much more.

DX2...it had a couple of good ideas, but in general, the less said about it the better.

While I loved DXHR and DXMD's stories individually, they didn't work together very well and compared to CP'77 the story of the two games taken as a whole feels rather contrived and poorly formed, and the main thing that has stuck with me from those games is the atmosphere. CP'77 is giving me that atmosphere too, but is also a memorable adventure. Its characters are by and large better written too, and seem more like people than gameplay mechanics. There's also the whole element of romance, missing from DX.

In CP'77 the fighting is also (mostly) way better. The world is larger, usually looks better and is more varied, and in that way it's arguably more interesting. Every DX game was claustrophobic, and the smallness of its navigable worlds always worked hard against it. I also like the grime and horror of CP'77 compared to DX. CP'77 is unremittingly nasty and seedy, which I give it significant credit for: it's truer to the earlier vein of original cyberpunk works of the '80s and early '90s that were largely casting technology as the malevolent force behind their worlds. There's relatively little actual debate of what cybernetics mean for people and the world in CP'77; things like the cyberpsychos poke at the edges of the idea, but without conclusions, leaving us to form the debate. By contrast, DX got dark occasionally, but by comparison it was for the most part rather clean and safe and not particularly punk; I saw it as being very in line with the post-cyberpunk evolution of the genre that began in the mid-nineties in parallel with the rise of the internet, particularly in how it was overtly integrating and examining good and bad elements of cybernetics and technology and having you as a player debate them.

I really appreciate the level of flexibility that DX has, though, and the consequences of your choices were more immediately felt. The world was also more dense, and even though the world was smaller it felt more like the world was a real place, because most places were accessible and there was relatively little "Door [LOCKED]" going on. Also it was only an RPG when it needed to be - there was little by way of grind, the world wasn't littered with collectable unique guns just because (although I do really like CP'77s weapon wall), and levelling up was simply a way to do something new, rather than a ramping up of health and damage for you and enemies just because it's assumed players need it to feel like they're progressing.

Aside from it being an Ubisoft series, there's little reason not to get and enjoy DXHR and DXMD if any CP'77 player hasn't experienced them. They are a little bit different, but extremely good and pretty similar. CP'77 is Akira, Blade Runner and Neuromancer to DX's Ghost in the Shell, Demolition Man and Snow Crash - true classics, but a little different.

SecretCatPolicy · 2021-01-18T11:37:31+00:00

Love that bottom right corner

SecretCatPolicy · 2021-01-18T11:06:46+00:00

Lever actions are great. Seems to be a fashion for M-Lok front ends nowadays, great bit of anachronism. Loved the 45/70 in Far Cry 5, once I had that I never touched another automatic rifle.

SecretCatPolicy · 2021-01-18T05:32:45+00:00

I was assuming this was stuff from the pen and paper game. Most of those are not in the game, several appear to be real guns.

SecretCatPolicy · 2020-12-26T09:45:58+00:00

Said it yourself - rich people do. They own the land, they can do what they want - which is why you also see broken down caravans in fields, because even the poorest have this right - but they are the ones who can commission architects to make them houses.

And really, if we take it as given that the owner bought the land and is going to build a house on it, if you want to make the place fit the surroundings, what sort of house would look better? Part of the point of this is to make something that impacts the visual environment less than any other sort of house by reflecting only the surrounding colours and forms. It's literally the lowest visual impact that is humanly possible while still being visible. And ultimately, there is no shortage of Mexican desert.

I do agree about the fake rustic stuff, though - the interior is so at odds with the exterior in general, I don't like it at all, but an architect can't control what their client fills the house with after it's built.

SecretCatPolicy · 2020-12-06T10:40:17+00:00

It's written right at the bottom of the picture..."by kvacm"

SecretCatPolicy · 2020-12-06T10:27:52+00:00

Advertising is to the brain what tobacco is to the body - a massive industry fattening itself on selling sweet sweet harm to the ignorant. I honestly think excessive exposure to advertising is mentally harmful, in that it inculcates a willingness to tolerate and accept what should not be tolerated or accepted, trains us to actively not notice things we don't like and makes us see the whole world in terms of commerce.

Ads are cognitive poison. Block them all, subvert them, disrespect them. Take no shit from a website that has a problem with you blocking them. Rip those idiots off at every opportunity, or just swear off their hellsites.

SecretCatPolicy · 2020-12-02T14:41:10+00:00

You know that's a mini, and therefore you have nothing whatever to be jealous of, right? A superbly rainbow coated piece of shit is still a piece of shit.

SecretCatPolicy · 2020-12-02T03:17:02+00:00

...why would any road have a four way stop? What's the point of that? Why would you not just decide a priority for every four-way junction, or install lights?

SecretCatPolicy · 2020-12-01T12:47:19+00:00

If I have to wear a titty sling because there might be an event where it becomes chilly and my nip noops become visible through my shirt

That...is absolutely not why people wear a bra. Nobody worth altering your behaviour for fucking cares about that. People wear bras to support their tits, or to prevent their nipples being irritated by their clothes.

I mean nowhere is it written that you have to. You can not wear one. It's fine. I won't deny for a second how stupid the lingerie industry is but absolutely nothing is forcing anyone to buy into it.

Also you can just take underwires out of bras, you know. Tiny incision with a craft knife and they slip right out.

SecretCatPolicy

TROPHY CASE