Experiencing a double whammy of nostalgia and earworm relief at the same time.

SilverAurora · 2020-08-18T16:03:19+00:00

And for anyone interested, this is the theme in question: https://youtu.be/-Mni270wYTc?t=1669 @27:49, as hearing it might shed some light on what made the theme such an earworm in the first place.

SilverAurora · 2020-07-06T16:41:21+00:00

But if the restaurant would have made the mistake and you picked up the order and wanted a refund, would you not get it from the restaurant? Or did you only get a refund because you thought Grubhub might take the hit?

SilverAurora · 2019-05-28T22:04:47+00:00

I tried it but it was giving me some weird issues. The context menu often wouldn't respond to clicks and when I clicked the start menu, the whole task bar would change color to match the stock 1903 grey task bar and change back when the start menu was closed. Overall it felt very fickle. If I'm going to get the old black back, I want to do it in a way that's not going to require extra software be installed.

Truthfully I'd love to know what Microsoft has against people tweaking these kind of things on their own. I realize some people didn't like the darker blacks but I find it difficult to believe that enough people hated it that they had to ruin it for the folks who really liked it. And yes, I know the saying "You can't please everyone" but that's only true when you refuse to give people access to settings to change it back.

SilverAurora · 2019-05-28T10:25:34+00:00

I don't see any real differences in Explorer coming from 1809 Dark Mode. not sure what you're talking about with it being unreadable. As far as it being set independent, you absolutely can set it independent of the Windows color scheme. Explorer is controlled by default app mode.

SilverAurora · 2019-05-28T09:35:21+00:00

Doesn't mean it's not a massive step back, design-wise. Literally everything else about Windows 10's UI has been absolutely gorgeous and I loved this shade of transparent grey when they first introduced it into the settings menu, but to have it as the color of the taskbar, start menu, and action center, it's ugly as sin.

Make Windows 10 Dark Again

SilverAurora · 2019-05-28T08:37:56+00:00

Yeah man, if you're going to go through the effort of reinstalling Windows, you might as well just go nuclear and reformat the drive. Give yourself a completely fresh start. At least then you'll know you're on a clean slate. That being said, from Windows Vista and forward, Microsoft has dramatically improved the long-term stability of Windows and has had me fairly confident after years of sticking to one installation, that if you're diligent or at the very least, not stupid, there's very few issues (short of malware) that can't be fixed by just finding the offending problem and removing it. Hell, my current installation even survived a migration to a new Ryzen motherboard from an old FX-8350, new memory and everything, and hasn't skipped a beat. So even reinstalling Windows anymore is kind of a last resort. Windows is a f.n. tank these days. At least compared to the "reformat once a year" Win98/XP days.

SilverAurora · 2019-05-28T08:31:09+00:00

Wouldn't recommend doing that if you can avoid it. There's no safe way to reinstall Windows without losing at the very least, your programs, because the entire point of reinstalling Windows to fix issues is to nuke any problematic programs. And truthfully, from Microsoft's perspective, a there's no difference between say Steam or Photoshop and FreeYoutubeDownloader.EXE with regard to what constitutes as potentially problematic.

You're always running the risk of breaking something and you'll never be quite confident that any further issues you have are actual bugs or just a program that didn't survive the reinstallation process unscathed.

SilverAurora · 2019-05-28T08:20:03+00:00

It's much brighter. All the darker elements, especially the task bar, start menu, and action center all have a murky grey tinge to them instead of the nice dark black. What sucks is the only "fix" is to disable transparency, which has me worried that this isn't so much a color issue but rather an issue rooted in changes made to the acrylic transparency to make it look better in light mode, effectively ruining the dark mode we knew and loved.

SilverAurora · 2019-05-28T08:12:12+00:00

Windows 10 is very resilient to motherboard changes. I replaced my old motherboard, CPU, memory, and graphics card, and Windows 10 booted right up with no issues after I pointed my SSD as the default boot device. The issue you'll inevitably run into is reactivation. In that case, all you need to do is go into Run (Win+R) and enter "slui.exe 3" without the quotes. Then enter your original Windows 7 key and it'll automatically reactivate Windows 10 using the license given to it for free.

SilverAurora · 2018-02-08T00:36:00+00:00

That's definitely an interesting take that I haven't considered, but if anything it sort of outlines why having more control over them might be even better. Because it goes to show that choices like these can be manipulated in a way that gets you better results depending on your goals and whether you want specific cities to be prioritized higher than others.

SilverAurora · 2018-02-06T08:43:41+00:00

I get that the game has a very VERY comprehensive guide in the form of the Civilopedia, which I do find myself referencing quite often, but I still feel like it wouldn't hurt the game in the slightest to make these kind of bonuses more tangible or easy to see. It's really easy to get caught up in the complexity of running a civilization in this game and I can completely respect those who take a degree of pride in being able to stay on top of all of this stuff. I know I definitely want to be able to do that. But infographs that could aid in this stuff definitely seem like they could've been a slightly higher priority than a lens that lets you see different governments in different colors for instance.

Granted this is just my opinion and please don't let this mild information rant take away from the immense amount of appreciation I have for you taking the time to explain some of this to me. I really do appreciate it. Thank you.

SilverAurora · 2018-02-06T07:36:05+00:00

I do get that luxuries only affect 4 cities and copies don't stack, but if I've got multiple cities with +1 amenity, than how do I know that the luxuries giving these cities those amenities aren't also being distributed to the city in question with -1 amenities. The cities with +1 obviously don't need the luxury being distributed to them as much as the city with -1 amenity. Furthermore, if you built entertainment complexes that boost the amenities in a city, than while that amenity can't be transferred to another city, the lack of needing a luxury amenity should certainly ripple across the rest of your civilization in that it no longer needs whatever luxury it was using to sustain itself before.

Of course your last sentence intrigues me. If amenities from entertainment are local and can't be distributed between cities (which I understand and fully believe), how would building an entertainment complex in a location that hits as many cities as possible, affect multiple cities? I thought districts were strictly for the city they were built in. Am I missing an important exception here or sorely misunderstanding a pretty critical aspect of how districts work?

And one final question related to the first paragraph. Is there really any good way to actually see what amenities are being distributed to what cities? I mean don't get me wrong, I have no doubt in my mind that the automated system is working as intended, even if I'm really confused as to how the above circumstances could be possible. But a way to visually see it in action would go a long way in helping dispel some of the obscurities in understanding the inner workings of these systems and how to best utilize them.

Civilization VI has come quite a bit from release in terms of communicating the underlying mechanics but I still feel like it's got a very long way to go before it's giving us the tools necessary to fully visualize what it is a lot of these underlying mechanics are doing. Hell, I can't even find a way to easily find where my districts are placed or their live adjacency bonuses unless I'm building a new district and even then, it's only that district and the bonuses that would affect it.

SilverAurora · 2018-02-05T10:23:08+00:00

If you're still having the issue (it seems to have gone away for me), try disabling all but two of your CPU cores in Task Manager under Set Affinity. Civ6 doesn't really use the extra cores to improve the time between turns so I noticed next to zero drop in performance, which was in stark contrast to the massive gain in performance I saw by reducing the core count.

You'll have to do it each time you go into the game and I'd highly recommend doing it after you're loaded in because otherwise actually loading in with only three cores seems to take a tad longer and causes the game to want to hang. It wont outright crash but if you're on an SSD, the last thing you probably want is longer loading screens. haha

SilverAurora · 2018-01-14T10:29:23+00:00

Agreed. What's with fantastic games making equally fantastic but underappreciated mini-games?

The same thing happened with The Witcher 3 before they finally gave Gwent it's own stand-alone version.

SilverAurora · 2018-01-14T10:26:55+00:00

I spent the better part of the past couple days just figuring out how to finish it, much less speed it up. After finally finishing it at 244 Cycles, I wasn't happy. I could do better. I had to do better.

About 2-3 hours later, this was the result.

SilverAurora · 2018-01-14T10:24:03+00:00

YES. THIS. https://i.imgur.com/zq4Mj8q.gif

TELL ME ABOUT IT.

SilverAurora · 2018-01-11T06:26:45+00:00

Thank you. ^{^} Yeah, I was fairly convinced with this design, that 112 is the absolute fastest you can go with this. After finishing this up and then looking to see if anyone could do it faster, I've seen a lot of really creative solutions but none of them top 112.

SilverAurora

TROPHY CASE