New Testingstan

adr wrote:hmm i think the sledgehammer games company is a new one

the two i had heard of before are treyarch and infinitely bored.

They co-developed one of the earlier games (MW3) but this is their first on their own. It's headed by the guys that did the original dead space, which might mean there's a little bit of promise in this at least.

I've finally gotten my Xbox 360 wired up to the internet (the older cream coloured model). How long will Xbox 360 games maintain online communities after their recent obsolescence? It sounds like GTA V's online presence bought the PS3 and Xbox 360 more time as secondary games consoles (and PS4 and the X-Bone haven't gotten to their full potential in games yet).

People will gradually be leaving the 360 for the One, so the server population is bound to dry up a tad.

As for an actual shutdown? The 360 came out in 2005 and the XBOX live servers were shut down in 2010, so you've probably got a couple years yet.

I finally got Kerbal Space Program.

It's fun, but fuck me is this a learning curve.

record all of your terrible hilarious mistakes

Right now I'm just trying to not fuck up the tutorial launch. My guys almost always land on something explodey.

I wonder if there's any fan mods which put that bug back in where you could explode planets.

I never really progressed beyond the screwing around stage of playing. Stuff like strapping a couple dozen solid rocket boosters to a command module with just enough girders to keep it from collapsing under its own weight. Then I switched the solid fuel with the liquid rockets and put them in orbit around the sun. Their orbit intersects with Kerbin's at two points, so I imagine that eventually it will get close enough to be pulled back in by gravity, though it may take a few thousand years.

I just had a rocket so overpowered that when it got to 1100 metres all of the rockets flew apart.

Thankfully I only fly unmanned missions. No casualties.

I've been playing Star Trek Armada 3, a mod for Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion.

It rocks. There's apparently an expansion in the works that will add the Cardassians and Dominion. Currently the Feds, Klinks, Roms and Borg are in the game, with the latter being OP as fuck (and designed that way, it's meant to be one of those 3v1 or 4v1 type factions).

It's a bit unfortunate that Sins is 32bit because the engine clearly struggles at times when you have large fleets fight it out. But still, it's a neat little mod.

Big Orangutan wrote:I've finally gotten my Xbox 360 wired up to the internet (the older cream coloured model). How long will Xbox 360 games maintain online communities after their recent obsolescence? It sounds like GTA V's online presence bought the PS3 and Xbox 360 more time as secondary games consoles (and PS4 and the X-Bone haven't gotten to their full potential in games yet).

I'd be more worried about the 360. Those early models, and I think only the early ones were cream, are held together by pritt stick and string. It will die on you.

Gands wrote:Thankfully I only fly unmanned missions. No casualties.

Where's the fun in that?

I'd rather not have people be killed due to my engineering failures. When my space program is safer, I'll introduce people.

They're not people

They're kerbals

The Ballad of Jebediah Kerman is not truly complete without a series of highly unfortunate deaths.

I find it a fun challenge to engineer non-fatal abort sequences
Like 'cut all engines, decouple command module, fire small solids on escape tower'
I think I mostly started doing it just so the abort button would have a function
Totally saves lives, though
And when you get to orbit, you get to yell TOWER JET as you shoot the escape tower off into the distance

So far my guys just go up and then down, in the manner of a ballistic missile. Still working out how to get into orbit.

Get up into space, turn 90 degrees, and fire your engines.

This advice comes with the disclaimer of my own rocket death rate.

My favorite moment was when I was first experimenting with multiple stages. I ended up building a ship so massive that the first stage's rockets (of which there were many) did not generate enough force for a lift-off. So I kicked off the second stage, separating the original rockets, which flew off in every direction before exploding. The second stage was much more powerful, causing the ship to rocket off into the air (somehow missing the out-of-control first stage rockets) and uncontrollably spin around since the autopilot couldn't compensate for the sudden lack of fins (which were all connected to the first stage rockets). This led to me frantically hitting the separators for each stage, sending the still-burning rockets careening off everywhere, in a desperate attempt to hit the last stage and deploy the parachute before the command pod crashed into the ground.

Is there some secret to parachutes? I switched to two radials on the command pod with a standard one on top but half the time I get a structural failure at 300m and the by dies

Dude wrote:Is there some secret to parachutes? I switched to two radials on the command pod with a standard one on top but half the time I get a structural failure at 300m and the by dies

Wait as long as you can-the earlier you deploy, the more likely they'll fail.

Also, try to reduce your speed as much as possible before then.

A possible solution is to have to set of parachutes, with the first set being a stage before the last. You'll be able to open it just after ending the fiery phase of atmospveric reentry, maximizing drag without compromising the parachutes you'll need for a soft landing.

Alternatively, aim your re-entry trajectories to have as shallow an angle as possible in order to maximize the distance you'll travel in atmosphere, and thus the distance over which drag will slow your re-entry vehicle. Be warned though that if your angle is too shallow and your speed too great, you risk rebounding over the atmosphere, and either lengthening the time you'll spend in time, or worse, having you stuck up there if you don't have engines able to cancel enough of your velocity.


OR, if you don't care about weight that much, you can go brute force, and use retro-rockets to lose delta-vee. Of course, it would require you to use the SAS to stabilize your vehicle, and also possibly fins.

There's a lot of ways you can go about it.

If you start turning (gently, and preferably to the east) at 5-10km up, you can save remarkable amounts of fuel getting to orbit
You only have to shift your vector 5 degrees or so, and gravity will start doing most of the work (and this is why they call it a gravity turn )

Is there a PSP emulator for Android?

I'm getting curious about that "Persona" thing, and want to give it a try.

Oxymoron wrote:Is there a PSP emulator for Android?

I'm getting curious about that "Persona" thing, and want to give it a try.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... sspp&hl=en

It has worked fairly well for me so far, on two out of three of the games I've tried with it.