vometia

I think it's probably been a "must have" at every point in the past, and one I had to learn the hard way, several times! But even with the IT budget at work (I may have got to choose how a lot of it was spent, but still had to get the justification past my pointy-haired boss: who after griping about it promptly spent literally ten times the entire spend to date on a "vanity server" because someone in a neighbouring department had one, the same again on a team of people to manage it, though there was cronyism involved; and then years trying to find something for them all to do. Grr. But I digress...) it was quite painful seeing "useless" storage space costing money. Took that mentality a long time to dispel considering that logically I knew perfectly well that it wasn't useless! Seems weird to me that in the mid '90s, DEC were still internally experimenting with RAID solutions internally and memos were going around asking for any unused HDDs people could donate (pointy-haired bosses again: budgets for actual work were by that time practically impossible to get approved) as they'd had their own RAID products out for 10 years and they weren't even new then, though I vaguely recall something about them testing out really gigantic arrays rather than the usual small-scale mirroring and XOR stuff.

I think they are, and in part I'm surprised that "spinning rust" is still the standard; but at present, though SSDs may offer huge performance advantages, HDDs absolutely trounce them when it comes to cost per unit storage and for many applications that'll keep SSDs in the future for now. I wonder if that reflects the cost of manufacture or if it's "what the market will bear". In that regard, I'm reminded of the price premium of CDs over cassette tape in the mid 80s, typically 2½ times as expensive for any given audio album: obviously they were way cheaper to manufacture and "record" than cassettes, and quite often weren't remastered so the sound quality wasn't even that much of an improvement (though some publishers did use cheap and grotty-sounding tape for their cassettes) but the mark-up must've been huge. Additionally, I think I was concerned about the longevity of SSDs because of the finite number of times flash memory could be written to, but either that's changed, is irrelevant or was over-stated, as a cursory look suggests that their MTBF is probably far superior, and a modern transactional filesystem probably wouldn't be overly compromised anyway, I would assume. I mean unless it's a catastrophic failure, but "common sense" (ahem) suggests that's much more likely with HDDs.

And now I'm under doctor's orders to spend more time playing video games and modding. True story. She said I'm overdoing it, as I'm taking new drugs which are allowing me to concentrate, and she said the stuff I'm concentrating on (writing to people a lot, stuff like that) is essentially work and is stressing me out, and that I need to relax. So video games it is, then...

Thank you! Perhaps as I haven't been active with my mod for a couple of months; in fact I haven't done any gaming at all over that time and was just thinking that as it seems to be in a reasonable state of readiness (well, ish: I didn't do her mother's outfit, but that would be another major release) maybe I should tie up any loose ends and decide it's finished before I risk moving on and forgetting about it. I'll look into the add-on but as a fairly casual modder I'm always loath to part with money. I'm interested to see what it can do though: I found a couple of ways of creating a sort of pseudo low-poly (or high-poly) version of the mesh but they were definitely rather crude and basic and I would imaging a proper tool would yield significantly better results. And some of the terminology there is slightly flummoxing be but obviously worth getting to grips with: and I figure if I had the determination to figure out Blender in the first place (however ineptly!) I really should make the effort to learn this stuff. I mean I've been using it for years and have become perhaps a bit too "comfortable" in that I can do the basics but in trying to get this outfit looking reasonable given that FO4 has raised the bar a bit I feel it's really time to make the effort. So thank you so much for the links. Talking of raising the bar, one curious thing: as part of my "random visitors from other universes" I also decided that Fallout Needs Elves so I transferred some stuff from Inquisition: obviously not distributable since unlike Elizabeth's dresses, these use the original Bioware assets. But given that they are the originals, other than me wrenching the mesh this way and that so it fits the FO4 body, they don't look nearly as good as they do in Inquisition in spite of me even increasing the texture resolution in a couple of cases. I'm guessing that's just a result of the respective engines and how they render stuff (and as much as I may gripe about some elements of Frostbite 3, it does make things look very pretty) but I was wondering if I missed something, or if perhaps something got lost in translation. But as far as I'm aware, I have the usual bits like the diffuse, normal and specular maps and obviously the mesh itself...

Still mulling over whether to release this mod now that it's finally unencumbered by non-distributable IP: it does include some other third-party assets, but I have permission to use all of it. Everything else has either come from FO4 or I've re-done it myself. In favour: I so rarely ever release anything so maybe it would be nice to do so! Not in favour: not really sure how useful the outfits are without the character, who's absolutely non-distributable given the amount of stuff owned by Irrational (I haven't checked their policy but I doubt it covers porting it elsewhere); they're not absolutely perfect, even though in most cases people won't notice, except for stuff that's a general problem in FO4 (e.g. occasionally erratic skirt physics); and someone will nick it, as happens with practically everything anyone uploads! Decisions, decisions...

For me, the right hairdresser is the one who comes round to my house: I hate going to salons. Fortunately he's also a good laugh and does a good job! He's also quite hyper so I like to give him a really strong coffee so he's good and ready for his next client.

Oh, that's a point, at risk of tempting fate, I don't seem to have experienced any more random logouts...

Since we were recently on the subject of hair, I recently had a haircut. Which I know is terribly exciting, but I had most of it cut off because it was annoying me and by the time I'd finally finished de-tangling it, it was almost time to go back to bed. Don's beard is probably longer than my hair is now.

Oh dear, don't give them scary ideas: not entirely sure I'm too enthusiastic about an always online requirement. I'm also very keen on third-party tools since I mostly interfere and meddle with the outfits and other 3D models so I rarely use Bethsoft's own editor. I think I like things the way they are which is hopefully where they'll remain, at least as an option, but I suspect we haven't seen the end of attempts to monetise what some view as an "untapped resource" and of course the consoles potentially bring their own dimension of complexity into the mix too...

Just got logged out again, when clicking on the "TES Alliance" logo to refresh the main page; but the previous time I did it, it seemed quite happy with me. Checked the cookies to make sure there weren't any with an unusually short expiry time but at a glance they all look okay.

I'm using Firefox 58.0.2 on Linux, going through a Squid cache. It's only been happening lately though; had another couple over the past 24 hours. Anything else I can keep an eye out for which might help?

I'm assuming it's just part of the forum update, but in case it's not, I've been getting signed out a lot over the past few days, on a fairly erratic basis but on average once or twice a day. I'm guessing it's not a cause for concern but figured I should mention it. Also the sign-in pop-up appears not to be working and takes me to the full-screen login page, which fortunately does work.

BTDT, for what it's worth. "Why has my monitor gone all pink? Is it dying? Oh, the cable's half fallen out..."

Simultaneous feelings of "yay, there's someone who knows what they're talking about, I may learn something!" and "argh, there's someone who knows what they're talking about, I'll look like an idiot!" And once again I realise that Blender does more than I realise. I did wonder if there was some form of texture painting within Blender while you can see the UV map wrapped on to the model and... there is! Cool. Understanding how to use it may be a different story, it really took a step-by-step idiot's guide and probably a fair bit of luck for me to figure out how to get Blender to generate a normalmap, for example.

Slightly surprised at what you're seeing in the 3D viewer there; and skin is also a special case as the colouration is altered to reflect the correct skin tone beyond what you see in the texture there. I forget the exact mechanism offhand (if I ever knew it...) In terms of hiding seams, there may be ways of doing it but in my case it seems to be "with some difficulty"! Some very fiddly use of the clone tool may help to hide it, but the alternative method is to highlight the seam instead. For example, one of the Bioshock-inspired outfits I recently made includes a pair of stockings based on that CBBE mesh you mentioned. Once I'd cut the mesh down to just the legs I re-unwrapped with the seams marked out as vertical a line as I could get down the backs of the legs and simply shaded them a very dark colour to give the appearance of that older style of stockings that indeed had seams down the back. Not strictly authentic to the outfit I was duplicating but it was a handy means of side-stepping the problem!

I'll particularly like not worrying about them! I first realised something might be up with I noticed the occasional artefacts on the screen when playing FO4. Though I suspect it may just be something random with the current weather mod I'm using it did alert me to the overheating, and the CPU will throttle once it gets to those temperatures which doesn't exactly aid smoothness... and though I haven't played it properly since my upgrade, I dare say the cell loading pauses should be a lot less significant with the much faster device. I feel like I've finally moved into the space age with my fancy SSD. And looking at the original heat sink I'm surprised the CPU didn't have even worse overheating problems, it really just isn't big enough and the contact area is smaller than I'd imagined.

Finally installed the various gubbins. The CPU cooler was a bit hairy (I forget it I mentioned, I'd arbitrarily chosen an Arctic Cooler 13 in the end) as the clearance was really rather tight in some regards and required temporarily removing two of the DIMMs in order to fit it, but everything fits together nicely and there's no obstruction. And of course it slid around a bit until I managed to secure it, but that doesn't appear to have caused any problems. Hopefully the thermal paste won't dribble off and short something out as happened with a previous system. :/ CPU is now idling at about 35⁰C or so which is kind of meaningless as it depends on ambient temperature, airflow through my lair (which is random and sometimes not very good) and what the various other bits of the PC are doing; and so far has topped out at 66⁰, which is probably about a 20⁰ reduction. I've also changed the top fan back to being an exhaust as I suspect that otherwise the airflow would be too random to really help things much and it would probably be working against the cooler's own fan. First experience of using a SSD is positive: even though I'm only using the cheapo card and an ancient SATA cable I dug out of the garage, load times are enormously reduced. Took me a while to figure out how to create the correct sort of link ("mklink/d" as administrator, for the record) by which time my FO4 tools folder had forgotten its icons, so a somewhat minor but annoying job for me to do. Overall it seems to have made a positive difference.

That makes two of us. I just mess about with several layers of brushes until something eventually happens, sometimes more by luck than judgement. Given the dubious quality of my texturing work I'm definitely not the best candidate for giving out detailed advice, but what I have found is getting the normal and specular maps right makes a big difference to the overall appearance.

Yeah, "mark seam" is your friend. But I'm not an expert at all, beyond that it's just a case of "unwrap and hope for the best". If it's really bad I'll interfere with it in the UV mapper, but once that's done it's just export UV layout and then try to figure out the rest in Gimp...

Good to know. I hadn't heard of them before so it's encouraging to hear they probably don't suck.

I finally ordered a new cooler, which I admit I ended up doing slightly at random, mainly as my sleep has been all over the place this week, as has my concentration. But it's got positive reviews, and hundred of them which hopefully filters out some of the nonsense you sometimes see on Amazon. Also a spare SATA controller, some unknown (to me) brand, Startech, but I didn't want to spend a fortune on it, at least not unless I decide I want built-in RAID features (which are often not really significantly better than software RAID anyway). What I forgot to order was a caddy for the SSD, but it's so lightweight I can just use a cable tie for the time being. Not exactly professional but it'll do as a "temporary" (yeah I know) fix. Something in the PC keeps squeaking periodically and as it doesn't have mice, I'm guessing that'll be the CPU fan's bearings which is probably why it's having trouble. Sigh: which is because after going to all this trouble, I can see another episode of "games meh" descending where I don't even feel like playing anything!

I seem to have lost it somewhere.

I think the "C" stands for "creates subtle logic bugs that you'll spend all week trying to find"! It's the successor to B, which I guess you know, and there is a tentative language D which fixes a lot of its shortcomings but unfortunately has never really caught on. It's one of the few things I may have considered migrating to if it was more widespread, and is certainly nicer than C++ which I refuse to go anywhere near. Sadly, the cooling thing didn't make a lot of difference: it may have gone down by another couple of degrees but I think I need to accept I have to fit a better cooler; so it'll be off to Amazon for something or other, some conductive paste and some cleaner since I can't remember where my bottle of the stuff has gone. I'm sure it never used to be this bad though I have terrible luck with fans gradually dying which I suspect may be happening as 2,200 rpm doesn't seem terribly fast for a fairly small fan; and the heat sink is simply too small to work at all effectively without some serious ventilation going on. The computer's going to need some other surgery too, as I decided to invest in an SSD thingy only to find I'm out of SATA connectors: the motherboard only has six and I have three RAID-1 arrays. At some point I should really just buy a pair of much bigger drives and consolidate them but I'm not in much of a mood to be dealing with drive letter hell!

I think I'm too set in my ways. I never really got on with Pascal, though I admit I haven't used it since I was at college 30 years ago; I saw Ada as a possibility (and modern compiler suites tend to support that as well as C) but I also haven't used that in 30 years so I'm not sure how long it'd take me to figure it out. People keep coming out with helpful suggestions and I still keep on going "I hate C and life's too short!" but I continue to use it anyway. I mean it does actually do what I want, it's just so tiresome to do the basic stuff, even with assorted libraries and macros and things, but I really can't see myself using anything else. Back to cooling, I reversed the airflow of the top fan which made a tiny improvement but again just a couple of degrees, so there's no avoiding the fact that I really do need a better CPU cooler.

I'm extremely agoraphobic and rarely leave the house, so it does place certain limits on my abilities to speak to people directly, annoyingly; I also live in Oxford which is extremely difficult to get around by any means. :/ I'm fairly experienced with building computers, having done my own PCs on and off since the mid '90s and minicomputers (mostly big noisy Motorola VME based things, and the occasional Vax) since the late '80s. But the trouble tends to come in when there's subtle and difficult to predict incompatibilities with things like memory sticks and motherboards; though in the case of my old tri-channel i7 920, it appears another problem may have been that a lot of the MBs had slightly bent pins in the CPU socket that meant a slightly indifferent connection which may have also been the cause of the memory problems. But mostly as I just can't be bothered. I've assembled (and disassembled and reassembled... etc) computers so many times now that I just think I've done my time! Someone else can do it now. I even caught myself saying "life's too short to program in C", though I still haven't found a language I would prefer using, as annoying and tedious as C often is. Sorry, hopefully that doesn't read like "look at all this stuff I've done!" when it isn't that awesome, though I am quite happy for it to read "look at all this stuff I've variously meddled with and broken!"