Andrew

@SimmonsHave you been in any good crashes lately?

Rare photo of Simmons.

Authenticious Italian food

Keeb. I also got the UK layout one which is a nice surprise. I was expecting the US layout one. Also no import fees that needed to be paid, so that's good as well. Thanks for arranging this guys, and thanks EVGA for sponsoring the event.

I believe this is the first time the NA-ion batteries are going to be used outside of a lab, so it's going to be pretty interesting to see how they perform. It's not just cars that could make use of them either. In lab testing, Na-ion batteries are less power dense(375Wh/L vs 600Wh/L), slightly less efficient (92% vs 95%) but are half the price ($77/kWh vs $137/kWh) of Li-ion. They're also less likely to catch on fire when damaged and they can handle significantly more cycles, so long term from the lab testing, they do seem to be able to make up the power density issue over time. There's also the added benefit of sodium being almost twice as dense lithium. I don't know how well this translates over to the batteries themselves, but if it does scale with the mass, there is potential to either have batteries that are half the size and have roughly the same energy, or batteries that are the same size as current Li-ion but have almost double the energy.

Huh? Sony just released a new VR headset for the PS5 a couple of months ago and there are quite a few big titles that got support for it, from Gran Turismo 7 to Resident Evil and even Cities Skylines. The PSVR2 sales figures are also doing better than expected. They were expecting between 270K-300K units to be sold in March. Instead, they managed to sell over 500K units, almost doubling to a total of 915K units 2 weeks later. Things are looking just as good on the PC side of VR as well.

Bomb has been planted?

I would not at all be surprised if it turns out they've been doing this, and been successful in doing it since at least 2014-2015. That's when large gaming communities really went bad and a lot of politics started to get talked about. That's around the time the "oppressed gamer" became a thing and a lot of things "oppressed gamers" believe now line up pretty well with the same anti-Western propaganda Russia and China have been spreading for decades. The people in those communities also tend to have a pretty fragile ego. See: War Thunder classified document leaks as well as the classified documents leak that just happened in that Minecraft Discord server that the article talks about. Every single time, without fail, the documents leak the same way. Someone makes a claim about something. Someone else says "you're wrong"/"you don't have those documents" then their fragile ego kicks in and they post those documents as proof that they aren't lying. This is a fantastic tool that the military can use, and tbh I wouldn't be surprised if all of the classified document leaks ended up being bait. I look forward to watching that to hear questions being asked such as: Does UwU mean good things, yes or no? Tracer rule 34 violation. Is that part of the Chinese spy network?

I got sent a link to a car mod. One of the first things I did was go to a race track. For comparison, here's actual GT7 at roughly the same part of the track along with another screenshot to match the time of day and weather settings. The camera position and FOV is a bit off, but considering Asobo never intended anyone to do this and I am comparing it to a game that has a laser scanned and hand crafted track, what FS2020 has is really impressive.

I think something is wrong with my copy of Gran Turismo 7

I've not got mine either or anything saying I need to pay for import fees, but I'm guessing that's because it's being hand sent from the EU rather than from the US. I know @badbull hasn't got his either as of a couple of days ago.

This is mostly down to @Simmons as he is the one who did most of the work.

Well, I found the solution to the VR problems I've been having. Turns out the correct order is: Make sure controller is plugged in and working. Launch the game. Get into a plane at an airport. CTRL+Tab to launch VR mode. Turns out if you launch SteamVR then launch the game, it ends up rendering the game four times, which explains the horrible fps occasionally. The audio also doesn't know what to do, and the game tries to use the Index VR controllers, which is why my Xbox controller stops working. It really would have been nice for Microsoft/Asobo to put this somewhere either in game or on the internet.

Not got mine yet or anything in the mail saying I need to pay for import duties. I am also the furthest away AFAIK so that might also be it.

I have acquired another piece, the front license plate. It is now one step closer to being road legal.

Pie and unspecified cube.

I was browsing the 4chan the other day and found a recipe for butterdogs. They're like hotdogs, but with butter instead. For reference, this is what they're supposed to look like. I messed up the recipe along the way because mine look like this.

Dibs on the Aurous Cat Master. I don't have a cat. I just don't want someone with a cat to have it.

I've not heard anything. Did EVGA send a tracking number? Importing things to the UK is now a PITA and from my experience, they no longer tell you that they have something waiting that needs import duties paid.

Not really surprising tbh. Windows 7 will be 15 years old when they drop support and I don't think anyone is using Windows 8/8.1. In fact, them supporting Windows 7 at this point is incredible. Imagine in 2009, software that regularly gets updates that would still be compatible on Windows 98. Let alone Windows 3.1.

Been using FSLTL recently and it makes the world seem so much more alive with planes in accurate locations to where they are in real life as well as spawning them in at much further distances that makes it seem more realistic. You can now see planes flying at 30K ft+ complete with realistic length contrails. The ground traffic is also more realistic as planes spawn in roughly where they are IRL with realistic liveries. Like this Emirates A380 that departed here IRL at the same time. Even if you don't fly airliners, it's worth getting just because of how much it improves the look with this. I've not noticed any performance hit either. If you are going to get it, do it through the FlyByWire installer. It's pretty easy to install that way. The only real downside is that you have to manually launch it every time you want to play the game. If you forget to do that, the ground and air traffic is non-existent as it requires you to switch off the default AI traffic.

I've downloaded Las Vegas. KLAS is a bit broken. As you can see, all of the lights have stopped working, at least from this angle. I've also been on the FS2020 subreddit again looking at threads for people getting help and it really is like this clip OP: Why is my autopilot not working? Reply 1: What plane is it? OP: It's on Xbox. Reply 1: Okay, but what plane is it? OP: Airbus. Reply 1: Which Airbus? What exactly are you trying to do? OP: Make the autopilot work. Reply 2: Press the Autopilot button. OP: I did it's not working. Reply 2: What exactly are you doing? Have you put all of the information required into the MCDU? OP: Pressing the autopilot button on the Airbus. They also get really rude in the replies for the kind of help that 10-15 years ago would have cost you $25/hr on the phone. I really don't understand this. If you want help with something, you should at least give the bare minimum amount of information needed, and if you don't know what that is, ask what information is needed. If you've been asked what on certain things that are pretty crucial for making it work and you ignore it, don't get rude to the people trying to help you for free. /rant

They sure weren't saying that 3 years ago when they were able to put up the prices of their GPUs by 50% and now they've kept them there.