UltraMega

Thx! I took a few more photos: From Wikipedia: So the first jar, or the one on top, is my gfs jar. She started this whole thing because she has a 20 gallon standard fish tank with pea puffers. The puffers like to eat small snails, and you can typically get pest snails from any fish store for free, which we did. My gf originally started a smaller jar just to raise pest snails as food for her fish, but the jar turned out to be kinda interesting on its own so that evolved into a bigger, better jar, and then I made my own jar. Her jar has pest snails. My jar (bottom jar) does not. There is definitely a difference in how much plant growth goes on between the two and the plants grow a lot faster in the snail jar, though they're not all the same type of plants. Both jars are doing well though. Some other differences, her jar used natural sand that we got for free from a rock yard. When we told them we only needed a small amount of sand, they told us to just take it and didn't charge us. A lot of the plants we also go for free, but not all. Some came from our other fish tanks (we have 3). My jar uses a mix of sand and plain old dirt from my backyard. I had never put dirt into a fish setup before, but it works. Each jar cost about $30 to setup. $15 for the jar, and $15 for the light. The rest was pretty much free, aside from the living creatures. Jar one has about 15 cherry shrimp that we are hoping will breed soon, and a dwarf African frog, and snails. My jar has 6-7 cherry shrimp and 2 Otocinclus algae eater fish and nothing else. We got the shrimp on amazon. First time I have ever ordered live shrimp/fish online. Worked out pretty well. Was about half the price compared to getting them at a store. Pics from out 3 fish tanks. We have a 40 gallon, which is my tank that I've had for a long time (although the actual tank itself is new after the recent leak, but the setup is the same as it was before), a 20 gallon which is my gfs tank with the pea puffers and some other fish, and a ten gallon that we only setup recently. We had a spare 10 gallon tank with a light and filter so we just set it up recently as a very basic tank just to grow extra plants that we can move to our other tanks over time. If you like this sort of thing, this is a great youtube channel: tanks for nothin - YouTube ^This channel came out of nowhere, put out 4 awesome videos and got ~10 million views; with a brand new channel and just 4 videos. They're all like a Planet Earth style episode, but about fish tanks.

Just a thought; I actually prefer to get information from written articles. The problem I find is that articles seldom have the goal of just being informative today, and instead they're padded out and time wasting. YouTube often works better, but only because it's quicker and easier to skip through the filler on a video, and there are extensions that help with that for YouTube. If it's a written article, it just takes more energy to go through it to get to the point. Wish that wasn't the case.

Really looking forward to this game. But with that said, seems odd that hardware RT would need to come later on a UE5 title since it's already baked into the engine. Also seems like a strange choice to add multi-player. Stalker games have always been single player. I definitely wouldn't mind a coop mode though. IMO, this game doesn't really need hardware RT. The original games had very dark stencil shadows that really blended well with the art style to create a dark gritty atmosphere. Software Lumen does a good job of replicating that visual feel since it tends to be darker than hardware Lumen. I wonder if using hardware Lumen would technically add to the fidelity of the lighting but diminish the dark gritty vibe by just making everything a bit brighter. I don't see a big need for games like this to use hardware Lumen over software Lumen when most of the game will be outside environments without reflective surfaces. The indoor environments may benefit, but based on what I've seen from trailers, they really nailed the look of the indoor scenes already.

@Slaughtahouse

Sorry, I just pulled that last comment out of my ass. I don't think this game even supports direct storage. That is a weird issue. If I had to guess I'd assume the game is decompressing information differently when it thinks the game is running on an HDD, and therefore it's slower even though it's not actually an HDD.

It's a known issue/deficiency that Direct Storage is slower on PC because PC does not have a dedicated hardware to deal with the decompression, and instead direct storage takes away from the GPU. It's just how it is, performance differences are usually minimal. I was prepared to argue about the camera more - 4K native 30 FPS cap: I can run this at 60FPS with upscaling, and I would not suggest playing Outlaws at 30 FPS. But maybe there are some cinematic camera aspects that infringe naturally on to the player when cinematics are the focus.

I've been thinking of picking this up. I don't expect it to be amazing, but it looks like a fun time none the less. I think it's about the same kind of camera lensing that Hellblade 2 used for 21:9, and IMO it worked well there. We're getting to the point where graphics are getting good enough to look highly cinematic. The camera effects of a cinematic camera are somewhat necessary to really achieve that cinematic experience.

The update is a preview update right now, so unless you do insider previews, you don't have the update yet.

Revisiting some dark and dirty Lorn: I watched 2001 Space Odyssey for the first time recently. I feel that a lot of Lorn is inspired by the film. ^ This is a remastered trailer, from the original film. This movie is available in modern 4K-Original Film Quality.

In a nutshell, the Walstad Method is a way of setting up an aquarium or fish bowl that requires no input or output, and no filtration. The point is to setup a self sufficient environment where the shrimp/fish/frogs/whatever balance out with the plants in a way that is symbiotic. My gf and I setup two Walstad jars with 2 gallon cookie jars from Walmart. We used some wire to make a cradle for the lights, and found LEDs that fit nicely under the lid of the jars. Just another fish side hobby we enjoy.

It will be interesting to see if this applies to other CPUs as well like Zen 3 or older.

I'm not sure. It affects more than just Ryzen 9000 though, so I'd assume the fix will make it's way to win10 as well eventually.

I try to avoid posting videos as the only source for news, but I haven't seen this info anywhere else yet.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/scientists-think-they-have-found-the-source-of-the-most-promising-alien-signal-ever-seen/ar-AA1pbU8s?ocid=BingNewsVerp A little background, the hydrogen line is a frequency that astronomers expect aliens to broadcast on if they were reaching out. Sort of like prime numbers, it's something they thought would be a sign of intelligence. I'd assume they no longer think of the hydrogen line in the same way knowing this can happen naturally. Its rare for anything to happen suddenly in space, but hydrogen is the most abundant element so it's not far fetched at all that a hydrogen cloud could be heated up quickly in rare events, and thus send out a hydrogen line type signal.

Mozilla supports full extensions on mobile. And so does edge canary, with a little effort.

There are already a lot of mods that remove loading screens. I know there one that removes the loading between space travel, and one that makes elevators work without a loading screen as well. Still, returning to Starfield even for the DLC doesn't interest me much. I doubt I'll return to the game anytime soon. Maybe if another big update plus some really significant mods come out I'll reconsider, but once you beat the main quest and most of the big side quests, there's just nothing meaningful to do.

I think Microsoft is feeling a bit upside down in their investment goals with all their acquisitions, and trying to balance their books on an individual IP basis. Since the Indian Jones game probably comes with a heafty IP licensing bill, they want it to be multi-platform. It's not a game that is going to help build the Xbox brand so much, as it's just an average licensed movie IP game. I agree that a few months of Xbox exclusivity seems meaningless at this point, but it at least allows them to appear to be putting their own platform first. I'm sure a lot of this boils down to just competing forces within Microsoft's executive's expectations, and them trying to find a balance between having their cake and eating it too. This Indian Jones game feels like a console market game more than a PC one. It looks like Uncharted, but worse, and with the Indian Jones IP on top. Games like this that cater more to console audiences are probably the ones Microsoft will be doing this with in general. Games like Stalker 2, probably not. I would be surprised in Stalker 2 ended up on PS5.

I agree with all of your criticism of Microsoft's strategy lately. It was a huge mistake IMO to release the Series S all together. Making a lower res 1080p system wasn't crazy, but releasing it with less ram was. I think Sony and Microsoft also both suffered from being very late with true current gen content and cross platform really held back this gen, and still does more than it should. To be fair, I think Covid contributed a lot to that. Chip shortages had a real impact, and we can't really know if the approach would have been different if not for that. But with that in mind, I don't think any of those issues you mentioned are made worse by releasing games on PS5. I agree that quantity over quality has been the theme for the birth of game pass up to now, but selling more copies by releasing on PS5 doesn't really impact that one way or the other. Or if it does, it would seem they could maintain higher dev budgets with the anticipated extra sales. The homogony between Xbox, PS5, and PC now is at a level where there are no major hurdles for devs to release wherever they can. I think it's worth mentioning as well that Microsoft did make a lot of huge investments that have yet to really come to fruition. Had they made those investments a few years before launching game pass, they could have kicked off with a bang, but it's not typical for subscription services to launch with a big library of high quality first party IP. Netflix and Hulu started by streaming purely content they didn't produce, now they both have a lot of quality first party stuff. I think Microsoft will get there. Once titles like Stalker 2, MSFS2024, Fable, and all the other current gen stuff they have in the works come out, I think they will get the ball rolling in the right direction. It will be interesting to see if they still want to release titles on PS5 once they do have some truly good current gen titles out. This whole Xbox titles on PS5 thing seems like it could be temporary as sort of a stop gap to slow the bleeding from all their investments that don't have a short term pay-off. But I hope it lasts, and becomes more standard as time goes on. I'll just wrap up by pointing out FF16 is a good example of a game that was more or less forced to become a PC title because of the low sales. Not a first party Sony game, but from what I understand the game was supposed to be a PS5 exclusive indefinitely but it just didn't sell enough copies.

https://www.guru3d.com/story/amd-clarifies-ryzen-9000-game-benchmarks-new-windows-11-update-and-chipset-driver-will-help/

I think the market has changed. Consoles don't sell as well as they used to, which means selling games exclusive to one system means seller less copies over all. The Playstation 2 is still the best selling console of all time, followed by the Nintendo DS. Another factor is that games are cheaper now than they used to be. Games are still $60 as they were when I was a kid buying PS2 games, which means they're cheaper now since they price didn't rise with inflation. That means they have to sell more copies (or riddle their games with micro-transactions). In a world with fewer consoles being sold, and games being technically cheaper, somethings gotta give. The video game market overall is bigger today than ever, but individual console markets are smaller. The only way to keep profiting from game sales is to cut the dev budget or sell on more platforms. Nintendo is the exception, as the Switch is the third best selling console of all time; the audience is big enough there for Nintendo to stay exclusive. Plus I'd imagine the budget for their games is a lot smaller than a typical AAA game like COD or whatever. Also of note, all the Playstation games you listed are on PC now, except Gran Turismo. Sony is also seeing the need to sell their games on more platforms. I don't see Sony selling games on Xbox, but they're ramping up their efforts in the PC market. You said it's a double edged sword, and maybe that is or was true for the console makers, but as gamers we benefit from games being available in more places. I see no down side.

You can use extensions on chrome on your phone?

I may be the odd man out here, but I love that Microsoft is going full tilt on multiplatform titles. Microsoft's whole MO is: be everywhere people are using software. This is entirely within their main business strategy and long term it has the potential to really shake up the 'platform game exclusive' concept as a whole. We are past the days of needing to cater to hardware from a game dev perspective. The last time we were there was the PS3 era. Since then, dev are just leaving money on the table if they don't release their games everywhere they can. I understand that this move is happening early because Microsoft over-estimated the short-term success of game pass, but all that aside, we all benefit from more multi-platform games.

Anyone here playing this game? What is your experience so far? This game uses: Software Lumen Hardware lumen - up to path tracing Nanite It does not use: Nanite for vegetation Virtual Shadow Maps Note: virtual shadow maps are unnecessary when using Path Tracing. As an interesting note of comparison, HellBlade 2, the only other serious UE5 title to date, does use nanite vegetation and virtual shadow maps, but only software Lumen. The HellBlade team was actually only able to implement these features late into their dev cycle, nanite vegetation almost didn't make the cut. This is because those features were added late in development of UE5 itself, and likely why Black Myth doesn't use them. At the end of the day, this is the first open world game to make heavy usage of the bigger tech promised from UE5. Performance is definitely reflected, as a 4090 with DLSS cannot maintain 60 FPS without frame gen at max settings. AMD really suffering here. IDK if it's unoptimized drivers or what. AMD is behind in RT, but for medium settings one would assume this is software lumen, which AMD should be able to manage with decent performance. Black Myth: Wukong GPU Benchmark | TechSpot WWW.TECHSPOT.COM Black Myth: Wukong is a new action RPG that's gained attention for its stunning visuals and intense combat. Today, we'll focus on GPU benchmarking to compare performance... Note: this games release is impacted by a press release controversy that reflects the censorship views of a foreign nation. I have not played this myself, but I assume someone here has, or will. What are your thoughts?

Recently I had to reset my phone. Before the reset, I was using an older version of AdGuard that had a decent free ability to block ads universally on Android. After the reset, I found this app was no longer available in an effective form on the Android store. So I installed Egde Canary Build, and did a quick mod to allow it to use full desktop extensions. Now I have Ublock and SponsorSkip installed on my phone browser as extensions. Its nice to have these features on the same browser that windows defaults to on mobile for convenience reasons. How to Edge: https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-to-add-extensions-to-microsoft-edge-on-android What do you guys use to block ads on mobile?

If it were a standard feature that we all happily used, then it would be fair. But as is, it's an extra feature that you have to pay for to get an unfair advantage. As long as that is true, it should be banned IMO.