Software: On & Off the Web

[Spastic Hamburger]

And another one came in: City Car Driving. It has VR support, which the other two do not, but its wheel support isn’t as extensive according to the reviews but it definitely warrants some additional research to see which one of the three programs is best suited to me 🙂

[DeVaultSetter]

Which one made it to pole position?
Can stock folded, sad as was a subscriber. The Splashy image was purchased for a couple of bucks, presumably the rights to the image don’t change.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Looks like City Car Driving is getting an updated version in May so I may start with Beam.NG drive when it goes on sale and go from there. Or Euro Truck Simulator. Need to look into the latter more but it I think I read that it has good hardware support. It also has a ton of DLC but I may not need much of it, will need to take a closer look. Would also be nice to have something to mess around with outside of learning so I’ll take that into consideration. Will pick up the research again this weekend. 🙂

Always sad to see a service fold. 🙁

Weird that the Wikipedia page is so inaccurate. The issues have already been mentioned on the talk page so hopefully it’ll get changed

• This reply was modified 2 months, 1 week ago by Spastic Hamburger.

[DeVaultSetter]

Tried a hand at the MSN games Spades, the first thing was the old login is deprecated, now it’s either anonymous or only the MS account to login through FirebaseApp.
Fun, except the game screen won’t maximise in the browser and there’s a bug in the sound volume slider. The chat icons take a bit of getting used to as well.

[DeVaultSetter]

In response to this observation, there has been more action on trimming the Wikipedia content down as per e.g the 2007 Wikipedia: “In Popular Culture” Content article. Do like the xkcd ref. 🙂
Take, for example, this revision of the page for What Are Little Boys Made Of before the section got chopped. This is the current page.
There are some interesting references that have been moved on, it’s possible to argue the items are all relevant because they satisfy certain criteria. In the olden multivolume hardcopy days, one was obviously restricted by physical media, here there is no such restriction. Wikipedans have become too encyclopedic! Having some of the most “important” references in popular culture now as links in the page below, does take something away from the article. Bring them back I say!
Edit: Having said that, references are a thing though, one can’t, for example, say something happened in a film without references. If the movie, or at least its transcript isn’t at IA or one of the official video channels that provide access to the film for everyone, the reference might be rejected. Snippets from movie reviews from syndicated sources might be acceptable as long as they are not behind an impervious paywall.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by DeVaultSetter.

[Spastic Hamburger]

I like how the popular culture section lives on in See Also but without the descriptions. The section doesn’t really detract too much from the articles as one can easily skip it and, often, the references are pretty interesting. I think they’re doing too much to make things more concise and, as a result, making it a bit less useful. To be fair, some of the articles were getting out of hand such as the Wile E Coyote and Acme articles. Especially the latter: people were adding every reference to Acme, even companies that predated the fictional corporation, so they had to do a bit of a purge. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the inspirations behind the xkcd strip. Love xkcd still. Been reading it for close to twenty years now 😛

On DeVaultSetter said

Tried a hand at the MSN games Spades, the first thing was the old login is deprecated, now it’s either anonymous or only the MS account to login through FirebaseApp.
Fun, except the game screen won’t maximise in the browser and there’s a bug in the sound volume slider. The chat icons take a bit of getting used to as well.

Didn’t know MSN had a dedicated game zone. Looks like it hasn’t been maintained very well. Some of those look like web clients for the desktop versions that weren’t ported very well. Maybe they were the original versions that were brought over to a standalone program later and then forgotten about?

[Spastic Hamburger]

Alright, picked up BeamNG.drive as it was on sale. The physics are good. Really good. And the UI is a lot more intuitive than in Rigs. As expected from being the same team, there are a lot of things that are similar. The controls are also pretty fluid. Not yet sure how well the AI controlled cars work out but we’ll get there 🙂

Passed on Euro Truck Sim 2 for now as I had a hard time finding ways to turn it into a car sim

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Spastic Hamburger.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Looks like Windows 11 24H2 is being pushed out. The changes don’t look too significant. The biggest change is support for AI compute cores. Another notable one is support for WiFi 7. Other than that, it looks like it’s mostly minor tweaks to the UI in addition to other bug fixes under the hood.

[DeVaultSetter]

Just got it here as well, the install, as with on the last occasion was through the WU interface, relatively painless as an ISO was not required. Also ran GPEdit to prevent the well meaning but “flawed” WU downloading OEM driver updates. That is, funnily enough, has not to-date existed a policy of HP to tinker with WU, as everything driver related (including Intel) should be dealt with through their provided Support Assistant. Not bad in that respect. 🙂
Edit: Oh, and the current official known issues list, for the unofficial ones it’s easy, just Google “<an_expletive> W11“. 😛

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by DeVaultSetter.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Yeah, I’ll be on standby to fix the drivers. I usually wait until it’s automatically installed just in case. 🙂

Yep, the big vendors are pretty good about sharing with Microsoft so things go more smoothly 🙂

Good catch! Also, there are known issues with Ubisoft games so definitely something to keep in mind

[Spastic Hamburger]

On Spastic Hamburger said

Alright, picked up BeamNG.drive as it was on sale. The physics are good. Really good. And the UI is a lot more intuitive than in Rigs. As expected from being the same team, there are a lot of things that are similar. The controls are also pretty fluid. Not yet sure how well the AI controlled cars work out but we’ll get there 🙂

Passed on Euro Truck Sim 2 for now as I had a hard time finding ways to turn it into a car sim

Update time!

Been spending the last few weeks getting acquainted with the realism and different vehicles in short bursts so today I gave it a longer session. It went rather well. They’re still working on the AI traffic so that it’s not basic but I did a decent job of driving in it and got some highway driving in. Also tried out some of the scenarios and they’re pretty fun. One of them has you driving a police car with your objective being to drive a semi of the road. Others are more basic, having you simply crash your vehicle. Still need to keep practicing, though 🙂

Edit:

Still don’t have a real car to practice on, though. More on that in the private thread later 🙁

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Spastic Hamburger.

[DeVaultSetter]

Nico at AfkMods mentioned GOGs giveaway of the point and click The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, downloading now. The manual for the KQ adventure-like looks really cool, the main gripe in game seems to be stuff lost in translation, oh well.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Thanks, will snag it! 🙂

I’d play it in German but not only am I rusty, I doubt I’d really understand enough for it to make sense. 😛

Handy for engineering, though!

[DeVaultSetter]

Sprechen sie Deutsch Nein? About the limit of mine. 😛
Morrowind anyone? Interesting C++ project for budding (or even slightly decrepit) C++ enthusiasts! 🙂

[Spastic Hamburger]

Cool! Will need to go through it sometime 🙂

Code doesn’t seem well documented, though. It’s also missing a build recipe so would be a bit difficult to build. Interesting that it uses a lesser known image library. Why not a more common one, I wonder?

[DeVaultSetter]

Sounds a likely candidate for Projects, getting it all to wrok from VS being the major stumbling block if not disposed to CMake. Is that image library still being updated?
Edit: Doesn’t look like it, and there are embedded dlls, so how closely bound into the project is it.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 6 days ago by DeVaultSetter.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Quite possibly. I know I had installed some bits of VS over here when I first set things up, will need to look at it to see which parts. Never been good with VS, though. CMake may be a good option. In the last few years, I’ve been wanting to play around with Meson some. It’s a newer build configuration utility that the GNOME project has been switching to. As far as the image library, I don’t think so. Here’s the current repo and, while it has pull requests from last year, there’s been no real activity on the official branch in four years according to the statistics. I do wonder how difficult it’d be to swap it out for something more supported like GraphicsMagick (assuming I understand the usage of the image library in this instance; if not, there are others to choose from).

Due to its age, the code may need some additional updates to be compatible both with modern compilers and the APIs of modern systems. Quite a few things have changed in the standard in the last twenty years. Running a compiler in dry run mode would help track all of that down along with Cppcheck which we’ve used before.

It’d be nice to get working cross-platform as well since OpenMW works across several platforms. That’d require something like GTK or Qt.

Another thing missing is the code license and the headers don’t give much clue either. Should still be possible to contact Dave over at UESP, though.

Just redownloaded Fallout: New Vegas. Bit in the mood now that I’ve been reading the Silo series. I’ve also only put five hours into it so it’s time to make more progress 😛

Edit: New Vegas crashed after just an hour. Will try again another day….

• This reply was modified 1 week, 6 days ago by Spastic Hamburger.
• This reply was modified 1 week, 5 days ago by Spastic Hamburger.
• This reply was modified 1 week, 5 days ago by Spastic Hamburger.

[DeVaultSetter]

VS is the first preference here as it has an IDE and a feedback system which has good support. There are others like the cross platform VSCode which might be worth trying out at some stage.

On the Sourcefourge page the licence is “GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2),” still more popular than other versions, but second fiddle to MIT these days.
There’s a fair bit of bulk in David’s code, so shooting through an enquiry might work. It’s clear he wanted to move quickly away from MWEdit, as evidenced by not providing answer for all the bugs posted, even if half of them were PEBCAK.
Is FNV coming from Steam, GOG or Beth?

[Spastic Hamburger]

I know CMake has a VS plugin that integrates it with Visual Studio. Not sure about Meson about I’ll definitely take a look.

The first order of business would be to simply see if it works, making the minimal code changes necessary to do so. After that, things can be freshened up a bit, maybe with a can of Febreze.

Other than the license, what else should be in the questionnaire?

As I recall, if it’s under GPL then all future changes need to be under the GPL unless permission is granted from all parties who contributed code to change the license. Other licenses aren’t as strict about it. Not too familiar with the MIT license, even though I’ve seen it around a lot. Just never really got around to reading up on it 😛

New Vegas is running from Steam without mods or DLC (never got around to picking up the DLC)

Edit:

Tried again and it’s still crashing 🙁

• This reply was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by Spastic Hamburger.

[DeVaultSetter]

Sounds like a project topic in the offing. 🙂
We could ask him for comment, or comment for code, or comment in return for code, or vice-versa, or seek his recommended flavour of Febreze – over here there’s Glen 20 for extra bug zap. 😛
Do you use NVAC?

[Author]

Posts