Paid game mods and failed logic behind it

So, Valve added option for modders to sell their mods. People instantly took it and mostly made bunch of stupid crappy reskins in a hope to make a quick buck. The main problem that happens here is that you get community flooded with stupid useless crap and causes proper modders to simply disappear in the flood of (below) average crappy mods, making it even harder for proper dedicated modders to earn a buck they really deserve.

Then there was an outrage that this would ruin the existing modding community that works just fine as it is and Valve took it down. Lets face it, majority of the best mods and total conversions are done absolutely free of charge as a hobby for someone who just wants to create cool new stuff and be rewarded with a “mod cred” as I call it. That sensation when people adore your creation and can’t stop playing it and talking about it. It gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling that you’ve contributed something to the community (and which feeling I know as a compatibility patcher who delivers compatibility patches for certain games free of charge).

But here is something I haven’t seen being mentioned by anyone, anywhere…

They’ve introduced the “BUY” button for the mods. Why haven’t they considered option “DONATE” instead?

Modders are scattered all over the internet under various communities dedicated to specific games. Unite them under one massive platform like Steam and give them simple foundation on which they can deliver mods to gamers and also get donations through it in an easy way without dealing with all the hassle to establish the “Donate me” thing on their own webpage?

Imagine, modding community wouldn’t really change much from what it has always been, but gamers would be able to DONATE any amount they desire to the modder (and a small cut from that to the Valve for providing the platform). Wouldn’t this be more convenient and fair for everyone?

Anyone could use the mods so nothing would really change from the current state of modding communities, but when you have a DONATE button just a click away, it becomes a habit for people to donate, especially if the mods are really cool (Black Mesa Source springs to my mind). And I think this model would work really well, far better than the one they just canceled…

What do you think about my idea? Would DONATE instead of BUY be a better option for a modding community platform?

DenverComicCon will kick out visitors with GamerGate T-Shirts

Ok, the shirtstorm, sorry, shitstorm is happening again. After fiasco at Calgary Expo and peaceful (but with the wrong opinions) Honey Badger Brigade was unjustly kicked out, here comes Denver ComiCon which will kick out or demand people to change their T-shirt if they’ll be wearing a GamerGate logo/insignia/slogans. You don’t believe it? Here is a Twitter screencap of user who asked official ComiCon Twitter account…

So, all these cons and expos are now banning and kicking out ANYTHING GamerGate related, because they’ve been reading Wikipedia too much on the GamerGate matters (hint, Wikipedia’s article on GamerGate is absolutely drowning in lies and false information)? Apparently. Because for fucks sake, GamerGate is about ethics in gaming journalism. And if you’re so fucking ignorant that after 8 months and several major victories and changes regarding disclosures, they are still going the “GamerGate is a hate group” bullshit. Really? Really Denver ComiCon?

And check this out. GamerGate logos and slogans are not allowed, but you can freely cosplay a Nazi soldier with swastikas and everything for extra authenticity. Because hey, Nazis were totally nice chaps right? Jews and 3/4 of the Europe might disagree but hey, who cares right, it’s the spirit of the ComiCon that counts…

Anyone feeling the hypocrisy already? It’s also so god damn ironic that all these conventions are banning everything related to GamerGate which is for ethics and against censorship and conventions violate/breach exactly that by kicking them out. Kicking out a peaceful visitor because his beliefs don’t align with someone else is hate and discrimination and they are positioning “double G gamepad” above Nazi Swastika on the hate scale. Are they mad on meth? Also sole act of kicking someone out because of that is censorship. Dear Denver ComiCon, you’re violating your very OWN policy.

Lets make a quick reminder what GamerGate has achieved so far…

GamerGate forced hostile and bigoted writers to quit big gaming journalism establishments, GamerGate enforced relationships and connections disclosures between journalists and developers, GamerGate has raised 6 digit in fund-raisers for various charities including feminist group that encourages and supports women to join game development (TFYC), we openly support minorities in gaming and game development with the help of a sister hashtag #NotYourShield, we openly support and defend game developers so they can freely and without restrictions create whatever content they desire and yet we, the GamerGate supporters are hateful people? C’mon, get your heads out of your own asses and open your eyes and stop listening to the general media who is smearing our reputation with lies and false information for 8 months and still counting. GamerGate is a group of people who has done so much good and yet everyone is portraying us as monsters and bigots and not a single person seems to question SJW (Social Justice Warriors) agenda when they stick their smelly noses into every single freaking thing in this world and want to ban it and censor it on every step. And these bigoted SJW’s are doing just that by infecting and infesting conventions with their narrow minded authoritarian minds, banning everyone and everything they even remotely dislike.

Organizers of the conventions, please stop listening to these SJW assholes and just allow people to wear GamerGate logos. I mean, we are the ones who support exactly what these conventions do and yet WE are the ones getting kicked out and banned. Sorry, I just don’t get your logic…

Breaking Down Breuer: Does Gaming Cause Sexism?

Another excellent video from our lovely Vivian James (@CultOfVivian) tackling a study performed by German University of Cologne regarding effects of games and gaming  on people regarding sexism. She’s also further encouraging people to do their own thinking and further reading instead of just blindly listening and believing.

Watch the video and gain XP points for level up! 🙂

Sound Blaster Z Surround setting disabling by itself

Do you happen to own a Sound Blaster Recon3D or Sound Blaster Z/Zx/ZxR and your “Surround” option keeps on getting disabled for no obvious reason?

Yeah, that one. Surround feature, as much as people hate it for music and movies, it’s fantastic for games. It makes sounds that pass through different speaker channels a lot smoother or gradient if you want. When there is a stationary continuous noise in a game, try rotating around your own axis. Sound will pass from one speaker to another. Without Surround feature enabled, sound will usually be cut and transitioned to another speaker where with Surround enabled, it will fade away in a more natural way and transition to another speaker channel, creating a lot more natural and smooth audio environment. Similar to how our ears perceive it in real world.

Anyway, this feature was getting disabled on its own and I couldn’t figure it out why. And then some nice chap gave me an answer on Creative Labs Forums. The culprit for this is ALchemy. If you use Creative Alchemy to re-enable DirectSound3D audio for older games, it will disable the Surround when you run that game. After testing, that was indeed the case, because I’m just playing F.E.A.R. and I also use ALchemy so I can have HW Audio Acceleration and all the EAX HD effects fully enabled. Every time I ran F.E.A.R. Surround setting was disabled.

There is a partial solution to this until Creative fixes it. You can Alt+Tab (or Ctrl+Esc) a game, open the above Creative panel and manually re-enable Surround. It does work.

Hope it helps for anyone having the same annoyance…

Killing Floor 2 Early Access going live on 2015-04-21 !

Tomorrow is the day I’ve been waiting for quite some time. The Early Access release of sequel to absolutely amazing Killing Floor game.

Original Killing Floor started as a mod for UT2004, but then evolved into a standalone game. And while it shows its age through graphics engine, it’s still one of the most fun and exciting co-op games. It even surpass Left 4 Dead in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, L4D is still a really cool game, but Killing Floor just has that special feel with character perking, loads of weapons and waves and waves of tougher and tougher enemies.

To spice things up, Tripwire released several seasonal updates. I remember one winter, it was Christmas time. It was literally magical. I was playing with bunch of people from god knows where from all over the world on an Ice Cave map, Zed corpses flying all over the place, Xmas music playing in the background, having tons of fun. I know this will sound really weird, but it was one of the most memorable Christmases I’ve ever had. And this wasn’t the only event. They also run one in the summer and another one in autumn, around the Halloween time. Always delivering new unique map and totally redesigned monsters + bringing new weapons and characters so you can pimp yourself out and be cool. Sometimes as a payable character, other times as a reward for doing the sometimes crazy ridiculous achievements.

It’s this awesome relation between developers, content, players and the whole community making this game a success. Killing Floor is one of the oldest games on Steam that still has one of the most active community/player base even after all these years.

Killing Floor 2 on Steam Store

Live gameplay with TotalBiscuit and Tripwire developer:

My initial impressions?

I know it’s Early Access, but from what I’ve seen in the above video, the game is already incredibly polished and has very little bugs. It’s built on top of highly modified Unreal Engine 3 with some of the Unreal Engine 4 features ported back to it. It looks amazing and like TotalBiscuit said, the feel of the weapons was one of the biggest features in the original game. Thy felt really good and you just wanted to use them. A lot. That’s why focus like this makes sense. They are now taking this like 5 levels higher with high framerate animations that look absolutely ridiculous (in a positive sense). The way how monsters and their corpses interact with the world is also awesome and the gore, well that’s just beyond ridiculous. You can almost paint the entire level in blood and guts. I also love how they expanded perks, because perking in original, while it was frustrating at times, it was greatly rewarding and was constantly pushing you to play more and more. And the community was so awesome, if you had to perk something specific, people ALWAYS assisted the best they could. And if community will be even half as good as with the original game, KF2 will be a huge success. With modded servers and new awesome pimped characters to unlock and/or buy, it will be freaking amazing.

Sure it will lack some content in Early Access and there won’t be all perks available at first, but who cares. I just want moar of this coz it’s so freaking awesome!!!

Can’t wait for tomorrow, it’s gonna be maaaaad and gory! 😀

Saving Private Badger

This will be a collection of evidence regarding unjustful ban of the Honey Badger Brigade from the Calgary Expo. If you have archived links, images, recordings, anything useful, please provide them either here or through my Twitter.

First news about the incident:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/18/female-group-ejected-from-comic-expo-for-criticizing-feminism/
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/04/19/calgary-expo-faces-consumer-backlash-after-expelling-female-critics-of-feminism/

Response from founder of Honey Badger Radio, Alison Tieman:

Full recording of panel at which Honey Badger Brigade supposedly caused the horrible interruption (from 18:30 onwards):

CalgaryExpo claims Honey Badger Brigade didn’t register as Honey Badger Brigade even though CalgaryExpo still lists them under this very name!

“Infiltration” promo message from Honey Badger Brigade heavily misunderstood:
What this message says is that they ARE those nerds already and that they are planning to “infiltrate” the Expo through years and years of training as these nerdy games, movies and comics lovers. CalgaryExpo representatives apparently have a broken sarcasm detector, because they took it as a real hostile infiltration of someone who is pretending to be all that just to get in. Somehow…

Photo of the “offensive” Honey Badger Brigade booth:

How is standing against censorship and having “ethics” written on a banner offensive? How is GamerGate logo offensive? Since when has standing up for ethics an offensive thing?

Some idiot (it turns out it was Calgary Security staff) called police on them after they were already kicked out of the Expo while they were chilling in a nearby park (raw footage):

WILL GET UPDATED FURTHER!

Men’s Rights Activism isn’t a supremacy evil cult

There is this negative association with MRA or Men’s Rights Activists floating around. When we talk about feminism (before the 3rd wave nonsense era at least), it is always taken as something good, a movement to resolve injustices towards women. Everyone cheers and applauds (with jazz hands) when we talk about feminism. And I agree. If there are issues, they need resolving. I respect that.

But things change dramatically when we switch the sides and introduce men’s rights movements into the conversations. And I didn’t really pay much attention to MRA’s messages (and I’m a man!) until feminists started throwing shit at them for merely existing and that’s when I really noticed them and seen that MRA messages and raising of awareness regarding issues that men face in real life go far beyond manspreading, mansplaining, man taking a piss standing up and other feminist bullshit they come up with lately. You know, all those really dumb petty issues for which you facepalm every time you hear them coming from feminist mouths…

Apparently there is this belief that MRA’s are these male supremacist shitlords who want even more privilege on top of all the privilege they already have (you know, the patriarchy). The reality is, there are in fact issues, serious issues men face and no one seems to give a flying fart about it because it’s “just” men. That’s rather sexist, discriminatory and simply filled with bigotry…

MRA try to raise awareness regarding problems like child custody bias in favor of women, forced child support even if the child is not even a genetic offspring of that man, male genital mutilation (circumcision) which is still not illegal unlike female genital mutilation, prison sentences that are drastically higher for men for the same crimes, rape laws where men can’t even be raped by a legal definition (to my surprise USA has changed that in 2012 I believe, but other countries still haven’t done that), very high suicide rates among men compared to women, work related deaths, high rates of homelessness among men and so on. Here are just few examples to get a taste of it, you can read more of them here:

Men’s Rights Movement Wiki

Now, if you look at the list, these aren’t some childish moronic issues like manspreading. They also aren’t about male supremacy, they not even level them with women in many cases, they just present them as stand alone issues that need resolving because they are affecting men exclusively or predominantly in a negative way. These are real struggles and issues men face and while I might not yet been affected by some of them or may never be affected by them in my life time, I’ve seen them happening around me, especially those around child custody among few others and that by itself is the reason why everyone should be open-minded when it comes to messages spoken by the MRA’s..

Don’t be one of those bigots and haters who attack MRA’s just because they are MRA’s. If you’re a feminist preaching about equality and then you decide and go and protest in front of one of the only two MRA centers in the USA (I think this is the right number), please stop and rethink your life values. Because you’ve fucked them up entirely. If you expect equality feminists demand, be a decent human being and allow MRA’s to present their observations, findings and other things related to male gender.

Why is there always this need for hostility towards MRA’s and the need to treat anyone who even slightly agrees with MRA’s like shit? Sure there are lunatics on both sides of the spectrum, but why don’t women present their issues and men present their issues and then we try to resolve them in relation to each other in a respectable way? I mean, isn’t that how you achieve closest equivalent to what equality should be?

Animals know how to cross the roads

I thought this video was so cute I had to post it here as well. Animals actually learned how to cross the roads by following the zebra crossing stripes and observing red/green lights. Amazing. 🙂

Volvo Life Paint

Volvo re-inventing safety. This time around not for cars, but for cyclists and even pedestrians. Pretty cool technology that shouldn’t cost more than a can of a high quality metallic spray paint.

Air conditioning units, the silent power consumers

I had plans to write about this few months ago, but have somehow failed to deliver.

I’m using a split air conditioning unit from Zibro. It’s several years old unit which was one of the highest end units back when I bought it.

I was curious how much it consumes when heating function is running during a winter. I’ve used it here and there when it was really cold. Plugged it through the watt-o-meter and I got my results. Turned it off and that’s when I got shocked…

Basics

While in OFF (standby) state, it was consuming ~90W of power. 90W for doing nothing at all, just being plugged into a wall socket. For reference, that’s almost like having a 100W incandescent bulb turned on 24/7!

At first I thought it’s something wrong with the measurements, but after doing some research, I’ve found out why it is like this. It’s not mentioned ANYWHERE in the instruction manuals and sales people never mention it when you’re buying AC unit.

Split air conditioning units consist of indoor and outdoor unit. And the outdoor unit is the culprit for this rather excessive power consumption behavior.

The outdoor unit also houses the compressor which pumps the coolant around the system and the reason for consumption is the heater within it, that keeps the liquids and particularly lubrication within compressor in a proper aggregate state. If lubrication becomes too thick due to very low temperatures, when you fire up the compressor it will wear significantly faster than with proper lubrication. And because of that, outdoor unit has its own thermostat that keeps compressor at a correct temperature at all times, keeping compressor always instantly ready for a wear-less operation.

Basic calculations

Where I live, winters often last from mid October till beginning of March. Roughly 5 months if we round it up. If unit is consuming power at the rate of 90W per hour, that’s 0,09 kW an hour. Times 24 for a full day makes it 2,16 kW a day. 5 months is roughly 150 days if we count them all as 30 days, making the total power consumption of 324 kWh for each winter season! 324 kWh of wasted power for doing NOTHING at all except being plugged into a wall socket. That’s a lot of power literally being thrown out the window.

For a better perspective, this is the equivalent power consumption to a 400+ liter, two door American style class A++ refrigerator running for a whole year!

Based on further research, power consumption depends on the age, tech level of the AC unit as well as outdoor temperatures. Certain newer high-end AC units have significantly lower power consumption to keep the compressor warm compared to my unit. But still, consuming even just 10W is 10W too much. Use watt-o-meter if you have one and do the measurements yourself. This mostly applies to countries that have winters. If you’re in a region with constant summer, I don’t think it’s even worth bothering. But for regions with winters, it can make a MASSIVE difference to the power bill and the environment.

Solutions

If you do live in region where you have winters and you know you won’t need the AC unit for the entire winter, simply unplug it from the wall. If it’s not running, it won’t be harmed by the extremely low temperatures. This way you’ll eliminate the heater and save tons of power.

Warning and limitation!

If you do live in a region affected by winters and you plan on using AC unit for dehumidification or heating during the winter, you need to plug it into the wall socket at least 12 hours prior actually activating its dehumidifier/heater function. The heater should heat up the compressor in 12 hours sufficiently enough. Then it is safe to actually run the AC unit and use it as usual. The unit will work regardless, but be aware that you’ll significantly shorten its lifespan.