Monday, October 23, 2017

You Can Optimize Your Rig, Can't You?

Back in the day, (I really dislike the expression) everyone who played games on a PC knew how to optimize it to within a nanosecond of it's life.
Today you are lucky if players know what is under their hood.

nVidia and AMD/ATI have all but neutered tweaking gamers.
nVidia wants to load a streaming service - and players wanna know why the game they are playing is lagging?

Or they use WiFi as a connection and wonder - "What is packet loss?"

Okay, here are some basics.

First rule is to minimize what is running in the background.
One of the best ways to learn about programs running on your computer is to go to Black Viper's site.

He teaches you to run services.msc.
Open the run window - windows key + R
Type services.msc

What you'll see is a list of ALL the programs that launch on your computer.
Some are .indispensable. He'll let you know.
Some are superfluous garbage, he'll let you know that too.

Some Anti-virus suite have a "game mode" to limit the interference while you're online gaming. Cheaper AV flags any change to an executable as a virus so every update to your favorite game causes your AV to quarantine or delete you game.

Then there is your router.
Have you enabled UPnP?
Many times a game wants to use specific ports UDP or TCP.

Each aspect of you PC is worth examination.

When was the last time you opened the case and cleaned the dust from your CPU heatsink fins? Your GPR heatsink?

Does your power supply allow for a good deal more wattage than you normally consume? Or are you running at the limit?

There are some great programs to monitor your hardware.
HWiNFO64 will show you everything you need to know about your hardware and it's performance after running a game.

If you have any general questions about tweaking your rig, ask away.

Cogmind - Roguelike My Ass, This Is Rogue Only Better

This is one amazing piece of code.

Rogue was a game that used ASCII characters as avatars for you (@) and your environment.

This is what Rogue looked like in 1980 on a Trash 80.
What defined the game was "permadeath." Die and the game was over, there was no save to restore and continue from.
You had to begin all over again.
Explore, find loot, kill monsters and then find the stairs to the next level. That was the entire game.

Later, Avalon Hill made another version dubbed, "Telengard."
It expanded the initial game in a few ways, many of them graphic. That is, if you had a Commodore or Apple II.
On a Trash-80, this is what you got.
More character information. Now you could roll dice to your hearts content to get that perfect character. And you could play as a Rogue, Fighter, Mage etc.

The trouble was you got invested in your character, much like D&D but the game...not so much. You could roll for a half an hour to get what you wanted in stats and then die on level two. How many times you'd do this, a measure of your masochism?

Well in Cogmind you are a bot that grows (levels, evolves) by finding and attaching various parts and subsystems.
Yes, there is permadeath. Yes, you can play using ASCII characters or tiles, your choice.
So they can call it Roguelike but I'd call it Rogue's successor.

On  the Cogmind screen you will find windows with all the information you need. What you have installed and it's condition. Your major systems (and their health), your logs, scans and inventory.
A Unix like environment.
There are many other types of bots to be found; scavengers, serfs, pests, mercenaries et cetera.
Some are innocuous, although destroying them can leave you with some loot. Some are enlarging the map - watch they don't wall you off.

The game play is familiar. Sneak or shoot but you are trying to find the stairs to the next level.
Sometimes you will "evolve" upon completing a floor; you gain extra slots to distribute.
"Do I place the slot in 'Power?' Or do I put it into 'Weapons?'"
That is about the extent of the RPG elements.

But again, I am more invested in the game - I want out, rather than being invested in a particular build I crafted.
It's $20 on Steam. And well worth your time.