I know I’ve been posting a lot of video lately. I didn’t get a column up yesterday and I haven’t had much to say in the comments. I’ll spare you the usual two paragraphs complaining about my health and just cut to the chase: I’m off my game this week. Hopefully I’ll bounce back soon. In the meantime, here’s three hours of my playing Grand Theft Auto V:
Link (YouTube) |
As a reminder: Tonight I’ll be streaming some Nier: Automata. Here’s the event reminder for the time. I should be there as planned, although I might not be my usual chatty self. We’ll see if I can get some sleep.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
First of all, hope you feel better, Shamus. Second of all, will you be posting the Nier Automata stream on Youtube later? I’m really looking forward to that one, but, well, the stream starts at 3 am in my time zone, which is a bit too late for the middle of the workweek, even for a night owl like me :)
Even if it doesn’t turn up on youtube, it will probably be saved on the twitch channel.
Oh, Twitch does that? I don’t really use it, so I had no idea. I’ve been actively avoiding watching streams up until now, to be honest.
Videos are usually saved for up to 3 months, after that they get deleted.
O brave new world! I wonder if this is what getting old feels like. There are suddenly popular websites and social media platforms out there that I know next to nothing about. So weird.
Although their player leaves something to be desired since longer videos will balloon the memory footprint like nothing. I feel as if it will try to cache the ENTIRE video into the memory, not just the bit currently playing.
I’ll second the call for adding it to Youtube. I’ve tried watching Twitch videos and I get about five seconds of loading for every second of video.
Air vehicles:
I’m kinda the opposite of the norm. I always try to stay in the sky as much as possible. If I could stay forever in air and rain effective weapon fire down on the unsuspecting land lubbers I would be happy.
One of my favorite memories is doing vigilante missions using an apache attack helicopter or the free sea heli with a minigun that you got with the main mansion.
As for their controls, actually helicopters are MORE controllable using keyboard, since the full motion of a helicopter is a bit too wide for gamepad sticks, but feathering works fine.
Unfortunately, all air vehicles tend to be HORRIBLY gimped speed vise for “game balance” reasons so ground crawling cars could keep up, which is ridiculous.
My understanding is that air vehicles were slowed down because the geometry streaming system can only cope up to a certain speed. So if the player moves around too fast the game can’t load where they’re going before they get there. This is typically a Bad Thing.
I think ALL the speeds are squished towards a more playable bell curve, with the upper bounds set at what the game engine can handle (on console. There are PC mods for “realistic” [aka much faster] car speeds, and it seems to work just fine.).
If you look at the raw stats for all the GTAV vehicles, you can see it. Jets can hit the max of 10.0, cars max at 8.64, and choppers (with one exception) are 7.7. (IRL most supercars can walk away from most helicopters in a straight line. Choppers of the type the LSPD uses cruise at 150mph, and fall out of the sky at ~180. )
Not sure what my actual point was, besides that I think they just balance it for fun gameplay.
I really liked watching this game, at least between the murder rampages. In fact, I almost wanted to go outside and wander around the city I live in. However, that would involve putting on a hat. Also, I’ve been to everywhere that’s close. Instead I put it on my Steam wishlist. Hopefully it’ll drop to cheap enough sometime soon.
What got me: I noticed that there’s stuff in the game that I could never properly explore IRL. And while the other open world games I own are fun, none of them are so close to real life.
I’ve been holding out on Automata because of Denuvo. I’m kinda surprised you’re playing it, Shamus.
I love how you complain about the unrealisticness of sand being incredibly easy to drive on, but have no such issues with ballasted trackbeds or wet dirt with bushes growing out of it. :-D
Also, since I’m not into computer games myself but strangely tempted by this to change that: is there a way to crank up the damage? I feel that falling (or jumping) off a bridge or hitting anything heavy at 30 mph speed differential should kill any car, and that even hitting poles and pedestrians should have a visible, and eventually cumulative, effect on the wellbeing of the vehicle.
If you feel like yet another episode of these, I’d love to see a bit of experimenting. Examples: what happens when you park a semi on the train tracks, will it also fail to stop the train? Can a helicopter be landed on a semi or train? How far can you get offroad in a normal car? Is it possible to fly under a bridge or in a tunnel (yes, Mission Impossible-inspired)? What happens when a helicopter is flown into overhead power line wires? How does crashing or shooting down the blimp look like? Can you position it on a collision course with an airliner, and will the latter be affected? How much detail is there on top of high buildings? Do front-wheel-driven cars (if they exist–the Smart car is RWD) still spin out through oversteer when cornering too fast? What about 4x4s and semis? Is it possible to roll a truck or van on tarmac by changing direction quickly and repeatedly, but without hitting a curb or something? You know … science.
A last thing: while I really enjoy watching you driving cars, motorcycles are a little dissatisfying to watch. Is the jerkiness when steering into corners inherent to the game, or can anything be done about it? I think it would look better if the leaning angle changed less abruptly when steering.
Really the last thing: You mentioned cars leaning out of corners ridiculously in GTA IV — do any of the ones in V do that at all? I’m thinking the big American wagon or something like that should, and I’d love to see that.
Years and years of conditioning. Similarly, people would complain about ice levels having *gasp* normal movement instead of the completely bonkers “ice is actually 99% frictionless” ice levels in older games.
Google “GTA V realistic car damage”. Granted, it’s a mod, but it exists.
Depends on whether it is a wooden or a metal pole. See, metal poles bend to any kind of impact, while the much stronger wooden poles cannot be run over or in fact damaged in any way by anything humanity has invented so far. If you take that as your premise, the damage they do to your car is somewhat close to not being ridiculous either way.
These have all been … tested conclusively, shall we say:
Trains are unstoppable, so yes.
In theory yes, but there is no way for them to “stick” together, so as soon as you touch the target, you’re highly likely to lose some speed and just slide off to the side or back.
As far as you like. Offroads driving does not damage your car, just makes it handle like arse.
Tunnels may be too narrow to fit your helicopter’s rotorblades, but bridges, sure! There even was an achievements for under-passing all bridges with iirc the same helicopter (or on the same playthrough) in 4.
They phase through each other.
Like this.
I think you can find all the rest through YouTube.
This is because Shamus is playing with mouse and keyboard. The standard way to implement driving for both PC and gamepad at once is by making the WASD (or alternatively arrow) keys to mean “full throttle, full left steer, full brake, full right steer” respectively, while the gamepad can sport all sorts of combinations of those, and all effortlessly output “10% throttle and 7% left steer” if your fingers are nimble enough to give that precise input.
This is without having played V at all, just going from my experience with many older GTA titles and what I saw and heard on stream or found through Google.
Thank you.
Meta: I’m glad these are getting some posts here, and the videos on YouTube. Twitch’s app didn’t notify me when the stream was going live yesterday, even though I checked the push-notifications settings earlier this week[1], just for this stream. Nuts to crappy software! :)
[1] 100% of them are enabled, and I don’t have the Twitch app blocked in Android’s settings either.
I can’t watch your streams live, but I’ve been watching them on YouTube. They almost make me want to go back and play GTA5.
I finished the game some time ago. The last time I popped back in to screw around in it, it was really boring to me, but I’m having tons of fun watching your antics.