Recent content by Instag0

I have been playing Mount & Blade for a bit over one and a half decades. I love it. I can wait for Bannerlord to finish. I mean, how long has it been in early access? That'll tell you how much I care about all the complaining.

Bannerlord could take another 16 years for all I care. Can't y'all just chill? Go play Fortnite or something-- TikTok flossing some more, or whatever you damn kids do these days. You know what? Get off my lawn. Bannerlord will be done when it's done.

It's going to be pretty bad everywhere, not just in New York. This thing is undoubtedly extremely virulent. And I don't think enough thought will be given to the fact that it may stick around, and we may be dealing with flare-ups for many months before we have a widespread, reliable vaccine. In other words, I'm worried about not one peak, but getting hit in waves-- many peaks that follow troughs where restrictions are lifted before being tightened down, then lifted and tightened down, and so on.

Then, factor in some natural disasters-- a few hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes, tornados, a gnarly fire season, and we have a the makings for a biblical apocalypse. And there's nothing that says we can only be hit by one disease at a time. We could get another pandemic that would otherwise have been shut down but flourishes either locally or spreads globally because of the general overload of our health care systems. And this overload is ultimately caused by yes, a virulent disease, but a critical and fundamental lack of imagination.

We are in circumstances lead by a lot of leaders across the world who never believed in science, who have no imagination for either the scale of death and destruction nor the scale of what's needed to be a bulwark against it, and things look very bad, to put it mildly.

On a happier note, the next several months should be clarifying for a lot of us. What do we care about? We have we cared about all along? We may not have much time to figure it out. So maybe there is maybe a silver lining, albeit a very grim one. I've finally concluded music and art is super important, so that's what I'm here for these days.

GPT-2 based models seem pretty firm-set in straddling the line between lurid incoherence overall and somewhat alarming conversational ability in short runs of text. It's sort of an uncanny-valley effect. I am not sure what to make of it. But I hope more comes of it. It'd be neat as a procedural elemental for a video game (AI dungeon is okay but it's really, really weird), or art, especially if the underlying neural network stuff can be wrangled into something that isn't ass at a lot of things. I feel the same way for a lot of the artsy projects involving GANs.

But I'm going to guess we either need about 20 years more of neural network research, or we need some kind of new set of models which are easier to control. I understand there's lots of work into models with these kind of things that implement "sliders" for various things (like for hair color on portraits), but I am hoping something more useful comes out of current research into interpretability or explainability of neural network models. I think the first step to better control over them is to peer into the black box a little more, so we can understand what they are doing. I tried in graduate school with a short research project, and made some headway, but the field needs a lot more work put into it by people who are much smarter than I am, and work much harder.

I came into Bannerlord wanting to be better at manual blocking, since I never was very good at it. I did not notice autoblock was gone. I spent some time in the training grounds and went on my way. At this point I'm still not great with manual blocking, but I mostly (but not always) play from horseback with a shield where it is less of an issue. I wrote this just to provide a little perspective of where I am coming from. At the same time, I understand it can be frustrating to not have the autoblocking feature there that you want to play with.

But here's the thing. At the end of the beta, I realized I was was better with a 2h, even with poor blocks, because my vulnerability in blocking makes me focus more on positioning, and made me realize I could be a lot more aggressive. I was timid with a shield, but learned how to fight better in the end with the shield taken away.

Even though I chose to work on manual blocking before hand, I feel like a lot of players may discover it is not that bad to be forced into it in the end. And gosh, it kinda sucks to say this, but I expect most people would never try manual blocking without being forced into it. Still, I expect many will find they enjoy manual blocking, after an initial period, and are more effective in ways they were not expecting when their disadvantage at blocking causes them to focus on other important combat skills. Some of these are those like positioning, and knowing when to commit to attacks, and following up on those attacks.

That said, I still totally understand the frustration. I would ask a lot of you to just give manual blocking another chance, and if you end up like me still being quite bad at it, focus on other ways to become effective such as positioning and knowing when to commit to attacks. Also, I would stay away from 1h without shield. That can be very tough to become good at, though you would look like a total badass!

I think it is premature to make a judgment on whether the leveling system has improved or not. The game is hardly out, and there is going to be tons of balancing. To be clear, I enjoy everyone's thoughts on it all, but trying to reduce the whole system into either "YES GOOD" or "NO BAD" is way too oversimplifying something pretty complex, and in the case of Bannerlord, something we do not have a lot of experience with.

I think, as a starting point, Bannerlord's system is better than where Mount&Blade's was at release, even taking into consideration the team is larger, how long Bannerlord has spent in development, and other real life factors.

To dig into that statement a bit more, I'll start with the negatives. I think a lot of what I dislike about the current system can be adjusted just through improving the rate at which you gain XP in different skills. For example, even though I spent focus points on trading, and many fewer on riding, my riding skill seems far too low compared to my high trade skill. This, combined with the fact that all my companions can use better horses, and a faction has a tendency to snowball, makes me feel a bit off about things.

To say it another way, in certain ways the progress of my character feels both too fast, and too slow, and the progress in the state of the world feels far too fast in how quickly one faction can dominate. This overall gives a first impression that seems negative, but when I realize how early we are in EA, how much balancing remains to be done, and how well I've enjoyed myself despite these issues, I come away from things fairly optimistic.

Back to the leveling system-- overall, I think the Focus and Attribute systems changing how fast you gain XP is neat since it gives a bit more choice and weight behind leveling up. Mount&Blade felt very "I stab people so my stabbing is better", and the current system seems a bit more in depth. As for the "skill caps" on leveling imposed by these systems, I am unsure. I will reserve judgment on "GAME GOOD" or "BAD GAME" til I've played more and we see how EA shakes out over the coming weeks and months.

Path of Exile. Lots of Path. So much Path. Oh gosh.

edit: I wrote this up without realizing your post was from May. I'll leave what I wrote anyways.

Video editing? I don't know about that. You probably want to look up benchmarks for your preferred program if possible. Ryzen processors perform comparably to Intel extreme 6-cores in Premiere Pro CC but can be noticeably slower at warp stabilization.

Puget Systems Adobe Premiere Pro CC review of Ryzen versus 6+ core Intel processors said:

Compared to the 6-8 core "High End" Intel CPUs, the two Ryzen CPUs we tested fared pretty well. They should be pretty much on par with the Core i7 6850K for exporting and rendering previews (for about $100-200 cheaper as well), but are on average around 30% slower for warp stabilize. If you use warp stabilize in your projects, that is likely going to be the tipping point where you should definitely use a i7 6850K over the Ryzen CPUs.

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As for cost it will probably be cheaper to build your own. Put a GTX 1070 or 1080 with your choice of processor and whatever storage and RAM options are appropriate for video editing. It should game fine. But be warned about Ryzen: there are some issues with RAM compatibility, and potentially other stuff which I don't know about, because the Ryzen processors are fairly new. It mostly occurs with high mhz kits. Make sure you keep up to date with your motherboard BIOS updates too. Usually, it's not that important for performance, but there have been reported performance gains from BIOS updates because of how new Ryzen is.

game is fokin dope m8

Since you have so much free time dalai pasha, may I suggest you read this.

These conclusions show the allegations of controlled demolition to be absurd and leave no doubt that the towers failed due to
gravity-driven progressive collapse triggered by the effects of fire.

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Now, as far as your pulverized particles go, the total amount of energy to produce all of them, on the upper bound, is 12.63x10^10 J. The available kinetic energy of the impact is one magnitude higher (10^11 J). So...

...we see that the available energy is far higher than required
for all of the comminution [pulverization].

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this is the only power which turn material into microscopic dust.

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http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4418&view=findpost&p=55165 said:

Sure, as soon as you provide evidence that the existence of ANY 30 micron particles indicates the expenditure of 1.4 million KWH of energy.

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http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4418&view=findpost&p=55177 said:

Anyone can now see that the 'light concrete' of the floors, and 'gypsum' of the office dividers/wall-cladding, were FIRST compression/friction heated/fractured by initial plane impact and jet fuel explosion, and THEN further heated by OFFICE furniture/equipment etc 'fuel' fire/explosions, and THEN WHILE STILL VERY HOT (full of energy) they were FURTHER suddenly compressed/ground by chaotic impact/vibration and 'ball mill'-like violent tumbling during the collapse of the HEAVY, gravitational-energy-laden TOP, HAT TRUSS AND REST OF THE BUILDING.

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There's a 100some odd page post on physorg that details physicists working in nuclear fields as well as others debunking the myth of a nuclear explosion. Link. But there's a lot of bull**** to trudge through.

2. an empty aluminium tube slower than one mach cannot penetrate steel with its nose intact. the wings, the engines, actually most of the plane would crash and fall. the nose would be non existant. the incident seems like it is from a roadrunner episode.
3. this definitely cannot pulverize a steel building into dust. that is microscopic dust.

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Math? Also, the whole building wasn't steel.

dalai pasha said:

there should be 1.2 million tons of debris. where is it? where has 110 story building gone? how was the wreckage cleaned to quickly? where has all the ruble gone FFS?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjyQk941tXQ&feature=relmfu

just watch this, joo. this is one day later.

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Mass doesn't disappear, even in the case of nuclear explosions. From your own video, it states that the towers were 'pulverized' and 'evaporated' (entered the atmosphere).

Here's the link to the actual paper that originated these claims, if anyone's wondering. The author argues on another forum here.

If everything was pulverized, how come there were survivors between the second and fourth floor?

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/28/nyregion/nation-challenged-ladder-company-stopping-save-woman-rescuers-saved-themselves.html

The men were spread out in the stairwell between the second and fourth floors. Four other rescue workers were trapped as well: two firefighters, a Port Authority police officer and a Fire Department chief, Rich Picciotta. They had cuts and bruises. They were caked with dust.

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Also,

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/2003/n_9189/

Sixteen people survived inside the collapse of the World Trade Center, and they were all in Stairwell B of the North Tower, in the center of the building. The survivors were spread out between floors 22 and 1.

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Same question.

Here are some links from reputable sources that more or less conform with the 'official story' of the collapse.

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cmh/distribution/PapersChron/WTC_I_Engineering_Perspective.pdf

For both the intact and plausible compromised core states considered, it is estimated that a core
collapse mechanism could have been initiated in WTC-I if the tower core column temperatures
were elevated to approximately 700oC. As the aircraft debris went through several stories in the
tower, much of the thermal insulation on the core columns would have been scoured off. Under
such conditions, the ensuing fire would be sufficient to cause instability and initiate collapse.

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http://eagar.mit.edu/EagarPresentations/WTC_TMS_2002.pdf

"Towers Don't Topple": 1. 1.35 bill ft-lb like bullet hitting tree - concentrated energy penetrated instead of pushing. 2. Inertia: Each tower had over 2500 times more mass than the aircraft. 3. Fire was clearly principle cause of collapse.

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http://www-math.mit.edu/~bazant/WTC/WTC-asce.pdf

The main purpose of the present analysis is to prove that the whole tower must have
collapsed if the fire destroyed the load capacity of the majority of columns of a single floor.
This purpose justifies the optimistic simplifying assumptions regarding survival made at the
outset, which include unlimited plastic ductility (i.e., absence of fracture), uniform distribution of impact forces among the columns, disregard of various complicating details (e.g.,
the possibility that the failures of floor-column connections and of core columns preceded
the column and tube failure, or that the upper tube got wedged inside the lower tube),
etc. If the tower is found to fail under these very optimistic assumptions, it will certainly
be found to fail when all the detailed mechanisms are analyzed, especially since there are
order-of-magnitude differences between the dynamic loads and the structural resistance.

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