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“Drinking hot tea is safe so drinking boiling water, which is also hot, should also be safe”
The quantity of radioactive material and what form of radiation it emits is extremely relevant to this discussion.
We have seen nuclear batteries - it’s decades old technology at this point. They were used in pacemakers. They stopped in the 80s because it’s too expensive and dangerous. You have to track radiation sources like this.
In smoke detectors and tritium watches the quantity of radioactive material is minuscule compared to the beta emitter in the battery, as in multiple orders of magnitude less. None of the things you mentioned have radioactive material in any significant quantity. If you swallowed or inhaled this battery you’d be exposed to significant amounts of radiation.
A microwave is not an ionizing radiation source.
I didn’t hate it, but nothing hooked me after I put in about 10 hours and I just ended up forgetting about it. It wasn’t particularly challenging but it was a huge time sink for the amount of progress I made. The social features detracted from the immersion.
I like the idea of meticulously planning for a trek in a highly atmospheric, apocalyptic, and dangerous wilderness, and having to make difficult decisions about gear/loot that weight limits impose, but I feel the STALKER games do this much better.
Jailbreak.
Important to note: this exploit is not persistent, meaning you’ll have to redo it anytime the console is shut down or crashes. The 360 doesn’t suspend, so unless you leave it on you’ll be doing the exploit a lot.
In addition it’s only successful 30% of the time, so you have to try the exploit multiple times each time the console boots.
Great progress though - hopefully it leads to something more permanent.
I played Shadow Warrior back in the late 90s on DOS. Granted, it was only the demo because I had no money and no internet to pirate things.
It was a pretty decent Duke clone from what I remember. Gory kills, interesting weapons, corny toilet humor, some sexuality, and interesting little tidbits that made the levels feel more alive than your standard shooter at the time. You could watch the rabbits bang and multiply, stuff like that. Pretty entertaining for me at the time. I’ve had it and the reboot in my Steam library for years now, maybe this is a sign to finally check them off the “to play” list.
When I was putting together my NAS, WD was selling their NAS grade drives without disclosing they were SMR. They got hit with a class action for this.
They’re all trying shady shit, no HDD will run forever, no corporation cares about you, so use whatever you want and backup your data.
I have 114TB of Seagate drives right now and they’re fine. I’d use WD too, or HGST. The fanboyism around HDDs is so strange to me.
While doing some research on Sega Channel (I was a SNES kid) I found this article which has a lot of cool info.
Don’t forget the mods! You didn’t have to download anything, it was all server side. I forgot which mod I played most but you could set up all sorts of sensors, automated turrets, forcefields, etc using models and textures already in the game but repurposed.
Also, the net code was extremely good, it was very playable even on my 33.6k modem.
HL2 didn’t feel like a it has a technical leap as big as its predecessor
Gotta disagree with you on this one. Half Life was basically the Quake 2 engine with different textures and models. It was applauded for being a good game, it did not really set any technical benchmarks.
Half Life 2 was absolutely mind blowing with the physics, facial animations, and shaders. It’s the first game I can recall with that level of physics realism, and set the stage for many games to come. The Source engine was a massive technical leap from Quake engine.
Seeing the HL2 E3 demo was a peak moment in my gaming life.
Give the Deus Ex series a try, the story in the original is IMO one of the best, and the later games have awesome stealth and cool world building.
Hmm. I haven’t played with the sniper rifles yet due to the extremely short range spawns, but I’ll give it a shot later.
One thing to keep in mind is the game is not realistic in terms of weapon damage. You can fire the same bulllets out of different tiers of weapons and they’ll have drastically different damage due to the penetration values. To me, penetration seems to be the key stat for weapons.
I drop people in a single shot often. Skif’s pistol, silenced with AP rounds, is OP as hell and nearly free to repair.
Only recently near SIRCAA have I noticed it being much harder, now that enemies have better gear. It takes 4-5 headshots with mid tier rifles for some of the armored/exoskeleton guys, using AP rounds in one of the unique mid tier 5.45mm guns.
I dunno. Personally it doesn’t feel much different than any other STALKER game in terms of enemy difficulty or how the guns work. Lots of damage falloff over distance with the early game guns.
I desperately miss A-Life though, and some of the bugs in SIRCAA are really bad, it took me quick saving every 10 seconds and many, many reloads after a CTD to get past that area.
I honestly don’t think the mutants are unbalanced or too tanky. One of the first things you have to do in STALKER is know when to GTFO and run away. This is even demonstrated in the first bloodsucker encounter when there’s a ladder only you can climb nearby and escape.
It shouldn’t be easy to take out bloodsuckers early game. They’re trivial once you’re 10 hours in and have a good shotgun. You close distance, mag dump in their face, and that’s that. It’s even easier if you can backtrack into a corridor.
You’re supposed to feel weak and scared of engagements early game. You can run away from many encounters, or lure them into a favorable position. Jump on something. This has been the vanilla stalker experience since I started playing back when SoC came out. If you’re really stuck, just toggle it to easy difficulty for a couple minutes.
IMO all that needs tweaking for balance is the repair costs, those are exorbitant.
It’s not online/offline like the internet, it’s just referring to how the AI is doing open world stuff. A-life has two modes. Online which is a bubble around you where enemies are rendered with models and doing things in the world, and offline where they’re basically just numbers on a spreadsheet. They have simulated activity offline, like walking around, looting things, sleeping, etc. but aren’t actually spawned into the world until your online “bubble” is nearby.
I ran it on default recommended settings (High, 3440x1440) and it’s smoother than any of the originals were, even after they had years of patches. I experience some mild stuttering when I approach a hub area with lots of NPCs but it’s not terrible. I can’t really complain. 3090 and 5800X3D.
Pretty fun for me so far. There’s some weirdness with dudes spawning too close and A-Life AI seems to be missing but I’m enjoying the zone so far after 15 hours or so.
It’s way better than any of the prior games were years after release. Granted, I do have a powerful computer (3090/5800X3D) but I haven’t had any significant performance issues nor crashes. A mild bit of jank but nothing that’s totally broken, just some occasional glitching corpses or debris.
Really, really enjoying it so far. Had a classic STALKER experience while exploring, got ambushed, found some really cool mega-anomaly, thought I was safe and got owned. 10/10 would die again
According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.
This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.
Yeah otherwise that’s a 9 year old posting