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sirspud · 3 years

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A Vulgar First Impression of Coromon

Playing Pokémon games recently has been something akin to hiring a fairy princess to perform for your daughter’s birthday parties. The first few times she came around were fun, she made all the kids laugh and play their games, but now the princess has grown lazy, idly watching YouTube while disinterestedly mumbling the same four or five lines she’s been spouting for the past twenty-three years. But you keep hiring her regardless, even though your daughter’s trying to point out that she’s not into princesses anymore because she’s pushing 30, and you’re starting to think she might not be worth three hundred bucks a visit. And she’s starting to smell.

So as the Pokémon community sits and waits for the Diamond and Pearl remakes, because what is Pokémon if not a prolonged exercise in nostalgia bait, some indie developers have been trying their hand at doing Pokémon, but properly this time. First came along TemTem, which was, “Like Pokémon but online”, and now there’s Coromon, which is “Like Pokémon” and that’s it.

I’ll admit, I was attracted to Coromon not because of any underlying nostalgia or a want to replay Pokemon, but because the devs put out a free demo for the game, which is a rarity in this modern age of Early Access and delayed release dates. Intrigued, I decided to take a closer look, to see which warts they cut off and which ones they allowed to fester.

The game starts with our protagonist waking up in a small town with his mother about to go get his OR HER first Pokémon. So far, so standard. But where Coromon differs is that you aren’t some apple-cheeked youngster with a criminally neglectful parent, but a college kid who’s been selected for a prestigious university that studies Pokémon – sorry – “Coromon”. And incidentally, Pokémon scores the first point for having a name that actually means something. They’re monstrous creatures that can be caught in a ball and put in your pocket – “Pocket”-“Monsters”. What the fuck does Coromon mean? Because Coro only has a meaning if it’s in Italian, and I’m pretty sure these things aren’t meant to be called “Choir Monsters!”

Anyway, a dude in a wheelchair who was apparently the guy in charge gives you a magic glove and tells you about these glowing elemental orbs, which are important for some reason I wasn’t clear on, and he sends you out on a journey to collect more by finding six elemental titans and – as far as I understood the process – murdering them and stealing their essence in the name of science.

We choose our first Pokémon from a choice between the fire-type, the water-type or the… ice type? And then, we set out on our journey to fight trainers, make new friends, and shuffle about in the grass for an hour because your gobblefrog isn’t level sixty-two yet.

The first thing that struck me about Choirmon is that it really isn’t being coy with its desire to ape Pokémon. Everything, right down to the statistics of each monster, is identical to the way Pokémon does things. The types have the same names, evolving is still called evolving, it even gives you berries and other items for your monsters to hold. You can battle monsters in the wild, blundering into tall grass to scare them out of hiding and capturing them after beating them into a bloody pulp, or you can battle monsters owned by other trainers in unregulated dog fights. So it isn’t trying to be like Pokémon, it is Pokémon. It stabbed Pokémon in an alleyway, cut off its skin and is now swanning about performing a perverted Face/Off act.

Now, I love Pokémon just as much as the next guy, but I’m no deluded fanboy. Pokémon is not perfect. In fact, it’s a game with a lot of flaws. And in its desire to imitate, Collectamon inherits a lot of the same problems that Pokémon does. Using items, for example, takes up an entire turn, and while this can be forgiven in a party-based RPG, where you have other actors to make up for the guy losing a turn, you can only put out one monster at a time, and using anything other than a healing item in the thick of battle just makes you an open target.

Trying to think strategically is also a lost cause, because again, it’s fucking Pokémon. The only strategy is “use whatever the opponent is weak to” or “mash attack until one of you dies”. And while you could argue that Pokémon’s strong point is its simplicity, it does mean that winning a fight is more a matter of patience than a matter of skill.

At time of writing, I’ve been playing the demo for 7 hours. An impressive run-time for a demo, to be sure, and that’s only up to the first boss. Incidentally, it’s in that area that we meet the evil team of this game, because Pokémon had evil teams, and so must we! I don’t even understand their motivation, or who these people even are! They’re presented to us as if we already know what their deal is and why we should hate them. All I know about them is their name and the fact that they like to hang around in caves. Pitch-black ones that you navigate by wandering around aimlessly getting lost in the samey-looking environments.

Really, guys? You thought it’d be a good idea to preserve one of the shittiest areas in Pokémon? Actually, they follow it up with an even shittier level that plays like the gym leaders from the annoying puzzle gyms got together and tried to devise the most efficient backtracking machine, culminating in a game of Mastermind out of fucking nowhere.

Well, so far I’ve just been going on about how the game is the same as Pokémon. What’s different? Well, for a start, each monster has a well of stamina points that they spend to use their special abilities, limiting how many times you can use those moves before your monster has to have a little rest. So you have to weigh up whether or not you want to waste stamina using that really powerful move or whether you want to keep a steady pace with the weaker moves. Except, Pokémon already did that with each move having limited uses. So we haven’t gone anywhere. All we’ve done is paint the walls a different colour.

Erm… what else? Well, your character speaks for one thing, despite you being able to name them and customise them to your liking. I think we tried the talking player avatar thing back in Fallout 4, and it was just as unimmersive back then too. It means that you don’t really get to impose your own character on the avatar, because the avatar makes his OR HER own decisions without your input, accepting every single quest that gets handed to you without even flirting with a dialogue box because it means oh so much to them to help this random faceless NPC, whose unique name and appearance does nothing to make him feel any less forgettable.

…Ah, that’s something different. There’s a quest system. I’m not sure why. In an open world game, quest systems give the game a structure and a reason to explore the world. But, as we’ve established, Crackmon is Pokémon, and so progression is strictly linear. It’s hard to tell just how much it’ll impact the game, since it’s just a four-hour demo, but a quest system like this can easily turn into a to-do list of tedious tasks for rewards that you don’t need. One of the sidequests early on had me capture a pissweasel for some guy, only for the bloke’s mentor to smack him across the head and have him hand the pissweasel right back! This is the very definition of wasting my fucking time! The only reason I caught that pissweasel was for your quest, and I don’t want to deal with its incontinence issues!

Another way that Cloacamon tries to differentiate itself is though its Potential mechanic. Get this – whenever your pet cockcrab reaches a certain XP interval, you get to directly increase its stats by a total of 3 points, on top of the cockcrab’s normal stat increases, so you don’t have to muck around with effort values and breeding to optimise your stats. Each monster also has a “Potent” and “Perfect” form, with each form reaching these intervals sooner than the normal version of the cockcrab. So the game encourages you to abandon your monsters frequently, exchanging them for their shiny, better versions, which I would argue goes against the whole point of Pokémon. At its core, Pokémon is a game about going on a journey and creating a bond with your tag team of beasts, a bond which is impossible to form if you’re encouraged to chuck your friends in the bin the second you find their better, newer models.

I could go down my list of subtle differences, most of which are quality of life changes, like the ability to evolve mid-battle, or the ability to swap out different moves instead of permanently forgetting them, or the fact that you use HM moves yourself instead of teaching them to your Pokémon. But I’d rather finish this first impression by once again re-iterating that Cocaniumon is just Pokémon. It’s not writing any new rules, it’s not even reworking old ones, and it seems content to merely lie on its back and spin its wheels. And while you could argue that Pokémon’s formula doesn’t need to be changed, I would argue right back that not having the ambition to change has long been part of the fucking problem!

If all you want is more Pokémon but with less bullshit, then go ahead and give Coromon a try. Personally, I wasn’t motivated to continue playing past the first boss fight. Part of the problem was that I had no idea what I was ultimately working towards. Collect all the titan essences, so that we can research them! Research them for what? So we can finally uncover the mystery behind shitty Netflix sci-fi originals?

#why yes I do watch zero punctuation how could you tell #coromon #pokemon #review #comedy #first impressions #opinions #TRAGsoft #Freedom Games #that's a reference to the netflix movie The Titan by the way #god knows how many people I thought would get that

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doom-eternal-pc-download · 5 years

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Doom Eternal Pc Download Installer

Doom Eternal Pc Download Installer - Opinion My

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Doom 4 has a little bit of old Doom mixed with the more recent aspects. There is no reload system in the recreation (other than for the super-shotgun). That is, if you have two hundred bullets from you equipment gun, you can empty all of it by trying to keep the button pressed. No reload needed, or something! Which is a fairly cool issue in my impression. There are upgrades to be discovered in the sport, just like the older game titles Doom Eternal. Every amount has a secret to be unlocked which provides you a weapon upgrade. These upgrades can be utilised to upgrade various weapon modules that can be located throughout the maps (do preserve an eye out for these). And there are two Doomguy small designs in each stage which you have to find. And just a trace, they would not be existing in the apparent places.

After fairly a number of many years of pretty critical ‘realistic' shooters, DOOM is a breath of refreshing air that the genre really required. It really is unashamedly entertaining gore soaked visuals each impress and harken back again to the good previous times of the 90s and it all will come with each other completely to make some thing really pretty special and I would really like to see a sequel or Quake reboot from the exact same staff - I'd get either in a heartbeat.

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#Doom Eternal Pc Download #Doom Eternal Pc Download For Free #Doom Eternal Pc Download Free #Doom Eternal Download #Doom Eternal

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rje · 6 years

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Hello (Procedural) World! - UE4 Voxel Project Devblog 1

tl;dr version: I’ve always wanted to play with 3d procedural spaces, and I’ve always wanted to learn UE4. So I’m doing both by making a voxel project in UE4!

For years now I’ve wanted a good excuse to dive into two different things: a deep dive into building things in UE4, and generating 3d procedural worlds from scratch. Recently some time opened up in my schedule to work on some new things so I decided to combine those desires and make a small voxel world game in UE4.

As of right now this is not a full game project, simply a technology testbed where I can learn more about working with UE4 and more about working with voxel data and procedural 3d spaces. That said I’ll be implementing various game’ish systems over time since that goes hand in hand with learning the engine.

So, after the first bit of work what does this all look like in action? Take a look!

youtube

Here’s a list of the bits I’ve implemented so far that make that video possible:

Using noise to generate a seamless/infinite world (including simple caves) and generating meshes

Multithreaded loading chunks of the world on demand

Basic player interaction to create/destroy voxels

A shader that textures voxels based on their material type

Also for fun I took the voxel generation and embedded it in an augmented reality application so I can build voxel objects in the real world. :)

UE4 Stuff I’ve Learned So Far

ProceduralMeshComponent

The ProceduralMeshComponent is doing the heavy lifting for all of my mesh rendering and world physics state, and it couldn’t be easier to use. It has a function called CreateMeshSection that you pass vertices, triangle indexes, normals, uv’s, etc to and it creates the mesh and collider for you.

One thing I found while I was testing is that a single ProceduralMeshComponent allows for multiple meshes - each CreateMeshSection call takes a “section index” and if you specify a new index it will add another submesh to the component and you can give it a separate material. However there seems to be an increased processing cost each time you add a submesh that I need to investigate. The processing was sufficiently large with the number of chunks I’m making (~512 chunks) that I ended up switching to an array of ProceduralMeshComponents and each one only has to handle a single chunk.

Long term I think this will be a better route anyways, since then I can use section indexes to handle materials that need different rendering options (e.g. water or stuff with animated tiles).

FNonAbandonableTask

As I started generating caves I hit stutters again since generating 3d noise is computationally expensive. What I wanted ideally was for chunk generation to be kicked over to another thread, and then update meshes on the main thread when the generation is finished. FNonAbandonableTask has been perfect for this so far - for each chunk I create a struct to hold all of the generation results and pass it to a new GenerateChunk task, which then does the work, fills out the struct, and marks it as complete. I was really happy with how easy this was to get going, between reading up on it and implementing it I think I probably only spent 2 hours? Works great. Worth noting that these are *not* immediately killed when a game stops, so if they rely on a memory/reference that gets destroyed on game stop it can bring down your editor. The joys of threaded programming. :)

FCriticalSection

One issue that I ran into with the threading experiment was that my sparse voxel volume data structure wasn’t threadsafe, so when I kicked chunk generation into the task graph all the different threads started stomping all over each other. Not good! I reworked the tasks to use a FCriticalSection to lock access to the volume for writes. The expensive part of the computation (noise generation) can still happen freely since each voxel is computed independently. So a single tasks generates all of the data for a chunk, grabs the lock, updates the volume, and then releases the lock. I was worried about how a locking data structure would work with the task system but so far it’s been smooth sailing.

Misc Stuff

Lots of little things about creating materials for the voxels, e.g. using world space + the block material to calculate UV’s for the block faces

Putting input handling into the player controller instead of the pawn - being able to swap in a new pawn type is handy!

Using SCOPE_CYCLE_COUNTER to track performance of various code blocks is super handy for tracking down what’s causing stutters in your code

Along those same lines: the profiler in the session frontend is great for digging into why you had a spike

UGameplayStatics has a ton of useful functions

Misc Augmented Reality/Mobile Stuff

If you’re on android, don’t enable Vulkan - it hard crashes on launch as of UE4.19

Ambient occlusion doesn’t work on mobile!

I still haven’t figured out how to get a directional light to cast shadows for my voxels

Getting close to the surface where you’re editing blocks causes the AR system to lose tracking -- not enough feature points?

Use the “launch” feature for testing, packaging/deployment is pretty slow otherwise

Voxel Stuff I’ve Learned

Generation

There is no magic single noise formula to get interesting results, use different noise functions for different aspects and combine them all for the result you want. Right now I’m using 3 sets of noise and will probably need a lot more before I’m done

3d noise is expensive. If there’s something you can do with 2d noise instead for a similar result, do it

Perturbed cellular noise is great for all sorts of stuff

Simplex noise is pretty boring to look at but great as modifier/argument to more noise stuff

Caves are really hard to do well when you’re generating each voxel independently

You can lose an entire night’s worth of work time just tweaking your noise parameters and testing the result

Always have an easy way to see the seed of your current world so you can repro bugs as you find them

Always showing player coordinates in dev mode is a really handy tool so you know how to get back to an area that had a bug

Rendering

Turn off all the static lighting stuff, you can’t use it anyways

For cubes, ambient occlusion adds a nice effect at the seams. But don’t overdo it otherwise it looks like your world is being taken over by black mold :(

Using world space coords to generate uvs for blocks is great - just make sure to inset everything slightly so you don’t bleed into neighboring tiles in your tile atlas

When you create/destroy a block on the edge of a chunk make sure you tell the neighboring chunks to update as well, otherwise you can end up with discontinuous areas

What’s Next?

Now that the basics are working I’m still deciding what I want to do next. On the UE4/gameplay side I’m thinking I might have block destruction spawn materials that players can pick up and use to build new structures. It’d be a good lead-in to eventually adding something like a crafting system.

For the generator, I’d really like to figure out a better way to assign material types to voxels (and add new material types for increased diversity). Also I’m not happy with the generated caves at all right now, in particular with how they present themselves on the surface.

On the voxel side of things I’m tempted to give up on the minecraft/blocky look entirely and try to move to a smooth world mesh like you see in Astroneer and No Man’s Sky. I need to read up more on how those systems work before I dive into it though.

Other things would be reading up on UE4′s static instance mesh system to start adding foliage, changing chunk generation to be based on player line of sight instead of a naive ‘load all chunks in radius x around player’. Also starting to think about how to handle chunks that need multiple material types (e.g. animated lava/water)

Well, that’s all for now I think, hopefully the next dev blog will be shorter! This one was a bit of a brain dump since I waited so long to write it. As always if you have questions or something in particular you want to know about - feel free to hit me up on twitter. Thanks for reading!

#ue4 #voxel #devblog #gamedev

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survivor-rotuma · 5 years

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Ep. 5: “Our tribemates had to die for MYSANDRE to rise.” - Lysandre

Felix

I'm kind of glad Raul is gone. To me, he was the biggest liability in all the alliances I had with him. It is just a shame to see someone I made an alliance with early in this game get eliminated like that. However, now that means Marie will continue to be a target for Cassie at merge, and I can still work with Lysandre. They are a valuable asset to me. I would not want to bring them to the end, but I would love to take them as far as I could to ensure my own safety. Right now, if it is a final 3 scenario, I want to take Flint and Joey since they seem the least active and the most trustworthy. Plus, they don't seem to have games at the moment, but I'll have to keep an eye on that as we go along. Final 2 scenario for me is definitely with Joey though at his point in the game.

Boris

"Sorry for my lack of confessionals lately. Just literally nothing is happening. My tribe basically died completely as far as activity goes and I'm just sitting pretty until merge anyways so!

Yeah go me woo"

Felix

"I don't want to summarize. So take this chat log instead.

TLDR: Joey confirms to me that we're ride or dies which makes my FTC plans more possible. He wants Sumi to win the challenge and for either Mea or us to go to tribal. I want us to go to tribal because, well, I don't trust Charlie to remain loyal to us.

What do you think about all that's happened?

Joey, 8:10 PM: i think we're the only ones who have never been to tribal

8:10 PM: Yeah I think so!

Joey, 8:10 PM: what's the tribe that's not mea

8:10 PM: Sumi

Joey, 8:10 PM: yeah i think at merge it's gonna be based on tribal lines

8:11 PM: Mea will defintely be the people in the middle. We need to reel them in if we want to stay the majority based on tribal lines

Joey, 8:11 PM: exactly that's why i'm wondering if losing the next challenge would be bad for us

8:13 PM: Yeah someone will have to lose it. If Sumi loses then they have 4 against our 5. But that means Mea will want to work with them more since we'd be a threat due to our size. Though if we lose, then we have to convince Mea on the same principles to vote out a person from Sumi. It's kind of a tricky situation to be in. But hen if Mea goes to tribal again, then that'd just be one person to convince but then it'd be deadlocked

I think this might be the most important immunity pre-merge

Joey, 8:14 PM: i agree like honestly best case scenario is Mea loses again lol but i think if sumi loses we could be in trouble obviously i'm loyal to the four but above all you're my ride or die man

8:15 PM: Are you suggesting that you throw the challenge? Tsk tsk how unsportmanlike lol. But I wouldn't mind it. The worst that happens is that we vote out Charlie

Joey, 8:15 PM: i hate throwing challenges lmao but i think it depends on the challenge i think regardless of what happens we want sumi to win make them the threats

8:16 PM: I think so too. Whatever direction you take this in, I'll follow. And you're my ride or die too! I've bonded with you the most out of everyone here and think you're awesome!

I'll trust your instincts on how to tackle this immunity. Good luck either way!

Joey, 8:17 PM: haha i appreciate it man!! we'll definitely touch base and see what happens "

Felix

This eraser will definitely help out at merge, especially those early votes. I think I'll use it the second merge starts just to make sure we have the numbers to kick out someone from Sumi. It sucks that I didn't get one of those big advantages tho

Flint

That auction was cut throat, woof!

Marie

"Hi, I’m Spencer from Cagayan you might of heard of me as the most unlucky survivor player ev-

NO BITCH MOVE OUTTA THE WAY ITS ME MARIE. O k, so my tribe is already down to 2 people. And now our chances are even worse?????????? Wow I have horrible intuition "

Cassie

Well that auction was a bit of a bust for me personally, but as for our five person unit it wasn't too bad. After I brought in a ten percent overall disadvantage for the next immunity, Joey scored big with that advantages. Plus Felix as well. I still believe in the Tuai power!

Joey

So I had a chat with Felix earlier today about the game. At this point I've coasted very easily through pre-merge since i have yet to attend a tribal council, but as the individual game approaches, it's time to go from a direct UTR/MOTR to a CPM legend! Obviously, Sumi and Tuai are pretty evenly placed going into the merge, but personally I think we're the bigger threat. We've never lost a challenge nor attended tribal together, so it's a lot easier for us to band together with numbers and I think the other tribes are smart enough to see that. So, I was throwing around the idea of potentially throwing the next challenge and booting Charlie so that we would go into merge with a numbers disadvantage to Sumi and have a lot of swaying power for the Mea duo. However, with my challenge advantage as well as Felix's vote eraser, we have a lot of opportunities opening up that we can hopefully capitalize on!

Flint

Turns out my machete advantage from the auction holds no power. So now I have to decide, tell people that I didn’t receive an advantage or lie about it and create a fake advantage to gain favor in the game. I’m a terrible liar but I think I should create some lie to help gain insight from others

Bradley

I am truly a mess and Jay deserves better. Been dealing with life changing stuff and its been keeping me away from checking in the game. I got a strike and its my first one ever and i feel so bad. Gunna try harder but still dealing with stiff so we’ll see.

Lysandre

"Oh boi I hope your'e ready for a thicc confessional. So I survived last round miraculously! Marie didn't vote me out lmaooo.

The reward challenge is here!! And the reward is an Auction!! I'm heading into the auction trying to snag something so that I can at least boost ability to navigate in the game. Some notable things from the auction: Joey gets a 15% advantage in the challenge, Felix gets to negate a vote, Marie gets a 10% disadvantage in the challenge hjefwkbvkaevbkj.fe bdka and Boris gets to pick someone from any tribe for a movie night.

I SNAGGED AN EXTRA VOTE at the AUCTION AND HOW I DID IT WAS ICONIC. So me and like 5 people bid on the same item and it got randomized 3 times and I picked spot number 4 to be the winner. The person in spot number 4 was none other than LYSANDRE. AHA!!

Now the speculation begins. Charlie bought a mask and I believe that the mask holds the ability for her to see the votes for one round. I have no idea what Apollo has but it may be an exile pass or like a clue to merge idol?? I think the first tho. Also who the hell knows what Brianna has. I believe Flint bought the power to give someone a disadvantage.

OMG BORIS PICKED ME FOR THE MOVIE. This is literally the best outcome I can think of. During the short time that I was on another tribe I really clicked well with Boris and I liked him a bunch. I really want him to be my ride or die moving forward into the game. I'd love to hear who he's close with and could pull me in with. I also want to gain a lot of his trust by willing off my extra vote to him since I have my idol. the only way I would do that is if I tell him about my having an idol .

JAY RELEASED THE CHALLENGE AND IM IN SUCH A CRISIS. It's Duolingo which is really oof. What makes it Biig OOOOF is the fact that we are learning the language of Game of Thrones or something. Do I look Like Arya or something???? So in order to drag me AND Marie into the merge I'm going to have to speak like the Valyrian, eat like the Valyrian, become the Valyrian, experience Valyrian. "

Lysandre

Marie is kind of a liability. She publicly announces things that shouldn't be announced and she now knows about my extra vote even tho its obvi. She was cute until she started anti returnee propoganda dbkvka l but I probably will keep her around unless we lose and battle.

Marie

Lys and I have a fire lit under our asses, but maybe that’s what we need to get our tribe of two to win

Bryan

I. Hate. Duolingo. So much. I hate being one of the two people participating. And I hate that Bradley is never online and is probably gonna barely contribute so it all rests to me. That sounds rude. If Bradley does end up contributing I will make an apology confession.

Felix

With recent news that we are losing majorly in this challenge, it seems Tuai might have to go to tribal for the first time in this game. The vote would obviously go towards Charlie, but what if she has an idol? I have an idol, but is that the only idol on the island? Things get crazier and crazier everyday but I am hopeful that things turn out alright. I really do hope she gets eliminated if we go to tribal, then we can make it to merge

Lysandre

People call me Lys now. I guess Lys is short for Lysol because I stay cleaning these bitches

Charlie

"I have a feeling I might be voted out this round, I think it has to do with how im performing in challenges

Boris

"that auction... whew!! So many hidden powers that's def gonna fuck me up in the future. And all I got was a pair of $400 movie tickets. The most EXPENSIVE movie i've ever seen, and it's gonna be a documentary about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lmao.

I chose Lysandre for the movie night bc? They're my fave from our fake swap tribe and even though they probably don't have a lot of juicy tea to spill because they're on Mea, I might as well start trying to build a strong relationship to prepare for merge"

Boris

also I was kinda worried about Brianna and Bradley having to compete in this next challenge for us because they sat out last time but so far it looks okay? Brianna seems to be doing #that and Tuai is trudging behind, which is perFECT because it'd give Sumi a numbers advantage in the merge. so yeah! come thru!

Apollo

2 things. Thank god I don’t have to compete in the duolingo challenge and I am so lucky to have received the extra vote. With a super idol and a vote steal and who knows what else out there, any extra advantage that’s out there? From now on? I’ll take it. I have the time to complete the challenge but not the patience nor the desire to. The gag is if Brianna or Bradley don’t put up enough effort and we lose? They don’t know that it’s their asses on the line. If we lost I think Brianna should go since she’s more of a threat than Bradley could ever be. Bradley will end up being loyal to us if we lose. It’s convoluted but if we lose my plan is. Convince Brianna and Bradley to vote for Zest. Convince Brianna that’s zest is voting for her. Convince Brianna that Zest has an idol and to vote Bradley in case Zest isn’t lying. Actually vote Brianna along with Borris and Zest. Brianna leaves in a 3-1-1 vote. Bradley would be shook and thankful that we saved him and we’d tell him afterwards that Brianna wanted him out. Then we’re a strong foursome with a goat in Bradley. Would I like to execute this plan? Yes, absolutely. But winning immunity would be just as satisfying.

Cassie

Waiting on results for this challenge has left me feeling quite nervous. Both Charlie and Joey have their reasons for not being able to catch up as much and it makes me more nervous. I don’t like feeling this way.

Marie

OH MY GOD WE MIGHT NOT GO TO TRIBAL, but then again those might be my famous last words

Lysandre

"So this duolingo challenge is agonizing but I'm giving it all I have so that me and Marie can rock this thing. She wants us to get 1st place because she thinks that the last two tribes will both be going to tribal council. I would agree with her and I'm aiming for first.

Also can't wait for my movie night with Boris to begin!! I know its going to be good and I plan on solidifying something with him!"

Brianna

2nd place. But we still have to go to tribal. Ugh. Um. Kind of don’t know what’s gonna happen. Probably gonna be zest or Bradley.

Felix

Charlie is gone. Or she will be. There's no way the Tuai Quad LLC will vote for each other. Unless we are snakes in the grass. Also, this double tribal council is iconic. Now the stakes are even going into merge. Let's see how this goes

Cassie

Well damn. I had a feeling we wouldn’t make it without a tribal, at least as a whole tribe. It seemed as though the disadvantage didn’t matter too much though as we were below Sumi anyways. Tonight should be the easy vote, I hope.

Marie

THE TRIBE OF TWO LIVES ON!

Felix

"Flint does not trust Joey which is understandable. I mean he doesn't trust Charlie either, but he hasn't talked to either extensively. Joey seems to not have a social game which proves that he is the perfect goat to bring to FTC (at least in this stage in the game). I have no doubt that Charlie will go since Cassie has already cast her vote, and Joey will vote Charlie since he's the other one on the chopping block. I will also vote Charlie. That 3-2 if Flint goes against us. But that most likely will not happen.

Cassie is so smug. She already cast her vote for Charlie. She cannot fathom us betraying her. She thinks she is in charge of this tribe which might be true. But she's got me so close that she can't see the snakes in her garden. It's infested honey! Flint already has doubts about the alliance, and I'm already plotting your downfall. Her garden of snakes will be the end of her!"

Lysandre

"Wow I can't believe that me and Marie are in the lead for this challenge!!

And my movie night with Boris was a huge success from it I learned that he has half of a super idol and he found an advantage that allowed him to see how many alliances a person was in and he chose Felix and revealed it was 2 alliances he was in. I first had to share my extra vote with him and we were solid. We started watching Knock Down The House documentary on Netflix and so Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or AOC for short was the icon that we bonded over. Since I had already seen the documentary I had just opened my duolingo in another tab and continued that lmao I refuse to lose!! Towards the end when AOC won I decided to really really solidify things with Boris by telling him about my idol. LITTLE DID I KNOW Boris the Brute had an idol as well!! From that point we decided to really work together and share our collective power.

Other notable events during movie night include an exposing Felix party as well as Briana possibly having the other part to the idol. Oh and Me and Boris also decided to name our alliance after AOC. Thats our final 2.. the AOC FINAL 2!!"

Lysandre

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Me and Marie WON!!! Mea WINS and we get to avoid fire making!!! Also Marie was right! The losing TWO tribes went to tribal. SO WE DID THAT by getting first place. Our tribemates had to die for MYSANDRE to rise.

Now that we won I can't help but hope that Boris survives. He needs to up his social game or else he's in trouble. Apparently his social game is ok at best because Apollo didnt tell him what his advantage was and yet Boris claims they are close so what is the truth.

Meanwhile me and Marie are discussing the game and our potential future at a merge and a strategy that may work for us. Lets go Mysandre and Lysoris!!

Flint

Ugh this is a tough loss and I’m so torn on what to do. I’ve heard both Joey and Charlie’s names being thrown out as an option. I was close with Joey at the beginning but we’ve seem to have drifted apart. Charlie did better in the challenge so that could also factor into my vote. With all the auction items on the table and talk of a potential merge this could be an interesting tribal.

Apollo

Imagine, me, finally getting the opportunity to play with Zib Zab. Imagine, me, thinking she was Karen in the beginning of the game. I think Boris is my mom. And if she’s not, And she is Karen, well, she’s doing a great job of being incognito

Marie

It’s so weird not planning for tribal, I’m so proud of lys and myself

Colin

"Last nights movie date has me SHOOK. Im so glad I picked Lysandre, we built such a strong connection in the limited time we were allowed to spend together, and I think despite us barely having time to connect I can consider them my biggest ally, even across tribal lines, so I hope we can both make it to merge in one piece!!

Lysandre gave me so much info last night; Felix is playing hard asf, there WERE alliances made on one world and the fake swap that I wasnt included in, and both Lysandre and I have our tribe's idols.

Knowing all of this is a game changer, I have to adapt my strategy to how everyone else is playing and hope it works out in my favor. "

Boris

ALSO this double tribal is ugly at. Bradley did the absolute bare minimum to not get a strike but we all see how poorly hes performing. Ugh I want him gone so badly so that we can have a strong tribe going into merge. Apollo and Zest are giving me a little push back, insisting Brianna is more of a threat but i don't care!! We got way bigger threats to worry about when merge hits!! We need to make it through as a stronger tribe, not a weaker one

Felix

Welp, she's gone. I wonder how things will go for Sumi. I'm just excited to make it to the merge!

Flint

The last tribal went off as hoped with no idols or funny business played. I feel bad for voting Charlie out but I can’t play with my heart and need to toughen up to make it far in this game.

Lysandre

It feels so good to not have a tribal or fire to worry about?? I am really relieved lol. It looks like Charlie left and thats ok because I didn't even know the person. I just hope Boris doesn't die lmao. I hope he uses his idol this round though.

Apollo

"https://media1.tenor.com/images/224ee4a75a647fa6154d57dfada003ac/tenor.gif?itemid=13920223

I suppose I’ll be a passenger for now. Brianna is going to stay and Bradley will be leaving if all goes according to plan. I’ll let Borris take control so that he becomes a bigger target than I come the merge. I love Borris but I guess I would cut him if it was a f2. I’m going to try and use this time to try and get Zest to be my f2 partner."

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minhthangcoi9993-blog · 6 years

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Review Game Team Sonic Racing

Mr. Sonic the Small Blue Animal Guy With Good Rings is back into the racing circuit. It’s certainly one of the lesser beloved game franchises, and I can’t help but think that’s because it would be ridiculous for a character whose super-power is being super-fast to trade that power for driving cars that are equally fast to all of his competitors. It just doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, Sonic and Mario facing off at the Olympics was also a game, so I guess maybe logic doesn’t matter here? Team Sonic Racing brings us back to the Sonic Racingverse, and I’m sure I’m in the minority, but this is that Game Content I crave. Check out the forthcoming Team Sonic Racing trailer with me.

Team Sonic Racing combines the best elements of arcade and fast-paced competitive style racing as you face-off with friends in intense multiplayer racing. Race together and work together as a team by sharing power-ups and speed boosts. Take control of your racing style - Choose from 3 distinct character types and unlock game changing vehicle customization options to suit your racing style.

Gear Up. Speed Up. – Team Racing at Sonic Speed!

Key Features:

Online Multiplayer & Local Co-Op Modes – 12 players per race, 4 player split screen, and various offline / online race modes including Grand Prix Mode, Exhibition Mode, Time-Trial and Team Adventure Mode.

Team Racing – Race as a team, win as a team. Use various team moves to assist your teammates, knock out opponents and unleash your Team Ultimate.

Performance & Skin Customization – Alter the appearance and handling of your vehicle

Wisps - 14 spectacular offensive and defensive items to help overcome rival teams and get ahead!

Adventure Mode – Unique story experience where players are introduced to basic game features and characters.

Play now Cannon basketball 3

Play more Coolified games

Various Characters and Types – 15 playable characters from across the Sonic Universe and 3 distinct character types including Speed, Technique, and Power.

In a world where any version of Mario Kart exists, other kart racers are always battling amongst themselves for second place. I’d make a strong argument that Sega’s blue blur took that position with 2012’s Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed – and even argue that it remains a high watermark for the genre to this day – which puts the recently announced Team Sonic Racing under a potentially unflattering spotlight.

Developed by Sheffield-based Sumo Digital, Team Sonic Racing is a separate fork to the studio’s earlier Sega All-Stars racers. That means no crossover characters like Space Channel 5’s Ulala, Jet Set Radio’s Beat, or Super Monkey Ball’s AiAi, with the new game instead of focusing entirely on the anthropomorphic inhabitants of Mobius as they’re drawn into a story-based racing adventure.

Yes, there’s narrative to Sonic’s latest petrol head outing, although not one that was on show at E3 2018. What was on display was the team mechanics – a gameplay shift that changes how the game works as a racer, and one I can see being incredibly divisive to players.

In the adventure mode, you’ll choose from pre-set teams of three racers, and control one of each trio as your main character. Each team features one racer whose specialty is speed, one for technique, and one for power, their attributes affecting how each handles, and the power-ups that best complement them.

The E3 build had two teams on offer – Team Sonic, with Tails and Knuckles, or Team Shadow, with Rouge and Omega. Both are nice nods to Sonic Adventure 2’s Hero and Dark teams, with the latter swapping out Robotnik for Omega. It appears as though the final game will have five teams and 15 total characters to start with, as the selection screen had three columns of three characters each greyed out. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chaotix team – Espio, Charmy, and Vector – filled one of those team slots, especially as Sega says the shift to purely Sonic-related characters is in part because they better fit into teams.

Jumping into a race, Team Sonic Racing ticks a lot of the expected boxes for a modern kart racer: imaginative tracks, alternate routes, and plentiful power-ups to collect as you zoom around. One nice tweak is that you can not only pull off the expected boost starts at the beginning of each race, but you can stack up to three ‘charges’ for it if you time hitting the accelerator at the right time during the countdown. Miss just one though, and you’ll lose all your launch speed.

The group dynamic comes into play almost immediately though, with allies able to ride in each other’s trail to gain a speed boost or skim past a teammate to give them a boost in turn. Performing these ‘Team Actions’ fills an Ultimate Meter, which gives a massive, sustained speed surge for the whole team. The differences between speed, technique, and power racers are easily apparent too. Sonic and Shadow zoom ahead of the pack, but can be easily knocked around by other cars; Tails and Rouge have tighter controls and felt better able to pull off Team Actions; while Knuckles and Omega are slower but more powerful, capable of shoving other racers around.

You’ll want to make the most of those Team Actions to keep your whole squad ahead too, as the final result isn’t down to simply who passes the finish line first. Instead, the final track times for each individual member are combined, resulting in a team score. If you come first, but your teammates end up dead last, chances are you’re not going to win the race overall – hence that aforementioned sense of division for players. This is going to be a love-it-or-hate-it mechanic, potentially over-complicating the simple fun of kart racers. That said, this doesn’t feel like the sort of kart racer where just holding down the go-fast button will result in victory. AI racers put up a fierce challenge, and you’ll need to pay attention to their efforts to run you off the track. It’s actually surprisingly tough to finish in the top three.

There are other tweaks to the kart racing formula that make use of the team structure, too. Items can be swapped between members with a tap of the circle button (on PS4), either sending an unwanted one you have to a partner who can make better use of it or requesting one when you’re riding on empty yourself. The items on offer at E3 weren’t terribly inspiring though, all feeling like stand-ins for Mario Kart power-ups – speed boosting Wisps in place of mushrooms, blocks instead of banana peels, and so forth. Hopefully, the finished product will have some surprises.

Away from the story mode, I was told by a Sega rep at E3 that Team Sonic Racing won’t be as restricted by the pre-existing team line-ups of the Sonic-verse. In the planned online mode, for instance, you’ll even be free to build a team featuring multiple instances of the same character – a triumvirate of Tails, if you like. There are also plans for vehicle customisation, with four blanked-out boxes on the racer select screen that are set to be used to mod your rides. I’m also told rings collected during the course of races are going to feed into the game’s economy, and while not confirming that Sonic’s virtual chop shop is where they’ll be spent, it seems a likely connection.

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reynoldslevi10-blog · 7 years

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9 Ways to Get a Great Workout at Home

"You're not tired! You're not tired!" says Chalene Johnson, as she starts another set of high-intensity exercises. She's tiny, blonde, and has the body I want to have. I am tired, but I follow her lead–a breakthrough since I'm watching her fitness DVD, an advanced cardio program called TurboFire, and there's no one in the room forcing me to do so. Why is this a big deal? Because I'm lazy–really. When I go to the gym, I can think of a 101 things I'd rather be doing, even as I jog on the treadmill. Outdoor exercise is also out; too hard on my asthma. You'd think I'd be the last person to do video workouts at home (no witnesses to my sloth!), but I've been able to stick with it for the past two years. Now, I'm stronger, I have more energy, and my endurance has improved. I even feel more confident when I pull on my skinny jeans. Here are my tips for keeping yourself motivated during your at-home workouts. Find a workout that fits your life Guess what? I used to think I hated workout videos. The truth was I had not found the right one for me. There are hundreds of DVD workouts, and some of them are too hard. Or too easy. (Or too boring.) So Goldilocks, take the time to find the one that's juuuussst right. Amazon.com has hundreds of user reviews for you to read and consider, even if you don't want to buy. Start by searching for well-known trainers like Jillian Michaels, Tracy Anderson, Chalene Johnson and Tony Horton. Then, hop onto Youtube to find a sample video. Some are short, but there are many high-quality videos that are 40 minutes to an hour long. Take the time to watch them to see if you can do the moves. Even if you're superfit, why not have a celebrity trainer you'd never have access to in real life? Stock up on DVDs Variety is the key to never getting bored. If you choose a popular program, you can save money by going online before buying from a store. If you get lucky like me, you might be able to pick up Tony Horton's P90X or TurboFire on Craigslist.org or Ebay.com for $40-$50, or half off the retail price. And just so you know, this is a good time to do it, since people are doing their spring-cleaning and getting rid of their dusty fitness gear. Personally, I like to keep more than one video around, so I can switch things up and never get bored. I currently own three, and one of them is a dated version of Debbie Siebers' Slim in 6. Even though it's old, I use it because it has a good track record, the trainer is likable and the music is pumping. After all, the whole point of this exercise is to get fit, get limber and to get moving. If you're budget-conscious, get yourself to the local library. Mixed in among old Hollywood blockbusters, there could be some pilates or cardio-based workout DVDs that someone has donated. You can also try using Freecycle.org. It's a nationwide service that people use to connect with others who are looking to give away their stuff for free. Schedule your workouts Open up your planner and schedule your workouts, following your trainer's calendar as closely as possible. BLOCK THOSE TIMES OFF! Rest days should overlap with special events or visits from out-of-town guests. And before you leave for any weekend trips, load your fitness programs on your laptop or iPad so that you can work out wherever you go. Think ahead, because when you're standing in front of a screen in your gym clothes, there should be no distractions. Johnson recommends working out six times a week, but I'd be happy if I could manage to do four. I've learned to be realistic, and this is a number I can stick to doing. Reward yourself for working out Still feel like you're too busy to work out? Try this mental trick. Make a list of things that eat up all of your free time. It could be Facebook and Twitter, or the TV shows you watch. Then, circle three or four of your least favorite activities, and swap them out in favor of exercise. For example, I can make a conscious decision not to watch an episode of "New Girl" every week. And just like that, I'm able to squeeze an extra 30 minutes out of my day. I also like to use a rewards system. Since food-related ideas are out, I've been forced to get creative. I've made trips to the museum and to Broadway shows. I've taken self-defense classes and signed up for bouldering at a local rock-climbing gym. Create the perfect space When I first started using fitness videos, I did it in my living room. It was so crowded that I had to push my coffee table and sofas aside so I could have enough space to do lunges, jump squats and sun salutations. I've learned that I'd rather have a trimmer, fitter body than a perfect living room. My commitment to exercise is not something that needs to be rolled up and hidden away all the time. This is something you might need to consider. I've recently moved all of my operations to the basement after discovering that I'm wearing a hole in my living room carpet. If you plan on doing a long-term program, it's probably a good idea to find ways to save your flooring from wear and tear. You can rotate your rug every few months, or invest in foam exercise tiles to spare your hardwood floors. Here's a pro tip. "To motivate yourself to enter and remain in your exercise environment, make it pleasant and inviting," says sports psychologist Mark H. Anshel, PhD. I'm taking his advice by painting the walls in a pretty, energizing color like peach. It should do wonders for my mood when I exercise. Change your diet too Some of the more advanced DVD programs offer menus and an eating plan, and I am happy to take advantage of the free advice. I love that I don't have to decide what to eat since it's all mapped out for me. For example, both P90X and TurboFire offer three meals and two snacks a day, and multiple options for each. With TurboFire, I get 50 pages of recipes, all based on a 1,500-calorie plan. There are weight loss tips, such as how to track your calories, understand food labels and break a weight loss plateau. And P90X has more than one nutrition plan. I can choose whether it's more important to me to shred fat and build muscle, boost my energy or maximize my endurance. Get the right gear To find out what equipment you need, you'll want to skim through the user manual that comes with most DVD programs, or watch the first five minutes of the video. Amazon reviews are especially useful, because you can find information on what equipment is necessary, what's optional, and where you might get items on the cheap. My current setup consists of a yoga mat and blocks that I purchased from Lululemon, and a pair of Powerblock dumbbells that I got for half off the retail price on Craigslist. I also ordered a set of resistance bands from Amazon. They can be used to replace small hand weights and don't take up much room. And since I do dance-based exercise routines, I have a pair of jazz shoes to help me slide and twist. Altogether, I've spent about $300 on equipment. It's steep, but still cheaper than paying for a gym membership every year. Dress to sweat! It's tempting to start working out in whatever you happen to be wearing, such as pajamas and bare feet. But if there's one thing I've learned about using exercise DVD's, it's that it's always best to get dressed as if I'm going to the gym. Wearing sneakers actually makes it easier to do jumping jacks, lunges and leg lifts. Since they cushion my feet and give me a better grip on the floor, I'll last longer and do more reps, giving me a better shot at actually finishing my routine. Equally important is a good sports bra, to prevent bounce when you start jumping around. And if you do yoga, I recommend wearing a top that doesn't gape open when you do the down dog. Still not convinced? Dr. Anshel says that workout clothes "reflect your commitment to perform at optimal levels and have motivational value." This means it's a lot easier to jump in and do your exercises if you change as soon as you get home from work. Here's another lazy-girl trick. If you're an early-morning exerciser, you can wear your gym clothes to sleep. The next day, you can pop out of bed, scrunch your hair into a ponytail, and hit the "Play" button on your DVD player. Practice patience It can be frustrating to have to learn a new series of moves, especially if it's a dance or aerobics routine. But in real life, you can't ask your fitness instructor to stop the class and show you those moves just one more time. The beauty of using fitness videos is that you can stop and rewind as many times you need. When I get frustrated, I like to take a deep breath and concentrate on getting the steps down. Most of the time, I'll discover there are only a few moves that are repeated several times. And if that isn't the case, I can choose whether to persist or downgrade to an easier video. That's always an option so don't give up!

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brandyfields66-blog · 7 years

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9 Ways to Get a Great Workout at Home

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kalachand97-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Globeinfrom

New Post has been published on https://globeinform.com/this-weeks-highs-and-lows-in-computer-gaming/

This week's highs and lows in Computer gaming

Bayonetta was given a marvel release on Pc this week and not only is the port pleasant great (it’s Durante permitted!), it’s one of the excellent games I’ve performed this yr. Phil included all of it in his evaluation, but I’ll recap right here: The fight gadget is expressive and animated fantastically, the story is a dopey melodramatic comedy that relentlessly pokes amusing at video game tropes, and for the whole thing of its playtime, Bayonetta miraculously keeps to escalate. It’s tough to agree with this game released in 2009. And what’s up, it’s simplest $20, which is about one-third of what I’d gladly pay for it these days.

Tom Senior: Headstart

The begin of the 12 months was once a real drought. Some video games may slip from their planned Autumn launch date and fall into the wastelands of February. This year is specific. Take a look at out our video games of 2017 spherical up and you see exceptional Jap hack ‘n minimize RPG Nier: Automata; the first-rate adventure sport we’ve performed in a while, Thimbleweed Park; and some engrossing space 4X in Stellaris. Plus, even though it took its sweet time, Bayonetta is finally out on Pc.

I am hoping this early rush of best is a sign of things to come back. Because of the major meetings—E3, Gamescom—maintain to seem less worthwhile to publishers, we might see the enterprise’s traditional cycles—pre-E3 tease, E3 announce, fingers-on Sept, release Oct—begin to fragment. Outside of Computer land, the Legend of Zelda, Character five, Night and Horizon Zero Sunrise have proven that—gasp—human beings like buying and gambling cool games all 12 months round. here’s hoping for extra splendid video games in early 2018.

I am pretty happy that we show up to live within the size that gets a couple of Rick and Morty video games within the identical month. Properly, one turned into a Grand Theft Car five mod, but the idea of mad scientist Rick invading Los Santos seems extra than suitable, given the amount of destruction and careless mayhem Rick brings to Earth in the course of the display. I mainly just like the component in this video showcasing the mod in which GTA’s strippers are model-swapped for Rick. It is nearly canon.

Virtual Rick-quality, then again, looks like a fair greater ridiculous Process Simulator paired with a few original voice work from Justin Roiland and with any luck A few others, which is greater than sufficient to get me to strap on a VR headset again.

Chris Livingston: area Evaders

Missile Cards is a unmarried-player turn-based card sport, in that you need to guard your space base against falling threats like comets and bombs (as in Missile Command). Playing cards cycle through an airlock, one by one, and you positioned them into play as protection (missiles, weapons, lasers, and diverse strength-ups) while threats inch closer and toward your susceptible base. I have been playing it here and there: a hand most effective takes a couple of minutes, so It is super to squeeze in at some stage in a wreck or a short meal. Its unfashionable look and soundtrack give it a pleasant feel, and its low device requirements make it ideal for a pc as Well. It’s difficult—I experience like I rarely virtually win a spherical—however fun, and It’s just a few bucks on Steam. Take a look at it out.

This week was Eastern Pc Gaming Week right here on Laptop Gamer, and our very personal Wes Fenlon prepares an absolute whirlwind of cool capabilities. Durante did a fantastic port analysis of Bayonetta, I got an excuse to put in writing extra about Valkyria Chronicles, and Chris played a peculiar jigsaw puzzle sport with animated women. but my favorite piece became a look at the Laptop’s recent upward thrust in Japan, which was eye-establishing to mention the least. It is easy to write off the reasons for Japan’s disinterest inside the Laptop, but Wes had a few surprising insights (like having to pay for Steam video games at a 7-11) that I absolutely by no means might have taken into consideration. I fantastically recommend you examine what he has to say.

Tuan Nguyen: Subspace: Continuum

Sometimes returned inside the yr 2002 even as visiting a chum’s house, I used to be shown a game known as Subspace. It turned into this lovable top-down space shooter recreation in which you helmed a tiny little ship and went on a rampage on what appeared like an endless map. Lots of humans had been gambling it, and I found it to be an exceptional mix between Asteroids and AOL Immediately Messenger—you could recall it one of the earliest MMOs.

I’d forgotten approximately the sport after that, but during the years stored thinking back to the laugh I had at the same time as playing it. Regrettably, I forgot what that game became referred to as. I saved asking my Computer gaming buddies in the event that they’ve ever played this ‘extraordinary space shooter game that became top down and had walls in space.’ No person became capable of identify what I used to be regarding, till these days. Seemingly, it’s referred to as Subspace: Continuum now and is available on Steam. What a first-rate throwback to my teens.

Desirable and Bad in Gaming Gaming is one in every of the biggest hobbies or even careers inside the global. people play video games for a laugh or mastering whilst others document movies about the video games. In this newsletter, I’m able to recognition more on gaming itself and no longer so much the facet of how to make gaming motion pictures. Game enthusiasts are available all different a long time, genders, religions, locations and shapes. The backgrounds of individuals who are Game enthusiasts make gaming that much more a laugh.

Backgrounds of Game enthusiasts can play a component in the form of games that humans play. There are all styles of combos for one-of-a-kind categories relating to the sort of games and sort of Gamers. You really want to look at the game’s internet site to get all of the pertinent data previous to shopping for.

There are numerous online platforms wherein you could purchase video games from including Steam or Humble Bundle. Those web sites will give you the description, videos via the employer, photos, consumer and non-consumer tags, critiques, website, enterprise and their social account(s). Be aware the sport’s website might not show you the whole thing you need to realize. As a minimum, a gaming company will display a quick income pitch description, a small amount of photographs (5 at pleasant), one or two videos by means of them and their social accounts. The maximum they may provide is an informative description, their social debts, consumer opinions and motion pictures with the aid of them.

Allow’s dive properly into what is perceived as negative about gaming. The general public of the bad things approximately games come from the actual-lifestyles people on Those games, the kind of video games and the varieties of games for the wrong character. A recreation can be poorly made but It’s no longer always the case in which the game itself is Horrific. It may be wherein it become the wrong kind of recreation for the incorrect character. That is wherein the types are available in. Maybe a sport has a bit of violence. That doesn’t make it Bad; it simply makes it the wrong sort of sport for a seven 12 months antique. Or Maybe you obtain a puzzle game for a person who loves motion kind games. So the movement loving character may not experience it, however, That does not make the puzzle sport Horrific!

The forms of games are endless from nudity, pills, and alcohol, horror, playing with cash and greater. Those different sorts are incorrect for adolescents Game enthusiasts in addition to incorrect for those who don’t like seeing such things.

Gaming has True and Horrific facets much like everything else. The key is how Good and Awful are Those facets. As an example, a few video games have a Horrific side with gamers that like to combat a lot. This is common in video games. Apprehend for a whole lot of Game enthusiasts this isn’t a big deal; but, for youngsters who are new to the sport or even gaming in wellknown, this could be frustrating. There are times when you need to avoid the Awful aspects altogether. There are instances when the best outweighs the Awful. If this takes place and there aren’t any issues with the game itself; then the Horrific side is just that one little fly in your room which isn’t any huge deal. Caution: If the Bad outweighs the coolest, I would strongly suggest keeping off that recreation.

Some other component that human beings will nag a sports developer or creator approximately is representation. Ought to I say, a loss of representation which isn’t always confined to race, body kind and message in the sport. If you are able to personalize your individual, then of the path you may no longer have a problem with representation. There may be a trouble in some video games where they don’t constitute robust and clever ladies, minority women and adult males, big, small, tall, and short women and adult males. Observe how I failed to placed “adult males” after a woman for sturdy? It’s due to the fact males in video games are continually represented as robust and smart.

In games that display a male robust and smart, he will primarily probable be white, tall, skinny, film famous person searching and buff. you will hardly ever see him be a minority, quick, overweight, now not buff, nerdy searching, at the same time as nonetheless being strong and clever. You notice this even much less for females. some women in video games also are white, tall, skinny and sturdy whilst displaying skin like no day after today. You best see Those women in MMO games (Massively Multiplayer online Position gambling recreation) though. RPG video games are supposed for delusion worlds where you broadly speaking fight humans and monsters. Of direction the women’ stats will be sturdy but they won’t appearance robust.

In maximum video games, after they upload a man or woman for you to play they always add a white male first, then a white lady, then a black male, and then a black woman. They don’t even truely upload people who are mixes of races or in among. In terms of the black characters they simplest add one colour of “black” or “African-American” and no longer every black person on this planet is that coloration.

In video games, The general public of the characters is usually thin and tall. You do not absolutely see characters which can be short and thin, tall and overweight, short and chubby, and so forth. There are a variety of folks that aren’t thin and who are not tall.

Then finally, There is the mental message that is going with the gender, race, and frame type. What do I imply by means of the mental message? a few games send an oblique message approximately that man or woman being strong and smart or something else. whilst for different games it could be a intellectual message either on motive or not. As an example, in the sport you play and also you see a minority woman who is brief, overweight, nerdy looking and her traits are to be a goof ball, naive, and dumb. It is able to ship a mental message to you that humans that look like her are similar to her. They are not smart, they are not skinny, and are not tall. They did poorly in college, and so forth. and so on. So that you begin thinking The ones things based on not only seeing this in that recreation over and over again, but whilst it happens in other video games too.

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componentplanet · 4 years

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How to Upscale Video Content to 4K, 8K, and Beyond

For the past three months, I’ve been working on what I’ve named the Deep Space Nine Upscale Project (DS9UP). The goal of DS9UP is to create a new, much-improved version of the show by applying modern processing techniques to the original DVD source before using AI-based software to create a higher-resolution version of the show. It’s had me thinking about upscaling and upscalers in general. Upscaling isn’t a feature we talk about much, but how your TV handles it (or, alternately, how you use the capability on a PC) can have a significant impact on how you experience content.

The word “upscale” generically means “to improve the value or quality of something.” In the video and PC space, it’s almost always a reference to increasing the effective resolution of a piece of content. There is typically an understood difference between upscaling and native resolution. If you upscale a 1080p video into 4K, it means you are taking a 1080p input and using a combination of hardware and software to create a larger image. This upscaled image will not be identical to a native 4K signal, but it should offer a better picture than what was previously available on your 720p or 1080p television.

Keyword: “should.” Video scalar quality in TVs can vary widely between different product families. In some cases, you might be better off using a GPU to drive a picture than relying on the TV’s native rescaling capability, while other TVs have excellent upscalers. Manufacturers rarely disclose their upscaling hardware choices, but higher-end TVs should have improved upscaling capabilities. If you have a UHD Blu-ray player paired with an older or lower-quality 1080p or 4K TV, you might even get better results by running all video signals through the Blu-ray player rather than the television. Generally speaking, a good TV upscaler is considered to be as good or better than a GPU.

How the Scalar Sausage Gets Made

The most basic function of a video scaler is to take whatever image it receives — 480i, 720p, 1080p — and stretch it across the entire screen. Without this functionality, a 1080p signal would take up just a fraction of a 4K television’s display. This simple resizing is typically done by taking each individual 1080p pixel and creating four pixels out of it (remember, 4K is four times the pixels of 1080p).

But many TVs and Blu-ray players do more than just perform a simple 1:4 mapping. They also use video processing techniques to extrapolate what details ought to be present in the scene. How well this works depends on the type of content being

Image by DisplayNinja

In the image above, you can see how the upscaled 4K is much more nuanced than the simple 1:4 mapping in the second grid from the left. If you’re having trouble seeing the difference between the 1080p upscale and the native 4K, look at the left-side blocks in the very first row and the right-side blocks in the very last row. The native 4K image resolves into distinctly different colors than the 1080p image in R1C2 (That’s 1st row, 2nd column), R1C3, and R8C8. As the amount of available horsepower in televisions has improved, the quality and sophistication of their integrated upscalers have grown as well. Some modern TVs have sophisticated sharpening algorithms to reverse the blur created by upscaling and interpolation algorithms good enough to almost match the precision of a native 4K signal.

How does all this look with real content? A 2017 Rtings article can help answer that question. The first image below is from a 4K set displaying 1080p in upscaled 4K, while the second is native 1080p.

Image by Rtings

If you have trouble seeing a difference between the two images, open both of them in a new tab and focus your eyes near the center of the image. See the house with a brown roof near the center of the image, with three windows facing approximately south-southwest and a fourth pointed east? (All directional cues based on north being “up”, not the direction of the sunlight). Look at that specific spot in both images, and the roofs in the buildings immediately adjacent. The difference should jump out at you. In this case, even using TVs that date back to 2015, the 1080p upscale to 4K is better than the 4K image.

Image by Rtings

If you have an older TV or a budget 4K model, there’s one obvious method of improving your TV’s upscaling: Buy a better television. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict how well this will work without knowing exactly what you own now and what you plan to purchase to replace it. The older your current TV, the better the chances that a new set will deliver upgrades in all respects, but many of those improvements may have nothing to do with the way your upscaler handles <4K content.

If you aren’t happy with your current TV, can’t replace it at the moment, and happen to own a high-end Blu-ray or UHD player, you can also try running content through its upscaler rather than relying on the television to handle it. In some cases, a top-end UHD Blu-ray player may deliver a better experience than an entry-level 4K TV from a few years back. If you’re still using a DVD player to feed a picture to a mediocre 1080p or 4K panel when/if you play DVDs, and you can swap over to a high-end Blu-ray / UHD Blu-ray player instead, I’d try it. It may or may not help, but it definitely won’t hurt. What you’re trying to do here is route the signal through the upscaler that’ll give it the best quality kick.

Still need a higher-quality picture? You’re in luck.

Real-Time AI Processing

I haven’t tested the most recent Nvidia Shield myself, but there’s a demo you can actually play with on Nvidia.com to apply the effect the TV offers. Here’s a screenshot of the effect. I’ve positioned the slider over the lizard’s eye because it’s the easiest place to see the upscaler’s impact:

Left: Regular upscale Right: Nvidia Shield

Still not clear? Here’s an enlarged version of the same screenshot.

The image on the left is a traditional upscaler, the image on the right is Nvidia’s Shield when asked to scale up 720p or 1080p content to 4K (content below 720p is not supported for upscaling, at least not yet). The AI component of the upscaler obviously improves the overall image quality. In my experience with applications like TVEAI, this is a fair representation of the improvements that can be achieved.

Third-party reviews of the Shield agree. Slashgear writes that when it works, the effect is “fairly astonishing.” So far as I’m aware, the Shield is currently the only set-top or 2D box offering this kind of functionality.

Video Upscaling via Third-Party Software

Finally, there’s the option to use a third-party upscaler, like Topaz Video Enhance AI. I’ve made extensive use of TVEAI as part of the Deep Space Nine Upscale Project, and can confirm that the application is capable of yielding stunning results. One major limitation of TVEAI, however, is that it currently only supports Intel and Nvidia platforms for GPU-accelerated processing. CPU processing is available, but likely too slow to be all that useful.

Thanks to AI-based upscaling, historic sci-fi canards like the “Enhance” function are now a reality. It’s a truism in video encoding that no application on Earth can put data back where it never existed, and that’s still true today. The reason we can now “enhance” images to improve their clarity is that AI-based applications are capable of analyzing a video field and estimating what detail would exist if the image were in higher quality already.

One of the typical ways to train a video-enhancing application like TVEAI is to provide the neural net with the same image or video in both high and low quality. The neural net is then tasked with finding a way to make the low-quality source look as much like the high-quality source as possible. Instead of trying to teach a computer what lines and curves look like by providing painstaking examples, we’ve developed the ability to make the computer do the work of teaching itself. That’s why “Enhance” has gone from a complete joke to a plausible reality in a matter of a few years.

You may need to zoom to see subtle differences, but this isn’t an upscale comparison. It’s a comparison of performing my upscale work in separate applications and steps (left-side) versus ingesting the entire video workload into Topaz Video Enhance AI using the AVFS virtual file system and performing the entire operation at once. If you’re thinking “Wow, that’s a tiny difference, who would even care?” well, you may be right — but I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to use the highest-quality source possible.

Applications like Topaz Video Enhance AI can cost several hundred dollars and they don’t run in real-time — the RTX 2080 appears capable of 90-110 frames per minute when upscaling 640×480 video to 2560×1920. The result of using these applications, however, is a vastly better picture than you’ll see from any other source.

DVD source on the left, upscale on the right.

I suspect we’ll see AI video processing and upscaling become more important over time as Intel, Nvidia, and AMD introduce their next-generation graphics processors. There’s an awful lot of old content orphaned on bad-quality source, and building specialized AI processors to fix it will likely consume some silicon for all of the concerned parties over the next few years.

Finally, I’ve embedded the current version of DS9UP’s opening credits for the show below. This is new footage that hasn’t appeared in a previous DS9UP article. There is no audio in this clip and you’ll need to raise the resolution to 4K, but I’ve created this file based on the DVD source with modifications in AviSynth, DaVinci Resolve, and Topaz Video Enhance AI.

youtube

Compare that to the actual credits ripped from the DVD and uploaded to YouTube by yours truly:

youtube

This is what the credits look like if you watch them on the source DVDs. The improvements from this version to my own are not small.

Upscalers are amazing and only getting better. That’s true no matter how you consume content or what technology you use to do it. Depending on the shows you like and how much time you want to sink into the project, there are tremendous improvements to be had… or you can just wait a few years, and buy a better TV. You can read more about DS9UP at the links below.

Now Read:

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project Update: Variable Frame Rate DVDs Can Burn in Hell

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project Update: ‘Sacrifice of Angels’

Upscaling Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Using Topaz Video Enhance AI

PCMag: The Best TVs for 2020

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/310029-how-to-upscale-video-content-to-4k-8k-and-beyond from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-upscale-video-content-to-4k-8k.html

#How to Upscale Video Content to 4K #8K #and Beyond

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guyrobottv · 8 years

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The Annual NAS Challenge

For some reason I like to build large storage arrays. I do tend to eat up a lot of storage and over time I’ve filled them up. For the last couple of years I’ve gone big and in 2016 I decided to just buy an off the shelf Drobo 5N filled with 5x 4TB SATA drives. It’s fine but there have been a few issues with it – the lack of active directory integration means I cannot securely use it to store virtual machine disk images for Hyper V Server and a lack of iSCSI and slightly lack-lustre out the box NFS implementation has left me with the same problem for VMWare ESXi virtual machines. I’ve ended up just using it to store all my old backups and ISOs but don’t feel I’m getting the most out of it.

I had some old parts sat around that I shared on Facebook a while ago – motherboards, CPUs, RAM and a lot of disks. Amongst them were 4x 4TB matched SAS drives and a SAS HBA I had used on a project a couple of years ago. At that time I was working on a NAS that I never quite felt happy with and then personal issues meant I had to leave it in an undesired state. Most of it got torn down but a few bits remained so this year is mostly a rebuild of a NAS from the past but with a clear intention on stability and performance – at least matching my Drobo 5N when it comes to network speed.

The last NAS had a number of issues:

Trying to get everything in to a 2U case proved extremely loud and messy

Consumer grade hardware posed issues with OpenIndiana, switched to FreeBSD

iSCSI stability issues – regularly lag spikes

Speed never ended up particularly high

Significant management overhead just to keep it running

I did however really enjoy working with ZFS and found iSCSI worked wonderfully for my virtualization needs. With a focus on backing virtual machines for my projects and learning from this build in the past this year’s requirements are:

iSCSI protocol

SMB with Active Directory integration

At least 100MBps sustained speed for an iSCSI read or write operation

Potential for link aggregation

ZFS implementation

Rapidly upgradeable NAS operating system

Low management overhead

Needs to look good and remain quiet on my desk as this won’t be in a data centre or rack mounted in my garage

A Virtual Solution

To meet my requirements the first thing I decided on way to go with an out-of-the-box FreeNAS installation. It handles iSCSI and ZFS but prevents me needing to look and manage everything under the hood if I don’t want to. It also comes with pretty good (apart from web authentication) integration with Active Directory which means it will be easy for me to setup and manage for iSCSI and SMB without installing a tonne of extra software. Having played with FreeNAS 9 and the beta of 10 during testing I decided to stick with the latest stable release of FreeNAS 9. I had a bunch of issues with the web interface and even the boot loader on FreeNAS 10. Whilst I think 10 is a landmark shift away from the issues I’ve always had with previous versions of FreeNAS it’s definitely not there for daily use yet.

The next big decision was how to manage upgrades. Knowing the issues I had testing FreeNAS what I didn’t want was to make a decision to upgrade FreeNAS at some point, or switch to another ZFS-based operating system, and end up with my NAS and consequentially virtual machines unavailable for a whole week. The solution – virtualising my NAS and using a bare metal hypervisor as the actual underlying operating system on the hardware.

Running FreeNAS in a virtual machine works and is supported but there are a few caveats – the main being that any disk which FreeNAS itself is sharing out needs to be as close to the physical hardware as possible. Creating a physical RAID array, having the RAID adapter setup in the hypervisor and then creating several disks for ZFS to be configured on in a FreeNAS virtual machine is the worst possible thing you can do. All the optimisations that ZFS does are negated but underlying technologies and it becomes a worst-of-all scenario.

I decided to go with VMWare ESXi 6.5 as my hypervisor. I’ve used 5.5 a lot and wanted to try the new version. I did consider Hyper V Server 2016 and gave it some testing but found a few limitations that frustrated me and decided (other than my desktop PC) I would stick to VMWare across all my virtualisations.

Using ESXI 6.5 left me with a simple solution. The 4TB SAS disks that will form my storage array are connected to a HBA which can, in turn, be directly passed through to the virtual machine. This makes my LSI SAS2008 card appear to FreeNAS as if it is installed locally. Because the card is where the disks are connected to VMWare never even sees the 4TB disks. The HBA itself is one I used a couple of years ago and blogged about at the time to make sure it just presents disks and does not RAID on top of them (note even JBOD). Passing through the HBA required enabling IOMMU in the motherboard and selecting the device in VMWare as a pass-through device. The mother board also has eSATA ports that I passed through even though I am not using them at this point.

For the FreeNAS boot disks I use SSDs. Unfortunately, I cannot pass these through and nor is there any underlying RAID on them. To give me some stability here I have two separate SSDs. I have created a virtual disk on each of these which are then configured in a ZFS mirror for the FreeNAS boot drive. Whilst this is not as ideal as having them directly passed through to VMWare it does mean that I have a mirror for protection against single drive failure and performance on them will be more than adequate to boot with. I also didn’t want to pass these through as I’d then lose some of the advantage of hot-swapping the underlying operating system unless I kept adding disks.

This virtualised solution means that I can configure FreeNAS with 16GB of RAM and 6 cores which will be fine for my daily use and then create a second VM with everything other than the PCI Express pass-through enabled. I can then get everything working and ready for migration. If I want to then switch to a different underlying operating system for my NAS I just shut down the initial VM, attach the PCI Express HBA to the new VM, start it up and import the ZFS volumes – this entire process will take a couple of minutes and can be dry-run through first. I am sacrificing some RAM here to FreeNAS but for my use case I think the versatility is better.

To complete this built I’m going to be using the hardware I have listed here. This includes a 6-core processor, 32GB RAM, an Intel quad gigabit NIC, a GTX 460 graphics card and most importantly an Aerocool DS200 case in fluorescent orange. I’d love to say I selected the case for the number of disk bays and noise dampening that it provides but the truth of it is I loved just how orange it is. I did a separate review of the case recently – it isn’t amazing but it is orange and works well for my purposes.

The Build

The build is detailed in full in the video at the top of this post and there will also be separate videos coming up showing how I configured FreeNAS and ESXi to enable this configure in full. Rather than rehashing everything here it all went pretty well though apart from a few issues that did crop up.

I started by almost bricking my SAS HBA. When swapping from a low-profile to full-sized bracket I got annoyed at a screw, removed its thread and almost snapped the PCB whilst trying to remove it. Thankfully everything still worked. Don’t get mad at your HBAs folks, it rarely ends well. There were a few issues with cable management – namely how little space this case provides behind the motherboard tray – and the graphics card makes more noisy than I’d like (but it does have an orange fan), however the physical build was fine other than these minor issues.

During the install of ESXI 6.5 I had a bunch of issues that I’d not encountered before. The first was with keyboards – a selection of modern gaming keyboards I had would not work once ESXi’s installer booted at all. I ended up using a late 1990s Sun Microsystems vintage keyboard I had lying around which seemed fine. I guess this is the first time I’ve tried ESXi with a consumer keyboard (rather than a basic Dell one in a rack) and didn’t spend much time investigating but something to look out for – no BIOS setting changes got anything working here.

The other really annoying thing with ESXi was its desire to not play ball with a USB-stick installation. One of the reasons I had selected ESXi over Hyper-V was so that I could install it on a USB stick. Many USB sticks were just not detected by the installer or would not partition – even one that I’d got ESXi 5.5 installed on. I eventually got it working on a USB stick I didn’t really want to use (it was a small collapsible one prone to falling out of machines) when eventually it started giving random errors during reboots. At this point I gave in and went with just using a small amount of SSD space on one of the datastore drives. I never got to the bottom of this, some of the drives could be fakes but I doubt all of them are – it’s more likely an issue between the consumer board and ESXi. I was able to work around this using SSD but never addressed the underlying issue. If you have this and must install on a USB stick my recommendation would be install ESXi as a VM in Windows (through VMWare Player) and then take that disk image and burn it to a USB stick (this also works for Hyper-V).

The final issue was the motherboard’s on-board Realtek network interface. The RTL8110 is no longer supported by VMware in ESXi 6.5. Whilst I had a separate Intel quad gigabit NIC (which worked perfectly) I wanted to use the Realtek one for management traffic and reserve the Intel card for iSCSI. To work around this you can install the other drivers from VMWare 5. This does work but is not supported. You can either merge these in to your ESXi 6.5 image before you start or do it via the other working cards afterwards (which is what I did).

To get your Realtek card working with ESXi 6.5 follow these steps:

Download the drivers from http://vibsdepot.v-front.de/depot/RTL/net55-r8168/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi.x86_64.vib and upload to your datastore (we’ll refer to its name a DatastoreName below)

Enable SSH on the host

SSH in as root to the host

Type in the following two commands:

esxicli software acceptance set -level=CommunitySupported

esxcli software vib install /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi.x86_64.vib

Reboot your host

This should all work magically – but a couple of caveats:

The first time I did this my Realtek NIC appeared but I lost the Intel ports. I never could get them back. They were detected and had a driver loaded but never mapped to an interface and no errors in any logs. A reinstallation worked fine.

Some people have repeated other odd errors – including the card running for months, freezing up and then working fine after a reboot. I wouldn’t use this port for anything production-worthy.

And with that the 2017 16TB NAS is ready for action.

Performance

I tested numerous configurations with both iSCSI and SMB. I ran drive configurations including two-parity disk RAIDZ2 (ZFS’ version of RAID 6), single-parity disk RAIDZ (ZFS’ version of RAID 5) and mirrored stripe and just striped configurations (ZFS’ versions of RAID 10 and RAID 0). I ran all these tests with the default synchronous write policy and compression disabled. I separately ran some compression tests and found a very small fluctuation in speeds with anything up to default levels of gzip compression (highest gzip did drop around 10MBps of transfer). I also ran tests to see if ZIL disks or additional RAM would significantly change performance figures – they didn’t.

From the main results it became obvious really early on that iSCSI out performed SMB but it had some odd issues including speeds peaking and then dropping significantly before peaking again. I was able to get 102.32MBps out of my tests (which did beat the Drobo 5N) but I wasn’t happy with the lag spikes – these can be fatal when you want low-latency for virtual machines.

I then did something many people would consider bad – I swapped to an asynchronous write policy. This definitely increases risk in your storage solution (a sudden power loss and I’ve potentially corrupted the disks far more than I otherwise would) and I would not recommend it in production unless you can take other precautions (keeping replicas, backups, and a stable UPS with graceful ZFS shutdown would be musts). That being said, I am not in a production system and the results smoothed out and gave me a big performance boost.

Switching as async writes with RAID Z over iSCSI gave me a whopping 125MBps – completely maxing out the gigabit Ethernet. Whilst I haven’t tested the impact of link aggregation yet I did do a test from another VM within the same host (in effect removing the NICs limitations). This was able to pull down more than 250MBps (2.5Gbps over the network) – and that was sat on top of a virtual disk in a datastore on top of the iSCSI itself.

I’m really happy with this NAS – it looks great, it’s quiet and I can happily get a 26% performance increase over my off-the-shelf Drobo 5N with a lot more versatility. Whilst these parts could cost a lot if purchased new everything other than disks could easily beat the price of a Drobo 5N if purchased second hand and there’s scope for many more disks and configurations here plus a fairly low power drag (I notice around 100W at the moment).

I’ll be doing some posts on the ESXi and FreeNAS configurations that I’ve used shortly but for now enjoy the video above which includes all the benchmarks and shows off the build a little more.

cof

mde

sdr

With a new year comes a new NAS - check out my 2017 16TB build. Did I mention... it's orange? The Annual NAS Challenge For some reason I like to build large storage arrays. I do tend to eat up a lot of storage and over time I’ve filled them up.

#esxi #freenas #iscsi #nas #raid #san #zfs

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