Yeah, I had only dial-up till 2011,and even now it may be only way to go on-line. So when I see "always on-line" requirements I spell my Litany of Curses towards developers. But that's not main reason. I still think it's the step industry should made itself, if it wants to be considered adult and grown up, because all those "adult topics" they've "raised" in their recent games mean a little. Generally we don't see constructors rushing into your flat or house to lay a few concrete slabs or drywalls they've forgotten to place, or to swap wallpapers after you already moved furniture in. You rarely see a chef in restaurant, who came to you, telling you he forgot to put beef into your beefsteak. Though few people like car dealership, it's not a common sight to see a dealer informing owner of newly purchased car that transmission misses few gears. Add near absence of demo-versions, and we'll get barely attractive picture. With media loyalty and honesty at question, it's fairly difficult to find proper investment for our haemorrhoid, if you know what I mean, In this situation I find it nearly impossible to be compassionate towards developers, who tells us how difficult their situation is - what exactly they've done to compel me to trust them and put my money on their account, especially with all those EULAs looking like "whatever happens - it's your fault, not ours, and no, we won't give you your money back".
Again, I could be wrong, but I think modern widespread of relatively fast internet is the cause of negligence among developers, like spread of cellphones is the reason of reduced punctuality among people.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm grumpy old pepper box. Sergeant Pepper's lonely hearts club band. Sing along!

We are the few, the proud, the pathfinders! We plot a trail for others to follow. We mark dangerous bugs and treacherous crashes, we search for suitable solutions and try to make scripts work when they fail. We are beta-testers on reverse payroll. We are day 1 gamers!
Playing relatively old games is viable strategy, as good games won't became really bad with ages (at least games from outside of early 3D era, which require regular will saving throws to keep up), so I really don't know what to object (actually I don't want to). The only problem here is that some games may be in bad condition even months later, and there is little you can do. It took around what, 6 years for community to release version 1.75 of Community Patch to Gothic 3 to make it playable. Patience is the virtue, but isn't it a bit too extreme? Not from gamer perspective, but rather developer/publisher?
In addition, there are "director's cuts", which, in fact, may be a bit worse than originals. I can't say I hate Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut lack of golden filter (I have copper-coloured lenses for my sunglasses), but it had some problems.
Either way we're screwed.

I wish your hardware to serve you for many years, but also I wish you find something worthy of upgrade. Heard AMD is about to release new 300 series. Nvidia also said to release new Titan with 12Gb of memory. I mean 11.5.

Ironically, "thanks to" consoles, majority of cross-platform titles were rather modest in their appetite when it comes to system extortions, excluding few "premium golden diamond elite deluxe" titles. So many years same PCs were more than enough to provide all we need. Yet now more and more developers push forward. If it really allows us to gain more, maybe it's time to upgrade. I don't mean just graphics, but many other possibilities. After all, games' engines are like backpacks, and sooner or later you'll find your 40 litres 3-day pack is full and you need a 100 litres Bergen to haul all your stuff around. As long as it doesn't involved increased system requirements due to bad optimization mostly.

Should they live to the promises and won't fail, it may be a truest cross-platform offering same picture on similar hardware.
DRM-free Rockstar is oxymoron, of a sort, I'm afraid. :) So I doubt they'll ever release it in foreseeable future, at least as long as GTA IV remains actual. They could make it free, but DRM-free? Unlikely. IIRC they still required registration to grab early titles, no?
And sorry to hear you had problems with their DRM, outside of GFWL-related fluff my experience was rather smooth. Excluding stability and performance issues. Geez, I can't even say it in positive manner.

Not like we have other options other than seat back and relax for this joyride.


GoG, would you kindly upgrade your forum engine so I'd be able to know why exactly I can't post messages? I remember editing my posts in Blitzkrieg forums, that was one huge PITA. Regardless of length, presence of quoting or lack thereof, and smilies. Thanks.

>:O

Optimized for more money... :D

"We require more minerals".

I just have grown accustomed to even the best trailers having semi-blocky blurry graphics that on a good day look like I'm watching it on an old analog CRT from the early 90s. The part that bugs me about it is that Youtube and most other places offer multiple resolution/quality options so that users can choose the quality that matches their hardware and Internet connection the best, however game companies tend to upload only to the lowest common denominator or maybe a notch or two above that perhaps with the thought that they're doing people a favour who might be Internet broadband challenged or something, but it isn't the case. If they made their videos 4k and compressed with no visible artifacts then people who could handle that would get awesomesauce, and Youtube would downscale a half dozen lower resolution variants down to 240p if desired so everyone can still watch it. Nobody does that though GRR. :)

"or later", don't miss that part. ;)

Indeed, the Witcher games look awesome to me. I do have a couple of friends who look at just about every game and if the graphics don't require a $1000 video card or two they say "the graphics suck"... but I am not one of them. I still think the graphics in DOOM 3, Halflife 2, Far Cry are amazing and anything that's come out since that is better is just that - even better. Having an engine scale down from super-mega-awesome to just mega-awesome or even awesome is still nice to have IMHO and shouldn't detract from gameplay to a good portion of gamers. Whether it is doable or not on a given game depends on a lot of factors of course too, but I appreciate it when a game dev does it.

Well, to be clear my experience is on the graphic back end at the OS/driver/OpenGL driver level mostly. At the userland API level and game engine level my experience is much more limited to 90s era stuff so my thoughts about that stuff are mostly limited to driver side of things and OpenGL, and entirely in Linux at that. Number of polys used in models and texture detail level will have impact in performance of course as will many other factors, but having an engine scale nicely to a 5-6 or so year range of hardware is sure nice to my eyes when someone does it. That of course may not come for free, but may involve tradeoffs and it's possible a dev doesn't want to make such tradeoffs and instead go for newer exciting things. Seems plausible this is what CDPR has done. That's ok too, but just puts some time lag on when some of us will be willing and able to play the game as it's meant to be. :)

LOL, yeah some games are like that, annoying. ;o)

I don't mind it in My Documents, but my 3000+ savegames in Skyrim ended up filling my SSD drive an causing OS instability for a while until I finally figured out what was causing the problem. 18GB of savegames. LOL Mind you, it's easy to drop down and move the Skyrim savegame folder to my hard disk and set up a junction point on the C: drive so that the game is none the wiser that it moved... Been meaning to do that and not gotten around to it yet. ;)

Yeah, I agree that ease of updating has played to the convenience of developers. That and the massive competition for gamers' dollars out there means the sooner they get their game to someone the sooner they tap into our finite budgets and all along gamers have responded largely by saying "gimme gimme, here's my dough" followed by "your game sucks and is broken wah wah", then doing it again and again and again. So while developers do have this behaviour it is only because gamers pay them to do it and they oblige willingly. I agree with your thoughts on cell phones but don't get me started about cell phones... :)

LOL! That's very true. I have thought those very thoughts 100% for some time now. If a game developer wants me to run their early access game, they can call me on the phone and send me some paperwork and I'll give them my social insurance number so they can hook me up on their payroll as a beta tester. Mind you, when I'm an unpaid tester my testing will be a little spotty depending on $life and $time etc. but my reports will be good. If I'm a paid tester, their developers will be sleeping under their desks and never see their families again. If there is a bug in something I will find it if I'm adequately motivated, and someone will be sorry. ;oP But... that doesn't happen for free. :)

I've heard rumours of a 300 series also, and it shows up on Wikipedia Radeon info. What really annoys the crap out of me though is that I bought my 2GB Radeon 7850 2 years ago for about $160 on sale and that was a supreme awesome deal at the time. While the card is harder to find now, where it can be found it is about the same price or marginally lower. For all intents and purposes when I price out any PC hardware at all current-day, I'm finding that every component in my 2 year old computer build is either the exact same price as it was when I bought it two years ago or it is higher price, and while the Canadian exchange rate has went for the shit to the tune of about 12%, that in no way can explain away 2 years with prices not dropping on anything in Canada whatsoever. It just doesn't add up for video hardware or anything else. I dunno if it is manufacturer collusion or what but they seem to be trying to make Moore's law false (the layperson version, not the original).

As long as prices stay up, my wallet stays locked down. I spend money over time according to Moore's law and if the hardware doesn't follow it, I just wait longer. My army of one way of doing things wont change the world, but it works for me. ;)

GTA1&2 are DRM-free on Steam although I don't think they show up anywhere in the store at all. They come with the GTA complete pack however the store page for that does not indicate that these games are included, but rather they are just magically added to your account when redeeming the GTA complete pack. I think GTA3 is DRM-free also but not sure about Vice City or San Andreas I'd have to google that. GTA4 is supreme mega DRM of all mightiness though for sure.

I had the worst DRM experience of my life with GTA4. It was so upsetting that I don't even want to describe it or it'll just get me all upset again and negative/hostile which I don't like to be. :) I just decided to put Rockstar on my "never buy" list after that and hope they change the way they do things over time. Not holding my breath but anything is possible I imagine. Hey, we got Lucasfilm here and Warner now. Only older games but hey it's a start! :) Getting GTA1/2/3 here would be a nice start too but well...

Long posts cause the forum code to go berzerk. Before I hit post on a long comment or reply like this one, I select all my text, copy it to a text file, then hit submit. If it doesn't go through, I lop it either in half or such and try to post half, then wait a bit and post the other half. Yes, that very much blows goats, and not in the good way. Whatever that means. :)

Friend of mine (video aficionado) recently complained on YT's compression algorithms. Probably that's why CDPR offers downloadable versions of their trailers.
If memory serves, though, some companies do upload even 4K versions, but these are rare, true. So yeah, GRR. :)

I don't, just looking for closest "landmark", so to speak. :) 4K for everyone! Can't wait to watch NHL in 4K on my microwave. Or toaster. Or iron, really - boring process.

Sorry to disagree, but I think DOOM3 graphic is pretty much edgy. One other game is still Riddickulously good, if you know what I mean. :) Even now Escape from Butcher bay looks great.
Far Cry has some problems depicting humans, plus I really hate those trigens, IMHO worst game design decision before Crysis series. Nature looks great, no objections here.
No complains on Half-Life 2. Except for where is Episode 3, really, it's been 7 years. Seriously, my niece born and went to school AFTER most recent HL2 instalment release. And all we got were those hats.
However, you raised an interesting question. Personally I think that visuals should support gameplay, i.e. work as one of mechanisms of narration. They should be sufficient for the task, but shouldn't take all attention. I use book reference here - in books there is only one mechanism of narration, text itself. Of course, some books have illustrations, but they support narration only when author worked with artist and controlled artist's work. So games' visuals do same thing as good paper, clear font, and proper ink do - they make experience smooth, positive, and exiting. Good looks cannot replace poor, bland content.
Funny, games you mentioned are nearly decade old, yet still they offer sufficient visuals (Riddick still does). Meaning - for many years developers haven't raised a bar to show us breathtaking graphics.

Better this than Crysis that's been created for hardware that wasn't available to public.

Sadly most cross-platform games do that. Some are worse, as TES or Mass Effect, some better, like Spec Ops: The Line - same number of keys, yet controls are not tied to single button. And I don't mean Jenson. :)

Okay, you won, I have OFP/ArmA mod folders that are smaller than your Skyrim saves. :)
As for My documents, I prefer to keep my documents there. Kinda Army style. :D



True, but this looks like fingers pointing. If they want to have a reputation of reliable supplier, then they should earn it. Take SCS Software, for example, developers of Euro Truck Simulator. They slowly work on their game, release updates, patches, and for most parts, it works just fine. They don't rush, and I'd rather wait 9 month (hmm, again?) to get new truck or country than spew litany of curses on rushed "buggerfall" patch.

Why not? I already expect interesting conversation. Sadly my old trusty Motorola's battery has given up the ghost and I can't find a replacement - too old. Now there are only those strange things without buttons.

As you said, it could be for free, if we really like the game and want to make it better, we could lend a hand and help them to test it, but we should know what exactly we are dealing with. If it's alpha then call it alpha, nobody expect AK's reliability from alpha. But when unfinished game released and nobody is going to fix it, that's completely different thing.

Modern talking time! You are not alone. :) My PC is farily old, around 4 years or so, and contrary to previous "upgrade time", when I could get two, three, maybe four times faster PC for same budget, now it will be percentage only. And if expensive, powerful hardware may be a victim of bitcoin mining, I really don't get why old middle segment hardware is still relatively pricey.

Admirable. Honestly. In this case, I wish you win some good GPU in a contest.

Strange, I remember Rockstar offered them for free, but with mandatory registration. Since I owned all games on disks, I saw no point on grabbing them, therefore I can't say anything on Steam version, sorry.

I won't force GTA IV experience on you. Mine was rather smooth, excluding bad disk experience and... not so perfect contact with local support, yet quite surprisingly responsive Rockstar's.
As for my "never buy" list those are language locked games, and anything from EA. Worst customer support I ever had. :D
Lucasfilm-wise: Republic Commando is worthy purchase, I wonder if they fixed that graphical bug that precludes launch on modern systems? Forgot the name of setting, Steam forums should have discussion.
Sure, bringing good old games to a place they belong is good thing. Given passion of CDPR people... Let's hope for the best. :)

According to my experience in Blitzkrieg subforums (you can find my wall of text there), it's not the case - at times I could post a huge wall of text in single try, at times I couldn't post a single paragraph, and had to carefully add lines. Quite tedious. But hey, it works! :)

The thing I like about DOOM 3 is that things that are dark, really dark - are dark because they're supposed to be dark to scare the crap out of you and if you're like me, it works great. :) I have Riddick as well here on GOG and both of those games are quite nice also although their custom 3D engine has this weird fisheye FOV problem to it that I can't quite sort out. Not sure if it's configurable to what I'd like it to be, but after a while of playing I got used to it/adapted. Fun games.

I haven't finished any of the HL2 series so I'm ok waiting it out for HL3 as it'll probably come out before I finish HL2 anyway. ;)

There are a few future games that the graphic demos I've seen did impress me very much even with the limitations of youtube or whatever - in terms of next-gen breathtaking stuff. TW3 is one of them, a few others skip my mind at the moment (would have to dig through bookmarks), but one that stood out with wow-factor for me is the upcoming Tom Clancy game "The Division" by Ubishaft. That game engine just blows my mind. Unfortunately I don't buy DRMware from Ubishaft so wont be playing it unless I happen upon it in a giveaway or something, but wow - amazing graphics.

I keep my actual documents/important files etc. on a separate drive that doesn't collide with existing Windows defined directory structure because I don't trust the plethora of buggy software out there to not try to do something in those official dirs that end up hosing all my personal files or otherwise mucking with them in some way. Also, I try to only keep things on the SSD that need to be there for performance and put data and other stuff on HDDs. I don't have it highly tuned to that standard, but definitely try to lean it that way in real world usage. Savegames are an anomaly in that regard. :)

Ok well... :) I totally understand mobile phones and their place in the world and the value that they can provide, but personally I think a lot more people have them than need them, a lot more people have them than can afford them, and I believe that all of these electronic gizmos are interfering with positive human interaction such as a simple conversation not being able to be had without someone interrupting to stare at their cell phone text messages every 5 seconds. Now when a group of 8 people get together, they don't get together to be together and share each other's company, but rather to all sit at the same table and text message people and laugh to themselves, sometimes texting people sitting at the same table instead of just talking to them. I am not made of that world and just don't get it. I also feel cell phones are contributing to a massive decline in literacy and that people are becoming more and more complacent about it.

I've never owned a mobile phone or tablet or other similar gizmo and I would not benefit from one at this point either. I can think of certain situations in which I could actually benefit from certain usage and if/when such conditions occur in the future I might go ahead and get one for very limited usage. For example, going on a road trip and having a pay as you go cheap ass mobile phone for emergency off road assistance or similar just as a safety thing. I can think of a few other uses that I could weigh the pros and cons and have a benefit from it, but nothing in my current day to day lifestyle.

Similar with tablets, no use for one currently however I see the utility and can think of some uses I could have for one in the future if and when they ever produce a tablet that meets my personal criterion for opening my wallet. In that regard I am a very extreme corner case user that I doubt any device manufacturer is likely to be designing such hardware specifically for, so I'm not terribly hopeful to see any such devices any time soon. :) The closest thing to what I'd want is the up coming 10" Mozilla FirefoxOS tablets which are not yet available mainstream in North America. Exactly zero other devices on the market remotely meet my criterion.

Anyhow, most mobile devices drive me nuts. Not the device itself per se, but the disruptive and disrespectful way in which so many people use them just about everywhere. It really puts me off. People come to your house for a coffee, ask you a question and while you're answering them they laugh, you look and they are looking down at their lap texting someone and not even listening to you. ARGH, get out of my house now! :)

LOL, well that would certainly be nice! What's funny is that in my entire life I have only ever bought 3 video cards. The first in 1994 was a Trident 8900CL for my 386, the second was a Cirrus Logic 5446 circa 1998 or so in a new build, and the third was my Radeon 7850 2 years ago. I've got about 50-80 video cards in my basement which are mostly AGP, and a smaller number of PCI all of which were freebies sent to me from hardware manufacturers during 2000-2006 while I was working on video driver maintenance. Those were the good ole days when I ended up with free video hardware for gaming. :) Alas, since I left that line of work I haven't had very exciting video hardware. :)

I have the GTA1&2 Rockstar free downloads here also and the ones I have don't require any registration during installation or gameplay, but I think they required registering on the site to download them in the first place.

Well, eventually I got through all of the GTA4 DRM hoops and got the game to work. I bought a Logitech G27 racing wheel setup to be able to use it in GTA4 and various racing games also and was able to finally play GTA with a racing wheel and that was immensely fun. So in the end I have got to enjoy the game but was very frustrated by what a huge PITA it was to get it running for being a paying customer. I know people who pirated that game and had less hassle playing it.

I have to be honest though too and admit that it is my fault (I prefer to take responsibility for things more than not) because I almost always investigate a game's DRM status on Steam or elsewhere before buying them. The GTA bundle on Amazon at $10 caught me by surprise one day and in my excitement to get it I did not look up the DRM status of the games. Oops, my bad. Fortunately I rarely ever make that kind of mistake though. ;)

It does, but they could a) smooth the edges a little bit, b) avoid mirroring everything. I really don't remember a single model that wasn't mirrored - even jackets or whatever people wore there have only button holes on both sides. In terms of these little things DOOM3 isn't great. In terms of "GET IF OFF ME, GET IT OFF! oh, it's just towel..." this game scares the crap out of me. :D

FOV issues are a bit too widespread, IMHO, and in some cases you can't even get used to existing FOV, yet changing it only makes things worse. Don't know why, some, games offer good FOV even on old 5:4 monitors, without making you feel like you're wearing old gasmask with very narrow eyepieces. :)

Or maybe you is the reason we still have no episode 3 yet! Gabe waiting till everyone will finish playing. :D

Excluding those moments in Witcher 3's trailers and screenshots I've mentioned, it indeed looks great. Those seeing that drawn distance after territories of ArmA2/3 feels a bit claustrophobic. I mean, Skellige region should be exhaust fumes free, no those "horrid diesel trucks polluting the air":), so visibility should be "million by million". I understand performance limitations, but can't I dream? All this looks even more amazing that Skyrim, besides it's ours, Slavic Fantasy, not that ADnD stuff - went there, killed dragons, saved world - boring Tuesday,
Division indeed does looks awesome, so unbelievable in fact (no towers to explore, clearly not Ubischrott game), some still argue whether it's actually a render.
And agree on their DRM. Add their recent language-lock policy where I am, and you'll get mandatory "avoid at all costs" game. Unless, of course, I'll give up and buy it from Amazon. Wow, such digital distribution, much freedom, very handy.

It's not the fact games are occupying certain folder, it's the fact folder is being named "my documents". Colour me weird, but I think content should reflect the name of storage (said somebody, storing his books under his bed, cause all bookshelves are full:D). Surely some folks store their socks in a fridge, claiming better service life, but why?
As for SSD, that's another problem with games being so unruly, SSD capacity is limited, and given large volumes and/or numbers of saved games and their folders, they not only clog SSD, they also make it a bit difficult to shuffle them from My Documents to stowage repository. I wouldn't mind a shortcut to a specific folder somewhere else.

Well, I've been asking for it. And I'm glad I asked - it's comforting to know I'm not the only one with similar pet peeves. :D

Well, try to monitor manufacturers, they offer some contests from time to time, and your country should be eligible for them. :)

Although, I'm not related to driver development in any way, but I bought 3 video cards too! Sadly, I don't really remember their designations. First was... hmm, I don't ever remember, S3 something, 1mb, mid 90s. My first "real" PC, before it I used remnants of Soviet heritage, you know, Soviet microprocessors are biggest in the world, and that kind of stuff. However, I do not badmouth computers of that era, they helped a lot and made work easier, much easier. Second was 5200FX, IIRC, I may confuse it with another card I got for work at relatively same period of time.
"And politicians say we are different".*giggle*

That's what I meant. My schpelling and frase konstruktshon are horribol!

You know what? DRM or not, Rockstar or not, but these are things piss me off. Seriously. I'm tired of this constant fight against law-abiding, paying people. you bought legit copy of your favourite TV-series, 24 series per season? Well, please watch unskippable 2.5 minutes "cut-scene" informing you of repercussions of piracy and full of FBI warnings. For Emperor's sake, I paid for this thing, why of all people I am watching this? One season=one hour of your time is gone on watching these warning. You left them playing, went to another room, and upon return noticed you missed series intro? Well, would you kindly watch them again? @#$@#$@#%^#$%! Same stuff with games. Codes, verifications, keep disk in drive, on-line DRM, Steam, all of above, various locks you know nothing about as they aren't mentioned anywhere?
Though I can't say I do not understand "content providers" - "pirates" are hard to reach, yet we, law-abiding people are just there, and we can't and won't avoid this BS, as we are law-abiding, so those providers can report they are fighting piracy. Entire regiment of Picards and Rikers wouldn't suffice for a facepalm required.
And all this is only for situations where customer support works, but we all know when it doesn't.
/nerd rage off.

P.S. This post is shorter than one before, but forum still playing Grzegorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz.

The problem I had in Riddick is that when you look at something perfectly square on the wall/ground/ceiling/whatever, it will have a natural angle of perspective to it both in life and in a game but still looks square when corrected for your viewing angle, but in the Riddick games if you rotate your head your eyes still would see the same thing but it distorts it like a hyper-rectangle for lack of a better description. I thought perhaps it was due to a poorly configured FOV or aspect ratio, but I went through the game's rather confusing widescreen/aspect ratio config and couldn't get anywhere with it and I'm a former video driver engineer not someone's grandma. :) It's the most confusing screen resolution/aspect ratio setting I've ever seen in a game and I can't figure out what one of the settings it expects my 16:10 display to use to be proper, but it doesn't matter much anyway because none of them look right. :) I just choose the one that looks the least distorted (not sure which), and played anyway and it takes a half hour or so to get used to it. By then I'm immersed in the game's storyline and gameplay and the aspect ratio/FOV problem is not as potent on me. The game is fun enough that over time it becomes less and less noticeable unless you look for it or think about it. ;)

Yeah, in general most games draw distance tends to suck, especially if they were designed for consoles because well... consoles suck. :) But even a lot of very fun games have draw distance problems that greatly negatively affect gameplay immersion IMHO. I really loved the Ghost Recon games in particular GRAW and GRAW2 (the last one I played), but they had a 150m draw distance which made no sense. You can play as a *sniper*, with an M99 .50 calibre sniper rifle but you can only snipe people a maximum of 150 feet away (excluding off screen kills slightly out of that range)? Talk about deus ex machina... In real life I could probably snipe someone with my shoe at 150m range... So I was pleasantly surprised by the ArmA series of games which I believe let you manually configure the draw distance and set it up to 3km away which is amazing.

I'll wait for The Division to hit steamgifts.com or perhaps as a freebie card that comes with a new GPU in a few years or some other source that doesn't draw from my wallet, just on principle, but I'd love to be able to play the game some day. Perhaps my gaming buddy will buy it and I can play it through Steam Family Sharing feature hehe.

Ah, true. The proper name for the folder should be /home/$USER/ or a subdirectory thereof. ;oP

I use junction points/hardlinks/symlinks in Windows appropriately much like I would in Linux to work around that type of problem. Even though the default tools that come with Windows blow goats for not supporting those features out of the box, the underlying OS does with the appropriate utilities installed. I use a Windows Explorer addon called "Link Shell Extension" that adds support to the Explorer UI for managing symlinks, hardlinks, junction points and various other functions in the Windows GUI. Makes disk management so much more friendly. :)

Windows itself as well as games and other software do tend to bloat up your C: drive in one or more locations or require a bunch of hand holding to move things around elsewhere per-app and sometimes unreliably. When I installed stock Windows 7/x64 on this machine with nothing else, my 120GB SSD had about 70GB of space used on it! Turned out that Windows makes a swap file the size of installed RAM (32GB) and a hibernate.sys file almost the same size by default. I disabled the latter completely, and moved the 32GB swap file to my hard disk and shrunk it to 1GB. Lots of other stuff gobbles the SSD though so I am forever trying to free up space on the 120GB SSD. I am likely going to buy a 480GB+ SSD sometime in the next year or so to try and put that problem behind me. ;)


You nailed it on the head right there. I *used* to buy DVD movies and TV shows. Used to. Never will again ever. I spend up to $40-60 for a new TV series season or heh... a lot of the time thye milk you by making it a half season... then... forced time dependent commercials that can't easily be bypassed or at least are designed to operate in that manner that you must watch every time the disk is put in? Endless other irritations. The last one I got I said "that's it, no more buying DVDs for me ever again" and I haven't bought a single DVD movie or TV show since. I've completely avoided Bluray both on and off my computers also. Not long after that I decided I wont ever buy any movie/TV/video content neither hard copy nor digital download which has DRM on it or any other annoyances or consumer unfriendly behaviour, nor if I consider them price gouging. I can and am ok with simply doing without and never seeing such content if it comes down to that. I can adjust my spare time to play more games or do other things more interesting instead.

I am more and more turning away from consumer non-friendly hardware and software over time due to not caring for many aspects of how products are produced and the way the companies treat their customers. It's not done out of hostility for the most part but rather self-empowerment of not feeling the necessity to have their products in the first place and having a plethora of alternative options out there without such bad experiences such as GOG.com for example.

I played that game too long ago, so I'm not sure we talk about same thing, however, in some games certain view distortion modifiers occurring when playing character uses some ability can be quite disorienting, and IIRC Riddick's "night vision" also has something similar. Maybe it's the same thing, coupled with your screen being rather large?

Hell yeah! You can spend several hours hiding in forest, in pitch-black night, avoiding enemy patrols using only your ears, only to be shot dead by sniper with anti-materiel rifle from kilometre away. Kilometre, not point blank range! :D
In this aspect I generally laugh at Mass Effect 2/3, their levels are about as compact as hockey rink, why the hell you need high-calibre sniper rifle, if there are no targets beyond even one hundred metres? It's just pointless. Add very strange projectiles' velocities (approximately 50 and 100 metres per second respectively) and you'll get very funny mix. Mass Effect 1 in this aspect was much closer to in-game encyclopaedia, having an instant hit to a target on any distance up to four hundred metres. Sadly, beyond that projectiles simply vanished.
Back to ArmA, though technically you can increase visibility range to ten kilometres, it's rather pointless thing, not because of increased load on CPU, though this is important too, but because of ArmA scale, all projectiles have flat velocity of approximately 400 metres per second, therefore, shooting at something that is four kilometres away from you will take at least ten seconds for projectile to reach. Given frequency of zigzagging AI units do, all this makes long-range shooting nearly useless. In addition, only Operations Arrowhead added range adjustment to certain sights and scopes, otherwise, you have to use built-in reticles, and with bullet drop at long range you could have to rely on scopes borders, not reticle, to make long-range shot. :) Still, better than competitors. Just imagining Skyrim or Witcher 3 having long-range visibility is just... breathtaking. :)
Take on Helicopters, on the other hand, offers 20 km distance IIRC, but it's a) flight sim of a sort, b) ground level looks awful. c) playing with setting like this will require CPU that is not widely available. But it does looks great. To make it greater, you can find Valve Software's building there. Sadly, you still can't enter and ask Gabe about Half-Life 3.
As for shoe-sniping, I'm not sure I'm that strong, but pucks could fly that far... And they will hurt. Ask me how I know it.

You know, I think SFS, along with free weekends, are the things, that should shut those developers who keep telling us that demo versions are too expensive to make, posing that as reason of demo versions' absence. Give 30 minutes of playtime for free, here is your demo. This won't remove "less than honest" developers problem (*cough* Gearbox *cough*), who will make vertical slice of a sort to make first 30 minutes best, but it will be better than videos and media - here you'll have all your senses, experience, and intuition to tell you whether this game is pure buy or not, other that trying to trust some other guy.

Recalling George Carlin, that'll be /stuff/ subdirectory. :D Or at least /some_of_my_stuff/. :D

True, but that's not the feature your average casual (it's not derogatory) user would use or know about. Again, even knowledgeable user have to do these things manually. Why not ask paid developers to adjust games so they would store all their user-related files somewhere where we need it?:)
Yes, you can fight laziness, but.. some other day.

Turn off the light! They drawn by the light!
Seriously, when I was doing routine archive maintenance on new system, it was around 1 GB on first day. Next week that was 2. Now it's 3. And I haven't installed a thing, all saved files (charts, bluprints, other stuff) is used from portable HDD that is used as mobile storage, to make them accessible from various PCs. So, uhm, turn the lights off, yeah. :D

Good idea, thanks. But 480Gb are quote pricey now, maybe two 240Gb instead? Still be cheaper. Yeah, yeah, I paid attention to "next year or so".;)


I concur. Providers keep telling us how difficult it is for them to "fight piracy" and to draw our attention, but they do little or nothing at all to make it comfortable for us to purchase goods from them, and use those goods too, without jumping through verification , authentication, registration, and regular on-line check-ins, and I don't meat security account-related questions. Unfortunately, there are too many barriers on our way, and their numbers are growing, simply making certain products less attractive. Even though you can try to justify certain limitations and additional barriers (uPlay on top of Steam, for example), usability of these barriers reminds proverbial potty with handle at the bottom, on the inside.

Your comparing Ubisoft's track record to Rockstar's?

Ubisoft's relationship with PC gaming is worse than Rockstar's.

Of course I do. Now, don't change the subject.

I think its safe to say GTA 5 PC will come out this month:

http://www.pcgamer.com/gta-5-pc-trailer-released/