Markku Vuorenmaa

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If you’re a fan of Remedy Entertainment or Alan Wake, you’ll probably find the exact content you’re looking for elsewhere. Therefore I’m sharing here a quick review by a Finnish gaming magazine Pelaaja.

Northlight Engine

So ...

I checked out a software called Fyre, found out that it uses Peter de Jong Map (fairly simple equations) to generate the images, and decided to try out the same in Python. I easily got my code producing roughly the same looking stuff as the computation is simple, with funny results like this one.

This was fun enough that I started looking for more resources to learn about algorithmic, computational, procedural art ... Whatever you like to call it.

The two resources that may come in handy are The Nature of Code book (free reading online) and Learn OpenGL material (also free online).

So I started a new full playthrough of Mass Effect series with the Legendary Edition. While I really like the story of the first Mass Effect and remastered visuals are good enough, some problems from the original game still remain. These are my practices and tips to cope with some frustrating parts of the gameplay.

The tips concern only the game mechanics and combat.

Be aware that you can't rely on auto save. A crash, bug or a wrong choice you will regret too much could mean going back several hours of gameplay. Save early, save often still applies very much for Mass Effect 1.

Saving before hacking doors and containers can save your omni-gel if you happen to fail the hack. Do it at least until you feel confident with hacking. Average hacks are significantly harder than easy ones.

If the combat feels too difficult, consider if you have the right balance of skills in your squad. Check also ammo, weapon and armor mods. These things can turn a hard fight into a target practice.

The difficulty level is a tough one to recommend. I chose Veteran, as I'm familiar with the game mechanics. For players new to series I'd recommend the Normal difficulty. If you just came to see the story, consider also Casual. I feel the combat gets easier on higher levels. So far, only one fight has felt too hard with the Veteran difficulty and that is probably just because how early I like to be there. Otherwise I don't rush with the main story and prefer picking side quests first. I feel this also creates stronger bond with characters later in the game.

Remember to check the availability of manufacturer licenses from every shop and buy all of them. You will find them at the very bottom of the list with the default sorting order. With these licenses you are able to buy more items from Normandy. Well, in general there is very little need to buy anything else from shops, unless you really want to maximize the power of your squad. Race specific armors could make an exception.

A little extra exploration with Mako during planet missions on equals easy xp and credits. Mako driving has been improved a bit and the vehicle feels heavier and generally better in combat. Better now, but not great.

Try to avoid the inventory size limit and sell your junk items aggressively. Many decent items will be junk quite quickly as the game progresses. It really spoils the mood to convert your items into omni-gel to make room for the new loot in the middle of a critical mission.

Somehow Youtube suggested me a Jeff Vogel talk from GDC 2018. I used to read Jeff’s blog while he was working on first Avadon game mainly because he seems to be an honest guy not afraid to speak his mind. As you can see from this video.

I'm a Zorin OS convert now. I know this doesn't make sense and I can't tell what it exactly is, but everything just feels a little bit cooler in it.

Max Payne just had a 20th anniversary with the above video release.

I remember being hyped by the early videos during development but I only played the demo back in the day. Later I bought all Max Payne titles from online sales and I've planning to start playing for a while. Now thanks to Steam / Proton, the first game is running fine on my Linux. (I had some technical issues when trying on Windows 10 earlier this year and I gave that up. Further details already forgotten.)

I'm mainly interested to see how much story there is, as video games have gone a long way since those days in terms of story-telling.

Two problems appeared almost immediately when I started using Kubuntu on my oldish PC. The fist one was that the machine didn't recover properly from suspend state. The PC often started with a blank screen and a dead keyboard.

I ended reading quite a lot about similar problems with various reasons. Luckily a very simple solution seemed to solve mine. It's probably an Nvidia specific issue. My GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub is now set to following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nouveau.modeset=0"

In addition, I kept seeing notifications about "Desktop effects were restarted due to a graphics reset" accompanied by short freezing of the desktop. Again, after some reading from various sources like https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=236501 and https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?t=130360, I decided to try and disable compositor in Kubuntu settings (screenshot).

Error messages disappeared and I was happy with that. Then, some time passed before actually finishing this post and I have just now switched the compositor back on. I didn't notice any issues immediately, but the problem is back again. Maybe not as frequent as earlier. Well it's not unexpected that old hardware comes with some compromises.

Hearing about how gaming has gotten better on Linux was one the reasons I decided to put more focus on Linux this summer. It actually sets me free from constant dual-booting between Windows and Linux.

I decided my old gaming rig will spend the rest of its days as a secondary PC, running Linux. I’m just too close with this ten year old veteran to let go of it. So, I went on to select a suitable distribution, thinking the hardware should be good enough running Kubuntu.

Before picking a distro, I checked out this Ubuntu related video that provided some useful tips. Some of them are quite relevant also for Kubuntu. I generally have more experience in installing Linux than using it regularly. I want to change that. I’m trying to create a good looking, working system that is still able to run a bit older games.

My picks from the video were:

Add additional software sources

Install Chromium

Install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Install Preload

Install Timeshift and create a backup

Install BleachBit