Blogs

More frustrations in GTA Online

Since I've been grinding my way through research items burning large amounts of money to try and get the unlocks I want I've been playing a lot of GTA online in the week.

It seems like the hacker problem is worse than ever as almost every session I join seems to have someone hacking. Even ones that look normal and seem like they will be a good easy session to just quietly run some cars and the odd supply mission to keep research running ends up with some player bombing me and 10 other players all over the map at the same time then laughing about it in the chat.

NaNo-Bloody-Hell-No

It's NaNoWriMo time again and this year I'm going to give it a shot. 50,000 words in 30 days. I must be mental.

My goal over the next few years is to get a bunch of published novels onto Amazon and have some cash trickle in over the months; like I get for Icar via donation. If I am any good then it'll make a good pension pot or career diversion! It's worth a go. NaNoWriMo might not create a very good novel but it is practise in the art of finding a voice; and that's important.

Bollockyfuckitybollock

So, we were going to have our garage rebuilt and kitchen extended sideways but now that's not going to happen. Not for a while at least. The cost would have been 70k and put up our mortgage by about 350/mo. All within reasonable limits but I recently ran some numbers (because I'm quite good at that) and:

̶A̶s̶s̶a̶s̶s̶i̶n̶s̶ ̶C̶r̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶M̶o̶r̶d̶o̶r̶ ̶2̶ Shadow of War - initial impressions

Follow up to Shadow of Mordor the sequel basically extends the good bits from the first one (the nemesis system, the ranger abilities, riding various animals over orcs) and adds extra levels of depth ... and also loot boxes.

The game plays as an extended version of the original shadow of mordor which I was quite a good game the innovative nemesis system adding a layer of depth to the game that made it a lot of fun to play. In Shadow of war they've taken that a step further and added some new modifications.

Postcards from GTA - taking out the bins

After a wank weekend, I did have mucho chuckles last night; thanks all. Glad I stayed for the finale, felt good to round off the evening with an overall success. It occurred to me after we finished that there's a deep irony to the pastiest member of our mini-clan being "Bronze" over and over. Like a Twiglet Adonis. The heists have been really good fun; it's great to have four of us!

Grand Theft Refuse

I like watching two highly qualified tech workers taking out the bins. Get used to it, automation is coming!

Postcards from Los Santos #GTA

I seem to have a cache of photos saved up! Here they are in some sort of time order. Had a great time last night, worked hard and made some tidy cash!

Rollins

EMW owns a weed farm on the edge of Grapeseed (Blaine County). One of the NPC characters who "works" there is a chap we've named Henry Rollins, because, well, he looks like Henry Rollins. You can sometimes find him working bust mostly he stands about smoking the profits. This snap is of the most we've had together in a single session, Left to Right: Henry Rollins, me, EMW, Big R, Fish, Dwain.

DevLog #4 Enemies!

After my previous attempt at getting bad guys to move around, I hit YouTube hard in my lunch breaks and discovered that lots of people repurpose the inbuilt animator finite state machine for doing most AI.

SMELLY

This is a code smell. Every domain object and class should do one job and do it well. Repurposing suggests that you're bending a system for something that it wasn't intended for (single responsibility principle). However, I thought it was best to just get over myself, give it a go and then come back again later.