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    Best posts made by ffff0

    • Easy Allies in 2016

      Made a little video about Easy Allies in 2016:
      Watch on YouTube

      posted in General Discussion
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    • Easy Ally series

      In case you're interested, in 2019 I made an Easy Ally video series and submitted it to Community Showcase to get reaction from featured Allies. Here are all episodes:

      1. Easy Ally: Michael Damiani

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [2:29:48..]

      1. Easy Ally: Daniel Bloodworth

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [2:30:10..]

      1. Easy Ally: Bradley Ellis

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [2:14:41..]

      1. Easy Ally: Kyle Bosman

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [2:54:20..]

      1. Easy Ally: Ben Moore

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [3:33:22..]

      1. Easy Ally: Ian Hinck

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [18:35..]

      1. Easy Ally: Michael Huber

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [2:34:40..]

      1. Easy Ally: Brandon Jones

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [2:20:58..]

      1. Easy Ally: Don Casanova

      Youtube Video

      Youtube Video – [2:04:55..]

      posted in General Discussion
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    • Easy Allies in 2019

      Easy Allies worked hard in 2019 to make their great content even better. To pay tribute to their work I've made this little video:
      Youtube Video

      posted in General Discussion
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    • RE: The EZA Community Top 25 Best of 2018!

      So the battle for GotY comes down to this:
      0_1549856790130_goty_2019.jpg

      posted in Hall of Fame
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    • RE: The EZA Community Top 25 Best of 2011!

      I always manage to make a choice in Dragon Age games that will severely hurt me in the end. And Dragon Age 2 was a prime example of that. Spoiler warning! I’ve got very attached to one particular companion and romanced him. Near the end this companion’s conscious action had started a war between two factions. Through the whole game I was trying to bring those factions to the peace, so when my companion had admitted his action, I’ve made a choice as a leader to execute my love and dearest friend.

      I rarely get emotional when I play games, but this moment was very impactful and lasting: when the game was over I’ve spent several hours thinking where I’ve lost my relationship with this companion and what could I change to keep him away from the path he walked. So this moment alone had made Dragon Age 2 my 2011 GotY.

      But there were many other things that I’ve liked in this game. It moves faster than Dragon Age: Origins (especially in combat) which was a welcome change for me. Visually it looks much better than Origins, especially for character models. Characters are great and well written: even when you don’t share their world view, relationships still make sense. As for the drawbacks of Dragon Age 2, I don’t like changing companion’s appearances and I don’t pay much attention to the set dressing anyway, so it wasn’t a problem to me that those aspects were lacking.

      So, yeah, from my perspective, Dragon Age 2 was nearly perfect game.

      posted in Hall of Fame
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    • RE: The EZA Forums Top 50 Games of the 2010s!

      And here it is:

      Youtube Video – [57:29..]

      posted in Hall of Fame
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    • Easy Allies in 2020

      Made a little video about Easy Allies in 2020:

      Youtube Video

      posted in General Discussion
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    • Easy Allies in 2017

      Made a little video about Easy Allies in 2017:
      Watch on YouTube

      posted in General Discussion
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    • Easy Allies: Year Two Tribute

      In a few days Easy Allies turns 2 years old. I want to pay tribute to their hard and amazing work in front & behind the cameras with this little video:
      Watch on YouTube

      posted in General Discussion
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    • E3 2019 direct links for press-conferences and other shows (Spoiler Free)

      Because of the time-zone and life not everyone can watch E3 live. But finding the recording after the fact and avoiding the spoilers at the same time can be extremely difficult. So I've decided to post direct links here so that you can copy and past them to your favorite YouTube/Twitch downloader and just watch the event without having to worry about recommended videos, comments and other spoiler territories.

      Press-conferences:
      Xbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeYQ-kPF0iQ
      Bethesda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9B5qhzKyhg
      PC Gaming Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hru6IvgRSp4
      Ubisoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKbKx2JHQ8s
      Square Enix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEuHAhkBRaQ
      Nintendo (with Treehouse): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhVCdxtofWU

      Geoff Keighley's show:
      Sunday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTLuhF9TRaA
      Tuesday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqQmlYWYCNE
      Wednesday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbB0ZTp703Q
      Thurstay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLS5mFvxlw

      Feel free to post other direct links, but please don't post any spoilers (game names, time codes, etc.)

      posted in Gaming Discussion
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    • RE: Easy Ally series

      Added "Easy Ally: Michael Huber" episode.

      posted in General Discussion
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    • RE: Easy Ally series

      Added "Easy Ally: Brandon Jones" episode.

      posted in General Discussion
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    • I've tested GeForce Now

      So, yesterday I’ve tested GeForce Now service and got some interesting results. Full disclosure: in Russia GeForce Now is served by 3rd-party company, but they use NVidia branding and, and NVidia promotes their service as GeForce Now. So while my results may not be indicative of worldwide situation, it should be pretty accurate.

      As a test game I used Doom 2016 and compared streamed version with a version running on my brand-new gaming PC. Good things first: I didn’t notice any visual difference between local and streamed version whether I was stationary or moving at high speed. Even things like fog had no visual artifacts of video compression. At the same time bandwidth consumption was around 20 Mbps, which is great for 1080p 60fps with individually compressed frames. Also launching games and using cloud saves is very easy.

      Not so good is the delay. Doom was perfectly playable via stream, but there was a noticeable difference between local version and streamed version. I haven’t measured it and I’m bad at estimating such things, but I doubt I would notice it if it was less than a couple of frames. It definitely not a network delay (I have 2ms RTT between my PC and data center where servers are hosted), so it must be a video compression delay. Another not so good thing is that my PC load level twice faster than the server (and I haven’t the fastest SSD you can buy). Again, it’s not a deal breaker, but I expected more from the cloud-based solution.

      Now the bad thing. There were dropped frames, sometimes almost a second of dropped frames. This was the most curious thing, so I’ve captured network traffic and started digging. Here’s what I found.

      Besides a series of TCP connections that last for 7 seconds and barely transfer any data, communication consists of 4 UDP streams. Two transfer data to the client (most likely, one for video and one for audio) and two transfer data in other direction (most likely, one is used for control inputs and another for something unimportant since it’s the only stream that don’t have quality-of-service marking):
      0_1580977357174_udp.png

      Now if you look at I/O graph you’ll see something interesting:
      0_1580977418719_1sec.png

      Blue is (most likely) video stream, green is audio stream, black is controller input and red is something else. When I saw dropped frames in game, there’s some significant packet drop, but only for the video stream. Other streams aren’t impacted. It’s even more obvious if you look closer:
      0_1580977442568_100msec.png

      And this is how it looks on the video-frame level:
      0_1580977455148_1msec-2.png

      For reference, this is how it looks on the video-frame level when everything is OK:
      0_1580977463270_1msec.png

      This doesn’t look like a network bottleneck, since other streams with same or lower quality-of-service level aren’t impacted. It potentially could be a result of load-balancing this particular stream on overloaded network link, but I know this network path from my work and I haven’t encountered any capacity problems. So I just have to assume that there’s some problem on the server’s side, possibly with the video encoding. I know it’s sounds strange since NVidia GPUs are great for video encoding, but delay I’ve talked earlier about is also indicative of some encoding issues. And it's possible that there's not enough video encoding servers (but enough servers to run games) in this data center.

      In summary, GeForce Now is a service that can actually do videogame streaming, but it has some issues that needs to be fixed. So you can consider it to play Cyberpunk 2077, but definitely try before you buy.

      posted in Gaming Discussion
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    • RE: The EZA Forums Top 50 Games of the 2010s!

      Community Showcase submission post is up: https://www.patreon.com/posts/community-2020-42135511

      posted in Hall of Fame
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    • Tribute video to reaching 50K goal

      Last several weeks Easy Allies were firing on all cylinders and this month they hit 50K goal on Patreon. To celebrate their success I've made this little video.

      Watch on YouTube

      posted in General Discussion
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    • Easy Allies in 2018

      Made a little video about Easy Allies in 2018:
      Watch on YouTube

      posted in General Discussion
      ffff0
    • RE: Easy Ally series

      Added "Easy Ally: Kyle Bosman" episode.

      posted in General Discussion
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    • RE: The EZA Community Top 25 Best of 2012!

      Let me tell you a story.

      I try all PS Plus games. One month one of those games for Vita was Virtue’s Last Reward. So I’ve decided to give it 5 minutes before deleting it. In 5 minutes I’ve got to a puzzle and I like puzzles. I’ve decided to solve it and then uninstall the game. The puzzle was fine, so I’ve decided to watch next cut-scene before deleting it. The next cut-scene was over an hour long (at that time I had no idea what visual novel is) and in that hour I’ve got intrigued by the mystery of its story. So instead of deleting the game I’ve kept playing, but at that point I wanted to go only through one storyline (I’ve chosen the leftmost path on the flowchart). I was very surprised when I’ve reached story’s lock and by googling it I’ve discovered that you need to play other story paths. By that point I was already wrapped by game’s plot, so I’ve continued playing. And once I’ve started seeing alternative paths and once I’ve discovered that this gameplay gimmick is a part of the grand narrative I felt in love with this game.

      Obviously some parts of its story and its premise just resonated with me and they may not resonate with you, but the fact that I went from being ready to trash this game almost immediately to 100% it three times and also buying 3DS and importing 999 just to see it’s prequel speaks volumes about the quality of Virtue’s Last Reward.

      It was ported to PC a couple of years ago, so it’s easily accessible and it often goes on sales. If my story made you intrigued, add this game to your Steam wishlist. Maybe one day you will try it and maybe you’ll love it as much as I do.

      posted in Hall of Fame
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    • RE: The EZA Community Top 25 Best of 2012!

      In mid-90s my parents bought me a book about video games. It had lots of short descriptions and two detailed walkthroughs. One of those walkthroughs was X-Com: UFO Defense. I had no PC at that time (and of course no consoles) so I’ve never played it. But I’ve read that walkthrough again and again imagining I playing it.

      Flash forward to 2012. XCOM: Enemy Unknown comes out and gets great reviews. I start playing it and it is exactly the same game I imagined playing nearly two decades ago. I had absolutely magical experience going through its campaign.

      It’s #6 on my list because while this magical experience is tied to this game it has almost nothing to do with game’s qualities. It’s a great game, but I played more enjoyable 2012 games.

      posted in Hall of Fame
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    • RE: Easy Ally series

      And the final episode of the series is now added.

      posted in General Discussion
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