Greboth

The modded server still exists if you want to play on it 🙂 But I appreciate there's fun in the challenge of figuring out your own 🙂 I remember Voizdev on youtube having some good tutorials on starting and joining servers. They may be out a little out of date now but I'm sure they're still relevant. It's more connecting, joining etc. though rather than hardware. Hardware wise, Minecraft is pretty easy to run so just go with whatever the best hardware is that fit's your budget. Some general comments though, Minecraft is still terribly multithreaded so benefits massively from fast single cores over high core count CPU's. RAM, fast RAM is great but total pool of RAM is more important than speed and even for the heaviest of modpacks I don't think we ever went above 8Gb but we probably pushed that limit a few times. Storage, less of a consideration so really any SSD/NVME would do.

Halo 3 and the original MW2 was probably my heyday in FPS - young enough to both have the time to play silly hours of it and the reaction time also. Though the game I was best at, probably a shock to no-one, is Gran Turismo sport. I've put a lot of time in to other GT games and countless other racing games but GT Spot was the one I probably got the fastest and consistently fast in due to the FG leagues meant I played it the most.

Agreed! Hopefully the announcement means it’ll be out relatively soon rather than GTA style it’ll be 2 years. As it’d be great to have it for some FG Fridays over Autumn/Winter.

Wreckfest 2 was announced a couple of days ago. I never got massively in to the first chasing the credits and whatnot but still absolutely love it. There's no release date and not much other detail on it either except the below "Wreckfest 2 is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, featuring a completely overhauled physics engine for even more realistic destruction, fully customizable cars that you can share with other players and revamped game modes including a brand-new split screen mode" @slamminbones time to re-ignite our rivalry 😄

I'm up for this, it's been a while since killed some zeds. @Chocolateboy Do you want to join from the beginning this time?

Go on then, I'll join.

The modded server is still running though I don't think it's used much, if at all. But it's a Java server so only accessible on PC. If people talking about console then that's the bedrock server which Matty @Misneach_ was admin for and I don't know what's going on with or if it's still up. With the autocrafter coming in an update soon, I'm tempted to try vanilla. I could switch the modded server to a vanilla one if people want to play but again, this would only be for PC players, not consoles.

As we were discussing the other day, my Astro's are 16 year old and on to their third generation of console but being wired they seem to just keep going and going. But it would be nice to go wireless and retire my current Astro's and de-clutter the bulky set up I have for my PC for one headset to rule them all. I'm in no rush though so will wait until release and a lot more in depth reviews to drop before deciding.

By the leaked information and report to investors it should be Q1 2025 so a year and a bit rather than 2 years. Still, plenty of time for it to ge delayed yet.

I said Goldeneye on the N64 in chat the other night but DOOM is probably my earliest FPS. Though both were played on other peoples computers / consoles. I think my first FPS was probably Battlefield 1942 as I can't think of any earlier than that.

As ever with CoD the hit detection is meh. Dying to what feels, and weirdly occasionally sounds like, a sniper shot but seeing the kill cam and it shows you getting hot 4 or 5 times. Yet other games, going on a spree knowing the enemy team are probably at the end of the horrible deaths. That said overall, I enjoyed what I played last night and great to be playing the old maps again. The new unlock system is weird in that it doesn’t really tell you what to do or how to do it - in that it says complete 3 daily challenges to unlock. Which I unlocked but as far as I can tell I didn’t complete any daily challenges so I dunno. But I like the system in general, being able to unlock the perks, greades, kill streaks etc. you want rather than just grinding levels unlocking loads of stuff you’re not going to use to get to the stuff you want.

Well that was a bit of understatement as I realised last night I'm halfway through Polyatomic now with 25/51 done. I probably could have finished all Polyatomic's by now but slowed down as, while unlocking Polyatomic, I've been making sure I've completed the gold and platinum mastery challenges too. So I've unlocked Polyatomic on guns but carried on using them to get another 100-200 kills with it. I haven't done the Polyatomic mastery though as I figure I'll do that when I go for Orion.

CPP Benchmark video with some interesting findings. TL;DW - 8Gb VRAM is pretty much required. It’s playable on lower but 1% lows get very low - V-sync should be kept off. 1% lows are far better with it off (some GPU’s seeing 10x the fps) though doesn’t seem to change average fps. - 1080p recommended but 1440p possible on high end GPU’s. 4k is pretty much a no go even on an RTX4090. - FPS drop with city size is not linear. 0-25k population saw a large drop while 75k-100k only a few fps. It’s worth a watch to get the full picture but they were the points that stood out for me.

It’s a weird one as you have people like in the video saying performance is unplayable. Yet others, like Biffa, running it at 1440p with almost everything on high and getting a solid 60fps (v-sync) while streaming. Now yes, Biffa has a 4090, but with his settings and streaming you’d expect to see some issues. I’ve seen 2 plausible answers; the first is a bug that means low isn’t low settings such as keeping the different LoD textures loaded even though the high res won’t ever be used. There’s also already been a bug found that the game defaults to the system resolution even though it doesn’t say it has and you have to manually change it back. The other is hardware though sample size is relatively low still. But it seems those with GPU’s with lots of VRAM aren’t suffering with performance as much. Then those with with high VRAM and high system RAM again are suffering even fewer problems. Why it needs so much VRAM and RAM though is up in the air and something that will need to be fixed if they want it to run on consoles as planned. Neither excuse the game being launched as it is but it’ll be interesting to see how quickly they can fix it. As it could give an indication as to if it’s just a bug or a systemic issue with the game. Personally I’m keeping my preorder though so will report back how it runs.

That’s because it’s the best game ever. Plus Diddums has bought about 9 copies over the years.

As we've got a few more faces racing who are new to the game / series, I thought I'd do a small update to this. Firstly, a couple tips about the HUD 1. Gear indicator This is the gear the game thinks you should be using for the next corner and will flash red when the game thinks you need to brake for the corner. In my experience, it's too conservative and will always tell you to brake too early and mostly to use a gear 1 lower than actual. However, it acts as a good starting point if it's a track you don't know and as you get more familiar you can start pushing your braking point later 2. Throttle position GT7, much like GT Sport, the lower the Traction control (TCS) you can use the faster you'll be. Though it's always important to remember, lower TCS will save you 1-2 seconds a lap but set it too low and spin, that'll cost you more like 20-30 seconds. You can however do a little practise of using lower TCS as the throttle position goes white, as in the screenshot, to show you're at 100% throttle but if you engage TCS, a portion at the top will turn red to show how much the game is limiting your throttle. If out of every corner you turn it red, try to be a little more gentle and ease on to the throttle. If you never turn it red, try turning down your TCS. It's not quite that simple as at lower levels TCS cuts in later so you can be more aggressive with the throttle before it activates but it's a small part of the picture of if you're over-driving the car. 3. Driving assists Which nicely leads on to driving assists. I think Phil mostly disable these on the server due to a certain Mike incident. However, much like TCS, they turn red when the assist is active and again, like TCS, activation of an assist will generally cost you time in GT7 (ABS it the exception to this rule*). So again, if you're constantly activating these over a lap, try being smoother, easing the stick to steer rather than 0 - 100% steering instantly etc. *ABS is the exception to this rule - technically speaking ABS does also slow you down too BUT it's incredibly hard to threshold brake without locking up. Lock up - and you'll be slower. Don't brake quite as hard to avoid locking up - you'll be slower. There's a tiny tiny margin in the middle where braking without ABS is faster. So keeping it ABS at default will overall make you faster as you'll be far more consistent. Smoothness I've mentioned this a couple times and I want to explain some of the theory behind it - Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Often times you'll a lap where you're on the edge and you have to really work the car will be slow and the laps that feel slow will be your fastest. Keeping the car balanced, with little to no understeer or oversteer, will mostly feel slower but is considerably faster. Now the question is how to achieve this smooth is fast - this can be broken down in to the 3 areas of a corner; braking, turning and accelerating. In a perfect world, each should only be done once - brake before the corner and come off the brakes as you turn in, turning to the maximum lock required for the corner at the apex, then start opening the steering as you feed on to the throttle. If you needed to get back on the brakes then you braked too late, if you get on the throttle before the apex you braked too early, if you need to change steering input you turned in too early or too late, if you need to counter steer on corner exit you got on the throttle too early or too sharply. I'm not saying you should be thinking all this all the time but it's something to keep in your mind while practising or watching a replay of your laps. As you go round the lap, make a mental note of things such as braking too early for turn 3 and too late for turn 9. Then the next lap, make small steps to correct these on the next lap while making mental notes of thing for next lap. Basically small incremental changes each lap can equal a decent improvement on overall lap time.

A couple of Jimmer videos

There’s a bew WRC game coming out next month which I didn’t pay too much attention to as the previous one wasn’t great. But this is getting some pretty high praise from a few youtubers who have been given early access. Always wary of anyone having early access and praising a game but certainly something to keep an eye on. EA SPORTS™ WRC – Like Racing But Rally – Electronic Arts WWW.EA.COM Build the car of your dreams in our biggest rally game ever when EA SPORTS™ WRC launches Nov 3, on Xbox Series X/S...

I appreciate the likes of this video and Jimmer are approaching from the more serious sim of racing. But it just doesn’t sound good anyway you look at it.

Reviews seem to be a little mixed on this one but tempted to pick up a month or 2 of gamepass to try it. Though might wait a few weeks to let them get a patch or 2 out first and for the community to settle on some good wheel settings. It’s a shame there’s mixed reviews though as it seems FM3 and 4 were the peak but they’ve been a bit downhill since. Still one to keep an eye on and will look forward to your thoughts when you’ve had chance to play it more.

Sadly only managed about an hour on the beta so will have to give it a better go in the upcoming beta dates. Though I didn’t see anything to make me not want to get it. It’s certainly good to have the old maps back. A couple of things though, I can see the breacher drone getting nerfed as it’s quite OP at times. It also seems there’s some description missing on some things as it took a few minutes to figure out why I didn’t have a lethal grenade until I figure out the vest changes it. I assume one of the other vest gives overkill too but hard to know as they don’t say it.

@Mikepjbell added the Jordan logos in to the dropbox link in the OP. I've added; Full logo with the bee and the "handwritten" Jordan underneath with full outlines The Bee logo and Jordan logo separate with full outline (so yellow Jordan, black outline and then white outline) I've also included the Jordan logo with only a black outline and with no outline too. Hopefully this covers all bases but if you want some other combo with or without outlines let me know.