Coming up later in 2016

To the many many people who stop by everyday, welcome and thank you!

To those of you who might hang around and revisit these pages I'd like to just go over a few items I'm looking at performing over the next few weeks.

Firstly, I have a big technical post about setting up Trac with Subversion, including securing it, hosting it on a virtual server and really getting you up and running with project tracking and management with Trac, from total scratch.

Secondly, I have a big of Dungeons and Dragons stuff to cover, both a bit about the official rules and the in-house rules we play with, and there will hopefully be a live stream with my niece whom is D&D crazy, and even made me a D&D based birthday card, which we will play through together.

Third, electronics, I'm probably not going to get to do the PS/2 connector project previously listed, but as the autumn winds in and and the winter comes across, I hope to get back to the DCC layout stuff, not least because I have a tonne of stuff laying around for it and two part soldered projects ready to go.

Fourth, a bit of computer history, I have a manual (just a manual) for a VAX VMS, I'd like to do some coverage of that for you all to geek out over.

Fifth and perhaps finally, gaming, I'm going to be looking back at Elite Dangerous I think, with the release and massive price tag on "No Mans Sky", I'm going to go back and see if Elite has done anything more interesting.  I've also been looking at buying Squad, the successor to "project reality" and going into that.  Our good friend Chaplain has invited us to play some Arma 3 time with him, and I'm playing World of Warships still.  So we'll go through all of that.

Sixth, so yes, fifth was not final, programming.  I'm looking at a project internal to myself, something I want to actually create, manage & sell.  So we'll see how that goes, but understandably there's not a lot I can share.  You will also find me touting myself for business at www.freelancer.co.uk, and as such I hope to make up some of the wads of cash we've been spending since the wife's surgery.

I'll speak to you all soon, I may start to make a mid-month post like this for you all to catch up on, but we'll see how things pan out.

In the mean time, the pony has a new home, and she has a new friend meet our Gerty and Magic once again:

Arma 3 - Grenade Worries

Last night I decided to take a look at come add-ons for Arma 3, notably the ACE3 pack, I was unfortunately disappointed with the pack, it seems to obfuscate so much of the learned functionality and change so much as to make it feel alien rather than a helper.

One notable problem was, no matter what I did, I could not lock nor fire an AT missile from a Titan Compact launcher, even dropping into the editor, sitting a target in the open and trying to fire point blank it'd not lock on.

Reboot and try without Ace, everything was fine, and this leads to a problem Dyslexi has passed the mantle of his excellent looking grenade mod over to Ace, if that grenade mod ends up mixed into the mash up within ace then it maybe impossible to separate it back out and run it without the perceived confusion Ace has caused me.

The other thing I looked at in the edit, as one can see from the above screenshot, was wind direction and it's affect on the battlefield.  Primarily I looked at this because I've been continually gravitating on the Zeus Community Server, however, their server seems to never have any weather other than the occasional splatter of rain.  So seeing wind make smoke drift was interesting.

Don't forget, you can find highlights and full streams of my adventures in Arma 3 on youtube now.

Arma 3 - Coop - Medic by Night, Light Machine Gunner by Day

Today's coop round finds us running around as a medic by night, and then a light machine gunner by day...

I also get very grumpy with a certain helicopter pilot... or is that wanker who thinks he can DJ in a game?....

Arma 3 - Coop Play - Infantry Havoc

This stream saw us take up the role of medic for Alpha Squad, we were inserted into the AO via nighthawk and moved along the coast from the low ground, things went pretty much wrong from there on in, we lost our recon team, our A10 over cover was shot down, our support helo was shot down and when we were tasked with rescuing the pilot he was shot dead upon our arrival.

The stream picks up nearly an hour into this havoc, and finds Alpha pinned inside the perimeter of a small electric generating site, the roof of the generation hall has proven deadly, and we're running low on ammo...

After that hiccup the stream continues with the massive push by the enemy, so many soliders (rendered in ultra quality) are approaching the server is struggling to control them all, and my 770 GTX is struggling to render them all.

Finally the fire fight is over, Alpha Evac is ordered, we pop blue smoke, though the support pilot does not land on our marker... But we lived to tell the tale... Or did we?

Arma 3 - Coop Play

The wife and I have spent sometime, getting off of our dearth of playing PVP games, and we've been playing a lot of Arma 3 in cooperative mode.

We have also started to stream regularly on twitch, www.twitch.tv/xelous, so catch us there.

We bought Arma 3, as I think Arma 2 and it's mods are starting to look very old... It's been a great experience so far, however we are getting random crashes from the game client.

Proper nasty C++ object reference null pointer crashy horribleness.