World of Warships : Cruiser Grinding

I've been, between lots of work, playing some world of warships this week.  I've actually been pushing my German Cruiser grind from tier IV to V.  Which I completed earlier...

I've had some excellent games, admittedly I've only been playing Cooperative, but it has been great fun.  And I love the option in Warships to play cooperatively.

World of Warships

How absolutely symbolic of the shambolic lack of clarity from WarGaming... World of Warships is released to the public... You can download and play the game now... 

And it's an excellent game, one I've been waiting for for months... However, they announce this and that as public, then when you check it's not and then finally when you do find the public release it's already gone midnight and one has work in the morning... GOD DAMN IT!

But this game is really good...

I've played just two games and it's really nice, I guess later it will be a huge grind but I took my USS Erie level 1 US Cruiser out for two spins and it's been brilliant... I will have a play about with this first ship before I rush up the tech tree, I'm in no hurry... But so far this is a WarGaming title I think I'm going to really enjoy.

There's my first battle results, a victory, and I sort of knew what I was doing; having watched so much youTube footage from the likes of Jingles.  But I kept my head down, no torpedo's in the game, and I got hits learning the controls.

From this one game I got enough XP to unlock the heavier guns for the ship, they fired slower, so I'm going to go back and experiment with the two types, but with the heavier guns I immediately did more damage and sank two ships... in just my second game... I don't see many YouTubers nailing two ships like that often.

So, yeah, new game for me to enjoy...

Gaming Update

Well, aside from blogging about shoes, I have actually been gaming this weekend... And I've been improving the man lab a little.

I've still not had the chance to clear the corner and drill the holes to wire ethernet directly to the router downstairs... However, I have had the drill out and fitted new black-out blinds to the window.  This made the room a lot darker for game play, and allowed more uniform lighting for when I plan to stream.

Gaming wise, the weekend started with board games, a little D&D, then some Pathfinder and finally Scrabble... Yes, physical gaming at it's best.

H1Z1 also featured a lot, the wife and I enjoying hardcore Battle Royale mode, and achieving a 3rd place finish on just our second game.

WarGame Air Land & Sea was also played, I finally went into skirmish  mode against the AI, and first was defeated squarely but then pulled a draw.  My major losses were a squad of Royal Marines whom I'd moved up in their lynx helo carrier, who were overrun with a pact flame tank when the lynx 20mm rockets ran out, and I had no support near.

However, I held my flanks successfully and I am getting the balance of supply.

WarThunder also featured, I spent several hours playing about and working with the settings of both my X55 Rhino and Track IR, to better fly simulator battles.  Initially all controls were being set and checked in the P38 due to it's balanced torque and ease of take off.  I worked on the aiming and gunnery settings, the sensitivity and profiles of the joystick and the Track IR.

There's still work to do there, the Track IR for example is very twitchy, so I've got the sensitivity too high somewhere, but I did notice the Track IR was just generally playing me up, it maybe it's age... Gimball lock was common when glancing down, despite it not being set possible on the profile I had loaded.

---- And in news from the blog ---

This is my 800th Post... Huzzah!

HMS Dreadnaught

Happy Birthday, HMS Dreadnought....

99 years ago, today, a new generation of Warship was launched, concentrating all the main fire-power into rotating turrets, rather than both turrets and barbed emplacements along the length of the ship.

She was HMS Dreadnought and her name went onto represent a new era and new form of Naval planform, from which the great naval arms races of the early twentieth century would hang.

It is with great reverie many of us look back at the great navies with awe and even a tear, some of us had family or perhaps ourselves served in the Navies of the world.

For my part, I grew up hearing about life aboard His Majesties Cruiser Belfast, stories from my Grandfather, which I will be bringing to you over the course of the coming months.

But today marks the day on which Naval warfare changed, and the great stories and names of other ships came to prominence, Hood, Bismark, Repulse, Warspite, Houston, Enterprise, Ark Royal and all the rest would not have occurred without the direction given to advances by Dreadnought.

OpenBroadcaster - x264

I spent a bit of time last night messing around with OpenBroadcaster, capturing some of my Simulated Battles in WarThunder...

As you can see I've got my name, the game and what I'm up to added as text legends, I've included the track IR window and the game itself.

It worked, I've captured like an hour of game play, including three air kills (which was good going in the Italian G50 I was flying).

My main challenge is playing about with the settings... So I have an EVGA 770 GTX SC graphics card, so not a slouch... And my CPU is a Core i7 (8 threads) running at 3Ghz (I can over clock it, but its not at present)... and I've got fast cooled DDR3 RAM...

However, the x264 encoder really sucked the life out of my machine, making flight hard, but the video very poor quality.

After that I set about looking at using NVENC, but it came out as this very strange sort of effect where as things moved the screen recording was fuzzy, as the screen stopped changing so much it would spring up into perfect detail, and then slowly degenerate again.. Pulse of detail, then blurr... over and over... so it was strange.

Tonight, I am intending to mess about with my settings some more, and if all else fails I'm going to revert to capturing the game with nVidia Shadow Play and using an editor to overlay text.

Minecraft Ordeal 3

I've been back in my Minecraft world, and I'm a little disappointed by a couple of things, first of all, that lava pool, I've breached it above and below with glass, it's even bigger than I previously thought, it goes under other rock in a circle now over 100 squares around.

This is a major problem, you can see my lower mining hall below, were I've propped the lava pool up on glass, and you can now see above where I've made a passage directly through for my higher mining shafts, but it is a lot of dangerous work, I was at one point down to 1 heart and burning before I had my water out to quench myself.

And that only then resulted in more damn problems...

Then the temple... What a let down... There was basically just a shaft down the middle, and TNT below a pressure plate... No adventure there at all, not what I expected.  I dunno, I expected something like CubeWorld, I assumed CubeWorld had copied Minecraft, but now it seems not.

Here's my expedition and you can see I expose the trap after digging down parallel with the shaft, in the chests was gold, bones, iron and one saddle as well as a lot of rotten flesh.

I had all the sandstone I could away with me, filling my inventory... But still no adventure, no fulfillment.

CubeWorld lacks any depth, Minecraft lacks any adventure... I don't know what to do... I'm tempted to sub to Eve to make sure my name gets on the statue... And I'm even tempted to download WoW again.

I would love to have the time to sit down and write my own new game, a mix of D&D with Lort of Ultima, with I dunno, something else... But I really don't have the time when I'm in a programming mood... Work is taking over, I worked a 6 day week, where I should have done 37 hours I've done 54; and the project is still not done.

I need something I can put on and zone out with...

So Wow is the perfect place for me, I find other games, like D&D online, LOTRO and the like to look terrible... I like the cartoony world of WoW... It's just not the same as the old days... And I've been out of it for 2 years... and really for the amount of time I'll get to play it, would £9 a month be worth it?... I doubt it.

But, take a look at my Battle.NET account and it says there's "Wow Starter", which is free to play?

It's a whole other account?

Full Real War Thunder

Please note, this was drafted and scheduled BEFORE the post of the 14th about my Full Real Control headaches... I might be buying a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro soon....


A while back I posted about going into War Thunder with my Track IR and trying Full Real Battles.

Well, that itch is back, but since the move I've been sorting things out and I've found the Track IR and the Flight stick... So the time is now.

I'm going to go through a short series of Full Real flights, I originally flew full real settings in IL2 Forgotten Battles, where my favourite plane was the 109 F-4, but the 109 has terrifying torque problems at take off and landing.

So, I may go with a twin engine aircraft to get used to things and then build up.

I have however been looking at Full Real Battle recordings from PhlyDaily and Kraut...

I think before I go into an actual battle I need to do a lot of take off and landing practice, circuits, touch and go landings and then go into battle.  I plan this to take the form of at least 2-3 hours getting used to the controls, then at least 10 take off and landing cycles in an aircraft, then some practice using the flight stick and Track IR in historical battles and finally going into a full real battle.

I am also wondering whether it might be time to up my graphics card from the single 4xx series to a 6xx or a dual 6xx series...?