colkassad

This is what I do. I find navigating with a remote control to be infuriating, especially when you need to search for something. With an old computer and wireless mouse and keyboard, it's so much better. Some minor configuration of Firefox's homepage and it's a fine start page for watching TV, with all your stuff right there. Plus you can have extensions that save hours of your life over time. The only downside is the remote becomes the literal keyboard and mouse which might be cumbersome for some, but I don't even think about it anymore. I've been using the same 50" for ten years.

Back in the day I made a lot of Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament maps. The Unreal Editor was a lot buggier than Radiant but the workflow was far superior. You could bang out a floor plan quite fast with the subtractive approach. No caulk textures to deal with either (a special texture that the renderer ignored for the sides of the boxes used to create the walls that the player never sees).

Good argument for breaking up the company.

Paint.net is my go-to image editing software. I'm not a digital artist or professional photographer, I just need to downsize/crop/adjust the occasional image. I don't need the kitchen sink. Regular MS Paint is annoyingly basic and Krita, GIMP, et al., are too much UI-wise. That said, I use Linux daily but not for images so not sure if there is a Paint.net analog on Linux already.

I feel for you. Went one to two weeks without power a few times from hurricanes over the years. One time our power came on after two weeks just as I came home. I had two hours to enjoy it before a storm came through and knocked it out again. Had to wait a few more days. I had a super loud gas generator and was worried about the noise but my neighbor just begged me to use it to dry her hair. I threw an extension chord over the fence and told her to keep it there.

Anyone ever worked with data from SDSS? What have you done with it? I imagine it's a gold mine for university students. I took an astronomy class and was able to plot the largest structures in the universe from their data, which was cool but pretty basic. I've loved astronomy all my life and I've always wondered if there was anything more one person or a small team could do with SDSS data. I took the class in 2010 so I imagine there are more possibilities now with AI?

Yes! Bombers Bar! That was it :) It was so much fun and quickly became the only thing I wanted to do.

Others have explained it pretty well in their replies. It's basically a slide-show. My big battle was the fight over the UALX-3 Keepstar that TEST was attempting to build as a FOB. My experience was sitting at my computer clicking my attack button when ordered and watching everything go by at a few frames per second. I had no idea if what I was doing was effective. The only fun part is knowing how momentous it was, with massive ramifications for each side depending on the outcome.

I know exactly how you felt. I had many moments like that exploring, which was a mechanic they might have added after you left. Searching for loot in ancient artifacts (or whatever it was) and never knowing if you are being hunted until it's too late was so nerve racking.

My coworker ended up defecting to a corporation that lived in wormhole space! The wormholes add so much to the game. A lot of times we'd find the mining ops by people scouting through wormholes. Another activity I liked was hacking those resource thingies (I forget what they were called, or even what they were). Doing that in wormhole space was so scary but the payoffs could be huge.

I bought the game when it first came out (2003? Boxed, from Target) and played with an online friend for a while. We mostly mined and we didn't really have a corporation, it was just the two of us. There wasn't much else to do at the time. At one point I fell asleep at my keyboard during a mining op. Gave up soon after.

In 2015 a coworker talked me into trying it again. We joined a small corporation, swore fealty to a larger corp (Brave? Band of Brothers?) and moved to low-security space. We got involved in massive 3000+ ship battles, some of which made the news. These are not as fun as you would think.

However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets that would warp in on unsuspecting mining operations and destroying billions of ISK (in game currency) worth of ships. We'd use Mumble for voice chat, which allows for a hierarchy of chat rooms, so that we could hear the fleet commander giving orders but he couldn't hear us. It was super organized and our fleet commander was really skilled.

In the end I couldn't keep up with the time commitments. For the fun stuff, you had to be online at a certain time and there was a lot of prep involved (buying the proper ships which changed all the time, getting your ships to the right station, etc). I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though. Nothing beats warping in and seeing those huge mining ships and then hearing the fleet commander start issuing targeting orders. It would raise the hair on my arms.

I was deep into the worlds of Quake 3 and UT99 back then. I made maps for Weapons Factory Arena, a popular spin on Team Fortress but much faster and frenetic (more like Overwatch). I also created all the weapons and some maps for the port of Weapons Factory to Unreal Tournament, which did well but was no where near as popular as the original. UT was by far the easier game to mod but there was something about the physics in Quake 3 that just lent itself better to that type of mod.

As for id drama, there was plenty after Quake 3. I remember a .plan update from John where he talked about people leaving and people getting fired...I think one of them was John Steed (rest in peace), one of the player modelers who was very active in the modeling community and well liked. Felt like a disaster at the time. I just think there was a lot of conflicting personalities at the company and it was doomed to fail (no pun intended).

Yeah, I went snowboarding once in my life (loved it but it was exhausting) and naturally rode goofy-footed. They only thing I really needed to learn was slowing myself down.

Interesting. Never really thought about one of my eyes being dominant. I do have a bad habit of covering my left eye when reading in bed.