Fallout 4

[fragger]

No worries Art I almost never watch TV either. Cheers first aired on TV in 1982, back in the days before there were home computers or DVDs, and even VHS was in its infancy. So TV was about the only visual entertainment medium available It was a good show though.

On the subject of the CC, that's a trend I'm certainly not crazy about. Now they want to cash in on people modding games? They can't help themselves, can they? If they can make an extra buck somehow, they'll go for it. It was bad enough when game companies started charging for DLC, but I'll be damned if I'll pay for mods If they're going to do that, then as far as I'm concerned, what they sell are no longer mods - it's just yet more paid DLC.

The most odious part of it is that gamers who have no mods will still have to put up with the framework or whatever being downloaded to their PCs, taking up time and hard drive space, for something they'll never be using. At least that's how I've interpreted some of what I've read about it.

My FO4 hasn't been updated because I've been playing offline since shortly after I began, and thus haven't logged on to Steam. But I just know that next time I log on to Steam, the updating will start. I forgot to turn automatic updating off for FO4, so next time I log in it will start. I have no mods as yet so it's not as big a deal for me as it would be for you guys, but it's still a pain in the bum for us all.

[Art Blade]

in the early 80s we had 3 TV channels. ARD and ZDF (so called first and second channel) which were national broadcasting channels and the so called third channel which was regional. Essentially, TV was *bleep*. By the end of the 80s, we had our first private channel, slowly we'd get more, one by one. When I last checked, there were around 25 channels available before the Y2K and only if you had access to cable TV. Normal antennae only received those three plus perhaps two more, that first private one and perhaps another regional one if you lived close to a different region so you could receive their regional third as well. We used to call that "the fourth" channel, making the private the fifth. Only cable allowed for more and later satellite dishes kind of revolutionised TV because you could receive channels from all around the world.

It was also common that we'd have a delay of usually two or more years until US shows and movies were aired as they by then were cheap enough for our public broadcasting services to afford them. Pay-TV has never been popular here as far as I can tell so only some private TV stations that were funded by commercials could afford better and newer shows and movies but commercial breaks increased, both in number and in frequency, which made it nearly impossible to enjoy a good flick. Most of the stuff that has been aired since only redounds to melting one's brains, anyway, which is why I completely gave up on it.

In other words, I never watched Cheers.

[Art Blade]

by the way, TV used to end their programmes on all channels at around 12:00AM or 1AM, after that you'd only see a test pattern and hear a test beep for perhaps half an hour, after that, white noise, both audio and video signals.

[fragger]

Understandable

Our TV stations used to do that too, end transmission around midnight. Then white noise until morning Now all of them run 24/7. After midnight on the main commercial networks, the ad breaks become the televisual equivalent of the back pages of a cheap newspaper - full of phone-sex ads and gonad-oriented products.

Up until sometime in the late 90s we only had three commercial TV channels and two government-financed ones. One of the gov ones was, and still is, SBS, which is a multi-cultural station. Today, it's one of the few channels worth watching as you get to see programs from all over the world (with English subtitles) as well as a good variety of locally-made stuff, with minimal advertising. It's also one of the few remaining channels that still shows lots of good documentaries. The commercial networks are almost entirely given over to reality rubbish and competition shows that are guaranteed to reduce the number of neurons you possess, tucked in between interminable brackets of ads.

Today we have over thirty free-to-air stations, and they're all *bleep*. Even when one of them does show a decent movie, the innumerable commercial breaks totally kill it. The few documentaries you ever see on those stations always seem to be David Attenborough ones, which are good, but there is a wealth of other doco subjects apart from just the bloody animal kingdom for frig's sake We have cable, but I'm not going to fork out for dozens more channels full of *bleep*. Doesn't cut out the ads either, cable is just as infested with them as the free-to-air channels are.

So no, I'm no TV fan either. It's increasingly becoming a medium for morons.

[Art Blade]

 

[LowPolyOWG]

Xbox One X improvements. So Bugthesda managed to do a decent 4K experience

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, supposedly one of the things included in the new update was something for graphics on the OrxBorx and something fixing some graphics glitches. Since I don't own OixBix, I don't pay much attention.

F4SE is updated, btw, so Art can get his fix again.

[LowPolyOWG]

OrxBorx  OixBix,

Yeah, but I think there should be a mod that removes the CC from the game.

[Art Blade]

orxborx & oixbix

thanks, going to get the update.

There is a mod that only removes the CC messages box from the start screen.

[LowPolyOWG]

Ah.

[fragger]

While playing Fallout 4, many of the car designs in the game were tickling something in my memory, but I couldn't quite pin down what it was. It came to me today.

Some of you guys are (ahem) old enough to remember the old Batman TV series from the 60s, which starred Adam West as Batman. Do you remember this cool Batmobile from that show?

Spoiler

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Well, what's not commonly known about it is that it was adapted from a design which was seriously proposed as a futuristic concept car in 1955 which, had it gone into production, would have been mass-produced and sold to the public as the Lincoln Futura:

Spoiler

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Many of the car designs in Fallout 4 have been ringing a bell in my mind, and it was only today that it clicked. The enclosed bubble-canopies and prominent wings were reminding me of something - turned out this was it. So many of the cars in FO4 look similar to this. Along the lines upon which I commented earlier, this was apparently how the future looked to those living in the 50s

It's a pretty cool-looking car actually, I kind of wish I had one Part car, part fighter jet, part Flash Gordon rocketship.

I actually got to sit in the Batmobile as a kid, right in Batman's seat, when it was brought to Australia as part of an international car show of sorts. I had to wait in line for about half an hour, but the coolness factor was well worth it

[Art Blade]

I have been avoiding super-heroes like Superman and Batman and basically anything Marvel Comic all my life with very, very few exceptions (like when "forced" to play a Batman game I received as a gift so I'd actually play it). Of course, it is next to impossible to stay completely ignorant of all that stuff and indeed, the Bat-mobile (not talking about a vampire phone here) is something that rings a bell. But I never saw the one you posted, which to me looks like a love child of a 1978 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and a 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air Impala Sport Coupe. And I love the concept car you posted, wow.

Very cool little anecdote, fragger

[fragger]

Thanks Yeah, I've never been a superhero kind of guy. But the old Batman series from the 60s was quite different to what's around today. It was very tongue-in-cheek, more of a camped-up comedy, and certainly not meant to be taken seriously. It was deliberately over-the-top and silly. It was a groovy show man, best watched on weed

Here's another example of a 50s "future car", the GM Firebird II. You can see where the FO4 devs got their inspirations:

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If you do an image search on Google and enter "futuristic cars 1950s", you'll see all sorts of cars like these. It makes for some really cool viewing

[Art Blade]

it would never have occurred to me let alone come up with that search phrase, good idea

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, the cars in Fallout are all nuclear powered, which is why they make a nice boom if you shoot them too much. Ford actually had a design for a nuclear powered car, which is talked about a bit here

https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/nuclear-cars-theyre-not-science-fiction-anymore

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Yep, a rolling nuclear power plant. Most of the back end of the car was taken up by the reactor, and forget about what happens in an accident. But the cars in Fallout are supposedly powered by fusion, not fission, which is what all nuclear reactors currently use. Fusion currently only happens on a very small scale in giant laboratories and takes more energy to create than it produces. The sun (and other stars) run on fusion, but they have a lot of heat and gravity helping them. I wonder if the people who originally created the Fallout games even knew the difference between fusion and fission, as the terms seem to be tossed around interchangeably in the game. If we could create fusion on the scale needed to run a car, or make the batteries that run the power armor in the game, you'd just need hydrogen to make helium, and it would be pretty safe, and not toxic like fission which needs uranium or plutonium which are both dangerous and toxic to handle. But there are the "Community Plutonium Wells" in the game, which leads you to think that the developers seem to think fusion requires plutonium, as there's no hydrogen dispensers around that you would need to fill up a real fusion reactor.