I don’t use the registry editor all that much, but when I do, I’m almost always going to some specific spot not browsing around the tree. I should be able to type HKLM\blah\blah\blah and have the registry editor open up to that part of the hive right away. Need I say more?
So apparently Bioware didn’t feel guns were gun like enough in Mass Effect without “ammo”, so they endeavored to add “ammo” to Mass Effect 2. Their in the universe explanation has something to do more efficient sinking of heat, and blah blah blah. In short, the guns now eject “thermal clips”, their term not mine, to manage heat.
Okay so the gripe isn’t that they need ammo, or that the guns have heat. Heat is a believable issue, even with current technology. Moreover, Mass Effect does a good enough job explaining all that in a believable way in their universe’s back story. What gets me is that in a distant human future with miniature mass drivers as assault rifles they would be able to hack up a better concept than manually ejecting their “thermal clips”.
I know it looks cool having your avatar do a reload animation, but seriously this is suppose to be the future. How is that even remotely futuristic. I mean seriously, a semi-auto rifle as it exists now ejects spent cartridges just fine without user intervention. Why can’t your future guns do something similar. It’s the future for heavens sake.
But wait, you say, the thermal clip isn’t a cartage it’s a magazine. Oh contrare! The designers may have thinly disguised as having a function similar to a magazine but it’s really just a imaginary chunk of imaginary metal being flung from the gun when it’s hot. They’re cartridges with a different name, function, and feel.
Game designers, your future weapons don’t have to follow current day design limitations just because they are guns. Current technology means that each bullet needs to be bundled with it’s propellent. Hence the cartridge, as it exists today. In the “future”, especially one where you change the fundamentals of how a gun works, there’s no reason to continue to stick to the same mechanic as we have to use today.
A “thermal cartridge” could very well hold the waste heat from multiple “bullets”, while still being on a fraction of the total capacity of the weapon’s “magazine”. When the “propellent” or in this case waste capacity of a given “cartridge” is reached, the gun should just eject it (unless there’s a good reason not to, say you have the equivalent of a bolt action receiver) .
Futuristic weapons in games have to be thought through completely. Rigging a system so there are “reload” animations–don’t even get me started on those–because they’re cool or make the guns feel more like guns, is fine, but there should be a good reason why my character is doing it manually. In this case, so far as I can tell, there isn’t one.
This bit of babbling was brought to you by the letter A, N, R and T, and the number 3.
…because I’m too fed up to do anything else about it.
For the past several months I’ve had no end of fun with my VPS. This site, and more importantly, my photography site pointsinfocus.com have been experiencing random downtime. Worst yet, I can almost always bring down the VPS simply by making a post on Points in Focus.
The thing is, I can’t find any damn reason this should be happening. I’ve been monitoring memory usage on my development server, running identical plugins and software and I never exceed my VPS’s memory limits, I don’t even get close. Even running top on the VPS nets nothing intelligent, always showing several 10s of MB of memory free at least, then blam, I get disconnected as the VPS’s processes are killed, VPS is inaccessable. Only by the time that happens, there’s no good reason why, so far as I can tell. The VPS never exceeds the allocated/available RAM, and CPU load is neglegable as well.
I get the feeling that somehow something, even though I can’t figure out what, is exceeding some instantaneous limit, and triggering the process killer. But given the tools available and the fact that the after the processes are killed there’s no way to get access to the /proc/PID/status to get the high water mark either it’s kind of frustrating to try and solve. Of course, even increasing the VPS’s available RAM doesn’t seem to help.
You know, I get the whole idea of VPSes and memory limits, but seriously if you’re going to kill people’s processes because they hit their limits, then the least you could do is provide them with some information about what triggered the kill. Better yet, would be to make the limit “soft” enough that they could actually see what’s actually going on with the tools available.
Sigh….
Someday I’ll have to open a ticket with Dreamhost about this, but not today…