Shacknews LoL

Portal Stories:Mel is out today!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/317400/

Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlx_Qsc9Vkg

Downloading now.

LIVE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5P_LAqiVg

Based on a quick read through and comparing the settings, here's a quick TLDR for those who don't like this shit and just want to know how to get to a beautiful, playable game ASAP. Looks like maxing everything, then dropping down things in this order will be a good way to go at it. Do not take this as gospel, I've obviously not played the game, but I've spent so many hours tweaking games based on these guides that I have a decent grasp at how to interpret them quickly for efficient setting finding.

-Max everything, including AA. Disable Depth of Field and Chromatic Aberration unless you like those. It's post process so it's not a total killer.
-Drop foliage density to high. This has a huge impact.
-Drop hairworks to only Geralt or off entirely. Large impact.
-Drop AA. It's post process, but has temporal magic thingies, so it's a little heavy. You can instead enable FXAA from nvidia control panel or alternative. Medium impact.
-Drop AO to SSAO. Medium impact. I would not disable this entirely even if SSAO has some performance hit as well. Games without AO look kind of lame these days.
-Drop shadows a step or two. These are not as heavy as in many other games. A few % difference per step, so might not be worth it considering the loss in IQ.

Those are the most significant settings as far as performance goes. If you're still not getting enough fps at that point, best approach is probably setting everything one stage lower and then doing the same checklist there if still necessary.

Hey dudes I want to talk about Amazon Mechanical Turk again. There were no biters last time I made a thread, so I went ahead and tried it and now I will report my results, because it's awesome. MTurk is the cloud for human labor; you post jobs and pay people pennies to do them. Pay as you go, and running everything in parallel costs the same as running it serially, same as Amazon EC2 except for humans.

The job I posted had 76 individual tasks. They're image transcription tasks; the user had to enter a column of numbers from a scanned page, and put the numbers in the right columns. Each of the 76 images is half of a page scanned from a catalog. This is what they saw:

http://chattypics.com/files/mturk_i3t7rpfdvc.png

I paid $0.25 per image. It took them around 12.5 minutes per image on average, so I effectively paid around $1.20/hour. The workers ate it up; the responses started flooding in immediately. I had to reject about 10% of the responses because they either didn't type in all the numbers, or they goofed up some of the transcription. In total, including both approved and rejected responses, workers did 18 hours of work for me in the span of two hours on the wall clock. So there were 9 people working on my job, on average, for the whole two hours.

All total, including MTurk fees, I paid about $20 for 18 hours of work, with workers entering over 5000 numbers in total. Amazing experience. The results came in faster than I could hastily verify and approve them. This would have been a major project if we had to type the numbers in manually, which is what we were preparing to do before I had the idea to use MTurk. Instead, I wrote no code and all we did is scan and crop the images, and write instructions to tell the workers how to do it.

Cheap third world labor, who knew? I will definitely use this every time I need some rote tasks done.

Anime for Adults - can anyone comment on this list

http://imgur.com/gallery/xM0dO

The Tatami Galaxy & Mushishi look interesting to me. Dunno about the others.

When I was diagnosed with cancer I didn't tell hardly anyone, mostly because people become awkward and social interactions become awful. It's not their fault - it's just hard to know what to say because those situations are so beyond what we're accustomed to dealing with that any words you might come up with seem insufficient. Everything that comes to mind starts to sound like an awful Hallmark sound byte.

However, my friend just linked me to these cards and I have to say they are pretty good. I don't think I would've minded getting one of them when I was being prepped for surgery. So if there's someone in your life who's going through a major illness maybe you'll be able to use these.

Link: http://info.emilymcdowell.com/empathy-cards-for-serious-illness/

Well done video comparing all the GTA5 graphic settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8WDPbvYbgg

He lists recommended settings at the end of the video too which you can view here.
http://chattypics.com/files/asdfddddddddJPG_n1e4g0vqlu.jpg

Good Book Loving People

I just finished A Darkling Sea, holy crap it's an amazing book. I think mysled recommended it last week. Can any of you guys who have read it recommend something similar? I want more!

For all of your custom heightmap needs:
http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/2y6yr4/its_a_terrainparty_and_youre_invited_web_app_to/
http://terrain.party/

People who use an Xbox 360 controller in PC games

Most PC games that support the 360 controller don't have any way to adjust the deadzone, so if you have any sort of stick drift you might find yourself walking when you're supposed to be standing still or whatever. I know I've had this happen in several games and I haven't found a way to fix it aside from buying a new controller, UNTIL NOW.

Just found this neat little utility via PCgamingWiki.com that will let you adjust your deadzone in any game (supposedly). It also will let you remap the controller, control rumble strength, invert either stick, or disable the joystick completely.

https://code.google.com/p/magical-tools/wiki/Durazno