2018.10.04_Civilization IV Beyond the Sword mod Mega-Marathon

[update 2020.08.29: the latest version of TyrMegMa with 34 civilizations is here: https://tyrantilles.blogspot.com/2020/08/20200829civilization-iv-beyond-sword.html

Try the new version. It is no point in playing this old version that supports only 18 civs.]

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/tyrmegma-mod-mega-marathon.637062/

TyrMegMa mod Mega-Marathon
Civilization IV Beyond the Sword mod Mega-Marathon by Tyr Antilles
TyrMegMa mod is basically the default Civ4BtS but longer and larger.


For hard-core Civilization IV enthusiasts that feel the huge maps of the game are too small and Marathon mode is too fast, I made this mod that offers two things:
1. create a huge random map several times bigger then the original Huge map of the game (original Huge have scale factor of 32x20 and TyrMegMa Huge is 80x50).
2. game speed, tech discovery, construction and others are a lot slower (about three times slower then original Marathon speed of the game), giving you enough time to play every age a lot.



Start of the mod:


- Close Civ4 if is open

- Unpack TyrMegMa.zip to Civ4BtS mods folder:
* for STEAM version of Civ4BtS, Mods folder is: {the place where your STEAM folder is located}\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization IV Beyond the Sword\Beyond the Sword\Mods\
* for the standalone installation of the game (if you installed on the default path) Mods folder is: C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Civilization4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\

- Clear the cache from Civ4 cache folder - just delete all files inside cache folder from c:\Users\{your win user}\AppData\Local\My Games\beyond the sword\cache\

- Fire up Civ4BtS and launch the mod from Advanced > Load a mod > TyrMegMa
The game will restart loading the mod. In upper right corner will be written the name of the mod: TyrMegMa

- At the beginning of the game choose:
* Custom game.
* Map type (Archipelago works best, but other types can be suitable. You can check how a new map is generated by entering the map editor, then restarting a new game with that map type.)
* Size: Huge (This is the one I modified and is about six times bigger then the original huge map of the game. All other sizes are game's default.)
* Speed: Marathon (This is the one I modified. All other speeds are game's default.)
* Deselect Victory: Time victory (To not have the game end just when things start to become interesting.)
* The other choices are optional.

Required to finish such a game: a strong computer and a TON of patience and free time.

TyrMegMa.zip : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1d19H4kSwC5h3sxJDwwmtOaWIO0r0C06s

If you want to know more about his mod, further details and the things I changed are explained on Calculus - Civ4BtS TyrMegMa.ods (can be opened with LibreOffice): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wlqSrM0YbdT_kTkVts7eGRZr75kQeMyX

2018.07.27_Ultima Online Shard «Inceptum»

Ultima Online Shard «Inceptum»

Ultima Online is the first real MMORPG released on 24 September 1997 and it offers a huge dark medieval world, Sosaria.

It is a place and a time of enchanted magic, armored heroes, beautiful ladies, wicked witches and dark forces. Of dragons and orcs. Of castles and dungeons. Of ships and land explorers. Of craftsmen and guilds. Of treasure seekers and fiendish thieves. Sosarian cities are the perfect place to spend the nights with your friends at a tavern, eating, drinking ale and telling stories about brave deeds, or making plans for future adventures. Is the best environment yet for roleplaying and user interaction.

It is an online world where you can build a predefined or a fully customizable house that you can decorate with your taste and store literally thousands of objects on it.

The game allows the creation of maximum 7 characters per account, each of them can be developed in every imaginable way.

At first you can choose your character race: human, elf, or gargoyle. Each race have its advantages: humans can carry more, elves can see at night and are more resistant to magic and gargoyles can fly and have a bonus to "imbuing". From here though, you can learn absolutely any skill in up to 720 skill points. Once you have reached the limit, you can choose to forget some unwanted abilities to hone the ones you want, so there's no problem if you start as a fighter and then choose to forget fighting ability to learn magic instead. Or anything else. You can be a fighter who uses some magic, or a tamer of animals and monsters, the possibilities are almost endless. It is still a good idea to plan ahead your character to learn some skills that complement each other.

Besides battles, the game offers tremendous possibilities of crafting. You can be a blacksmith, tailor, scribe, fisherman, alchemist, chef, lumberjack or miner, even a gardener and a flower seller, to name just a few of the possibilities. Traders can transform their house in a shop and hire vendors to sell their merchandise. Or rent vendors in houses of other players located in more populated areas.

You can play Ultima Online without ever participated in any fighting if you wish to; ladies can decorate their house in the most wonderful ways and they can make a collection of dresses with the most extravagant and colorful patterns. You can simply play Ultima Online by visiting your friends and stand chatting all day in homes exquisitely decorated, or in the well maintained parks of Sosarian cities.

And all these things represents only the tip of the iceberg of what you can do in Ultima Online.

Ultima Online Free Shard «Inceptum» is a well maintained Russian server with rules close to the official version of Ultima Online. It started in 2010 and is reliably running ever since.

Game installation:

All links are on INCEPTUM site: http://osistyle.com/

- Install 1.UO Inceptum Classic 2D Client

- Install 2.UO Steam

- Start UOSteam and insert on it the following data:

Login: login.osistyle.com

Port: 2593

- Registration is automatic: after the start of the game in login window create a new account simply by typing a new name for the account and a new password. Write them down first as to not forget them. After creating your character and successfully logging into the game you'll be presented with a gump asking you to fill in your real email, which we strongly recommend you do for safety reasons and recovery opportunities if need be.

Check your email once you're done (and spam folder if your inbox is still empty after few minutes), looking for a letter containing your unique email registration code and copy it (ctrl+c). Now get back to the game window and type the '[auth' command to bring up another gump asking for the registration key you just received and paste it (ctrl+v).

From here you are ready to start your life in Britannia, Ultima Online being probably the deepest fantasy game ever created.

Here are some reviews of Ultima Online over the years and please note especially user reviews:

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/ultima-online

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/30/ultima-online-retrospective/

https://mmos.com/review/ultima-online

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ultima-online-review/1900-2531690/

http://osistyle.com/

Screenshots:

Meeting with some friends in New Haven:

Studies doesn’t come for free. Learning the hard art of mining required me to use an important part of my starting money to pay my teacher:

Nothing comes for free in Ultima Online, and that’s a good thing. The feeling of accomplishment when you aquire something with your hard work is priceless. I finally managed to gather money for my first very modest house:

Wonderful paladin style custom house near Zento:

Beautifully designed custom player houses on UO INCEPTUM:

Fight with steel the savages and orcs at a orc fort:

Brigands and thieves won’t miss any opportunity to try to spill my blood and take my money:

Hopefully this time the good deeds will go unpunished:

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~

2018.07.17_Tyr comment for Ryzen 7 2700X vs. Core i7-8700K - TechSpot

https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/ryzen-7-2700x-vs-core-i7-8700k-35-game-benchmark.247606/page-5#post-1693718

AMD Ryzen 2700X for me for the following reasons:

- I do not overclock because I need to keep my computer running in full load for a very long time. I need maximum stability and longevity for my system. I will buy a big aftermarket cooler nevertheless, so, the bundled one have no value for me.
- I am into gaming but my monitor is DELL SE2717H, a 1080p freesync monitor that max out at 75 Hz, and my next video card will be strong enough to drive all games at 60 - 75 fps at this resolution. At 75 fps is almost 0 difference between Intel and AMD. If you are gaming at 1440p or 4k the bottleneck will also be the GPU.
- I do a lot of things with my computer including 3D renderings and video production and encoding. For these tasks that sometimes I run in the same time as games, I prefer to have 8 cores.
- The 720p resolution included in this benchmark for the sake of exposing the CPU's strength in gaming, is totally irelevant in real world because no one game today at 720p.
- All the tests here are made with GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Seriously, how many can afford such an expensive high-end card? Use a lower tier card and games will quickly become GPU bound, rendering the differences in CPU's totally irellevant.
- Both, Intel and nVidia companies have a way to do business that I personally dislike profoundly. So far, AMD started many open source initiatives like Vulkan, Freesync and others, and because of this I am more likely to support AMD then the other two when the price/quality ratio is about the same. I do not care about corporations fanboys dispute, I know for a fact that all corporations including AMD have only one rule: profit at all costs, even with the price of destroying the world, is just that AMD managed to look more friendly and fair in my eyes.

2018.06.27_Comparison of high DPI vs. low DPI displays

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-3732526/comparison-high-dpi-low-dpi-displays.html


After much research, I recently bought a DELL SE2717H monitor and now, after one month of daily usage I would like to talk about pixel size and pixel density. There are many other factors that should be taken into account when buying a new monitor, like color accuracy, backlight bleeding, maximum black luminance (how deep the black is), glow, gamma, response time, refresh rate, adaptive sync, angles, and many, many others, but I will talk here only about pixel size and pixel density.

DELL SE2717H is a 27” monitor with 1920x1080 resolution. That means is a low DPI monitor as illustrated by https://www.sven.de/dpi/ :
Display size: 23.53" × 13.24" = 311.5in² (59.77cm × 33.62cm = 2009.68cm²) at 81.59 PPI, 0.3113mm dot pitch, 6657 PPI²

My dilemma was if I should go for a high DPI/small dotpitch monitor, or for a low DPI/large dotpitch one. I arrived at the conclusion that this choice must be made with monitor usage in mind.


Here are pros and cons of the two display types:

--- Monitors with high resolution, high DPI, small dotpitch (Ex: 4k: 3840x2160 = 0.1557mm dot pitch @27”;;; 2k: 2560x1440 = 0.2335mm dot pitch @27”):
PRO:
- Because many small pixels are crammed togheter, the image is very sharp and clear. Pixels are usually not visible by the user. You can use the scaling option in windows to make the text larger for almost all recent windows menus and programs and image looks beautiful.
- I say it again because is a big PRO: image is beautiful on a high DPI display.
CONS:
- If scaling is not used, the text, icons and all items are very small, forcing your eyes to read. This is very bad for eyes.
- If scaling is used, it don’t work right with all apps. Some will have parts that not fit right on their windows or some menus cannot be scaled. For me is such a bother that I prefer to not use scaling at all.
- Games look good on a high DPI display, but you will need a very powerful (and expensive) video card to run games with good details on the native high resolution of the monitor. Lowering the resolution in games is not an option because the image will look very blurry and overall a lot worse then on a high DPI/small dotpitch monitor that runs at its default resolution.
- Hi-res monitors are usually a lot more expensive.


--- Monitors with low resolution, low DPI, large dotpitch (Ex: 1080p: 1090x1080 = 0.3113mm dot pitch @27”)
PRO:
- Text is easy to read, icons and menus are large and easy to spot at native resolution without any scaling. I also noticed I can point the mouse easier with almost a pixel precision (subjective impression).
- Because of the lower native resolution, games can be played with max settings even with a mid-range video card. Also, if you have a high refresh screen, you can use the power of your video card to achieve really fast fps. I always prefer to have more fps then more resolution.
- Cheaper.
CONS:
- Large pixels means you can see them with naked eye. Image is not that sharp and even in games you can sometimes notice the rough edges even if anti-aliasing is used.


CONCLUSION:

If you plan to use the monitor for productivity applications and web browsing, go for a high resolution, high DPI, small dotpitch monitor. Activate scaling and all items should be well readible. These monitors can be used well for gaming too if you have a very strong video card able to fill all the pixels at native monitor resolution at a high enough refresh rate.

On the other hand, if you are using unusual programs or older games that do not work well with scaling, the low resolution, low DPI, large dotpitch monitor will be probably the better choice. Also, if you game a lot and want the max fps possible with highest details possible, the lower resolution monitor have a clear advantage, especially if your video card is not top of the top behemot every gamer dreams of.  :)

2018.05.13_Video card and driver unusable after Windows update 1803 build 17134.48 [SOLVED]

On this page I uploaded a PDF file with screenshots and explanations: https://community.amd.com/message/2861408


After Windows 10 x64 updated itself to version 1803 build 17134.48, AMD driver stoped working and my video card is not recognized by Windows. Here is how I solved it, perhaps someone else have the same problem.
- After Windows 10 x64 updated itself to version 1803 build 17134.48, AMD driver stoped working.
- My video card is Sapphire AMD Radeon R7 370 (2Gb).
- I tried to reinstall the latest AMD driver and no effect. When I try to manually start RADEON SETTINGS I get the following error message:
"The procedure entry point ?getActivationProperty@Runtime@QV4 ..."
- I go ahead for a clean reinstall. Removed all AMD software with AMDCleanupUtility.exe located on c:\AMD\Win10-64Bit-Radeon-Software-Adrenalin-Edition-18.4.1-Apr26\Bin64\AMDCleanupUtility.exe
and proceeded to CLEAN install AMD driver from the latest package: v.18.4.1.
- After installation I got the following message: Radeon Software (18.4.1) has not been installed. General error during package installation.
- I checked how my video card is seen in GPU-Z and CPU-Z and I had surprise to see is not recognized at all.
- At this point I realized is because of Windows device manager, not because AMD driver. I opened Device Manager and I see my video card is listed as “Unknown device”.
- Right-click on it > Uninstall device and then hit “Scan for hardware changes” icon. Ta-daaa, my video card appeared where it should be: AMD Radeon (TM) R7 370 Series
- At this point I reinstalled the video driver again and everything worked great. Problem solved.

2018.01.21_Vivaldi browser is the true follower of Opera 12

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/23229/win-a-trip-to-meet-vivaldi-in-oslo/14

Vivaldi is my browser of choice since the old Opera 12 had been abandoned. I will not talk here about the many things Vivaldi is doing great, after all because of these great features I chose this browser over all the others. Instead I will talk about the ways I customized it to meet the one feature I can't live without:

Dark pages instead of white! Because white pages hurt my eyes so bad! I will never use a browser that cannot change the white background to something less offensive.

Right now, the only Chrome extension I found able to do this with a certain degree of flexibility is Stylish. On it I loaded a style called "Solarized Dark Modified Colors" that I modified once again to meet my needs.
I am well aware that the vast majority of webpages are built with a white background in mind and once this white is replaced with something dark, certain elements become hard to read, but even so, for me the dark background is essential. I believe I am not alone.

Why not integrate a feature in Vivaldi to interfere with the way the webpages are displayed? The "Themes" feature in Vivaldi is great, but why stop at the borders of the browser? What if you will implement something like Stylish, giving users the choice to set their own background color, text color, unvisited links, visited links, title and perhaps some other webpages elements colors? Then give users a quick way to switch between these Themes, in case some elements of webpages become hard to read.

Here are some screenshots of the way I prefer to see the web with Vivaldi:

You did an awesome job with Vivaldi and I hope to see it become the ultimate web browser!

Tyr Antilles

2017.03.04_Ryzen Gem Mosaic Wallpaper - AMD Community

A nice Ryzen wallpaper I made myself and posted on AMD site: https://community.amd.com/message/2784265

2016.04.29_Review Microsoft Lumia 550

published on GSM Arena
https://www.gsmarena.com/microsoft_lumia_550-7612.php
https://www.gsmarena.com/microsoft_lumia_550-reviews-7612.php


I will not repeat what is already written in the accurate and well made GSMArena professional review, but I would like to add my personal experience with the phone:

- The IPS display is very clear and sharp, and the subjective image quality is very good. With the phone I bought a screen protection called Glass Pro (made of glass not plastic), on which the finger glides a lot better and is very hard to scratch.

- The speaker is loud enough, and on headphones the sound is beautiful. The sound chip used on Lumia 550 is of good quality.

- MS Lumia 550 have no possibility to read directly USB Sticks, and on the micro-USB port, cannot be connected any peripherials like mouse or keyboard or USB sticks. Is not working either with OTG cable, and the connector is a normal micro-USB, not Type C. The only solution is to connect the phone to a computer with a normal micro-USB to USB cable and then access the phone memory from the computer. Or, of course, by wireless / bluetooth / internet.

- On the browsing side, Microsoft Edge web browser looks to me a lot faster and stable then the default browser integrated on Android (I can compare only with Android 4.2.2, so, maybe on newer versions things changed). All in all, my entire online experience with Lumia 550 phone is a lot better then on my old Android platform. Basically, everything on the net, windows store, web browsing, maps, etc., runs better, smoother, faster and most important, without crashes.

- The camera is only 5 MP and is not awesome from this viewpoint, but the photos are clear, have natural colors, and the camera menu offers advanced functions like manual adjustment of many parameters that are not accessible from any Android platform. For example you can manually adjust focus, ISO 100 - 800, or activate the option to capture "living images", HDR, white balance and others. Video capture at 720p with 30 fps is of very good quality in my opinion, but my standards are not as a pro photographer.

- Programs found on Windows Store are OK, and their number increase day by day.
For example, I found a free video player called CCPlayer that is able to play my MP4 files (codec HEVC H265 with AAC audio) and with ASS subtitles placed on the same folder. The same player can play MKV files with H264 and subtitles inside MKV container. Very important, the phone have hardware acceleration for H264 AVC1 and H265 HEVC, so, the 720p movies play fluently, without any glitches.

- A big problem, not of the phone but of the OS, is that, at this time, you canÂ’t remove downloaded and uninstalled applications from MS Store > My Library. Once you install an application, it will be there forever. Even if you decide it was crap and will never be installed again, there is no way to get rid of it, rendering My Library almost useless. I hope Microsoft will solve this problem soon.

In conclusion, after more then a week of intense usage, net surfing, installation and removal of tens of programs, I realize that I like Windows 10 Mobile (Version 1511 OS build 10.0.10586.218) more then Android. Even if the phone have only 1 GB of RAM, it never run out of memory, the OS is running fluid, internet experience is better on Win10 then on Android, the phone never locked and didn't had errors, and for me, hardware acceleration for movies encoded in H265 HEVC is a real deal.