MordeaniisChaos

But that sort of thing requires being a certain "rank" within the group, doesn't it?

I've been wanting a good way to start a spontaneous gaming session within a community on the PC, but it can be a pain in the ass. Is there some way to throw out a "beacon" for people to see and join on me somehow? Maybe through steam groups or something? Steam groups seem decent for pre-planned gaming but if you want to get a group of folks together in the moment, I can't really see anyway to accomplish that. Especially when *cough* no one's ever in chat.

Any suggestions?

That was already the weakest part of the conspiracy. I'm still hopeful!!!

I actually wouldn't suggest going for just another 1TB hard drive. Ultimately, the biggest bottleneck for your hard drive performance isn't if it's in use (few games really use much read/write speed, except when loading occurs and usually you don't need great recording during that) but the overall performance of your hard drive. It'd be better to invest in a fast hard drive (there are levels of price and speed you can go for. My Velociraptor, 1TB, gets SIGNIFICANTLY better write speeds than my WD Black. Dxtory's little benchmark gave me results of 78 MB/s for my WD Black, and 128 MB/s for my Velociraptor. If you really want to record and you're getting a dedicated drive for it, you should buy an SSD with at least 250 GB, record to that, then compress it from there to a storage drive. It's more expensive, but makes a HUGE difference on performance. But something like a velociraptor will give a good bit of performance boost for a lot less than an SSD, and you can get a bigger drive (I have a 1TB, and 600GB would be fine for just recording).

If you have to be cheap, get a 2TB Seagate Barracuda, it's the best 7200RPM drive for recording.

Duder, hit the link button. It's not hard v.v You don't have to make the link into proper text if you don't want to but it'd be nice.

That's a strange use case. Why not just play them from the same source and mix down the music, assuming that's the issue?

If you're really desperate, as long as you have two outputs that you are using, that show up as separate outputs in your sound properties, you can probably start iTunes with the default output set to speakers, and then while that's running and playing music, switch the default to headphones and start Skyrim. Then, if you keep iTunes running, you shouldn't have to change anything unless you want to start using your speakers again for non-iTunes stuff.

But if you aren't attached to iTunes, get winamp as was said before.

Or stop being a crazy person and just use one for both.

I think all games, PC and console, should have matchmaking that avoids any "non-vanilla" servers, but I also think there either needs to be a "random custom rules" matchmaking or a server list. Server lists are better because you can see what you're about to get into. Battlefield 3 just does a shit job of communicating that stuff on consoles.

You think that's annoying, try playing on random servers in ArmA 2. I have to have like three different presets for mod loadouts for every "chunk" of servers. A lot of servers don't bother to allow mods like JSRS which is just a sound mod to make the sounds more realistic, and there's no way to just have the game disable mods that aren't allowed without restarting the game.

But as @laserbolts said, look for the official servers. They won't have silly rules, they won't kick you for dumb things, and they'll probably perform pretty well. Not sure how populated they are though.

Also, find servers you like and favorite them. If you just join random games willy nilly, you should expect things like that to happen. If you have a server browser in a game, spend some time playing around with the servers with the best ping, until you find a few that are usually well populated and don't have rules you don't like.

I've been holding on to a copy of Civilization V for a while now but everyone I know already owns it. It goes for $30 on Steam, so I figure, I'm out of work, why not trade this for a couple of cheaper, new games?

So I'm looking to get two of the following games: Fez, Trials, Blood Dragon, Zeno Clash, Surgeon Simulator.

If you have others you want to try, let me know. I'm open to suggestions. I'm okay if they don't add up to the full $30 but it'd be nice if it came out to at least $25. I'm broke as fuck and want to squeeze what I can out of it :p

If you're willing to go into the "questionable" cross service thing, my prefered trade would be for this: http://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-Premium-Service-Online-Game/dp/B0087STJLS/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1368629647&sr=8-4&keywords=Battlefield+3. I'll even be nice and do the steam trade first, then you can gimme the code. My friends just got into Battlefield but they all play premium so I'm hardly able to play with them so I'd really love to get this to be able to finally play Battlefield with folks I know.

Private Message me on here with offers.

Anyone who gets paid to work on that show wins hugely. They get attention for it which drives numbers. This is exactly the kind of drama that sells that show.

Full SSAA won't really scale with optimizations, however there are ways SSAA can be implemented that will vary from game to game. And more importantly optimization will directly influence the amount of overhead you have to devote to AA, which is really what I'm getting at.