Grrizz

I use a second computer to stream to instead of a Steam Link but also had audio issues when trying to stream, when set to stereo it worked fine but surround (5.1) resulted in no audio, turned out that in-home-streaming uses DirectSound components from DX9 so downloading and installing the DX9 redistributable resolved my issue. Hope that helps https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=8109

Conveniently this came out today

I have a GTX970 but wouldn't mind getting some of that lovely HDR support (and a bit more memory ).

Yay another Oceanic time zoner Welcome!

Excellent start to the thread

Why is "its an alpha" not a reasonable rationalisation? Every game goes through an alpha stage and there's no reasonable way you can debate that this game isn't in alpha, if you aren't interested in playing an alpha you probably shouldn't be playing now. Just because you spent more than the minimum doesn't mean you get to skip alpha... A very bare bones break down of the focuses of each stage would be: Pre-alpha - Early stages of planning and development, pre-testing. Alpha - Feature implementation and functionality testing. <-- Where we are. Beta - Feature locked, known bug fixing, bug testing and performance optimisation. <-- Where you think we are (several months in). As far as an alpha is concerned this game runs very well (even for an early beta), I haven't been in many (not my industry) but some of the ones I've played in wouldn't run smoothly on any available hardware at the time, yet released perfectly fine. In my industry its much the same, alphas are slow and if you don't do things in a particular way the product will straight up break, you put code in that you know (or at least hope ) will work to allow functionality testing and come back to refine it in beta. Again the biggest problem at the moment seems to be that people are unfamiliar with development and either compare SCs current state to the public alphas/betas of closed development games, other early access games that are closer in design to 'total conversion mods' than actual new games or small projects that have a total development lifecycle of 1-2 years. Personally I see usage on all 8 of my cores (4C/4HT) but only see up to ~60% utilisation with only up to ~80% GPU utilisation, its a bug/unoptimised bit of code, its an alpha, its just where we are at in the development cycle, they could burn time and money on optimising the alpha the best they can but it would be an absolute waste when there are still core features being implemented. Equally I could uninstall the game and come back for beta/release but it runs 'good enough' for me as it is and I personally enjoy seeing broken games (as long as its not in the release version), its a peak behind the curtain, seeing something break often gives you insight as to how it was put together which appeals to my nature. Out of curiosity what alphas have you been a part of?

Personally I think 3 years is short even for S42, take COD as an example, they were on 2 year development cycles and have since moved on to 3 year development cycles and that's just giving an existing game a bit of a facelift and new story while coming from existing/established development companies with a known budget. Bear in mind CIG has not only been building a game but a company too, with a development budget that quite unexpectedly grew more than 5 times in size which would for the most part negate a lot of their early planning and budgeting unless they just skimmed the excess (something I'd personally be very disappointed about if they did). E:D would be another good example in which it took about 5 years with the last 2 or so being at full burn to release what is a good but fairly Spartan game as it stands. I would love to see this game sooner rather than later but I also think their current timeline is quite reasonable for what they are making.

Also in this comm-link article: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15189-Package-Split-Information Being its still early access I'm guessing we might see something like $60/$30 at release, something along the lines of a base game + expansion pack <-- Pure speculation at this point.

But no one has access to S42 yet so how can we comment on it, all we know is a rough outline of the story, it should be coming this year (TBH I wouldn't be surprised at an early 2017 release) and it has expanded beyond its original scope (due to the increased funding) in terms of story, content and quality. Based off the limited information we have on it I would say its still a fair way away from being in its beta stage too (still working on ships, characters, levels and animations).

This point in development (alpha) is mainly about backend and base functionality, you generally don't bother with client optimisation till you get to beta, although because of the open nature of this game they have done a lot more optimisation than you would normally see at this point. Once they get the background work done churning out content to fit over that framework becomes a lot quicker and client optimisation becomes more practical because things aren't changing as much. One of the problems I see is that a lot of people get their sense of scale from public alphas/betas these days, when a public alpha is more like a beta and a public beta is basically a demo/pre-release server stress test which tends to skew peoples perception of where a project like this should be at, the reality is if you've ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of playing an actual alpha this is miles ahead of what you would see in closed development and most games at this point might have been announced but all you would have got was a 10 second pre-rendered teaser making you aware the game is coming in a year+ (or 3 after delays ). Bear in mind that after a point money doesn't speed up development, things just take time to do and throwing more money/people at it wont speed it up and can even slow things down, more people can create more overhead in handovers etc. and more money tends to mean higher quality targets (if not siphoned off for pure profit). Edit: This is how I see your average closed development vs. what the public gets these days; Alpha Beta Release |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------|-> ^ ^ ^ Closed alpha Closed beta | Open beta

All the avengers in the store now are ships but they mentioned they would sell them as modules later when the module system had been implemented, the branding is a bit confusing though because half the titles currently list them as modules and the other half as ships

Yes but OP was asking about thin-ITX not mini-ITX

Those are two good points I forgot to mention too, the button layout is worse than on the older G930 IMO mainly because when in a high back chair or lying in bed the volume knob, being on the bottom corner of the cup, is easy to knock but also because IMO it's harder to determine what button your pressing just by feel compared to when they were all laid out on the front of the cup on the G930 and the mic was a disappointment for me, its about the same as the old G930 IMO but with all the extra effort put into the speaker drivers and the extra cost of the set I was really hoping for a decent mic this time round.

Surprised you didn't mention all the issues with the 5 minute sleep that there are multipage threads about on Logitechs forums or the horrendous pop you get when waking them up or the lack of charge indication while plugged in. They sound great but are a hard recommendation for the price when they have some pretty glaring issues that should be easy to fix but they just don't seem to care about post launch support... even the G930s still have the side tone setting issue which should be a 5minute fix... Although I will say I've never had an issue with them falling off my head, they sit very snug on me.

C3 was fun but nothing special, I'd be surprised if it still had an active player base. BF4 on the other hand is fun, has a lot more going for it in terms of gameplay and is still pretty active (even after its rough start turned a lot of people off), ~22K people playing now with a ~40K player 24hr peak on PC alone (Hardlines a laughable 2K/3K lol). I think BC2 still has a small active community, similar size to Hardline but I would definitely recommend BF4 over it, bigger community, bigger game and most of what's left in BC2 are the diehards, particularly TDM focused IIRC, which will be less fun for someone new to the game.