Now finally to the garden party chapter. About 2.4k so far and looks to hit about 5k before it is all over, putting me at estimated low 70's for the book.
I did sort of diagram it.
The weekend was also a perhaps unnecessary computer upgrade. The gaming computer had a 256GB as the C: drive, another terabyte HD holding the various downloaded Steam games, and another terabyte of spinning rust I couldn't remove because somehow it had gotten flagged as necessary to boot.
Starfield ran poorly on that system. According to one gent, the way it handles assets in multiple fragmented files -- the result of trying to accomplish Todd's "Sixteen times the detail" on a game engine that wasn't built around large optimized files -- played very badly with trying to read the game off anything that wasn't both solid state and in the primary C: slot.
But mostly it was just a little annoying having files all over the place and the remains of the old broken drive still stuffed in there because the computer wouldn't boot without it. So dropped a couple bucks on a 2TB SSD and did a clean install of Windows on it, then started plugging drives back in to haul files off them.
That's the thing; sure, you can DL the game off Steam again, but games for recreation is more about impulse. "Hey, I should finish up Dead Space 2 some time." Impulse and 50+GB downloads (Cyberpunk 2077) is not a good combination.
Oh, and turns out the Steam cloud bollixed a bunch of saves but fortunately I was able to haul them off the old boot drive, too.
Satisfactory runs smoother and I can finally show off my booster hyperloop transit system. So that's nice. I also couldn't get my AUTOMATIC1111 install working again, which is probably overall a good thing. Forbidden West will probably run with decent graphics -- once the price on Steam comes down.
And Starfield? "Graphics card does not meet minimum specs." What, you mean the card I was playing on before the OS reinstall? The posted specs are a 1060. I'm running a 3070 with maxed VRAM!
There are threads going back to 2023 about this bug. As usual for such things, it is all magic incantations. One person updated drivers, one entered some funny numbers into the init, one swapped an audio cable, one chanted at it in High Enochian. Nobody seems to actually know what the underlying issue is.
Here's an underlying issue; how could a major studio release a AAA game they were hoping would be their next flagship game for a ten-year run when modders got interested in it...and have such poor error handling and useless error messages?
I've had startup issues with games before. They last for like eight minutes as the game recognizes I don't have DirectX 12 or whatever, auto-connects to Microsoft, installs the necessary thing, then gets on with business. Or maybe I get into drivers and tweaking because it runs fine, but I think the graphics could be prettier with tweaked settings.
I could try some re-installs and patches. Or junk the game. The thing I'd love to do is ask for a refund but that's not available.
So I finished the evening solving puzzles around Hogwarts.
Got the 22H2 Windows update completed -- which required, apparently, pulling the plug on my microphone otherwise it crashed at 47% -- and now Starfield runs. I can crank up the graphics and it looks half-way decent. But the stalling is still there, even if I'm just standing still.
So I popped Cyberpunk 2077 up and cranked the settings to about 90% and at just under 30 fps it runs just fine for a fight scene and a car chase through Night City....and it looks GORGEOUS.
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