14 4E huh

13 for me

most stores around here max out at around 11.

@Batman Like the new avatar :-)

about time @Batman

I don't suppose anyone here has played Civilization 5, have you? Want to find out if its any good.

hello

@PeteH yes, I did. Actually the only game I spend any time with :)

Civ 5 is very good however it is better to install the plugin with religions

for some reason they cut religions out from the base version and it makes the game much more bland

@Rilakkuma hi there. good. My wife likes Civ 4, so I may buy that as a last minute present

nice present ;)

however my 5 years old mac struggles with it

I quite like the look of the new add-on, where you go off an colonise a new planet

so you should have more or less good computer for it

ah, yes, that one sounds very promising

did not play it yet though.

Yes, we have had that with games. Her current computer is only 6 months old. When it arrived we discovered it had no dvd drive!

must be fine then. Who uses DVD nowadays anyway... only for movies maybe?

something so obvious, it never occurred to us to check

external drive is some 50 euros +

Well, Civ 4 does a physical check for the dvd on startup. pita!

oops!

you can always emulate one though :]

We got an external drive, but then found that it came with n o software. So when she wanted to watch a film, it was more expense!

pita

Although I note that you can buy Civ 5 via Steam, so presumably the need for a physical disc has been removed

definitely.

btw., gor that campagnolish torx driver set now! Works like a dream. Quite obvious why Campa switched to them: much harder to break the screw.

yay! another bike-related expense!

I'm just looking on Amazon and see you can get a bundle of Civ 3 and Civ 4. I mean, why would anyone want that?

Civ fans do

I guess. I certainly played Civ 3 when it was contemporary, but then went on the Civ 4. I still play Civ 4.

Civ 5 seriously progressed in terms of AI, I think.

In fact, my wife descivered Civilization because of me. When we first started going out, I had a computer and she would come round to my flat and play on it!

it is pretty much same as in Civ 4 in beginning but they seem to learn

@PeteH oh, that's the recipe for happy marriage!

I have found a site where I can buy a key for Civ 5 Complete, at quite low cost. You can type that key onto Steam and download/activate the game. Sounds like a plan

Hahaha. We sit in the lounge together, she playing her games on one sofa, me playing my games on the other!

i hope it is legit

It has 50k votes on Google, so would assume so.

what are your favourite leaders in Civ?

asking because this probably shows the whole playing style

Mrs PeteH always chooses the Merkins. I always choose Random. But only play at a low level, chieftain I think

I mean not to play as, but to play against

I tend to set everything to "random", then if I don't like it, I can the game

well, same here!

But I will make war on everyone! That seems to be how you get the highest score

and of course the most satisfying victories are "domination"

"always war" setting?

? was unaware of that

well, there is :))

but it is hard to play. It is like playing against hordes of raging barbarians

We have tried to play each other across the LAN, but without success. Maybe if I get Civ 5 we'll be able to do that

Yeah I don't like BarBars.

in Civ 5 you also get revolts

not the revolts within the city when it is about to flip into another side, but random units which appear in the random place which belonged to another nation before

I think it sounds like a good purchase. A stocking-filler.

The only thing is, she will end up playing it for 12 hours on christmas day!!

(That was one of the reasons I don't play much any more, it can easily suck up a day of your time.)

yep. In FAQ of some older Civilization there was a question which sounded like "How to stop playing and go to bed?"

and the answer was about it being a known issue but no known solutions yet

I think the turn-based approach is a definite winner. I tried playing Age of Empires (many years ago) but didn't get addicted. Even though it is a similar kind of game

interestingly, at the time of Civ 1 and 2 there were several turn-based games not necessarily copying each other. Still, only civilization remains to this day.

when was Civ 1? The one I started playing (2 I think) would have been around 1997

On another note, the SE site offered me a hat to stick on my avatar yesterday. I said yes (which is why I now look like I have lots of candles on my head!) but have no idea why it offered it to me, and not to other people. Or maybe everyone else just though, that;s a stupid idea, and said no.

perhaps because you have high reputation, numeric and actual both.

Civ 1 was earlier but I played it around 97 too

2 was sort of boring. Not sure why, but just did not work for me.

I currently play a game called Football Manager 2015, I suspect that is uniquely English / European

I only got that a month or so ago. Previously I had FM 2012, and basically played the same game for 3 years.

what are you supposed to do there?

Before that, I think it was FM 2002, which yes I played for 10 years or so. I only upgraded when I got a Windows 7 pc and nothing worked any more

You manage a football team.

So you organise training etc. buy/sell players, pick the team.

As you can imagine it became more and more functional over time

and slower. I run all of this on an i7 processor these days. Silly.

I don't even own i7 :)

sounds somewhat like transport tycoon, but about football

I knew someone once who used to rave about....I think it was.....Railway Tycoon. Long time ago.

And I once bought my daughter Zoo Tycoon, ehich I think was a Microsoft offering

She then graduated to the Sims

But I don't think she plays any of them now

when developing digital cameras we used transport tycoon to generate not-so-boring images of several gigapixels

the game was very good on generating uselessly large maps and manage to work with them. Exporting took some time and resulted into huge images which we used to test image processing tools.

ah, probably a more useful application than the game itself!

I know this football game has expanded very much in the direction of social media. There are "upload" buttons which will post highlights of your (imaginary!) game up to Facebook etc.

Incidentally I am thinking of buying myself a new camera. I cannot justify it, which is why I haven't bought it, but I keep coming back to it and thinking about it.

It is a Nikon D810. I currently have a D200, which dates from around 2007

Obviously I would be able to re-use the lenses I already have, so would just need the body.

d810 looks good. Recently cameras often lack B/W display on the top which displays a lot of necessary info and apparently the d810 still have it

Yes my D200 has that, very useful. I didn't realise they were starting to get rid of that.

on low end cameras only. After some point in time the largest makers added three new directions - mirrorless cameras, high-end compacts and low-end DSLR's

perhaps the removal of indicator window was a move to make production of low-end dslr-s cheaper

if i am not mistaken this big change happened in 2008 - economically very challenging year and makers were struggling to keep sales as high as before

Nikon 1 mirrorless cameras are very good too

I own DSLR but in fact it is just too bothersome to carry it around ,especially on bicycle trips, so Nikon 1 is very good compromise between picture quality and the size

Ah yes, I see it on their site.

For lightweight use, I bought a Canon Powershot, which is a brilliant little camera. I took that to a TdF time trial and got some really good shots. It captures RAW and basically allows you to shoot in fully manual mode.

I was hoping to retire the Powershot when I got my Sony phone, as the camera was reputed to be very good on the phone. But I have found it disappointing. When I took the phone to Gent, it was fine for capturing landscapes but simply could bot capture the cycling.

What I really wanted was to be able to set the shutter speed to, say, 1/200s then set everything else accordingly. But this was simply not possible.

Needless to say, I bought the Canon before the Nikon 1 was available. At the time, Nikon did not have a small, good camera

canon make very good cameras too. They suffered some image quality problems on lower end cameras at the time of nikon 1 but overall made very good products

long time ago used conica-minolta camera. That was an awesome toy, very well made and with beautiful pictures.

then they sold their camera business to Sony

yes I think you could toss a coin between Canon/Nikon. I went down the Nikon route because I once had a Canon printer and received poor service. Notyhing to do with the actual camera

Hey I once had a Konica Minolta bridge camera which was also very good

dooh, bought a Canon printer just three weeks ago!

and the only good part of it is its price

...this was about 2001!

this only means they follow traditions :)

what is bridge camera?

The bridge camera was a perfect way to learn about a dslr.

Let me find the link.....

oh, found it

there's good chance we owned the same model!

It is basically a functional camera, but with a fixed lens.

I think mine was a Dimage D2

exactly the same!

:)

this was an awesome camera, indeed

Yes that;s the one!

I re-sold it later for quite good price and the next owner reported he was happy too

I think my daughter took (and subsequently ruined) mine :(

she definitely learned from it too ;)

ganref.jp/m/sashimi/portfolios/original/0/…

Well, I suppose given its age by then it wouldn't have been worth much. But nevertheless......the number of things that I consider "precious" that she considers "throwaway"

took this picture by the Conica Minolta

that's really good. Crispness and bokeh.

the flower on the front could be crisper, but when not zoomed it does not really stand out

I never used to post-process in those days so I don;t think I ever got the best out of my camera. These days I post-process as a matter of course

weird, the information says it was taken by Nikon, but this is definitely not true - still remember taking that picture :)

i am too lazy to post-process :(

or perhaps just need better computer

my Core2Duo mac is too slow to smoothly work with large RAW images

I hunted a lot for post-processing software for that very reason. Eventually I found something called Bibbke, which has now becone Corel Aftershot Pro

interesting name metamorphose

while looking through pictures, found this one - ganref.jp/m/sashimi/portfolios/original/0/…

The whole ethos of Bibble, they got right. It was built for manipulating large images quickly, it was totally non-destructive....

interesting if they have mac version too

Then they sold out to Corel, and Corel are gradually fucking it up

there's plenty of photo processing software for macintosh, but good ones are expensive

Bibble was always multi-platform. I suspect most photographers were mac users

Corel were good at this for a while!

(at phoocking up things)

there was an awesome piece of software called Bryce 3D by MetaCreations; the software was a little bit ahead of its time and was re-sold several times

ending up in the hands of Corel, who did nothing useful to it after

Yep. In fairness I have bought a lot from Corel - Paintshop, Video Studio, Aftershot, even a PDF program.....but all they seem to do is to spam me asking me to buy more things.

their Draw was very good until version 8 or so

I hate that. And I cannot work Paintshop any more. Once upon a time I used it b ecause it was easier that Photoshop

btw., the picture above, with the bird

it was taken in Hiroshima, the day after the huge earthquake in the Eastern Japan

we managed to get out of Tokyo on the next day, not to run away but because we planned to do it before

so every picture from that Hiroshima trip feels somewhat like an image from the island of peace

haha - we associate Hiroshima with a nuclear bomb!

It is strange, our perception has not changed in 70 years...but yours has. The Japanese influence

pretty much same here. Not entirely, but partially at least. So staying in Hiroshima and enjoying its peace was weird.

Yes, so can you visit the part of the city where the bomb hit? A kind of "never forget"? As you would with Pompeii for example

Hiroshima now is very lively city, even surprisingly lively for such remote place from the central Japan. It feels very peaceful but you see scars from nuclear bombing there and there - trees with no bark on the side, some old buildings with dark facades even now and so on

yes, sure

there's peace memorial now and so-called A-bomb dome - a building which was left as is after the bombing

it is quite impressive

also there's a museum with the artefacts, photos and much more reminding of bombing

I agree, that would be worth a visit.

definitely - it changes the view on any war

How far is the modern city from where the bomb hit?

the modern city did not move anywhere

the dome is in the centre of the city

ah

the fallout was cleaned up a lot and you may find the hiroshima have very little dust - perhaps this has to do with the fallout cleaning long time ago

things like a-bomb dome, trees and so on are still radioactive

not as radioactive to kill someone, but what remains remains

ah, this is interesting.

in the museum you see those bags, shoes, fans - all so cute, belonging to children at the time of bombing, who were involved in some military-related work at the time

also there's a sample of house wall with fallout remains on it

did you ever visit Nagasaki? Has that evolved along the same lines?

Nagasaki is pretty far from Tokyo, so I did not manage to go there yet

however used to work with a girl from Nagasaki and she told me a lot. Nagasaki is less used as a war memorial and is more of a "normal" city

in fact, Tokyo had more fatalities during bombings during WW2 than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however this is not well-known fact

ah yes I have just looked on Google.

Hiroshima was completely torn down and rebuilt with completely new face

Tokyo was too busy probably and just emerged in the same chaotic form

And probably, as a non-native, you have seen more of Japan than many Japanese

i like travelling around japan on a bicycle! However my interest lays more in local customs and language rather than history, however it is very interesting and interconnected with culture too.

however Japan is large and I am yet to travel on the coast of Sea of Japan

been there only in Niigata and aside from Sado island with its gold mines it was plain boring

As I have gotten older, I have found that history makes places more interesting. I did not study history at school, but wish I had

indeed - when you know the history you know much more about the place and why it is the way it is.

Certainly though there are some places where one visit is enough!

do you know, there's Shikoku island? The island is famous for its pilgrimage to 88 temples on foot and locals are supposed to support piligrims

i went there this year, expecting to see nice people and bright place

turned out Shikoku people were quite harsh on others and not particularly friendly; The nature is mind blowing though and it was worth visit only because of nature

nananananananana batman!

hey @Batman

hellow mr. @Batman

hello

Incidentally @Rilakkuma while we have been chatting I bought a product code from that site (g2a.com) for around half the price of the DVD, entered the key into Steam, and Civ 5 is happily downloading as we speak. So that will be a good gift on christmas day (I bought 2 keys)

congratulations! :)

and thank you for the link. Will look around too...

this picture is from Shikoku trip

It is good because the Steam mechanism is a good idea, although I have found them pretty useless when it comes to support.

what kind of support a user may need from a thing like Steam?

Mrs PeteH bought a game on there once, we couldn;t get it to run.

They made us jump through hoops, taking photographs of the serial number on the dvd case, before they turned around and said "your hardware isn't supported".

awesome :)

But it was just that they insisted on photographs etc. when they could have told us this immediately.

I used support only once. By mistake bought an album of soundtrack instead of renting a movie at iTunes store.

support people were exceptionally kind and refunded the money without any extra questions

Yes my daughter once deleted her iTunes library and Apple were very kind. In fairness, she would have only been 7 or 8 so there wasn't much music

it's almost 2AM! Time to sleep.

Whenever I buy music, I have automatic processes that copy the files to 3 disks in 2 locstions, before I ever got to listen to it!

good night everyone! :)

Good night, did not realise it was so late there. You'll be in trouble in the morning!

@PeteH iTunes progressed since then and now you can re-download music from cloud as long as it was purchased once. This is awesome I think.

nah, that's ok. I would be in a trouble if it is 3 or 4AM, but 2 is common. I still have 6 hours to sleep.

you youngsters.....;)

HATS

That is all

hats on hats!