August 12, 2016

 Last night I was up super late grading assessment responses. But I got it done. So it was worth it.

This morning I slept in because I was up super late last night grading assessment responses. I actually didn't sleep in as late as I originally planned but I felt like being at least a little productive with my morning. When I got out of bed I posted all of my graded responses into the online Google Sheets we're using to collaborate on the project. I'm not sure what the next step is, or if there is a next step, or if I'm involved in it if there is one. But for now I am done.

At noon No Man's Sky went live to download. It took me about an hour to download it and then it turns out the game is broken. I would get the initial screen with the developer's name/logo and it would either immediately crash to the desktop or it would freeze until I clicked and then it would crash to the desktop. I updated everything I could think of, I restarted my computer several times, at one point there was an update for the game, but nothing worked. I was really annoyed.

I checked online and saw that this was a common complaint for a lot of PC users, leading to a huge amount of dislike for the game on Steam. As a last ditch effort I downloaded it to my laptop because I saw somewhere that it seemed to be affecting AMD more than NVIDIA. My desktop is AMD and my laptop is NVIDIA, so I figured it couldn't hurt. While it downloaded I read a short story by O. Henry, so that was a positive.

After the game downloaded I crossed my fingers and clicked Play. And it worked. At least it got past the first screen, so I took that as a good sign. I had already hooked my laptop up to one of the TVs I use as a monitor for my desktop, and before going any further I also connected a keyboard and mouse to my laptop. Thankfully I wasn't just being an optimist by doing that because the game ended up working completely, it wasn't just a fake out. Also, my laptop is enough of a beast that I was able to play the game on decent settings without anything horrible happening.

I ended up playing most of the rest of the day, with breaks for dinner and laundry. Apart from the game being broken and not even loading for a lot of people, there were also people who got in but still had issues with the game. I'm not really one of those people. I think a lot of people were expecting an MMO, which I thought it was fairly obvious that it wouldn't be. The only thing I would like would be to build a homebase but that would discourage people from exploring so it is probably for the best. I definitely would have been spending most of my day today gathering resources for a house. In the end I spent most of my day walking around my first planet discovering stuff. It's one of those games where you walk to one spot to discover something and then you see something a little further out, so you go there and then you see something a little further out, and it continues. Which is like an MMO so I guess it has that. One of the biggest aspects of the game is discovering new plants and animals and then renaming them. I think you get twice as many points for renaming something and then uploading it to the server, rather than just uploading the randomly generated name the game gives it. I ended up pulling up a random name generator and clicking through that to come up with names. I've only been on my home planet and one small one nearby but when I get to my next big planet I want to go with a library theme. Like naming all the animals after authors and all the plants after books, or something along those lines.

Even though the game is a lot of the same after awhile I foresee myself playing a lot of it. I'm really glad it came out after I finished school.

And now I'm going to bed because it is late and I've got to work in the morning. It is going to be a looong day.