Really? Are you referring to the totally failed, money-wasting exercise on upstate NY revitalization? Or were you referring to her support and vote for the war in Iraq? Or were you referring to all of those other great pieces of legislation she sponsored and saw through ... oh, right, there really weren't any.

Why? Because her phony "reset" stunt with Russia worked out so well? Check with the people in Crimea and throughout Ukraine on that one perhaps. Or were you thinking of her proud handling of the affairs in Libya, where her championing of the use of force to topple the leader there, with essentially no further involvement, has resulted in chaos, death, and the insurgence of whole new ISIS and AQ-style franchises murdering people by the thousands? Yes! Really something to be proud of. Or were you thinking perhaps of her wise ability to so gracefully handle the situation in Syria, which has turned into a calamity for millions of dead and feeling refugees that are now swamping Europe and carrying radical jihadism with them? Yes, that was really a moment of pride, promising but never delivering on the support that the moderate anti-Assad segments of Syrian society needed, allowing the radicals to move in wholesale, followed by Russia and Iran. A real moment of pride, there.

I suppose what you really mean is that she can be proud that she leveraged her position as Secretary of State to get foreign governments to hand millions of dollars to her family business while she was in office, in exchange for better access to her while they had issues in front of the State Department. Yes, by her standards, she should definitely be proud of how wealthy she made her family while she held that public office. Way to go, Hillary!

You're not really saying that you can't understand a rhetorical reference to the rise of ISIS coming from the power vacuum that Obama created by pulling out of Iraq. Really? Or are you that unable to understand those sorts of references?

Right. In practical terms, he can't recommend prosecution because it was clear before hand that Obama's political appointee in charge of the DoJ wasn't going to prosecute his designated successor no matter how clearly the FBI established her trail of untruths and mis-handling of classified material. Loretta Lynch (and thus her boss, Obama) is the decision maker here, not Comey. You're just pretending you don't understand this.

Weaker than the presence of classified material in Patreaus' home safe? Weaker than a bit of sensitive material in the background of a sailor's selfy shot? You know, things that resulted in criminal convictions and even jail time? But her flouting of both administration rules and the law, her possession of many classified documents on unsecure systems and her passing them around to her staff and lawyers (people without security clearances) - that's "weak" by comparison? You're deliberately pretending you don't understand the situation.

Because it was in the context of trying to get to the bottom of her (and her boss's) lying about the Benghazi mess for political reasons right before an election that it became clear she had been running her official email on (and ONLY on) a home computer. And in examining that situation, it became clear that she had - on becoming aware that she was under subpoena - that she destroyed tens of thousands of federal documents, and repeatedly lied about what she did, when she did it, and why she did it. Right: you can't separate the two topics because SHE is the one responsible for them being part of an uninterrupted spectrum of incompetence and deceit that doesn't begin and end with just one topic.

So the problem here is that you don't actually understand the different branches of government and how they work. That explains a lot about your rambling, here. "The GOP" is a political party. It has no authority. Are you talking about congress? They could charge her with contempt for lying as she did in under oath in front of them, and that's still a possibility. But otherwise, the only entity capable of charging her with anything is the Obama administration. You get that, right? No, apparently you don't.

Blah blah. She said that she did NOT say it, and that's simply a lie. Regardless, you're carefully avoiding the long career of deliberate lies about all sorts of things - from the ridiculously meaningless (why lie about why her parents called her Hillary?) to the clearly self-aggrandizing (landing under sniper fire!) to the long, long parade of lies designed to deflect from public awareness of her corruption. Everything from her days in Arkansas to countless bits of business under her control in the White House, to her frequent throwing-under-the-bus of staff with a lie about why, to her non-stop lying - right to this day - about her "mistake" in setting up an off-the-books mail server to hide her public records from scrutiny ... acts serious enough that the DoJ has been doling out immunity deals like candy. Focusing on how half-truthy her spin on the her "it's the Gold Standard" assertion was then or is now is just you trying to avoid the rest of her career's disingenuous handling of the truth.

OK, I guess you consider her to be a more authoritative voice on her character than the judge who said she threatened his life. Do you have a reason to consider that judge to be a liar? Please explain.

Please explain some of the racist things he DOES say. Or are you one of these people who can't understand the difference between race and culture? While you're at it, of course, please chime in on Hillary Clinton's choice to do things like yukking her way through a skit at a fundraiser where the joke is that being late for events is an example of operating on "Colored People Time."

No, you just can't read. The issue isn't Bill Clinton, the issue is Hillary Clinton and her personal staff spending time and your tax dollars to deliberately engage in a campaign of character assassination against the women who - by either willingly or unwillingly being the Bill Clinton sexcapade and abuse show - were going to poison the well for Hillary's personal eventual quest for political power. She would never have progressed past being a lawyer getting rapists easy plea deals if she hadn't ridden her husband's coat-tails all the way to national office. She put up with his toxic womanizing from the days he had Arkansas state troopers bringing women to his hotel room all the way through his abuse of women in the White House - why? Because to leave him would mean leaving power and access to more of it. But she went WAY beyond merely tolerating that abuse.

That's the point - it's not about him. It's about HER deliberately seeking to wreck the lives of those women because she needed to change the narrative, despite anyone and everyone familiar with her husband knowing exactly how he conducted himself. Bringing up Bill Clinton would be pointless, except for the fact that Hillary - who panders like crazy on the "women's issues" front - has no problem treating other women like trash when she feels the personal political need to do. That sheds light on her character, and you, like the rest of her supporters, would really love to avoid the topic by lazily claiming it's all about Bill. It's not.

Oh, I get it now. You're this guy: "Hillary lies and uses character assassination and has throughout her career including while in public office, but Trump is worse, so I will pretend none of that is true about Hillary. Likewise I'll ignore that even the DoJ being run by politicians from her own party feel obliged to actually issue many formal immunity agreements to get to the bottom of her ever-shifting stories and destroyed records."

How many immunity agreements has the DoJ felt the need to dole out while looking into Trump's affairs? How many times has the director of the FBI said about Trump the same things he's had to conclude about a long list of Clinton's assertions (that they were "untrue," and that she was "extremely careless" in her handling of classified material, and so on).

Do these [abc.net.au] look like Mar's rovers to you?

No, and:

1) ... nor would you have the payload capacity to send something like that
2) ... nor would something like that survive the Martian environment (dust, radiation, cold, pressures low enough for outgassing, difficulty with radiating excessive heat, etc)
3) ... nor can you use that sort of power source on Mars
4) ... nor do you have people there to do the (extreme) sort of maintenance such a vehicle requires
5) ... nor do they do the most complex operations, only doing the (proportionally very simple) ferrying operations
6) ... nor do they have to avoid risk at all cost due to the lack of people there to fix it if it goes awry and hits something
6) ... nor do they have to avoid risk at all cost due to the lack of people there to fix *whatever it might run into* if it goes awry and hits something. ... and about fifty other things.

The ISS is just floating there doing nothing.

Deflection. The question was, in construction and research on ISS, do they use the available human labour, or do they send robots to do it? Of course robots are used where there aren't humans, but that's not the topic of discussion; we're talking about a world where there's a human settlement on Mars. You're arguing that robots outcompete humans in a space environment where humans are. Well, we have precisely one space environment where humans are - ISS. Where are all of the robots outcompeting them?

I'll reiterate:

It's certainly an arguable point as to whether it's worth the cost sending humans in the first place - but once they're there, there's no debate at all about whether it's cheaper to use their labour or to engineer, build, and send robots to do the same task.

Why should Benghazi come up? That affair, in and of itself, isn't an example of her law breaking. It was an example (in the event of the death of the ambassador and three others) an example of her incompetence and dismissive attitude towards underlings. And it was an example (in the event of her and her boss deliberately, knowingly lying repeatedly to the public generally and to the faces of the dead people's families literally while standing next to their coffins) of her general aversion to the truth and her willingness to look you, me, and and everyone else in the eye and lie. About little things (where her name came from, whether she "landed under sniper fire," about being "dead broke" and having trouble buying her multiple houses, etc) and big things (like her motivation for and practice of running her State Department email off a home computer, the casual disregard for above-classified document security, and the destruction of federal records while under subpoena).

That last bit IS about law breaking, but was more about the cover-up of her incompetence and lying. Her email arrangements, of course, were made so that she could run her foundation-related influence selling machinery without those pesky FOIA requests coming in later for a look.

When Trump BSes about trivial rhetorical stuff, it doesn't help. Just like it doesn't help when Clinton does the exact same thing ("I never said the TPP was the gold standard ..." and similar demonstrable "little" lies, the type of which she also trots out every day). But when Clinton deliberately lies about her official conduct and has her entire staff getting immunity deals in order to protect her from consequences that would send anyone else to jail, it's an entirely different level of behavior.

It's especially awful to watch her trot out a hearsay anecdote from an occasionally unstable Miss Universe contestant from 20 years ago to show how mean Trump is towards Latinas (despite the endless praise he gets from Latina women working in many management roles throughout his company) ... this coming from Clinton who personally launched the efforts to smear the reputation of multiple women with whom her husband had been screwing, including some of which were clear cases of abuse on his part. You can and should complain about Trump's ungraceful conversational style and bro-ish behavior. But Clinton's career of personal enrichment at the public trough, character assassination, and decades of deceit and lying is far more sinister.

Regardless, neither are well suited to the office. But one or the other of them will be seating Supreme Court justices. That's all that matters at this point. His choices - which will come from a list we've already seen - will skew towards constructionist jurists inclined to preserve the rights the Constitution protects. Her choices will without question be liberals who, like her, promise to act early and often to erode those rights. I'd rather have his likely flavor of jurists in place when we have future cases involving the Commerce Clause, campaign finance, balance of power issues, and friction around the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth amendments.

Surely this is a joke. How can you possibly have any tech blueprints left to find, 120 hours into the game? Most people essentially max out on their first planet.

You have a serious tolerance for grind. I don't know whether I should congratulate or feel bad for you. ;)

ASCII? You spoiled child, back in my day our games graphics were displayed with blinking readout lights on a board. Old Flashey, we used to call that board. A game of "Hit The Button At The Right Time" used to cost a dime, which was two hours wages at the time, but oh, how I sunk so many dimes into Old Flashey...

I actually liked the gameplay concept. There's nothing wrong with the concept for many people. The problem is that they failed to actually deliver the concept.

I think the difference between the concept and the reality does, however, lay bare a more important element. What most people want out of procgen isn't just that the algorithms can generate diversity... it's that they can generate scenarios that even the coders wouldn't have expected. Some algorithms can do that. Others cannot. NMS's absolutely cannot, they're just standard fractal noise terrain with random primitives, animals that are just armatures with random parts swapped out, etc. For anyone thinking of taking up the mantle of such a game after the failure of NMS, I think that's really going to be a key aspect. Because players are always going to explore worlds faster than developers can make new content, so if your engine is limited to making "things that the devels have thought of", it's always going to wear thin rather quickly.

The real world we live in always keeps presenting new fascinating worlds every time we explore a new place, for a key reason. Real worlds are built by fluid and rigid body interactions (primarily fluid, at least on the large scale) with variable chemistry. Physical properties like viscosity vary over numerous orders of magnitude in different pressure and temperature environments, and there's thousands of different chemical constituents that can be found in bulk, depending on the environment. Furthermore, each body is exposed to anisotropic conditions (bombardment, solar radiation, Coriolis force due to its rotation, etc), and widely varying local conditions like gravity. Basically, the computer equivalent would be CFD with chemical equilibria. Now, of course you can't do some extreme-detail CFD simulation of planets in realtime. But IMHO, if you want interesting generation, you want a generation algorithm that can emulate these sort of *effects*, even if the underlying core mechanism is radically different. Terrain generation algorithms generally make a goal of emulate the effects of uplift/folding, erosion, volcanism, impacts, etc. Recognizing how radically, many-orders-of-magnitude different these can all be in different environments, and with different materials in the same environment, seems key to making landscapes that can defy even creator expectations.

I think Pluto should be the gold standard. Before NH arrived, who would have thought that what we'd find was a giant scar facing Charon where the mantle bubbles out in supermassive convection cells, with mountain-sized icebergs drifting around the soup and collecting in iceberg-mountain ranges on the shore (just to name a couple of the really bizarre things New Horizons discovered)? The issue isn't "could you code a generation algorithm to emulate Pluto?"; of course one can. The question is, "could you code a generation algorithm that would have come up with things as weird as Pluto, without having to explicitly spell them out, without you ever having seen them before"?

I tried to convince myself that it was a "relaxing", "meditative" experience, a "palate cleanser" if you will.

After a while, I just couldn't convince myself of even that minimal goal. It's just... nothing. The terrible gameplay actively discourages you from doing the only thing that the game really offers (exploration), and the exploration is only skin deep due to the shallowness of their generation algorithm.

And really, how can you say NMS feels "solid", when you can walk right through the animals and things don't fall when you mine out the ground from underneath them? What's the opposite of "solid" in this context?

Nothing that the person wrote in that post is in any way accurate.

They do! Those big firefly-esque ones handle differently than the little colonial-viper-ish ones.

No, they don't. They all have the same speed, turning radius, etc. The only difference is that on the big ones, when you get out you can take falling damage ;)

You could do it by going to a world someone will later return to and mining resources

Nope. It has no effect. Resources don't sync between instances.

they were planning on getting, or taking a crashed ship, or if they did any terraforming with the grenades, using your own grenades to destroy what they did. (If you do enough terraforming, it sticks)

No, it distinctly does not. And this has been known since the first day after release. Two players even sat around mining stuff in front of each other - even day/night and locations of sentinels, etc aren't synced between player instances. Heck, more to the point, if you mine something, leave the system, then go back to the same spot, all of your changes will be lost, even in your own local instance.

And I do believe that selling enough of certain items to vendors will change the prices offered. You sell enough Emeril to a vendor...it will lower the price it offers.

It does not. More to the point, it escapes me how you could not realize this, as this is the way most people make money - searching out a starred system and selling the same item over and over again, because the price remains fixed no matter how much you sell.

Is there anything more you'd like to just make up about the game? Or did you pick up a copy from Bizarro Universe or something that's a different game from the one that the rest of us have?

Nice reading comprehension. In the game files. The game files distributed contain the actual assets used by the game, and then a bunch of random stuff not used by the game, in different directories. These unused assets range all the way to the whimsical, such as a lego-man dummy player model on a unicycle, to a monkey in a hat, to the Fallout logo. Among the "not used by the game" stuff are the files that were used to fake the E3 demo, in an "E3" directory. These models are only partially rigged, and thus could not actually be used in the game. More to the point, if you try to include a model that large in the game, you can't even see it. Creatures in game don't behave like in the trailer, their actions don't affect the landscape like in the trailer, etc - all of that was hard-coded. Faked.

Really, once you start digging into the game files, it's amazing the depth that their fakery went. Even the "player-named star systems" that you see during the loading screen are just from a hard-coded list in the game files.

More to the point, they continued lying about the content right up to launch (e.g. incl. at the release party) and in tweets after the release (the "slowed down planet rotation", the "people can't see each other because too many people are playing" lie, etc).

Indeed. I was amazed at how weak the generation engine is. Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty - they're using a good graphics engine and have artists with a good eye. But the terrain is just standard diamond-square (fractal noise terrain) modified with random hard-coded primitives. No biomes, no continents, just noise and a global sea level. The animals are just built by swapping out pieces of armatures and randomly choosing premade textures. They don't even bother to check that any of the parts make sense (lots and lots of "derpasauruses" who missed leg day), or that the metadata about the animal matches its form (it's amazing how many vegetarian T-rexes you'll encounter). Plants are often not modified at all. In a lot of cases they inexplicably put the exact same thing on numerous planets (the same aggro crab), or even every planet (the same giant coral, the same mushroom-covered rock, etc - found on every planet in the game).

So. Weak.

Indeed, it's amazing how many people on the NMS reddit sub have written posts about "I'm trying to find a way to enjoy this game and it hasn't been working... please make suggestions!"

Sadly, you can't force fun. I think people would have been a lot more likely to forgive the missing features and even the explicit unambiguous lies** if the game had at least been fun. Except that it's not. HG is terrible at gameplay design. Their formula for gameplay is really simple: "don't let them get hurt, make everything available and easy to acquire, and then - so that the game isn't over in a matter of minutes - load the game down with grind." And if people finish too quickly? "Dramatically increase the grind."

  ** While a lot of people singled out the multiplayer lie as a big one (where even the manufacturers had been duped, with the boxes having to add a sticker to cover up the multiplayer label), the whole planetary dynamics one may be even more brazen. With multiplayer, they tried to pretend that the reason players couldn't see each other was because the servers were overloaded - even though there's no player model in the game files, no attempts to send packets, no open ports, no references to multiplayer anywhere in the game files, day/night cycles and NPC positions aren't synced between instances, and you can outright pause the game. But in the rotation case, after having made fun of games that just use skyboxes and talked up their real-world dynamics, they made up this whole story about how playtesters had been "confused" by things moving around, so they "slowed down" planetary motion. The reality is, of course, that they use skyboxes. Nothing moves relative to anything else, and nothing can; planets are just placed at random coordinates in a box. You can't have things orbit the sun when the sun is just a painting and doesn't even match the location of your light source. Unless they want us to believe that to "slow down rotation", rather than simply setting speeds to zero, they removed their entire solar system model and entire lighting model and re-did them with an entirely faked one.