An interesting month away from gaming

After moving out my son has communicated and dropped by more often than we expected. He did have a sort of baptism of fire, coming down with influenza A in his second week, but he got through that. He has remarked that adulting is a bit harder than he expected, but overall, he seems happier within himself.

Between being out of sight / out of mind, and a focus on him being 21 and responsible for himself, I have felt less stressed in general about him since he moved out.

I also took the opportunity to box up and pack away everything he left and got a skip in and did a big spring clean. Having a neater and more organised house has been therapeutic, and I feel more settled within myself.

It was all worth being too busy to game for a couple of weeks.

Then I got sick. My diverticulitis has become chronic this year, triggered mostly by stress, caused mostly by my daughter and wife. I couldn’t get on top of the flare up, and the ongoing infection set off an unrelenting and severe migraine that lasted many days. It was the sickest I have been in 30 years. I expect the next step is to be referred to a surgeon, which I am trying to delay for as long as possible.

So that added up to about a month of no gaming.

Recently I have logged back into The Last Caretaker, gone through update 5.5, and methodically cleared some of the tasks and quests I hadn’t really enjoyed and put aside. I also found my first whale. That game is heading towards a full release and while still a little quirky, is coming together well.

While I haven’t been playing much, I have been watching a lot of YouTube content about Satisfactory. There might be a DLC being released for that, which I would be very interested in.

I have had half a dozen sessions in EVE but not been doing much of anything. The Cradle of War update has just been released. There was nothing in social media that seemed relevant to me, but I plan on going through the patch notes just in case.

Just as I was getting back into a bit of gaming my 6 month old 5070Ti had a sudden burst of maximum fan noise and then died a couple seconds later. I have to hunt down the warranty process on that – but I purchased a replacement from a different brand since I did not want to miss weeks of gaming.

Meanwhile last night at 2:30am I was woken up by my latest diverticulitis flare up.

Moved Out

My son finally moved out. The consensus amongst my peers is that they would have moved out as soon as they could, living a little rough, instead of waiting for all the creature comforts to be delivered like he did.

It is a strange thought that after seeing him almost daily for 21 years, we may never see him as often again for the rest of our lives. If he does boomerang back, I expect having this taste of freedom will mean that he will never stay again long term.

He of course left a mess behind, which I am slowly sorting through, at the expense of my gaming time.

Fenris has released a few EVE Online articles recently. One was about Skill Boost bundles.

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/new-skill-boost-bundles2025

Last year they aligned the amounts of skill points in Skill Training Boost Bundles with how many base skill points you train in a month, to make the value comparison compared to PLEX etc, easier to work out. I did not realise that – but it is not a bad idea.

They have reset the purchase history for these bundles so you can buy them again now if you wish.

They are also going to be introducing updates to the HUD.

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/eve-evolved-a-new-horizon-for-the-hud

There were a couple small hard to see screen captures showing some possible options which I found interesting.

One was having the system map on the HUD which I could work with.

Another seemed to be a variation of the system map which showed connected systems, which I could also work with.

I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Not so smart

I have a nuanced opinion on AI – from it being an exciting and powerful tool when applied with a silo approach, through to horror and fear at the untrustworthy and irresponsible custodians behind the rush towards artificial superintelligence.

While the future of AI is not clear, I suspect its immediate impact will come from the explosion of the AI economic bubble. I hate to think how much of my retirement funds are locked up in AI related shares, what might be left after such a crash, and how long it will take to recover to something I can retire on again.

I look enviously at my colleagues and friends who are 5 to 10 years older than me and have retired and cashed out their superannuation at what is likely to be near peak valuations.

I know plenty of people who use AI at various levels of depth, but for me the primary direct interaction is in the measurably poorer search results Google now delivers.

On the weekend while researching my EVE fits, I decided to use Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot to answer the questions I had. I started about 30 different conversations with a question, each generally going back and forth a few times.

One question was please list every ship in EVE Online that has an exploration role bonus.

It provided a list of about a dozen.

I pointed out it was missing some ships, and to please provide a full list.

It apologised and agreed it had made a mistake. It then listed just two hulls, naming them both destroyers and indicating they were more flexible to fit because they had more mid slots for fitting things like inertia stabilizers.

I pointed out one of those hulls was a frigate not a destroyer, and that inertia stabilizers were fitted to low slots. I then asked if they could please provide a full list like I asked in my first question.

It apologised and agreed it had made a mistake. It then explained the use of inertia stabilizers.

Not a single question chain was answered fully or with complete accurately.

As I have said for a while, to use the Google Search engine currently you need to already know the optimal way of asking your question, and what the correct answers are.

Life intended

My 21-year-old son is in the process of moving out of home and into a share house.

He has impactful ADHD and anxiety and parenting him has not been simple. While we support his move and think it will be good for him, we cannot assume a level of normality in the process as he is able to find problems in unexpected places and upscale any consequences.

While all the interviews and checks and paperwork and initial monies have been paid, his new room sits empty while he waits for his new bed to be delivered.

We have tried to suggest he work on other tasks in parallel to make the move go smoother, but he cannot deviate from the linear process he has come up with in his own head.

It is hard to know with him where neurodivergence ends, and laziness with excuses starts.

This past weekend might have been the last weekend at home before moving out, and the last opportunity to have a day or two to organise what he wants to take with him, what he wants to store, and what he wants to throw out. He refused to do anything because the bed had not been delivered. Instead, he was excited about going out clubbing all weekend – it being his 30th weekend in a row.

One of my favourite quotes is that life cannot be saved up, and it must be spent to have any value. I believe it is a variation of “Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved” by D H Lawrence.

I don’t place judgement on what people spend their lives on. I think that is too subjective. I think the important characterisation is spending life with intent. If that is finding a cure for all cancers, or playing computer games as much as you can, or seeing how many weekends you can go clubbing in a row, you are finding value in your life.

So, I guess I might have to cut my son some slack.

Anyway – next weekend might be the last weekend at home, or the one after that, or the one after that, and so on and so forth. I noticed the online store he purchased from reported everything in stock but then indicated it could take up to 6 weeks before it was dispatched. So, in stock could mean on a boat from China, or in a Chinese warehouse, or plausibly just ordered but not yet manufactured. He did pay to expedite his order, but logic dictates if his bed stock is not onshore, expediting it won’t make it arrive quicker unless it means he steals someone else’s position in the queue. We will have to wait and see.

Interestingly I said our son could use our camp bed which is comfortable if he wanted to move in earlier. My wife metaphorically kicked me under the table, and then angrily told me off later because it gave my son the impression I wanted him out of the house as soon as possible. I suspect my wife is not as ready for that to happen as I am.

Meanwhile in EVE I’ve realised almost every one of my ship fittings on my newer toon is now out of date. I spent some time updating some, but it is a bit of a chore given how far away from Jita I am, and with how many ships they have already accumulated. I have added a bunch of tasks on the to-do list, but I need to try and action some of the other goals I have in between updating each hull.

ADIA64 Extreme

I have been using infopanel for the last 3 months to display hardware statistics on my Corsair Xenon Edge. It was working well, and allowed me to quickly pick up temperature and resource issues while gaming.

Then with no apparent change to it or the system, the nicely laid out onscreen profiles were resized into small rectangles and stacked on top of each other every time I rebooted. I could see in the log the positions were all being reset on the shutdown of the application, but I could not work out why or how to stop it.

That sent me looking for yet another alternative, but I am running out of options I haven’t already tried. I looked at a bunch of widgets this time around, but I ended up trying and then purchasing ADIA64 Extreme. It was expensive (at around $95 AUD), but I was able to use its sensor panel tool to show all the information I was using with infopanel.

ADIA64 Extreme’s SensorPanel Manager was pretty clunky and slow to use, and is missing a bunch of standard options such as colour threshold changes on standard text sensor displays, or being able to do and display calculations on data.

I wasn’t really happy about paying so much, but it does look like it might be a replacement for a bunch of free tools I use to cover my hardware statistical information, such as Core Temp, CrystalDiskInifo, HWiNFO64, HWRadar and Speccy.

I’ve missed a few days of gaming. The neurodivergent fuckery I frequently deal with robs me of the time and sometimes mental capacity. As I have said before, I write alot about it, but almost never post what I write.

I find myself like a lifeguard – finding ways out of the predicaments my family swim into, throwing out preservers and diving in when they start to sink, keep afloat while they fight my help and try to pull me under, and then when I manage to drag them out of deep water, I rewrite the narrative of their many rescues to try to minimise the damage they have done.

Too long

I have had a PS5 for some years now. It is primarily used when I have the urge to play Grand Turismo. It is in my study, hooked up to one of my PC monitors.

Today I picked up a cheap copy of the PS5 game – “Lego Star Wars – The Skywalker Saga”. Lego games are one of the few games I don’t mind playing on a console.

I also have a PlayStation Portal Remote Player. It is convenient and suits playing certain types of games (like LEGO) and for doing admin tasks like applying updates without taking over one of my PC screens.

I turned on the remote player, and it asked me to log in via QR code or manually. I did a manual log in and had to use an SMS two factor authentication code, and then it applied the update.

After a reboot it then asked me again to log in via QR code or manually. I did a manual log in and had to use an SMS two factor authentication code, and then it said the update would be paused until the remote’s battery was higher than 50%. I plugged it in to charge, and shortly after it applied the update.

After a reboot it then asked me again to log in via QR code or manually. I did the QR code – and then had to log in and trust the browser on my phone after using an SMS two factor authentication code. This log in required me to approve several updated terms of use.

Finally, I turned on the PS5. It also required me to log in – which I did via QR code which was quicker. Then it also had updates to be applied.

I grabbed one of my controllers to manage this – but is battery level was too low. I had to charge a bit, make some selections, charge a bit, until I got the PS5 updated.

Then I had to reconnect the remote to the PS5.

Then I inserted the LEGO Star Wars game – and it took quite a long time to copy the game. Then I had to wait for the game to update.

Finally, it was time to play – and I had lost interest.

Do it all

In The Last Caretaker I have set up the Fabricator on my boat to have all the inputs connected – oxygen, methane, fresh water, electricity, oil, diesel and petrol. This makes it much easier to mindlessly be able to create what you want when you want.

Next door to the Fabricator I have an oxygen tank fed from a portable oxygen generator, and a small water tank fed from a dehumidifier.

Next to the diesel engine is a tank of diesel for the fabricator – isolated from the rest of the boat’s tanks.

Next to the electric engine is a tank of petrol for the fabricator – isolated from the rest of the boat’s tanks, along with a tank of Menthane.

On the back of the boat is a Sabatier Reactor which feeds the Menthane tank.

It takes its water input from the second water source on the boat (its water pump), and its Carbon Dioxide from the boats engine and a portable electric generator.

This second water source also feeds the Soilforge and Food Processor. Those allow me to convert all the Biological material into Food material and then into Food.

On the deck is a Distillation tower to convert oil into diesel and petrol. I am shuffling around fuel storage tanks to remove them from the sides of the boat – after hitting a mine in fog and losing a bunch of them.

I still have my diesel refinery and petrol refinery to be able to convert biological material into fuels as a last resort.

Power comes from 7 Typhoon wind generators and 5 Lumilite solar panels, stored in 8 medium batteries.

I will shortly chase down the new sources of oil.

All told while a touch crowded, the boat is rather self sufficient.

Nothing to report from EVE – aside I am logging in daily.

Multitasking

I tend to buy all the family gifts, including for my own Birthday, Fathers Day and Christmas. This is because – while well intentioned, my wife is a horrendous gift shopper.

I will usually get myself a small selection of some sort of pop culture item, or a Blueray set or CD, or a good brand tool like some screw drivers, or a book to read, or an item or two of clothing. I also tend to give myself a Steam gift card.

I add these to my Steam wallet, and by the time the Steam sales occur I will usually have enough to grab the items on my wish list which are heavily discounted.

In the last sale I purchased the following titles to add to my collection of games to get around to play at some future point in time:

Meanwhile I decided I need to teach myself to play multiple games in the same timeframe. So today in EVE saw me moving ships back to my home base and refitting some with all the extra T2 modules I can use, while in The Last Caretaker I installed the helipad on my ship and continued with neatening all my hoses. Later I might fire up Satisfactory. I am at the point in that game where I need to set up some of the more complicated manufacturing lines – and I am stuck at how to neatly source the materials from the large factories I have producing all the basic building blocks of the game through to these new factory lines.

Giving a rats

I figured I need to get back into the habit of logging into EVE.

To start with I still need to collect the scattered loot and ships from the last event I ran.

Logging in, I found a new event had just begun called Operation Avalon with accompanying daily log in rewards.

The operation involves chasing around investigation sites which move systems once enough are cleared. If you are lucky enough to have an investigation spawn nearby, you can often run a site or two before a steady stream of players starts to turn up and everything becomes contested.

I ran a few salvage sites in this way – since they seemed to be the easiest. They were worth about 8M ISK each on average. As other players rushed in I then lost interest. I have enough stress in my life already right now without adding to it with stressful gaming.

Looking at some of the loot on offer helped with this indifference. I am not sure about anyone else, but I couldn’t give a rats about SKIN design elements or booster rewards.

My newer account has now had a couple extra months of skill training under their belt, so there are a bunch of ship fittings I need to update to T2. That should keep me busy for a little while.

Wall Sockets

I purchased The Last Caretaker in March this year and have played it for over 160 hours, with plenty of life still left in it. That comes in at a current cost of about $0.24 an hour.

The game is in early access, but entirely playable. It has been available since November last year and update 3 had been released just before I started to play. An impactful update 3.5 was released in April, an impactful update 4 was released in May, and an impactful update 5 was released in June. While I have complained about having to return to locations I had previously completed, these updates have had lots of worthwhile new content and new game play.

The Last Caretaker is developed by a small independent studio called Channel 37. I don’t know all the ins and outs of how small and how independent it is, but I did note comments suggesting it has a dozen or less developers.

I expect some big studio or venture capital group will come along and ruin it all, but in the meantime, I hope to enjoy many more updates.

For all the things added to the game in Update 5, I have been primarily focused on the Wall Sockets. You need to route various resources through locations using hoses. The physics behind these hoses is a bit skewed, and they tend to loop through floors and appear where they shouldn’t. Using chains of wall sockets I have been busy cleaning up my boat and bases of these loops.

Only one thing at a time

At the start of June I had 155 hours in The Last Caretaker.

I then noticed Satisfactory 1.2 had been released – so I switched over to it. I am not sure how many hours I have put into it over the last couple weeks, but it would have been a lot. I am currently up to 890 hours in that game.

Aside from logging in for daily rewards, I have not touched EVE, or any other game for that matter.

I had not noticed the pattern before, but I only seem to be able to focus on one game at a time.

I got to a good place in The Last Caretaker. I have done the main things in the game, set up my ship as I wanted, and have a big base in the Lazarus Complex. The game is in early access – so there is the promise of more. While the game could do with some performance tuning and fixing some resource leaks, it plays well and I like the backstory and content. What I haven’t really liked is the impact of its ongoing development.

The game play can have an annoying habit of changing. The sharks were problematic to hunt and deal with – and then they changed and could be easily and safely farmed. The nightcrawlers suddenly started to swarm me and my equipment in substantially larger numbers. You couldn’t go out at night and falling into the water was a death sentence. I scrambled for solutions, but it wasn’t fun. Then the Eclipse flashlight turned into a long-range lightsaber and instantly vaporized them – so the tables turned. Then the swarming and volumes died down, while the Eclipse flashlight became a lot less effective. It seemed to have ended up in an ok place – but these sorts of jarring balance changes can detract from playing the game.

The developers also add content to existing locations. Locations that I had already carefully gone through, cleaned out, and found all the content in. It breaks something for me to go back and revisit every location to work out if and what might have been added.

So, it was probably a good time to put the game down, but I do plan to go back as new content is released.

I rate Satisfactory highly. I started a new world from scratch for the 1.2 patch and used the option for the resource node allocation to be random. This makes the game easier at the start – and frankly more fun. It also stops you just repeated your old set ups – get the oil from here, uranium for there, and so on. The adjustment to the project assembly phases, research tiers, and the MAM research trees also give you more flexibility in the order of what you do, and earlier access to some technologies which has again made the game more fun. I expect I will keep playing this world until I have gained access to all manufacturing options.

The Last Caretaker – Diesel

I am up to 140 hours in The Last Caretaker.

It scratches an itch in a similar way to EVE. There are goals that the game feeds you, and you can also set your own – with plenty of different approaches you can take and mindless effort in between.

Let’s start with fuel.

This is my ship, docked at the only oil rig in the game. My ship is what I call neatly cluttered. I like being able to fit in as much storage and equipment as possible, so I can manufacture as much as I can on it.

The ship is propelled by two engines – one electric and one diesel. Both are fully upgraded, and I can run the Electric engine all day every day.

The ship comes with an internal 2,000 litre Diesel fuel tank. I have 14 more 2,000 litre tanks attached along the Starboard side of the hull, giving a usable 30,000 litres. That means I must dock on the port side.

I have two other 2,000 litre Diesel tanks which are not used in day-to-day travel. One is attached to a Distillation tower, and the other to a Fabricator.

With both engines running at around 90%, I average 45km/h, and my fuel burn is around 300lt/km, giving a range of 100km.

As mentioned, I also have a Distillation tower and 10 additional 2,000 litre oil tanks.

These are mostly mounted on the side of the Bridge and can be walked though / under without issue.

The Distillation Tower converts each 2,000 litres of oil into 3,600 litres of Diesel. So, I have the equivalent of 66,000 litres of diesel, giving a range of approximately 220km. For context, from one side of the known map to the other is around 20km.

Further I have a Diesel Refinery on the ship which converts organic material into Diesel, at 4L per unit. So, every 75 Units of organic material equates to about 1km of travel. Generally, I use it to get rid of excess material, but it is an emergency option if needed.

Despite carrying all this fuel, I still have plenty of room on deck to land and takeoff with the gyrocopter. It is the surprising level of flexibility in which you can set things up which makes the game enjoyable.

(I can arguably carry less fuel – but I am offloading it in various caches as I move around the map.)

The Distillation also creates petrol, which is used by generators, flame weapons and the gyrocopter, but I might talk about petrol another day.

Sailing alone

I have not played much EVE in the last few weeks. I did have a couple of solid sessions and have ensured I picked up the daily task rewards for the month.

Mostly I have been playing The Last Caretaker – now up over 70 hours.

As mentioned, it has its faults, but it can also keep you mindlessly busy.

I have reached 27 of 30 available levels. I have sent my first rocket into space, visited the listener station, and am about to start on setting up for the second rocket. I have cleared some Nodes, Habitats, Outposts, Warehouses and have just finished organising fuel production on the Black Vien Station. The boat is set up to manufacture just about everything.

It has at least been worth the price of admission.

The game does follow the trend of making some things more difficult than they should – such as taking screenshots and saving your progress. I am not sure why games are taking this approach, but this is certainly not the first.

Spending

I spent about 100M ISK of my Alt’s newfound wealth on 80 odd levels of new skills and visiting PI.

I was able to look at the 1 to 10M ISK skill books now. Picking the new skills was a reminder that I have been playing EVE for a very long time. I did not have to hum and haw over my decisions – I knew exactly what was worthwhile and when the cost investment made sense.

I need to remember that in how I view the EveLens tool.

Amongst others, I picked up some more Ore processing, Market and Rigging skills. I also picked up new skills in Cloaking, Nanite Paste, PI and Hauling.

For most of the purchases I applied 3 ranks immediately from my pool of Free Skill Points. That makes the game much more playable.

So far, I have made the barest start on some PI colonies. While I remembered lots about skills, I initially struggled with basic PI tasks. It is not as intuitive as it should be.

I have also played The Last Caretaker for 5+ hours now, an interesting early access first person survival game. It does some things well, but sometimes it starts into a stuck black screen, has difficult to judge parkour mechanics, and horrible combat, which there is a lot of. It has promise, and I don’t mind the story line. We shall see how it pans out.

I am also 2/3s of a way through a book. I haven’t read a book in a long time. I picked up the Star Wars Thrawn novel by Timothy Zahn after being intrigued by the character in the Ahsoka series. I don’t entirely like the writing style, but Thawn is fascinating, and the nepotism and politics in the Empire is shown well.

Event Cleanup

Happy Easter Sunday.

There was a perfunctory collection of eggs left out for the family which received good natured thanks, but we are past any excitement for such things. The only “child” left in the house is 17 and earns good money at her casual job, so can buy chocolate whenever she might have a craving. In fact, her job has already given her easter chocolate.

Like with hot cross buns, I never have easter eggs before Easter Sunday. It is funny how the scarcity in my youth still reaches through time to influence my thinking today. There are still a couple brands that have that original smell and flavour which sends me back to those times.

Growing up my dad was on an average sort of working wage. We always had a roof over our head, food on the table and bills paid, but with four kids there wasn’t a lot of luxury. Mum, however, always found routines that made the treat days special.

Over the course of the Gallente Presidential event I moved a Procurer mining barge, Kikimora Destroyer, Executioner Frigate and Exequror Hauler into Sinq Laison. The destroyer and frigate were new.

By the time I earned 1,000 points I had operated out of 3 different stations. While I had sold off the more expensive rewards as their value dropped day by day, I still had a messy collection of general loot and ore which I have now collected over two days and also sold off.

While I normally salvage most of my PVE, I did not do it for the level 1 missions I ran as part of the event. I fitted a T2 Tractor Beam (a recent skill) to the Kikimora and just grabbed what loot cans were within range as I was moving about.

I keep Trade goods (for no reason, I just do) and Tags (the ones agents want). I refine all modules worth less than 25K ISK and sell everything to buy orders if they are within 15% of current average market value. Anything left over I check, generally putting them up for sale, sometimes storing them to sell later, or sometimes refining them if they will take too much effort.

As I expect there will probably be an event stretch goal, I have left the ships in location, retained some favour for quick trade points, only did one tier of the ore task, and am ready to run the trail task which I had not started – to make that whole extended process a bit easier.

I did make use of the much healthier wallet to take the opportunity to upgrade a new clone into +2 learning implants, and I have shuffled around and added to the training queue.

Speaking of training queues, TACN posted about a possible replacement for EVEMon called EVELens.

/ttps://tagn.wordpress.com/2026/04/03/evelens-in-the-footsteps-of-evemon/

https://evelens.dev/

I used EVEMon extensively for years until its development fell away. I have played around with EVELens with my new character, and there is a nostalgia hit, but I am not sure it will become a tool I stick with.

Last, I have swung back on the side of the Xenon Edge. I have started using it to display other small programs – such as my media player, or the task manager when I have it open, and the Simple Sticky Notes that cover my tasks for the current day. It is working rather well for those things you want to be able to glance at quickly, and of course the performance statistics.

An unusual day

Easter Friday has ended here, and it has been an unusual day.

My son managed to arrive home from clubbing without waking us up, and there was no alarm set for my wife’s work or driving my daughter to a sport or band practice, so I had a reasonable sleep in and got up when my body was ready at 7:30am.

I grilled some hot cross buns, made a cup of tea, and then logged into EVE with the mission to finish off this stage of the Gallente election event.

My daughter came downstairs at 9:00am and asked for some hot cross buns and then spent most of the day playing and transposing music that she will be performing in her various school bands next term.

My wife then came downstairs at 10:30am and asked for some hot cross buns and then spent most of the day on social media and reading books.

My son then came downstairs at 12:00pm and asked for some hot cross buns and then spent most of the remainder of his day playing and chatting online.

Apart from hot cross buns, and a walk with my wife, I was left alone and able to play a very long session of EVE. Almost like from the pre-kid days. It was very unusual.

I don’t think I have finished the main stage of one of these events before.

I did a little bit of mining, and some trading, and visited but did not start the campaign trail, but primarily I ran Gallente security missions. I alternated between two L1 agents, rejected anything causing a loss of Amarr or Caldari standings, and taking a break when both were on refusal timers.

It took a while to complete and the value of the rewards have steadily fallen, but it was overall worthwhile. Between PLEX, Political Favors, Presidential Candidate Favor and the Campaign Bus it was worth close to 1B ISK.

The risk was primarily how CCP channeled participants into set locations that were easily camped.

Every time I visited the Dodixie site where you spend your Favor, I had 1 to 3 players cargo scan me. I went there to work out what options were available, to take some screen shots, and to grab a few small drones to complete some of the trade tasks, and the cargo scanners were always there, and the catalysts were always on d-scan.

CCP made ganking the easiest way to collect event rewards.

After that, I spent the rest of the day continuing to work on reestablishing some sort of performance monitoring on my PC – making use of the new Corsair Xenon Edge. I used Rainmeter for many years, but it hasn’t had new functionality for a long time and is a bit fiddly. I was looking to use the Elgato Virtual Steam decks, but the statistics from external sources like iCue would come and go, and statistics from plug-ins would occasionally just freeze.

By chance I came across a free tool called InfoPanel. It is a bit quirky and repetitive when setting up profiles, and it doesn’t prompt you to save when you close the app which has caught me out a few times.

https://infopanel.net/

But I have been able to set up the basics I had covered in Steam Deck and was doing in Rainmeter.

I was playing a 4K EVE client at the time of the above screen shot. While the 5070Ti did not do a huge amount for Star Citizen, it had a surprisingly big impact on EVE. Everything just runs cooler and easier.

So far InfoPanel seems stable and reliable. I still have work to do, such as deciding on the primary source of statistics and setting thresholds to change colours for alerts and what not, but it might be the solution I go with.

Sadly, if I had come across it before, I could have probably done without the Xenon Edge.

(Growing up we did not get treats or sweet foods all that often, and I have fond memories of getting hot cross buns once a year on Good Friday. Having hot cross buns turning up in store just after Christmas ruins that – so I refuse to allow them in the house except on and just after Good Friday. I feel a bit sorry for my family who don’t seem as sentimental, but they do begrudgingly admit it keeps them tasting a bit more special. I get relegated to preparing them because I’m quite fussy about toasting them just right, like my mother did. They might also just be lazy.)

They don’t make them like they used to

For over 30 years I have worked in IT roles primarily around maintaining productive ERP systems. The senior colleagues I first started working with – some who mentored and trained me, have been retiring.

A number have looked around at those who are still working and passed over their old clients. I have picked up half a dozen over the years. Most were not commercially viable – it is more being charitable, keeping them ticking over until the business closes or new owners migrate them to different systems.

One of those clients had an outage yesterday. The version of database and application was 26 years old – and something I had not worked on for 15 or 20 years. An unpleasantly stressful situation I find myself in on occasion. My memory did not fail me, and I was able to help them and look like I knew what I was doing.

The client had assembled a sizeable team of resources – not one having any clue what to do, or who would speak up in case they got dragged into it. No one would make a decision, no one would action anything I asked or suggested. The long silences and failures to respond delayed a resolution until they decided to bypass procedures and just give me full access so that I could fix it myself.

Once it was up and running, I outlined the processes they needed to follow to identify the cause and how they can monitor for the problem and manually address it in future. I just heard crickets. No thanks, no plan, just the quiet sound of relief that the disaster seemed to be over.

They don’t make IT staff like they used to.

My burnt ramp in Star Citizen disappeared the next time I logged in. I am still down the rabbit hole of looking at my PC performance.

The new 5070 seemed to cause some stability issues with my PC, but as I have found in recent years Windows 11 seems to resolve these itself. Running an EVE 4K client window on the 4060 uses 80% of the GPU CPU. That explains why I had to allocate each EVE client to a separate 4060. They only use 30% of the 5070 – so it runs cooler and easier.

I haven’t looked at the CPU and memory hardware configuration yet, but I have been looking at memory usage. The DuckDuckGo browser I was using for Dotlan was using 1 to 2GB of RAM all the time, regardless on if I had used it or not. I turned off the fast start up and the AI features and applied some other suggested tweaks, and now it only uses RAM when it is running and about half of what it did. I guess I have Star Citizen to thank.

There were a number of other processes that did similar things, and between that and making changes to the Chrome browser settings, I have freed up a persistent 2GB of RAM during normal operation which suprisingly seems to have helped Star Citizen run a bit better.

I am also in the process of setting up monitoring tools so I could keep a closer eye on these sorts of performance statistics while gaming. I have done that many times over the years, but since my most recent PC’s have just worked, I had stopped doing it.

A further unnecessary purchase was made of a Corsair XENEON EDGE touch screen. That did not work as I had initially expected – my motherboard’s support of thunderbolt ports for example I had specifically had in mind when I purchased it had a little asterisk against it “with additional optional hardware” that I had not noticed. The screen also switches to a different mode when it has its own widgets running, making it difficult to use them in conjunction with other software. I am currently playing around with virtual Elgato stream decks and have a fair way to go to find an optimal solution.

A work in progress

Now it turns into a 7^th screen attached to my PC. I have 6 Display port connections and 1 HDMI, which I had been trying to avoid as I previously had issues doing that. It is however working so far.

I am also going to go back and revisit how I am controlling all the peripherals, lights, fans and cooler. I can save some resources there. Much of it comes under the Corsair environment, but I am sure that has caused me underlying USB port issues in recent years and clashed with the SteelSeries software to the point where I cannot have the later installed.  I still have a hodgepodge of tools on top of iCue such as MSI Afterburner, Glorious Core, ASUS Armory Crate and Razer Synapse which I am frightened to touch because of how difficult it was getting everything to work together in the first place.

Errr – thanks again Star Citizen for getting me to look at this stuff again?

I have actually progressed further in the current EVE Gallente event than I have in any of the others, thanks to some tips and suggestions here.

I still have a bit to go, but I might achieve the end goal, and maybe even the extended one.

I guess it all keeps me distracted from the drama at home and in the world.

Don’t judge me too harshly

I swapped one of my RTX 4060 TI’s for a RTX 5070 TI.

This was not specifically for Star Citizen – although it was the trigger.

After researching the limitations of my 4060’s and looking at the worsening supply issues for what options I had to upgrade, I decided to grab a card that was on sale and in stock to give myself a bit more of a performance buffer on my Desktop.

I had already seen that Star Citizen was being constrained by the CPU and Memory, so going from the 4060 to 5070 did not really make it run smoother.

Going from 8 to 16GB of VRAM did allow me to increase the resolution, so it looks better to play. I will also play around with some of the individual visual quality settings to get it looking even better.

I have to admit when building my PC I did not really maximise the settings for the CPU and Memory. I left a lot of settings at default. It worked, was stable, and I had no performance issues for what I was asking of it.

I am going to have to spend some time rectifying that.

At a glance the new card has helped EVE. I might be able to reverse some of the minor changes I made to make two clients run a bit quicker together.

Star Citizen had a patch the other day to 4.7. I clicked on update without thinking too much about it. It was 15GB in size and slow. (CCP has got this sort of thing working so much better on EVE.) While it was downloading I started reading the patch notes, the first section of which remarked on “Characters in this new environment have been built from Long Term Persistence (LTP) data.” Or in short, much of the progress was reset, even having you back to selecting a starting base and doing your character sculpturing again.

I understand the game is in an alpha state, but that is a complete red flag for me. I will continue through the process of getting the game to work reasonably and getting familiar with how to play it, but I can’t see the point of investing in a character that has no permanence.

Another strange thing about the game – you can not list your wallet / financial transactions. There doesn’t seem to be any history available of where your money is coming from or going to.

On the bright side the improved visual settings has improved the playability, although I am still having issues with ignored or delayed responses to key presses.

This was a bit odd – my ramp was all burnt up after a flight. Maybe I forgot to close it? Although it was closed when I docked, and nothing was burnt inside the bay. I went to repair it, but the service did not seem to be available. I will see if the damage is there next time I log in.

Have I done enough to play Star Citizen?

I delved into VRAM and the differences between the 4060Ti and 5000 series graphics cards and monitored hardware performance while running Star Citizen.

The VRAM was certainly impacting on the resolution and the image quality I could select, but generally it was RAM and CPU which Star Citizen was hammering.

A 5070 Ti was about the only upgrade option that made much sense – but at $1,300+ AUD it is a bit of an investment just to make one game look better.

I then read and watched multiple guides on setting changes you could make to get Star Citizen to run smoother. By the end of several more hours of investment and ensuring I closed anything else on my system using resources, I might have got the game to run just well enough to be acceptable.

So, the next step is to try and play it.

One of my first thoughts was – oh no – not another game designed to be played on a console. The suboptimal maps, the reuse of a limited number of keys, an irritating pie/radial menu. It makes for a much poorer game to play on a PC.  Except Google tells me the game has never been available on a console and there were no current plans for it to be done. So, UI sadists or an approach to sabotage the now for a future which is not yet planned.

So far all I have got out of Star Citizen is a list of irritations.

I went to a console and was able to call my ship out of storage.  I went to the appropriate elevator, but it did not list my private hanger. I went to one of the external hangers which was available – but I almost suffocated to death because I was not wearing a helmet. Oddly I did not at first notice I was dying as the process was rather sedate. Finally, I worked out that when you press F to activate the elevator controls, you can then use the mouse wheel to scroll through all available hangers.

Once on my ship and in the pilot’s chair I remembered you had to use ALT N to request permission to undock.  It didn’t work. I powered up my ship and tried ALT N again. It didn’t work. I lifted the ship up off the docking bay floor and tried ALT N again. It didn’t work. I then retracted the landing gear with N and tried ALT N again. Permission was granted and the doors opened. I thought I understood the sequence, but it works differently any time I try. Sometimes the Air Traffic Controllers don’t hear the request. Sometimes there is a long delay before they respond, give you permission, then point out they have already given you permission as all your overdue attempts are processed. 

The same when you come into land. It can take well over a minute for them to allocate you to a hanger. If in that time you get too close to the station, they threaten to impound your ship because you are in a restricted area or blocking flight paths.  When you move away the threat remains, although the timer tends not to tick down.

You press N to lower and raise your landing gear. You press and hold N to do an automatic landing.  Except sometimes the automatic landing doesn’t work and your landing gear goes up and down.

Currently I am watching YouTube clips to understand how to use the map properly and find some trustworthy and repeatible sequence for docking and undocking.

I get the feeling there are a lot of quirks in the game that people who have been playing for a while just work around without thought. Brand new players are left thinking WTF!?

Self-censorship failure

My self-censorship failed with the last post – it contained too much frustrated ranting on life and not enough frustrated ranting on computer games. Let’s rectify that.

EVE Online has started its latest event – the election of a new Gallente leader. Capsuleers can influence the results by doing tasks that support 1 of 3 lackluster political aspirants.

The Hi-Sec tasks generally need to be done in Gallente space – Sing Laison being the closest to me. Looking at the statistics, there was a substantial amount of suicide ganking going on. The kill reports rarely showed an economic rational, so it was mostly griefers benefiting from CCP’s artificial clustering of players together.

I decided to start with the mining task that required me to laser up 30,000m3 of a particular ore. I picked a bunch of relatively quiet systems with plenty of belts and moved a mining barge there.

It was only a couple of hours after downtime, but the first two systems I checked had been entirely stripped of the ore, and the skerricks available in the third system amounted to only 15,000m3.

I will have to consider if this is going to be fun or not.

I also spent a bit of time looking at the performance of Star Citizen.

As I remarked somewhat recently, my PC is 15 months old, running Windows 11 on an Intel i7-14700K with 32GB RAM, a pair of GeForce RTX 4060s with 6 monitors (3x4K, 3xFHD), with all executables running off performance m.2 SSDs. Every component was researched and from a good brand, the system is well cooled, and I keep the patching up to date.

4K multimonitor gaming does not always work straight out of the box, but I have almost always been able to find workarounds.  For EVE Online, if I want to run two 4K clients I just need to remember to allocate each to a different video card. In Satisfactory there is one specific setting around lighting or shadows that I must change. More often I just use Desksoft’s WindowManager to move and resize windows or THS’s Lossless Scaling to get a FHD game to mostly fill up a 4K screen. That works really well for DDO.

I initially left Star Citizen to pick its own settings, which were running at low visuals on my primary monitor in full screen, at 2K resolutions upscaled. When slowly moving around in the short tutorial it seemed to be ok, but once out in a station it would work ok if I looked and moved straight ahead but was jittery any time I tried looking left or right.

As you change graphics settings Star Citizen shows you how much VRAM is required. At the default settings it required more VRAM than my 4060s have (8GB).

So, I started playing around with the graphic settings.

Unlike EVE online, setting tooltips either did not exist or were poor. To understand what settings did I generally had to google them.

When making changes to graphics settings I found the client sometimes picked up performance issues related to making changes but unrelated to the actual change. After making a string of changes the game was also prone to crashing. To test properly you had to log out and back in again between each individual change.

This highlighted that the login times for Star Citizens seem to be frustratingly slow compared to other games.

It turned out that while I could bring the game’s VRAM requirements below the 8GB I could provide, it never seemed to run ok full screen on my primary 4K monitor without it being ugly to play.

I tried changing the scaling options and using the NVidia specific settings recommended without much improvement. I also tried using Lossless Scaling instead, but it crashed my PC.

I could only get the game to run smoothly in borderless window mode at settings below 2K.

I then thought I would just run the game on one of my FHD monitors instead – but it kept forcing itself back to the primary screen which is 4K. Google searches suggested the only solution was to make one of the FHD monitors the primary screen – since Star Citizen generally runs on that. That is not an option as I do much more on my PC than just play Star Citizen.

I still must go through every setting individually – in case I find something like I did with Satisfactory which makes a big difference by itself. Reading the commentary however suggests the game is poorly optimised and requires beefy hardware.

I am still looking for a balance where the game’s visual experience and performance align to make it worth playing.  I am not there yet. I still remain unimpressed.