Goooood Morning Gamers!
We’re back live with Game Bandits 11am EDT Wednesday August 11th
https://www.twitch.tv/techbanditry
And what, pray tell, shall we speak of today?
Well, I’ve been wondering if there was anything I could do to become faster at the button mashing, less creaky at the keyboard and a slightly less pained parent before during and after my gaming (defeats), so I went looking for some tips…
Dr. Levi “The Gaming Doctor” has great information and exercises…
including how important it is to stretch and flex and take just a 5 minute break every 60 minutes of gameplay
…it doesn’t sound like much, but apparently it can really make a big difference to your gaming abilities and how long you’ll be able to play!
And having run through Tykato Fitness‘ warmup and stretches my hands feel likethey could reduce a controller to powdery plastic dust…try them out, it’s a real work out!
And while all the extra video game and computer time we’re getting can be bad for us… COVID, once again proves, the virus is great for video games! 30% increase in sales for a whopping $11.6 billion between April and June,
We’ve also got to check in with BagOfChips and hear all about his quest for components to feed his new PC gaming beast! Found any great deals out there BagOfChips? Or perhaps you’ll be holding off until the rumoured Nvidia 3080 GPU’s (Graphics Processing Unit – the card what draws every element of every frame of your game onto your screen) hit the shelves?!
3080TI!!!!??? As Bratlett says, you will be able to see the bullet coming before the enemy even aims their gun at you! 😉
GPU cards are becoming almost as important…if not more important…than CPUs (Central Processing Units – the brains of the computer)! CPUs are fast, but they max out at around 28 cores (meaning they can be running 28 “virtual computers” all at the same time) whereas GPUs have literally thousands of these “virtual computer” cores. So obviously GPUs are in big demand for heavy processing jobs like rendering VFX, processing big data, searches, and of course…AI.
AI is always something that gets my attention so I wondered if games were using the GPU’s to handle the AI side of gaming… that’s when I stumbled onto this series about the difference between AI and game AI. Game AI turns out to be a bit different than I’d assumed… and I was surprised to find that it’s still a lot faster just to give those NPCs (non player characters) a crazy long list of possible moves, rather than have real AI decide what they should be doing to seem more “alive”.
And finally, I noticed that there were a few leaks, rumours and even fan trailers about a possible Sims 5 release, which I thought our fabulous London Ladies, PinkNinja & GoldenWolf, might have some thoughts on…
Being the distracted SQUIRRELS! that we Bandits are, we spoke about easy ways to do 5 times tables:
Although, the Bandits showed me it by dividing numbers to be multiplied by five in half and then multiplying the result by 10.
We also had a very funny discussion about the possibility of making zombie shark themed video games (or a man-shark approach that Bratlett quickly dubbed “Mhark attack!”). The bandit’s found the above image as a nightmarish “inspiration”?
And musically… how about a tiny bit more death metal take on Baby Shark:
We wondered if perhaps this “Zaws” project might be a job for Roblox and their Roblox Studio?
Or does one just dive into Unity or Unreal Engine? I guess we’ll find out!