NL Central is doing awful. Pretty much everyone in the division is awful compared to every other division in the MLB lmao. As a Cardinals fan, it's kinda hard to watch.

A couple of games to kick off next Saturday, then on the 31st the full season gets under way! Can't wait!

Who else is stoked? Predictions for the season? Contenders and busts?

AMA: Ask me anything
I'll answer questions, within reason... so feel free to ask about anything you want to know about the madman zalost.

I'm sure this is a stupid question, but, is it good?
I have the option of staying with a landline or switching to Hotspot.
I've only used land lines, and I'm wondering if I'll have no problems playing Multiplayer Minecraft or downloading stuff like steam games.
Thank you everyone who answers my stupid question.

I saw some youtubers had attempted this, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I'll be posting some pictures tomorrow (once I have my other PC with the screenshots fired up), but I have a feeling I've completely maxed out the city. I hit about 44K and it won't go one bit higher. 

Granted, the tile I chose had about 82% land available. Had I chosen a tile with closer to 90-95% (leaving just enough room for water pumps/sewage drains), I might have been able to break the 50K barrier. I also made the mistake of building an auxiliary highway through the city, and made some strange road choices, which didn't help my case too much as far as having the optimum land availability. 

In general, my cities end up spanning at least 5 tiles once I truly get them going. Challenging yourself to one tile definitely makes for an interesting time trying to maximize land potential. 

How quickly do you buy new tiles in the game? Do you generally make use of the tiles you have first, or build more spread out regions with space between individual districts/neighborhoods?

So I've always been a bit paranoid about internet privacy, after all while I don't do anything bad other than research and tinker, I don't want some corporation to gather my search habits and sell them to marketers so they can spam my mailbox with stuff I may not want.

However this is not the only form of cyber anti-privacy.

I recently came across a company that has been working for the various corps in the background since 1999 called Mark Monitor.
Mark Monitor claims to be hunting internet pirates but they've also sent tons of false cease and desist letters and are a big part of the whole elimination of net neutrality thing.

Even I've gotten a letter or two about P2P usage... I use torrents to Download patches and ISO's of linux distro's since it allows parallel file transmission to get them mroe quickly, nothing uncouth.

so I started looking into the people claiming I'm a scary internet pirate for downloading a freely available Operating system from a torrent on said OS's website.

and well I'm a bit shaken up about this company I've never heard of before.
while google isn't tied in with them they do own several large Internet domains hosting thousands of websites and use that to monitor what you search for in an effort to find targets to send warnings and threats to anyone doing anything that they or their partners deem disagreeable.

They also apparently monitor any and all P2P connections they can get their grubby hands on so they can backtrace them and get the ISP's to send threats.

it's a bit odd honestly, how can a company get away with what is essentially wiretapping (illegal in the US), so they can threaten honest to goodness people in their efforts to "stop internet pirates" by throwing out a massive net?

it's just weird.

So I finally took the leap, I went to microcenter last week and they had a coolermaster 240mm all in one watercooling unit, with RGB fans for $75.

so far I've seen a thermal drop of around 10*C compared to the massive dual fan radiator I had before, on top of that it takes up way less room... now I need another case so for now it's zip tied to the side of the case to cool my computer giving a more cyberpunk look.



it's also significantly quieter.

has anyone else tried watercooling vs aircooling?



For those wondering about the wires coming off the fans, those are RGB headers, unfortunately my watercooler didn't come with the header pins to connect them correctly so I'm waiting for amazon to ship me some... thank deus en machina for prime.

I spent many hours back in the day playing Cities XL (and its iterations that followed, such as the 2012, Platinum, and XXL versions). It was overall a great game that seemed like it was lacking something somewhere. I can't exactly pinpoint exactly what it was. It should have blown SC4 absolutely out of the water, but for whatever reason it didn't cut it for me. The cities just felt... lifeless. 

However, for its time, CXL was a pretty ambitious game. The maps were absolutely gigantic. I've never even come close to filling a tile in the game, so it was awesome to have the freedom to build as far as you wanted to. And of course the graphics were absolutely gorgeous. Even by today's standards, they blow even Skylines out of the water. It was perhaps the single biggest selling point for the game. 

What it lacked was a sense of fine-grained detail in the simulation. Skylines is the only game in the genre that simulates each sim individually. SC4 and CXL both simulate in batches, where batches will take the same routes, work at the same places, have the same attributes, etc. This is done to save CPU, which is a large part of the reason that Skylines cities never seem to reach higher populations, despite the sheer number of skyscrapers you can build in a city. 

In CXL, there aren't any disasters, aren't really any fine grained events that happen with the sims that make you feel connected. It's more crude and more generalized in a lot of ways. And it really kinda kicked CXL in the behind in the end. The original developer went bankrupt from developing it, and as a result, Focus Interactive took over the project and didn't really do much to add to it or to finish some of the unfinished aspects of the game. 

What are your thoughts on this ancient game? Despite its shortcomings, the graphics are gorgeous (even by today's standards), and the maps are huge. It definitely has things that were done right, despite its pitfalls.

It's a blessing and a curse that in Skylines, you have to manually draw your own subway and bus lines. in SC4, you could plop them just about anywhere and they'd be used, and the game would figure out all of the messy mechanics by itself. 

In my skylines cities, I usually plop 2-4 subway stations in each district, depending on the size. People in this game seem to be willing to walk much further than the sims in SC4 were willing to walk.

I then draw a couple of generic large loops through the entire city first, each one taking slightly different side routes and stops. I then draw smaller north-south and east-west loops that are more localized, and hope that the CIMS just switch lines when they need to. Oh, and I found out the hard way, they all have to be in a loop, or else the line doesn't run at all. 

Bus lines are even more challenging for me, because you have to place the bus stops on a good, high capacity road. I've seen traffic jams putting them on side streets. 

Anyone got any tips on this regard? It's been a bit challenging for me so far. Otherwise, a fantastic game.

I've been playing Skylines quite a bit these past couple of weeks. And honestly, it's by far the best city builder I've ever played. And it absolutely blows SC4 out of the water.

My computer, however, is a toaster. It's a 2012 MacBook Pro with Intel HD 4000 graphics. This is basically one of the lower end Intel graphics chipsets, and newer CPUs have better integrated graphics than mine does. However, being that Cities Skylines specifically states that Intel graphics are not supported, I was worried the game would be rendered unplayable on my computer. This isn't so much the case. I can report it does in fact run, and it's definitely playable. And enjoyable. Even on larger cities, it renders about 15 FPS, which isn't unplayable for the type of game that it is.

I cranked all the graphics settings down to their lowest settings, disabled anti-aliasing, and set the resolution to 1024x640. I use a dynamic resolution mod that scales the UI resolution to its native resolution for the display, and only renders the game itself at a lower resolution, so I don't necessarily notice the dropped resolution as much. If you're playing on an older computer, this is an absolute must, and makes the game much more enjoyable. 

Also, despite having to crank all the graphics settings down to their lowest values, the texture quality itself doesn't seem to affect the frame rate significantly. I cranked the textures up to Medium with no noticeable effect on the framerate. Doing this helps the graphics quality a bit.

Doing this, I consistently get 15-20 FPS in smaller cities, and about 10-15 FPS in larger cities. I'm currently building a 5 tile city with 70K residents (relatively large city for Skylines), and my computer is still keeping up. I would say the frame rates are better when you zoom out a bit. Once you zoom in at street level on a larger city, your frame rates drop to about 10-12. It is laggy, yes. But not unplayable.

That being said, these aren't amazing stats by comparison. Someone who has played with a better card would find it unbearably low. For me personally, I find that despite it feeling a bit choppy at times, it truly is not too bad. Again, for the type of game that this is, lower framerates aren't a drag, and it's still very enjoyable to play. And it can handle large cities without too much trouble. The gameplay itself is so awesome that it more than makes up for subpar frame rates. 

So, if you've got an old computer with intel HD graphics or something similar, don't let that scare you away from playing the game. If you take a little bit of care with the graphics settings and you keep your expectations realistic, the game will still not fail to impress you, even on an older computer. Any Intel processor 3rd generation or newer should be able to handle it.

Also, if you have anything newer than a 3rd generation CPU (e.g. 4th or 5th generation or newer) - the graphics chipsets are vastly improved in these. It can handle higher resolutions on my backup computer with a 4th gen i5 and HD 4600 graphics. My 2018 MacBook Air (with HD 617 graphics) could handle the game very well and consistently maintained 30+ frames per second on medium graphics settings. This post describes performance on the older generations of integrated graphics. The newer ones are definitely decent performers on the game and will sustain 20-30+ frames per second on moderate graphics settings.