MERNIZ

Leaving DDR4 in the dust As spotted by Videocardz, Adata has taken the wraps off several new products in an online announcement today, including its first DDR5 memory modules, which will feature frequencies of up to 12600 MTps, making them the fastest DDR5 modules announced so far. The company also announced a host of other products including PCIe Gen4 SSDs, external SSDs, laptops, and SD card readers. Adata showcased two DDR5 models at its event, one being its generic DDR5 module with a maximum operating frequency of 8400 MTps and a capacity of up to 64GB per DIMM operating at 1.1v. This is in line with the fastest DDR5 modules we've seen announced so far from any memory manufacturer including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Crucial. But the next model is much faster. With a speed of up to 12,600 MTps, these are the fastest speeds announce so far for any DDR5 module. Adata will be targeting these modules toward gaming rigs and will brand them under the XPG Unfortunately this is all Adata had to say; there's no word on pricing, availability, or upcoming memory configurations for its new DDR5 modules. It'll be interesting to see how quickly Adata can start producing its ultra-fast 12600 MTps memory models, as previous statements from SK Hynix suggest any high-speed kits approaching 8400MTps or beyond won't be available in the first wave of DDR5 adoption. Simply put, DDR5 needs to reach a certain maturity level before high-speed kits become a reality, at least at retail. Still, it's great to see ultra-high-speed DDR5 modules are in development and on the horizon.

Arthmoor, the modder behind Live Another Life, Open Cities, and other well-known mods, is protesting the site's policy changes. Po[CENSORED]r mod-hosting site Nexus Mods announced recently that users who upload files will no longer be allowed to delete them. It's planning to add a collections feature that will let people assemble lists of compatible mods to download with a single click, and if a mod that others rely on was deleted that would break any collection featuring it. Instead, modders will be able to archive work they don't want on the site, removing a mod's front-facing pages while leaving the files accessible in collections they've been added to. Some modders aren't pleased with the move, and have been taking advantage of Nexus Mods' policy allowing files to be deleted if they apply by August 5. The latest modder to request removal is Arthmoor, who is responsible for Skyrim mods like Alternate Start - Live Another Life, which lets players skip the intro and tutorial and has been downloaded over eight million times, as well as Cutting Room Floor, Run For Your Lives, the Paarthurnax Dilemma, Open Cities, Ars Metallica - Smithing Enhancement, and more. Arthmoor also has mods for Oblivion and Morrowind on the site, and is requesting they be deleted too. However, Arthmoor's mods will remain available on AFK Mods, a site that allows deleting mods. And group projects Arthmoor was involved in to create unofficial patches for Skyrim, Skyrim Special Edition, and Fallout 4 will remain on Nexus Mods. "Here's to hoping that current efforts by several parties to launch sites that honor a mod author's legal right to delete their content take hold and provide some badly needed competition in this space", he writes. Among modders there's a fundamental difference between those who view their work as expressions of individual creativity—personal projects they take ownership of—and those who see their work as additive—part of a shared community project to make a given game better. While the latter are happy to hand over control to hosting sites, curators, and list-makers, the former want to retain ownership of their work. Wrye, creator of Morrowind modding utility Wrye Mash, summed the two approaches up as Cathedral vs. Parlor, which is a handy explanation of the two philosophies and why there will always be conflict between them. We'll continue updating our lists of the best Skyrim mods and the best Skyrim Special Edition mods to point to the new homes of mods that move, or alternatives to those removed completely.

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Read the rules and come back in 14 days https://csblackdevil.com/forums/forum/3869-rules/

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Name of the game: Grime Price: 21€/12.98€ Link Store:https://www.instant-gaming.com/en/ Offer ends up after X hours:here Requirements: Minimum Requirements OS:Windows 10 Processor:Intel i5 3470 or AMD equivelent Memory:4 GB RAM Graphics:nVidia GeForce 960 or AMD equivelent DirectX:Version 10 Storage:10 GB available space

No arrows to the knees here, just 360 degrees of freedom. One of the truisms about Bethesda games, and I love them for it, is that they look hilariously bad in third-person. The default first-person perspective? You can almost hear the deep voiceover booming "epic fantasy adventure!" Stick it in third person, and almost immediately the voice transforms into yakety sax music as your avatar stiffly bumbles o'er the landscape. There are already, of course, a ton of Skyrim mods that make various tweaks to the third-person view (here's the best of the best Skyrim: SE mods). The big deal with the True Directional Movement mod (first clocked by Eurogamer) is not just that it allows full 360° movement, though this is the core feature. It's ended up layering a bunch of other additions on top to make it feel like a more contemporary third person action game: such as, for example, a target lock which can also be used for aiming projectiles. "The mod began as a small SKSE plugin which introduced the core feature: true directional '360°' movement," writes creator Ersh. "Then I realized that it needed a custom target lock component, because the available mods wouldn’t play right with it. Still, my vision couldn't be 100% realized with the use of current mods, so I kept adding more custom features that I felt were still related either to the core idea, or to the other, already included changes. I tried to make each of them feel like it fits the vanilla game as much as possible." Thus the mod lets you move and attack in any direction in third-person, use a target lock (with an animated reticule and enemy healthbars), projectile aiming support, mounted directional movement and camera fixes, support for both keyboard & mouse and controller, and a modular interface that allows you to turn all of these features on or off.

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Contra.

CONTRA play 30h and respect rules good player

I’m sure that these raids will enable a richer game experience!" Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker is creeping ever closer—but after almost a decade of plot twists and characters spanning three expansions, it can be hard to make sense of what to be aware of when going into the MMO's climactic expansion. Fortunately, speaking to PC Gamer recently, game director Naoki "Yoshi P" Yoshida gave us a handy checklist of what quests you should check out if you want all of Endwalker's nods and beats to make sense when you jump in this November. “This is an MMORPG, so of course I think it's best for you to play freely," Yoshida explained. "However, if you would like to talk about the lore in more detail and have a deeper understanding of the world behind the main scenario quests to be found in Endwalker, I’d be glad if you play through the 'Coils of Bahamut', 'Alexander' and 'Omega' raid series if you haven't already. These are not mandatory quests, but they are raids that are deeply rooted in the mysteries around FFXIV’s world." None of these quests are absolutely mandatory for understanding Endwalker, Yoshida notes. As relatively standalone stories, he also reckons you're safe to wait until you've finished Endwalker before diving into these raids. But being "deeply rooted in the mysteries around FFXIV’s world", Yoshida feels these quests will make Endwalker's stories hit all that much harder.

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The beta will support multiplayer and versus AI matches for up to eight players. Age of Empires 4 is coming on October 28, but before that happens a closed beta test set to kick off on August 5 will give Age Insiders a chance to get their hands on the game and see what it's really like. The beta will include the tutorial mission, which teaches building, economics, combat basics, and "other core skills," and will also support multiplayer and versus AI matches for up to eight. Only a "sample" of maps will be available during the beta but each will offer user-selectable options for size and appearance, while four of the eight launch-day civilizations will be playable: Mongol, English, Delhi Sultanate, and Chinese. The goal of the beta is to fine-tune systems, hunt down bugs and balance issues, and lay some early groundwork for post-launch support. To that end, the developers hope that players treat it as an actual beta test: "Relic and World’s Edge are depending on you to play as many matches as you’re able to while trying out the various matchmaking systems." If you'd like to get in on the action yourself, you need to sign up as an Age Insider by 4:59 pm PT/7:59 pm ET on August 3—that's today, so don't dick around about it—verify your email, and upload your DxDiag file to your profile. OS: Windows 10 Processor: 1.7-2.7GHz (turbo) 4 core: Intel Core i5-4460T (35w) / AMD FX-6300 or better Memory: 8GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GTX 760 / AMD Radeon R7 260X or better with at least 2 GB of VRAM Note that this is a "preview spec" for the beta, and not the recommended requirements for the released game.

Voted'

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Name of the game: FIFA 22 Price: 60€ / 44.99€ Link Store:https://www.instant-gaming.com/en/ Offer ends up after X hours:HERE Requirements: Release date 1 October 2021 https://i.postimg.cc/cCTz4BZY/download.jpg

The 'Nocom' exploit was ingenious, almost invisible, and let its creators fill their boots. The public-facing side of Minecraft is the jolly, happy one. This is where we coo at people recreating the world of the Lord of the Rings, or admire the incredible visual tricks that can be pulled off with a little ingenuity. But then there's the less well-known (though often no less po[CENSORED]r) side, where things all get a little grimmer. One of the most infamous 'anarchy' servers in existence is 2B2T, a long-running and no-holds-barred server which has not been reset since 2010. The name stands for '2 Builders 2 Tools' and it is designed to be inhospitable, nasty, and has at times been named the 'worst' Minecraft server in existence. Naturally its players would disagree, and from another perspective 2B2T is an example of Minecraft's enormously wide appeal and its ability to turn players into creators: it is a place with a real history, which is written on and defines the landscape. The community around 2B2T and the way it has developed over the years is why it was featured in the 2019 exhibition Videogames: Design / Play / Disrupt at London's V&A Museum. This story begins even before that. In 2018 a bunch of ne'er do wells found an exploit in a piece of Minecraft server software called Paper (thanks, WindowsCentral). This exploit essentially made the server think a player was clicking on every block in the map: instantly making it try to load countless block renders and crashing the server. It's the kind of catastrophic bug that, with software like this, is fixed quickly as soon as it's been used and noticed. And 'quickly' was the problem. One of the coders that came to work on NoCom, though only since 2020, is Leijurv, who wrote a long and detailed post explaining exactly what the group did after this point, and why it worked. The beginning of the post points folk towards this youtube video by FitMC, which the perpetrators assisted in preparing and gives a more general overview. The reason why NoCom flew under the radar for so long, in Leijurv's words, "is that there is no actual 'exploit' or 'backdoor' in the sense that you might think. In other words, the server doesn't 'misbehave' or do anything suspicious. It's fully expected and intended behavior, the code doesn't do anything sneaky or surreptitious, it's actually perfectly simple." PaperMC, the developer of Paper, 'fixed' the original exploit, which was exactly what the hackers behind what would become known as NoCom were waiting for. One particular patch of PaperMC allowed the hackers to click on blocks and be told what its contents are, which is not unusual behaviour for Minecraft. What is unusual behaviour is applying this logic far beyond where the 'player' actually is: that is, being able to 'click' a block anywhere in this absolutely enormous landscape and know what it is. "So this is known and desirable behavior on the part of 2b2t," writes Leijurv. "It's just that not many people thought of intentionally going outside one's render distance to extract information. The realization is that you can click absolutely any block, anywhere on the server, even a million blocks away, and learn if it's currently a loaded chunk, by if the server responds to you or remains silent. Using common sense, the Paper developers intended for this patch to reply to the player only if the chunks were loaded by your player, as that would make logical sense (that's all the blocks you could reasonably be digging in good faith). The problem is that the way the code was written, the server will reply to you if the chunk is loaded by any player on the server, which is clearly an unintended side effect." Why does this matter? Why do you think. Once this exploit was available, the people behind NoCom began check whether specific chunks of the map were loaded or unloaded. The former indicated the presence of other players, and so these locations were recorded, creating a master document of bases and other locations to hit. There's a certain poetry to this, but over the past three years the NoCom exploit was used to grief the hell out of players playing on a griefing server. Here is a heat map of 2B2T's world showing where players and groups are concentrated. And here's where the hack gets simply devilish. When first discovered, the exploit had to be used manually. And obviously endlessly clicking blocks to find out what's where is not the most efficient method of dastardly thieving. So the NoCom group began to automate it, introducing bots to the server on a shift system such that one was always online: and these bots watched the world's main thoroughfares. When one of these bots spotted a player it would trail their movements using the program, and take particular notice of how much time they spent in certain areas. Here is a "kindergarten explanation" from Leijurv of what the bot called Elon_Musk would do. "They scan the nether highways (really, punch one block per every 9 chunks, expanding outwards on every highway and diagonal, sort of like radar). When we get a hit, we've found a player traveling. Perhaps traveling to a base? "So... we just keep up with them. We devised a system, using a monte carlo particle filter to simulate and track movement, that uses about 2 checks per second to keep up with a player as they travel at arbitrary speed. Elytra, boat, entity speed, sprinting, walking, anything. Even pig god mode! Even spectator mode! All we care about is if chunks are loading, that's what we can see. "Basically, we built a machine that plays this game of battleship against 2b2t, really well, using up all the hundred some checks a second we get, and uses it to follow the battleships as they move around the board. "And when a battleship disappears from the nether board, we look over at the overworld board and keep going (the bots coordinate with each other of course). "In this way, we simply, just, follow people to their bases by keeping up with them as they load chunks. From our observation posts we can check chunks all over the map, at any distance." By the end the NoCom crew had amassed 1.7 terabytes and 13.5 billion rows of data on the world of 2B2T. Data which would mostly be used in the following way: "print out bases with the most chests, travel to them ingame, steal all the items." NoCom activity began to peak in 2020, as the hackers' knowledge of the game world became ever-more complete and the temptations were simply irresistible. Countless bases were destroyed, endless valuables looted, and the community descending into full-blown panic to the extent many refused to log in. Members of the 2B2T community had noticed something funny going on over the years building up to this, but the group behind NoCom had also organised a disinformation campaign across forums and Discord groups ("Memes to cover up the exploit, and other miscellaneous related gaslighting"), dismissing those with concerns as paranoid. As NoCom's momentum built and its presence on the server became impossible to hide, the crew behind it knew that the end was nigh. It went on a murderous rampage over June and July, trying to wring every last drop out of the data it had, before the server admin finally managed to fix the exploit by limiting the number of packets accounts could send per server tick. NoCom may be gone, but its legacy will long hang over 2B2T. That data is all still out there, and it's all still accurate until players and groups relocate their bases: not exactly a small undertaking on something of this scale. Many fantastic builds are now just hostages to fortune. 2B2T is still around, but this is probably the most impactful event in its history. Rich Stanton Rich was raised by a Spectrum 48K in the Scottish wilderness, and this early exposure to survival mechanics made him a rooter-out of the finest news truffles, and suspicious of all the soft, civilised Amiga people. These days he mostly plays Counter-Strike and Rocket League, and is good at one of them. He's also the author of a Brief History of Video Games.

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