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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • 5.1 and 7.1 systems aren’t all that widespread, even in the music industry. Surround kinda sits in the same place vr does for me. It’s immensely cool, but it’ll never become standard due to hassle and lack of support.

    Most of the recent innovation in sound has been trickled down from the music and film industries. Just a general increase in the capabilities of soft synths and a better understanding of foley, alongside dedicated in house recording studios have raised the bar of audio.

    To be honest I agree with you that sound is overlooked, sound engineers truly are unsung heroes. I mean even when people point out the sound in a game, it’s usually directed at the composer.


  • I got curious myself and agreed, so I went looking.

    A lot of sources specified that it was part of a technical requirements checklist, and…

    Yeap. It doesn’t explicitly require a “press any key” screen, but it gives a more pleasant screen to look at while you select a user. People online also say it’s used to detect which controller is in use.

    If you add a feature like this to a game, it becomes harder to maintain if there are discrepancies between builds. So presumably it’s usually just left in rather than removed.


  • Most people here have already given you good answers. I’ll just add to this by saying it depends on too many other factors, and add some of my own experience and calculating to support what other people are saying.

    TL;DR : It doesn’t matter, it’s like around 1 DPR (damage per round) difference. If you care, use a DPR calculator to work out your ideal options

    As far as I am aware, there are no agile attacks that have a damage dice higher than a d6 (for PCs), so my math will be done assuming that.

    The Third Attack

    The way the math works out, you should want to use an agile attack for the third attack. It will be very unlikely to hit or crit, but it grants a better DPR than using a non-agile attack.

    The Second Attack

    As for the second attack, it depends heavily on multiple factors:

    1. What is the difference in dice size between the agile and non-agile attack, and how many damage dice do you have?

    Higher differences in dice sizes will make the non-agile attack more preferable, as though you’re 5% less likely to hit or crit, the damage if you do hit statistically makes up for that. Larger amounts of damage dice exacerbates this effect, as your non-agile weapon will pull a larger gap to the agile weapon.

    2. What is your damage roll modifier?

    A larger damage roll modifier rewards hitting more often, so agile weapons become more favorable if the modifier is larger. This also includes things such as the damage runes, where the damage dice of your weapon is irrelevant.

    3. What chance do you have of critting or hitting the target?

    If you have the chance to crit on rolls that are not nat 20s, your DPR with the non-agile weapon begins to trump the agile weapon. This is due to the crit doubling the difference due to damage dice size. The exact point at which this occurs depends on the above two factors as well.

    Weirdly the DPR starts to swing the other way as the target’s AC gets higher. As you exceed a roll of 9 needed to hit a target, your chance to crit is static at 5% (nat 20). This reduces the effectiveness of the agile weapon, but after that, the agile weapon starts to claw back its effectiveness as the non-agile weapon’s ability to hit shrinks. Again, the exact point at which this occurs depends on the above two factors.

    Graphs

    I plotted a few graphs to illustrate the above considerations. The attack roll modifier refers to the attack roll without any MAP, and the DPR calculations have factored in the MAP for the agile and non-agile weapons.

    The first is a graph with a d8 non-agile weapon, a d6 agile weapon, and a +4 damage roll modifier.

    Note the scale of the axis on the left, it doesn’t make a significant difference for this set of stats.

    Now what about a level 4 character without any class bonuses to damage, with the same weapons with all the expected fundamental runes, doubling their damage dice?

    Note the fact that there isn’t even a window where the agile weapon is good against weaker enemies, but it claws back much more effectiveness. This is what we’d expect due to the larger amount of damage dice.

    Lastly to illustrate the effect of flat modifiers, I put up a level 7 swashbuckler with an Dueling Spear (d8 finesse) against a Shortsword (d6 agile finesse). They will have panache, and are making these strikes non-finishers. The weapons both have the expected fundamental runes, and a flaming rune.

    Note how there is a larger range of ACs where an agile weapon is better.

    Conclusions

    The answer is it depends, as it always does. I can’t give you a definite answer for every single scenario, because there are way too many, and I’m not your dad. In general the following you should make the second strike with an agile weapon if any of these conditions are true:

    • If you would crit on a 18-19 without MAP (usually creatures 3-4 levels below you if you are a non-fighter martial)
    • If you are fighting a creature with an AC 10+ higher than your hit modifier (usually creatures on your level or higher)
    • If you have large damage modifiers
    • If the difference in dice size isn’t too large

    Otherwise, use you should use your non-agile weapon to make the second strike.

    Note that the difference in DPR is small (it’s like 1.2 at most), so it doesn’t really matter which you choose. I’d go with an agile attack if I wanted consistency, and non-agile if I wanted burst.

    That’s it! If you read through all of this, thanks for reading my insane ramblings. There are many more things I probably forgot to account for, but I can’t think of them right now, and I accidentally overwrote the sheet for the second graph. I’m gonna go do something more productive now.


  • I’ve been playing through it with a few of my pf2e group.

    Larian did such an amazing job with this, and I am enjoying it, but I find myself wishing this game had the action economy from Div : OS2 or pf2e.

    That said, I’m glad to see that they’ve continued the trend of their prior crpgs, and made something approaching the flexibility of a GM behind a screen.





  • Huh, strange. Everywhere I looked online indicated that this pair of headphones has a single TRRS 3.5mm jack that comes with a usb adapter.

    TRS (tip-ring-sleeve) and TRRS (tip-ring-ring-sleeve) indicates the number of channels on the 3.5mm jack. TRS is usually dual channel balanced (one channel for ground) whereas TRRS includes an additional channel for a mic.

    As for all the other cable stuff, everything you’ve told me means that the troubleshooting for jacks and cables can stop there (I’m also assuming the echo happens in both ears and not just one). If we can’t replace the cable, we can’t tell if the problem is the cable or the headphones. I doubt the USB adapter will help either, unless JBL has some weird thing going on with that.

    The echo being affected by your headphones volume control makes me think the internal wiring is miswired somewhere along the signal chain. You should still be able to use the headphones without the mic, so that’s what I’d do.

    I’m planning, in the far future, to buy a cheap DAC to plug-in a headphone, a microphone and an electric guitar so I can use all of them on the computer at the same time that I can use the headphones as monitors for the microphone and the guitar. Is this possible?

    You’re looking for an Audio Interface, not a DAC (although audio interfaces have DACs in them). There’s a lot of options out there, and you’ll have to assess the options based on your budget and use case.


  • I do not own this pair of headphones, nor do I use 2-in-1 headphones. But since no one has responded, I’ll just throw whatever I can think of at you and see what sticks.

    Low Likelihood Solutions

    I am listing these to try and give answers. None of these should work, but they’re easy to try and don’t cost anything

    • Are you connected via jack? Try connecting via USB instead. The jack has a TRRS connector and PCs usually only have TRS. This shouldn’t cause any problems normally, but idk what JBL or your PC is doing
    • Are you using Stereo Mix on your control panel > sound settings? Switch over to the actual mic and disable the Stereo Mix. That could be what’s causing your audio doubling

    Medium Likelihood Solutions

    These might work

    • Have you tried this without EQ APO installed? Try fully uninstalling it and ensuring sound devices are set correctly. EQ APO could for whatever reason be mixing your output and input. It’s been a while since I’ve used EQ APO, but I only used it for audio output
    • Is the mic not disabling correctly and picking up audio from the headphones’ speakers? Try lowering audio output to a minimum and seeing if that changes the volume of your echo. Ask another person to help test
    • EDIT If possible, can you try a different cable? The cable could just be faulty. Wherever you got it from might have a spare to try

    This requires additional spending to confirm

    • Is the USB or are drivers the problem? Get a TRRS splitter (3.5mm, 1 female to 2 male), and split the mic audio from the headphone audio

    I hope one of these work, because…

    The Nuclear Option

    Get new headphones or claim warranty on them (if you have it). My cursory googling showed that this problem has cropped up with a reddit user, and they ended up buying new headphones. If you do end up buying new headphones, I highly recommend buying a solid pair of wired headphones and a mic separately. It’ll be more cables, but much easier to swap out if things go wrong, and a good pair of headphones will last you a good 5+ years.

    Best of luck, and let me know how it goes!




  • This is an amazing list. I will +1 Dexed cos FM is great, and add a few more music production apps to the list.

    BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - A great all-in-one orchestral vst with decent samples. Great for people wanting to bridge the gap between writing with sections and writing for specific instruments. Lacks articulations like Legato and Marcato, but is ridiculously good for the price of jack shit

    SPAN - An excellent mixing and mastering vst that gives you a highly configurable fft spectrum analyzer, with a few presets for translation checks. My favorite feature is the correlation meter, which helps me visually check interference in stereo mixes

    Kontakt free library - Has some solid samples for a selection of instruments, but I mostly use the Jazz Guitar and Bass Guitar from here for basic sketching

    Equalizer APO - System wide EQ. Extremely configurable. I’ve since hopped over to SoundID Reference, but prior to that, I was using this. It’s great for making all your headphones and speakers sound like any other pair of headphones, and there’s a huge library of headphone presets that tell you how to get a neutral signature on just about any pair of them






  • Honestly the average user should probably go wireless. The convenience factor is huge, and most of these new headphones come with active noise cancelling.

    The average pair of wireless headphones is also good enough for casual listening (depending on codec) and can come pretty close to wired solutions.

    That said, I would never go for wireless on ear/over ear headphones again. The more features something has, the harder it is to fix when something breaks.

    My wireless solution is a set of mmcx in ear monitors connected via Bluetooth adapter. Even without active noise cancellation, they block out sound well. For desktop my job requires critical listening, and I like neutral signatures, so I’d rather stick to desktop monitors and wired solutions.