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Chronocidal

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  1. Chronocidal
    Confirmed, I just got the BBTS link. https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/251910?o=10&utm_source=Marketing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=marketing&utm_content=
  2. Chronocidal
    From what I'm finding out, there are some DirectX updates that are embedded in the cumulative update roll-ups for Windows now. I'm fairly certain this is at least partly a Windows issue, because I will never assume Bethesda isn't involved. My computer's specs are far more than enough, but I'm running a version of Windows 10 that's older than what they want (1909), and it doesn't contain the DirectX updates required to run it. There's no separate install for that, and that's the reason the game requires a specific build of Windows. This is what I was saying about the new update structure making it impossible to install only what you need to do what you want. Updates are an all-or-nothing deal. You want to play the new games? You're getting MS-branded adware on your desktop along with it. The reason I'm on 1909 is because I'm an obstinate user that's sick of MS mucking with my computer, and I didn't want any of it. So yes, it's my own fault that it doesn't run. I'm just not that interested in Starfield that it's worth screwing with my stable system, and potentially having to reinstall Windows from scratch and get everything else I do on this computer back in working order, just to play a buggy and under-optimized game at launch. And there's no guarantee it would even fix it, since some people have gone through that process, and it still didn't let them play the game. I'm patient, and I'll just play it somewhere down the line, where I either decide to do a complete reformat, or get a new computer. It'll certainly be a better experience by that point, anyway. This is a Bethesda game, after all.
  3. Chronocidal
    To be clear here, this isn't specifically about a Windows update causing issues, either with Starfield, or in general, although there are quite a few reports I've read of people trying to update to the latest build to play this, and Windows Update just fails on them. It winds up driving them down a troubleshooting rabbit hole of manual patching, sometimes requiring complete reinstallation of the OS, and sometimes even that doesn't do the trick. This game is not worth that much trouble to me. This really has more to do with how Windows manages their update processes now. Back in the day, updates rolled out on a module-by-module basis. You would get driver updates, DirectX updates, UI updates, application updates, security updates, etc, all broken out via individual patch objects. Admins and tech enthusiasts appreciated this, because you could tailor your update path to support only what you needed on your systems, and leave out the features you didn't want. You could troubleshoot the system piece by piece if something didn't work. That went away a long time ago. Now, Windows is updated entirely by cumulative update roll-ups that include everything. You can't break out the updates to different parts of the OS, because they're all thrown into the same giant bin. The individual bits of necessary security updates and bug fixes are all tangled up in the spaghetti of Candy Crush, start menu ads and MS365 promotions. As I understand it, Starfield "depends" on some update to DirectX that was rolled into a more recent build. Without being able to dissect those updates and pull the parts you actually need out of the pile of garbage, you're stuck pulling the entirety of MS's shenanigans into your OS, whether you want any of it or not. It's bordering on tinfoil hat levels, but I don't expect this is a bug, I expect it's entirely intentional. MS doesn't want people on older builds of Windows, because they can't monetize users who don't download their adware.
  4. Chronocidal
    My cynical take on the matter? Microsoft is cockblocking people who don't want their most recent Windows garbage. The more literal reason I've heard speculation about is that there are hidden updates for DirectX 12 buried under some of the more recent OS updates (remember when you could pick and choose what updates to install if you didn't want a specific feature?), and not having those means the game throws a hissy fit, and pops a generic "your video card isn't compatible error" rather than explaining the actual issue. And it's basically an instant "NO SOUP FOR YOU" error. You click the game to start, and it throws up a "Your video card does not meet the minimum requirements" window. This is on a 2080 Super, for the record, which has defined default settings in the initialization files for the game. The error is a lie. It's not like games where you can install it on older hardware, and expect it to run poorly, this just denies you even attempting it. And the whole thing is a pile of BS anyhow, since the game runs on Linux, and doesn't even need DirectX to begin with, but what are you going to do? I use this computer for everything (mostly DCS World and other flight sims), it has run completely stably for almost four years, and I have no intention of upsetting that stability by reinstalling Windows from scratch to play a Bethesda title at launch. There's not even any guarantee that it would do the trick, since many people have forced their computers to update to the most recent build, and it still didn't solve the issue. I'm really in no rush, so I'm perfectly fine waiting for the "complete" edition to come out, since it will be cheaper, more stable, and have a lot more content. Edit: FYI, Steam's refund machine is running smoothly, just came in about an hour after requested.
  5. Chronocidal
    Bleh.. sad to say I went ahead and requested a refund on Steam for Starfield. Just cannot get it to move past the "requirements not met" blockage, and it's not worth reformatting a stable computer just for one title. Steam said I "played" for a grand total of 7 minutes.. which, considering it would try to start and kick me out within a couple of seconds, speaks to exactly how many attempts I made. I'll play it on my next computer, once the patches and mods have time to cook.
  6. Chronocidal
    Eh, I can forgive the F-35 bit. There was no way it was getting used, no matter how much sense it would have made.
  7. Chronocidal
    I forgot that I posted better pictures later of the arm slider, and two sides of the arm do move a fair distance. Not having them all the way in one direction or the other definitely makes a difference in how well they fit into the wings, and that sliding mechanism seems like it was a magnet for sloppy glue application. Mine took a lot of force before they began sliding the whole distance. Pics are in this post: Far as the wing/leg tabs go, I had to do a significant amount of filing those down on every release before any of mine would tab in. There were visible molding seams on all of them that had to be removed before they would even begin to fit into the slots. Edit: Looking closer at those pics, it might be worth using a better camera and redoing them, I didn't realize how out of focus they are. Probably posted them from my phone.
  8. Chronocidal
    Ok, that fits way too well.
  9. Chronocidal
    Yeah, as much as these are called "toys," the 31 series is altogether not very fun to swoosh. They have too many pointy/folding bits to actually pick them up easily, and they're really not that fun to handle, because they are absolutely covered in tampo prints that your fingers will eventually rub off. The bulkier construction of the AX just made the situation worse. Funny enough, if you remove the canards, they actually get much easier to pick up, since you can grab them around the intakes, and if you add the super packs, they cover enough of the valk that they feel like tampo shielding.
  10. Chronocidal
    I wouldn't say no to completing the DYRL squad with a couple 1As and a CF, but yeah, my most wanted is the Super Ostrich. I want to see it done in this scale.
  11. Chronocidal
    Boy, I went to bed early, and figured I'd wait until the initial rush for the Concorde faded away. Checked this morning, and nope! Was able to log in, throw two in the cart, and check out with no issues. I think the past couple of orders I've made on LEGO.com have been much smoother than things went for a while, so maybe they've smoothed out their stock/supply/ordering process somehow.
  12. Chronocidal
    Also interestingly, while the PF VF-4 has made several rounds of restock on HLJ, the PF YF-19 never has. I've kept it refreshing for a long time, wondering if I'd get a chance to grab a second one, but so far it's never gone back on sale.
  13. Chronocidal
    Judging by the photos, being designed in CG helped it immensely compared to the YF-19. It looks pretty good in all three modes.
  14. Chronocidal
    Fortunately, it does look like Bandai is aware of this, and has been putting all of their newer releases in plastic shells. Both YF-29 bundles, all of the VF-1 releases, and the new VF-25 releases have been in plastic, so I think we're past the era where we see them packed in styrofoam. I'm going to miss how sturdy the styrofoam made those boxes, since they tend to stack much better than the plastic shell ones. It's a small price to pay for keeping them from yellowing though.
  15. Chronocidal
    I'd love to see them update all of those molds to current standard, and if we ever get a VF-17T, I really hope they do the white and orange trainer scheme we saw parked in Macross Plus. I've wanted one of those forever. I'm not sure what you mean about the LERX joint on the 19s though. Better articulation might be nice, but if you're referring to the articulation on the Bandai YF-19, I'm not sure if that would work with the larger LERX panels on the VF-19s, just because they're so much bigger. I went looking at the lineart, and those triangular panels wind up much smaller than they should be in the back view, and are completely omitted in the front view. Also, my only experience with the DX YF-19 was to have the hip panels repeatedly pop off because the pivots were too stiff and the little plastic ball joints were far too weak in comparison (very reminiscent of how the VF-25 hip gun panels tend to pop off, rather than move). The DX YF-19 is fresh in my mind, since I was messing with my Yamato VF-19s yesterday, and got the bright idea to do a comparison, and transform it from fighter to battroid and back. Yeah, that was a mistake. There's a reason the Yamato/Arcadia ones are what I transform on a regular basis. It took me two hours to cycle that stupid thing from fighter to battroid and back, because the process involved completely disassembling the hip joints (typical Bandai construction with a 6-piece metal and plastic socket held together by four separate screws) to make the legs move enough to transform. Yeeeeesh.
  16. Chronocidal
    Good to know, and yeah, I'm not overly concerned about this. Provided you could get the lower arm apart, it probably wouldn't be hard to replace with a printed copy. Mine is such a clean break, I'll probably be able to just drill into the parts and add a segment of paperclip, and glue it back together. Given the option, I'd probably redesign the part with a fillet in that hard corner where it snapped though. I'm surprised it didn't have that to begin with.
  17. Chronocidal
    I think the issue is that they just didn't sell well at all the first time around. They stopped production on them quickly, because no one bought them when they were new. Arcadia would probably have to charge the price they go for on ebay before they could actually turn a profit making another run.
  18. Chronocidal
    So this is interesting, and a little weird to discover. Apparently my first release Fire Valk has had its left upper-arm joint shear off in the box over the past few years. Bizarrely clean break, too, I'm thinking it was just a flow point in the plastic. The other arm has a stress mark here, so maybe I pulled something out of whack when I originally transformed it? I checked all my other VF-19s, and none have a break or stress mark forming at that point. There's actually enough flat surface area at the break that I could probably drill and pin this together to fix it pretty well, but it actually kind of stays together on its own. The friction of the pin is enough to keep the joint together, and though the pivot is floppy, it's held in place fine by the shoulder cover in battroid and gerwalk, and doesn't matter in fighter at all. Just something to be aware of, since there's a new release coming, and I think all of the VF-19s and the Arcadia YF-19 share these same parts.
  19. Chronocidal
    That would be a little redundant, since Bandai already included the arm cannon pack with the first release of their DX YF-19. It's not included in the most recent re-release, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they offer an add-on pack with the missiles, fast packs, arm cannon, and fold booster in the future. They cut out a ton of content for the repop, and I think a lot of people are going to want the fast packs and missiles, as well as that cannon.
  20. Chronocidal
    Anime Export still showing that they have stock, so long as you didn't already order one.
  21. Chronocidal
    There was never any change that I know of, and while I don't recall any complete explosions, I do remember one or two cases where either Alto's, Luca's, or the Maruyama release had a knee twist joint go floppy, which is the precursor to these failures. It just indicates that the friction pin/plate is loose in that plastic shaft, either due to wear or structural failure. After the legs started falling off, I think people started being more careful with them. There really did seem to be something amiss with the CF production, in terms of materials and assembly, because there was such an overwhelming amount of failures, but I do recall seeing the same sort of cracking along a plastic flow-line start on the knee of my Luca copy a couple of years after the CF mess. Left it in fighter mode forever after.
  22. Chronocidal
    Wow, managed to nap through the whole thing, but AmiAmi and AE still up.. threw an order at AE since I can ship it with other stuff later. I'm thinking the low demand is more a product of the 171's bad history though.
  23. Chronocidal
    There's really nothing to fix. I kept all of the parts, but there's no way to replace the knee without destroying the lower leg. I wasn't kidding when I said Bandai made a glue sandwich out of it. Best you're going to get is a solid knee for permanent fighter mode. Maybe someday I'll do surgery and break open the lower leg to replace the broken bits, but I just don't care that much anymore. I parted out the busted one to cobble together two good copies out of four broken ones I got cheaply.
  24. Chronocidal
    Found my original post describing the leg issues. It's a combination of bad design, bad materials, and bad instructions. Not easy to sort out, and close to impossible to fix without a completely new leg design. As a side note, I did see someone in one of the older threads (Duymon I think) state that out of 12 VF-171 CFs they bought, 4 of them had at least one knee that exploded. One-in-three odds is absolutely insane. To think, the entire thing would have been rectified if Bandai would have just done what Yamato did on the VF-17, and give the knee a simple stupid twist joint. The ENTIRE problem is due to their stupid unnecessary interlocking pivot.
  25. Chronocidal
    I know it did from me The exploding knee joint issue was something much less common than the triangles being broke, but it's far more catastrophic, because there's really nothing to do except try to glue everything back together to be in fighter mode forever (provided you can even collect all the pieces). I've posted comments about what causes this issue in the previous VF-171 threads, with some pretty extensive examinations of what exactly causes it, but fixing the issue would require a complete redesign of the knee joint. That in itself wouldn't even be hard to do, if Bandai had not glued, screwed, and then glued again, turning the entire lower leg into a sandwich that you will very likely destroy before you ever make any progress trying to disassemble it. The short version is that Bandai made the knee rotation joint a hollow plastic tube with a metal friction pin in the center of it, and the shiny metallic plastic they used has the rough physical properties of obsidian. It shatters into shards along flow lines. BE VERY VERY CAREFUL ROTATING THE LEGS IN ANY WAY. There is a longer description for how to "safely" transform the legs in my previous posts, and I'll look for them in a moment, but the reality is that it's never really safe to transform them, because the joint Bandai designed is just incomprehensibly terrible in execution, and desperately needs to be replaced with something that doesn't suck. I would be absolutely thrilled to see them fix that garbage design in this release, but I also have absolutely zero expectation for them ever to do that.
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