tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on A year after nationalisation, is South Western Railway delivering? 7 hours ago:
South Western Railway’s newest train, wrapped in union jack-inspired Great British Railways livery, may divide opinion on aesthetics
The GBR train livery, drawn up on the cheap by ministers and advisers in the Department for Transport, has attracted attention – some incredulous. It was described by one insider as “more GB News than GBR”, while the architecture and design critic Cath Slessor said the “effortfully deconstructed livery looks like an explosion in a union jack factory – and not in a good way”.
Really? What does it look like?
goes hunting around
Oh, come on. That’s the over-the-top flag train that’s giving offense?
hunts for some pictures over here
- Comment on Xbox makes more leadership changes, hiring analyst who said games were losing the attention battle with gambling, crypto and porn as chief strategy officer 3 days ago:
Yeah…idlers are a category for the desktop too, but IME they also aren’t typically oriented towards being “TV-like”, something that you’d watch.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_game
Incremental games are a video game subgenre characterized by the incremental accumulation of in-game resources, and gradual, often exponential progression through repetitive actions or automation. Incremental games that emphasize active input, such as repeatedly clicking a button to generate resources, are also called clicker games, while games that center on automation and progress that continues with minimal player interaction are also called idle games. Many incremental games combine both elements.[1]
- Comment on Xbox makes more leadership changes, hiring analyst who said games were losing the attention battle with gambling, crypto and porn as chief strategy officer 3 days ago:
That doesn’t really seem like mutually-exclusive stuff.
You can definitely make video games that incorporate pornography.
Gambling is probably also generally-available, though some locales have pretty restrictive law on online gambling.
I don’t know about crypto, but if “crypto” in this context is effectively “gambling by trying to trade cryptocurrencies”, I’d think that that basically falls into the gambling category.
The article also mentions TikTok. I don’t know how readily you can do that — TikTok is maybe the closest analog to television in the Internet era, and video games are something you actively participate in. It might be possible to introduce categories of mostly-passive video games, where the player has some limited degree of interactivity but is mostly watching what’s going on, and where there aren’t hard real-time demands on their attention. Like, a game that you play while simultaneously eating dinner or something.
- Comment on Xbox makes more leadership changes, hiring analyst who said games were losing the attention battle with gambling, crypto and porn as chief strategy officer 3 days ago:
They spend too much money on the games on DLC, that game has like more than $500 in DLC probably. Its insane.
The Sims 4 is currently up to $1,596.89 with all DLC on Steam.
DCS is up to $4,368.28 with all DLC on Steam (though in fairness, I think that it’s very likely that almost all players are not getting all planes, but rather picking specific ones that they’re interested in playing.)
- Comment on UK ‘built for climate that no longer exists’ and needs urgent changes to survive global heating, report warns 4 days ago:
- Comment on UK ‘built for climate that no longer exists’ and needs urgent changes to survive global heating, report warns 5 days ago:
Canada and the US see much more considerable temperature extremes than does Europe. Water moderates temperature, and in the middle of a continent, far away from the oceans, you get wider swings. Europe’s basically a bunch of peninsulas.
The largest swings are in inland Asia, where you can get a really long distance from the ocean.
searches
I can’t find a map I’ve seen before that shows summer-winter temperature difference, but here’s one that shows it for a country’s capital which…is a very rough approximation.
brilliantmaps.com/capital-temp-difference/
Being close to the poles and being further away from water.
The UK is an archipelago, so it’s pretty much all near the water.
- Comment on Going in blind on this bad boy 1 week ago:
I am not familiar, but, cutting the “changes” section out of a review:
www.rpgland.com/games/hoshigamiremix/review.html
Remix adds various, easier difficulty levels, new character art, redone music, a new character, and an overhauled localization.
Another problem with the game is the extreme lack of portability. It is a DS title, and as such should be capable of being played for small amounts of time at once. Unfortunately, there is no suspend feature to allow for saving while in battle. Factor in that the average battle can take 20-40 minutes and that sometimes one battle immediately follows another with no break for saving, and here’s a game that is not at all good for playing on the move.
So going entirely off that, it sounds like the remake is probably preferable, but it might not be a good idea if you plan to play the DS game as a “mobile” game — dropping into the thing for a few minutes while waiting in a line or something.
- Comment on Game Consoles Are Pricing Themselves Out of Relevance 1 week ago:
The limiting factor is in significant part memory, and while in some cases, there are options for PCs — like using scavenged DDR4 memory — that aren’t available for consoles, PC prices have also generally been hit by the same factors that have driven up console prices.
- Comment on What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ? 1 week ago:
It’s not that they lasted longer, but that it was considerably less expensive to recharge them than to buy and throw out a new set of batteries for each session.
- Comment on What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ? 1 week ago:
That thing drank 6x AA batteries like there was no tomorrow.
There were NiCad rechargeables. I didn’t own a Game Gear, but a friend did, and I remember him using NiCads for that and RC vehicles.
- Comment on What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ? 1 week ago:
- Comment on ‘Six lanes of tarmac and vehicles doing 70mph’: can ‘green bridges’ help animals cross the UK’s motorways in safety? 1 week ago:
While there is no definitive data on the impact of roads, experts say the links between infrastructure and biodiversity loss are clear.
“It is based around genetic isolation,” Herd says, explaining how wildlife suffers when a habitat is spliced into smaller sections. “They will breed and breed and breed, but the gene pool becomes tighter and tighter and tighter, and that’s not a good thing.”
“They can feed here, get cover, they can bask, they can breed,” says Herd. Ground-nesting birds, such as nightjars, woodlarks and Dartford warblers, will also benefit from the newly connected landscape.
Why?
Sure, I get the argument for ground-bound animals. But while those birds might nest on the ground, they are going to fly when traveling. For them, the road shouldn’t be a genetic obstacle.
- Comment on YouTube now 1 week ago:
- Comment on Engineer creates video game of Alaska’s Tracy Arm landslide, which generated a megatsunami 2 weeks ago:
And then the wave exploded into a fireball.
- Comment on MAGAs Are Fuming After Email Confirms They Will Never Get Their $500 Trump Phones or Deposits Back 2 weeks ago:
My impression is that Trump mostly just licenses his name to these ventures for a payment and isn’t affiliated with them otherwise. I don’t think that he likely cares much what happens to the phone buyers or sellers. He’s made his money either way.
- Comment on Engineer creates video game of Alaska’s Tracy Arm landslide, which generated a megatsunami 2 weeks ago:
Patrick Lynett, a USC civil engineering professor, said when it comes to natural disasters, training people how to react is important, and one way to do that is through digital work like the simulation and video game he created that depicts what happened.
I think that if you’re in a boat right next to the initiation of a 328-foot-high megatsunami, going 1,578 feet up a rock cliff, as the video portrays in the game, you’re probably just pretty much boned.
- Comment on The half-assed implementations of battery charge limits... 2 weeks ago:
I’d like to have standardized LFP battery form factors and BMS interfaces. I’m not really enthusiastic about everyone rolling their own battery form factor for a given product that isn’t going to be available forever, even if it can save a bit of space. That battery is going to degrade over time, and unless I’m going to throw the product out soon, at some point I may want to replace the battery.
- Comment on Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News 2 weeks ago:
On eBay, I see two listings from scalpers already up for $230 and $319.
- Comment on Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News 2 weeks ago:
I think they truly didn’t anticipate the volume of people interested in the controller.
If you’re getting the Steam Machine 2.0, you’re probably going to get at least one Steam Controller, since it’s the closest thing to an “official” Steam Machine controller, and it’s designed to let you do a reasonable job of playing mouse-based games from the couch. Kinda go together like peanut butter and jelly.
But…the Steam Machine 2.0 is deferred, so the people buying one are buying one to use on a PC, either for use at a desk or some non-Valve-built living-room PC, which I think is probably harder for Valve to predict demand for.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
For a given user, I suppose that depends largely upon whether what a given end user wants to use character.ai for is copyrighted characters.
- Comment on Chinese attackers are pwning your infrastructure to use in attacks, 10 countries warn 4 weeks ago:
compromised routers and IoT devices
I mean, that’s kind what you’d expect if you stick devices on the Internet and then they don’t get updates.
- Comment on Valve Uploads Steam Controller Unboxing Video, Launch Imminent 4 weeks ago:
pcgamesn.com/…/steam-controller-shipment-leak
14 tons of Steam Controllers appear to have just arrived in the US, hinting at imminent release date
- Comment on Playnix: Boutique Linux PC released with better gaming performance than Valve Steam Machine 5 weeks ago:
I mean, you will almost certainly be able to build machines that outperform the Steam Machine in bang-for-buck if Valve isn’t subsidizing it, which they said that they won’t. If not at release, then a few years in.
But that’s not gonna be what the Steam Machine is for — you could always build a DIY gaming PC, unlike with consoles. It’s an open platform. What Valve is gonna do is be aiming for is going to be ease of use, the “you plug it into your TV, plug it into power, turn on gamepad, play games that target Steam Machine 2” thing. That’s where consoles have been able to pick up users that haven’t done the PC.
- Comment on QUIC will soon be as important as TCP 5 weeks ago:
QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.
SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pr…
Features of SCTP include:
- Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.
- Comment on Two-year-old Surface PCs get $300 price hikes as sub-$1,000 models go away 5 weeks ago:
I’m rather concerned about what I do when my Surface Pro 7 dies
Well, most of what I’ve seen expects memory prices to be coming down in 2028. So if it’s got two years of use in it, you’re probably good.
If you’re desperate for a laptop sooner and cheaper, you can get used laptops on eBay (well, maybe somewhere else if you’re not in the US, dunno what the used PC market is like globally).
- Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.
- Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!
- Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20 5 weeks ago:
I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.
- Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20 5 weeks ago:
Rank Title FTP? 1 Roblox Yes 2 Counter-Strike 2 Yes 3 League of Legends Yes 4 Minecraft In China 5 Fortnite For modes other than Save the World 6 Dota 2 Yes 7 Valorant Yes 8 World of Warcraft No 9 The Sims 4 No 10 Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 No 11 Escape from Tarkov No 12 Overwatch 2 Yes 13 Marvel Rivals Yes 14 PUBG: Battlegrounds Yes 15 World of Warcraft Classic No 16 Grand Theft Auto V No 17 Diablo IV No 18 Wuthering Waves Yes 19 Genshin Impact Yes 20 Apex Legends Yes I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.
- Comment on Please just stop 5 weeks ago:
Followed by a lot of Jira.
It was clear that more use of Bugzilla would cure many of society’s ills.
