tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Bethesda has released a major update for Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition on Nintendo Switch 2, significantly improving the overall experience on the console. 3 days ago:
Not happening until after the next Elder Scrolls game is out.
- Comment on Woman deported from China over Manx passport mix-up 3 days ago:
But the airport officials looked “confused” she said, and asked to see her visa.
The Douglas resident said she did not need one as the Isle of Man was part of the British Isles, but she was pulled aside and told to wait.
That’s not going to work. Ireland is also part of the British Isles, and I’m whatever agreement the UK signed with China doesn’t apply to people just because they’re citizens of the Republic of Ireland.
You want to say “it’s a Crown Dependency”.
- Comment on Anyone else looking forward to the new Starfield dlc and update? 3 days ago:
Yup!
- Comment on HW News - US Bans Most Routers - Shortage Likely, AMD Joins Corrupt Council, CPU Price Hike 4 days ago:
Shortage Likely
OpenWrt (from open wireless router) is an open-source project for embedded operating systems based on Linux, primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic.
OpenWrt can run on various types of devices, including CPE routers, residential gateways, smartphones, pocket computers (e.g., Ben NanoNote). It is also possible to run OpenWrt on personal computers and laptops.
OpenWrt also recommends choosing a device with a minimum of 16 MB of flash and 128 MB of RAM, preferably higher amounts.[77]
If you can install OpenWRT, you can probably get ahold of hardware that can run OpenWRT.
- Comment on Russia wants to legalize cars stolen in EU 4 days ago:
I mean, the EU could impose a 24-hour quarantine period on vehicles leaving the EU for Russia to see if any theft reports come in that aren’t whitelisted as a freight-hauler vehicle list or something like that. That’d probably suck a lot more for Russia than it would for the EU.
- Comment on SpaceX confidentially files to go public at $1.75tn, reports say 5 days ago:
So, I’d agree that he’s probably not doing a fantastic job of running Tesla as an auto company these days. However, if you consider Tesla to just be an auto company, its valuation is way too high. I think I heard someone put it along these lines a while back, that “Tesla is a solid auto company, but one valued at ten times what it’s worth.” The only way its present-day valuation can really be justified by an investor is if they think that the bulk of the company’s value is going to come from new things that it is doing and that those things will all be wildly successful, like robotaxi service and humanoid robots and all that.
- Comment on SpaceX confidentially files to go public at $1.75tn, reports say 5 days ago:
One of the things that Musk has to do to get his trillion dollar pay package fully paid out from Tesla as CEO is to crank up Tesla’s market capitalization. I’ve wondered if this is a gyration to advance that?
Elon Musk Threatened To Quit Tesla Before $1 Trillion Compensation Deal
forbes.com/…/tesla-proposes-compensation-plan-for…
Elon Musk’s xAI and SpaceX merged in February, valuing the company at over $1.25 trillion. SpaceX is now preparing for an initial public offering (IPO).
- Comment on Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow 1 week ago:
I mean, Apple is the example the author is using to come to his conclusions, but he’s talking about the industry as a whole regarding the disk controllers.
- Comment on Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow 1 week ago:
It’s just an Apple fanboy
checks article history
Almost all of their articles are about Linux.
- Comment on Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow 1 week ago:
You don’t need to as long as you’re getting sufficient speeds from non-soldered DIMMs, and desktops are generally still using non-soldered DIMMs.
- Comment on Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow 1 week ago:
Aside from them, discrete graphics cards are history, just as disk controllers were a few decades earlier. DIMM slots are going too. The primary storage will be built in. (The industry missed a great deal there.)
Discrete disk controllers are still around.
My last deskop had a PCI SATA card that I added after I exhausted all of the on-motherboard SATA slots.
My current one has a JBOD USB Mass Storage enclosure.
- Comment on Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow 1 week ago:
I’m not sold that modular desktops are going away in general. SoCs have some benefits in terms of power usage, but those are most-substantial on phones and least-substantial on the desktop.
My understanding is that memory may move away from DIMMs to CAMM2 to permit for higher speeds, but that’s still a modular system.
- Comment on Is there any decent PvP FPS that's not infested with cheaters? Looking for a decent PvP FPS 1 week ago:
If I were set on that, I’d probably play on a console. I prefer keyboard+mouse for shooters, but…
The PC’s strength is that it’s open. You can do whatever you want. Want to mod a game to have more features or make it look prettier? Go for it. Tweak it? Sure. Get more-powerful hardware to get a more-attractive appearance in a lot of games? Sure. Cheat to skip that annoying grindy bit in game X? Sure thing. Use whatever new and interesting input devices you want to add quality-of-life features with an extra button or macros? Sure.
Works beautifully for single-player games.
But by the same token, attempts to resist cheating in multiplayer competitive games are ill-suited to the platform and rely on developers trying to hack together attempts that tend to have performance and compatibility implications.
Whereas the strength of the console is that it’s closed. You can’t do whatever you want. You don’t get to mod or tweak games much, which eliminates routes to cheat. Everyone has (more-or-less) the same hardware, so nobody can “pay-to-win” in the sense of getting a performance edge in multiplayer competitive games — there’s a level playing field. Cheating is a pain. I understand that these days, console vendors blacklist and authenticate alternative input devices, so that players can’t use alternative controllers and the like, which prevents them from getting an edge.
Works beautifully for competitive multiplayer games.
- Comment on What was the worst movie to game adapation you've played? 1 week ago:
To cue anyone’s memory:
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 1 week ago:
That’d be quite high compared to historical inflation-adjusted launch prices.
visualcapitalist.com/game-console-launch-prices-a…
Game Console Launch Prices Adjusted for Inflation (1975-2024)
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 1 week ago:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Ninth_generation_of_video_game…
The ninth generation of video game consoles began in November 2020 with the releases of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S console family and Sony’s PlayStation 5.[1][2][3]
The duration from the eighth generation until the start of the ninth was one of the longest in history, having started in 2012 with the release of Nintendo’s Wii U. Past generations typically had five-year windows as a result of Moore’s law,[10] but Microsoft and Sony instead launched mid-console redesigns, the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro.[11] Microsoft also launched a monthly console lease program, with the option to buy or upgrade.[12] Some analysts believed these factors signaled the first major shift away from the idea of console generations because the potential technical gains of new hardware had become nominal.[13]
The eighth generation video game console period ran for about eight years, so there’d be precedent for the ninth generation consoles to do the same, which would take us to 2028.
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 1 week ago:
searches
ign.com/…/nintendo-switch-2-production-cut-33-fol…
Nintendo Switch 2 Production Cut 33% Following Weak Holiday Sales, Report Claims
Nintendo has reportedly cut back on manufacturing Switch 2 consoles following weaker than expected holiday sales for the console.
That’s according to Bloomberg, whose sources say Nintendo now expects to make 4 million Switch 2 units this quarter, down 33% on the 6 million it previously planned to manufacture.
Nintendo recently confirmed it had sold fewer Switch 2 consoles internationally over the holiday period than it had once hoped, particularly in the U.S. — though the impact of this had also been dulled somewhat by stronger sales in its homeland of Japan.
- Comment on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible" 1 week ago:
I seriously wonder if they’d be better off just deferring the next console generation until 2028.
- Comment on Borderlands 4′s New $30 Expansion Pack Isn’t Winning Over Fans 1 week ago:
I never thought Borderlands games were all that good, personally.
I didn’t like the respawning enemies aspect. Felt like an unchanging world.
And the story was kinda forgettable, in my book.
Most of the humor didn’t really do anything for me.
But I did enjoy the constantly-changing collection of procedurally-generated weapons that constantly changed up how one played, which is kinda the signature of the series.
- Comment on Hackney pub’s child‑free rule sparks debate online 1 week ago:
Heh. Meanwhile, over here:
calrest.org/…/minors-and-bars-the-basics-one-page…
No One Under 21
Section 25665 of the California Alcoholic Beverage Control statute states that minors are not allowed to enter or remain within a bar.
Patron Must Prove Age
If the patron can’t prove their age, then they can’t remain in the bar. (B&PC §§ 25658(a), 25658.4, 25659).
Bar owners wrongfully allowing minors in a public bar with a green license face a penalty of $1000 and/or 6 months in county jail.
The penalty for the minor wrongfully in the bar is a fine of not less than $200.
- Comment on New RPG Maker Entry Announced With HD-2D Style Visual Shift 1 week ago:
Ah, gotcha, thanks.
- Comment on New RPG Maker Entry Announced With HD-2D Style Visual Shift 1 week ago:
At least some of the past ones do; they’re on Steam.
- Comment on What is on your next-to-buy list? 1 week ago:
I’ve got a substantial existing backlog of owned games and am trying not to just jump on more things until I’ve worked through some of that.
Some things that I’d buy anyway:
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If Kenshi 2 comes out anytime soon. My expectation is that that’s years out.
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If something like Caves of Qud comes out. I already have some roguelikes to play.
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Additional good DLC for some games that I have been playing, like Starfield. The Rimworld DLC has been worthwhile.
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If something like Steel Division 2 with Wargame: Red Dragon’s modern setting came out. Steel Division 2 has reasonable game AI and good quality-of-life features, but I personally enjoy the newer setting of Wargame: Red Dragon. WARNO isn’t that — it’s much too fast-paced for me and has less unit variety, feels to me like mostly just directing a constant flood of units.
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If Fallout 5 came out anytime soon, which I am very confident will not happen.
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- Comment on Why NEMA 1-15 Power Cords Still Matter for Everyday Devices? 2 weeks ago:
The NEMA 1-15 power cable becomes the most important item in the room when people discover their specialized devices cannot recharge without it. It is frankly hilarious how much we obsess over liquid cooling and fiber optics while our daily sanity relies on a design that has barely changed since the dawn of the lightbulb.
Only peripherally-related, but on that note:
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The most-common lightbulb socket in the US (the “Edison screw”) dates back to 1909.
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The 1/8-inch headphones jack isn’t identical to the original standard, but it’s a direct decendant (and electrically-compatible with) the 1/4 inch mono headphones jack from (checks) 1877. Since that time, we’ve had variants with more rings (stereo, microphone, balanced audio) added and the size reduction to 1/8-inch for smaller devices. But the basic standard has been around for quite a while.
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- Comment on I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t played it, but if you can’t skip the animation, that actually highlights the issue I complained about in another comment, where the animation becomes the bottleneck. Say they do this, and it’s tuned to that hard drive. Then someone decides that they’re willing to spend more to improve performance and goes out and gets an SSD for their PS4. Now the game probably doesn’t need to spend all that time hiding the loading, but the player’s still stuck with it in the game.
- Comment on Console Commands and Mods Shouldn’t Disable Achievements — Consoles Are Holding Players Back for No Good Reason 2 weeks ago:
I kind of took the approach of not caring about achievements in the first place.
I mean, at best, they’re an inexpensive way of adding grind of some premade categories to games. At worst, they’re another source of tracking player activity in games (though I suppose that as data-harvesting goes, this is probably one of the less-objectionable forms).
I get wanting to do challenge playthroughs to accomplish certain things, but it’s not as if the game developer needs to provide support for that. It’s maybe a quality-of-life improvement, but…shrugs It just isn’t something that matters that much to me.
I think that there’s a good argument for mods disabling achievements, if one wants the achievement to be meaningful. It’s hard to reliably determine whether a mod (or an updated version of the mod) “helps” or not. You’d likely need human review, which is subject to errors and costs something. If someone permits through a mod that helps and then achievements gotten with that mod are revoked, that’s going to piss some players off.
All that being said, if someone does care about achievements, I think that one option might be to have two lists of achievements. One is for the vanilla game. One is for the modded game. That doesn’t require human review of mods or hard calls to be made (since all mods “taint” the achievement and move it to the “modded game” achievement list) and it still lets players who just want to track their own progress do so using achievements. It doesn’t mean that a player can enjoy some quality-of-life mod and still prove to their friends that they accomplished Achievement X in an unmodified game in terms of challenge, but that might be fine for a lot of players.
- Comment on Bethesda has no plans to slow down on paid mods, Todd Howard says he wants to get Creations 'in front of more people' 2 weeks ago:
I generally agree that improving mod accessibility to the public is desirable.
I just stuck maybe a couple hundred mods into Starfield this week using Creations, including a number of paid ones. I’m fine with paid mods, but Bethesda still needs to deal with some basic issues.
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While I had fewer problems than I had with installing mods on prior Bethesda games using third-party mod managers, the need to troubleshoot hasn’t gone away. I installed some high-resolution texture mods that crashed Starfield shortly after boot. Bethesda doesn’t detect crashes in that scenario and offer a way to “roll back” to a “safe mode” or anything like that. I poked around a bit, and, as with their prior games, Starfield has a plugins.txt containing a list of modules loaded, and one can just remove the leading asterisk to disable them. But that’s going to be unacceptable for general use if you want all players to have access to mods. Either troubleshooting has to be pretty idiot-proof, or not be necessary at all. You definitely can’t put someone in a situation where they effectively can’t access the mod manager.
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For more-advanced users, troubleshooting tools still aren’t great. Bethesda would benefit from something that can at least do a binary-search for a breaking mod: turn off the latter half of a problematic mod list, see if the problem goes away. If it does, the problem is in the latter half; repeat for that half. If it doesn’t, the problem is in the first half; repeat for that half. Various tools that I’ve used in the past can do this, like
git bisect. Conflict Catcher on the classic MacOS had a particularly good implementation that could detect multiple extensions that conflicted with each other; I’ve never seen another tool do this. -
Bethesda doesn’t, AFAICT, do adult mods in their own mod repository, which are popular for a number of their prior games. Nexusmods carries things that Creations doesn’t. LoversLab carries things that Nexusmods doesn’t. I appreciate if Microsoft doesn’t want to be in the business of distributing adult mods. However, I am confident that a lot of people would like to use those, as with prior Bethesda games. If one wants a lower bar to use, not requiring use of external mod managers would be desirable. I do think that extending the in-game mod manager to support external mod repositories would lower the barrier there. If Bethesda wants their game to be a platform, then that means more stuff strengthens the platform.
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Loading time still increases as mod count rises, as with prior Bethesda games. It can easily take minutes. It should be possible, at bare minimum, to have a progress bar up showing about how long it’ll take to complete load based on prior loads, if the mod list hasn’t changed. Personally, I’d like to see the load time reduced. If they have to validate content or something or build an index, only do it the first time a mod list changes and then cache the index.
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It’d be nice to have a “recommends” option. That is, if a mod requires another mod, when installing the first mod, ask the user if they want to install the latter mod. Nexusmods can do this. Bethesda’s Creations can’t — they will keep one from enabling an installed mod with missing dependencies, but the user basically needs to read mod descriptions and install appropriate dependency mods. That’s a barrier to use.
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Bethesda’s Creations store just has abysmal filtering options. I get that it’s for a single game, and so it’s hard to amortize costs, but browsing through what’s there is just atrocious. You don’t have the ability to apply multiple criteria when searching for games.
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The Creations store always re-downloads the list of Creations, instead of caching it. Exit Creations and go back in and everything gets re-downloaded again. This is obnoxious.
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I understand that there are some technical limitations associated with the Creations mod manager. The Dark Mode Terminal mod, for example, says that the Creations release cannot work around a bug associated with changing mod load order that the Nexus release doesn’t have a problem with.
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One popular thing to make as mods in many games is skins or cosmetic changes, like to clothing or the like. Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 had “cinematic kills”, where sometimes the camera would pan away, allowing one to see one’s own character. Starfield doesn’t do this, which means that there are few opportunities to see one’s character, unless one leaves the camera in third-person (which is generally not great from a gameplay standpoint). This is an issue that I also would say applies to Cyberpunk 2077’s clothing options — lots of work went into creating many clothing options, but one so rarely actually sees oneself in the game that it has little impact. Ditto for a number of cosmetic options, like hairstyle and the like. I think that it’d be beneficial if they could work some way to see oneself more frequently into the game in terms of people reskinning things.
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For Fallout 76, Bethesda made money by mostly selling cosmetic items used by people who want to build themed player CAMPs. I was never personally very interested in building elaborate CAMPs just for the sake of looks, though clearly there are some people who are. However, my take is that these items were generally quite expensive compared to the cost of assets in the base game, though I’ll admit that I don’t know what volume they sell at. At least for me, the idea of paying for more content and functionality, to keep expanding that aspect of the game, is interesting. Buying cosmetic clutter items isn’t terribly interesting. I’m sure that they gather statistics on what players actually get, and Starfield’s Creations seem to me to have a different focus than the Fallout 76 Creations, so that’s good so far as it goes from my standpoint. My own interest would be in, say, getting new handcrafted cities and quests and the like. Getting a new player home or a different style of couch to put in it doesn’t really interest me nearly as much.
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- Comment on I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime 2 weeks ago:
One thing that annoys me about loading animations designed to conceal the game needing to load is that there’s no guarantee that — especially with PC games, as the game is played on faster computers — the bottleneck may become the animation completing rather than the actual loading.
Static loading screens don’t have this problem.
I kind of like Fallout 4’s approach of putting a single model up that you can rotate and look at while something is loading. It’ll add to the loading time a bit, but at least there’s something going on.
- Comment on I hear Quarry Junction is lovely this time of year! 2 weeks ago:
If you get past the cazadors, then there are deathclaws on that route.
- Comment on Public invited to pick Sycamore Gap tree artwork 3 weeks ago:
My understanding is that the felling didn’t actually kill the tree. There were apparently spouts coming up from the stump.
