NuXCOM_90Percent

@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Randy Pitchford Snaps Back at Borderlands 4 Criticism: 'Code Your Own Engine'⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
You can expect whatever you want. That isn’t what is being sold. That’s why so much of the nVidia bullshit insists that reviewers and partners report upscaling and framegen as the “normal” results (and why outlets like Gamers Nexus are on their shitlist).

And the “norm for over 20 years” was that games targeted a specific range of hardware “power”. That is why so much work was put into engines to support higher res models in first person view that would only be one per scene and lower res models that other characters have. And scaling detail based on distance and so forth. But it also meant that we didn’t have the ridiculously high res hero models that might only exist for cutscenes because no computer of the era would be able to run that performantly in real time.

Personally? I would LOVE if more effort were put in for scalability (which Unreal is ironically really good at because it targets film). But that gets back into what the target audience is and if it is worth putting the effort in for “Mega Ultra Super Epic” settings when nobody is going to use them. And… considering that one of the biggest issues is people refuse to put more research in than “I set it to High”… yeah.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Randy Pitchford Snaps Back at Borderlands 4 Criticism: 'Code Your Own Engine'⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Obligatory dril tweet about not “Gotta hand it to them”

But yeah. It is infuriating how often people just spew nonsense about “it is Unreal so it runs like shit” just like it was when “It is Unity so it runs like shit” and so forth. I very much do not think people need to “code (their) own engine” to understand things but… it would be a good idea to to do some basic research on the topic.

I can’t speak for blands 4 specifiaclly. But with a lot of these games? People don’t realize that the game is very much being optimized with upscaling and even framegen in mind. You can say you hate that if you want to. But these studios aren’t targeting 120 FPS at 4k. They are targeting 120 FPS at 2k or even 60 FPS at 2k. In large part because… there still isn’t a lot of value in actually targeting 4k on any console or even most PCs. So it gives them more or less a “single” target. And some techniques don’t scale anywhere near as well (also 2k to 4k is not linear).

It is just that people grew up in the golden age where everything was targeting a PS4 and kind of has been for almost a decade at this point. So the idea of futzing with your graphics settings and checking the different AA (now upscaling) models is kind of anathema to a lot of users. And consoles STILL try to hide all of that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
…

DID Blands 4 “dominate”? The only mention of it I saw was pitchford (and his magic flash drive) bragging that the servers wouldn’t get hugged over the weekend and… yeah.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RomM (self-hosting emulation) releasing a significant update - 4.2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Its one of those things you can only really “know” by actually keeping an ear open. I mean, look around. Lemmy generally seems to skew left (how much of that is the tankies on dot ml is a different discussion). But there are basically two or three of us who point out that BDS is specifically calling for a boycott of Microsoft every time a gamepass or Gears of War thread comes up because fuck that shit, No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism™ means Fuck Off Palestine New Forza Dropped.

But if you listen and ask questions when people reference Internet Lore, you too get the brainworm and can make informed decisions going forth.

Which, truth be told, is not that different than anything else. If you only watch the news when something interesting happens, you might think a nazi is a good man and father. Whereas, if you have suffered even a bit of continual psychic damage over the years, you KNOW that is bullshit and can start thinking about why CNN is glazing him and so forth.

The Internet is a spectacular pleasure box and a great way to find out information on demand. But relying solely on The Algorithm and Others to inform you is how you get… 2025.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
As a very early backer of S42 way back in apparently 2012: It never ceases to annoy me that The Wing Commander Guy has once again managed to do everything possible to NOT make a fucking Wing Commander. This is, what, the third big clusterfuck and the first one where there was nobody to take it away from him and just finish it themselves? But, whatever.

As a big fan of elite games: I am really glad star citizen “exists” to contrast Elite Dangerous and has led to some truly amazing games in the genre. Some of which actually ARE more Wing Commander than not (Everspace 2 is basically the Freelancer that was promised). Now we just need some studio to make a proper Freespace game.

All that said: I don’t like it but I weirdly keep coming back to the thought process that Star Citizen actually IS delivering on its “promise” to the backers… of the past decade or so. Not the OGs. Fuck us.

Because they were never sold on actually playing a game. They were sold on a dream. It is the same logic by which you watch Aisha Tyler do VO for a Tom Clancy game and think that you and your friends are also going to be super sweaty tier seven operators. Or how you watch your favorite group of online youtubers read off their pre-written jokes and pretend to be shocked while playing “friendslop” games. Or… you are a non-sicko who read too many AARs of Dwarf Fortress and thought you would boatmurder too.

Its the idea of spending money to Dream. You know you’ll never actually do what you saw the pretty people do. But you THINK you will and, by owning a copy of Garry’s Mod that you will never boot up, you think you will too.

Obviously the star citizen heads are spending WAY more than 20 bucks a pop and some are buying multiple megaships they’ll never use meaningfully. But it is hard to not see parallels to the people who buy a DCS plane because they want to pretend that one day they will learn how to fly that jet.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
TOO MUCH GAMES I REALLY AM EXCITED FOR!!!

But yeah. Hades 1 might actually be the best “full package” roguelite I have ever played. VERY solid gameplay and an unlock system that gets you your full arsenal within the first two hours but then encourages you to learn every single aspect of that as more and more options open up. And it is Supergiant so the story ranges from leaving you misty eyed to having a full blown weep-fest during credits. All done in a way that actually takes advantage of the game mechanics which is what makes Supergiant (and Greg Kasavin) so special.

I TECHNICALLY still have the final final ending to do with Hades 1. Should… probably do that some time. But what little I played of 2 so far is already so fricking good.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Which is, if anything, against white supremacy. You want the best bang for your buck which is, funny enough, often an H1-B slave (or outsourcing).

Which is one of those dark secrets of the world. Rampant Capitalism is HORRIBLE for countless reasons but also tends to be the model that creates the most diverse workforces.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Again, there are definitely the scumfucks who are true believers. And NOBODY liked “DEI” as a policy since it almost always manifested as all the worst elements of “affirmative action”. It was well intentioned but it was very much a bunch of white liberals behind it. Its why the republicans run on “anti-DEI” platforms so much. Yes, it is a dog whistle but it also is one of those things where it is hard to find anyone who actually wants to defend those poison pill initiatives.

But the thing to understand is that the mega corporations? They don’t give a fuck about white supremacy. Most are global affairs with a fairly diverse upper level management (albeit, with an over-representation of East Asia). They have zero incentive to actually want white supremacy to be a thing. But they DO have a lot of incentives to make token gestures and spend marketing money on placating the white supremacists who are increasingly in power globally.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
The “good” news is that the vast majority of that has nothing to do with ideology. It is all about staying in fuckface’s good graces so they can get more government contracts or, best case scenario, have some legislature and grants built up specifically to benefit them musk-style.

As you go more towards the startup size of company (O(10) or even O(100) heads, including admin) things get a lot murkier and you have a lot more True Believers. But the zucks and Jensens of the world are pretty much the definition of apolitical in that they only care about what makes them more money in the short term.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨THIS JUST IN: FBI suspects Kirk was likely targeted, more info to come⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
No no no. It is Freedom! The Freedom to celebrate guns’ rights and to sacrifice your loved ones in the name of making sure Ted down the street can have five assault rifles in his living room.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨THIS JUST IN: FBI suspects Kirk was likely targeted, more info to come⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I mean… fuckface got got during a school shooting. LOTS of people get murdered during school shootings every fucking day in this country because we worship assault rifles.

It actually makes a lot of sense to indicate if this was a targeted assassination or if someone missed while aiming at kindergarten nap time.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Incels have as much to do with sexual desire as rape does. Because that is inherently what the incel mindset is. It is that others (almost always women, sorry, “females”) don’t deserve any agency and must exist solely to service people with the abrahamic god given right to sex. It isn’t about getting your rocks off. It is about asserting power and dominance over someone by raping them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RFK Jr. Blames violent video games for Mass Shootings.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
You used an ableist slur for no apparent reason?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RFK Jr. Blames violent video games for Mass Shootings.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah. When all y’all are talking about how we need government intervention and legislature to get you what you want?

THIS is why some of us are very wary of that and don’t think “We are just idea people. Other people can make it a law” is at all a good idea.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I just want to make it abundantly clear I am not with this person.

Titillation is good. Masturbation is good. Sex is good (when between consenting parties).

The issue is not that there are tits and hints of dicks in games. The issue is that there can only be the kind that caters to a very specific male gaze and anything else unleashes a holy war.

Lust is one of those material prisons

Sweet fucking Eothas
Wu-Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neckwww.youtube.com ↗
Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨videos@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨11⁩ ⁨comments⁩
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RomM (self-hosting emulation) releasing a significant update - 4.2⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
resetera.com/…/duckstation-now-on-indefinite-hiat… is a good thread on the subject of the RA/LR crew turning to harassment the moment someone won’t specifically package their emulators for LR and www.resetera.com/threads/…/page-7 for transphobia specifically.

I’ve seen increasing statements that the harassment campaign that murdered Near was driven by RA/LR folk but haven’t managed to find any direct evidence and there is zero chance I am wading through kiwi farms for it. But I definitely recall a few clashes with RA/LR as that was coming up and its priorities (and market share) were shifting.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subscription models like Xbox Game Pass are "not properly valuing" developers, says former Bethesda exec⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I think you still very much don’t understand the distinction between a music set (an “album”) and a curated set of songs to tell a story (an “Album”).

There are a LOT of things to complain about but frigging Beyonce talked about this… a decade or so ago. And plenty of other musicians and “music industry” people have made the same sentiments.

Are there still some Albums? Of course. But they are a tiny fraction of what is actually created for reasons very much tied towards streaming music services, attention spans, and so forth.

So you can either continue to not be able to see how this is a statement and continue arguing against it. Or you can actually do some googling and look at this as a greater discussion point. Up to you.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subscription models like Xbox Game Pass are "not properly valuing" developers, says former Bethesda exec⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Music is released in album format in the sense of being a playlist that might get sold as a vinyl at a show. It is incredibly rare to be released as a curated listening experience. The idea that you listen to the music, in album order, and have a story told to you. One of love and loss or of making it past an infidelity or of murdering your brother in the hopes of waking up a subjugated populace and so forth.

Plenty of musicians have talked about it and it is a very common talking point on the music side of things. I think Hayley Williams’s shadow dropped album (that was part of a hair product line or something?) is being widely praised as an Album? I dunno, I love her but I’ve been too busy to sit down and listen. Which… is also a big part of the problem.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Wow. Every dog in the tri-state area suddenly started barking. I wonder why…

But yeah. That is some bullshit that comes up every time anyone tries to address the diversity issues. “Well, if there were more intelligent black people, maybe we would hire a black or two” level comments.

In my experience, most first year undergraduate courses for STEM related degrees more or less match the demographics of the university itself. Depending on how rigorous the program that can change drastically as the weeding out courses happen, but it generally is “close enough” by the time they are in the 400s and going to special guest lectures by us industry a-holes.

The problem is what comes after. There is a reason there are Black Engineering and Women in Engineering mailing lists. Because so many companies (and graduate programs) basically want a “diversity hire” and nothing else. So you might have a class that graduates with 40% women entering a workforce that will hire 5%, at best. And… the good groups talk about this and encourage people to have a plan B. Whereas men (at least up until recently) know that if they just keep trying they’ll get hired eventually because 95% of those jobs are for them.

And grad school (less an issue for game dev) has the added problem where so many advisers are complete creeps with tenure. But that is a different mess.

No. Whatever the field, if you actually work towards having a diverse hiring pool and actually hire on merit, you tend to have an employee demographic within a stones throw of the regional breakdown. Because, yes, socioeconomic and institutionalized racism do give certain ethnic groups a serious disadvantage. But when you are hiring for roles with undergrad or graduate degrees? The best of the best are the ones who actually DO tend to find a way to bootstrap themselves up (or have parents who did). And… long term that goes a long way towards fixing things. It isn’t the complete solution but it REALLY helps.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subscription models like Xbox Game Pass are "not properly valuing" developers, says former Bethesda exec⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Its exactly what we saw with the rise of Spotify and the like… but worse because it is so dependent on in-house productions (so Netflix?)

For the AAA games? it doesn’t matter. They can get special deals (see Rockstar and Activision on Steam) or they just don’t have to care because people will play hundreds of hours of their game regardless. And for the A/B games? It is actually still a great deal because it drastically increases discoverability, early on, where “Well, I always fucking hated Shenmue but apparently people like these Yakuzas? Might as well give it a go for free”.

But it fundamentally changes the medium. It is incredibly rare to see an Album anymore because people don’t listen to music as albums. They listen to them as singles in a playlist. Its why there is no real point in deciding whether something should be a film or a tv series because you can just release it as a four part miniseries or stretch things out for a full eight and so forth.

And we are rapidly seeing that come out of MS. They bought so many dream team studios that were known for making AMAZING crafted SP games (Obsidian et al) and a variety of technically excellent games (iD) or money makers (Bethesda). But none of those map well to a system where there is little point in sticking to a single game and… monetary incentives towards short and sweet games.

I forget if it came before or after Sony made PS+ another one, but the biggest mistake was day and date for all major MS releases on gamepass. Provide discounts and get the “patient gamers” but don’t put Indiana Jones on the subscription service the day it releases. It is just killing Q1 sales. And… once you do it, you can never undo it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gamers Nexus's GPU smuggling documentary is finally back up after being fraudulently DMCA'd by Bloomberg. Go give them a watch to make up for some of the lost traction!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Really fun watch. I probably am more aware of this than most so most of the contextual information was “common sense” or “open secrets”, but never really saw anyone put it that clearly or blatantly before. And the technical segments (building a frankenboard) were awesome.

Although one thing Me and a few buddies keep wondering but are too afraid to ask legal about: Did Steve actually film himself committing a crime when he bought the card? Like, he as a US citizen is a party that can buy one of those and as long as he didn’t give it to anyone else, it is no different than buying and shipping a card from a less than reputable source. But it also raises every single export control flag in my head.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
You mean the homeboys that are almost always wrapped in about forty buckles and, at best, exist as a viewpoint character for the harem of big titty anime girls?

But yeah. East Asian media tends to have fewer massively jacked protagonists. But it is still the fundamental male gaze. It is just that East Asian dudes tend to be less likely to spend dozens of hours a week working on glamour muscles.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RomM (self-hosting emulation) releasing a significant update - 4.2⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Look into Moonlight… or GeForce Now (and Google Stadia for the five minutes before Google realized it was a good product and killed it). Game steraming is more than solved.

And, in hindsight, it really makes a lot of sense. The vast majority of the cost is video streaming and… youtube and twitch exist. All that is left is sending what amounts to text back and forth since controller inputs aren’t actually that complex.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RomM (self-hosting emulation) releasing a significant update - 4.2⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Heh, heard about this yesterday on a different board and gave it a go.

It is definitely jank. Super easy to set up and get running (one of the best docker compose files I ever used) but the hodge podge of grabbing your own API keys for the metadata services is a mess. Would have preferred it if their folder structure were the same as the “industry standard” retroarch (ugh. transphobic shits) layout but whatever. Same with support for distinguishing that a .cue file means the associated bin/iso/chd files probably shouldn’t be scanned to.

My only real complaint is that it doesn’t have a clean way to remove missing files (for example, if you moved said isos into a subfolder rather than using the .cue file that was always a mess) or providing in-UI excluding of matches (e.g. shader caches for modern emulators or a memory cards folder of older emulators).

Still, I like it a lot. Not likely to play anything in my browser but really nice for browsing what is actually on my NAS when the mood strikes. And gonna take a look at the romm APIs in the not too distant future to see if I can leverage that to finally set up my sync utility (which will probably involve research/getting involved to figure out how save states and memory cards are handled… or set up a way for them to be handled).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
That was always my experience. You can force people to do hundreds of hours of sensitivity training and explain to them why making the acronym for their solver “K*KE” is inappropriate. But if you just focus on increasing the diversity of your hiring pool and ACTUALLY hiring the best and the brightest, so much of that solves itself because now there is someone to explain that China and Japan may have a lot of shared culture and history but are very much not the same country or why that word is totally a slur and so forth.

I don’t know the actual metrics per studio (and most that DO report it are heavily skewed because they put the administrative staff in with the creative to juice their numbers). But, mostly, every time I think about “popular gamedev” it just reeks of startup culture. The idea that if you were part of a successful team then you should lead your own and that this game was made by one auteur rather than a giant team and so forth.

And that has the exact same problems we see at so many startups as a whole. The person who was real good at coding is HORRIBLE at management and has no understanding of what HR is even for and so forth. Which leads to the kind of shit that was deeply frowned upon in a conference room at 3 am becoming corporate culture and leading to “cube crawls” and the institutional abuse at companies like Blizzard or Ubisoft.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Skimming their data tables (don’t have access to the journal outside of work), it feels like a really broad hodge pdge of semi-related studies (which the authors essentially admitted).

But it also kind of misses the point. The problem isn’t titties or dicks in video games. The problem is the culture around it and what it reinforces and it very much goes far beyond video games. Big jiggly titties? You are a mature game. Dick size slider so you can rock a magnum dong that needs a monster condom? You are progressive. What? Both of those are just more male gaze?

And all of that is normalized. You won’t see a significant change from the baseline because that IS the baseline.

You know what you almost never see (outside of those “problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes”)? A sexy twink. We all made the same joke about Lies of Timothee Chalamet being one of the better souslikes of the past decade but it is also very telling that we mostly see our twinks in full stillsuits or twelve layers of Victorian clothing. Look, but have enough chastity belts that nobody needs to be worried about being able to touch. And the moment you have a woman who doesn’t have an hourglass figure? See: The Last Of Us 2.

Which is the issue. We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke” to the point that we don’t even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular (I’ll always cite that Yasuke was a recurring character in Nioh long before people turned him into a culture war).

Its like saying that gas stoves cause no meaningful decrease in air quality but having every study take place in the home of a pack a day smoker.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
To elaborate:

One of the foundational elements of Rogue and Roguelikes (that is so polarizing it isn’t part of The Berlin Interpretation) is the idea of randomized and unknown item effects. It goes back to tabletop gaming where you would find a potion and have no idea what it does, so you would give a sample to a rat you keep in a cage or splash it on a goblin prisoner. For obvious reasons, that shit went away in favor of skill checks.

The BoI items were very much in that vein. Theoretically you would memorize them over the course of runs and learn the synergies that helped you. In practice… ain’t nobody had time for that shit.

But it is a design philosophy that wasn’t uncommon for roguelites/likes of the era.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Waking up to World War 3 AND the greatest qol update to a game ever? Today is gonna be real fucky, huh?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Part of that is definitely gatekeeping.

But a lot of it speaks to… people are REALLY stupid these days. You notice it a lot when buildcrafting comes up. If it is more complicated than “raise strength to the soft cap” then people start making up massive excuses on how it is too complicated to explain and you are a fool for asking and MAYBE to go watch their favorite youtuber and so forth. When I feel particularly trollish I make a “like bags of sand” joke but the reality is that they just do not have the ability to actually learn what they are talking about. They can barely even regurgitate what an influencer told them.

And that has more or less broken fighting game discourse online. Because it is no longer “oh yeah, so and so has a super easy 20 hit combo” and inherently has to be “your crouching light jab is a +4 but your crouching light kick is -2” because EVERYONE is an expert in frame counting and so forth.

Souls gamers more or less broke with Elden Ring. The base game is probably the most accessible any Souls game has ever been and most people learned fast they can just beat Malenia by doing an arcane bleed build or getting a big fricking hammer to stunlock her, but they felt like they were super cool for it (which is the point of a Souls game). Then the DLC came out. And people felt the need to shit on the games media folk saying “So… this shit is kinda hard?” before rapidly getting their poopy pushed in by silver knight equivalents.

And it very much broke people. The discourse went from “Git gud. But in all seriousness, Capra is a boss that is designed to make sure you know when to block and when to dodge” into “Git gud you fucking loser. I beat it with no problems”. And we are seeing similar discourse with Silksong as a lot of us talk about how some of the runbacks are REAL bad and get responded to with “That is just what Hollow Knight is”… even though there was like one bad runback in the entirety of that game (Mantis Lord).