Hazzard

@Hazzard@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m down for uh… parts of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.

  More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.

  The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is a gamer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, does it? I was literally thinking to myself that Teardown was an interesting example of destruction, and wondering how they did their lighting. RT makes perfect sense, that must be one of the earliest examples of actually doing something you really couldn’t without RT (at least without lighting it well).

  But yes, agreed that recent performance trends are frustrating, smearing DLSS and frame gen to cover for terrible performance. Feels like we’re in a painful tween period with a lot of awkward stuff going on, and also deadlines/crunch etc causing games to come out half-baked. Hopefully this stuff does reach maturity soon and we can have some of this stuff without so many other compromises.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is a gamer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The big benefit of raytracing now, imo (which most games aren’t doing), is that it frees games up to introduce dynamic destruction again. We used to have all kinds of destructible walls and bits and bobs around, with flat lighting, but baked lighting has really limited what devs can do, because if you break something you need a solution to handle all the ways the lighting changes, and for the majority of games they just make everything stiff and unbreakable.

  Raytracing is that solution. Plug and play, the lighting just works when you blow stuff up. DOOM: TDA is the best example of this currently (although still not a direct part of gameplay), with a bunch of destructible stuff everywhere, and that actually blows up with a physics sim rather than a canned animation. All the little boards have perfect ambient occlusion and shadows, because raytracing just does that.

  It’s really fun, if minor, and one of the things I actually look forward to more games doing with raytracing. IMO that’s why raytracing has whelmed most people, because we’re used to near-flawless baked lighting, and haven’t really noticed the compromises that texture baking has pushed on us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong - Special Announcement Stream (starts in 48 hours)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, the delays have increased my hype more than decreased it. I’m not one to obsess over a release, I’ve played other things and enjoyed them in the interim, so I really have no resentment for the long dev cycle.

  Lately my habits have been to try to avoid games for a couple months to let them get polished up anyway (I recently regretted picking up DOOM TDA at launch after they reworked combat across the whole game, and that would’ve been a better first playthrough experience). Team Cherry is a team I know can use time well like that, in fact, HK did get broad balance overhauls before I discovered it. They also added an astounding amount of well integrated post-launch content, so I’m excited to see just how much they’ve managed to create and polish Silksong with all this time, and will feel comfortable playing at or close to launch now due to these delays.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Amen to that, here’s to hoping.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Mhm, fair enough, I suppose this is a difference in priorities then. Personally, I’m not nearly as worried about small players, like hobbyists, who wouldn’t’ve already developed something like this in house.

  And I keep bringing up “security through obscurity” because frankly, I’m somewhat optimistic that this can work out like encryption has, where tons of open source research was done into encryption and decryption, until we worked out encryption standards that we can run at home that are unbreakable before the heat death of the universe with current server farms.

  Many of those people releasing decryption methods would’ve been considered villains, because it made hacking some previously private data easy and accessible, but that research was the only way to get to where we are, and I’m hopeful that one day we actually could make an unbeatable AI poison, so I’m happy to support research that pushes us towards that end.

  I’m just not satisfied preventing Bill down the street from AI training on art without permission while knowingly leaving Google and OpenAI an easy way to bypass it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly, it is an arms race. But if a few students can beat our current best weapons, it’d be terribly naive to think the multiple multi-billion dollar companies, sinking their entire futures into this, and also already amoral enough to be stealing content en masse from the entire internet, hadn’t already cracked this and locked everyone involved into serious NDAs.

  Better to know what your enemy has then to just cross your fingers and hope that maybe they didn’t notice, and have just been letting us poison their precious AI models they’re sinking billions of dollars into.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, it’s a fair point. Not trying something like this is essentially “security by obscurity”, which has been repeatedly proven to be a mistake.

  Wouldn’t surprise me if OpenAI or someone else already had something like this behind closed doors, but now the developers of tools like Nightshade can begin to work on developing AI poison that’s more resilient against these kinds of “cleanup” tools.