tal
@tal@olio.cafe
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I’ve never played either the original or the remastered version of Oblivion. I got into Bethesda games via the Fallout series rather than the Elder Scrolls series.
I think I did see a friend, who was a big fan of Daggerfall, play that. And I went back and played Morrowind with the open-source GemRB engine. But I never did Oblivion.
- Comment on TikTok 🤡 💩 2 weeks ago:
This shit should really be illegal.
I suspect that if you mandated human support for unpaid services that the Threadiverse wouldn’t exist.
- Comment on Who's your favorite female protagonist in a video game? (Add pic of character in response) 2 weeks ago:
I don’t see any official announcement of cancellation, but honestly, between its development not going well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2
The game was originally announced at Ubidays 2008, with almost a decade of silence before being re-revealed at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 conference, although no release window or target platforms have been mentioned.
Its development was characterized in the media by uncertainty, doubt, and rumors about the game’s future, and has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[1] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development period of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.
And Ubisoft as a whole having problems recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft
Financial concerns and reorganization (2023–present)
Citing disappointing financial results in the previous quarter, Ubisoft cancelled another three previously unannounced games in January 2023.[86] In an email to staff, Yves Guillemot told employees to take responsibility for the company’s forthcoming projects, asking that “each of you be especially careful and strategic with your spending and initiatives, to ensure we’re being as efficient and lean as possible”, while also saying that “The ball is in your court to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality, and show everyone what we are capable of achieving."[87][88] Union workers at Ubisoft Paris took issue with this message, calling for a strike and demanding higher salaries and improved working conditions.[89]
In August 2023, Ubisoft announced that it had reached a 15-year agreement with Microsoft to license the cloud gaming rights to Activision Blizzard titles; this came as part of efforts by Microsoft to receive approval from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The agreement would allow Activision Blizzard games to appear on Ubisoft+, and allow Ubisoft to sublicense the cloud gaming rights for the games to third-parties.[90][91]
As part of a cost reduction plan, Ubisoft reduced its number of employees from 20,279 in 2022 to 19,410 in September 2023.[92] In November 2023, Ubisoft laid off 124 employees from its VFX and IT teams.[93] In March 2024, Ubisoft laid off 45 employees from its publishing teams.[94] Another 45 employees were cut between its San Francisco and Cary, North Carolina offices in August 2024.[95] By the end of September 2024, Ubisoft had reduced its number of employees to 18,666.[96]
In 2024, Ubisoft released multiple games that experienced underperforming sales and declining playerbases post-launch, which included Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull and Bones, XDefiant, and Star Wars Outlaws, causing its stock to fall to nearly its lowest levels in the previous decade.[97] As a result, the company announced they were launching an investigation of their development cycles to focus on a “player-centric approach”, and opted to delay its next major flagship game, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, from November 2024 to February 2025.[98]
On 16 October 2024, over 700 Ubisoft employees in France began a three-day strike, protesting the company’s requirement to return to the office three days a week. The strike, organized by the STJV union, involved Ubisoft’s offices in Paris, Montpellier, Lyon, and Annecy. Workers expressed dissatisfaction over a lack of flexibility, salary increases, and profit-sharing, which they believe the company has ignored. Ubisoft has yet to address the union’s concerns.[99]
In December 2024, Ubisoft announced that their free-to-play game XDefiant would be shutting down in June 2025, less than a year after its initial release.[100] They also announced that its lead development studio Ubisoft San Francisco, and Ubisoft Osaka, were to close, resulting in up to 277 employees being laid off.[101]
In January 2025, Ubisoft closed the Ubisoft Leamington studio and downsized several other studios, resulting in up to 185 staff being laid off as part of ongoing cost-cutting measures.[102][103]
Around September 2024, one of Ubisoft’s shareholders, AJ Investments, stated they were seeking to have the company purchased by a private equity firm and would push out the Guillemot family and Tencent from ownership of the company.[104] Bloomberg News reported in October 2024 that the Guillemots and Tencent were considering this and other alternatives to shift ownership of the company in light of the recent poor financial performance.[105] Later reports in December 2024 suggested that Tencent was seeking to capture a majority stake in Ubisoft and take the company private, while still giving the Guillemot family control of Ubisoft.[106] In January 2025, it was reported that the Guillemots had also considered carving out certain Ubisoft assets into a new subsidiary, which would allow Tencent to make targeted investments to increase the company’s overall value.[107] Ubisoft announced this subsidiary on 27 March 2025, devoted to its flagship Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six franchises; the subsidiary will consist of the franchises’ assets and development teams, and have dedicated leadership. Tencent will make a €1.16 billion investment in the new subsidiary, giving it a 25% stake at a valuation of €4 billion; the value of this subsidiary is larger than the current valuation of Ubisoft, which is based on Tencent’s belief that these properties are undervalued. Ubisoft stated that the subsidiary would “focus on building game ecosystems designed to become truly evergreen and multi-platform”.[108][109][110] The new subsidiary, Vantage Studios, was unveiled in October 2025,[111] with Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot to be co-CEOs.[112] With its financial quarterly report on July 2025, Ubisoft stated that it will reorganize into “creative houses” that will “enhance quality, focus, autonomy and accountability while fostering closer connections with players”, with the previously announced Tencent-backed subsidiary as an example of such a division.[113] At the end of August, Ubisoft sold the rights to five of their titles, including Grow Home and Cold Fear, to Atari SA.[114]
…my bet would be against it coming out. Or, even if it does…I mean, people who wanted the game want it because the original Beyond Good and Evil was a solid game. That first game came out in 2003, 22 years back. That’s a long gap in time, technology, and people. Someone could probably sit down and try to come up with a list of examples where you had one very successful game in a series and another that far down the road, and my guess is that in most cases, the next game doesn’t live up to the original.
tries to think of an example where someone’s managed something like this
I like Carrier Command 2. That came out 33 years after Carrier Command, though it certainly didn’t meet with the same level of relative success, and there was an (unsuccessful) remake of the original between the two releases.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Starfield was very stable for me.
New Vegas was unstable, especially near the end of a run. And I’d swear that it was worse on the XBox than on the PC. Not just longer load times, but plenty of times that the thing would die when loading an area.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
My impression from playing both was that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were pretty solid when you started playing a game — well, okay, if you get the post-release patches in place — but that the game became less-stable over the course of a run.
The loading times also got a lot more painful over the course of a run. Fallout 76 and Starfield did much better in that respect.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
As much as I hate the idea of remastering all their games instead of just making another fucking game,
I would pretty happily buy the 3D Fallout games remastered for the Starfield engine. Higher texture resolution. Use some of the features that were added to their engine in the years subsequent to release. Capable of being rendered at frame rates that modern monitors can display. Eliminate some of the weird ragdoll stuff they used to have. Modders have improved the models a lot, and I’m sure that that’s doable. Another popular change for Skyrim modders was doing things like opening up the world (because you didn’t need to load towns separately from the outside world on modern computers), adding more foliage and other things that computers couldn’t handle back at release, adding modern shader effects, and all that.
I mean, sure, I’d also like to have Fallout 5*, but I suspect that the cost of doing a remaster is a lot less than a new game, and the earlier games are getting old enough that they’re kinda hard to recommend. I mean, if they release *Fallout 5* in the early 2030s, the last game in the mainline series will be *Fallout 4*, 2015, and before that, *Fallout: New Vegas from 2010. That’ll be a huge gap, if you hope to get players to play the series.
Skyrim got the LE->SE (well, and AE) path, so it got updated to be more-playable over the years. The Fallout games are still running on the old stuff.
- Comment on Dog attacks are still rising - even after the XL bully ban 2 weeks ago:
Sounds like there’s potential for even more political gains from more political theater, then?
- Comment on The most important person in Britain you’ve never heard of 2 weeks ago:
Only the king has more power than this gas executive in a Russian emergency.
I’m pretty confident that the prime minister has a larger role than the king in a “shit hits the fan with Russia” scenario.
- Comment on Android/Phone Alternatives? [Discussion] 2 weeks ago:
You can use VoIP if you have a cell data connection.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals 2026 launch for his AI game alongside Grok-made garbage 2 weeks ago:
There are some existing video games that incorporate LLMs or diffusion models. So in one sense, that’s probably very doable.
But I think that it’s probably going to be a slow process. There are probably going to be dead ends. I kind of suspect that early games, even if they’re technically-novel, probably will suffer the same problems that past video games did before they matured. End of the day, a video game needs to be fun, and just throwing a new technology like a powerful graphics card or a fancy natural-language parser or whatever at it doesn’t get you to that fun game. I think that it’s going to take quite some years of game developers iterating to incorporate generative AI stuff well.
That being said, there are some things I’d like to see tried.
My guess is that it’s probably possible to create to develop some sort of social-media-based video game that generates a choose-your-own-adventure style video game, remembering story branches generated by other users to take advantage of human-assisted creation, and trying to show “top” story forks. Like, make the bar low, use voting or link tracking or something to determine what story branches people like, and show those.
I’d like to see some kind of system for tracking world state that isn’t purely based on having an LLM look at the entire preceding text for context. That’s a pretty inefficient way to store world state, and implementing game logic at the LLM level is, I think, going to be problematic. Think of something like, oh, a game system like Inform/TADS/glulx-based interactive fiction. You have objects and properties and a game engine that handles tracking them and their interactions. But you try to get an LLM to generate text for those objects.
There are some games that use diffusion models, either statically or at runtime, to generate illustrations, where the number of permutations would be impractical for a human artist. The ones I’ve seen have been adult-oriented; I don’t know how the field has developed, and there may well be a lot more out there now.
One thing that I think could be done today is to start using procedurally-generated voices. Generative AI can do pretty decent voice synthesis. Video games are good at doing procedurally-generated text, but if you do that, you don’t get voice audio. That’s not really a game genre, but it’s a way in which one could provide some neat added functionality. I think that to really take advantage of this, there’d need to be a training corpus of text annotated with emotional information and such, but I’ve seen people doing this in a usable form for game mods.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals 2026 launch for his AI game alongside Grok-made garbage 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think that that’d be very analogous. He explicitly said that he wasn’t going to do the Hyperloop himself, just proposed it as an idea that someone else could implement.
That being said, you could dig up something that Musk had said that he would do that he didn’t. considers FSD on Tesla vehicles is probably the prime example.
- Comment on Tories set a low bar after misspelling Britain on conference chocolate 2 weeks ago:
Based on current polling the conservatives would be lucky to get third place. Reform on track to get second or third place depending on the pole, Labour and the lib Dems are fighting for the top spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
This graph has the Liberal Democrats at ~14%, the Conservatives at ~16%, Labour at ~20%, and Reform at ~32%.
- Comment on Tories set a low bar after misspelling Britain on conference chocolate 2 weeks ago:
Organisers are reportedly blaming the mistake on a “printing error” and have since removed the chocolate from the bags
Wait a minute. So the organizers dick it up and get rewarded with a bunch of chocolate? This doesn’t seem like proper incentivization.
- Comment on Landmark study shows 1.4m Britons have a gambling problem 2 weeks ago:
An estimated 1.4 million adults in Britain have a gambling problem
Put more optimistically, that’s 67.8 million Britons who don’t have a gambling problem.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 2 weeks ago:
An original consultation took place during 2018 as part of the previous government’s Child Obesity action, and legislation was finally passed in Parliament in December 2021.
The rules only came into force on Wednesday (1 October 2025).
The legislation was actually passed under the Johnson government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Johnson_ministry
I suppose that Labour could have passed a law canceling implementation, though.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 2 weeks ago:
If you put sugar in granulated or powdered solid form into soda, it’ll create a lot of convection points and the soda will rapidly foam up and lose a lot of its carbon dioxide.
You could use a sweet syrup instead.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 2 weeks ago:
The notice reads: “Want Coca-Cola Classic? It’s one glass only.
“Based on new government laws, we’ve had to limit Coca-Cola Classic to one glass per customer.
“Still thirsty? Help yourself to any of our low-sugar fizzy Bottomless Soft Drinks.”
Under the new rules, any soft drinks that are low in sugar, for example ‘Zero’ alternative versions of most popular soft drink brands, can be drunk to one’s heart’s content.
I imagine that manufacturers of artificial sweeteners are in for a good time.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 3 weeks ago:
Well, fair enough.
One point that someone does make in that thread where someone also brings up the “where to start with Final Fantasy” is that it doesn’t really matter that much, because the series isn’t in one universe — it’s a bunch of stand-alone games. It’s not quite like you’re starting on trying to read, say, Hellboy comics many decades into multiple series or something like that. The games did evolve in the technical sense, but you won’t ruin a game by playing others “out of order”.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 3 weeks ago:
I think that you’re going to likely get more-helpful suggestions if you list some games or genres that you like, something beyond “No Final Fantasy” and “No GTA”.
This Reddit post has a list of PS2 games that “still hold up”, without genre restrictions. There’s nothing there that I glance at and say “oh, I loved that and one needs to go back and play it”, but it’s probably a reasonable starting point. I mean, I enjoyed Max Payne (which I would also recommend playing on the PC instead) when it came out, but I don’t know if I’d go back and play it as an FPS in 2025.
- Comment on Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’ 3 weeks ago:
Sacks, the Trump administration’s AI czar and co-host of the conference, stopped Musk mid-answer. “Well, Elon, by the way, could you just publish that?” he asked. “Wikipedia is so biased, it’s a constant war.” He suggested that Musk create what he called “Grokipedia.”
This past week, as the Wikipedia controversy reignited, Musk announced xAI would, in fact, offer up Grokipedia. Soon after, the Wikipedia page for Musk’s Grok was updated. The entry included a brief comparison to an effort almost 20 years earlier to create another Wikipedia alternative called Conservapedia.
Yeah, my initial take is “Conservapedia was pretty much a disaster, and there’s a reason that people don’t use it”.
Like, go to Conservapedia’s “evolution” article.
https://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution
Like, you’re going to have to create an entire alternate reality for people who have weird views on X, Y, or Z. And making it worse, there isn’t overlap among all those groups. Like, maybe you’re a young earth creationist, and you like that evolution article. But then maybe you don’t buy into chemtrails. It looks like Conservapedia doesn’t like chemtrails. So that’s gonna piss off the chemtrail people.
There are lots of people on the right who are going to disagree with scientific consensus on something, but they don’t all have the same set of views.
- Comment on Can anyone ELI5 the severity of this? Emerging Unity game vulnerability 3 weeks ago:
looks
For Linux, my off-thr-cuff take is that I’m not that excited about it. It means that if you can launch a Unity game and pass it command-line arguments, then you can cause it to take actions that you want. Okay, but usually the security context of someone who can do that and the game that’s running should probably be the same. If you can launch a game with specified parameters to do something bad, you can probably also just do something bad and cut the game out of the picture.
This is why you have few suid binaries on a Limux system (and should never make something large and complex, like a Unity game, suid) — because then the binary does have a different security context than the launching process.
Now, it’s possible that there are scenarios where yiu couod make this badly exploitable. Say games have chosen to trust command-line arguments from a remote system, and that game has community servers. Like, maybe they have a lobby app that launches a Unity binary with remotely-specified command line arguments. But in that case, I think that the developer is already asking for trouble.
Most games are just not going to be sufficiently hardened to avoid problems if an attacker can pass arbitrary command lines anyway. And as the bug points out, on Linux, you can achieve something similar to this for many binaries via using
LD_PRELOADanyway — you cna use thst route to make fixes for closed-source Linux games.It’s possible that this is more serious on Android. I donlt know if there’s a way to pass command line parameters there, but part of the Android security model is that apps run in isolation, and so if that’s exploitable by any local app, that could cause that model to break down.
- Comment on Ohio Republicans pass pornography age verification ID law as part of state budget • Ohio Capital Journal 3 weeks ago:
I would note that — to pick two examples:
ExpressVPN appears to have California-based exit nodes:
https://www.expressvpn.com/vpn-server/us-vpn/san-francisco-vpn
NordVPN appears to have California-based exit nodes:
https://nordvpn.com/servers/usa/sanfrancisco/
You can functionally choose the state law under which you want to access the Internet. looks at Ohio meaningfully
- Comment on Britons believe the UK is seen by the rest of the world as ‘weak’ and ‘soft touch’ 3 weeks ago:
Just 1 in 4 Brits think the UK is viewed positively on the world stage, with most wanting their country to play a large role in international affairs, exclusive poll shows
I — American — view the UK positively in international affairs, but frankly, if you’re comparing the UK to its recent history:
The UK itself has grown, but a lot of international influence came from the UK being, globally, at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. That’s a discovery-of-fire level event, a pretty rare situation in human history.
That was a major part of the Great Divergence; the UK was highly developed, and pulled wildly more than its weight in per capita terms.
If the bar that a Briton is setting is relative to the UK’s international role over the past couple centuries, that’s a high bar to set, because the UK had extraordinary influence in the world in that period. That’s not because the UK’s economy has become weaker, but because the world has been economically converging; less-developed countries have been catching up. I’d say that the UK definitely punches well above its weight in population terms internationally today, and is probably relatively-engaged. Could it do more? Well, I’m sure it could. But I don’t really think of the UK as especially isolationist. Name another country of 70 million that independently has as large an impact internationally.
- Comment on Embedded video in online articles is totally broken. 3 weeks ago:
If these news organizations cannot fix that embedded video behavior, then just download the clip, credit the poster, and cite the link at the bottom of the page. It’s public domain when it’s posted, so I don’t understand why that’s not the standard.
Posting something does not place it in the public domain.
- Comment on Yes, Apple. This is exactly what I wanted *facepalm* 4 weeks ago:
It might be that it’s taking into account how recently you used the thing or something.
As long as any infrastructure used to hint to the indexing engine that its index is dirty to avoid fully-rescanning the filesystem occasionally is available to non-Apple software, I assume that you could just use a different software package for this.
kagis
I haven’t used any of these, and can’t recommend them, but it looks like Mac developers have built alternatives:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/spotlight-alternatives-mac-search/
I mostly use
plocateon my Linux machine if I want to do a search across filenames on the filesystem as a whole. - Comment on Trump Posts an Absolutely Bonkers AI Video in Which He Promotes a Magic ‘Med Bed’ That Can Cure Any Disease 4 weeks ago:
Setting aside Trump, I have no idea why people who can apparently be mostly reasonable about, say, cars subscribe to utterly batshit insane views about diet and health and buy into all kinds of snake oil.
I’m not saying that there’s no magical thinking with cars — “my magical fuel additive” or whatever — but I have seen more utterly insane stuff regarding what someone should eat or how to treat medical conditions than in most other areas.
It’s also not new. You can go back, and find people promoting all kinds of snake oil when it comes to health. Some of my favorites are the utterly crazy stuff that came out when public awareness of radiation was new, and it was being billed as a magic cure for everything.
- Comment on Kindergarten forced to back down after proposing to charge parents $2,200 for their own children’s art 4 weeks ago:
Eh. It sounds like the thing is likely going out of business, and people are just batting around ideas to try to bring it back. Probably good odds that it won’t happen.
Craigslea community kindergarten, a local childcare centre in Chermside West in Brisbane’s north, made national headlines this week after a series of emails to parents. The centre has been in turmoil for weeks and was closed after a mass exodus of staff before the school holidays.
On Sunday, the management committee sent parents a 1,000-word email claiming the centre was “insolvent”, owing more than $40,314 to the tax office and employees. It proposed to “wind up” the centre, which has been placed into voluntary administration.
- Comment on Google, Meta and Vodafone want help from smartphone-makers 4 weeks ago:
I think that if I were Google, Meta, and Vodafone, I’d go build an app to measure a phone’s lifetime playing video and then promote that as a benchmark. Things that are the path of least resistance to measure tend to get measured more than those that are a pain to measure.
- Comment on Low birthrates in England could lead to ‘closure of 800 primary schools by 2029’ 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on The Pokémon Company confirms that no, its imagery was not granted for use in disturbing US Department of Homeland Security video | Eurogamer 4 weeks ago:
Thank you kindly, good sir.
