ericwdhs

@ericwdhs@discuss.online

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, I didn’t think of that. If Valve did something like subtracting Machine wishlists from Controller wishlists to estimate the number of people wanting to buy the Controller to use by itself, that leaves a lot of room for underestimating the overlap. I probably contributed to this too by wishlisting the Machine despite not being sure I actually want it. If you only wishlisted the Controller, I may have taken your spot. Oops. Sorry, guys.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, it’s a complete mess to try to predict. Despite both the Frame and Machine being in my wishlist and expected to come in around the same general price, I’m buying the Frame day one while the Machine may stay on hold indefinitely. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, but I’ve got better PCs than the Machine already, so my interest in it is more just for its novelty. Nothing about my wishlist status tells Valve any of that though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I said it somewhere else, but I think Valve actually did factor in wishlist counts. The problem is in the percentage of those that convert to sales. For games, the median conversion rate is 10% to 20% of wishlists converting to sales within the first week. I expect the Steam Controller’s conversion rate was much higher.

  Valve may have even tried anticipating this from Deck sales and still failed to account for the Deck conversion rate still being lower due to the greater price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I definitely think graphical fidelity is “good enough” now, but there’s still quite a bit of advancement available in other areas still drawing on the CPU and GPU, VR and local AI being a couple. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, and while I reject corporate AI as much as most people here, I do run local models occasionally and would like to have NPCs using the tech.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, anachronism most literally means “misplaced in time.” You can go two directions with that, something being more at home in the future or more at home in the past. The former obviously doesn’t apply here, and I would consider my wording identical to the latter. A reduction in belonging implies a reduction in commonality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not worried about the tech going away so much as the market percentage dropping to make enthusiast hardware more niche. Among other things, it makes enshittification in the space harder to fight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Except even among most current PC gamers, the threshold isn’t that high. 4K is still less than 5% of the market.

  Also, I’d argue “anachronism” isn’t the same as “pointless.” It’s just claiming that something that was once more common will become less common.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think the greater power of larger devices is being questioned. There just happens to be a threshold where a technically inferior but more accessible solution becomes “good enough” for most people that they never consider moving up.

  Just look at mobile devices. Of everyone who accesses the internet, 75% do so via mobile devices only. As someone who doesn’t even like desktops losing ground to laptops, that statistic scares me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ELI5: How does Frame Generation even work?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, there’s a fair bit of criticism about the tech being better for the higher-end cards that shouldn’t need it in the first place. Another way this shows up is in VRAM amounts.

  To ELI5, how effective FG is at improving the base frame rate scales with available VRAM. (Think 60 improved to 80 versus 60 improved to 120.) Some modern games hit 12GB regularly now even in 1080p and before any fancy tech. (There’s a separate discussion on game optimization in there.) Since lower-end cards really skimp on provided VRAM (every tier should really be at least 4GB higher), there’s not much space there for FG to work with in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨caww caww⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you trolling or do you genuinely believe that? I remember the original too. YouTube is applying AI filters on many old videos and reuploads, and the end result is distrust of many videos we used to trust.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, never read the books. Just figured I needed to expand my reasoning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Counter-counterarguments.

  That assumes the 999 are in a position to stop the 1. Assuming FTL travel/communication/detection is never possible, reaction ability is always going to be limited. A relativistic projectile aimed at a planet can be a silent civilization killer.

  This is more about cautiously reacting to the possibility of hostility in the very high stakes scenario of first contact, not the confirmation of hostility. In the room analogy, we don’t know who has the gun, whether it’s truly 1 person or 0 or 100 or 500, if most or all of the 999 are blindfolded or willing to defend newcomers, whether overpowering the violent one(s) is actually possible due to everyone being spread out and any guns having functionally unlimited ammo, whether other people have already been taken out for just showing up or resisting, and whether all of the above even matters if the aggressor gets a kill shot off before any of the above takes effect.

  Evolution is inherently a competition for limited resources with winners and losers, so violence innately comes with the territory. Even grass and trees are in a war for sunlight. The concept of peaceful cooperation may be common due to the individual specialization likely needed for a species to become space-fairing, but it’ll be a higher level, more abstract idea, and the universality of other species applying it more broadly cannot be assumed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Regarding the first point, I think it just assumes the possibility for hostility, not the universality of it. If there’s a room with a thousand people and I know one person in the room has a gun and wants to kill me, I’m still going to hesitate to enter regardless of the 999.

  Also, any intelligence that arises out of evolution is going to have at least the rough concept of violence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry. I may be reading more into the chain than what’s actually here. I’m just saying “aliens can’t be expected to behave like humans” isn’t really a viable explanation to the Fermi Paradox without some big caveats, because given a large enough sample of intelligent alien species, (1) they won’t be monolithic, (2) some will exhibit human-like behavior on the premise that humans aren’t special, (3) some will have arrived on the scene millions or billions of years before us, and (4) the “somes” from the last two points is enough that galaxy spanning civilizations should already be everywhere even if FTL is forever impossible.

  If intelligent life is rare enough to preclude the “given a large enough sample” (I’m thinking one species per galaxy level rarity), then the solution to the Fermi Paradox is elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there’s a good chance it won’t have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.

  Let’s say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.

  As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.

  Also something I noticed per their guidelines:

  It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

  As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.

  But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.

  I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contribution of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s actually been kind of a relief to have fewer new games to look forward to every year. I have a backlog of something like 700 unplayed games already in my library. I know I’m not going to play them all as much as they deserve before I die, but being able to make a much bigger dent in them is nice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Mostly agreed. For me the actual biggest problem here is Nvidia presenting this as the assumed default experience everyone obviously wants and using a heavily genericized face as a win. The tech needs to be much more energy efficient and configurable on both the developer and end-user side before I’ll give it any serious attention.

  Regarding future versions of this tech, I think “death of the author” still applies to video games, so changing artistic intent isn’t always bad, especially for games that get frequently replayed. I certainly don’t play stock Skyrim or Minecraft anymore. To use your example, yes, a photorealistic (attempt of) Ocarina of Time would probably be too off-putting, but give me style options like BotW, Spiderverse, Pixar, anime, etc.? I’d be down to try those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So, I actually like generative AI (disclaimer I feel I have to include every time: local open models only), and my main problem with that image is how genericized the new face is. If you’ve seen a lot of AI images, it’s immediately recognizable as the default mixed Asian/Caucasian face you get when not prompting something more specific than “woman” due to the datasets dominating the training data. It heavily implies all faces will be similarly genericized.

  I don’t think this tech will be viable unless creators can give the AI a reference image of what a character should look like when photorealistic, and that’s just going to increase the workload of running this in realtime.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Glorious cracked out wall kitten returns with more wisdom for the masses.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone who always backs in (unless it’s a diagonal or pull-through spot) and a math person, I’m ashamed to say I never thought of the geometry of it, so thanks for the additional reason to add to my arsenal.

  I can add it to “ready to leave quickly in an emergency,” “practicing delayed gratification,” “backup camera guidelines make centering easier,” “constant trunk access,” and the biggest real reason, “I have a bad habit of leaving for obligations at the last possible minute and need to plan ahead.”