Katana314
@Katana314@lemmy.world
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 2 hours ago:
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 3 hours ago:
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
- Comment on Today's featured article on Wikipedia: Bejeweled 8 hours ago:
A few adult games made me realize I like the base concept of the game if it finds a way to feel rewarding and doesn’t ratchet up in difficulty (eg, mechanics that cover half the screen in stones)
Still haven’t really located a game that applies the match 3 formula in a way that makes me want to keep playing. EA’s touch is definitely one of those souring aspects.
- Comment on Steam Machine is huge for indie development 9 hours ago:
I’ll first admit I predicted Valve wasn’t bothering with a Steam Machine again. I was proven wrong.
But I still absolutely don’t see it being more popular than the Steam Deck. They don’t have the production scale to make them at the Xbox / PlayStation hardware-per-dollar values, so they’ll still be an enthusiast item for people aware they’re buying a prebuilt PC.
So yes, you do already see this; indies target the Steam Deck as a supreme metric for Linux compatibility (and if someone complains HDR doesn’t work on his desktop Mint install, well, whatever). Valve even promotes some store presence to indies that do a bit of work to certify this. We’ve seen lots of games get patches mentioning Steam Deck related fixes - even when the game is a windows build using Proton.
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 9 hours ago:
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 9 hours ago:
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
- Comment on Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve’s ambitious new game console 1 day ago:
It’s possible placing the thumb sticks in some slightly different way helps to avoid patent issues.
- Comment on Winter burrow SBI controversy 2 days ago:
I understand Valve being libertarian about not moderating people excessively, what I’d like to see are better tools like shared blocklists or general moderation for any developer that doesn’t wish to control their own Community page.
- Comment on Valve announces three new products: the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller 2 days ago:
I suppose it’s not the first time Valve has counted to 3; in terms of releasing 3 projects. They released the Orange Box which had 3 games in it. But they never put out a 3rd iteration of things.
So expect this to be the last Steam Controller and Steam Machine, if we count the old 3p hardware Linux boxes and Index headset they helped with.
- Comment on Elden Ring Nightreign The Forsaken Hollows - Gameplay Reveal Trailer 2 days ago:
Elden Ring: Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows: The New Frontier: Last Rites: A New Beginning: The Pursuit of More Money
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 2 days ago:
I’m still a little curious how that will work for games. Are they going to somehow emulate Win32 amd64 games? Do devs have to recompile them in some new way? Will engines support it beyond Unity and Unreal?
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 4 days ago:
I once tried writing a guide for Paper Mario, and it was then I realized how much effort, consultation, and typing all of these are. It’s in some ways not a surprise that walkthroughs are now just video playthroughs of the game (often involving someone backtracking 3 times as they figure out a puzzle) - that takes a lot less effort than conscious text recorded outside of a game.
- Comment on #RatFuckTheTimes 4 days ago:
Just copying this from a top level comment in case you haven’t seen it.
commondreams.org/…/zohran-mamdani-new-york-times
Now I feel bad that I unsubscribed from them for something as simple as popup annoyance. I could have slammed them for this.
- Comment on What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype? 4 days ago:
Another Crab’s Treasure, Stellar Blade, Jedi: FO and Survivor, Hollow Knight, Tunic, and lately Steelrising.
Some of those games are a bit easier but also have harder moments. To me, it’s about having a better-structured difficult curve.
- Comment on What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype? 6 days ago:
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.
- Comment on Some hidden gem demos and games I've found on Steam (2025) 1 week ago:
The game seems awesome, but it is by no means indie or at all a hidden gem. It has a ton of presence.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 1 week ago:
I’m cautious but a little curious about this one, because QA could actually be a very good target for AIs to work with.
- It might not kill jobs. Right now, engineers finish a task and the limited number of QA engineers can’t possibly test it enough before release. That game-breaking bug you found in a game? I’m sure some QA had it in their plan to test every level for those bugs, and yet they just didn’t have enough time - and the studio couldn’t justify hiring 20 more QA squads. Even if they do upscale AI testing, they’ll need knowledgable QA workers to guide them.
- This is often extremely rote, repetitive work. It’s exactly the type of work The Oatmeal said is great for AIs. One person is tuning the balance on the Ether Drive attack, and gives it an extra 40% blarf damage. He tries it, sees it works fine, and eagerly skips past the part of the test plan to verify that all cutscenes are working and unaffected to push it in. An AI will try it out, and find: Actually, since an NPC uses an Ether Drive in a late-game cutscene, this breaks the whole game!
- Even going past existing plans, QA can likely find MORE work for AIs to do that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Think about the current complexity of game dev that leads to the current trope of releasing games half-finished to eventually get patched. It won’t help patch games, but it’ll at least help give devs an up-to-date list of issues.
That said, those talking about human creativity and player expectations are still correct. An AI can report a problem with feedback that a human can say “No, that looks fine. Override that report.” It will also be good to do occasional manual tests, and lament “How did the AI think this was okay??”
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
Yeah, filesystem is a slow battle of forfeiture. Everyone wants to say “I’ll just use FAT, or NTFS, because both Windows and Linux support them!” And then it inevitably gives them performance issues among other problems.
I still use either for the drives where both of my dual boot OS’s need to access them, but I recognize it’s not a good place for games (I have some old, light ones that I’m not worried about accessing on NTFS, but big ones like Helldivers are out). It may even be a good excuse to learn more detailed partitioning so you can slowly shrink/eliminate what’s still using the two compatibility formats.
Distro choice is a tricky problem. I say that as someone that kinda settled on one; my own experience has not always matched others. But I will admit, it’s nice to stay on an interface not too far from Windows’ taskbar.
- Comment on Assassin's Creed is a "forever brand" because Ubisoft supported huge risks with it, ex director says: "Whereas, say, EA, you get these awful execs and they never made games and they came from toothpaste companies" 1 week ago:
I’ve always felt the tower thing was unfair.
It WAS a good idea when first used. And, when imported across to Far Cry, they also tried to come up with new forms of climbing and even puzzles to get you up. Then, simply because the internet made memes about it through repeat emphasis (repeating an old mechanic alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing) they responded, took the system out, and even lampshaded it in Far Cry 5 - WHILE other devs as far as Nintendo/Zelda were copying it.
Theres a lot to condemn Ubisoft for, but the towers thing always irked me. Call open worlds as a whole boring, but it suggests it’s not the sort of game to keep your interest anyway.
- Comment on What are your favorite games from a worldbuilding standpoint? 1 week ago:
Trails in the Sky
I got sick about dystopian chaotic worlds that don’t work - where the hero’s journey is about saving the world from some impending ruin, or about preventing a starving dystopian city from being blown up.
In Trails, the conversations you have with NPCs remind you that while you’re on the trail of some bandits or suspicious people, other people are not evacuating, sheltering in fear, etc; they’re living their lives, keeping up to date on modern trends, making travel plans to other countries.
So, so many worlds just don’t have space for characters to have those thoughts. It’s always fear around impending disasters, or how to respond to a fight, or grim poetry about how much the world has fallen into darkness.
It especially hurts that some people live so much of their lives in these fictional worlds that they start to believe people would be like that when they go outside. Worlds like the one in Trails, even if they spend a lot of time being boringly polite, are a nice call back to reality.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
Yup, I had this exact experience. Installed Bazzite because it was a “gaming OS”. Had trouble just installing any non-gaming apps, or looking up guides to do so. Even gaming wasn’t perfect.
Installed CachyOS, and yes, there are annoyances, but also a nice path to fix them. It’s both a good gaming OS, and a daily driver for casual use.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
My daily drivers: Outlast Trials, Dead by Daylight, Wild Assault, Helldivers 2, Warhammer Space Marine 2.
All of those work fine on Linux. It just seems to be the most toxic, gamerfuel-heavy games that go full kernel anticheat.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
Certainly interesting to look at the fastest-growing distros: Ubuntu (the well-known, popular option), Bazzite (the gaming-marketed one), Freedesktop (someone else can answer this for me), and CachyOS (the side-gaming one? Not quite a gaming OS but very good at it)
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
I’m not so sure Valve is the right maintainer for the core desktop. The Deck works well, but mainly what Valve is maintaining is the Game Mode feature and Proton. Everything else is largely better handed off to a bigger group.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
I’ve definitely run into some snobbish “Accept my incorrect solutions and be grateful, or go back to Windows, newb” types of people. I don’t have much love for them. I recognize it takes patience to acclimate new users, but it’s part of the job.
By and large I’m preferential to just stay with something that works; part of what pushed me off it has just been Microsoft themselves enshittifying the experience. I feel like I remember a day when Windows start search actually took you to what you wanted, and now “notepad” immediately queries the shopping network before your own program list, and when you get Notepad open it has a Copilot button.
You’re doing the right thing as long as you stay on an OS that keeps you going day in and day out. I tried Linux earlier in the year on two distros that did NOT work as well as the internet said they would, and went back to Windows. More recently, tried another one and there were stupid difficulties - but I got past them, at a time when Windows issues were just giving me “This is the way it is now, just put up with it”.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 1 week ago:
I’m dual booting with Windows because of a project I’m finishing that would be difficult to move OS, but Cachy is now my gaming OS. It’s nice to move away from the “forced” behavior from Windows.
Tangentially, a few UI decisions felt locked-in on Ubuntu and Mint too; or at least I couldn’t find an easy way to change them. I’m still a little annoyed my scroll wheel changes form options but it’s a minor thing.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
It’s a little funny that all my multiplayer games work fine, and the only ones broken on Proton are mainstream ones I hate.
It’s like an invisible filter telling me “These devs are jackasses and the playerbase is toxic. Don’t play this.”
- Comment on 1 week ago:
How do people feel about this company using generative AI? That was a concern of mine around The Finals; they’ve defended the decision on voice acting and it made me wonder where else they’re using it.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
IGN: “Traditional gamer journalism is dying. Please support honest journalists.”
Also IGN: “Good work, 47. Now publish the article and locate an exit.” - Comment on We could have lived in a world where Hideo Kojima made a Matrix game, if only someone had told him he was offered to make one 1 week ago:
Did anyone else know the reason Morpheus is “reborn” in an odd way in Resurrection is because he canonically dies in the MMORPG? I remember wanting to play that as a kid…probably didn’t miss much though.