addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon achieves new heights⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And having to buy shoes and trousers from specialists, and having your feet hang off the end of the bed in hotels, and wandering into spiderwebs that no-one else has disturbed yet, and not being able to adjust the shower high enough away from home. Gift that keeps on giving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former BioWare lead writer reads the runes on EA-Saudi deal and speculates that 'guns and football' are in, 'gay stuff' is out, and the venerable RPG studio may be for the chop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.

  Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I’d be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don’t make any sense.

  In fact, I’d say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And ‘hard mode’ could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed ‘infrequent crazy difficulty spike’ mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we’ve got them.

  Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t ask for this.

  The original looks fine; it’s gone from ‘okay for 2000’, through to ‘dated’ and back to ‘retro charm’ again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn’t the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.

  All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture ‘upgrade’ doesn’t bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox invests big into indies, signs Game Pass deals with over 50 studios⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  48 studios will be closed before they get a game out, and then the other two will be closed after making something award-winning and genre-redefining, and the IP will never see the light of day again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piss off!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m subscribed to oxygennotincluded@lemmy.ml - seems dead, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ladies get urself a mothman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I prefer to pretend that Dune and Dune Messiah are the only books in the series, and in particular that his son never wrote anything. Makes for a much more satisfying tale.

  Also works for ‘underground worm film’ Tremors. Done perfectly after the first one, no sequels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or ‘love hotels’. You want to rent a room by the hour, Mario gets his cut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight Silksong Patch Version 1.0.28497 Now Live⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The harpoon works just fine too, one-hits the stick insects and does her some damage as well if you can line it up. She’s not very dangerous if you know her moveset, but that’s an education learned by many runbacks.

  Doesn’t say they’ve fixed the comedy bug where if you look at the map while on one of the collapsing platforms, then when you fall through then the game stops accepting input, Hornet just stares at it forever. Only glitch I’ve found, quite impressive for a day one purchase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The time for “collaborate and listen” has passed. Now, the time for Nintendo to bring down hammer go hammer mc hammer yo hammer and the rest can go and play has arrived.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US panel releases over 33,000 pages of Epstein files⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Open to abuse, unfortunately. If even the most trivial of cases takes a week to resolve, then you could shut any company down by filling fifty suits.

  The real solution would be for the judge to actually do their job and to penalise companies for doing that kind of bullshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘A new frontier of potential abuse’: Is it legitimate to charge someone flying to a funeral more than a leisure traveler?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly this. I needed a day return on short notice the last time I had to take a flight for a funeral, so that would be business price for tickets rather than leisure price. About 10x price difference, but there was no alternative if I was going to be there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Living the dream⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Was expecting it to be “vodka without beer is just waste of money”, in that case.

  Looking it up, most sources seem to have it the other way around - “beer without vodka”, as in there’s no point wasting money on drinking unless you’re going to do some hard drinking?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Living the dream⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am intrigued. Most of the cultures I’d expect to have that proverb have neither definite nor indefinite articles in their language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love a good fractal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Think if the GNU project had spent less time working on ‘clever’ recursive acronyms and fitting Scheme into everything, and more time hacking, we might actually be using their kernel.

  Linus locked himself in his bedroom for the summer and got almost all of POSIX working on 386. That’s the level of geek to aspire to. If RMS had just decided to name his kernel after himself rather than messing, we’d all be be using Stallix instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uhm⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen that rectum before…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electricity Consumption⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Visited a traditional water-powered flour mill recently. Very cool, beautiful building, and the end product makes really delicious bread and pasta. Wholemeal, not too fine, nothing in it but grain. Perfection.

  From the water flow, drop and wheel turning rate, I made the maximum possible power as about 5 kW. Probably optimistic to think you’d get a quarter of that in practice. Still, that’s a huge amount compared to what a person can produce, and it’s ‘on tap’ 24 hours a day. That kind of thing does explain why, in the days before electrification, that having ‘the right landscape’ made some areas really wealthy and some others not. Exploitable renewable energy, what a concept.

  So yeah, your proposed map would be really interesting. The Romans burned down whole forests to make steel - you simply couldn’t refine it in a place without. It would be fascinating to see the map of “power resources” and the resulting industries, even if it would be very hypothetical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Begun the kernel wars have⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Seeking a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Rather than having one set of company-hosted servers that they then struggle to police, just let everyone host their own, and they can be responsible for banning anyone that doesn’t follow the community rules.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Begun the kernel wars have⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually makes it easier to write aimbots and triggerbots, since you’ll have the video feed and can respond with the right inputs. Skips the step where you’ve got to film the monitor on the machine that’s ‘playing’ the game, which is protected by the HDCP between the PC and the screen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  SIMD is pretty simple really, but it’s been 30 years since it’s been a standard-ish feature in CPUs, and modern compilers are “just about able to sometimes” use SIMD if you’ve got a very simple loop with fixed endpoints that might use it. It’s one thing that you might fall back to writing assembly to use - the FFmpeg developers had an article not too long ago about getting a 10% speed improvement by writing all the SIMD by hand.

  Using an NPU means recognising algorithms that can be broken down into parallelizable, networkable steps with information passing between cells. Basically, you’re playing a game of TIS-100 with your code. It’s fragile and difficult, and there’s no chance that your compiler will do that automatically.

  Best thing to hope for is that some standard libraries can implement it, and then we can all benefit. It’s an okay tool for ‘jobs that can be broken down into separate cells that interact’, so some kinds of image processing, maybe things like liquid flow simulations. There’s a very small overlap between ‘things that are just algorithms that the main CPU would do better’ and ‘things that can be broken down into many many simple steps that a GPU would do better’ where an NPU really makes sense, tho.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🐀🔥🔥🔥⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I didn’t realise Amouranth was Polish. Every day is a school day.

  shunbeer.com/article/where-to-buy-amouranth-beer

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game sequel ruined a beloved franchise or character for you?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Think you could take it back a step there.

  • Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
  • Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
  • Fallout 3 - “Oblivion with guns”, but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what’s available in the world.
  • Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for ‘proper’ RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I’m going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
  • Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. “Talking” interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the “final decision” point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda’s worst habits, given free rein.

  Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of ‘hyped’ is for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve found that disabling VSync in games entirely and then letting MangoHud do the limiting works a bit better. Some of that will be because I’m using Proton on Linux, which has DXVK as a translation layer. Games will be trying to limit their frames the DirectX way, whereas MangoHud is limiting them the Vulkan way and is ‘closer to the monitor’ for keeping the pace right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, MangoHud has an ability to set fps_limit in a per-game way that generally results in much smoother frame-pacing than most games achieve by default. That’s awesome for eg. Dark Souls / Elden Ring, which are stuttery at 60 fps but buttery at 59 for some reason, but also for random strategy games which would be just fine at 30 fps but instead have all the fans roaring to render at 144.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.

  It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.

  I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.

  Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.

  Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.

  Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marathon is delayed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.

  There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.

  lochnits.com/aopid/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gayte⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Twice as big as half a hole, obviously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is ironic, because Fallout 4 is the game that caused me to no longer be hyped for anything else that Bethesda had coming. Fallout 76 and Starfield didn’t disappoint, because I was expecting them to be shit from a company that had lost its way, and they delivered spectacularly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‎ ‎ ‎⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My bath takes up the entire width of the bathroom - that place looks cavernous. Am sure I could tolerate an apartment that crappy when you can have a game of squash in between dumps.