addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cranking Up The Detail In A Flight Simulator From 1992⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A shame that all the really early 3D games use their own software rendering engines, and aren’t so amenable to being “cranked up” like later games when accelerators became common.

  Get some of the early freescape games like Total Eclipse or Castle Master, early cyberpunk games like Interphase, or even Frontier: Elite II running in big resolutions with silky framerates and insane draw distances, I’d be so pleased.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ethnically sourced⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well yeah, but you can get either or both from a corpse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ethnically sourced⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Get some Dwarf Fortress-style reanimation on the go. A ghost and a zombie from the same corpse? Why not, one’s the soul and one’s the body, makes as much sense as anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Turkey Temptation⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But cooking a ham is still okay?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unofficial PC port of Zelda: Majora's Mask, 2 Ship 2 Harkinian has a big new release out⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Original release was fantastic - super-smooth, high resolution, “how I remember it on the N64”, ie. not true to the original at all, but like the impression it made on me as a youngster. Super-dark storyline and minimal hand-holding makes it very unusual for a Zelda game, absolutely stunning bit of porting work. Everything you could possibly want in 2024.

  And then I got to the down-the-well bit, and that can just fuck off. New release needs a dedicated keybinding to skip that time-wasting shit, could bind it to a mouse button just so that there’s no difficulty finding it when the time comes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Science or some other arcane wizardry PCM⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why buttplug for tachyons?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PC Gamer: The top 100 PC games⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah - Doom (DOS): and Doom Eternal are on there, as are Baldur’s Gates 2 and 3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can't. Busy.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dang. It’s going to take a dedicated regime to fill up a one gallon jar with, eh, fluids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Borderlands' theatrical run grinds to a halt with just $31 million worldwide, which is barely enough to cover the marketing costs⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The one with Timothy Olyphant and Olga Kurylenko in it? It was fine, had a few good action sequences in it. Managed to both not be much of an adaptation of the game, but also trying to be enough of an adaptation that it frequently makes very little sense. Probably have been better if they’d cut loose a little more, had some more fun with it. Gets a completely OK / 10 from me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gearbox's first Risk of Rain 2 expansion gets hammered on Steam as developer admits the PC version 'is in a really bad place'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Average game chat censorship⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dark Souls’ implementation is something special. Censors your name based on the language settings you have in place at the time, voice-over dialogue remains in English. So change your system language to either another language you know, or play it a few times so you know what things are, and then put the most offensive shit in as your character name you like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon plays Metro 2033⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I quite liked all the people complaining about ‘unrealistic’ Russian accents, and every single character in the game is voiced by a native speaker. Many lols. Bit like people complaining about Yvonne Strahovski’s ‘phoney’ Australian accent playing Miranda in Mass Effect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon interviews for a job⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In which case, the job becomes transferring the bottled samples into sample tubes in trays so that the machine can process them, and usually adding a barcode to each sample tube. The sample tubes need to be kept immaculate as well - some of the things that we test water for, like pesticides, are only present in miniscule concentrations. Might not actually save a great deal of time, and you need to buy and maintain a very expensive automated sampler.

  When I used to work in the water industry, we were usually able to get PhD-qualified research chemists to do all this mind-numbing laboratory work. There’s a bit of a surplus of qualified chemists compared to the number of chemist jobs available, so you got absurdly over-qualified people applying for these roles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The trouble with England – why rioting in the UK has not spread to Scotland and Wales⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d suggest that we do not. How about we split the difference, and drop them off halfway between Belfast and Stranraer, say?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Darksiders game teased by THQ Nordic⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Genesis is a different style of game tho, isn’t it? Diablo-like rather than third-person hack and slash?

  Love the series. Personally prefer 3 due to its more limited scope; the other two are great, but to on for a very long time, and I really can’t be bothered playing through the Portal-like bits again. Happy if 4 is the same length as 3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Report: Resident Evil 7 on iOS has earned Capcom $28,140 since launch⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Unless they’ve some ulterior motive for porting their RE engine to iOS, then this is insane. That kind of cash will barely fund a senior engineer for a month once you’ve paid out overheads as well.

  If they’re planning to have some kind of phone tie-in to the next Resi game, then maybe it might have made sense to work the compatibility issues out. An app that runs on your phone that makes it “your phone in game”, so you can receive texts from the president’s daughter while shooting some definitely-not-Spaniards on your Playstation, bit of an augmented-reality thing. Could be a laugh to have your phone be in control of a drone so that you can see round corners, while juggling the other things you’re doing? But probably mostly so that you can get dinged for microtransactions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I aM tHe DeVeLoPeR wHy Do YoU AsK⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, one of our customers’ users deleted the /var directory on one of the servers we provided to them, because it was “taking up too much space on disk”. That’s where Postgres saves its DBs as well; wiped out weeks of work in production for them. This hits very close to home.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨its crime time⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thought the text said that they were going to do Grimes. I’m up for some crimes, tho.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Armadillo⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, that there’s an armsadillo. You can tell, because he has two.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gog will delete cloud saves more than 200MB per game after August 31st⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. JSON solves:

  • the ‘versioning’ problem, where the data fields change after an update. That’s a nightmare on packed binary; need to write so much code to handle it.
  • makes debugging persistence issues easy for developers
  • very fast libraries exist for reading and writing it
  • actually compresses pretty damn well; you can pass the compress + write to a background thread once you’ve done the fast serialisation, anyway.

  For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I’d probably never consider anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Powerful enchantment⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If having affairs outside of marriage counts as a ‘straight to hell’ offence, then sure. Also if pride still counts as a deadly sin, then off downstairs he goes. But he was an atheist in life.

  Heaven looks boring anyway - I’d rather be where my friends are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like ‘to’ to form an infinitive. ‘Will’ is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) ‘Would’ is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)

  Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of ‘ir’, analogous to ‘going to’, often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn’t exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they’re indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.

  Translating a ‘future tense sentence’ for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple ‘correct’ answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:

  • Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
  • Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
  • Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)

  Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zelda Producer Eiji Aonuma Doesn't Really Care About the Series' Chronology⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Which makes perfect sense - none of the previous producers have. Mostly, they’ve just used their stock characters and locations, and made a game that they thought would be fun out of them. There’s a couple of games that qualify as ‘direct sequels’ (Ocarina -> Majora’s, Wind Waker -> Hourglass) but even then, it doesn’t benefit you much to have played the preceding one. Would be weird to try and twist the games into a chronology that strikes me mostly as ‘fanon’ anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨John Romero: Happy 30th birthday, DOOM. [...] Thank you for playing our games, and thank you for keeping DOOM alive, all these many years.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Since all the games of that era now have laughably out-of-date tech, the fact that Daikatana did at the time doesn’t stand out so much. Played through it again a couple of years ago; it’s more janky-but-interesting than the disaster that you’d believe from its reputation - has some good bits in amongst the mostly-okay.

  The Gameboy Color version of Daikatana, which is a top-down JRPG instead? That is genuinely a good fun game. Think JR has it for free download on his home page? Easy to get, anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I get better at remembering names in video games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Fine advice generally, but I don’t know that many Panams or Reginas…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 dev shows off the level of optimization achieved for the Xbox Series S port, which bodes well for future PC updates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Act 1 and at the first half of Act 2 ran pretty well for me, generally 80ish fps on max settings everywhere (6700xt @ 1440p). It’s after that when it started running like a three legged mare; frequent random slowdowns to about 15fps. I suspect that they got the game mostly finished and then started their optimization pass at the beginning, and just hadn’t got to the end of the game by the release date, which was moved forward last-minute to avoid Starfield.

  The end of the game doesn’t look any more complicated than the beginning; suspect they just ran out of polishing time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The newest of new news! 🤦😮‍💨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not really the same Chinese Room any more - they basically closed the studio after Little Orpheus, and have restarted it with a new team.

  Now, whether you think a bunch of randoms might make a better or worse job of it than Hardsuit Labs, who for reasons still unclear were dropped by the original publisher, is a reasonable question. I don’t see why they shouldn’t make a better job of it. If they do turn out something with great promise but a slew of game-breaking bugs, it’ll be exactly in the spirit of Troika’s original, for sure, and we can have another twenty years of fan patches trying to put it right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OK Microsoft... trying to log into Teams while work lapop updates to Windows 11. No longer works in any iPhone browser, including Edge. The app will not authenticate my work login...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking as someone who has to use Google Cloud Platform most days; they also do some horrific stuff, and their documentation and support are miles behind the AWS and Azure equivalents. And having worse documentation than Azure is quite the achievement.