addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electricity Consumption⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Twice as big as half a hole, obviously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨‎ ‎ ‎⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clair Obscur's Composer Talks Going From Unknown To Scoring 2025's Most Celebrated RPG⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I found that too. The animations are misleading - just listen for when you need to press the buttons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Telegraph has deleted the seemingly made-up article⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Fark used to be great. That bear headline is a beast.

  And then they got rid of the ‘foobies’ (ie. nudity) links off of the main page in order to appeal to advertisers, then they got rid of lots of extra stuff that upset advertisers, then they started shadow-banning paying subscribers if their posts didn’t fit the narrative. And then all the users got fed up of it all and moved ever to Reddit, where the mods were more transparent and there was more of a sense of community. How ironic.

  If your core site content is users posting links and commenting on them, then there’s probably a lesson to be learned about how important it is to treat your users well and have a welcoming, inclusive community. Probably a lesson that Lemmy users have already learned, mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon makes a modern game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s two kinds of motion blur, really - camera based, and model based. Camera-based requires calculating one motion vector for the whole screen, which is basically free. Model-based requires projecting the motion of each vertex of the model in the projected view; one matrix multiply per vector is not ‘expensive’ on a modern graphics card. Depth of field requires comparing the depth buffer, which you’ll have already created as part of rendering, and then taking several ‘taps’ around each point on the screen to calculate the blur for the ‘focus distance’ compared to the actual distance. The final image post-processing will generally process the whole screen anyway, so you’re just throwing a couple of extra steps in for the two effects.

  Now, what does it save you? If your engine is using TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) then that’s performed by ‘twitching’ the camera a tiny amount (less than a pixel) every frame. If nothing’s moving, then you can merge the last several frames to get a really high-quality anti-alias; all the detail that wouldn’t be caught with a ‘completely static’ camera will be captured, and the result looks great. But things do move; if you recalculate ‘where things were’ then you can get a reasonable idea of what colour ought to be at each pixel. Since we need to calculate all the movement vectors to do that, then using the same info gives us the motion blur data ‘for free’ - we can add a little blur in post-processing to hide the TAA mistakes in post processing, and when implemented well(*) then it looks pretty effective. It’s certainly much, much cheaper to calculate that ‘proper’ antialiasing like MSAA.

  (*) It is also quite easy to not implement TAA well, and earn the ire of gamers for turning everything into a blurry mess. Doom (2016) does a fantastic job of it - it’s in the engine at a low level - and I’ve never seen anyone complain about that game being blurry or smeared.

  It takes time to load high-quality textures and models from disk, and it uses up the RAM budget for each frame. Using lower-quality textures and models for distant objects greatly helps rendering speed and prevents stutter, and a bit of depth-of-field hides the low-quality rendering with a bit of a smear.

  Now, if your graphics card greatly exceeds the design requirement (which was probably some kind of console) then you can switch these effects off and the game will look even better, which might make you question why they’re there in the first place. To help consoles look better with some ‘cinematic’ effects, is why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨if pure water is not conductive why would condensation be an issue for electronics?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not very easy, even then. Very pure water will absorb CO2 out of the air to make carbonates, it will strip ions from the surface of most materials you’d want a make a distillation column from. It’s a very aggressive solvent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RIP obsolete tech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We used to do that in industrial automation. If you make any changes to the PLC / HMI / SCADA software, burn a DVD with what you changed and leave it next to the rack. No danger of bringing in viruses on a USB stick (the whole system was air-gapped) and you’d still have a backup available.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.

  Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developer interview: my Q&A with the Heroic Games Launcher team⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.

  I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.

  Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.

  Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.

  Awesome interview as well, @PerfectDark@lemmy.world - a really interesting read.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whenever a beast is shown on screen⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They’ve got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.

  Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Librarians in UK increasingly asked to remove books, as influence of US pressure groups spreads⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Guardian-reading lefty here. You got any links to actual transphobic articles in the Guardian itself? I’ve been reading it for years, and have never noticed anything like that, particularly it being a stance. Would be very disappointed in them if so.

  That link says that there have been 1100 articles in the Guardian, and also well-known right wing rags the Times, Mail and Telegraph, “most of” which are attacks. Bizarre to group those four papers together; one of them is very much not like the others. I would believe it of the other three, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Space Quarry⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey! The images of Ryugu that were taken from Hayabusa2. What a sad lonely rock that place is - a loose collection of boulders in an endless orbit, in which it will probably continue without further interaction from now until the end of time. You could sneak a few ghosts onto that place, right enough, and no-one would notice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is chasing an old high⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How’s the lag on one of those things? Doesn’t matter for an RPG, but playing some of the old platformers on a modern TV is an exercise in misery, and I just couldn’t get past the first couple of levels in Um Jammer Lammy without connecting up a PC monitor instead.

  Places where I’ve seen that live of projector are for eg. showing the football in a pub, and the sound and screen are noticeably out-of-sync.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Snow Fuff⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s easy to tell the difference between stoats and weasels. One is weasily recognised and the other is stoatally different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.