addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.

  Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop Killing Games Petition to UK Relaunched⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Identity is a many-layered thing, and I’d never describe myself as British unless very specifically prompted to do so, but I can at least sign that. 5,071 let’s go!

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Larian Says Its 'Full Attention' Is on Its Next Game, 'Media Blackout' for the Foreseeable⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So far we’ve had “amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and “bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.

  Larian have said that they’d like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I’m assuming they won’t have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon expects more⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Halo: Combat Evolved sucks? That’s a hot take - been a few years, but I did enjoy playing it, massive controllers and all. Or did you have a specific one in mind?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YARRRR!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Bit narrow for satisfactory booty plundering imho, although that wheel looks convenient for tying people to before you make them “walk the plank”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨British girls outdrink boys — and most of Europe⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, we’ve a minimum pricing per unit on alcohol, any kind of multipack deal is forbidden, and the licensing hours are such that it’s easier to get yourself some bennies than it is to get a drink before lunchtime; need to plan your day around getting some booze in the house.

  National drug policy should really be about minimising harm, with treatment and rehabilitation for addicts, but any kind of talk that isn’t about stringing them all up is anathema to our circus of bawbags in Westminster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anons make the worst game ever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think every game of theirs since Dark Souls has a decent supply of homebones, and you can always ‘suicide out’ with the darksign. This a Demon’s Souls issue? Never before in the history of video games has so much jank been dropped haphazardly into a pile and ended up creating such a great game. If you can’t get stuck on geometry in that, then it’s the only technical issue it doesn’t have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I was idle and copilot was bored⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Surely i, j, k, l, m and n should be integers, and the rest should all be floats? Seems to me that this language model hasn’t been trained up on enough FORTRAN77.

  Disgraceful lack of respect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨master manipulators⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The ho-meow-ner, at that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cranking Up The Detail In A Flight Simulator From 1992⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ethnically sourced⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Armadillo⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨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.