HEVC 10 bit in order to reduce banding for animation, especially during dark scenes. I know H264 Hi10 exists, but it has poor hardware support, so using HEVC 10 bit is the best option (I don’t own a single streaming device that supports HW accelerated Hi10, besides my PC). Also, an added benefit is reduced file size. I find that doing my own encodes is very rarely worth it, but when I do, I use FFmpeg in the CLI and not tdarr.
Hold up. That entire image is 8-bit. It’s a JPEG image. JPEG can’t encode more than 8 bits per channel. Nor can most displays, including mine, display more than 8 bits per channel. And yet the left half of your image exhibits far worse banding than the right half.
The left half looks more like 5 bits per channel rather than 8. You’d see that kind of banding in gradients back in the days of Windows 3.1, when 16-bit color was common. (16-bit color uses 5 bits each for red and blue, and 6 bits for green.)
Then it should be marked as such. It’s highly misleading to anyone who doesn’t know better. Again, you’re demonstrating the difference between 5-bit and 8-bit color, not the difference between 8-bit and 10-bit color.
The purpose of the comment is to demonstrate banding. The only reason I marked it in bits is to show how banding can be reduced in video encodes by increasing the bit depth, not the specifics depths itself, it’s not a technical write-up.
I like that they donnt use the grid. Feels more natural. That being said, I would occasionally like a measurement tool or something so you can see if you’re within 5/60 ft or whatever
Not that this was one of your listed options, but have you considered setting up your own Plex/Jellyfin/Emby server along with the *arrs and adding her to that? You can’t get much more snappy and Netflix-like than that.
I can’t imagine this would offer a very pleasant viewing experience for a first timer when it relies on stuff like YTS, RARBG (they need to update their page apparently), KAT, EZTV, and TPB. I can see the potential for her to be bombarded with a bunch of fakes and low quality rips.
IGG /nosteam uploads presumably means that they are the sources of the games. I don’t know a huge amount about game piracy, but it sounds like IGG / nosteam are not trustworthy.
IGG is very toxic website that has a history of adding various types of malware (both web and games), including cryptominers.
It's higher on that list, even though for some reason it only highlights the (barely coherent) silliness that it has DRM.
I'm not know the nosteam website, it's odd that they mention it on the list but it's not listed.
2 of my favorites of all time. Final Fantasy VIII and Morrowind.
Final Fantasy VIII, to my knowledge, never once tells you that enemy levels scale. This wouldn’t be a problem if you never grinded fights (for exp, AP, items, etc). I think the intention was that you would never need to grind so you never would (the game is actually super easy). But people do grind, and you can level up very quickly if you want to.
Morrowind just drops you into the world, for better or worse. There are some prompts to familiarize you to menus. But that’s it. Most of the basic functions are self explainable. Except fatigue. Fatigue affects everything you do. And you won’t realize that it’s the reason whatever you’re trying to do isn’t working. Most players get frustrated and quit because they can’t hit anything with their weapon, not realizing it’s because their stamina bar is drained.
Morrowind was on another level compared to modern open world games. Map markers? Nah, fuck you. You get old world directions like “follow the road south east out of town and take a left at the fork then turn right at the crazy broken Dwarven machine and you should find the dungeon my brother went exploring”.
Then the main story quest giver tells me to “come back after two moons have passed” to continue… I thought that meant two MONTHS. Left the dude at level like 3 or 4 and came back a walking God of death because I nearly completed all guilds side quests in 2 months… Learned years later he just wanted me to wait 2 fucking days.
Man, I have a buncha people giving me shit on my thread for BG3 asking if one of the encounters can be cheesed because the way it would be cheesed is hilarious. It’s a clone fight and I was curious if you could make the clone spawn naked and make the fight a non-issue. Now some people are upset and tell me I should just “play the game.” Is that not what I am doing? I was gonna do it anyway, I just wanted to know if I should save before hand if it fucked me over completely.
I like breaking games. It’s fun. I’ll play them the way they were “intended” once or twice; but after that I’m doing everything but that. Just to see what I can actually get away with. I thought that was the point of an interactive experience. Why the hell would I want to just do the canned ‘canon’ shit? I want to do all the things you can’t do in reality because they would hurt yourself or others. I want to test the limits of the game designer’s imagination. If I can think of it and they missed it or if they actually put that little detail in.
While I do enjoy cheesing fights in BG3, I’ve run into a few which seemed impossible if I didn’t find a way to cheese it, which is kind of a bummer. Shoving the big bad off a cliff should be a strategy, but shouldn’t be the only one.
Cyberpunk 2077 is purely an escapist game for me. The game itself sort of sucks, the side missions are mostly “go and kill this dude” or “go and steal this thing”, nothing you do has an effect on anything and it’s generally pretty uninspired and blah, but I bought it because I got it for under 20€ so I figured why the hell not.
It looks damn purdy though, and Night City is intricately built and has lots of small fun details. I love just wandering around the city, stopping at hole-in-the-wall noodle places (even though they might just be “window dressing”, and even if they’re not the restaurants in the game are totally pointless), or browsing the stuff at some market, etc. etc. etc. So even though I don’t like it as a game, I like the environment it provides (although honestly the constant in-your-face sexism gets pretty old…)
I personally really like cyberpunk, I wish the launch went better. Adding more features would have made it truly great.
I’m an achievement hunter. Normally once beating a game I uninstall and move on to the next game. But cyberpunk, I did three full playthroughs on very hard with different builds.
The story is really great the first playthrough, but for my second and third playthrough, I rush to level 14, grab the double jump, and just go exploring. I hit level 50 before talking to Takemura at the diner.
My favorite character is my third one, my corpo netrunner. Pre-patched contagion was just bonkers. You could walk into an enemy stronghold, look at someone, and command the whole building to die.
The game becomes a whole lot less fun when you’re that OP, but it felt like a reward, since the early stages of a netrunner build is the weakest build in the game.
It’s absolutely got a lot of good things about it. While I don’t necessarily like it as such, I don’t dislike it either 😁 mainly the things that bug me are that the mechanics are a pretty generic sneak’n’hack clone and it’s very linear: nothing you do actually influences anything very big in the world except for some fairly inconsequential things, and you have no real choice in the larger picture of how things turn out.
I’m hoping the DLC, whatchamacallit, delivers on its promises of remaking some of the game to deliver more of what they originally promised.
I have not! I was actually just eyeballing it in Steam the other day thinking about whether I’d want to buy it, so I think I’ll take this as a recommendation
Absolutely a recommendation. It’s extremely atmospheric. If you’ve ever wanted “drive” around in Blade Runner’s world, Cloudpunk is about as close as you’re going to get in terms of feel.
Cloudpunk has really nice atmosphere but is highly linear, almost to the point of belonging to the “walking simulator” genre. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but just don’t go in expecting much in terms of gameplay.
Oddly enough I like walking simulators, even though Cyberpunk’s linearity irked me. I think it’s because I like my RPGs more nonlinear and with more freedom to decide how things go, but I’m fine with linear stories in games that don’t try to sell themselves as something else
Right‽ I just started playing Cloudpunk and I’ve really liked it so far, and I had this exact thought. Cloudpunk is close and it’s great fun, but I would commit light treason if it meant getting a (good…) 1st person Blade Runner game on the market
edit: oh and thank you for the tip, it’s exactly what I was looking for
It doesn’t fit well into my life. With work, the kids and all the responsibilities that comes with it I can’t afford to sink a lot of time into it, so if I get a game I’ll focus on single-player games, or I’ll go with multiplayer games with a co-op to at least enjoy the game without it being a competition.
I hear you on the competitive games piece, but competitive games where i can play with friends gives me a similar feel. As long as you can all laugh at losing. lol
Did you ever have a time where competitive gaming was an interest or pastime for you?
Here’s my advice as someone that quit drinking about 6 years ago due to my inability to drink responsibly.
Do you want to quit? If you feel like you can’t handle playing a game in moderation, maybe it’s time to think about quitting it entirely. If you feel like playing other genres of games will eventually draw you back into playing more addictive games like WoW, then you could think about quitting that too, it’s up to you. If certain music makes you think about playing WoW and you can’t control yourself if you listen to it , make a sacrifice and don’t listen to it. I avoided bars for years and still don’t really love being around when people are drinking. The sacrifices I make are well worth it though and I’m much much happier as a result.
Have a long, honest conversation with yourself about what you want from life and how video games fit into it. That’s what I did with alcohol and realized I didn’t want to waste my life on stupid shit any more and decided to quit.
You’re probably too young to remember when computers were a huge pia to use. Your MIL probably knows more about PCs than you do if she worked in an office in the 80s and 90s.
It is odd being in the gen X and millenial cohorts and being two generations trapped between ones that either had little to no experience with computers or have only used smart tech that simplified everything down.
I’m 18, so also Gen Z I guess. But growing up all I did was try to bypass WiFi and device time limits & content filters. Later I got more into programming (due to mental health I’ve been letting that slip unfortunately), and currently I’m looking to study AI and CompSci.
And I constantly wonder why other people aren’t as interested in this stuff. And are completely helpless in troubleshooting. I kind of want to buy a PC for my siblings to get them interested too, but I don’t have high hopes of it working…
I don’t know if I was trying to make a point here but I’ll post anyways, enjoy
There’s always going to be people interested on computing more so than their average cohort, if there weren’t boomers into it we wouldn’t have got anywhere with the tech to begin with.
However simply owning a computer between the 70s to 2010 odd meant you had to do a lot more problem solving and fiddling that lead to a better understanding of how stuff worked across the generation as a whole in comparison. Whether it was learning to use BASIC on your micro computer or having to mess about with drivers in Win 98.
The exception rather than the rule. I’ve seen several articles claiming your lot don’t know that computers have a file system. Ie they use the search function to find their files and don’t pay attention to where things are saved. Ie the computer is a large bucket full of my shit and the only way to access it is by telling the computer to rummage through it.
It’s fine for me. I just got hired as a “programmer” despite having extremely basic python skills and ability to use Linux. I’m quite happy to be “settled for”.
With the risk of being tagged as a car analogy, its similar to the experience with internal combustion engine cars, shifted by two generations. My parents (boomers) and the Silent gen often knew cars backwards and forwards because it was the only way to get them to work reliably, not unlike computers of the (60s) 70s and 80s. Those older were pretty resistant/baffled, and those after tend to just see them as appliances - being regularly ridiculed by boomers for things like not knowing how to change the transmission fluid (no longer necessary in many CVTs), drive a stick shift (rare on modern US vehicles), or brake “properly” (aka pumping brakes, which in an ABS enabled system is not recommended).
“lifetime” fluid doesn’t mean what you think it does. It means the lifetime of the transmission, which will fail if you don’t change the fluid at some point.
Any time a manufacturer has said that it has turned out to be b.s. and someone figures out that some off the shelf fluid works better than the stuff they put in at the factory.
lifetime fluid usually means “lifetime of the warranty” There are incredible high tech oils now that can easily last 100k mi in their intended use but they don’t work forever.
while we are on this topic the Detroit recommended oil change interval for the semi I drove was 85k miles, so basically slightly more than anually. Completely blew my mind, though in between oil changes they also took samples and tested them which is a big part of what makes that possible otherwise you’d change it at 35k to be safe. also the things took 5 gallons of motor oil, so a smaller proportion of the oil is being pummeled by the crankshaft bearings and piston seals, at least that’s how it was explained to me.
Screen is not the best, but everything else is superior. SteamOS is much better than Windows, IMO. Though I don’t play multiplayer games and I’ve read some anticheats don’t run on Linux. The only multiplayer game I play from time to time is Fall Guys and it works. Emulators are actually where Linux shines and especially Steam Deck - there’s an app called EmuDeck that sets up all the emulators you could think of and makes it work really easily. For Epic and GOG games I use Heroic Games Launcher and it works well, I played Spider-Man and Fall Guys from Epic and most of my library is on GOG.
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