honestly though, the game is a complete package AND it doesn’t come with a bunch of fucking microtransactions/live-service/etc. etc. Gaming is the one area where I think we would all like to see our games be made the same way they were 10-15 years ago, instead of the bullshit from today.
You should see unions soon. Gaming industry is going to force every game designer and developer under a union because of the insecurities. A union guarantees they can’t fuck with you like the crunches. Or the absolute worse is when they have to do unpaid overtime which I think is illegal.
True, I didn’t really mean it to that extreme. and yea not saying gaming industry was perfect, there was plenty to gripe about in the past. Just on average, as a whole, the industry seems worse. The one exception I think are Indie games.
Maybe raise a stink with your attorney general and/or representative, too. The whole idea that a company can sell licenses for something and then arbitrarily decide they don’t want to do it anymore and revoke all the licenses doesn’t sound legal. And if it is, it doesn’t sound like it should be.
Not in this case, seeing that progress is stored online.
Who says that the game you care about tomorrow won’t do this next? Why be against an action/not care about something that can only benefit players now and in the long term?
The Crew was great in its time. It was basically the bridge between Test Drive Unlimited (superior open world gameplay) and early Forza Horizon (superior driving physics). Later Forza Horizon games simply took all the good gameplay features from both TLU and The Crew and is unmatched in quality now.
The Crew 2 was worse than both its predecessor and the competing Forza Horizon at that time, so if you were talking about that I’d half agree. But it’s still a problematic industry trend worth stopping.
Never has it been easier for small people to attempt to knock people down to their level. It’s a shame people feel alright being so nasty to a complete stranger
NZXT Flex customers have never experienced a pre-tax subscription price increase and will never experience one unless they decide to switch subscription tiers.
I think they’re forgetting the part where GN themselves were a NZXT flex customer who experienced subscription price increases. So this statement is already proven to be false before they even said it.
The same Hasbro that tried to make a land grab for all D&D derivative content by changing their Open Game License to grant them irrevocable, perpetual rights to it. This is not a nice company as they demonstrate time and again.
So maybe it’s time the RPG community stopped thinking Hasbro are ever going to change, mourn for what D&D has become, but move onto something else.
Yeah Pathfinder 2e is good. It’s more crunchy than 5e, but that also means there are rules for most situations that come up. I like the 3 action system, much better than the old, “main action, swift action, move action, move- equivalent action” thing the old version had going on.
I have a group of friends, half in same town as me, half on the other side of the country, that get together once a week ion discord and play dnd via a self hosted foundry virtual tabletop docker. We used to play 5e but we decided to try out pathfinder 2e to see if we liked it and we haven’t gone back, pathfinder is fantastic. The flexibility with the actions makes it feel like you always get a chance to do something and you aren’t just wasting your turn when you are getting into position or whatever. Feels close enough to 5e that most of your intuition will be pretty close, just use a different website to look shit up. Highly recommend pathfinder!
What? We don’t have a plethora of other games here in the US? I’ll have to remind the owners of all those shops that those hundreds of other games they’re selling currently only exist outside of the US. How embarrassing for us…
The OGL License happened after Larian teamed up with Hasbro to make Baldur’s Gate 3. Thankfully Larian is still independent so it can continue on to make better RPGs without Hasbro.
Most of the planets are dull on purpose because my graphics card catches fire if there’s too much excitement on screen. Thanks for looking out for me, Todd!
This is absurd, considering Mike Johnson doesn’t work for a living. None of these government officials do anything worthwhile but still get paid for it.
Pays well too. The price of their morality for a lifetime of pay and free healthcare. Because let’s face it, these idiots get FEHB healthcare for life for being in congress because they made it so. They get a salary AFTER they served too, after Min 5 years, but they get 80% of their salary as part of a pension. Insane nonsense if you stay for 20 years compared to what we get.
So there is an anti-trust lawsuit against steam, but not apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft… Etc of those giant companies who literally destroy everything in their way? Please tell me they’re next?
There are anti trust lawsuits going on with most the companies you listed though? Microsoft had one in the early tech days that they won, but there’s probably going to be another one soon…
GN sticks to tech news, and I respect that that Steve sticks to his area of expertise when it comes to reporting on issues in the tech field. LTT has repeatedly shown glaring errors in their testing, and that’s what was reported on by GN.
The staff and professional issues the company faces are for an entirely different style of journalism, and I do hope someone picks up that story.
Linus has always struck me as someone who would be kinda cool to be friends with, but the worst person to be your boss. He can be arrogant, dismissive of employee ideas, and penny pinching. I’ve seen it time and time again in videos where he participates, and it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. I only hope the people who faced discrimination and burnout at LTT are in better places now and have found ways to let their obvious expertise shine.
I also hope one of these employees can summon the strength to report LMG to the relevant Canadian authorities for their blatant abuse of their employees. No matter the “opportunities” and employer offers, or the “contracts” they make employees sign, workers have rights, and their should be a reckoning when those rights are violated.
Yeah, Canada is not the country to fuck with people’s rights in. Many still do, of course, but if they actually fight back companies will usually be willing to give 5 figures once their lawyers get word of what’s happening, in hopes of avoiding the 6 or 7 figure judgement that the courts might give them.
Btw, if you want to learn about your rights, take a course meant to train HR people. It’s their job to protect the company and they need to know where the lines are to do so effectively.
Don’t wanna say I was expecting it but I was always kinda waiting for “something” to come out of ltt. A bunch of tech bros in their 30s still making penis and 69 jokes every video doesn’t seem like a good environment lmao
Yeah enough of their company culture had leaked into their videos and through some of the things Linus had said that I wasn’t really that surprised to see that thread. The power imbalance was thrown around for jokes and Linus comes off as a stingy bastard who will spend a ton of money in some places and then complain about a relatively trivial expense elsewhere. And the way he talks about it implies that he thinks everyone sees it that way.
There’s a web tool that estimates the value of your Steam account by looking at all the games you own, but it can’t tell you how precisely much you’ve actually spent on Valve’s wallet-plundering platform, microtransactions and all.
If you bought on sales or Humble Bundles then this number will be so far off its useless. If you only buy new and retail then I feel bad for you sucker.
After many years of selectively evaluating and purchasing bundles as my main source of new games, I've come to wonder if it would've been better to just buy the individual games when I wanted to play them at whatever the available price was - the rate at which I get through games is far lower than the rate at which games are available in "good" bundles. In the end I'm not even sure if I've saved money (because of how many games have been bought but are as-of-yet unplayed) and it does take more time to evaluate whether something's a good deal or not.
The upside is way more potential variety of games to pull from in my library, but if I only play at most like 1-2 dozen new games a year then I'm not sure that counts for much 🫠
A bit tangential, but I also feel a lot of people make the same mistake with GamePass. I buy a lot of gameson release day (mostly indies, but also some AAA), so theoretically I should be the target audience for GamePass, but I did the math once for a three-month period and came out at a loss if I had bought GamePass.
Based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, the type of person to get GamePass also typically enjoys a lesser variety of games on average, making the cost/benefit ratio even worse.
I guess I’m a weird one. I’ve saved so much money using Game Pass it’s not even funny. Throw in the pc version, and I’ve saved even more. I can try so many different genres I wouldn’t typically risk my money for. I have also avoided buying games I thought I would love but then ended up hating.
Yeah, I don’t think I make that many that wrong purchases, although that doesn’t mean that a lot of games I enjoy end up unfinished due to limited time. When it comes to testing games, one thing that’s neat is that demos got a huge revival in the last few years, particularly due to Steam Next Fest.
Looking at the current line-up, I’ll say that right I’d probably come to a different conclusion, seeing as Blue Prince, South of Midnight and the new DOOM are all included. Then again, I use Linux, so I wouldn’t be able to use Game Pass even if I wanted to.
I let the charity be the deciding factor. Some times I will just get a bundle and move the sliders all the way over for EFF because I would have donated to them anyways. Other times I see that the cause (relief, children, etc) is just worth doing. If I don’t play the games, at least the money was not wasted.
Wanna try some super entertaining pills, or would you prefer a syringe so you can pump entertainment straight into your veins? First round is free, don’t you want to be entertained?
Somewhere in here there’s a joke about the cocaine laced with fentanyl that I keep getting told is a massive problem that requires more police funding to deal with.
The feds can’t imprison me for making cocaine “too entertaining”!
Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.
It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls.
As for why people would cheat in an online game, it always seems obvious from a psychological standpoint, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.
I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:
<span style="color:#323232;">PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.
</span>
They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.
The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.
Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 to be abused by people? You can slam your dick in a car door for a lot less.
Whats sad is that people keep wanting more client-side anticheat to fix this, when the real answer is server-side anticheat and changing the engine to stop being so leaky with that much information.
lol raycasting isn’t optimized for server side deployment, it would increase the poly count of the mesh tenfold, which would in turn increase average ping and fps. Couple that with the client side rendering problem and I don’t know anything about development just kidding
Your suggesting the server maintain a real time render for every single player and somehow manage to get the data back to them in less than 17ms so that they don’t have empty frames that suddenly become people?
Because that’s a ludicrous requirement in terms of latency (ping is totally reasonable at any value under 100ms) and server capacity.
Because your solution sounds like it would cause popping constantly and be a major burden on the server, which is already the largest overhead on a released game.
By rendering people, as in sending data about an object that should be rendered, in a few pixels before they would be visible. And not at all on distances, without a scope (as they would not be visible). Footsteps etc. could be represented by two noise levels precalculated by the servers very roughly, so you can tell someone is there behind you, but a cheat could not determine where exactly.
You want a server to determine if a player should be visible (ie render each player’s perspective) and then get that back to them right before someone walks around the corner? With latency you’d need to render people in at least 200ms before they appear… Which is still plenty of time for a hacker to flick to them and kill them.
True that, but I imagine such sudden flicking to seemingly random positions to be much more obvious than if the hacker had 10 seconds to see the player, tactically preaiming a corner pretending to hold an angle to then be lucky and hit a shot. Would be harder on games with smaller maps, CS like, as holding angles would be much more common than in open worlds - eg. Tarkov.
If the trajectory and speed says either the client or another player will cross a wall soon where the player sees them THEN it could send the data to the client. You need some tolerance for ping up to maybe 200ms but that’s it. Wallhacks could give you at most a flash of a couple specific people.
You need to account for every gap in the wall, nook and cranny and peephole for these sightlines. You’d have to bake so much detail into every calculation server side that it would effectively be rendering the entire map to host a single game.
It could be a client-side check with verification on the server. Basically transmitting which places are in view. Ray casting like the other person said. Not raytracing which is much more computationally intensive. A server side check basically so that the client can’t just say they’re looking around every corner at once.
Why not? More computationally intensive things are done to calculate lighting in a lot of modern games as I alluded to. Yes it would increase the load on your CPU but that’s less of a problem nowadays with higher core counts and clock speeds and it’s not like modern anticheats don’t steal some CPU cycles already. I think you underestimate the power of modern computers. I’m not trying to be condescending here but it is worth remembering that gigahertz means BILLIONS of calculations per second.
We’re only talking in theoreticals right now anyways, it is entirely possible that a game studio has tried this and it hasn’t worked, I just don’t put a lot of faith in modern game companies.
You cannot break the speed of light with computational effort.
You’re saying that you want to have a round trip from client to server and back happen in-between frames.
You cannot do that. Period. You will not ever have latencies that low.
Even if you frame lock it at 60fps that means you’re calculating views, sending the data up the tube, checking it on the server, responding back with all the data about the new character that should appear and then rendering the new guy within 17ms.
So you’re going to take all the places a character could be in the next 200ms, do Ray casting on all of them and send that data to the server to check every 17ms?
While the server also does that for 15 other players at the same time.
Do you know what algorithmic complexity is? Big O notation? If so - that’s a n³ * 15m³ problem space that you’re expanding out across 200ms every 17ms, where n is player locations possible in x/y/z and m is the other players locations. Physics collisions are usually the biggest drain on a computer’s cycles in game and in the worst case that’s n² complexity.
There are many ways of doing this. I know the source engine uses visboxes, which are calculated once at map compile time. It takes a while to compile, but it means that clients can use the pre-compiled data to calculate parts of the map that are visible and the server can use them to determine what the player can see at a given time. I’m not sure whether it does that or not, but it would make sense to use that data.
You constantly have to render people in when they can’t be seen but will soon be seen. Which also means instead of keeping track of just locations the server needs to render the scene in sufficient detail as to determine sightlines.
Usually games just do this by sending info to clients of where everyone is and letting the clients render people in when the client determines that the sightline isn’t interrupted.
Some games will just not send the positions until they’re within a certain range of each other, but I’m a realistic game like tark you’d need several kilometers of info in case someone scoped in.
If you don’t do this correctly it leads to characters popping into existence from thin air
You could use things like ray tracing to determine if one player can be seen by another on the serverside and only send packages when they can see.
But to resource heavy to do that.
Edit: Thinking about it, you simply have to render the whole map with all players server side and based on that determine which players can see each other and based on that send the information to the clients.
You do see why that’s a serious issue right? Before the Server did nothing more than maintain a list of x,y,z coordinates of player positions. Now it’s rendering the entire game space and doing 3d calculations.
That’s several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.
Like, this is what leads to invasive client-side anti-cheat. Which also happens to be one of the main blockers for OS portability.
But if you make it so that the server has to constantly validate the game state, you get terrible lag.
You really have to design your game well to deter cheaters. And you have to empower server moderators to ban cheaters. This sorta implies releasing the servers so that communities can run their own instances, because these studios don’t have the resources to handle moderation themselves.
the validation shouldn’t cause too much lag since game needs to sync up the game states anyways, which is an operation that is inherently way more expensive than any validation anyways (since each frame of the following game states need to adhere to the game rules anyways, there’s already inherently some form of validation). It’s more about not trusting everything the client says the game state should be.
Cheaters are a big problem in this game. To experience the cool parts of the game without all the bulshit, there is still SPT-AKI for playing solo and also the SIT mod for PvE multiplayer coop.
Haha I’ll believe it when I see it. Pretty sure he said something similar a couple of Stardew Valley updates ago. This seems to be his number one love and obsession and one of these days while working on Haunted Chocolatier again, he’s gonna think “hmmm that would actually go nicely in Stardew Valley” and start working on SV again.
Just FYI I’m not complaining or anything. I think it’s funny and relatable. But I’m not gonna hold my breath for this game until it’s actually out.
I’m not saying there’s going to be another Stardew Valley update, I don’t even know at this point. Right now I am focused on my next game. So, we’ll see.
pcgamer.com
Ważne