All I want is someone to make an open world Sims 3 like game with 64-bit support and better multicore support. Can’t wait to see if Paralives and Life by You will deliver
Sims 3 was best, no? I feel like it was the full package and mostly complete right out of the box. Didn’t have the same feeling in 4 at all. Been some years since I tried 4, but when it launched I remember going back to 3 almost immediately after a couple weeks.
I did the same thing. It may have been because there weren't as many dlcs and expansions, but it just felt really dull. Plus it didn't have the completely open world like 3 did. Sitting through all those loading screens every time you wanted to go somewhere was a pain.
I tried playing Sims 3 again recently and holy hell is the performance bad. Like the FPS is running at whatever I cap it at but there are constant freezes and stuttering with no FPS drops even with all the recommended performance mods. I then remembered I stopped playing for that very reason ages ago and now my desktop is like 100x more powerful.
Edit: it sounds like they are actually delaying to ensure a more polished release. Given the massive scope of the game, this seems totally reasonable. I wish Paradox would push deadlines more often honestly, given the sorry state of their most recent titles on release day (CS2 and Vic3 in particular) Though I am still disappointed we won’t get LBY sooner.
Good choice, a favorite of mine as well. In the middle of the night when I’m supposed to be sleeping with a theme that often makes no sense in reality but I’m bought in 100% anyway until my alarm goes off.
Exactly! I spent an entire night playing a football game over and over in my head that didn’t happen and wasn’t important to the team. But John Elway just could not throw for a first down to save his life…
What’s happening to RPS? I’ve been seeing more and more articles from them about games the writer has never played, with no useful information. Like this one, basically copy and paste of the patch notes and a summary of steam reviews. Used to like them for in depth game reviews, guess that’s going the way of the dodo.
Gave it a whirl. Basically, you can now scrap ships to get their components to create a new ship inside any station. Couldn’t find any merchant within the station selling pieces, so you have to go out and explore, or scrap some of your own ships.
Stations now look slightly different from one another and no longer have those semi-hidden rooms that nobody cared about. Alien vendors now give a discount if you’re at a good standing with their race. Guild “vendors” offer a list of stuff for free, but I don’t get why the prompt is red instead of white. Performance is still mostly CPU bound.
Overall decent update, but the new features don’t warrant playing more than 1 hour.
They had to have seen the writing on the wall at least a year or two before they brought this to market.
I seem to remember that at about a year before launch there was some reporter (Jason Schreier?) who had an inside tip that they were changing some stuff in the face of the realization that GaaS were not the money maker they were thought to be once upon a time, but the tipper also said that they were too locked into the GaaS paradigm to make the sort of meaningful changes that would salvage the experience. I don't think there's any rescuing this one if they knew they were in trouble a full year before delivery and still couldn't shape it up into a product worthy of attention.
There was a similar comment about that. How they are in a sunk cost fallacy for all the GaaS promises they made a few years ago. And to not release it means they make zero.
Versus releasing and maybe they make some money back.
Some people here are blaming paradox but honestly, I don't envy any game releasing in this period. We've had so many great (and expensive games) in the past few months but even if that weren't the case, personally I'm not willing to pay 50€ for something that looks like a blander XCOM game (or 65€ if you want the special additional character, bleugh).
Then again maybe I'm just not the diehard fan and their target audience, the only game of theirs I played was shadorun many years ago and I wasn't interested in battletech either. If I were in a mood for a turn based game I know I'd sooner pick up BG3 since their price is relatively close...
makes sense they would be upset with a third party intentionally altering the game’s message, but im not sure why it’s framed as an apology to “russian gamers”
Is there any ethical AI, all they do is take data people posted online and then profit off it. With the original creators not getting a say if their data gets used or any profits derived from it.
Though Getty did introduce their new AI today that was only trained on images they own the copyright to. Arguably, still not ethical, but at least it's things they own the data for.
I didn't dig too much into it, but my guess would be no.
Even if you could verify, it's still an ethical grey area as it's taking works they paid photographers to generate new works potentially without crediting the original photographers? Their own website tells people they have to credit the original photographer, and I'd be surprised if the AI lists all the works it used to create it.
We did this in a previous org. Basically, we had a bunch of user-generated data, users would then classify a sample of that data, and then we’d train our model on those classifications.
I don’t see how it would work in game dev though, unless they’re using AI to customize an NPC’s behavior based on the player’s actions (i.e. teaching an enemy to block player attacks). Generating models and whatnot would just have too small of a data set to work with.
Was interested, but looking at the steam reviews there’s no campaign, just a bunch of strung together skirmish maps. And it sounds like another case of EA abandoned as full release.
I loved Dune on Sega Genesis, and it had a great campaign IIRC. It’s too bad, because if this had a decent campaign, I’d probably get it out of nostalgia.
There’s a campaign, just not a story mode. It’s a conquest-style, like what Dune 2 pretended to have (but was obviously scripted). Like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade or Soul Storm.
As a die hard Windows hater that games (I haven’t had Windows installed on any pc I own since 2015) all of the AAA games always get absolutely dogshit performance when they first come out. It was like that with Cyberpunk and it was like that with Hogwarts Legacy. Today, those games play just as well on Windows as on Linux. I’m sure they’ll eventually work it out
I remember seeing a video where they compared linux to windows starfield performance and it was basically the same on average fps but the 1% lows were less prevalent on linux so it might actually work better on linux.
I bet it works fine on amd gpus right now. If you’re on a 10 series Nvidia card you’re fucked. If you’re on a newer Nvidia card it’s still kind of bad though but not every protondb report involving Nvidia 3xxx or 4xxx cards is complaining about performance. I suspect there exists some kind of performance fix for later Nvidia cards that is not yet well known.
The latest driver is 537.13 I think. Most of the time they only bother to put every multiple of 5 driver version in Linux distro repositories. Someone that was familiar with how exactly the low level parts of this worked could manually get driver 537 working on Linux probably. No idea if that would work or not but I haven’t seen someone claim to have tried it yet.
To be fair, Cyberpunk’s performance was awful for everyone at launch, Windows, Linux and consoles.
At one point I remember seeing someone on Reddit show that the game was less likely to crash on Linux than on Windows. In that regard, one could argue the performance was better for Linux users when Cyberpunk launched. Mind you, the games was still a buggy mess at launch too.
Cyberpunk’s performance was awful for everyone at launch, Windows, Linux and consoles.
But it wasn’t? There were a lot of bugs, to be sure, but PC performance was not among them. Hell, I was on a 970 at the time, and it was still fine.
The console versions specifically were a shit show.
But in regards to running better on Linux, a lot of it tends to come down to shader precaching. Lots of stutters on Windows are the first time a shader loads. That was definitely the case with Elden Ring.
I don’t understand how anyone buys Early Access games. Yes, I understand that the creators need to make a living before the game launches, but big companies should have the reserves and small companies may just take the money and run.
A couple days ago I looked at pcgamer’s summer steam deals list, and since Manor Lords topped the list I went over to Steam to check it out. Early Access. Nevermind.
I forgot about it entirely until looking at this article. Went to Steam and: Oh. Right. Early Access. Nevermind.
I do agree that it is too early to expect more updates. It only became available in April. I don’t expect it to have improvements worth integrating yet. That said, I’m not spending $30 (regular price $40) on something that may or may not end up being any good – that might always be too buggy to play, or too cringe-y to enjoy, or go so far from the initial demo that it isn’t the same game (I will never forgive you, Spore, and I will never buy you).
It’s a gamble - but one mitigated by looking at review.
I, for one, am very satisfied with my EA purchase of Satisfactory (…pun intended, but heh). Coffee Stain has been absolutely amazing throughout the entire EA Aperiod.
Same for me, and I have had better luck with enjoying early access games than most full release games. Valheim is the stand out example for me, but there arena couple others with hundreds of hours of fun! It also helps that indie early access games tend to be less expensive.
Then there is the case of Multiversus, which was way more fun to play in prerelease than it is now. On top of that they cranked up the intrusive monetization, so getting to the less fun gameplay is a slog.
Then there is Tekken 8, which launched ok and then added a shitty shop and annoying seasons shortly after release. It also seems like the networking has gottenn worse.
But every early access game where I was clear on expectations has been fun and always feels worth the money.
See? That’s the thing. I don’t want to support future in-app purchases that get tacked on after they got me to PAY THEM for the ‘privilege’ of doing their beta testing for them. That seems like a special kind of evil that must not be encouraged.
Tekken 8 didn’t have an early access that I am aware of, and I have given a Not Recommended review on steam because of the shop being added post release. The Tekken situation is not an early access problem, just a greed problem so I might have caused some confusion as an example of games having sketchy behavior even without early access.
Multiversus is free to play with predatory monitization. The beta was free, but you actually got stuff by playing a somewhat reasonable amount of time. During the beta they increased the amount of time and people complained, so it was kind of surprising that they did the opposite of the early access feedback on release.
Yeah, Rimworld was in early access for 5 years and was worth the price the entire time IMO. Project Zomboid has been in early access for over a decade! If you just blanket ignore early access games you’re cutting yourself off from some excellent games.
One of my favourite examples of this is still Rust. Sure, it’s not a perfect game, I don’t always like the updates, but do I feel like I got my money’s worth, from a purely online game I bought in 2013 and can still hop on with thousands of other people? I do.
Like, a big AAA dev/publisher or a relatively unknown newbie? Not gonna trust that it’s going to turn out good or get finished.
A company like Crate? Hell yeah, they make solid shit and haven’t fucked me over once on it. I watched Grim Dawn grow up from 2 acts to getting a third expansion. Farthest Frontier is also shaping up into a fun time, in my opinion.
If they have a history, it can be worth it to take the risk and take some small part in the process.
Early access doesn’t necessarily mean bad. 2 of my favourite games this year have been Core Keeper and Timberborn. Both early access, got more than 100 hours in both and I’m definitely not halfway through either. They’re great as they are and updates are coming to improve them. I do agree though you have to be very wary of what game you choose to support, I have been burned before by a developer that took the money and ran. Fuck you Code{}atch, I’ll never forgive you.
I do that to help some of the indie devs I like. I don’t play them until the final release or don’t contribute any other way. Did that for Factorio, Mashinky, Soviet Republic, Songs of Syx, Kingdoms Reborn, Farthest Frontier, etc.
Yes. But last time I played it (which was admittedly, idk, 2 years and something like 10 major updates ago now ? These guys just don’t stop), barring a few exceptions the gameplay was all breadth and no depth. You could do a ton of different things but after you had done a thing once, every other instances of the same activity would feel extremely samey
Edit: I should point out that I’m very much ok with repetition if the gameplay is deep enough to keep me interested. I have easily played various horde shooter games for a total of ~2500 hours. Not including the ~800 hours in Warframe, where the gameplay isn’t even that deep, but still interesting enough to make the grind for new toys bearable.
All breadth and no depth, still the same. Some 12 different planet types, a number of neat looking anomaly planets that exist only for sightseeing (one of my favorites was a planet where everything is covered in a metallic hexagonal mesh). As I said in another comment in this thread, the game is very repetitive with some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)
some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)
And now I remember why I stopped playing the last time. All the things I wanted to do (mostly, getting cooler/better ships and capital ships, and getting better weapons) required grinding insane amounts of money. Plus getting the exact ship you wanted was extremely random (and grindy, because good luck finding the ship with the looks you want and a good rating) but it looks like this update addresses this at least…
Oh yeah I think I remember reading about that and going “that’s a thing ?” And promptly realizing that none of my bases were on a planet where the profits would be worth the time investment
The planets with big money kinda suck to make bases. They are usually the most hazardous ones. I basically only leave a landing pad and a portal besides the mining stuff to collect and take it to my main base from time to time.
If you mean mining Active Indium, they nerfed the price hard some updates ago. Using Oxygen + Chlorine for infinite multiplication still works. Another easy-ish way to get money is with a huge plantation of cactus. There’s a recipe that turns 200 into a gel that sells for 50k each.
Hah, I think I figured out the cactus thing by myself right before I stopped playing. But I didn’t have the motivation to make a big enough farm to really start racking up the big bucks
You’re not wrong, but also the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world (pardon the pun). Also not so sure how that would work out on the consoles.
TLDR > A lot of the repetitiveness isn’t a problem of “Lack of disk space”, it’s just a matter of not making good use of procedural generation. Seeing “the same building blocks in a different configuration” is better than seeing “the same thing”.
the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world
Not necessarily. You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry, but that becomes a huge CPU hog in a game that already blows CPU usage. But most of the repetitiveness can be “fixed” (read: reduced) without adding more than ~20MB of new textures and geometry.
One of the problems is that there’s no variation within a planet. Every grassy planet is the same mechanically. Sure, one might have bubbles in the air, another might have yellow grass instead of red, but they’re mechanically identical. It’s the only planet type to find starbulbs and minerals with parafinum. No grassy planet has an ice cap, or a desert patch, or a volcano. If you ever need to find cactus and pyrite, you have to go to a desert planet. If you need uranium and gamma weed, radioactive planet. Then you have the caves, which are completely identical in every planet.
Some planets may have bio luminescent plants, which are gorgeous to look at, but because there’s no variation within a planet, you see them everywhere. There’s never a point where you think “This is the spot on this planet”. Because everywhere is “the spot”, so it’s just “the planet”, which can also be found on the next star system.
Save for airless planets, if I’m not mistaken, every planet has the same 3 “trap” plants (man eater, whip, spores in a cave). There’s not even a color change depending on the planet. Same damn plant, same damn damage, same oxygen amount on death, whether on ice or on a volcano.
Another thing that compounds on the lack of planetary variation is the same sin that Starfield did, of every point of interest being the same everywhere. Every market is the same, every small settlement is the same, every infested facility is the same. This one is easy to give more variation, just create some building blocks and chain them together, like how rooms are generated in ARPG games like Diablo or Torchlight. You know how each star system has a different market rating? Use that to calculate the maximum size any one POI can reach, or as a weight to the POI that can appear (small settlements become more common in 1 star system, markets more common in 3 star, etc).
They do the above in a limited capacity with derelict freighters, so it’s not like there’s “no way” to do it or “they don’t know how”.
Yet another thing that breaks the immersion and “want” of exploration: the vast majority of the galaxy is “settled”. Star systems without any alien presence are the exception. What the hell are you even exploring if there’s already someone there with a working teleporter in space, plus several POI dotting every planet?
You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry
Does any game do that today? I’m not aware of any. ??
Another thing that compounds on the lack of planetary variation
That’s the same problem again, you need hard drive space for all that 3D variation.
As far as I know all the 3D stuff is what takes up the most space on the hard drive, and that stuff is never procedurally created. /shrug Maybe someday with AI??
.kkrieger did that. Not a “real game”, it’s a demo (of a demoscene), a “proof of concept” or a “proof of skill”. Nostalgia Nerd has a very interesting video about it on youtube.
3D models tend to occupy less disk space than textures, as these usually come in at least 2 files: one for the actual colors, one or two more for light mapping (bump map, emission, normals, etc). I don’t know which format NMS uses, but a .obj 3D model with 62k triangles will take around 4.5MB of disk space.
For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The Default_albedo.jpg is the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.
That’s the same problem again, you need hard drive space for all that 3D variation.
Not really. Again, they just need to be smart with what they have. Grassy planet where one third is green grass, another is red grass, another is yellow. No need for any extra stuff to be made, they already have the building blocks. Better yet, mostly grassy planet with patches of radioactive terrain surrounded by desert.
For buildings, just think about player made bases. You can make effectively “infinite” interiors and exteriors with all the stuff players can use to make a base. Write coordinates of “premade” rooms, write some extra lines of code to join specific rooms together and bam, all you needed was less than 10kb of extra text to increase variety.
You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry
Does any game do that today? I’m not aware of any. ??
Today? No, I don’t think any game does it.
Well, my comment that you replied to was about a specific game that is already out, today. Hence, my point still stands.
Let’s hope that future hardware and games are aligned more with what you described, but today’s games do have limitations, based on the day and age they’re created in.
The limitation is coder skill, not hardware. That .kkrieger example is 20 years old. It could make a Pentium 3 “generate an entire FPS game” from less than 100kb of coding instructions alone.
The question is "why don’t other people do it, then?" and the answer is “because having all those media resources as files makes the startup faster, memory usage down and is easier to modify and replace”
“because having all those media resources as files makes the startup faster, memory usage down and is easier to modify and replace”
None of that matters, because you can load them in the background/parallel wise, as needed, which is what the game already does today.
But all of that takes space on the hard drive, which brings me back to the point I keep making.
My original comment…
You’re not wrong, but also the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world (pardon the pun)
, and what I keep replying back to comment on, is specifically about visuals, and variety in the planets, the areas of the planets, and the star systems, and the aliens. 3D models and meshes.
What you been describing is not 3D models and meshes, which is what takes up the majority of the hard drive space.
So, can you describe for me how the hard drive space for 3D models and meshes would be?
What you been describing is not 3D models and meshes, which is what takes up the majority of the hard drive space.
My brother in christ, what the fuck do you think i’ve been describing then? I even linked an example of how the 3d model itself, the geometry, the mesh, occupies less disk space than the actual textures
For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The Default_albedo.jpg is the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.
What I see is that you don’t understand how procedural generation works. As is today, how do you think planetary terrain is generated? That it is all saved as a file that is read from your computer/PC? That you could load up a “planetXYZ.file” externally to edit it? That the terrain mesh is this huge file with all sorts of hills and plains that you could import/export and load in Blender?
My brother in christ, what the fuck do you think i’ve been describing then?
Algorithms that use the models/meshes/etc., and not the models/meshes data themselves. Algorithms take up allot less space on the hard drive.
What I see is that you don’t understand how procedural generation works.
I’m a computer programmer. I’ve written that kind of code before (gotta love some Perlin noise). /sigh
Also, you’re not quoting me on that part, but someone else. I didn’t make any mention about a ‘Damaged Helmet in gitf format’ (or anything else in that text you quoted).
As is today, how do you think planetary terrain is generated?
It mixes/matches models (that have meshes, etc.) like Lego pieces to assemble the landscapes/things. If you want more new/varied worlds, you need more models/meshes. The algorithms are not going to create them, its going to just assemble the ones that already exist as files on the hard drive.
Edit: Funny enough, I’m currently downloading the update, all 7.48GB of it. The whole game takes up 14.69GB on my hard disk. I’m going to bet most of the update is the new stations look/variety, and not the logic code for mix-and-matching ship parts.
Actually, there’s a couple popular mods with an overhauled algorithm. No space required (That wouldn’t make sense anyway). Back when I played through this I wouldn’t touch it without it.
I’m speaking about the 3D models and meshes, visuals.
Variety of planets/systems and various areas on planets is very poor just because of the amount of hard drive space needed for all of the models and meshes.
Some people have already given their take, so I’ll add to it:
The game has a couple of hours of actual, fun content. After those couple of hours you’ll start to notice that everything is the same. Oh sure, the creatures and plants are made of different parts, but that’s as far as the differences go. Every planet has the exact same pattern, every system has a space station with the exact same functions, so eventually it really feels like exploration doesn’t matter. Which kinda sucks for a game that’s supposed to be about exploration.
I’ve always said that exploration would’ve been far more impactful if the universe of No Man’s Sky had just a bit more realism in it. This would mean most planets would be frozen iceballs or low atmosphere dustballs with no life on them. This would make discovering a planet with life on it quite momentous. It would also eliminate the problem of quickly finding out all life on every planet is exactly the same.
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