Damn, this video is garbage. Lots of yelling about smudging and “HOW COULD THEY?!” And then complains about how people aren’t implementing any effects like he says. And that part about “I told Epic Unreal 5.5 wasn’t ready!” Like he actually matters to Tim Sweeney.
Avoid the video. Nothing of substance or value is within.
He makes some fair points but I fully agree with your sentiment.
Had this man made a less confrontational and more educational video, he would be much more widely regarded as a fair source. Alas, he thinks the raging grants him clicks
ANYTHING that has a “lazy devs” narrative is shit and not worth your time. Because anyone with a modicum of intelligence about how games actually are made isn’t going to throw that shit can because they understand just what kinds of pressures development teams are under.
The reality is? Yeah. Some stuff very clearly has been under-focused on. Part of that MIGHT be related to the complete wasteland it is for funding for indie devs coupled with the mass layoffs amongst major publishers and platform holders but that would be completely insane to see any correlation between them.
The other is that we are more or less insisting devs support two completely orthogonal lighting systems this generation. Without raytracing? You need to really zhuzh up everything like in the old days. With raytracing? That all looks wrong and you need to change all the lighting to be hyperrealistic so that it looks the same (rather than what a dimly lit subway ACTUALLY would look like) without people realizing it. Once we reach the point of having one scheme (and DOOM The Dark Ages or whatever is targeting that), things get a lot simpler.
I found that channel a couple weeks ago and without having much insight into the development side of games myself, I just thought their videos couldn‘t look more shady if they tried. Especially the plugging of their own company (?) and call for donations among other things left a bad taste. They should work on their presentation IMO.
I appreciate you digging up the link and even timestamping the relevant area. Top class, thank you very much.
Also I forgot just how utterly massive of a cunt the Artesian CEO was. Man had significant Elon Musk vibes, Just didnt have the money or family money to stop his fall.
Yeah even in this video the guy was saying they used to be great, but after having like 3 motherboards fail prematurely and dealing with their crappy RMA process, I learned long ago that their reputation isn’t deserved. I did buy a couple of their routers which seems fine for now but I won’t be giving them more money in the future after watching this
Back in university at the turn of the millennia I was a front-line desktop support guy and the amount of Acer and Asus laptops that came in just completely falling apart was insane.
I was in college around the same time and recall doing my usual minimum research for a new system and still to this day think "acer's crap, right?" when someone mentions it, even though the memory of why is gone.
Acers would start with a QWERTY and after a few months would be down to Q–R-T. If you were lucky one of your USB ports hasn’t detached from the motherboard.
I don’t have experience with their systems, but I had to go back to the store twice for an Acer monitor. First monitor had a dead HDMI port, second had a gap in the chassis at the top. Don’t know why I didn’t just go with a different one after the second replacement; it would end up developing a line of shadowing after about 18 months.
Portal (1 and 2) and The Talos Principle are the only puzzle games I've played that not only had a story, but also managed to make the puzzle gameplay actually make sense within the story. Like, there is an in-universe explanation for why you are solving puzzles. I'm sure there are other games that do it, but those are the only ones I've played and they were fantastic. That's a hard thing to pull off -- how do you make a compelling narrative, complete with characters, around "moving some boxes?"
Looking forward to playing the sequel. Also, the original is $3 on Steam right now!
I don’t see how anyone can consider the sound puzzles in the jungle, the Tetris piece puzzles in the swamp and the color theory puzzles in the greenhouse the same kind of puzzle and be arguing in good faith.
The game has multiple “endings”. My only advice: Don’t start a second playthrough or browse any online communities until you’ve reached the credit scroll. I wish someone had told me that before I started…
Like, there is an in-universe explanation for why you are solving puzzles.
That observation actually made me go through my library looking for more examples and, yeah, it’s surprisingly few. There’s ‘The Entropy Centre’, which also falls into the “You’re a test subject” category. Other than that there’s the Zachtronics games, where the reason for puzzle-solving is because it’s your work.
In Zachtronics Infinifactory, the setting is that aliens have kidnapped you and force you to build things for them, in return for kibble and other things humans like, such as a little league third place trophy. Always enjoyed that.
I see the word EPIC in a gaming title and my brain immediately goes "OH NO, not them again. What fucked shit are they trying to convince everyone of now?"
It’s almost as if Epic actually does have developers’ and the industry’s best interests at heart despite the shit takes from the terminally-online Gamer™ crowd…
It’s not entirely against their own self-interest. More accessible engines on the market means more beginner devs who may graduate to Epic in a few years, and more products to sell on the EGS. Also more devs potentially means more asset store customers.
Regardless, it’s certainly more helpful to the industry than Unity at the moment.
Mozilla’s primary revenue is from Google, because Google doesn’t want Chrome to be broken up by the FTC. Same reason Microsoft kept Apple afloat in the dark times before Jobs returned.
I strongly disagree with the premise that there’s a “wrong” way to play retro games. Don’t gatekeep. Imagine if people told you not to listen to Pink Floyd unless it’s on vinyl. It would be lost media.
That said, CRTs present images fundamentally differently than LCD displays, and a lot of developers took advantage of those idiosyncrasies. There are scanlines everywhere. CRT phosphors aren’t square, and appear smaller when darker. Bright pixels can “bleed” into nearby pixels, particularly when using composite signals.
Before LCDs, many (not all) pixel artists used this to their advantage, basically harnessing the imperfections of analog TV to provide equivalents to anti-aliasing, bloom, extra color depth, and even transparency. Some particularly famous examples came from Sega Genesis games. This video goes into good depth on the whys and hows, and there are some solid examples of the outcomes here.
I’ve attached examples below (hopefully they upload). If you like the raw pixel art, then no harm done. Enjoy! But if you like the way CRTs interpreted and filtered those signals, you owe it to yourself to look up some shaders for your favorite emulator.
I strongly disagree with the premise that there’s a “wrong” way to play retro games.
I understand your sentiment here and you are right too. What I think is, that the wording on this title here is misunderstood. Emulating (old) games without Shaders is not faithful or accurate in the looks. It looks “vastly” different and thus means it looks “wrong”. I interpret the “wrong” in the title as “not faithful”, instead as “bad”, like this: You’re Probably Emulating Retro Games Not Faithful (you need CRT Shaders for the oldschool look)
I pretty much just assume “Free To Play” games are full of microtransactions, is that wrong?
E: to be clear, I don’t think microtransactions are an inherently bad thing. In fact, if people want to make games where other people with more money front the costs of development, I’m all about it.
What I hate is being reminded every 5 minutes that it has garbage skins that I can pay IRL money for.
Yes, there are good games that are just totally free. I’ve enjoyed the hell out of both ΔV: Rings of Saturn and South Scrimshaw lately. Both offer things you can purchase, but you get the full experience without them.
I thought I heard once that the demo is just the full version, but you can just also buy it to support the devs? That might be outdated or just wrong information though.
Also there are several really good open source games which are obviously microtransaction free. OpenTTD from this list is an example and Osu!lazer and SuperTuxKart also come to mind
I have like 1000 hours in Warframe and only spent like 20$ on it. Even that wasn’t really necessarily. You can farm shit and easily make enough of the in game money for what you need selling it to other players.
True, but there is nothing wrong with that really unless it’s a multiplayer game where you get unfair advantages. It’s hard to expect a f2p game to not have micro transactions.
I honestly thought of Mario first but yeah, Tetris, Mario, pacman and maybe space invaders would be instantly recognisable to everyone. If I was to show my non gamer dad a picture of Niko, CJ or Trevor/Michael/Franklin then he would have no idea who they were. Where as the other games he absolutely would recognise the characters or the names.
Not everyone can sit down and read for very long, some people want something to listen to while they do other things, some people learn better in audio format, and some people just like watching videos. It’s fine if it is not your jam, but that is no reason to denigrate someone choosing to watch a video instead of reading an article.
I had an argument shortly after the great migration. Someone had posted a video essay on something gaming related and the person I responded to was adamant that a video couldn’t be an essay. It was a two hour deep dive into the topic, with graphs/journalistic photos/news video snippets, and the video info section had a citation list longer than your arm.
This person couldn’t understand that just because the creator had decided to present their essay in video format, didn’t mean it wasn’t an essay. All they had to say basically boiled down to:
only stupid people watch a video this long when you could read the equivalent amount of information in less than half the time.
Yeah it can only get so good before Windows starts to show its ugly face. Steam Deck works so well because it runs games within it's own compositor with absolutely no bloat or distractions.
Yeah I’ve played some games on GamePass on my Deck via MS Edge and xcloud. It works pretty well for anything where input lag isn’t a factor, like turn-based games.
I tried Rocket League and Forza just for shits and giggles, and while it’s not unplayable, it’s also not responsive enough to be enjoyable
Same household only? Why can’t they just allow a certain number of people in your “family” use it? I have no kids, but I’d like to allow my siblings or in-laws use my games. They live in different cities.
I really doubt they’ve got an IP lock in place; just set up a Family and invite your siblings and in-laws.
Edit: tried it with a buddy, and it is in fact IP locked; he was unable to join until I set up a VPN for him to connect through. After initial setup, you don’t need the same IP address.
They do point out that they will be monitoring how it’s used, and could adjust things later.
Sounds like corporate-speak for “if people abuse this, we’ll lock it down harder.”
Even if people are using it to share with actual family around the country, they may get caught up in future updates that remove that feature. Also note that any publisher can opt out of the sharing. If EA or Ubi or some other big company doesn’t like the lack of limits, they may be able to force Valve’s hand in changing the policy.
The idea is wonderful, but there are a ton sof ways this could end up worse than the old system.
This is technical but you could set up a wireguard vpn server and let your friends connect to your computer. Then you all look like you are sitting in your home network from the steam servers point of view.
Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.
Your friends will have a bit of lag though since all their connections have to go through your computer to the steam network. But I believe it may not be noticeable.
Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.
Free for 100 devices! You can legit install it on every device virtual and physical device in your home and maybe run out of devices for the free plan. Right now I use it to secure the connection between my VPS proxy and my Minecraft server, as duct tape fixing some network fuckery, and as my primary means of connecting to services inside and outside of my LAN
Oh yeah I fully expect it at some point in the future. Right now their business model appears to be “get the nerds hooked on using it on their personal stuff to see how awesome it is to then sell enterprise licenses” and they’re in the “establish growth” phase so I think there’s a few years before enshitification begins.
There is a competitor called Netbird that does similar and is fully open source and self-hostable. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks good on (virtual) paper
By my memory of what I read headscale is a reverse engineered backend using the official tailscale client, so more opportunities for breakage or the weird issues that come from a reverse engineered server with a stock closed source client. I also could be horribly misinformed and/or misremembering
I think it was initially 5 before they upped it to 100. They said they initially assumed they’d have tons of people using the subnet routing to share more than the limited number of devices, but found that wasn’t the case so they upped the free accounts
Because the point of this is to force friends and adult family members to purchase extra copies of games. Do yall actually think Valve is giving away free game access?
To those who are saying it’s not IP locked: people on reddit are all saying that the newer sign-ups are locked but they didn’t clear older sharing from early beta.
You can likely use it from different physical locations. But just know that I’m order to set it up, you have to login with your account on their computer at some point to enable the family sharing feature. So unless you go there qnd do it, or remote into their computer to do it, or give them your password, you can’t use that feature. Some level of trust in each other is required.
That is not how the new families work. The new on all you need to do is sent an invite and they'll be able to join the family. No need to log in their computers or authorise anything, just a simple invite.
It actually is how it worked in the beta at least. I’ve been using it for several months with my friends and the invite wouldn’t work unless I had logged into steam on their pc previously.
That is certainly not the case, either something unexpected happened or either of you didn't have the families beta on. I have never logged in someone else's PC and neither have someone logged on mine, I always use Steam on beta and I was able to send family invites to my friends, however only the ones in my region (country) were able to join.
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