I “beat” isaac on the Switch (one Dead God), then got it all again for the Steam Deck so I could have mods. Unsure if the mods themselves are tanking the performance, but I don’t really care. It’s up there as one of my favorite games. The creativity of the mod creators has kept me coming back to play custom characters and challenges.
The modding community really is insane. There are a couple of fan-made expansions like Fiend Folio that massively overhaul everything. I hope this update tries not to break mod support.
Oh yeah. Got that installed. Was fun because I hadn’t worked with Linux systems before, so finding the proper file locations was a little challenging for myself. Custom characters have post-its and I don’t get the big banner saying it was installed wrong. Even messed with performance settings the deck offers for each game and lowered those since, well, Isaac isn’t exactly the pinnacle of graphics. Even now, just custom characters, alt paths and their additional effects (rain drops, ash, etc) tanks my performance. Unless there’s some magic that I’m not seeing, I’ve tried what I know. It is a little annoying when games that have actual models, and a lot of them at once, don’t have issues at all (Deep Rock Galactic Survivor being a prime example).
Turns out vehicle simulations are hard. You either have games that play like a cabinet arcade or require a “simmer” setup (control cockpit) to really be good at.
And then there’s the work that goes into the level of detail. Example, Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t even have the underside of most cars modelled, to save on polys and performance, but there’s still a lot of little details that have to be modelled, textured, and sound recorded. This is even more important when a driving game goes into VR, because you will notice when something in the interior is missing or offmodel.
Also shoutout to Live For Speed, the active-since-Windows-XP open beta / early access mediumcore simulation that’s had VR support for a long while, and a release date that will probably coincide with Half Life 3.
It feels like we used to be spoiled for choice and now there’s only a few select titles out. A lot of racing franchises got ruined by micro-transaction garbage. Project Cars decided to go in an entirely different direction with their latest installment and basically ruined the game. Most games no longer support split screen so if you want to race locally with friends you basically only have Mario Kart.
There’s still games though. Forza, Gran Truismo, F1 24, Asseto Corsa, Need For Speed… But even so it feels like something is missing. There’s not a lot to fill in the Wipeout niche, or the Burnout niche. I miss random things like Midtown Madness and Twisted Metal. I really want a good racing combat experience again.
I think a lot of studios aren’t willing to take chances and a good racer isn’t something you can make easily since people want good graphics and excellent racing physics.
This has been discussed a lot over the decades (with some VERY good articles written by assholes we try to pretend don’t exist))
The gist of it is: AI cheats because the alternative isn’t “fun” and rapidly outpaces humans.
Because in an RTS? After you get a build order down, the big decider is Actions Per Minute (APM). From a build standpoint, it is the idea of triggering the appropriate research the absolute second you have enough minerals. From a combat standpoint, it is rapidly issuing move and attack orders so that you always win the combat triangle. The former isn’t significantly different than just having cheaper research or faster build times. The latter is actively demoralizing in the same way that we all died inside when we first got permission to go online in Starcraft. Except at a level that even the good players realize they ain’t shit.
For grand strategy games (barring real-ish time ones like Stellaris) you basically have two real approaches. The first is the games with research options (… like Stellaris. Look, I have been playing a lot of Stellaris lately). We try not to acknowledge it but RNG has a massive impact on that when you really want to get torpedoes but no options are popping so you are just doing the fastest research choices you can to get a new pool. And the difficulty option there is… a known order.
The other are the very elaborate fixed tech trees. Obviously this gets back to build order. And the reality is… the benefit gained from rapidly updating the hard mode AI to use the current meta just isn’t worth it. That IS somewhere that an optimizing function can be applied to (and… semi-off-the-record but that has been a thing for over a decade and is why devs aren’t THAT surprised when a “new” meta takes over in a strategy game) but it becomes a question of how much it is worth it.
All that said, we are seeing a lot more effort put into “learning” AI in racing games (driveatars) and fighting games because those tend to be cases where even the best AI is still expected to be “human” and we aren’t TOO demoralized when we realize we are in a pub with Daigo. That said… there is a reason that modern SNK Bosses tend to have super armor rather than frame perfect inputs. Because the former is “bullshit” but the latter is just mean.
APM actually does jack shit. You can spam a button fast and you’ll get 400 APM and get rolled by someone who does 40. EAPM is where it is at. Which is effective APM. How many actions you can do that move you closer to victory. Instead of just spamming two buttons on repeat (which is what a lot of Starcraft players do)
There used to be AI’s integrated into Starcraft 2 and later actually playing the game (like a player would) online. You can put restrictions on eAPM for these bots. You can force them to make human mistakes - delaying upgrades. They can get pretty well aproximated to human skill. The main issue with it is they suck at context. They can’t really “remember” stuff happening. Picked up a dropship and it flew away from my FOV? It’s gone. Oh shit a dropship came from the exact same spot! Oh good it flew away, which means it can’t hurt me no more.
There are also tournaments in SC2 for unlimited AIs - where they play the game without any caps. The only thing that matters is who wrote a more efficient bot. Machine learning isn’t reallly used there, more likely a decision tree. Those do exactly what you are describing. Playing against those as a human is pointless and would get someone who introduced them as a difficulty instantly fired.
This one was much better than the sequels and I think it was because in the sequels I found Lara unbearable. In this one she was scrappy and there was lighthearted chitchat to just make everyone feel a bit human. In the sequels everything was just so melodramatic and it all took itself way too seriously, especially considering how silly the stories were.
Absolutely. And particularly it was is “batches” especially as you get to Shadow.
Collecting stuff as you go along playing is fine (I mean, I’d argue not because it’s lazy game making but its normal). But going along and hitting a village that has 50 side quests in it just interrupts flow.
Plus, they made nested fetch quests so I felt trapped in a loop. OK I’ll just do this one quest…“hey, now that I see that you are good at fetching arbitrary items, I want you to go get this for me too”
I enjoyed the first Tomb Raider of the reboot series shockingly more than I thought I would. A few years later then played the sequel and wrote a big letter of complains in a review. Maybe I was a bit overly negative because of some frustrations, but overall it was boring, bloated. Skills weren’t interesting or any game changing, collectibles were annoying but needed and part of the gameplay. There wasn’t even interesting enemies, they were the same all over again.
It started fun, but overall was the same again and again, without interesting story parts, and always climbing and climbing. There was no challenge I liked to do. Too many checkpoints and all the hints what to do next if I get stuck just a little bit took any tension and challenge from the game. Especially the third half of game was a huge time waste. The “Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch”-DLC was actually pretty good.
And then after finishing it, the cliffhanger at the end… man that was frustrating ending without answering the questions.
That being said, congrats your factory has officially grown to a large state. 4 cores will NOT be enough to run this game. If you look at htop or something you can see full cpu usage, I’m guessing you’ll see one core pinned at 100%
To understand how the server works, it chunks the entire game map and then shards that across available cores. So your 4 core server each core is handling a quarter of the map. That’s a lot of factory on one core kemosabe. My server is a 24 core beast with still very high single core rates. You can feel when you’re working on another core that has less load when you walk into a new area and your frame rate jumps.
My group has had several iterations of our server, from being on shared resources, to a 48 core thread ripper (plenty of cores but single clock speed wasn’t enough), to finally we bought a 5950x for our Update 8 factory - and even then you’re still going to notice some rubber banding when you get to late game/factory spans across the entire map big.
Now, thinking about it too, is this happening at intervals? If so, that’s your saves happening. As your saves get larger the auto save will take longer, and that means longer time the client doesn’t talk to the server, so it rubber bands your last known server positions. If it takes too long the client will disconnect. To fix this just update how long it is allowed before timing out, that’s on the dedicated server wiki. We usually call out when a save is about to happen and take it as a break to stand up, stretch, and get more coffee.
Beyond getting more cores and a higher single core clock speed, the other massive thing that will help is spreading your factory out. Allowing your factory to take advantage of multiple chunks and multiple cores will have a noticeable impact. Make very liberal use of trains, my last factory had over 60 rail lines and 100 trains running around. It’s a lot easier to manage a train car with 10,000 items stored as an integer than hundreds of miles of interconnected belts that it constantly has to shift around on.
I’ll have more info later, should probably write a wiki, but those few changes will have a noticeable impact.
Source, I’ve ran a dedicated satisfactory server for about 4 years now, on bare iron, docker, and in kubernetes. Helped many others set up their servers too
Now this is the niche content that makes Lemmy great. I’ve never really dabbled in multiplayer a lot as even though I have hundreds of hours, I never actually finished the whole thing, opting to start over every time I picked it back up.
Just wanted to thank you for your post, it was fun to read
Still on my first playthrough amd my “factory” is a collection of what I had to build at any moment connected where it has to be for the next step. Other than a few rebuilt spots here and there. Last night was the quest for more coal and a lesson in power grid management. Next up to tackle is better water pressure optimization.
I worked at GameStop at the time. The policy was absolutely no returns on new titles that had been opened. The day after the launch was not a fun day. We even had people trade it in for probably less than half of what they paid
Fuck GameStop. They treat customers bad and employees worse. Do not fucking support them
I still haven’t properly played, I pre-ordered. I had some ok fun when it came out, got tempted about the plot, saw the miles of posts saying “fuck going to the center of the universe, not worth it” and left it alone.
I’m still ok with having made the pre order, because my motives have always been “I liked joe danger , and the small team behind it say they’ve got the balls to procedurely generate an entire universe? OK, let’s make it happen.” and they did. As far as I’m concerned, I got what I paid for.
now I just gotta be in the mood to play a crafting exploration game. I’ve been waiting for quite a few years… I’m afraid to check how many, because it’s going to make me feel ancient
I can understand the frustration but I don’t see that as much when I’m playing more indie games. Are you playing more quintuple a titles, if so have you considered going for more independent stuff instead? I could give some recommendations
the point of goat simulator was that it was a three-week goof project the Sanctum devs had fun with to celebrate good sales before they got to work on the sequel.
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