Thorry84

Thorry84, miesiąc temu

It isn’t just a reskin, there are a lot of differences. One of the biggest is there is no run in Doki Doki. That makes the experience extremely different from the running and jumping action of Mario.

Thorry84, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It’s like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.

The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let’s you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it’s easy to forget the right button combination for it. It’s very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won’t even pop up. An experienced player won’t notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.

Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn’t help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.

Thorry84, 2 miesiące temu

The game is rendered at a lower resolution, this saves a lot of resources. This isn’t a linear thing, lowering the resolution reduces the performance needed by a lot more than you would think. Not just in processing power but also bandwidth and memory requirements. Then dedicated AI cores or even special AI scaler chips get used to upscale the image back to the requested resolution. This is a fixed cost and can be done with little power since the components are designed to do this task.

My TV for example has an AI scaler chip which is pretty nice (especially after tuning) for showing old content on a large high res screen. For games applying AI up scaling to old textures also does wonders.

Now even though this gets the AI label slapped on, this is nothing like the LMMs such as chat GPT. These are expert systems trained and designed to do exactly one thing. This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs. Now these systems have their limitations, but for games the trade off between details and framerate can be worth it. Especially if our bad eyes and mediocre screens wouldn’t really show the difference anyways.

Thorry84, 2 miesiące temu

Rendering a 3D scene is much more intensive and complicated than a simple scaler. The scaler isn’t advanced at all, it’s actually very simple. And it can’t be compared with running a large model locally. These are expert systems, not large models. They are very good at one thing and can do only that thing.

Like I said the cost is fixed, so if the scaler can handle 1080p at 120fps to upscale to 2K, then it can always handle that. It doesn’t matter how complex or simple the image is, it will always use the same amount of power. It reads the image, does the calculation and outputs the resulting image.

Rendering a 3D scene is much much more complex and power intensive. The amount of power highly depends on the complexity of the scene and there is a lot more involved. It needs the gpu, cpu, memory and even sometimes storage, plus all the bandwidth and latency in between.

Upscaling isn’t like that, it’s a lot more simple. So if the hardware is there, like the AI cores on a gpu or the dedicated upscaler chip, it will always work. And since that hardware will normally not be heavily used, the rest of the components are still available for the game. A dedicated scaler is the most efficient, but the cores on the gpu aren’t bad either. That’s why something like DLSS doesn’t just work on any hardware, it needs specialized components. And different generations and parts have different limitations.

Say your system can render a game at 1080p at a good solid 120fps. But you have a 2K monitor, so you want the game to run at 2K. This requires a lot more from the system, so the computer struggles to run the game at 60 fps and has annoying dips in demanding parts. With upscaling you run the game at 1080p at 120fps and the upscaler takes that image stream and converts it into 2K at a smooth 120fps. Now the scaler may not get all the details right, like running native 2K and it may make some small mistakes. But our eyes are pretty bad and if we’re playing games our brains aren’t looking for those details, but are instead focused on gameplay. So the output is probably pretty good and unless you were to compare it with 2K native side by side, probably you won’t even notice the difference. So it’s a way of having that excellent performance, without shelling out a 1000 bucks for better hardware.

There are limitations of course. Not all games conform to what the scaler is good at. It usually does well with realistic scenes, but can struggle with more abstract stuff. It can get annoying halos and weird artifacts. There are also limitations to what bandwidth it can push, so for example not all gpus can do 4K at a high framerate. If the game uses the AI cores as well for other stuff, that can become an issue. If the difference in resolution is too much, that becomes very noticeable and unplayable. Often there’s also the option to use previous frames to generate intermediate frames, to boost the framerate with little cost. In my experience this doesn’t work well and just makes the game feel like it’s ghosting and smearing.

But when used properly, it can give a nice boost basically for free. I have even seen it used where the game could be run at a lower quality at the native resolution and high framerate, but looked better at a lower resolution with a higher quality setting and then upscaled. The extra effects outweighed the small loss of fidelity.

Thorry84, 2 miesiące temu

I’ve played this in the past because of the unique co-op feature. You can team up with another player and play the game. You both do a battle and if you win, your units can go over to the other fight to help your buddy out. It’s super fun and I played it a good number of hours with my brother. The biggest issue however was the camera, you can’t hardly zoom out. That mean in co-op you can only see your own battle, you can go look at your buddy’s battle, but that means you can’t see your own battle. This sucked really bad, because you couldn’t see what worked and what didn’t and how it was going overall. For us this kinda ruined the co-op game mode, it was just like playing the game solo and sometimes you would get help randomly. We submitted it as feedback to the devs, saying in co-op you need to be able to see both battles at the same time, but I don’t think they ever did anything about it. So we’ve stopped playing it, maybe we’ll give it another go sometimes.

Thorry84, 2 miesiące temu

If I could erase any game from my mind and experience it again for the first time, it would be this game. One of my favorites of all time.

Thorry84, 3 miesiące temu

Elden Ring is absolutely beautiful. Since the DLC they’ve stepped up their game, using shadow and light to make something that’s really special.

Thorry84, 4 miesiące temu

Multiple reasons:

Higher speed impacts penetrate deep, but also cause the rock to melt. This fills in deeper craters, limiting the max depth a crater can be. There are still very deep huge craters, but these look more like big depressions than craters, because of how big they are. They are also themselves covered with craters usually, making their size and shape harder to see.

Because the diameter of the moon is 3474km, a difference of several kilometers would only amount to a fraction of a percent. So even though one crater is for example 10km deeper than another, relative to the size of the moon this is practically nothing. When viewing pics like these where the whole moon is visible, this matters.

The moon is a very uniform gray color and lacks the indicators our brain use to gauge depth. This makes it very hard to guess how deep the different craters are. You can see some craters have more shadows where others don’t, but they are also different shapes and sizes and the lighting is different so it’s hard to see.

There is also probably some part of the speeds of incoming stuff being within a certain range and the moonrocks being relatively uniform in materials, so the range of craters than can exists is probably limited. But I’m not certain how big of an factor this is and what the range is.

Thorry84, 4 miesiące temu

There are plenty of missions right now. China has landed a rover on the moon this month. And multiple countries have satellites in orbit around the moon. Nasa has their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which takes very high resolution images of the moon all the time and these are publiced on their website.

Thorry84, 4 miesiące temu

The online for seamless coop isn’t actual online, it’s limited to the functionality of the mod and doesn’t use the official servers. You can in principle get cheaters on that, but most people have it setup to only connect to friends. And when you are using mods you are probably just having fun and playing for the memes instead of being a hardcore PvP player.

I personally love seamless coop, I had hoped FromSoft would have made the coop like that from the beginning. So happy mod makers are putting in the time to make it work. I’ve played over 100 hours with my brother and had so much fun. I can recommend mods like The Convergence as well, combined with seamless it’s so much fun.

Thorry84, 5 miesięcy temu

COPIUM

Thorry84, 5 miesięcy temu

They are going to bring him back eventually, maybe as early as this year!

Thorry84, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

I love Salt, but man his videos are getting way too long. I put the speed at 1,25x for any of his videos and the pacing is still perfectly fine.

I’ve heard people enjoy his videos with some drugs and I get it, it sounds super chill. But this length is a stretch for me, it could be half the time and lose basically nothing. And this is coming from a guy who enjoys long format videos like hbomberguy.

Thorry84, 6 miesięcy temu

Duke Nukem Forever was the victim of this (among other issues). Expectations were so high, by the time it finally released it couldn’t do anything but be an absolute failure. It still sold well, because of the hype, but the game was total trash and ruined any chances of a new Duke Nukem for a long time. Part of it is also internal, the game gets delayed, people get hyped up and voice their expectations. The devs hear those expectations and see their game doesn’t live up to it and delay the game to make it better. It’s an endless race you can’t ever win.

Thorry84, 6 miesięcy temu

Half Life was always about pushing the boundaries of gaming. The first Half Life with their combination of story telling in a 3D shooter environment was absolutely at the sharp end of the field at that time. If you’ve seen the Black Mesa documentary you’ll know why HL2 was such a hit and how it was revolutionary at that time. After that they did some DLC, but Valve wasn’t happy with what they were doing. It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was just creating content for the sake of content. As they didn’t need any more money from creating games, they opted to not create HL3. It wasn’t till VR became more mainstream they again tried to do something at the sharp end of the field, by creating HL Alyx.

I don’t know what would prompt them to ever make a HL3 if such a thing even exists.

Thorry84, 6 miesięcy temu

Agreed, but that’s not how a studio looks at IP. Any IP is only as good as it’s most recent content.

Thorry84, 6 miesięcy temu

I think I may be have outgrown movies, it’s that or almost all of the movies in the past 5 years have been total crap.

Hmmm nah I don’t think I’ve outgrown movies, I think it’s the total crap thing.

Thorry84, 7 miesięcy temu

Sorry guys, we’re under dictator rule now. We should be getting some food coupons next week, otherwise we’ll starve. If only xxx_Epicl33tGamer69_xxx didn’t let us down in the big game last night. Oh well, such is life.

Thorry84, 7 miesięcy temu

In true clickbait fashion the article then goes on to describe in detail said mysterious thing. Almost like it isn’t mysterious at all.

Thorry84, 8 miesięcy temu

Damn space.com, don’t forget to put some article in between the ads on your site

Thorry84, 8 miesięcy temu

Yes! As a die hard Grim Dawn fan I can say Last Epoch is awesome. Grim Dawn is still better imho, but Last Epoch comes close. Both are excellent games one could easily put 100+ hours in and have a blast.

Thorry84, 9 miesięcy temu

Chill, it’s a handful of stuff on an entire freaking planet. Sure Mars isn’t as big as Earth, but it’s still huge. You would be hard pressed to even find a single trace of man if you’re on that planet.

It’s a clickbait title, look at how bad the humans are. In the grand scheme of things this is a nothingburger. The benefits vastly out way the potential downside of dropping some stuff on another planet. Even if there is some trace of life there, dropping a little bit of stuff doesn’t harm it in any way.

Also remember the scale here, it shows as dots on the map, so you think there is a lot. But in reality the size of the stuff compared to the size of the planet wouldn’t even show up on a picture. It’s not even big enough to be a single pixel. If the resolution was 10x greater, it still wouldn’t be a single pixel. It’s like those maps where they show the space debris around Earth to make it look like there is a lot. It’s tricky to spot anything man made on Mars with high powered optics in a low orbit and knowing exactly where to look. If you can see the whole hemisphere, you ain’t seeing shit.

Thorry84, 9 miesięcy temu

Bruh, queen is so OP! It’s BULLSHIT!

Thorry84, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s a photoshopped image