frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

frezik,

It’s about the same as the inflation-adjusted PS3 price, but here’s the thing: the PS3 had a difficult first couple of years. If not for the Red Ring of Death, Microsoft could have come out ahead that generation. One thing Sony is good at is capitalizing on its competitors’ mistakes, and combined with price reductions on later models, they pulled out a victory. Being >$750 inflation-adjusted dollars at launch wasn’t why it won.

frezik,

I can’t wait to buy movies from Sony only to have them invalidated a few years from now.

frezik,

deck just fails at new games.

That assumes the PS5 has games worth playing in the first place.

frezik,

I’ve seen very little worth playing on any consoles. Conversely, my problem with the Steam Deck is finding time for all the games I want to play.

frezik,

Given the contemporary examples, they weren’t wrong to think so. Everyone was trying to make a console in the 16/32-bit era.

  • PC Engine/Turbografx
  • Phillips CD-i (only sorta a console)
  • Atari Jaguar
  • Neo Geo
  • Amiga CD

Some of these are better than others–I’m fond of the PC Engine–but none can be called successful. Neo Geo is somewhat of an exception because it was used as arcade hardware. Some others here are the butt of jokes. There’s also a bunch of Japanese consoles around this time that go nowhere, and are little more than fodder for retro gaming YouTube channels.

Sony took a big gamble and won.

frezik,

. . . our goal is not to push any specific agenda

This is the part they’re actually getting at. Not that the fundamental game design is for everyone (which, yes, is what they try and fail at), but rather they’re responding to people who think they’re failing because they put a woman as the protagonist in some game or another.

frezik,

And I feel like half of that 20 years was based on FOMO. “I better get the next Assassin’s Creed or I’ll miss out”, and then it’s all the same crap but they still sold a million of them. People do eventually wise up to FOMO.

frezik,

Also, Iron Bands of Bilarro in DnD 5e, but I’m not sure how far back the history of that item goes. DnD 3.5 had Iron Flask that works kinda the same.

frezik,

Which, incidentally, would probably past legal muster. You can get pretty close to the source material, and as long as it’s your own custom art, it’s not infringement.

That said, lawyers can send a C&D letter for anything. Doesn’t mean it will hold up in court, but they’re betting the target won’t want to pay that kind of money to fight it.

Elon Musk destroys astronomy

Observations with the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope last year showed that first generation Starlink satellites emit unintended radio waves that can hinder astronomical observations. New observations with the LOFAR radio telescope, the biggest radio telescope on Earth observing at low frequencies, have shown that...

frezik,

China is putting up their own equivalent system. Terrestrial radio telescopes are fucked.

Time for a moon base.

frezik,

Sony will try to drag this thing out at least one more generation. If that goes like this one–and it has room to actually go worse–then Sony will have to make some hard decisions.

frezik,

I mean, it’s just DNS with an extra field type.

frezik,

Unions can organize without the government having any protections. It’s very difficult to organize that way. It’s difficult to organize even with the most union-friendly government imaginable. But either way, it can be done.

Unions in the US have been shot by police at before. Hard to have less government protection than that.

frezik,

Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.

frezik,

Minishoot Adventures is a twin stick shooter with a 2D Zelda-style map.

Can anyone suggest some good co-op games for two people? angielski

Hello all! My buddy and I finally finished up Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and we are not left with a giant co-op game shaped whole in our hearts. It was such an incredible experience and it was truly even more fun running through it together. We are excited to hop into another game, but we have no idea what to play. We’ve...

frezik,

If you don’t mind an MMO subscription fee, you might try A Tale In the Desert:

www.desert-nomad.com

It’s fairly niche, and it’s been years since I’ve played it, but it seems to still keep an active player base. It’s much more cooperative than most MMOs, with very little PvP. It’s like the whole community is working together to build a civilization.

frezik,

I dispute the Serious Sam claim. The LucasArts iMUSE system was doing things like that years before. Even among fps games, the first Dark Forces game used it.

frezik,

Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player’s health was shown on the main character’s boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.

frezik,

It’s also possible they just didn’t know. LucasArts didn’t push the system all that much in their PR. You’ll see it in some bullet points on the retail boxes, and articles of the time might make a passing reference to it. It was quite a remarkable system for the time and they were very low key about it.

frezik,

I’d put it at Quake.

Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.

Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn’t develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called “2.5D”.

Quake brings everything together. Everything’s texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.

frezik,

Even if it’s not the first, I’d say it’s the first that figured out that computers were powerful enough that you can have a gobsmackingly huge factory.

frezik,

And it’s a bad one if it applies at all. PC shooters of the time always kinda tried, but it didn’t work. The original Half Life got dinged a few points in original reviews because of a few janky platforming sections.

frezik,

The term GPU wasn’t used yet. It got applied as something of a marketing term to cards that had hardware transform and lighting, and that was indeed the GeForce 256. Before then, they were “3d accelerators”.

You can see this on the Wiki page for the GeForce: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256#Architecture

GeForce 256 was marketed as “the world’s first ‘GPU’, or Graphics Processing Unit”, a term Nvidia defined at the time as “a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second”.

So it kinda depends on perspective. If you take Nvidia’s marketing at face value, then the GeForce 256 was, indeed, the first GPU. You could retroactively apply it to earlier 3d accelerators, including the SNES Super FX chip, but none of them used the term at the time.

frezik,

Nvidia did indeed market it as the first GPU at the time. You can retroactively apply the term, but it didn’t exist before then.

frezik,

It’s a series where a dragon kidnaps a princess, and a plumber from New York must save her. To do so, he must gather mushrooms by hitting bricks while jumping with his fist, jump on turtles to make them hide in their shell, and dodge fire breathing plants.

In the most recent 2d incarnation, the fire breathing plants will sing at you.

The people who made this were on a lot of drugs.

frezik,

Just wait until you see the sequel to this one.

frezik,

People don’t even get Robocop, and that one is even less subtle (IMO).

frezik,

ARM isn’t more efficient than x86 at that scale. Below 15W or so, it is, but not scaled up. I think there are other good reasons for it–like having more than three companies that can produce them–but not that.

frezik,

I’m not sure why I’d want a PS5 when there are zero games that interest me on it, and most of PC games I do want have very modest requirements. A Steam Deck is overkill for most of them.

frezik,

Steam is a platform that works best for word of mouth. Yes, 90% of it is crap if you just browse around. Hang around gaming forums and YouTube channels that highlight top indy games, and you’ll soon have more games than you can play in a lifetime.

Those of us who rave about it have been doing this for years and have a big backlog. Now that I think about it, it would be difficult to jump in cold.

frezik,

On paper. In practice, meh.

frezik,

Gamers Nexus is killing it over the past few years. So many shitty companies taken down.

frezik,

The Steam Deck also isn’t made by a shitty company with a shitty warranty. Which puts the Ally on the blacklist.

There’s a lot of options in this space, and more coming out. I wouldn’t even glance in the Ally’s direction right now.

frezik,

And many parts of Gradius 3.

frezik,

It’s almost like having double frame buffers for 720p or larger, 16 bit PCM audio, memory safe(ish) languages, streaming video, security sandboxes, rendering fully textured 3d objects with a million polygons in real time, etc. are all things that take up cpu and ram.

frezik,

There are shared libraries that have to be loaded regardless of you having a tab that uses them or not.

frezik,

WebGL means the browser has access to the GPU. Also, the whole desktop tends to be rendered as a 3D space these days. It makes things like scaling and blur effects easier, among other benefits.

frezik,

But without an app store full of shit that games the recommendation system.

Nintendo handhelds would have died a long time ago if smartphone vendors could have avoided that problem.

frezik,

Funny, but Opera has much the same problems. Especially when they were caught pushing predatory loans a few years back.

frezik,

Emulators don’t take up that kind of space. In general, code makes up a small fraction of any game.

frezik,

Shareholders have a right to sell their shares. If there is no other buyer, then the company will have to pay them for it. They may not have enough liquid capital to pay off 30%. Other assets might have to be sold off, which may make it difficult to operate.

frezik,

I did a little more research, and it tends to be only specific circumstances and shareholder agreements, but there are times when a shareholder can force a company to buyback the shareholder’s stock.

achkarlaw.com/what-to-do-if-company-refuses-to-bu…

frezik,

Playstation textures used a lot of dithering. Composite connections blurred them out, but they look awful on modern displays.

frezik,

Composite connections more than CRTs. An RGB SCART connection reveals so many sins.

frezik,

There’s a saying in computer graphics: if it looks right, it is right. Meaning you shouldn’t worry if the technique makes a mockary of how light actually works as long as the viewer won’t notice.

frezik,

We hit diminishing returns a while ago. It will be much harder to find improvements, both in terms of techniques and computation.

Consider that there is ten years between Atari Pitfall and Wolfenstein 3D, ten years between that and Metroid Prime, and ten years between that and Mass Effect 3, and then about ten years between that and now. There’s definitely improvement between all those, but once past Metroid Prime, it becomes far less obvious.

We’ve hit the point where artistic style is more important than taking advantage of every clock cycle of the GPU.

frezik,

2d games did, too. The SA1 chip did a lot to make games run better on the SNES. There’s mods out there for running games on the SA1 chip, especially shooters like Super R-Type, and it’s a substantially better experience.

frezik,

Not really. We have more bugs because there are more lines of code.

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