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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gaming crash was more of a console thing. One of the arguments was why you should buy a console when you can buy a computer for a bit more and do so much more. Computer games ran through it mostly unfazed.
People who think modern coding practices are bloated should study why certain speed running mechanics work. A lot of them stem from things we would never do today. We’ve removed entire classes of bugs by using “bloated” languages and tools.
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.
Hasbro is unprofitable, but there was a memo a while back that said Wizards of the Coast was their most profitable division. Possibly their only profitable division. That covers Magic: The Gathering and D&D.
This is also why we’re seeing both those properties getting the fuck monetized out of them. Big influxes of MTG sets based on other licensed properties, and attempts to undo the open licensing around One D&D.
But then it makes even less sense to lay people off from those divisions.
Nintendo did try that, though, and mixed it around again whenever they felt like it. “New research uncovered that…” blah blah. Better off if they don’t bother anymore.
Best part of GTA V for me was the social satire and Trevor being a total sociopath. The story isn’t anything special, the final mission hits the wrong story beats (it should have ended with the big shootout of government bureaucracy pileup), and the gameplay has some design mistakes (like business income being completely useless, and money in general being a non-issue after the first big heist). It had bugs that prevented story progress without workarounds that were never fixed. It got a lot of praise at the time for having crazy draw distances in an open world game while working on an XBox 360. That’s no longer a big deal.
I don’t think it deserved all the five-star reviews it got back then.
Conversely, if the social satire is on point and the character building is solid, then I’ll be happy.
I don’t have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man’s Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.
I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.
In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....
Sony announces the PS5 Pro with a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI upscaling (www.theverge.com) angielski
$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
Does AAAA just mean awful triple A games now? angielski
It seems the general direction the internet is going and I’m all for it
'AI is coming for all of us:' Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid, and Baldur's Gate voice actor Jennifer Hale weighs in on SAG-AFTRA's games industry strike (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I've never seen a company squander as much goodwill as Blizzard. (lemmy.world) angielski
Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before angielski
This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options....
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...
What games popularized certain mechanics? angielski
I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry....
Let's discuss: Super Mario (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
Peak graphic design (lemmy.world) angielski
Casper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but still finds it mind-boggling some take it at face value (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Hello, PC gaming here: Are the consoles OK? (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
ASUS breaks your ROG Ally if you don't pay $200 for warranty repairs: SCAMMING COMPANY! (youtu.be) angielski
How times change (lemmy.world) angielski
Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld
Have you ever held a switch? Its long, flat and the controllers suck. Awful dpad and bad sticks....
I've seen lecture halls larger than this. (lemmy.world) angielski
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Launch Is a Disaster - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
'We don't have shareholders, but we also don't think about them,' Larian Studios uses its stage time at the DICE Awards to speak out against a brutal industry climate (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I truly don't know how to explain this to anyone who wasn't around then without them thinking we were out of our minds. (startrek.website) angielski
Then vs Now (startrek.website) angielski
'There's almost nobody left': CEO of Baldur's Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Suffering and success.
Zelda Producer Eiji Aonuma Doesn't Really Care About the Series' Chronology (www.ign.com) angielski
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.' (www.pcgamer.com)
Rant: Valve's new Steam Deck screws speak volumes about their ethos.
In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....