jarfil

@jarfil@beehaw.org

Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

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

jarfil,

Next campaign:

"Save the games, save the CHILDREN!"

  • Let your children have a better childhood
  • Play your favorite childhood games with them
  • Don’t let publishers decide what’s best for your children
  • Make sure your children can play the games with their children
  • Childhood is the time to play, think of the children!

…wonder how successful that would be.

jarfil,

In their email, Jagex management also told staff: “[…] Our job is not to use the game as an outlet for our own views, but to craft worlds that serve our players, offering immersion, escape and meaning.

Well, isn’t that some of the best BS contortionist corpospeak I’ve seen in some time…

Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game (web.archive.org)

Fact 1: Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox announced this week that it will sell “some” of its upcoming video games for $80 — a hike from the previous standard price of $70, which itself was a hike from $60 just a few years ago. This comes in the wake of Nintendo Co.’s announcement last month that the new Mario Kart game for...

jarfil,

Fun fact: you can get a machine to do that, for about the price of 3 games. It will even last longer than the games.

jarfil,

Let me know when stuff is no longer locked behind a “Battle Pass”.

I got pretty much all the cosmetics in OW1 without paying for a single lootbox, and definitely refuse to pay for the privilege of FOMO.

jarfil,

what do people use discord for exactly?

Too much.

It’s a chat platform geared towards gamers, with voice chat, screen sharing, and streaming options… that’s been coopted by vloggers… but most unsettlingly, it’s being used for customer support and documentation.

A lot of knowledge bases are buried in the walled garden of servers, and a labyrinth of chat rooms.

jarfil,

They don’t ban the entire company from distributing any software.

They can do whatever, it’s their store.

Keep in mind that Epic Games v. Google has made Google add features to allow alternative app stores on Android… which automatically removes the monopoly argument and lets Google ban anyone they want from the Google Play store.

jarfil,

I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can’t even do because I don’t run Google Play Services

Spoiler: you can use the LÖVE loader to run the “PC version” of Balatro on Android, since it’s all written in Lua.

jarfil,

Read the case, the whole thing started because Google banned Epic from the Play store, and the only reason for it to become a case, was the monopolistic position. That’s gone now, they’re free to refuse service to whoever they want, whenever they want, for no reason at all… and if you don’t agree, go sue them, they’ll show you the precedent followed by the door.

jarfil,

what is gone, exactly?

By adding support for alternate stores, the monopoly argument is gone: everyone can build their own store now. Meaning, everyone with a store can kick out anyone else, and tell them to just build their own.

comply with their own ToS

…which they can change at any moment, but don’t really need to; most ToS include clauses about refusing service without having to explain why. If you ever agree to a ToS, better make sure they’re even supposed to notify you if they ever decide to cut you off.

jarfil,

game without [being exhausted of the] screen

There is your answer: if screens exhaust you, do something without screens.

Games are supposed to give you a good time, reinvigorate you, and prepare for your “real life”. If you’re sick of screens, then pick up pottery, or squash, or hiking, or skydiving, or cooking, or… thousands of activities out there to have a good time without a screen.

having a huge backlog

That’s work. Just don’t. Do stuff that makes you feel better, not just tick a box in a backlog so you feel slightly less bad.

jarfil,

Games reward you in game mechanics, same as most games at a casino.

jarfil,

The newest take on cookies, is “accept all, or pay to read”. Quite shady, if you ask me.

jarfil,

“Right of withdrawal” is quite easy: allow cancelling the transaction before the in-game content has actually been used.

It only takes a “has been used” flag, and maybe a log entry to prove when.

jarfil,

What are you looking for?

RTX 50 just dropped in, they’re in the “beta early adopter” phase, AKA expensive for people with more dough than smarts. They’re the same TSMC 4N process as the RTX 40, and unless you have a PCIe 5.0 motherboard, the RTX 50 makes little sense. No need to go to used market, but I’d personally stick to the 4060/4070 for the time being, or the Radeon RX 7600/7700.

If you need some serious AI oomph… then go to the pro line, there are some nice RTX Ada for less than $10k, or rent some cloud H100s.

jarfil,

The nice thing about Steam, is that it’s “too big to clamp down”:

  • People used to 🏴‍☠️ on the high seas, for many reasons.
  • Steam came up as a “single point of sale”, at the same time as Netflix was doing the same for movies and series.
  • Over time, companies tried to carve out chunks of the pie, restoring some of the original fragmentation…
  • …but while Netflix has been torn to shreds of its former glory, Steam is still the main “single point” for games…
  • …with a “single point” DRM

Steam’s DRM only exists because game updates keep coming out with constantly updating DRM versions. The moment Steam tried to act against its clients, and they decided to leave Steam, every Steam game copy at that moment, would get cracked all at once.

Maybe EA, MS, Nintendo, Sony, etc. don’t see that as a great thing… and that’s why they’ve been setting up their own stores… but I think it’s AWESOME! 😁

jarfil,

Steam supports different multiplayer server modes: Steamworks Multiplayer

Some games already use P2P, or provide servers for the community to run, so only the private servers would need replicating. Even in that case, I’d argue that having “some” common API, would make it easier than chasing around everyone’s different implementations.

jarfil,

Because traditionally there were few Linux devices.

Android 15 is going to change that: it comes with a virtual machine API and a Linux Terminal running Debian for ChromeOS compatibility.

Soon, the most popular consumer OS in the world will be Linux:

  • 3.3 billion: Android / Linux
  • 2.2 billion: Apple iOS/macOS *NIX
  • 1.6 billion: Windows
  • 400 million: Windows 11 + WSL 2.0
  • 250 million: gaming consoles
  • "millions": SteamOS Linux

Wine might still make sense to keep things standardized for some time, and as a compatibility layer for older games, but native Linux games will also work on the Linux solutions for Android, Apple, and Windows.

jarfil,

Yes… it will kind of depend on which layer of compatibility will a game require. Debian is Linux + GNU, which is what most people identify as “a Linux system”. Android uses Linux without GNU, but starting with Android 15 it will come with a VM (container?) system to run a GNU userland. Android can already run Linux distros via Termux, which can be set up to run a desktop, but having it by default will mean apps will be able to use it directly. I’ve just tested RetroArch on Android, with DosBox to run Windows 98… but that’s kind of a mindfuck of its own 😂. macOS is BSD, which shares the POSIX interface with Linux, but it does some things in a different way, however there is a GNU userland for BSD, so games using only that, can run on it already. WSL 2.0 is a full first-class VM with full Linux + GNU and a desktop interface that can coexist with Windows… since Windows 10/11 itself runs by default in a Hyper-V VM (the bootloader is Hyper-V).

SimCity Classic in RetroArch - Who needs Windows 11 when you can play on Windows 98? (beehaw.org) angielski

Edit: Oh I forgot the Direct X and drivers links. Added it in the below link list. There is a website that hosts old versions. With Windows 98 SE I use “voodoo_graphics_driver_kit_version_3.01.00” and “directx9.0c_april2006”....

jarfil,

I’ve installed RetroArch on Android… but kind of feel this could be pushing it too far. I do still have some official keys for 95, 98SE, ME, XP… sigh

jarfil,

Well, this has been a blast from the past. Haven’t set up all the drivers, or an internet connection, but with the turbo button it’s been the fastest Win98 install I’ve ever done 😆

I’m impressed.

jarfil,

Motion smoothing means that instead of showing:

  • Frame 1
  • 33ms rendering
  • Frame 2

…you would get:

  • Frame 1
  • 33ms rendering
  • interpolating Frames 1 and 2
  • Interpolated Frame 1.5
  • 16ms wait
  • Frame 2

It might be fine for non-interactive stuff where you can get all the frames in advance, like cutscenes. For anything interactive though, it just increases latency while adding imprecise partial frames.

It will never turn 30fps into true 60fps like:

  • Frame 1
  • 16ms rendering
  • Frame 2
  • 16ms rendering
  • Frame 3
jarfil, (edited )

Hm… good point… but… let’s see, assuming full parallel processing:

  • […]
  • Frame -2 ready
  • Frame -1 ready
    • Show frame -2
    • Start interpolating -2|-1 (should take less than 16ms)
    • Start rendering Frame 0 (will take 33ms)
    • User input 0 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
  • Wait 16ms
    • Frame -2|-1 ready
  • Show Frame -2|-1
  • Wait 4ms
    • Process User input 0 (max 12ms to get into next frame)
    • User input 1 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
  • Wait 12ms
  • Frame 0 ready
    • Show Frame -1
    • Start interpolating -1|0 (should take less than 16ms)
    • Start rendering Frame 1 {includes User input 0} (will take 33ms)
  • Wait 8ms
    • Process User input 1 (…won’t make it into a frame before User input 2 is received)
    • User input 2 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
  • Wait 8ms
    • Frame -1|0 ready
  • Show Frame -1|0
  • Wait 12ms
    • Process User Input 1+2 (…will it take less than 4ms?)
  • Wait 4ms
  • Frame 1 ready {includes user input 0}
    • Show Frame 0
    • Start interpolating 0|1 (should take less than 16ms)
    • Start rendering Frame 2 {includes user input 1+2… maybe} (will take 33ms)
  • Wait 16ms
    • Frame 0|1 ready {includes partial user input 0}
  • Show Frame 0|1 {includes partial user input 0}
  • Wait 16ms
  • Frame 2 ready {…hopefully includes user input 1+2}
    • Show Frame 1 {includes user input 0}
  • […]

So…

  • From user input to partial display: 66ms
  • From user input to full display: 83ms
  • Some user inputs will be bundled up
  • Some user inputs will take some extra 33ms to get displayed

Effectively, an input-to-render equivalent of between a blurry 15fps, and an abysmal 8.6fps.

Could be interesting to run a simulation and see how many user inputs get bundled or “lost”, and what the maximum latency would be.

Still, at a fixed 30fps, the latency would be:

  • 20ms best case
  • 53ms worst case (missed frame)
jarfil,

You’ve just invented time travel.

Oops, you’re right. Got carried away 😅

could you use the motion vectors from the game engine that are available before a frame even exists?

Hm… you mean like what video compression algorithms do? I don’t know of any game doing that, but it could be interesting to explore.

jarfil,

Texture packs or not, IMHO the key point is they’re optional, not a requirement for the game to be playable. Games that depend on photorealism, are bound to end up in deep trouble.

jarfil,

Ok, but… shrinking horse balls. That’s realism!

jarfil,

The more subscriptions people need to access the content they want, the more likely they are to pirate it instead.

Everyone is talking about “Netflix-like” and “Steam-like”, while forgetting that Netflix and Steam grew big not because of their subscription plans, but because they were a single point to access all content.

jarfil,

The good ones aren’t “blur”, they’re “subpixel rearrange”.

It takes about 4x4 square pixels to emulate the subpixels of a single round one… just like it takes about 4x4 round pixels to emulate the subpixels of a square one.

jarfil,

The video shows an objective example where square pixels destroy the image, while rearranged subpixels restore it. There are more similar examples here around in the comments.

jarfil, (edited )

All pixels are a “blur” of R, G, and B subpixels. Their arrangement is what makes a picture look either as designed, or messed up.

For rendering text, on modern OSs you can still pick whichever subpixel arrangement the screen uses to make them look crisper. Can’t do the same with old games that use baked-in sprites for everything.

It gets even worse when the game uses high brightness pixels surrounded by low brightness ones because it expects the bright ones to spill over in some very specific way.

jarfil,

The tech changes things completely. There are practical examples in other comments.

jarfil,

Have you checked the examples…? I feel like we’re going in circles. There are cases where the CRT looks objectively better, supporting examples have been provided, technical explanation has been provided… it’s up to you to look at them or not.

If you wish to discusd some of the examples, or the tech, I’m open to that. Otherwise I’ll leave it here. ✌️

jarfil,

The objective part is in whether it matches what the creator intended.

Sometimes they intended crisp contours, like in ClearType; sometimes they intended to add extra colors; sometimes they designed pixel perfect and it looked blurry on CRT; very rarely they used vector graphics or 3D that can be rendered at better quality by just throwing some extra resolution.

Many artists of the time pushed this tech to these limits, “objectively better” is to emulate that.

jarfil,

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/ed89bb43-8e6a-4f17-a938-ab22d0447216.webp

If you call this “preference”, then there’s nothing to talk about. Like printing the Mona Lisa on toilet paper and calling it a “preference”.

yeah, I game on APUs (beehaw.org) angielski

Yeah punk. Living that 5700g life. Rocking 3700U as a daily driver, what? Yeah I have a fast graphics card, it’s called a 780m you might have heard of it from can barely play Baldurs Gate 3 but it counts as playable. Gaming on integrated graphics is cool because it’s a lower TDP option for the environment. Fight me. I’m...

jarfil,

Goat Simulator, 62fps 1080p, 70% GPU use, 2W TDP avg, 5W peak.

My GPU? A smartphone’s Mali-G68 😁

Is there any (single player playable) game with $10 which has made you point any go "haha" or given you an equivalent feeling because it was that enjoyable for every moment you played it? angielski

This is a very strict bar with a limiting price requirement. As for the title of the post, I fully mean giving the enjoyable feeling 100% of the time. Put forth the niche games which do this, because I do not know of any popular AAA or popular/fairly big developer indie which does this. The game must be playable for 100 hours at...

jarfil, (edited )

I’ve spent way more than 100 hours on plenty of games over the years, games that nowadays are below $10, like:

  • Doom
  • Duke Nukem 3D
  • Tetris
  • BlockOut (now, BlockOut II)
  • MS Flight Simulator 5.0
  • F-117A 2.0
  • Monkey Island 1
  • Monkey Island 2
  • Ultima Online (now, UO Outlands)
  • GTR: FIA GT Racing

There are many free-to-play mobile games with optional ads, that I’ve also enjoyed for over 100 hours each before they became frustrating, but hard to make a list now.

Many others have been mentioned already.

jarfil,

What kind of handheld, what genre, open source or anything goes…?

There are many decent games, as in “none or optional ads, not pay to win”. Some P2W can be played up to a certain point before they become obnoxious.

Recently I’ve been playing casual/idle ones:

  • Rush Royale
  • Raid Rush
  • Pocket Champs
  • Capybara Go

Before that, I went through a phase of RTS:

  • Last War
  • Top Heroes
  • Million Lords

Before that… don’t remember anymore, I keep switching genres every few months 🤷

jarfil,

Games could have multiple protagonists with different bodies, genders, personalities, etc… something like Overwatch did have that, you could even play as a hamster or a robot!

jarfil, (edited )

Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.

First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.

You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.

For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/b344e9b7-e2cf-43ae-b593-d3d3ca9e5a60.webp

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/2106bac4-c8a1-47ea-a9dd-b04c64e91035.webp

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/e96ddf96-2085-4643-bcab-df9bfd37ae1e.webp

jarfil,

Well, there is an OpenSource client, and private servers with custom rules. That makes every modification possible.

jarfil,

Looks like photo-edited AI? 😜

jarfil,

Could be a chat or email trail. People nowadays often forget the difference between talking something over at the urinal, and writing about it in an app.

jarfil,

Unfortunately. It’s the private place of choice for people to conduct shady business… all the way to US Presidents like Lyndon Johnson:

melmagazine.com/en-us/…/lyndon-b-johnson-penis

jarfil,

Redundant, like the server staff who told Elon it would take 6 months to move the servers… so he decided to move them himself on a whim… and it took 6 months to finish making them operational again?

Or redundant like the content moderation staff, whose redundancy has turned X into an even bigger dumpster fire?

Moderating and serving the content from 300 million users, worldwide, in near real time and no downtime, might seem like a simple task, but it really is not.

jarfil,

Keyboard and mouse… but the Steam Controller is cool too.

Other than that, any PS clone. The long thin horns fit my hands better than others.

Dr Disrespect finally shares why he was banned from Twitch (www.theverge.com) angielski

I love when completely innocent people say things like “no wrongdoing was acknowledged" and “no criminal charges have ever been brought against me”. I was suspicious before, but if there were no criminal charges then who cares, right? Right?

jarfil, (edited )

As someone who’s never been into sexting… what’s the difference between “leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate”, and “actual sexting”?

Interactive Loading Screens - High Hell angielski

Developing interactivity is effort and an investment. Most developers put up a simple loading screen, maybe some text like rotating tips, and a loading indicator. Until 2015 a patent on interactive loading screens may have made developers and publishers cautious and decide against developing interactivity....

jarfil,

The best loading screen is: none.

Load levels in chunks, preload the first chunk of the next level before the player reaches the end of the previous one, and either have a smooth transition, or at most put a skippable cutscene.

Loading screens are for poorly developed games.

jarfil,

There is an anecdote about a judo teacher from where I live: he also liked his motorbike, so one day he was joining the highway, when some car rear-ended him at twice the speed, crushing the bike into the barrier. Driver was all panicky, then weirded out when the guy showed up to check if everyone was all right. Turns out he instinctively jumped out of the bike, did a somersault over the car, and landed rolling, then got up and ran to check on the driver.

No game physics needed.

So yeah, go ahead and be “100% certain”. I’ve seen actual martial arts masters IRL, and you wouldn’t believe how quick a fight can end with a thug biting the dust, or a lamppost. Technique beats muscles any day.

If anything, that fight on the show was slowed down and drawn out for “dramatic effect”.

jarfil,

The following is somewhat similar, but it keeps changing, and there is a decent evolution of the characters (hard to pull off in just 8 episodes, but they did it). Basically it’s 3 shows in one: in-vault, surface, flashbacks. Each one has its own conspiracy, which all come to a joint conclusion at the end, with a slight cliffhanger for the second season.

It’s not the best show I’ve ever seen, but I’d say they did a good job.

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