tal

tal, wczoraj

Is he running with antialiasing on?

Looking at their system settings page:

borderlands.2k.com/…/amd-optimization/

Their settings for every single GPU listed there seem to have antialiasing off.

It may be that current hardware can’t do that at a reasonable clip

tal, wczoraj

no TAA

I would like TAA to be available. I think maybe a more reasonable ask is “let me toggle TAA”.

tal, wczoraj

Ram is cheap

Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.

I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.

checks Wikipedia

The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.

The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.

You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.

Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.

considers

Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.

Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.

Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.

tal, 6 dni temu

copyright

This isn’t a copyright, but rather a patent.

tal, 7 dni temu

Jack Thompson

For those who don’t remember this guy, he was pretty obnoxious.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)

tal, 14 dni temu (edited 14 dni temu)

corsair.com/…/scimitar-pro-rgb-optical-moba-mmo-g…

1000009259

OP didn’t expand on it, and his photos didn’t show it, but this mouse apparently has a bunch of thumb buttons, which is a legitimately-rare feature (though it’s not the only mouse out there to have a bunch).

EDIT: Amazon has 786 “gaming mice” with 10 or more — a bit arbitrarily-chosen on my part — buttons, so I guess that there’s a reasonable crop out there.

tal, 17 dni temu

kagis

I haven’t played it, but it sounds like it doesn’t have a replay system, which apparently has exacerbated finding cheaters.

tal, 17 dni temu

facebook.com/groups/…/1842637456471565/

Sounds like PvE works, but not PvP.

This guy claims that he got it working in PvP, at least at one point:

old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/…/tarkov_on_linux/

Ran fine for me with Proton Easy Anti-Cheat when added to Steam. This was a few patches ago now though. Whenever Streets came out.

tal, 17 dni temu (edited 17 dni temu)

I doubt it, seeing as it looks like it’s still being actively developed. I’d expect anyone who wanted to have higher resolution textures or whatever to just add an option for that to the main game.

EDIT: It does look like they have abut 500 “addon” tracks, and I suppose that some of those might have higher-resolution textures than the tracks in the base game.

online.supertuxkart.net

EDIT2: Also, it’s not SuperTuxKart, but you’re looking for more-realistic open source racing graphics and haven’t seen it, there’s TORCS. That might do what you want.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-vnkZyDghA

EDIT3: Also Speed Dreams:

speed-dreams.itch.io/speed-dreams

EDIT4: It doesn’t look like you can sort the add-on tracks on the website by size, but you can sort by upload date, and I’d assume that newer tracks are probably more likely to have higher-resolution textures.

tal, 17 dni temu

Looking at their dev guidelines page, they don’t have any texture resolution limit other than “don’t use very large textures on very small objects”, so I doubt that the project has any really hard caps.

supertuxkart.net/Texture_Guidelines#texture-detai…

Do not use large textures for small objects—this wastes video RAM.

If they are concerned about distribution size, if the game supports it or could support it, might be possible to have a separate high-resolution-texture package, package those separately.

tal, 19 dni temu

Well, someone in this thread linked to the Diablo 4 credits, and those list what they do.

tal, 22 dni temu

My guess is that most people in the market for a Steam Deck aren’t getting either this or a Deck.

tal, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

He could install https://www.luanti.org/ and mod to his heart’s content.

Like, legality aside, he’s fighting to add value to a game whose publisher has tried to prevent him.

tal, miesiąc temu

“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”

I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z15zGaCUjxo

tal, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

Hmm.

I have to say that as pornographic video game tags go, the tag library that itch.io provides is kind of limited. The goony.dev people apparently scraped the tags from itch.io’s database of tags, which makes sense if their aim is to keep pornographic itch.io games visible. But…if goony.dev aims to be a database of specifically pornographic video games, there’s not a lot by way of relevant tag data to make the games searchable.

Contrast with, say, vndb.org’s tag library, which has a wide range of tags specifically dedicated to fine-grained classification of sexual content. Vndb.org isn’t specifically for pornographic games, but tracks and indexes quite a few, and has a very extensive tag database.

I wonder if it might make sense to (a) link to other vendors, like Steam/Patreon/whatever as well and (b) since there are tags on some other sources, incorporate use of those tags as well to get more metadata, since some games are listed on multiple databases or with multiple vendors. Maybe have a way to ask for tags just from one vendor if there’s concern about not forcing users to see mixed data from multiple sources, but that seems like it’d be a significant value-add relative to just searching directly on itch.io or whatnot.

tal, miesiąc temu

I dunno if you’re specifically referencing Lawrence of Arabia, but if so, I really like that movie.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvH6PT7I_dI

LAWRENCE: It is the servant who takes money.

AUDA leaps to his feet and backs away from this moral threat as another man might from a physical one.

AUDA: I am Auda Ibu Tayi! (He goes to the edge of the tent and bawls into the darkness) Does Auda serve? Does Auda Ibu Tayi serve? (He faces his persecutors and goes into a furious litany) I carry twenty-three great wounds all got in battle! Seventy-five men I have killed with my own hands, in battle! I scatter, I burn my enemies’ tents! I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure. Yet I am poor! … Because I am a river to my people! Is that service?

tal, miesiąc temu

That’s nice, but I’m not going to do so, because I’d rather support the developers of pornographic games financially. They already deal with enough flak without needing to give up sales revenue over this.

It also sounds like at least some of the stores are aiming to make the games available later with different payment processors, so I expect that they’re likely to come back.

tal, miesiąc temu

Could be. They don’t say so on the page, though.

tal, miesiąc temu

Markdown treats a single newline as a space, so that already wrapped text doesn’t need to be rewrapped. If you want to have each item on one line, some options:

Two spaces before newline

<span style="color:#323232;">Foo  << two spaces here
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Bar
</span>

Yields

Foo
Bar

Backslash before newline

<span style="color:#323232;">Foo
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Bar
</span>

Yields

Foo
Bar

Paragraph Break

Most clients will have a “larger” vertical space if you do this. Use a double newline:

<span style="color:#323232;">Foo
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Bar
</span>

Yields

Foo

Bar

Bulleted List

<span style="color:#323232;">* Foo
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Bar
</span>

Yields

• Foo
• Bar

tal, 2 miesiące temu

I doubt that it has anything to do with social preferences of anyone internal to payment processors. They won’t care.

Putting pressure on payment processors is a useful way to put pressure on any commercial service. The commercial service may operate in another country, but it needs the payment processor, and the payment processors don’t want to be ejected from countries. The payment processor can be a lever for laws passed elsewhere.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

There’s a whole class of controllers, often called “fightsticks”, which have a full-size arcade-style joystick and a ton of buttons, to reproduce the feel of arcade fighting games.

www.reddit.com/r/fightsticks/

!fightsticks (not very active)

www.amazon.com/Arcade-Sticks/s?k=Arcade+Sticks

tal, 2 miesiące temu

“Fallout is the big one,” Middler claimed. “There are multiple Fallout projects in development, including, as far as I’m aware, that one that I’m sure you’re all wanting. It’s not far enough in along to say anything like ‘you’re going to be playing this game anytime soon’.”

Middler then joked, “Anyway, New Vegas 2, coming soon”. Is this the one we’re “all wanting”? Yes, but then also so is Fallout 3 Remastered, Fallout 5 and even a remake of Fallout 2. The fanbase is rabid, and hungry, and it’s been a long time since they’ve been fulfilled outside of Fallout 76 updates.

I mean, if Bethesda released all four of those, I’d buy all four.

I also don’t know what “Fallout 3 Remastered” entails, but if it means forward-porting the content to Starfield’s engine, that’d be pretty cool, though I do wonder how much effort will be required for mod-porting.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

Honestly, I feel like Morrowind is the title least in need of a remaster, as unlike later 3D titles, it has an open-source fan reimplementation of the engine, OpenMW, plus the fan updates of content.

searches for video of content

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnvOy5Kw79Y

It looks like the OpenMW people are also working on a VR version.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

There’s a similar, open-source game, https://www.luanti.org/ (until recently, known as Minetest). It doesn’t have as many mods in 2025 as Minecraft does, but you might also enjoy it.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

I love CDDA, but I don’t know if I’d call it light on a battery. It won’t hammer a GPU, but it actually does use a fair bit of CPU time for the simulation. Also, every time it redraws a frame, it does so via recomputing the world lighting and such, so it’s actually surprisingly heavyweight.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

kagis

docs.luanti.org/for-players/controls/

Touchscreen

Display inventory: Press on-screen button in left lower corner

tal, 2 miesiące temu

Not ignored—not played yet.

Journal, July 3, 2025:

The day opened with a round of https://store.steampowered.com/app/2478330/Barbie_Project_Friendship/.

I then followed it up with survival horror https://store.steampowered.com/app/1944430/Amnesia_The_Bunker/ from survival horror specialists Frictional Games.

Next on the list was gay dom/sub dating sim https://store.steampowered.com/app/2747220/Blood_Domination/.

Then hard milsim https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076160/Command_Modern_Operations/.

I wound down with some relaxing time in art toy https://store.steampowered.com/app/1418570/Zen_Trails/.

I have always been partial to variety.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

Sure, but I think that the type of game is a pretty big input. Existing generative AI isn’t great at portraying a consistent figure in multiple poses and from multiple angles, which is something that many games are going to want to do.

On the other hand, I’ve also played text-oriented interactive fiction where there’s a single illustration for each character. For that, it’d be a good match.

AI-based speech synth isn’t as good as human voice acting, but it’s gotten pretty decent if you don’t need to be able to put lots of emotion into things. It’s not capable of, say, doing Transistor, which relied a lot on the voice acting. But it could be a very good choice to add new material for a character in an old game where the actor may not be around or who may have had their voice change.

I’ve been very impressed with AI upscaling. I think that upscaling textures and other assets probably has a lot of potential to take advantage of higher resolution screens. Maybe one might need a bit of human intervention, but a factor of 2 increase is something that I’ve found that the software can do pretty well without much involvement.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

From the article, I believe that it’s Steam Deck parts, not Steam Controller 1 parts.

Which makes sense, because you can get a Steam Deck, but the Steam Controller 1 has been out of production for some years.

EDIT: Wikipedia says that production ended in 2019.

tal, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

They have mechanical components that will wear out over time (though I suppose some people probably use them lightly enough that it’s less of an issue).

tal, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah, I really liked https://store.steampowered.com/app/1620/Jagged_Alliance_2_Gold/. The UI is pretty elderly today, though.

I haven’t been very impressed with some of the subsequent attempts to revive the series, though I still haven’t gotten around to playing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084160/Jagged_Alliance_3/ yet, and that has much better scores than some of the intervening releases, like https://store.steampowered.com/app/57740/Jagged_Alliance__Back_in_Action/. If you haven’t tried JA3 yet either, you might consider taking a look.

EDIT: Oh, wait, yes I did play it, because I remember the intro mission that they have screenshots of.

…steamstatic.com/…/ss_0edc29526ad201a59357234cd77…

https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1084160/ss_0edc29526ad201a59357234cd77a34a5ba507208.1920x1080.jpg

I don’t recall finishing the game, though. I should go back and see what my status in that game is. Thanks for making me think of it.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

Cannon Fodder - a UK classic, very arcadey but very fun and lighter than all these other “serious” games

It has that iconic theme music:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASTLGt_9vbU

tal, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Just tried it, and it was some other game I was thinking of; I hadn’t played JA3 yet.

While I haven’t finished the game, thoughts:

• It’s the strongest of the post-2 Jagged Alliance games that I’ve played.
• Still not on par with JA2, at least relative to release year, I’d say also in absolute terms.
• My biggest problem — I’m running this under Proton — is some bugginess that I’m a little suspicious is a thread deadlock. When it happens, I never see the targeting options show up when I target an enemy, and trying to go to the map or inventory screen doesn’t update the visible area onscreen, though I can blindly click and hear interactions. The game also doesn’t ever exit if I hit Alt-F4 in that state, just hangs. AFAICT, this can always be resolved by quicksaving (which you can do almost anywhere), stopping the game (I use kill in a terminal on Linux) and reloading the save, but it’s definitely obnoxious. Fortunately, the game starts up pretty quickly. Nobody on ProtonDB talking about it, so maybe it’s just me. I have not noticed bugs other than this one.
• So far, not much by way of missions where one has to figure out elaborate ways of getting into areas or the like: more of a combat focus. I have wirecutters, crowbars, lockpicks, and explosives, like in JA2, but thus far, it’s mostly just a matter of clicking on a locked container with someone who has lockpicking skill. Probably more realistic — in real life, an unattended door isn’t going to stop anyone for long — but I kinda miss that.
• The maps feel a lot smaller to me, though the higher resolution might be part of that. A lot of 3d modeling to make them look pretty. There’s a lot more verticality, like watchtowers.
• The game also feels considerably shorter than JA2, based on the percentage of the strategic map that I’ve taken. That being said, JA2 could get a bit repetitive when one is fighting the umpteenth enemy reinforcement party.
• Unique perks for mercs that make them a lot more meaningful than in JA2 (though also limit your builds). For example, Fox can get what is basically a free turn if she initiates combat on a surprised enemy. Barry auto-constructs explosives each day.
• Thematic feel of the mercs from JA2 is retained well.
• Interesting perk tree.
• A bunch of map modifiers like fog that have a major impact.
• Bunch of QoL stuff for scheduling concurrent tasks for different mercs.
• Pay demands don’t seem to rise with level, though other factors can drive it up (e.g. Fox will demand more pay if you hire Steroid).
• Feels easier than JA2, though I haven’t finished it.
• I’m pretty sure the keybindings are different.
• Tiny thing, but I always liked the start of JA2, where your initial team does a fast-rope helicopter insertion into a hostile sector. Felt like a badass way to set the tone. No real analog in JA3.
• I started running into guys with RPGs early on in JA3, much earlier than in JA2.
• JA2 has ground vehicles and a helicopter and they require you to obtain fuel. Transport logistics don’t exist in JA3, other than paying to embark on boat trips at a port (and just checked online to confirm that they aren’t just in the late game).
• More weapon mods in JA3. Looks like some interesting tradeoffs that one has to make here, rather than just “later-game stuff is better”.

For me, it was a worthwhile purchase — even with the irritating bug I keep hitting — and I would definitely recommend it over the other post-JA2 stuff if you’ve played JA2 and want more. It hasn’t left me giggling at the insane amount of complex interactions that were coded into the game like JA2 did, though, which were kind of a hallmark of the original.

tal, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).

I don’t know what the internal mechanics are like, haven’t read material about it. From a user standpoint, I have just a list of positive and negative factors impacting my hit chance, so less information about my hit chance. I guess I’d vaguely prefer the percentage — I generally am not a huge fan of games that have the player rely on mechanics trying to hide the details of those mechanics — but it’s nice to know what inputs are present. It hasn’t been a huge factor to me one way or the other, honestly; I mean, I feel like I’ve got a solid-enough idea of roughly what the chances are.

even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.

Yeah, I don’t know of other things that have the strategic aspect. For the squad-based tactical turn-based combat, there are some options that I’ve liked playing in the past.

While https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/ aren’t quite the same thing — they’re closer to Fallout 1 and 2, as Wasteland 1 was a major inspiration for them — the squad-based, turn-based tactical combat system is somewhat similar, and if you’re hunting for games that have that, you might also enjoy that.

I also played https://store.steampowered.com/app/254960/Silent_Storm_Gold_Edition/ and enjoyed it, though it’s now pretty long in the tooth (well, so is Jagged Alliance 2…). Even more of a combat focus. Feels lower budget, slightly unfinished.

And there’s X-Com. I didn’t like the new ones, which are glitzy, lots of time spent doing dramatic animations and stuff, but maybe I should go back and give them another chance.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.

They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.

Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

It really depends on how one is applyng mods. Bethesda does have their own mod site and in-game support for modding, and that’s pretty straightforward (and the only option on consoles). That will limit what mods are available.

I do kind of wish that there were one cross-platform open-source universal “game mod” program that could support multiple online services. Would like to have Wabbajack-like functionality (apply a whole set of curated, tested-together mods) as a base too, as that’d lower the bar.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

Obligatory

tal, 3 miesiące temu

Capitalism deals with industry being owned privately.

If you want to complain about Microsoft being a publicly-traded, private-sector company rather than a worker cooperative or part of the government or whatever, okay, at least I can see where you’re coming from.

But a socialist economy is perfectly compatible with having high prices.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

A lot of real-time tactics and turn-based tactics games would fit that description.

Matrix Games specializes in milsims, so they’re an easy way to get a list.

www.matrixgames.com/inventory?sort=new-releases&f…

As another commenter says, having more criteria to narrow it down would help.

I like the Close Combatseries myself, which is real-time.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

I like single-player D&D.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

I enjoyed Bastion and Transistor.

I also preferred Hades to either.

tal, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Just out of curiosity, listing the games mentioned here as of this writing by their date of release:

Release Date	Game
1980	Pac-Man
1985	The Oregon Trail (assuming widely-played 1985 game)
1985	Tetris
1986	Kid Icarus
1988	Mega Man 2
1988	Super Mario Brothers 3
1988	The Guardian Legend
1989	Abadox: The Deadly Inner War
1989	Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II
1989	Monster Party
1989	Populous
1989	Sweet Home
1990	Dr. Mario
1990	Final Fantasy III
1991	Battletoads (assuming original game)
1991	The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
1992	Ecco the Dolphin
1992	Sonic the Hedgehog 2
1992	Super Mario Kart
1993	Dinopark Tycoon
1993	Doom
1993	Gauntlet IV
1993	Lufia & the Fortress of Doom (assuming first game)
1993	Mega Man X
1994	Donkey Kong Country
1994	Earthworm Jim
1994	Sonic & Knuckles
1994	Sonic the Hedgehog 3
1994	Super Metroid
1994	The Lion King
1995	Chrono Trigger
1997	Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
1997	Diablo
1997	Final Fantasy VII
1997	Mega Man X4
1997	Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
1997	Snowboard Kids
1998	Banjo-Kazooie
1998	Metal Gear Solid
1998	Sonic Adventure
1998	South Park
1998	StarCraft: Brood War
1999	Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
1999	Heroes of Might and Magic III
1999	Planescape: Torment
1999	Quake III Arena
1999	RollerCoaster Tycoon
1999	Silent Hill
1999	Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
1999	Sven Co-op
1999	Unreal Tournament
1999	Worms Armageddon
2000	Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
2000	Diablo II
2000	Resident Evil CODE: Veronica
2000	SimCity 3000 Unlimited
2000	Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
2001	Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies
2001	Final Fantasy X
2001	Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
2001	Shenmue II
2002	The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
2003	Beyond Good & Evil
2003	Need for Speed: Underground
2003	Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
2004	Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
2004	Champions of Norrath
2004	Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
2004	Gran Turismo 4
2004	Half Life 2
2004	Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
2004	The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
2005	Champions: Return to Arms
2005	Psychonauts
2005	Shadow of the Colossus
2006	Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
2006	Ōkami
2007	BioShock
2007	Dark Souls
2007	Mass Effect
2007	Portal
2008	Clonk Rage
2008	Left 4 Dead
2008	Mirror’s Edge
2008	Super Smash Bros. Brawl
2009	Dragon Age: Origins
2009	Forza Motorsport 3
2009	Killing Floor
2009	Left 4 Dead 2
2009	Plants vs. Zombies
2009	Steins;Gate
2010	Battlefield: Bad Company 2
2010	Limbo
2010	Nier
2010	Planet Minigolf
2011	Bastion
2011	Portal 2
2011	Terraria
2011	The Binding of Isaac
2012	Hotline Miami
2012	The House in Fata Morgana
2012	Tokyo Jungle
2014	Forza Horizon 2
2014	LISA: The Painful
2015	Bloodborne
2015	Ori and the Blind Forest
2015	The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
2015	Undertale
2016	Doom (2016)
2016	Kirby: Planet Robobot
2016	Stardew Valley
2016	The Witness
2016	Titanfall 2
2016	Tyranny
2017	Little Nightmares
2017	Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (for Deluxe version)
2017	Nier: Automata
2017	Night in the Woods
2017	Super Mario Odyssey
2017	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2018	Celeste
2018	Donut County
2018	Return of the Obra Dinn
2018	Rimworld
2018	Subnautica
2019	A Short Hike
2019	Disco Elysium
2019	Outer Wilds
2019	Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
2019	Slay the Spire
2020	Cyberpunk 2077
2020	Factorio
2020	Hades
2021	Everhood: An Ineffable Tale of the Inexpressible Divine Moments of Truth
2021	Psychonauts 2
2022	Elden Ring
2022	Lil Gator Game
2023	Baldur’s Gate 3
2023	Dave the Diver
2024	Balatro

tal, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.

I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be “good” games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.

But I’m not in the EU or UK.

I also am kind of puzzled by this:

www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

Isn’t the law on this already settled?

A: It mostly is within the United States, but not in many other countries.

It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:

carltonfields.com/…/youve-been-served-legal-effec…

Of course, case law has never really been settled on whether games are goods or services. Right, Steve?

Steve Blickensderfer: No. No, I haven’t been able to figure this out one way or the other looking at the cases.

A few quick searches haven’t picked up US case law, if it’s out there.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

There are a number of Dune games.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_games_based_on_Dune

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Star Citizen is a scam.

I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly-mismanaged development process that ran out of control, and where they have no realistic way of fulfilling all the promises they made at this point.

This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.

In a traditional development environment, the publisher would have bailed on this a long time ago.

EDIT: I do think that it does highlight two things, though:

• The risks with this kind of funding structure for game development.
• The fact that there are a lot of people who really badly want a modern, good space combat video game.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

that has promised not one but two games that are not coming out.

Not just the games. Don’t forget all the feelies, the physical stuff they promised to manufacture.

This guy lost a court case trying to get a refund on his $5k seven years back:

vice.com/…/star-citizen-court-documents-reveal-th…

Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”

That was back when only $200 million had been sunk into the development.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I really don’t think that it’s all that abnormal, aside from the funding structure.

Lots of video games — including even some pretty successful ones — have dev studios that screw up the scope when they estimate what they can accomplish with their financial and hardware budget.

The problem is that if you’re a video game developer and you look at the state of your game and you know that it doesn’t meet up with what you’re hoping to make, you can maybe go to the publisher and say “we screwed up and need more money”. And the publisher — who is familiar with the industry and has the ability to actually come in and take a look at what’s going on with your development process and has bean-counters whose job is to make a cold, clear-eyed call on this — is one entity who is hopefully is going to make an objective call.

But with Star Citizen, that structure doesn’t exist. The developer can just keep go begging for more money.

Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana: “The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past.”

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever: “Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.” That was self-funded, so there wasn’t some outside party saying “no more”.

In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] A small team of ex-employees, which later became Triptych Games, continued development from their homes.[14]

In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.

The problem is that the developer knows perfectly well that the game doesn’t meet the kind of standard that they’d hoped for and which they’d gotten players expecting, but they aren’t willing to cut their losses and just wrap things up. And the publisher wasn’t in a position to cut development off. In Duke Nukem Forever’s case, happened when they exhausted their own capital, because employees aren’t gonna work without pay.

But in Star Citizen’s case, even that brake doesn’t exist. They aren’t using their capital. They’re using player capital that they got in exchange for promises, and I don’t think that players are nearly as good as an outside publisher at performing cold, hard, objective analysis of the development process. CIG dug themselves into a deep hole. Once they’re in that hole, there’s not really a good way out. If they just stop development at any given point, they aren’t going to have something that players are happy with. The only route they have out, to not fail, is to make more promises, try to get more money, and somehow try to develop their way to a successful game. So they’re gonna keep doing that until all of the players cut them off, which can take a long time. A publisher would say “you blew through numerous deadlines in the existing development process, and I don’t think that you’re a good investment”, or said “no more money unless you give me a hard, short timeline for wrapping this up”. I think that CIG knew pretty well that there was no point where they could wrap things up in a handful of months and meet player expectations, so their choice was always “fail” or “keep kicking the can down the road in hopes that they could fix things”.