Chobbes

Chobbes, 5 miesięcy temu

The thing that always bothers me about people saying consoles are a good deal as the hardware is cheap compared to a PC is just that it gets more expensive really quickly with software. Particularly if you get a digital only console it only takes a few games until you’re at the price of a PC. I just can’t justify buying a locked down system anymore.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

I just want Logan Cunningham to whisper me to sleep every night.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

Some of it’s kind of cool and makes sense. Like developers can get heat maps of where players die so they can see which areas need difficulty tuning, and it can also help developers understand where to spend resources on their games in the future, or notice if players aren’t engaging with something so they can figure out how to make that aspect of the game better. I have mixed feelings about it, but I don’t think telemetry has to be evil.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

I find the DLCs / preorder bonuses that give you really powerful weapons at the beginning of a game just… bizarre? Like, okay, thank you for the thing that completely ruins the progression?

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

Okay this has been bothering me lately… Wasn’t inverted y usually the default setting in games until somewhat recently? Now it seems to never be the default. What changed and when? Or is this just in my head?

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

I still think inverted was the default in the 2000s. Maybe around 2008 with the PS3 and 360 era it started to change? This is also when video games really seemed to take off for the average person too, so maybe that has something to do with it?

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

I keep getting tempted to try it, but honestly it doesn’t look like it would be my jam. I don’t want to build bases, and I don’t want to grind and collect resources. I’m kind of not into sandboxy stuff anymore. Maybe there’s more to the game, but that’s all it looks like to me as an outsider.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

NOPE. This might work for some people but my partner couldn’t handle it :/. When walking around in 3D and paying attention is hard portals are just too hard when thrown into the mix. I would kill to be able to play Portal 2 coop, but alas :C. Maybe Portal 2 would be better to start on, they do a better job of introducing some concepts and the story is harder to completely ignore lol.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

This didn’t really work for us to be honest. It went a little better than most games, but it was too easy to get separated and do your own thing and it just didn’t really feel like we were playing together. Could be a strength, but I don’t think it’s ideal if your partner doesn’t really like video games haha.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

My partner had a hard time dealing with FPS movement. Throwing in portals just made it a complete mess. It really wasn’t a good jumping off point, I think it’s good to be weary.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

It Takes Two is probably the best jumping off point (as you’ve already been informed). It has enough variety that you can discuss what parts they liked and maybe find the games in that kind of genre.

My partner isn’t big on games, but loves The Binding of Isaac for coop. The latest DLC adds a better coop mode, but the original coop mode with coop babies works well too (and there’s advantages like them being able to fly so they don’t need to worry about floor hazards). I think the fact that they grew up in a catholic household but aren’t religious helped them get into it lol.

Chobbes, 6 miesięcy temu

The steam version is actually pretty approachable. You can mostly learn all of the systems on your own time. You don’t have to interact with everything at first.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

The creative director for the sequel died unexpectedly this year :(. It feels like a cursed game.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

Interacting with maybe a dozen people outside with a mask on for a few minutes at a time is almost certainly much lower risk than being in a courtroom with, likely, many more people and stale air for hours. It’s certainly helpful if everybody is masked up in the courtroom, but people are notoriously bad at wearing masks properly, they’re going to require Gabe Newell to unmask for questions, and there’s a lot more factors you don’t control in that scenario… outside delivering stuff you can always walk away if somebody isn’t giving you the space you’re comfortable with… Regardless, all risk is cumulative and you may want to limit the number of times you do higher risk things as much as possible. Even if you rarely do some riskier things, it doesn’t mean you’re okay with that level of risk all of the time. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to want to manage and minimize your exposure if you’re high risk.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I don’t really think anybody should have to go to court in person, and I can definitely empathize with somebody wanting to avoid COVID (even if they’re not super high risk, you never know how it will affect you it seems). I kind of understand the bias towards in person things, but I really wish people would get over it. Sometimes it’s just a lot more practical to do things remotely, and while a video call isn’t quite the same as being there in person I think it’s something we can deal with. It certainly doesn’t seem like it would be that much worse for testifying tbh.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

I have mixed feelings on GOG. I want to like them, but the lack of Linux support is a real thorn in my side… Having DRM free stuff is great and I’d love if more games had DRM free versions, but currently steam actually supports me and GOG wants to pretend I don’t exist… And realistically, I’m not totally sold on GOGs promise of always having access to your games… If GOG explodes you’re probably going to lose access to your games too? I mean, of course it’s easier to archive a game for yourself if it doesn’t have DRM, but unless you do that religiously for each game on GOG you won’t be able to acquire them after GOG hypothetically explodes either… Hopefully you get enough warning to archive what you care about, I guess?

I do totally respect that DRM free copies can make a big difference but everybody argues that GOG means you’ll always have access to your games, and I’m not sure it’s substantially different than steam in that respect for “normal” people, you know? If either store kicks the bucket people are going to be out of luck. I kind of just want to throw Steam and GOG in a closest until they make out, though. Would be nice to get the best of both worlds.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

I like the shallot turrets.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

Display manufacturers may understand what Valve might want in a screen, but they might not understand how many units of a screen of such a specification they would be able to sell — is it going to be a custom job for just a few thousand of valve’s experimental console (which may have different degrees of success), or is it going to be something that they can sell to more people and a wider audience.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

x86 to ARM translation is a fairly different problem than what proton solves, so I don’t think it’s clearly in their wheelhouse. Proton / wine is mostly just an implementation of windows libraries on Linux, but doing efficient x86 emulation on arm is a compiler problem. I would guess that Valve could do it or at least hire people to do it, but it’s a bit of a different skill set. Doing x86 efficiently on ARM (particularly with concurrency) also likely involves some extensions to ARM like Apple does with their chips. I haven’t heard if the snapdragon elite chips have anything for x86 compatibility baked in at all. Frankly, I’m treating the snapdragon elite with a fair degree of scepticism until you can actually buy the thing, but I hope it’s good!

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

I don’t think they’re waiting for ARM specifically. If that ends up working out, sure, but if they can get x86 with the right power to performance ratio I doubt they would complain.

Chobbes, 7 miesięcy temu

It’s going to depend. If it’s a really old game it’s unlikely to matter. Anything heavy on CPU and particularly single core performance may struggle through a translation layer. A good translation layer on a good chip will probably lead to roughly similar performance in many cases, and most games seem to be GPU limited, so it’s possible it will just work out most of the time. It could always be the case that a critical section of the code somewhere ends up not translating well, leading to poor performance. It would not be terribly surprising for an important loop to end up two or four times slower than it should be, which could cause hiccups.

Chobbes, 8 miesięcy temu

Yeah I was going to say… in many cases bosses seem to be easier than the normal fights. The bosses sort of focus on being a novel gimmick with easily telegraphed attacks, which often ends up being easier than normal fights in some games.

Chobbes, 8 miesięcy temu

Dusk is actually amazing and already has such a perfect atmosphere that the graphics just melt away. This feels so wrong to me, but I guess it might work better for some people.

Chobbes, 8 miesięcy temu

Of course :).

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

I had a similar situation with my health insurance company, except I think they added the character limit a while after I had set my password T_T. So, it worked for months, then they changed the mobile app so I couldn’t enter a long password… And then eventually they changed the website too and then I couldn’t log in at all. Thaaaaanks.

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

Oh, they are. I keep telling people to WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORDS, and NEVER use same password on two sites. They dont listen. Its a lot easier to just remember 1-4 variations of a password and use that than carry around a password notebook. And they think themselves safe.

Honestly, the best solution for this is a password manager and not a notebook. The average person is not going to come up with strong passwords on their own for every website. A password manager once setup can be more convenient than whatever they were doing before, so if you can get people to use one they’ll be in much better shape.

I’m thinking most people shouldnt use passwords at all anymore. They are a huge point of failure because people are people. We need something else to be the norm. How can we make hardware keys or something the norm for logging in? Have everyone carry around a bankcard-like thing that fit into every computer where people need credentials. Would’nt that be safer while still being accessible and convenient?

My understanding is that this is basically what the whole passkeys initiative is. I have sort of mixed feelings on it. Hardware tokens for logging in is great, but I worry about people stealing the hardware tokens from others. Mostly people are going to use their phones, though, which should have some other mechanism of authentication.

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

It would take some time to turn around of course but the same was probably the case for https, 2fa, ipv6, and tpm’s.

Oh yeah… Definitely good IPv6 support everywhere. That really turned around, and we’re not dragging our feet on implementing IPv6 at all 🥲.

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

Both Valve and Epic are private companies. I still trust Valve over Epic, but I think technically Tim Sweeney has pretty much full control over Epic as well (for better or for worse).

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

Ah that’s a fair point. I haven’t paid too much attention to this. Thanks for providing some more context :).

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m not sure if it’s such a direct conspiracy, but I’m sure some of this happens inadvertently at least. Developers of big budget games are likely going to target higher end hardware, and API usage that might cause problems on lower end hardware probably sneaks in as a result of that. I’m sure there’s some deals between game studios and Nvidia / AMD to get the latest GPUs for workstations at some discount, which probably means the machines they’re using for the bulk of development are beefier than the average consumer’s (you also probably want a bit of headroom while developing)… But this kind of stuff can naturally lead to higher requirements for software because you don’t run into performance issues unless you’re very serious about testing on lower end hardware… Which you might care about to some extent, but it’s an additional cost that can take away from other aspects of the game, which might make it less marketable (graphics are a big deal for marketing, for example).

Obviously it’s not great if a game uses API calls inefficiently and that means it runs worse than it would otherwise… But I’m not really that surprised when it happens? Working on big projects on deadlines there’s often a “try the obvious solution, worry later if it’s too slow” mentality, and I’m not sure you need any more of a conspiracy than that to account for stuff like this.

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

I liked the lore, but the game was a bit of a slog for me. Just kind of sick of that kind of open world game, I guess! I don’t think it’s a bad game at all, but I can imagine others might feel similarly. Also I guess I really wasn’t invested much in what was happening story wise in the present in that game and the side quests are just aggressively mediocre and I kind of regretted bothering with any of them.

Chobbes, 9 miesięcy temu

I was kind of disappointed with all of the planets after leaving Anachronox and I kind of just stopped playing at some point. I kind of want to pick it up again but I’m not super into the combat system either.