So, I have a not so unique problem. I want to build a PC with decent power and good Linux support but local parts are hard to get and importing is a mess....
It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot closer to the real deal than most other job simulators. You can genuinely use this to pick up the basics, but there’s no substitute building in the real world. The sequel got better reviews (79 on Opencritic vs. 70 for part 1), but I haven’t tried it yet.
What I’d recommend once you know which part goes where is getting some scrap parts from somewhere and assembling something functional out of them. I’m talking random parts found by the side of the road to at most 20 bucks in total for everything, case included. That’s how I built my first PC as a kid. It was only a 486 with 100 MHz (which came out in 1994) years after the GHz barrier had been breached (~2002ish), but it was mine and I loved it.
Happy to help. Forgot to mention: Make sure to check the difficulty options and disable things like automatically placed cables.
Also, keep in mind that any prices in there tend to be widely out of date. If you want to use this to plan your build, use PCPartPicker to pick out the parts you can afford and then find them or the closest equivalents in this game. The sequel is obviously going to be a bit more up to date.
The presentation was genuinely astounding. An absolute marvel for the hardware it runs on and it still holds up today, at least visually. Gameplay-wise, not so much, unfortunately.
I didn’t see it until its tentacles had already engulfed my little submersible. I screamed like a little girl and didn’t touch the game again for weeks. No other game has ever managed to scare me like this.
Quite a good list, although without any real surprises, except for the cheeky inclusion of a recent fan-made PC port. I’m glad Kerbal Space Program is on it, but a few other personal favorites (and candidates for best game of all time) are absent, like The Talos Principle, BeamNG.drive, NEO Scavenger, World of Goo, Mafia,...
Apples and oranges. GTA V has a small, entirely hand-built world. It’s just 80 square kilometers and was meant to fit onto two DVDs / one Blu Ray Disk. Real-world Los Angeles, which this is based on, is 1,210 square kilometers.
This Flight Simulator on the other hand covers the entire planet. If we are just going by land area, that’s 510.1 million square kilometers. It’s using a combination of satellite and aerial photography, radar maps, photogrammetry (reconstructing 3D objects - buildings and terrain in this case - from photos), Open Street Map and Bing Maps data, as well as hand-built and procedurally generated detail. There’s also information on the climate, live weather data, animal habitats (to spawn the right creatures in each part of the world), etc. pp. We are about two petabytes of data, which is an unfathomable amount outside of a data center.
You can not optimize your way out of this. The developers have the ambition to create the most detailed 1:1 virtual facsimile of this planet. There is no other way of achieving this goal. You can not store two petabytes of data on a consumer PC at the moment, you can not compress two petabytes of data to the point that they are being reduced to a couple hundred gigabytes and if your goal is accuracy, you cannot just reuse textures and objects from one city for another. That’s what every prior version of this flight simulator did, but if you remember those, the results were extremely disappointing, even for the time.
By the way, if you don’t have an active Internet connection, Flight Simulator 2020 (and 2024, if I’m not mistaken) will still work. They’ll just do what you’re suggesting, spawn generic procedurally generated buildings and other detail instead (in between a handful of high detail “hero” buildings in major cities), based on low-res satellite photography and OSM data, which is relatively small in size even for the whole planet and tells the program where a building and what its rough outline and height might be - but not what it actually looks like. Here’s a video from an earlier version of FS 2020 that shows the drastic difference: youtu.be/Z0T-7ggr8Tw
It is worth stressing that you will see this kind of relatively low detail geometry even with an Internet connection any time you’re flying in places where the kind of high quality aerial photography required for photogrammetry isn’t available of yet. FS 2020 has seen continuous content updates however, with entire regions being updated with higher quality photogrammetry and manually created detail every couple of months - and FS 2024 will receive the same treatment. I am generally not a fan of live-service games, but this is an exception. It makes the most sense here.
The one major downside is that eventually, the servers will be shut down. However, since you can choose to - in theory - cache all of the map data locally, if you have the amount of storage required, it is actually possible to preserve this data. It’s far out of reach for most people (we are talking low six figures in terms of cost), but in a few decades, ordinary consumer hardware is likely going to be able to store this amount of data locally. The moment Microsoft announces the shutdown of this service, people with the means will rush to preserve the data. Imagine what kind of amazing treasure this could be for future generations: A snapshot of our planet, of our civilization, with hundreds of cities captured with enough detail to identify individual buildings.
FS 2020 had an offline mode. I don’t see why this one wouldn’t have one as well. It’s either using procedurally generated or cached data.
You can not get the same visual fidelity and low latency with game streaming. I’ve tried nearly every service there is (going as far back as OnLive - remember that one?) and they are all extremely subpar, including Microsoft’s own game streaming service.
FS 2020 is available for streaming, by the way, and FS 2024 is likely going to be as well. You’re only getting the console version though. Officially, the resolution is “up to” 1080p, but due to extremely heavy compression, it looks far worse than that. It’s comparable to 720p at best, which means that nearly all fine detail is lost behind huge compression artifacts. On anything larger than a smartphone screen, it looks horrible. That’s on top of connection issues and waiting times that are still plaguing this service.
But…that’s what you’re doing? Streaming the game at 180mbps…
No. Map and weather data is being streamed, cached on your SSD and then the game engine loads it from there into RAM and uses it in combination with other locally stored data and locally performed physics calculation to render the game on your machine. You get an uncompressed, high quality image and low-latency input, freshly baked by your graphics card for your eyes only. At 1080p and 60 fps, that’s already 2.98 Gbit/s per second generated by your GPU and sent to the screen as is. At 1440p, we are at 5.31 Gbit/s and at 4K, 11.94 Gbit/s. DisplayPort can handle up to 20 Gbit/s per lane and use up to four lanes, by the way.
Xbox Cloud Streaming only uses up to 20 Mbit/s (and that’s very optimistic). At the advertised 1080p, this means that only 6.7% as much data as generated on the server is reaching your screen.
The problem with game streaming is that in order to limit latency, they have to compress the image and send it very quickly, 60 times per second, which means they have just 16.7 milliseconds for each frame - and do this for potentially millions of users at the same time. This cannot physically be done at any decent level of quality. It is far easier to send much larger amounts of map data that is not time critical: It doesn’t matter if it’s even a few seconds late on your machine, since the game engine will render something with the data it already has. At worst, you get some building or terrain pop-in, whereas if even a single of the 60 frames required for direct game streaming is being dropped, you’ll immediately notice it as stuttering.
That sounds like a great reason not to buy this game.
If you don’t have the hardware to play this game locally, then I would not recommend it. If you have - and a base Xbox Series S is enough for a reasonable experience, which costs just 300 bucks new or about half as much used - then there is no reason for using the streaming service, unless you absolutely have to play it on your phone at work.
Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.
More than that, actually. I measured well over 250 over large cities. Others have reported more than 300.
That’s not how cache works.
In this case, it does. The cache for this simulator is a disk cache - and it’s completely configurable. You can manually designate its size and which parts of the world it’ll permanently contain. There’s also a default rolling cache (also on SSD - this program doesn’t even support hard drives), which does get overwritten over time.
Small clarification: Satellite imagery is only used where higher quality aerial photography isn’t available. For cities with full photogrammetry, a plane needs to fly over the whole area twice (the second time at 90 degrees relative to the first pass) in order to capture buildings from all sides.
As the title suggests: I’ve had it with open worlds with dozens of things to do and checklists to complete. What are your favorite, delightfully simple, linear games?...
I’m currently playing through this game. At one point, it totally hit me that the non-linear structure and even the way secrets are scattered throughout the world is very reminiscent of Super Mario 64.
Yes, exactly! Coming from one of the best-made mindless game series to essentially gaming high art is quite the transformation. There has always been a lot of talent at Kroteam, but I’m glad they have finally found their true calling.
The small handful of nods to Serious Sam in The Talos Principle are quite amusing, by the way. I almost got a heart attack from suddenly hearing the sound of the headless kamikaze…
Gotta finally make it through The Witcher 1 first and then play The Witcher 2. The first game in the series is so rough around the edges (even after many patches) that this is easier said than done. I hate jumping into the middle of a game series due to the fear of missing out on references and character backstories, which is why I’m torturing myself like this.
The troubles I went through to play this game with keyboard and mouse in the past. My first attempt involved an Xbox One X hooked up to the same monitor as my PC, streaming the game to the PC over local network, only to then use a specialized piece of incredibly janky software for just this game that would translate keyboard and mouse input into Xbox controller commands. Start everything up, switch the screen over to the Xbox (so that I would have full image quality) and I had a somewhat tolerable experience. I kept auto-aim enabled though.
It was about equivalent to, although more stable and performant, than running emulators and remapping the controls of those, which also required special tools.
It’s very impressive how well the assets hold up at higher resolutions. You can’t say this about many games from that generation. Landscape rendering and design in particular was a whole generation ahead of the competition.
Development of this game was highly troubled, to the point that the relatives of the developers working on it held a rally in protest in front of Rockstar San Diego’s office to decry the abysmal working conditions taking a toll on their families. I’ve heard one developer describing RDR’s code base as “spaghetti code” and a miracle that it works at all, which is likely what prevented it from being ported to other platforms for so long.
You should though. This is still one of the best open world games of all time. It’s about as close to flawless as a game this old can be and it holds up incredibly well.
Edit: It’s also far, far less cluttered than modern open world games, which means that the content there is has far more meaning and impact due to fewer shiny trinkets and pointless map markers distracting the player every ten meters.
I don’t disagree. I used to remove the DRM of games I bought on disc way back when, just so that I didn’t have to insert those discs into my PC any time I wanted to play.
Test Drive Unlimited 1 (2006) - but not the flashy “next-gen” version for PS3, Xbox 360 or PC. Instead, I’m replaying the somewhat obscure PS2 port, using an emulator this time around. TDU was a remarkable achievement at the time, having a full-scale recreation of the entire island of Oahu, with the entire real-world road network to be explored online with other players at the time. There’s nothing scaled down here, unlike in most videogames, which means you get about 1600 km or 1000 miles of roads, from city streets over coastal straights to twisty mountain roads. It’s not just the quantity that is amazing, but also the quality, with tons of elevation changes keeping these roads interesting. Buildings and other track-side detail are less close to the real world, but since I’m here for racing, not sightseeing, this isn’t bothering me too much.
You would think that having such an enormous world world would make this exclusive to the then most powerful systems at the time, but they actually managed to port all of Oahu, with no reduction in size, to both PS2 and PSP. Sacrifices had to be made, for obvious reasons. Visuals suffered the most, but you still get an enormous draw distance, far beyond what would have been necessary at the original resolution, cars with 3D interiors (not on PSP), tons of geometric detail and realistic reflections that look better than in most other PS2 games. The landscape is very sparse though, especially in terms of geometric and texture detail (and on top of that, most non-car textures aren’t just low-res, but also terrible from an artistic standpoint), but the game still throws just enough detail at the player that it looks remarkably close to the big version, especially when you’re racing past things at high speed. There are other cuts that were likely made due to a lack of time instead of hardware restrictions, like a few missing cars here and there, all motorcycles, some minor event types, walking around interiors and all character customization, most of which is fairly inconsequential however. Really the biggest issue this version has is that the GPS is persistently trying to send you into oncoming traffic during free-roam due to it not taking one-way streets into account, which can lead to both frustration and fun, depending on your mindset.
If you’re still reading, you might be asking yourself why I would torture myself with PS2-era visuals when I could instead play the much prettier PC version that also runs at more than 30 fps without hacks and has more content and immersion. The reason is simple and it’s not nostalgia (since my first contact with this game back in 2008 was with the PC version): For some reason (likely because they are running on entirely different engines), the handling model is completely different and actually better on PS2 and PSP. It’s a bouncy, yet believable simcade model that feels remarkably close to Gran Turismo 2 (if not quite as good - it’s 90% there). Since that game is still the pinnacle of simcade handling in my opinion, this is just about the highest praise I can think of for a racing game. The way cars grip the road, how vastly different front and mid-engine cars behave and the way vehicles react to sudden changes in elevation in particular is night and day between the two. The big version’s most glaring issue in my opinion and one that carried over to the fascinatingly flawed sequel is that its handling never achieved a similarly comfortable compromise between simulation and arcade as the otherwise downgraded ports.
TDU 1 PS2, even with its remarkable online features long gone, remains a fun, accessible racing game with lots of meaningful content in short, accessible bursts, with the majority of races are less than five minutes long. Fun driving, fast and logical progression (unlike whatever the hell Solar Crown is torturing players with) and a neat variety of licensed vehicles in a believable real-world location keep it relevant even today. I can’t recommend it enough. If the main appeal of TDU is the fantasy of owning cars and houses all over Hawaii though, I would recommend playing the big version instead (and the sequel), since they are simply more immersive in this regard. They almost feel like games that in this day and age would be perfect for VR.
Were you still playing Starfield when the DLC came out or did you continue your old save game? I’m asking, because while I enjoyed the main game when it released (got something like 110 hours out of it), I haven’t touched it since and I wonder how easy it is to get back into.
I know LazerPig and his whole persona might be a bit of an acquired taste, but he’s making some excellent points here, especially near the end, when he goes on a bit of a deep dive into the corporate culture of gaming’s favorite punching bag right now.
Sooo, since I have you as an enthusiast here: The only Silent Hill I’ve ever played was Shattered Memories way back when (I actually have a rare pre-release press copy). Clever game and equally scary. Which game should I pick up first if I wanted to seriously get into this series? This new remake of Silent Hill 2? The original Silent Hill? Shattered Memories again?
Random trivia; VR is so 90s 🤪 - this is a photo of an offer for a en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear for ~500USD in 1997. Apparently it was compatible with games like Mech Warrior 2 and did already feature stuff like head tracking for compatible games.
Ahh… Pearl. Home of every kind of future landfill fodder disguised as tech (and even some legitimate products), dubious feature lists and even more dubious included bonuses for almost 30 years. At least the cover girls aren’t dressed like discount Playmates anymore.
I like how on this page they aren’t specifying the “car racing game” and “full version of well known flight simulator” packed in with the “Multi-Gamestation^Plus”. I think I can hear the creaking of this thing’s cheap, hard plastic through space and time. It seems like the VR headset and 3D glasses weren’t shipping enough units, given that this is at least the second time they discounted them:
Das war knapp ein Jahr bevor ich mich ernsthaft angefangen habe, mit dem Thema zu beschäftigen, aber um dir ein paar Anhaltspunkte zu geben: 10 DM im Jahre 1997 entsprechen 8,39 € heute. Die Preise für die Joysticks, Gamepads und Lenkräder entsprechen grob den Preisen, an die ich mich erinnere (wobei ich selbst als Kind nie ein Gamepad für 15 DM gekauft hätte - das konnte nichts taugen). Gerade Lenkräder waren trotz niedriger Qualität (Force-Feedback war selten und die Verarbeitungsqualität dürftig) generell sehr teuer zu der Zeit. Die Spiele sind fast alle zwei Jahre alt (Pearl war und ist eine Resterampe) und entsprechend etwas reduziert im Vergleich zum Neupreis. Wenn ich mich recht erinnere, fing die Software-Pyramide erst im Jahr darauf an, den Preis von älteren PC-Spielen deutlich nach unten zu treiben, entsprechend können das durchaus normale Preise sein.
Das VR-Headset war zu dem Zeitpunkt ebenfalls zwei Jahre auf dem Markt, ziemlich lausig (263x230 pro Auge waren selbst 1995 nicht der Brüller), die Firma dahinter bankrott und das Gerät entsprechend stark reduziert, aber immer noch kostspielig. Es gab freilich keine Alternative für Heimnutzer. Ich konnte keine Preise von anderen Händlern aus dem Jahr finden, entsprechend kann ich dir nicht sagen, ob das ein gutes Angebot war. Der Rabatt ist aber echt.
Außerdem war anders als heute die teure Hardware sehr schnell veraltet: Der schnellste Prozessor im Jahre 1997 lief mit 500MHz, aber nur zwei Jahre später wurde die Gigahertz-Grenze durchbrochen - und Software, gerade Spiele, neigte viel eher als heute dazu, relativ neue Hardware vorauszusetzen. Schönes Beispiel: Dieser High-end PC von 1997 für 6666 DM hat einen 500 MHz Prozessor, 64 MB RAM und eine 4 GB Festplatte. Wir haben 2001 unseren ersten PC gekauft, für ca. 1800 DM: 1,3 GHz, 128 MB RAM, eine richtige (wenn auch lausige) Grafikkarte in Form einer Geforce 2MX und 10x so viel Festplattenspeicher.
Was ich damit sagen will: OK-Preise für Technik im Jahre 1997 waren immer noch viel Moos.
It’s from a livestream and then saw at least another additional generation of compression when IGN reuploaded it again. This upload from Epic themselves is ever so slightly sharper and less desaturated (if my eyes are not deceiving me), but it’s still only 1080p:
This is so strange to hear. I loved Frostpunk, but found it to be the very opposite: Far too easy and forgiving, which made the finale in particular, as the music swells up dramatically and the storm reaches its peak, feel kind of anticlimactic, because everyone was well-fed and warm(ish) in my settlement on my first attempt of playing it. Not one person froze or starved to death, no kids were sent into the mines and we most certainly didn’t serve a 19th century spin on Soylent Green.
I know this sounds like I’m bragging, but I think the reason why this game felt so trivially easy to me is that I grew up with far more complex, challenging and punishing city builders, like Caesar 3, Pharaoh, The Settlers 2, 3 and 4, Anno 1602 and 1503, etc. I must have played many hundreds of hours of Caesar 3 alone, watching city after city succumb to fires, pestilence, barbarians and unrest until I figured out how to deal with these issues. There are so many more variables and difficult decisions in these games compared to Frostpunk, despite their idyllic presentation. Frostpunk’s core city building mechanics suffer from the very idea the narrative and the few scripted decisions aim to avoid: Pretty much every problem the player has to face when building the city has an ideal and obvious solution (if you know your city builders). It’s more of a puzzle game than an actual city builder. A very pretty and atmospheric one, which is why I enjoyed the brief campaign, but still.
I hope this encourages you to pick it up again. It may seem difficult at first glance, but once you figure it out, you can cruise your way through it with little effort and spend most of your time looking at the pretty graphics, waiting for the next scripted event.
Seems to me like this studio never actually closed. Either way, this is at least as funny as Ubisoft’s and Sony’s dreadful live-service games flopping hard.
The limited-time demo (link for the lazy) has no DRM, so all you need to do to preserve it beyond its expiration date is copy the folder it’s installed to somewhere else. This works with most limited-time demos on Steam....
In order for Sony to sell the game again and a PS5 (or PS5 Pro) to you - or at least, in a couple of years, the remaster to those who bought the original PC port. There are still about twice as many PS4 than PS5 consoles due to a lack of both exclusives and actual reasons to switch over to the newer system. It doesn’t help that more and more people are realizing that one should replace any mention of “the economy” in the media with “rich people’s yacht money”, given how little average people are benefiting from it anymore, which means disposable income is down. The PS4, despite being almost 11 years old now and still relying on a mechanical HDD (unless you upgrade it), is simply “good enough” in the eyes of many. Microsoft has the same issue, of course, except from a much weaker position in the market. The law of diminishing returns makes newer consoles a hard sell.
At the same time, PC gaming is highly accessible, PC hardware is lasting longer for gaming than ever before (in large part due to the longevity of the previous console generation keeping hardware requirements of most multiplatform games in check) and now that former exclusives are finding their way over at a reliable pace, there are fewer reasons for those that are primarily playing on PC to get a console just for the exclusives. As fantastic as Astrobot looks and as much as I appreciate the return of the classic 3D platformer with physics and shiny new graphics, it won’t make me purchase a PS5 any time soon or ever.
Sony is still producing both PS4 and PS4 Pro (whereas Microsoft discontinued both Xbox One consoles four years ago; they are still supporting the previous gen though), games are still being developed for them, despite first party studios having switched over to PS5 by now. Third party developers who were once happy about the low number of hardware variations they had to deal with now have to handle up to nine different systems if they want to release a game on all currently supported games consoles (ten when Switch 2 comes out) - plus PC and Steam Deck, which might just as well be another console as far as developers are concerned. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen cross-gen games that aren’t just yearly sports titles being made for this long into a new generation at such a large scale. We certainly haven’t had such a wide variety of systems since the early home computer era, even if their architectures and capabilities are much more similar now than they were back then.
Quite a few people appear to be playing this game and its sequel for the photo mode, which isn’t surprising, given that the gameplay is nothing special, contrary to the visuals.
Hardware Unboxed: 6 Years of Ray Tracing - Part 1: On vs. Off 37 Game Comparison (youtu.be) angielski
Valve won't sacrifice battery life to deliver a more powerful Steam Deck 2 (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
need helpbuiltding a PC, not sure where to ask
So, I have a not so unique problem. I want to build a PC with decent power and good Linux support but local parts are hard to get and importing is a mess....
[Official Art] Tourniquet Promo Art - Tomb Raider angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/14448921...
Subnautica 2 - Teaser Trailer (youtu.be) angielski
This looks amazing!...
PC Gamer: The top 100 PC games (www.pcgamer.com)
Quite a good list, although without any real surprises, except for the cheeky inclusion of a recent fan-made PC port. I’m glad Kerbal Space Program is on it, but a few other personal favorites (and candidates for best game of all time) are absent, like The Talos Principle, BeamNG.drive, NEO Scavenger, World of Goo, Mafia,...
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of internet bandwidth while in flight — equivalent to 81GB of data per hour (www.tomshardware.com)
Recommend me your favorite linear games! angielski
As the title suggests: I’ve had it with open worlds with dozens of things to do and checklists to complete. What are your favorite, delightfully simple, linear games?...
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How Optimizations made Mario 64 SLOWER (youtu.be) angielski
One of the worst reviewed Tomb Raider games [Angel of Darkness] is getting the remastered treatment, and I am here for it (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Which unplayed game in your library are you most looking forward to playing eventually? angielski
Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare Coming to PC October 29 - Rockstar Games (www.rockstargames.com)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 6th
Late thread this week, sorry bout that....
Skull & Bones: a rant (youtu.be) angielski
I know LazerPig and his whole persona might be a bit of an acquired taste, but he’s making some excellent points here, especially near the end, when he goes on a bit of a deep dive into the corporate culture of gaming’s favorite punching bag right now.
Silent Hill 2 (2024) Review Thread
Game Information...
VR is so 90s
Random trivia; VR is so 90s 🤪 - this is a photo of an offer for a en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear for ~500USD in 1997. Apparently it was compatible with games like Mech Warrior 2 and did already feature stuff like head tracking for compatible games.
'None of this makes any sense': Amazon's latest MMO import is a localization disaster (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I really don’t care about MMOs, especially not Korean MMOs, but this is a very entertaining read.
Unreal Engine 5.5 Megalights - Tech Demo [Video 5:49] (www.youtube.com) angielski
Digital Foundry: Tiny Glade PC - Beautiful RT Visuals - 60FPS on a GTX 1060! (www.youtube.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 29th
Whatcha all playing?...
The Day Before studio returns from the dead and asks for a 'second chance': 'From now on, our development and marketing will be based on the principle of honesty' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Seems to me like this studio never actually closed. Either way, this is at least as funny as Ubisoft’s and Sony’s dreadful live-service games flopping hard.
90s classic Little Big Adventure's lovely looking remake is out in November - And there's a limited-time demo on Steam (www.eurogamer.net)
The limited-time demo (link for the lazy) has no DRM, so all you need to do to preserve it beyond its expiration date is copy the folder it’s installed to somewhere else. This works with most limited-time demos on Steam....
Horizon Zero Dawn Dev Addresses Criticism Over Aloy’s Remastered Look (questalerts.com) angielski