There is a “puzzle” in Riven that I got stuck on for hours, just searching the map looking for anything that I had left to do. I couldn’t find any more interactable things that hadn’t been done. Then I looked it up and found it was a door that you had to enter then turn around and close to find the hidden passageway behind it. There was no puzzling value to it being hidden like that, it was something you either simply found or didn’t. I put it down to old-style game design that hadn’t yet learned what not to do in a somewhat open world game.
Honestly this iteration could move the entrance like one metre to the left so it’s not hidden and it would be a better game for it.
The only similar experience I had with Myst was the rail maze. I didn’t notice the audio cue at all so I just mapped out the whole thing on paper by following the left hand wall. I say that because when I was done, I tried following the right hand wall out of curiosity and it was the shortest possible path. It was like a cruel joke on people who say that you can find your way through a maze by following the left hand wall, just because the “left” wall was the way people phrased that concept.
I finished the whole series and it was better designed later on. None of the other games had such notorious sticking points.
I have played through that and I don’t remember that part, did they make it easier to find or something? I’d be shocked if they left it the same, it really sucked.
Actually the 3d thing makes a lot of sense. I had a walk around the new Myst game recently and everything’s location was so much clearer when you weren’t navigating it through static screens.
Did you ever finish it? If not the conclusion of the game was pretty satisfying, and nothing is spoiled by being told about the door thing. It’s actually more memorable for me than the following ones, maybe because I spent so long wandering around in despair. I actually tried replaying it a little while ago but just bounced off the extremely clunky 90s design and the technical limitations. I think this remake will be a good chance to try again, and see the environments rendered nicely.
Yeah, 3 and 4 were where they hit on a really good balance between the pre-rendered graphics and a smooth experience with the skybox-style wraparound images. In V they went to full 3D rendering which was clunky because the computers of the time just weren’t up to it. I think now we’re finally seeing how good these games can look and work in 3D.
Yup, if you’ve played Obduction it’s like that. Full 3d environments made with modern rendering. I tried the latest Myst remake and this one feels like a modern game, although I imagine most of the early 90s design foibles are still there.
I haven’t played many of the other remakes of the original, there have probably been too many, but it’s nice to see the later games getting this treatment.
This is going to be important for maintaining the legacy of old video games.
Like, emulators are fine, but access to recompilation makes it much easier to keep things in a generally useful format.
Honestly one of the reasons I don’t play emulated games much is that the extra step of configuring and running the emulator is a hassle, and sometimes it straight up doesn’t work.
Edit: Anyone who thinks access to the source code is somehow worse than the original executable code, just ask yourself, what is the legacy of say, Doom, for which we have access to the source, versus literally any other closed source game of that era that requires DOSBox to be run? Doom is a meme that “runs on anything” and has a thriving modding community, and it’s hard to think of examples of DOSBox games because you never think about them. Source code is important.
Right, but it’s not just pushing a button to get the recompiled code, there’s still translation work to be done. Crucially, a framerate will need to be chosen, so you can just choose to base the framerate on the processing done.
Sure, the ROM is “original” but I’d argue that accessing the source code - or an analogue to it - is a more fundamental way of archiving the original, since without that source code we don’t have access to how it was originally made.
The point is not that it competes with ROMs or replaces them, but it adds to them and makes the archive that much more complete.
Also for games where emulation doesn’t work or isn’t practical, recompilation can allow us to maintain games that otherwise couldn’t be.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.
You are conflating technology and its benefits with the owning class’s misuse of that technology. Capitalist apologists love to do this because otherwise the crimes of capitalism would have to stand on their own and there would be no defending them.
It’s exactly this conflation that lets people claim that the luddites were entirely anti-technology, but they weren’t. Again this is a lie that has been spread by capitalists to defend their own image.
The luddites were killed and suppressed by the military and the government made industrial sabotage a capital offense, and then slandered them. Maybe if they’d won we’d live in a world where reporters weren’t murdered over the Panama papers for instance.
E: You can scroll down to the dividing line if you want to read the history and not my condescending screed about your ignorance. I suspect you won’t read much of this so I’m putting this note here at the top to let you know that if you don’t read the whole comment then you’ll probably sound like a fool in your reply. I mean that’s already true but like… even moreso. If you don’t like the way I’m talking to you, you can refer yourself to the way you just talked to me.
Okay, so I think you’ve fucked up here. I think that because you seem to think I’m asking you for a demonstration, ie, for sources. But if you actually read my comment carefully you would know that I asked you for a claim. This was me politely asking you to simply say what you mean instead of hiding behind insinuations and vague hand-waving.
And the reason this is a fuck-up is because anyone who actually knew how to understand and source literature on a topic like this would have immediately known the distinction between making a claim, and demonstrating a claim. I have made quite clear claims but not yet demonstrated them. You have not made a single claim that could even be demonstrated, you have just assumed that everybody already agrees with your version to the point that it does not even need to be stated.
I also know it’s a fuck-up because I have heard this fact as a rebuttal of a common misconception several times from a number of trustworthy sources, and before I repeated it I quickly checked to make sure I had it right, and it does appear to be the consensus of historians; I found no evidence of a credible debate on this; nobody is replying to some other side on this; it is uncontroversial.
I said the same thing four different ways there because you do seem to have some trouble following what is being said.
I am now going to go beyond what I originally asked you for and give you some real information, and then after that, if you still feel like it would be a good idea, you can reply. I suspect you won’t want to though, because if you had the information to hand you wouldn’t have protested so hard against me asking for even the most basic stating of your position. You also might have read something and learned that you were wrong, but let’s not expect the moon. I suspect you went so hard because you realised you had nothing and you hoped I would be cowed by your obvious confidence, but I wasn’t. I was in fact somewhat invigorated by it.
The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy
The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.
Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Also because I can see your fingers racing to the keyboard about this: the first article on wikipedia is not the only thing I have read on this, I am simply using it because it is a good overview and starting point, and because it clearly shows just how easy it would have been for you to learn literally a single thing about this topic, but you chose virulent ignorance instead. I have in fact gone beyond wikipedia by giving you an actual source, and you aren’t even there yet. By failing to even state your position, you have refused to enter the arena of discussing facts.
Now, I did mention the Panama papers, and that was a nod to the way that the rich employ violence against their detractors, and perhaps that was a stretch, but I could make the argument to someone interested. I doubt you are.
The problems the Luddites were protesting are more closely related to the modern problem of Fast Fashion, in which vast quantities of extremely poor quality transient clothing is produced and destroyed every single year. It is an economic, ecological and social disaster that ironically employs many many people in the most brutal shop conditions. The “cheap” clothing you championed as the cause of the “flourishing” is exactly the problem that the Luddites feared, and it has not been good for the planet or for people. The horrendous work conditions of the industrial revolution also led to clothing factories where children were employed to crawl under operating machines and were frequently minced by them. This is the kind of barbaric treatment of human beings that the Luddites were against and that the ruling class had them killed to maintain. This sort of thing still happens today, but in far away countries with poor populations that you don’t see. Capitalism hasn’t resulted in plenty, it has resulted in abject poverty for the vast majority of the world’s population so that a small minority can live in luxurious comfort. I assume you don’t think that’s real capitalism or something, but you’d be wrong about that too.
The term Luddite did not come to have its modern meaning until the 1950’s, at which point anyone who had ever known a Luddite was long dead and they were not able to protest the slander, but popular perception is often given by the ruling class, so we get people like you who apparently go off the vibes of the word you’re familiar with and confuse that for actual knowledge.
We haven’t done nothing. There’s Rojava and the EZLN building whole competing systems. There’s loads of people doing mutual aid or building cooperative economic structures all over the world, and those movements are gaining a lot of traction as people are waking up to how shit things are.
You don’t usually hear about all these projects, in the same way you may not notice termites hollowing out a structure until it’s far too late to save it.
I have an urge to buy some of them on steam before they get delisted but don’t want to give any money to wb in the process. The way that apparently devs could just leave or sell/give away the game on other platforms made me think maybe wb doesn’t get a cut of every sale. Does anyone know that for certain?
If their priority is to make a nintendo emulator, they have to think about keeping their lines of communication secure against corporate legal threats, because those lines of communication are basically what software development is.
A bunch of beta QOL improvements are finally on the main branch.
late game spoilersThe last time I played I died trying to get to 64 orb Kolmi. I was at NG+24 or so and some asshole did an RKO from outta nowhere with a circle of transmutation. I had all the more love stacks, but I had a chainsaw on my teleporter wand for rapid fire, and this bastard dropped down from off screen and into the chainsaw, then retaliated against their own stupidity by turning me into a sheep, where I danced about for several agonising seconds on fire before I finally bought it. That was over a year ago. I have since decided that on long runs I need something other than chainsaw to make a rapid fire tele wand.
It’s taken me a while to want to play again, and I really wanted to wait for these improvements before I did.
Edit: I have been trying to make these spoiler tags work and it ain’t happening, folks.
Are these mods to improve things like stability and performance? I’ve found I can only use Yuzu to test out games because it’s impossible to put any real time into them due to crashes.
So I like to use Xbox controllers (doesn’t matter if it’s first- or third-party) because I like the layout, it’s just comfortable to me. However I’ve noticed that on all my controllers in the past few years, the left thumb stick will start to “give out” over the course of a couple months. For instance I’ll be...
A lot of people have mentioned cleaning it out. If you can open it up and clean the potentiometers that are underneath the joysticks, that works best. I use isopropyl alcohol for this, just spray some over the pots and wiggle the stick around for a little while to move the internal wipers and clear away any gunk.
After that I add dielectric grease - I use lithium grease but there are other types - to the potentiometers after the cleaner has dried. This protects against particles and corrosion and extends the lifetime of the potentiometers significantly, and reduces how often you need to do this. It has to be dielectric grease because it is non conductive. Conductive grease will short out the pots and stop them working correctly.
I find the joysticks will last quite a few years after doing this.
I don’t know what people are talking about with how others use the controllers; the speed or violence of movement of the sticks should make no difference to how fast the potentiometers degrade. It’s possible if their kids are using the controllers, they just have dirtier hands and that’s making the difference.
Eventually however the controllers will degrade no matter what. If manufacturers used hall effect sensors or just added grease to the pots to start with, the controllers would last so much longer, which is maybe why they don’t do it.
I don’t know all of the details of this mission, but it seems like they’ve just lowered the lowest point in its orbit - called periapsis - until it sits low enough in the atmosphere to get enough drag that the orbit slowly decays over a decade.
The lowest part of the orbit would only drop a little bit, but the highest part of the orbit woukd reduce more with each orbit. If you do it slowly enough, the orbit would circularise and then it would begin to decay more evenly. As it falls deeper into the atmosphere the orbit would decay faster and faster until it can no longer sustain orbit, and then it falls deeper into the atmosphere and burns up in just a few minutes.
The reason for this I can only guess at - it wouldn’t take a whole lot more fuel to just deorbit all at once. My best guess is that it has something to do with reentering at the lowest possible speed. If you fall from a high orbit and reenter, you have a lot more speed and have to dissipate more energy all at once. It’s possible this increases the risk that the satellite will fail to deobrit, and break up and send pieces off in less predictable orbits. If it breaks up from a low circular orbit, there’s no chance of any parts escaping back into orbit.
The delay is purely about piracy, if I had to guess. It only makes sense if you believe piracy affects sales negatively, but these corporate publishers are incapable of thinking anything else. Their entire business model revolves around artificial gatekeeping, so they simply cannot admit that that whole segment of their work is pointless.
Piracy is a service problem, and releasing a buggy port with enormous delays is bad service. It doesn’t make me want to spend my money with them.
There is the exclusives thing, but I think it goes the other way. The consoles are loss-leaders, meaning they’re manufactured at a loss, then they make their money on game sales. So they need game sales to make up the numbers.
Yes, people buy playstations for the exclusives, because they know there will be many. Also I guess once you buy it you may need to justify the expense with more game purchases.
Now Sony is the publisher, so they get money either way. It may be that the cut is apportioned differently for PS sales, maybe the PS division needs to protect their numbers, but I know games companies in the past have talked about their reluctance to release on PC because of piracy, and the attitude seems to me to be that PC users need to be taught a lesson.
Personally I think the whole walled garden ecosystem is bullshit and in an ideal world we’d all be running open source software on open source hardware, and the only new hardware you’d get would be for performance upgrades, or because you wanted a handheld or a second machine. There wouldn’t be this situation where people buy three separate machines just because some people decided their proprietary games would only work on their proprietary machines. It’s absurdly wasteful.
Piracy is important to protect the legacies of material for exactly this reason. It used to be just that items physically degraded, now they’re being deliberately removed.
Since I’ve started routinely pirating shows I no longer have to ask the question, “is this show available?” Because if I’ve heard of it then someone has uploaded it.
EDIT: If it’s true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there’s definitely a case here. I didn’t understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.
I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…
claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.”
…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.
This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.
Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.
To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.
Copyright is a tool that gives creators the ability to commercialize their work. That its spirit, nothing more.
That’s what we are told is the purpose because otherwise we wouldn’t accept its existence. In practice it doesn’t work that way. The persistent story is that artists get very little compensation whilst whichever large entity is acting as the middleman for their copyright - often owning it outright despite doing nothing to make it - takes the vast majority of the profit.
It is a tool of corporate control, nothing more. Without copyright there would be no way a middleman could insert themselves and ripoff artists, take their money, and compromise their work with financially-driven studio meddling.
And the idea that the “spirit” of copyright is for artists, that completely falls apart when you understand that modern copyright terms exist almost entirely to profit one company’s IP - Disney is just delaying the transfer of Mickey Mouse into the public domain. That’s why copyright is now lifetime +75 years, or something ridiculous like that. That is not for artists to be compensated. Mickey Mouse isn’t going to be unmade when that happens. If Disney can’t operate as a business with all the time and market share they’ve built then they should just go under. There’s no justification for it beyond corporate greed.
Also without copyright there couldn’t be monopolies like Disney buying Fox, Marvel and Star Wars. That is an absurd situation and should be an indication that antitrust is effectively gone.
And as for artists getting paid, we’re transitioning more and more to a patron model, where people are paid just to create, and release most of their work for free with some token level of patron interaction. You don’t need copyright for that.
They bargain their rights because they’re eager for a shot at money. It is very hard breakout without one, if that’s your goal.
It’s incredible that you can say this and not understand that this is exactly why the relationship is coercive and gets abused.
Plenty of horrible things are legal; that is not the measure of what is good. Our entire economic system exists to benefit those with money. It’s always been that way. Can you guess who it was that decided we should have a political system that gives power to people based on how much money they have? It wasn’t poor people. Capitalism inherently drives towards monopolies.
I did the inverted vertical mouse for ages for the same reason, and then one day it just stopped working for me. I think I’d tried other systems and come back to my PC and it suddenly felt wrong. Then I went to normal mouse controls and discovered aiming was more natural and smoother, and I’d probably been sabotaging my aiming by forcing an extra layer of abstraction into it.
It’s weird, I thought of it like leaning back & forward to make it intuitive, and our brains can learn to make just about any adjustment with enough practice.
But IRL if you’re physically pointing at one spot and want to move your point of aim up and to to the right for instance, you move your hand up and to the right, just like the uninverted mouse movement. So you’re spending time IRL learning one movement and time in games learning the opposite movement. I think that’s why inverted was so much worse even though I did it that way from the start.
But you’re not pointing in the games. You’re moving the view/camera.
You are doing both. They are inherently coupled in this format. But in reality you are not leaning with your hand, you are pointing with your hand, and so the closest 1:1 mapping between movements is uninverted mouse controls.
Also I don’t know what “roll to the left” means here at all. You’d need to draw a diagram or something if you wanted me to understand that part. Your words alone are not enough to convey it.
If you want to blame someone, blame the producers, not the devs. They don’t want to be pushed to strict deadlines with artificially limited budgets and whatever enshittification method the execs bought into this week. They want to make good games, but often they work under stifling conditions.
By that logic, “You don’t have a contract with me, therefore you can’t own my intellectual property,” should also apply, no?
Like, if your intellectual property was given away on the basis of an ongoing royalty payment, and Disney decides not to honour that contract, then they can’t keep the IP.
The recently promised "changes" to Unity's controversial new per-install fee plan for developers could include hard limits based on a company's total revenue and developer self-reporting of installation numbers, according to a new report.
Honestly at this point just the peace of mind of working in a FOSS engine and not under a corporation that can do this whenever is enough to motivate me to learn godot. I’ve got some prototypes I can port into that engine to learn on, it might even be some good motivation to start integrating them into a single project.
Oh sure, if you count the emulator libraries I’ve installed on a retropie in bulk then this number changes, that’s every NES, SNES, N64 and SEGA Mega Drive game ever, but I mean games I specifically sourced. I find if I compare full price individual game purchases versus individually pirated games, the pirated ones still have a better hit rate.
I guess I’m talking about launching and trying the game, rather than finishing it. Like once I start playing, the chances I continue are mostly about the game itself, and probably more about my mood at the time than I’d like to admit. I’m talking about games languishing completely untouched. As someone that’s been collecting a steam library for 20 years, I’ve got well over 1000 games and I haven’t played even close to half of them. I play almost all of the games I pirate. I’ve only started doing that a lot in the last year or two, but even in that time I’ve bought a bunch of stuff I don’t play. The pirated ones just call to me stronger.
I used to avoid it too, but I was less worried about the bugs and more about possible viruses. When I realised there was a crack scene with certain uploaders that are trusted by the community I lost a lot of that worry.
Yeah, I remember the Duke Nukem Episode 1 shareware, one of the first games I remember playing actually. There were others but this was the first one that really gelled as a functioning game. A lot of the others were sort of incomprehensible to my small child brain. It’s wild that I can remember these old games then just search them and they’re immediately playable with no setup needed.
Oh well, I should’ve said “acquired” there. I mean I bought it on sale, then forgot about it because I wasn’t jazzed to play it right then and there. With pirated games, the act of acquisition is the download, so they are generally available when I’m thinking about them.
Riven | Official Launch Trailer | Available June 25th (www.youtube.com) angielski
Trackmania 20th Anniversary: Desert Update Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
How to port any N64 game to the PC in record time (arstechnica.com) angielski
Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" (lemmy.world) angielski
Does wb get any money from sales of adult swim published games on steam? angielski
I have an urge to buy some of them on steam before they get delisted but don’t want to give any money to wb in the process. The way that apparently devs could just leave or sell/give away the game on other platforms made me think maybe wb doesn’t get a cut of every sale. Does anyone know that for certain?
Discord Shuts Down Servers for Switch Emulators Suyu & Sudachi; Disables Lead Developers Account As Well (www.theverge.com) angielski
Discord👏Is👏Not👏A👏Replacement👏For👏 Websites
Noita - Noita Epilogue 2 Update (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu (news.bloomberglaw.com) angielski
Nintendo’s full case filing...
How Do You Deal With Thumb Stick Drift? (lemmy.world) angielski
So I like to use Xbox controllers (doesn’t matter if it’s first- or third-party) because I like the layout, it’s just comfortable to me. However I’ve noticed that on all my controllers in the past few years, the left thumb stick will start to “give out” over the course of a couple months. For instance I’ll be...
Big, doomed satellite seen from space as it tumbles towards a fiery reentry on Feb. 21 (photos) (www.space.com) angielski
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition comes to PC on March 21 (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Microsoft Wants Game Pass On PlayStation, Nintendo, And "Every Screen" Possible (www.gamespot.com) angielski
No way Playstation or Nintendo agrees to this, but hopefully this means Linux/Steam Deck support is on the table…? Maybe?
Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
"The Next Subnautica" aims to deliver underwater survival spooks in early 2025 (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Cities Skylines 2 dev stuck to launch date despite “potential kicking” (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Hatoful Boyfriend creator: "btw I’ve got no royalty payment for Hatoful Boyfriend from Epic since they acquired Mediatonic back in spring 2021" (twitter.com) angielski
Report: Unity considering revenue-based fee caps, self-reported install numbers (arstechnica.com) angielski
The recently promised "changes" to Unity's controversial new per-install fee plan for developers could include hard limits based on a company's total revenue and developer self-reporting of installation numbers, according to a new report.
Is anyone else like 10 times more likely to play a game they pirated versus one they bought? angielski
I can’t explain it, something about the freedom of acquisition takes the pressure off and lets me just launch it and try it out....