MentalEdge

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

Ghostrunner was fantastic. Cathartic AF movement. Glad to get more.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

While I’m no fan of paid sponsorships holding back good games, this is untrue.

Neither nvidia nor amd block their partner devs from supporting competing tech in their games. They just won’t help them get it working, and obviously the other side won’t either, since that dev is sponsored. There are some games out there that support both, some of them even partnered.

So yes, it’s bullshit. But it’s not “literally paid” bullshit. Bethesda could have gone the extra mile, and didn’t.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

There was talk about making “steam deck optimized” versions of games that would ditch high resolution assets as they would be pointless on a 720p display. Nothing seems to have materialized.

That said, there are reasons why games are taking more and more space. Game assets cannot be compressed the same way image files intended for humans can. They have to be stored losslessly, or there WILL be rendering artefacts. And a material or texture in a game is composed of a lot more layers than just an RGB image (normal maps, specular maps, material maps, depth maps). And modern game-engines can pre-bake a lot of things that otherwise would have to be rendered in real-time. That pre-baked render data has to be stored, preferably in high resolution to avoid aliasing, and shipped along with all the other game files.

Games aren’t ballooning in size for no reason. Stuff like pre-baking essentially trades storage for the ability to get the same looks for less processing. More data layers in textures and materials allows rendering to take shortcuts in how the appearance of a surface is calculated, etc. etc. etc.

But none of this would prevent the option to not download these resource files for ALL detail levels. If you’re not gonna run a game on ultra textures, you don’t need those files sitting on your drive.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I’m fully behind the idea that you should be able to opt for not downloading the biggest texture files and 3D assets, if you’re gonna play at low settings, anyway.

But it’s worth noting that “optimizing” the file sizes of high-fidelity games isn’t really possible. You can’t compress textures or 3D assets the same way you might an RGB image. Game textures contain a lot more layers than just color, in modern games they can contain material, depth and specularity maps, just to name a few. And that’s before considering any accompanying bre-baked lighting data that entire levels may come with, which trades in the need to real-time render stuff for doing it in advance and storing how something is supposed to look, and shipping it alongside the game.

None of this can be easily compressed. It has to be retained losslessly, or you risk rendering artefacts.

Also, most game distribution services will send you an AGGRESSIVELY compressed (as in packed as a whole, using great amounts of CPU to pack it smaller without data loss) format, which your PC/console unpacks as it downloads. They too have every reason to save bandwidth.

But even then, you seldom see data savings of more than 10-30%. There just aren’t that many corners to cut.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Absolutely.

But I did want to make the point that there aren’t as many corners to cut as some might think.

And while lossless compression of course exists, better compression is usually also a processing trade-off. You can use more storage and less processing, or use more processing, and less storage.

Compression is not a magic tool that reduces file size for free, its doing math to store some given data using less bits, which then has to be done in reverse to get at the original data.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

!armored_core

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s not unusual. Or do you mean vram? Still not surprising with the detail level in the game.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ve felt this, too. But actually I just hadn’t figured out the right response to any given attack.

Manage your EN right, and everything is avoidable.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean, there are actual ACvAC fights, too.

Though I do wish the arena AIs weren’t mental three-year-olds. They go down like wet paper.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Arena should have been increasingly demanding fights that each require a unique build to conquer. Or even better, each fight should have made you use a pre-set loadout, so you’d have to explore and learn new builds, and that knowledge could then be carried into designing mechs for the campaign missions.

I bet theres a lot of people out there not changing it up at all, missing out on an a lot that the game has to offer.

Ideally each one could have made you adapt to and learn new mechanics.

But it seems each one is just a randomized loadout or a character from the story, with the exact same AI slapped on.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

It’s just an idea I had from a game design perspective.

Nier: Automata is one game with which I saw a lot of people complain, as the game does nearly nothing to get you to actually experiment with different weapon combinations and plug-in chips, and a lot of people overlook those systems because of it. And hence the experience of some players suffered.

Pre-set loadouts in arenas could have been used to address that design problem by showing players the possibilities.

Although, it wouldn’t necessarily need to be mandatory. Each arena fight could come with a “recommended AC” for countering the opponent, while still allowing players to take in their own mech should they want to. This could have come with the fights being a lot harder as well, making using your own design viable only if you know what you’re doing.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

Ok.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

Don’t overuse dodges, a lot of attacks will miss if you’re just boost-moving around the boss, so save the dodges for stuff that you actually need it for, so you always have EN to spare.

Don’t be afraid to burn your EN on flight when warranted, the spinny thing that the Spider does in its final phase is really easy to avoid if you just fly over it.

Don’t stop doing damage, consider having something that you can use to at least poke at the enemy just enough to keep the stun bar from decaying, so you can build it up to get a stagger. Or switch to weapons that have a high impact stat to build stagger faster.

Don’t sleep on melee weapons. They do MASSIVE damage if you can land the hit.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

Whoa, subscription models hurt smaller games? Whoever could have seen this coming?

Glances at spotify.

No-one could have predicted this!

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

Likely because when the big games weren’t part of it yet, they were getting good payouts.

But as soon as you throw in one elephant into the pool, let alone a dozen, the rest of the swimmers are gonna have a lot less water to swim in.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

In the case of both, how fair it is, depends on payment model. At least spotify is grossly unfair, to the point that there is an entire industry around bot farming plays to drain money from the payment pool.

As for game subscriptions, I’ve not looked into it much, but I know Apple’s service at least is based on hours played, which has resulted in some games on the service attempting to stretch out their playtime using things like mandatory grinding to progress in their games. With this model, developers can literally shoot themselves in the foot financially, by allowing the player to sprint. It’s stupid.

Games can’t be reduced to that simple a value. You can get the same amount of hours out of God of War as you can Binding of Isaac, but their production and purchase costs, are not, and should not, be the same.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

Unfortunately, basically no game on these services, will ever get what a customer paying full price would net them.

The same goes for music. There’s simply less money to go around in the subscription model.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

Right but that has the same problem as video game pricing. Ten bucks is a lot less than it used to be.

And do you listen to just one album a month? I don’t think so.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

https://i.imgflip.com/1wemok.jpg

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

I suspect they may have chosen just the right price. People have paid more than this for controllers that don’t come with a screen attached.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

It’s literally the same price as the dualsense edge. You overestimating the capacity for reason among “console enthusiasts”.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

So what’s your point? That people who will pay this price do exist, or that they don’t?

Because now I feel like you’re trying to claim the former, to argue the latter.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

Again, I’m confused, are you saying there are people who will buy this, or not?

And that’s a subjective and arbitrary claim. It has no logical merit in arguing for or against whether people will consider this thing worth the price.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

Ok. I was confused because then your argument essentially becomes “there are people who will spend a lot of money on their hobbies and professions due to intense emotional investment, but not on this”.

I agree that the device, based on what we know, is dumb as hell, but I am also pretty sure, that a lot of playstation players will buy, and even enjoy, this thing.

I mean, I use my SteamDeck ten meters from my PC, just so I can play on the sofa instead of an office chair for a bit.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

Shadow can definitely look a lot better than this picture suggests.

The biggest advancements in game graphics have not occurred in characters, except for perhaps in terms of animation and subsurface scattering tech.

The main character always gets a disproportionate graphical resource allocation, and we achieved “really damn good” in that category a while ago.

Adam Jensen didn’t look that much better in Mankind Divided, than he did in Human Revolution, but Prague IS SO MUCH MORE DETAILED than Detroit was.

Then there’s efficiency improvements in rendering brought by systems like nanite, material shader improvements, more detailed lighting systems and more efficient ambient occlusion.

Improvements in reverse kinematics is something I’m really excited about, as well.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

My main point is that a headshot of the main character is not a good yardstick. The mc is always going to be rendered with enough oomph to look good, no matter the settings or game generation.

The difference in recent years has been in environment detail and material shading, lightning, things you maybe can’t even enable due to playing on older hardware.

While I agree ray tracing is a total energy hog, that’s not the only area seeing advancement. Rendering pipelines like nanite enable more graphics, AND less power consumption.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

It is. Adam works for the secret underground interpol base in the middle of the city. There are abusive secret societies to dismantle, murder cases to solve, drug rings to bust, corrupt cops to beat up. Mankind Divided is a prime example of making a hub-world medium sized but super detailed, being just as good if not better than huge and full of nothing.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

Another point in favour of new graphics tech, you mentioned you’re worried about artist needing to do more work. As someone who has done 3D work, I can tell you that its actually easier to make something photo-real. The hard part is making it look good within the limitations of a game engine. How to get something that looks just as good, with simpler material shaders and fewer polygons.

Tech like nanite actually eliminates the need for all that work. You can give the game engine the full-quality asset, and it handles all the difficult stuff to render it efficiently. This is why we are now seeing games that look as good as Unrecord coming from tiny new studios like DRAMA.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

!helltaker