Not sure about other companies, but at the one I work at, recommending a training doesn’t mean a whole lot except “this might be relevant to your work”. For example, in this case an employee expressed concerns of being discriminated against, so it makes sense to recommend training on how to identify and address those kinds of problems (even if no such situation is actually occurring) so that you’re better prepared to handle it.
This is how the software engineering industry works. It’s actually games that are the outlier here, with their big releases each time a sequel is made.
More visibility would definitely help here though, odd that they don’t put a banner on the store given how big of a release this is for many players.
Framework is also releasing their GPU modules. Hopefully someone finds a way to make that work with a handheld as well, although the form factor of the module might not be handheld-friendly.
I had no expectations going in (wasn’t planning to play it) and came out having fun. I don’t know what expectations you or anyone else had, but maybe those expectations are what ruined the game. I don’t think anyone’s claiming the game is perfect (anyone who is probably is trolling), but it’s pretty dismissive of its strengths for people to say it’s unplayable (unless you legit can’t run it, which is fair). If all you focus on is what the game doesn’t do well, then you might as well only ever play perfect masterpieces because all other games will be a disappointment. If the price is a concern, it will probably go on sale eventually anyway, assuming you don’t find alternatives before then.
I do think there are a lot of flaws with the game, but those flaws have already been elaborated in great depth by others. Despite those flaws, game is still fun and has a lot of room for mods to come in and make it better.
Ah, most laptops these days ship with an internal NVMe, so that’s what I assumed you were comparing against. A USB 3.2 gen 2x2 enclosure will vastly outperform a SATA SSD I believe, again assuming it’s the only device connected to your controller.
For me it’s pretty much any competitive multiplayer game. I don’t dislike the games, I usually dislike the communities. That was one of the big things that turned me away from Overwatch (the first one) for example, the gameplay was fun but I just wish I could choose who I was playing with.
Needless to say, I stick with singleplayer games these days, or at least less competitive multiplayer games. Games with good local multiplayer, like SSBU, are also pretty fun when I can get a group together.
You also have to be careful with what other USB devices you plug into your computer (both internal and external). The spec is 40 Gb/s for the controller, but ports often share the same controller and the bandwidth will be split between connected devices. For some computers, this could mean that 3 or more ports should be completely blocked off when plugging your gaming USB drive in, at least while playing the game. If your PC only has a single USB controller, I guess you’ll also need bluetooth peripherals.
Compared to a HDD, yeah USB 3.0 speeds aren’t too bad, but most laptops being released these days use an NVMe for storage (or possibly even a soldered drive). My comparison was around what you’d expect in a laptop purchased in the past year or so.
For your partner’s laptop, getting better read performance from an external drive doesn’t surprise me, but there are also limits to this. Games are starting to support DirectStorage, which allows the GPU to directly read and decompress assets from the hard drive. This won’t work with an external drive (at least from my understanding), so those games will likely fallback to much slower methods of loading assets if they support the laptop at all. This is also not taking into account the other hardware on the laptop, which might have been excellent for the time, but with how much CPUs and GPUs have advanced over the past 4 years, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re starting to reach their limits with today’s major releases.
USB 3.2 gen 2x2’s theoretical speeds cap out at 20Gb/s (or 2.5GB/sec). It’s certainly a performance improvement compared to USB 3.0, but still doesn’t quite meet the performance of an internal NVMe. If your PC supports Thunderbolt, you get double the bandwidth (so 5GB/sec) which does match what some slower PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives can handle. This is of course assuming you’re comparing to a NVMe, a SATA drive won’t come close to these speeds but I believe most laptops these days use NVMe drives.
Regardless, if you’re loading games off a USB 3.2 gen 2x2 interface, and assuming you’re using a single drive to a single controller (keep in mind that performance is split between connected devices per controller, and PCs often only have a couple controllers at most to manage all the ports), your read performance is probably more than enough.
Read speeds from a USB stick are incomparably slower than most hard drives. The USB 3.0 specification has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 5Gb/sec (~600MB/s). By comparison, my PCIe 4.0 NVMe (I believe most laptops these days come with NVMe storage? Could be wrong) has a read performance, reported by CrystalDiskMark, of 7.3GB/s (that’s a big B, not a little b, and looking at 1MiB sequential 1 thread 8 queues). In other words, my hard drive’s measured performance is 12x faster than the theoretical maximum throughput of a USB drive. This also doesn’t take into account things like DirectStorage, which some games have started to adopt.
I think realistically games should consider separating the higher quality assets from the low quality assets intended for lower performance systems, and make them separate downloads. HD assets could be a free “DLC” on Steam, for example.
Wife absolutely loves BG3 to the point she ordered some 5e books to better understand the systems. She went in knowing nothing about the lore, the systems, or anything and it quickly became her favorite game of all time.
I have yet to jump in though. Played about an hour, but I feel like I need a good block of time I can dedicate to getting acquainted with the game before I can really start to enjoy it.
You really thing not referencing them or making any content related to any of their IPs will prevent them from sending a C&D? They’d probably send one out to everyone if it didn’t cost them any money to do so. God forbid you hire some plumbers, wear a red shirt, or draw something in the shape of a star.
Not a dumb take at all, it’d be awesome if they did. Unfortunately there are likely contracts or business reasons preventing them from doing so, or code shared between the 360 and current gens that they want to keep proprietary. Still, with MS open sourcing more and more projects over time, I’d love to see it.
I think the issue was it wasn’t clear what items were available to craft. If I had known that axes, pickaxes, shovels, etc. were all in the game then it might have been easier, but even making the crafting table (2x2 wood planks) wasn’t very intuitive. Honestly, there wasn’t much of a clear path forward with most of the recipes. Advancements and the recipe book later helped a lot, but it was pretty hard to play during beta and alpha without the wiki or a mod like TMI.
Then there’s redstone. I feel like even today, redstone is completely unexplained in the game, and while you can kind of figure it out on your own, many of the intricacies are left unexplained (repeater locking, timings, comparators, how redstone is passed/not passed through different kinds of blocks, gates, etc). Without taking some time to learn about digital logic and basic computer engineering concepts on your own, redstone is basically magic dust that does a thing when put in a specific configuration.
Also, being pedantic, but shears weren’t added until beta 1.7. Wool dropped from sheep before that. That being said, alpha had a lot of really weird mob drops (why did zombies drop feathers?) and there wasn’t much use for wool anyway beyond decorative purposes and hiding doorways with paintings until beds were added in beta 1.3.