Does Crusader Kings 3 have African leaders enabled or does it come as a DLC?
The base game has a notoriously difficult achievement involving starting as a specific female tribal chief uniting “all of Africa” under one reformed pagan religion. Scare quotes because the map doesn’t go further south than approximately the Sahel, not all Africa is playable. Whole of the Americas, Oceania, as well as much of east Asia (incl. China and Japan) are missing. There’s probably going to be map extensions (and China and Japan will be DLCs with lots of custom mechanics) but the original map is already bigger than CKII ever got, and India was playable from the start, with custom mechanics and all.
4x splitscreen needs approximately 4x VRAM with modern approaches to graphics: If you’re looking at something sufficiently different than another player there’s going to be nearly zero data in common between them, and you need VRAM for both sets. You go ahead and make a game run in 1/4th of its original budget.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game.
How to tell me you’re not a gamedev without telling me you’re not a gamedev. You don’t just turn a knob and the game uses less VRAM, a 4x budget difference is a completely new pipeline, including assets.
Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
Speaking about redoing mesh assets. Textures are easy, especially if they already exist in a higher resolution which will be the case for a 2015 game, but producing slightly higher-res meshes from the original sculpts is manual work. Topology and weight-painting at minimum.
So, different proposal: Don’t do it yourself. Scrap together a couple of millions to have someone do it for you.
The general point still stands, though, you can’t do the same thing with a 2015 game. On the flipside you should be able to run the 2004 game in different VMs on the same box, no native support required.
Output resolution has negligible impact on VRAM use: 32M for a 4-byte buffer for 4k, 8M for 1080p. It’s texture and mesh data that eats VRAM, texture and mesh data that’s bound to be different between different cameras and thus, as I already said, can’t be shared, you need to calculate with 4x VRAM use because you need to cover the worst-case scenario.
NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.
Can recommend, but only when you’re subverting expectations. Young student is unloading a bunch of empty beverage crates from the elevator on the ground floor, making you wait, already looking quite self-conscious about it? Bellow, loud but not shouty, “Unbelievable, the students of today”. See them flinch and cower, “oh fuck this again”. Continue, with flawless timing, “why isn’t that beer?”.
Try for yourself. Long story short: The devs would anticipate a lot of stuff you might try, and given that this is Douglas Adams the game can be quite snarky, but if not then you’ll see “I don’t know the word ‘foo’” or similar.
That particular game is notoriously hard and confusing and meant to be attempted several times before you’re able to get through it without triggering some dead-end in the beginning that will only become apparent in the end. It’s from another era. You might want to try Starship Titanic, also Douglas Adams, pretty much the pinnacle of text adventures (though it’s not a pure text adventure). All in all I’m just a tad too young to really have gotten into the genre, regarding point+click adventures I can recommend anything Terry Pratchett (multiple Discworld adventures) and pretty much anything Lucasarts, though the very early stuff (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken) is quite rough around the edges. All the LucasArts and Discworld stuff is supported by ScummVM, you only have to get your hands on the game files.
Fair enough but it’s definitely giving you the “throw random stuff at the parser and have the game be snarky” experience. It’s from the point-and-click era, the tail end even, but does a throwback to introduce those elements again.
Definitely another experience than Fallout 4 reducing dialogue to “yeah, nah, question, bail”.
Bethesda never does that and from what I’ve heard the modding community still won’t switch away from Skyrim. They, too, are tired of Bethesda’s shit and they already invested so much time in Skyrim to fix it up they might just as well continue.
I mean… sandy, optic camo/cool, blades? For some odd reason it took Edgerunners for people to give the sandy an honest spin, possibly due to “aw shucks doesn’t work with guns and I can’t hack”.
See and that’s the issue if you want to sell your game you shouldn’t need to do it on steam, it should be a system that continues to exist even if the producer (gamedev) and store go bankrupt, you want some kind of public ledger.
Steam or the creator shouldn’t be a central authority: If you have a game on steam and want to sell it to someone and they then activate in on epic, that should be possible. There should be zero influence from those parties over what happens with the NFT. It would also be legal, at least over here, to procure an erm backup copy from somewhere if you have such an NFT. And the NFT can live on after the original minter (presumably the publisher) went out of business. Say, GOG or archive.org could offer a service where the gamer pays a small fee and they can download binaries+emulation environment for those abandoned NFTs.
Neither the publisher nor the original store have any legal standing preventing any of this because exhaustion. Which is also why you can get Windows keys for dirt-cheap in e.g. Germany: There’s a small cottage industry buying up volume licenses at bankruptcy proceedings and then sell them on, unbundled. Microsoft can do exactly as much about it as Coca-Cola can stop you from selling individual cans from a sixpack.
The valuable thing about an NFT is not any text (as in: link) you embed in it but the fact that it has been minted by someone to mean something. A publisher minting a game NFT would be saying “this token is a proof of license”, same as companies (once upon a time) handed out slips of paper saying “this token is proof of ownership of a share in our company”.
Moreover why would anyone else have an incentive to pay the significant costs associated with hosting a game ownership was on a blockchain, and therefore could be sold independently without them receiving a cut?
You could charge for it. It’s essentially fancy cloud storage. Also, archive.org.
GOG might let you do it if you buy a game from them once in a while. Steam constantly subsidises downloads by allowing devs to mint and sell their own steam keys, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue.
And, yes, you could have a database somewhere – but then the proof of ownership might disappear with that database, e.g. when the publisher goes bankrupt. Also the publisher has incentives to make ownership transfers awkward, slow, etc, the blockchain doesn’t.
Another option would be the equivalent of a central bank, some public institution (as in public law) which keeps the database. But do you really want to register your ownership of a license of XXX Hentai Boobmania with the copyright office?
Don’t get me wrong I’m far from a cryptobro. It’s just that trading licenses independently of stores is about the one thing the tech is actually good for.
The government would probably have your actual identity, while the NFT is pseudonymous. Granted, the government could also do that. Another argument would be that the government probably doesn’t want to do it.
Again, if they can be bothered to host the game, I don’t see how a database that’s smaller than most modern AAA games is more likely to disappear.
Who is the actual authority on the database? Are publishers going to trust the stores? The stores the publisher? If the operator goes bankrupt, who is responsible for saving the database and keeping it available? Publishers can’t even be bothered to keep selling their own games after a while. It’s a liability, not an asset, noone actually wants it.
The blockchain doesn’t need incentives to be slow and unwieldy when it takes hours to confirm a transaction, and a gas war can randomly delay things even more.
You’d be running the thing in a way where that’s not an issue. It doesn’t even need tie-in with crypto currencies, in the extreme case you need neither proof of work nor proof of stake: All that’s needed is a non-fungible token on a public ledger, run by stores and trading platforms: By the stores because they legally need to provide the possibility to trade the license off-store, by trading platforms because that’s their business. They would then sign off on ownership transfer to a different pseudonymous crypto key (your identity) upon receiving funds in another way.
I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly,
It’s called screen-space reflections: Things that aren’t on screen don’t reflect because, well, they’re not rendered. The alternative is either not having reflections, having the “screen” not be a rectangle but the inside of a sphere, or, and that’s even more expensive, raytracing.
It’s a bog-standard technique and generally people don’t notice, which is why it’s good enough. Remember the rule #1 of gamedev: Even if not in doubt, fake it. It’s all smoke and mirrors and you want it like that because the alternative is 1fps.
Well yes I was answering under the assumption of “eradicate 100% of artefacts”, and as long as you don’t render all the perspectives there’s always going to be some angle somewhere that you’re missing.
Practically everything in rendering is a terrible hack (including common raytracers as they’re not spectral) but realism is overrated, anyway.
I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...
Ever talked to the cleaning staff how they’re faring? Your suppliers in Cambodia (or wherever)?
It’s not that hard for capital to see reason when it comes to specialised, educated, and sometimes right out irreplaceable workers, but that doesn’t mean that capital suddenly developed a conscience.
You know perfectly well what I meant and the intent and purpose behind my comment. Try again.
And even if you’re working in a five person co-op outfit and someone of you indeed does scrub the toilet: What about the dishwashers at that Chinese takeout you order at every other day. How does your actual supply chain look like, even if it’s pizza and coffee.
And I never said anyone was. That’s something you came up with.
All I wanted to do is remind people is that capital giving a fuck about your ass doesn’t mean that said capital is benevolent, or you shouldn’t organise, because it’s still going to fuck anyone over it can get away with fucking over. Like the cleaning staff.
How can you force the bosses to pay cleaning staff properly if the engineers aren’t striking for them? There’s a gazillion desperate scabs out there and I can’t even blame them, how can you blame someone with two jobs for wanting a third to pay rent.
…that, btw, is why the likes of the IWW organise companies and industries, and not trades.
Not without class consciousness, no. But yes that is how it often works in countries that aren’t the US. Occasionally, it also works in the US, e.g. the Hollywood strikes right now. Was it the writers I think who got a proper offer right now and they said they’re going to continue until others got theirs, too.
HZD is very Ubisofty, but done right, as in it’s not littered to the brink with pointless collectibles and can actually be completed. It’s way more action than role-play or story focussed but that’s not a bad thing in itself. I think of it more like Tomb Raider, and for that kind of game HZD has plenty and very good storytelling.
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
Being intimidated and lost is completely normal given that it looks like this, and there’s probably not a single person on the world to have ever used all of Blender’s features.
Watch the whole Blender 2.8 fundamentals playlist, things get way easier once you know what to ignore and what UI conventions blender uses as well have a rough overview of the feature set – because that allows you to ignore even more stuff. Then figure out what you want to do, figure out a workflow, customise the UI to make that particular thing convenient (remapping a couple of keys when you need something often, leave other things you need twice a day in the menus, etc), and bob’s your uncle.
Last, but not least: Unless you come from another 3d program and absolutely can’t be bothered to re-train your muscle memory use right-click select. Your index finger is going to thank you, it’s also a better UI convention in general as it leads to way fewer misclicks (selecting instead of manipulating or the other way around). Personally, I use space bar for the context menu (the default is play video which I rarely use, and if then shift+space isn’t exactly awkward). There’s also plenty of extensions focussed on particular workflows, e.g. F2 is very common if you do mesh editing, I also use machin3tools, especially for mode switching.
All major general-purpose 3d packages have a feature set so large that it can’t possibly fit onto keybindings, and you can’t pick them up like picking up a word processor. At the same time it’s professional software used by professionals who want to be fast and efficient, so the optimal UI isn’t “intuitive” (as in: dumbed down) but flexible and customisable. Blender’s defaults aren’t bad for some basic work but ultimately you will find them lacking, that’s not because the defaults are bad but because they are a compromise between 10000 ways to use the program. Ask three blender users how they use blender and you’ll get fifteen answers.
Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a mammoth-sized update, titled Update 2.0, tomorrow, September 21, and it promises to be a bit of a game changer. A police revamp, a progression overhaul, a new cybernetics system, vehicular combat, DLSS 3.5—it's vast, and thankfully separate from the Phantom Liberty expansion due next week, so you'll...
They tend to do that by tacking on new jank without removing (much) of the old stuff, though, presumably because they have base assets and scripts that they’re constantly re-using. Or, differently put: As long as Papyrus will still be in the thing I seriously doubt they’re giving any thought to technical debt. Already in Skyrim people rather used the UI to script stuff (because that’s Flash and ActionScript is at least remotely sane and fast) but ultimately it’s SKSE (that is, native dlls) for anything that isn’t a lag fest.
It’s not so much that CreationEngine is easy to mod, it’s that it’s what a gigantic community of modders are used to and have developed tooling for (you can get by with little to no use of CreationKit which is an abomination all on its own). Stockholm Syndrome at its finest or we’d have seen much more content for RedEngine which is far technically superior (and yet CDPR is abandoning it for Unreal).
I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.
I don’t think you’re a bigot, but I also think you’re off the mark.
First off, the mod has quite literally zero value. Installing it is more work than ignoring an option during character creation. I constantly ignore options I don’t care about during character creation, it really isn’t hard. It’s hard to interpret the intent of the creator of the mod, as well as its users, as anything else but being out for blood.
That alone though isn’t a reason to remove the mod – Nexus is full of useless mods. But something neat happens when you do nuke the mod: Bigots come out of the woodwork, you can ban them in one fell stroke, and thereby lessen your moderation load in the long term.
Their rate-limiting isn’t bad at all, their integration into everything is excellent, and for games without much of a community Vortex is often the only mod manager. Their API isn’t closed down, so Mod Organiser can integrate with Nexus just as well, and they probably would also do it with other mod sites if those ever bothered to set up a version check etc. API. They have an excellent search function.
In short: They provide a good service. Like the most annoying part about Nexus as a freeloader is the five or what seconds wait before your mod manager picks up the download.
And, no, their rate limiting really isn’t bad. 1.5MB/s for people with adblock, 3MB/s for people without. How often do you download gigabytes worth of mods it’s not like they’re bullying you into a subscription.
Does any one of those integrate with Mod Organizer or do I have to download the mod (often also with an annoying wait time) and then point Mod Organizer to it. Do they have an API that enables “a new version is out” notifications, or do I have to hunt everything down manually.
It really wouldn’t be that hard, but none of them cares. Nexus kinda has itself positioned well there as they would not have to support any third-party API endpoints in Vortex, but Vortex isn’t even the popular choice for many games.
Github has other ways to make money, and Microsoft capital to back up everything. And granted Nexus could use a better bug tracker, but you won’t see them getting into the private repository business any time soon.
Selecting the sex of the PC has been a standard feature in practically every RPG with character creator ever, and definitely in Bethesda RPGs, what they added is an option to change pronouns the PC is referred to by NPCs from the default. If you want them to match you simply don’t touch that option, done.
From a developer’s perspective it’s dead simple, similar in triviality as allowing people to mix+match any voice to any body type. Cyberpunk’s free choice of genitals needs some implementation care but if you’re planning for it from the start it’s also easy.
Where things get more complicated is things like dresses for male bodies, especially if you don’t have any shape keys in place. But if you use one body mesh for everything and simply shape key it into male and female then it’s again no issue (you also need to lerp animations then, probably, male and female bodies walk differently because hips). Basically it’s hard if your asset pipeline is simple, if the pipeline is sophisticated it’s easy.
I’m still waiting for a microphone that’s coming out of a three to four pin mini-xlr adapter: Plug one side into the headphone, the other takes the cable (now with three instead of two leads (plus shielding/ground)), voila, a headset.
Also Sennheiser’s build quality at the lower end it atrocious. Sennheisers priced in the same ballpark as e.g. AKG K240s might be a bit more neutral but you probably don’t have the ears to notice and a) no replaceable cable b) you can’t step on them and they’ll be fine (K240s are what recording studios whip out when a punk band comes in with three crates of beer) and c) they fit like ass and the plastic creaks like a motherfucker.
(Also to be fair to make a K240 nice you’ll have to invest what ~20 bucks into velour pads, and another 20 into a proper cable (the included one is shoddy and will break at the earliest opportunity. 15 for the connectors (“neutrik/rean or bust”), the rest for the actual cable, make it as long as you want impedance doesn’t care. Plus maybe two connectors more to have a predetermined breaking point. Soldering iron not included. Also wash your fucking ear pads)
If you’re minmaxing elsewhere there’s no practical need to craft as at higher levels you’re an unstoppable killing machine anyway.
…what does annoy me (dunno whether it changed after the patch) is that things like legendary sandevistan heatsinks are only available via crafting. Such things should be available (at stellar prices) from shady dealers at high enough stats and street cred. Or via a particular mission path that really caters into the playstyle and is practically impossible otherwise. Trap gauntlet only survivable if you’re basically teleporting?
You absolutely should. Reflexes+blades is the usual option, flanked by body and cold blood. Even without the legendary heatsinks you can spend more time inside bullet time than outside, at low levels that’s going to result in a lot of “run in, slash stuff, run to cover before sandy runs out to recharge it” but then there’s also camouflage and your slashing is going to become ever more effective and body is going to make you a bullet sponge so at some point it just ceases to matter whether people have a chance hitting you once in a while.
Gun builds are problematic because bullet time slows down shooting frequency (it doesn’t do that with melee) but I’ve seen people do comrade hammer’s builds. If you want maximum damage output for crowd control at decent range there’s monowire which uses the same skill tree as katanas. The katana is to avoid excessive collateral damage as well as for style, and then of course knife headshots.
Oh, great, trade unions. That never caused any issues for worker’s unity. If you can’t organise everyone, from tech lead to cleaning staff, in the same industrial union you’re playing right into the capitalists’ divide and conquer game.
So instead of coming to terms with your fellow workers you rather have them fight capitalists by themselves? Leave them to the scraps the bosses deem sufficient while you’re wheeling away a wagonload of concessions won through your unique bargaining power?
You’re limiting the strength of worker’s. If train conductors don’t strike for train toilet cleaners noone will.
And any opposition between worker’s interests is negligible compared to that between workers and capital, who have no interests in common at all.
I know of a certain former boss of mine who, after becoming a millionaire by side-lining the whole (game!) company and selling it to random yanks who didn’t know WTF to do with it, still continued to pirate games. While moving into the most expensive quarter of the city – by renting a house there.
But sane people without a cocaine habit, sure, yes.
Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.
The main difficulty with split screen is that you need to be able to fit everything you need to render the scene into RAM, twice. Let’s go through some cases:
Just rendering to a higher resolution still lets you get away with the same amount of RAM if you use low-res textures, or a moderate increase because you’re using high-res textures, but only in the foreground – all you need is enough GPU compute power to push the pixels.
If you’re rendering VR both camera perspectives are going to be nearly identical, looking at the same objects, so RAM use is nearly identical to a single camera. Your frame time targets are much stricter in VR, you have to have high and very regular fps or people are going to puke, but again that’s compute pressure, not memory pressure.
In the split-screen case all bets are off: When players are at opposite sides of the map there may be literally zero meshes and textures in common between those two areas and you need twice the RAM for twice the amount of camera views. Nothing in common is the worst case, yes, but it’s bound to happen, and not leave PR in a situation where they have to say “We degraded performance when players are far apart to promote an atmosphere of closeness and cooperation”.
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
Are game studios suddenly abandoning Black developers? (www.gamedeveloper.com)
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection used modder's work without credit (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
How does this KEEP GETTING WORSE??
I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"
Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?...
Earth will be destroyed in 12 minutes... (lemmy.world) angielski
This is accurate gameplay from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure that INFOCOM made with the help of Douglas Adams in 1984....
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For consistency sake, let’s say that any game that’s >or=7/10 at what it’s trying to do while having a popular perception of being a
EU court rules people can resell digital games (www.gamingbible.com) angielski
Finally some good news! I’ve been waiting for quite a while for such a ruling....
Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K (youtu.be) angielski
Since I haven’t seen anyone post this, I thought I’d share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.
Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release. angielski
I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...
CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Cyberpunk's storytelling makes Starfield seem ancient - Opinion (www.eurogamer.net)
Godot Engine hits over 50K euros per month in funding (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
CD Projekt recommends starting a new game when Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 drops: 'starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a mammoth-sized update, titled Update 2.0, tomorrow, September 21, and it promises to be a bit of a game changer. A police revamp, a progression overhaul, a new cybernetics system, vehicular combat, DLSS 3.5—it's vast, and thankfully separate from the Phantom Liberty expansion due next week, so you'll...
The Elder Scrolls VI will skip PS5 and isn’t coming until at least 2026 (www.theverge.com) angielski
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Sennheiser Exits Gaming Headphone Business (www.anandtech.com) angielski
Technically the successor owner of the gaming brand....
CD Projekt reveals which new Cyberpunk 2077 features are available for free and which are related to the game's expansion (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry (www.eurogamer.net)
Running With Scissors Studios gives permission to pirate games (beehaw.org) angielski
based...
Microsoft’s Xbox Series S Parity Demands Are Now Handing Sony Free Wins (www.forbes.com) angielski
Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic (youtube.com) angielski
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.