captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 7 dni temu

The number of “cheat codes” that were actually just bonus content. Like I remember there were codes in Diddy Kong Racing where you could change all the power-up balloons to any color, like all red or all blue. I also remember there were codes in Mechwarrior II that unlocked a few mechs. Like, there were NPCs in a few missions that were a Tarantula, a Battlemaster, and there were elementals in one level. You could cheat to play as them, but the Battlemaster crashed the game.

Good times.

captain_aggravated, 7 dni temu

I miss casual flight sims that were designed to be played with a joystick. Not so much Janes F-15 1997 or whatever, i’m more talking about Crimson Skies. I want more Crimson Skies.

captain_aggravated, 13 dni temu

I’ve got a Linux machine attached to my TV right now. It’s basically a Steam, Kodi and Firefox box.

captain_aggravated, 16 dni temu

it’s a little ARM box running Android, right?

captain_aggravated, 21 dni temu

I’m right now in the process of building an “entry level PC” from components, here defining it as new currently produced off the rack parts, no used, no refurbished, and with a Ryzen 7500F and a Radeon RX7600 “AMD can’t decide whether their cards get an XT or not, so why should I?” I price it out right at $900. To go much below that, I’m gonna have to resort to some jank.

Dumpster dive a core i5 10400F Optiplex, stick a GTX-980 in it, install Linux Mint and you’re making 120FPS in CS:GO for the price of a foot pic.

captain_aggravated, 21 dni temu

Gilette gives away razor handles to men to encourage them to buy their blades.

Inkjet printers are often cheaper than a change of ink cartridges.

I think it was Standard Oil, gave away hurricane lanterns in order to sell kerosene.

Most video game consoles are sold for less than they cost to make because the company expects to earn more in video game sales.

captain_aggravated, 21 dni temu

It’s a little hard to comment on high end 4 years ago with low end now because technology marches on, but no I don’t think it would.

I also built a PC with similar specs for my cousin (we’ll call her Lila) to that in October of 2022, Ryzen 5600X/Radeon RX6800 (non-XT). Built that rig for my cousin. Socket AM4 B550 chipset, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM. I had a budget of $1500, $500 alone went to the GPU. The 6800 was two years old at that point. Solid mid-range PC that can handle 1440p gaming with no questions asked…okay one question asked: “are you sure you want ray tracing enabled on an RDNA 2 platform?”

You could go higher. 32 or even 64GB of RAM, a 5800X3D CPU, a Radeon 6950XT or RTX-3090 would provide much more solid 4k gaming with significantly better ray tracing…for a couple more grand.

The machine I built last year, a Ryzen 7700X/Radeon 7900GRE for myself. I spent $2000, I got socket AM5, 32GB DDR5-6000, a 16 thread CPU, and the third-to-highest GPU in the range. This thing does 1440p ultrawide or reaches into 4k with aplomb and ray tracing is worth turning on. You can still go up from here; the 7900XT and XTX are even more powerful and again Nvidia offers even higher, and there’s several CPU SKUs above me. Mine is a mid-to-high end PC, I expect it to be relevant for 5 more years, then I’ll buy a Ryzen 11800X3D on clearance for it.

Meanwhile, the PC I’m building now is for a 12 year old (Lila’s daughter, let’s call her Maggy). 16GB of DDR5-5600, a spec’d down 6-core without integrated graphics, the pack-in Wraith Stealth cooler, and a x600 tier GPU for a solid 1080p experience, more than enough for the hand-me-down 1080p60 monitor she’s gonna get with it. This computer is the same generation as mine, but less than half the price at $900 and change. And I honestly struggle to build much lower than that without resorting to used parts, new old stock, or jank.

captain_aggravated, 23 dni temu

Not sure about hate, but the entire Steam Machine thing happened because Microsoft was making noise circa Windows 8 that they were going to take the platform more closed and require sourcing software from the Windows Store, which would shut out things like Steam. So they said “Okay, we’ll make our own operating system with blackjack and hookers. We could take the PC gaming market with us, and we’ll even come for the living room console market and threaten Xbox while we’re at it.” And if anyone in the world is going to get that done, it’s Valve.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Bazzite offers KDE or GNOME, and in the menu mentions KDE is what is used in SteamOS.

I installed Bazzite on my HTPC recently. It was the worst install process I’ve seen in over ten years of using Linux. I shall enumerate the problems I had:

1. The image is weirdly large, it’s like 9GB in size. It takes awhile to download and a weirdly long time to write to a USB stick.
2. Once written, you boot the image, and GRUB has the options to Install Bazzite or Test Media And Install Bazzite. By default, Test Media is selected. It always fails this test.
3. If you use the typical non-live environment image, the scaling is tiny on a 4k monitor, and there’s no way to adjust this.
4. If you use the live environment image (in beta at time of writing), it might just lock up. I had that happen twice just while clicking through the Anaconda installer.
5. The Anaconda installer, which I think they inherited from Fedora, was I think designed by one of the contrarian idiots who work for Gnome. There’s a DONE button up in the far upper left hand corner of the screen that sometimes acts as a back button, sometimes acts as a forward button. You have to move the mouse from the top corner of the screen to the center of the screen a lot, for no reason. The top-left corner of the screen is a dumb place to put a DONE button because most languages read top to bottom, left to right, the DONE button is where a START button should go.
6. There isn’t a simple way to tell it “put / on this drive, put /home on that drive.” There’s an automatic installer which will do god knows what…fail, most likely. There’s a “custom” partition dialog which I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and then there’s a “custom advanced” one that lets you set the size and position of each partition to the byte. Doing it this way apparently REQUIRES you to not only set up a /boot/efi partition, but also a /boot partition separate from /root.
7. If you’re in the habit of putting /, you know, operating system and software, on one drive, and /home on another drive, you have to learn from osmosis that part of Bazzite’s immutableness means that there is no /home, there’s a /var/home symlinked to /home.

And if it doesn’t randomly lock up, you’ve got Bazzite installed!

Bazzite markets itself as a newbie friendly Linux. They’ve got that configurator on their website that gives you a little Cosmo quiz about what system you have, what desktop you want etc. which is good! That is good user friendly design. But the actual software you get rattles like a Chrysler. How many noobs are going to bounce right off that?

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Having played with it for a little while now that I’ve got it installed…I think it’s alright for a mostly or entirely gaming machine. I wouldn’t want to use it, or any immutable distro, as my main computer.

I’ve attempted to stay out of the trendy distro of the month club, remember Garuda? Remember Peppermint? Remember Endeavour?

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

I had one fail fairly early, giving me a cryptic message because apparently it couldn’t cope with how I’d set up the partitioning.

I’ve had a Linux Mint install fail because it couldn’t cope with a BIOS setting, the error message gave a plain English explanation “it’s probably the XMBT (or whatever acronym) setting in the BIOS, see this page on the Ubuntu wiki for details:” and it gave a hyperlink, because the installer runs in a live environment, it had a copy of Firefox ready to go, AND it gave a QR code so you could easily open that link on a mobile device. THAT’S how it’s done.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

At least some of the problems I reported about Bazzite are inherited from Fedora. Bazzite didn’t create Anaconda.

Fedora has the problem of being generally fine, but most of the world for the last decade has been targeting Ubuntu as THE Linux distro, so there’s a lot if Git repos out there that don’t include instructions for Fedora. Way fewer things are packaged in rpm rather than deb. I’ve never seen Linux Mint kernel panic unless I was fucking around with the video drivers, I’ve seen Fedora kernel panic.

The main reason I’m using Fedora right now rather than Mint is Mint tends to have an older codebase, and we’re at a point in PC technology where things like wayland offer support for video and graphics stuff that don’t work well under X11. like my 1440p ultrawide 144Hz monitor sitting next to a 1080p 60hz side monitor. Fedora KDE has it ready to go, Mint Cinnamon does not.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

For new users, if it doesn’t exist in the repos, you’ve gone too far.

I don’t think this holds up under scrutiny. Theoretically sure, installing using your distro’s package manager is the beginner skill, compiling from source is the advanced skill.

The reality is, people transplanting from Windows often own hardware they want to continue to use, that require software that isn’t in a distro’s package manager. For me, this included a DisplayLink docking station, an Epson printer and a SpaceMouse. For some, it will include gaming keyboards or mice, stream decks, who knows what else. A lot of times, there are folks making open source software for these things, but they don’t package them. So you end up on Github as a beginner looking for the thing to make your thing work.

As you migrate into the ecosystem, you start buying hardware that is well supported by the Linux ecosystem, that problem starts to fade away.

by rpm vs deb, I wasn’t meaning downloading individual files…though I’ve done that. DisplayLink offered their driver as a .deb. At first, that Epson printer only issued a .rpm, and I had to use Alien to install a .rpm on a Linux Mint computer. With time, they offered a .deb, and eventually the printer was just natively supported by CUPS. I meant, I find that the Debian/Ubuntu repos (the dpkg/APT system that uses .deb files) have more stuff in them than Fedora’s repos (the DNF package manager that uses .rpm files) do.

Does Mint still not use Wayland?

When I built my current PC, Wayland support in Mint Cinnamon was “We’ve just now added it, it doesn’t work worth a damn but you can try it.” They’re coming along, but they’re behind.

Is an older codebase generally good for new users? The first distro I installed on an x86 PC was Mint Cinnamon 17. Quiana. On a then brand new Dell Inspiron laptop. For about 6 months, the kernel that shipped with the OS didn’t support the laptop’s built-in trackpad. I had to manually update the kernel through Mint Update for the trackpad to work. There’s problems at the bleeding edge, but there’s problems at the trailing edge as well.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Things like Minetest exist.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Precisely.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Mechanical/civil engineering software, music production, and digital art. Those are the big ones.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

I was about to say, I loved Futurama, It’s run it’s course, I’m fine with Meanwhile being the series finale (especially since as broadcast it ended with them pushing the time loop button, and they aired the first episode after that) and I’m ready to move on.

captain_aggravated, miesiąc temu

Two occur to me: Chell from the Portal games, and Lufia from Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. And both of those almost don’t count.

I almost don’t want to count Chell because she’s almost not a character, but I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing as her.

Lufia is one of the rare SNES JRPGs not made by Squaresoft or Enix, it was published by Taito. Gameplay is similar to classic Final Fantasy, the story manages to be quite tragic. Lufia, the title character, is not the player character, Enter Your Name is the player character, and Lufia is a playable party member/his love interest/…well, play the game to find out. So there’s reasons why I hesitate to call her a “protagonist.”

I have to mention a fun thing that series did: Lufia 1 starts with a playable prologue/tutorial section where you play as some legendary heroes fighting an ultimate battle. Lufia 2 is a prequel, and it’s the story of those legendary heroes, which ends with that same ultimate battle as the final boss. In Lufia 1, the heroes speak very formally. They sound stalwart and brave and a bit old fashioned, as legendary heroes should. In Lufia 2, we know these characters more as real people, and the dialog treads the exact same ground but it’s much less formal, makes them sound less hypercompetent.

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

I made the mistake of trying to go back and play Portal 2 during the pandemic, and the themes of isolation, neglect, abuse and gaslighting just weren’t as funny in 2019.

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

You know, I didn’t doubt that for a single second.

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

Desert Strike was my last.

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

I’ll allow it for smaller studios that have a big, offbeat idea. Games like Factorio, Satisfactory, Kerbal Space Program and Subnautica. All of these games had multi-year early access campaigns that were very successful, Satisfactory in particular. I think it’s appropriate for weird games like these that have uncommon mechanics like factory building, space flight or scuba diving.

Thinking about Satisfactory, I imagine their sales weren’t spectacular on launch day last year, but a lot of their customer base had already bought the game, so they got their $30. Maybe another way to phrase it is, who cares if it sells before or after launch?

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

Don’t you guys have phones 90-series graphics cards?

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

The Box Bra, by Croft.

captain_aggravated, 2 miesiące temu

Every now and again you’ll see a Tomb Raider cosplayer who has stuffed a box up her shirt and it’ll never not be funny.

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

Looking at my game library, I seem to prefer blank slate player characters.

In Factorio, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. In Satisfactory, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. Infinifactory you play as a humanoid in a space suit. Antichamber you play as some being that can hold a gun-like tool. Buckshot Roulette you play as…something that can fire a shotgun. In all Half-Life and Portal games you play as a series of named but barely characterized people. Return of the Obra Dinn you play as an investigator, each time you start the game it randomly chooses a male or female voice for the player character. In Subnautica, you play as a stuffed wetsuit.

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

I mean, I don’t. Believe it or not it isn’t mandatory.

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

Actually yes, you got any oreos?

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

spoilerSPAAAAAACE!

captain_aggravated, 3 miesiące temu

That was the one where you had to use cat hair to add a mustache to a fake ID to impersonate a character that had no mustache? Yeah, I don’t really miss moon logic.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Stop buying things. Go to your bank and withdraw cash. Write checks.

Catch a goose and catch an octopus. Wring the ink out of the goose, pluck a feather out of the octopus, dip the feather in the ink, and write a check like they did in the good old days.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

I can offer a clue.

Discover was Sears’ in-house charge/credit card. It got spun off by itself but a lot of companies never really started accepting Discover.

American Express, their whole thing is exclusivity. It’s the card you use to pay at fancy places. They charge merchants more in service fees, so a lot of places just don’t do business with them.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Then stop buying things.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Your utilities won’t take checks. Sure.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

If they seriously ONLY take credit cards and can’t be paid via bank draft, cash, personal check etc. you should be talking to your government.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

It was Discover.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Fry was too much of a shlub to have an AmEx card.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Don’t the Japanese have to stab themselves in the liver with a sword if they resign from one of their soul crushing 18 hour a day office jobs?

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

I mean, the publisher seems to be pretty stupid, because…how did they figure that $250 million?

There are two entries in the Subnautica series, Subnautica and Below Zero. Subnautica has sold “over 5 million copies” at a retail price point of $30. So that’s $150 million in gross revenue. For this back of the napkin math I’ll assume that the “over five million” and the number of copies sold at a discount come out in the wash. 30% of that gross revenue is going to immediatley go to Steam or whatever other platform, so the company got $100 million in net revenue before their own expenses like rent and power bills gets at it.

I cannot find sales figures for Below Zero, but it sells for the same price point and I don’t think it could have possibly sold more than Subnautica did, so let’s figure another $150 million gross, $100 million net.

Subnautica as a franchise netted its studio ~$200 million across the launch of two games selling ~10 million copies.

And Krafton had agreed to pay out a $250 million bonus for reaching a certain revenue target in 2025, which they were on track to do given the announced early access launch.

Just to put them in the black for that bonus, Subnautica 2 would have to sell better than both previous games put together at a higher price, and that doesn’t touch the purchase of the studio, operating expenses, or the dump truck of cocaine that must have been involved in these financial decisions.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Okay, they spent $750 million for a studio that has barely made $250 million in its history. I still don’t think the math mathulates here.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

1. What do you base projected performance on if not prior performance?
2. I don’t think Unknown Worlds did have a $250 million single release; that’s probably what they netted across three games, Natural Selection 2, Subnautica, Below Zero.
3. Stupidity is an ingredient in betting against your own teams. Because this is what happens, you put yourself in a position where you don’t want your own victories.

Any way, I see it as our goal as the game playing public to figure out how to make this cost Krafton more than $250 million.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

That was my take.

Before the Krafton acquisition, Unknown Worlds Entertainment has produced Natural Selection 2 (the first was a Half Life mod, not sure it counts), which sold 300,000 copies, Subanutica sold “over five million” at a $30 price point, and I can’t find any sales numbers for Below Zero, but for back of the napkin math let’s say it sold about as well as Subnautica at ~5 million copies, again at $30.

So both Subnautica and Below Zero grossed $150 million. Subtract the 30% that Steam takes, and you’re left with $100 million, so $200 million between those two games would have been the net take.

Meanwhile, Moonbreaker happened, and I have no sales figures for that.

Everybody talks about what a massive hit Subnautica is, and while it is a successful game, Stardew Valley sold 40 million copies. Subnautica 2 stood a good chance of being a solid commercial success with tons of 2 hour Youtube video essays about how it compares to the original. It was never going to make $750 million. Even if it outsold Subnautica and Below Zero combined at double the price. Add in merch, Peeper plushies, T-shirts, ball caps, they were talking about a movie…Subnautica 2 was going to make a good chunk of that but wasn’t going to make it all.

As far as I can tell, they never intended to pay that $250 million bonus, it was probably offered in bad faith as incentive to sell the studio, and when it looked like they were actually going to pull off the conditions Krafton broke the contract in order to break the contract.

If I get my way, Krafton will never do business in the United States again, and since I’m a vengeful asshole that likes doing brain surgery with a backhoe, I’d probably ban Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Sony, Nintendo and Honda, and half of those aren’t even Korean.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

See they should have done a Charlie’s Angels type thing, have them standing kind of back to back like they’re on the same team. But I guess that won’t have been as controversial.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there’s a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka “Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?” The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line “Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down.” You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.

Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you’ll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.

The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Very, very light spoilers:

This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don’t need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.

A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn’t stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they’re playing it like Minecraft, and it’s not Minecraft. You don’t need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don’t have an immediate idea of how to use, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you’re a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you’re not moving in. To quote the game itself, “Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not.”

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.

You’ll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.

Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you’ll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn’t complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.

Lifepod 6 and 7 are both “coordinates corrupted” quests; it won’t give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.

All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.

It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.

I’ll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, “Well now what?” And the game doesn’t seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.

captain_aggravated, 4 miesiące temu

I can also say I’ve had my fun with the game and move on.