You just made my 10yo self massively envious… all I had was a couple cardboard boxes, fake dials, some blinkenlights, DIY switches and paper code cards, and some paper tube graphite heaters fed from an old high voltage TV cap that I’m still unsure how didn’t set the whole thing on fire.
when in PH I accidently click “empty working sets” instead of “combine memory lists” and windows swaps out everything, it’s horrible for days until I just give up and reboot instead.
“Empty working sets” doesn’t swap out anything by itself, it marks it as “swappable” but stil in RAM. It does make a copy to swapfile in case it needs to swap it out so it can do it instantly.
To fully force a swap out, you have to clean the lists… level 1, I think? (sorry, in bed, don’t want to look it up RN).
If you did that with a HDD however… yeah, I can see how that would feel bad.
Pro tip: don’t leave PH open for too long, it’s kind of a devel tool and has some bugs that can mess up the hooks of the whole system. Best is to open, use, close, for ~15 day uptimes on Windows 8 to 10 without ECC.
I have 32 GB of RAM but since I have dozens of tabs in several windows open
I used to play games with 8 GB of RAM and 40 tabs in Chrome. It was either-or, it worked, didn’t kill the SSD, for years. 🤷
No, they’re pretty nice, that’s why they got popular. It’s when you pair them with game development, that shit hits the fan.
Basically, you have:
Rocket software - if it fails once, you fucked up
F-35, infrastructure software - if it fails, it better recovers fast
Business software - if it works for most of the workday, it’s fine
Consumer software - if it works most days, it’s fine
Game software - if it eventually works at least once, you’re fine; most people don’t care about replaying the same story anyway
Unity and C# are very easy to make utter crap with, and still have it “work at least once”… which leads game developers to use it, make it work, and have it packaged and sold. Add to that “modders”, who are mostly random people who want to see some [part] of some idea they had, work maybe once in the game… and you get a perfect recipe for disaster: rushed out games, with sloppy mods, often conflicting with each other.
I don’t want to send my full browser to swapfile just because of a greedy game
You don’t, most of the times the game doesn’t use all that memory anyways (or crashes if it tries to… so still, doesn’t use it).
Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time
No it won’t. Browsers preemptively allocate a bunch of RAM just in case they need it… then never use it. “Loading back” empty memory, takes zero time.
This also applies to the reverse
No it doesn’t. Games rarely can be suspended and resumed successfully, and they rarely allocate RAM that they aren’t going to use. I was clear when I said you suspend “chrome.exe”, not “your game.exe”. If you resume the browser without exiting the game, the game stays in RAM and the browser manages with what’s left (surprisingly, they manage to run a tab or two without a problem, which further proves they didn’t “really” need all that much RAM in the first place).
swapfile on my SSD. This is the perfect way of killing yours
My swapfile SSD got retired after 10 years when I switched to a NVMe, it’s an external drive now.
writing 16 GB of data every time you switch between windows.
As explained above, no you don’t, most of the data simply gets discarded, maybe 1-2GB of it gets actually written. To further expand on that, the swapfile gets constantly pre-populated with less changing in-RAM data so the OS can “swap it out” instantly. That same data stays in the swapfile after it gets read into RAM again, so it doesn’t get written to the swapfile over and over, only read back.
There’s a reason I’m using a multi tasking PC instead of a single-tasking gaming console
If you do, then you put more RAM in it. Otherwise, you can use it as a gaming console. Your choice.
freeing RAM is hard. Chrome gobbling up your whole memory is good when you’re using Chrome, but you don’t get it back when you alt+tab back to your game
Actually… you can do it with two .bat files and a “ram cleaner” tool:
Suspend all “chrome.exe” processes
Free all working sets (since Chrome is suspended, it marks all the RAM used by Chrome as swappable/discardable)
Now your game can use all the RAM, the OS will just swap out or discard whatever was in use by Chrome as needed.
Want to go back to Chrome?
Resume all “chrome.exe” processes
The OS will swap in whatever it swapped out, and let Chrome ask for as much RAM as it feels like.
even with RTX 4090s and lowering the graphics to 1440p medium settings. Based on utilization numbers, it sounds like the GPU is limiting factor here.
What are the CPU utilization numbers? C:S is a notoriously CPU-first game, particularly with mods. If your CPU can’t calculate more than 10fps, you won’t get more than 10fps.
Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.
It starts (barebones, slow as hell) with 8GB. You want 32GB or more for it to run somewhate decently.
Seriously, people don’t understand what “cache” means, maybe they should just create a ramdisk and install the game there to understand the concept.
Preorders. It used to be that you had to preorder the LOTR special edition on DVD with figurines to make sure the shop had existences… then Kickstarter bastardized it into “pay to maybe get something”… and Steam jumped onto the bandvagon of “pay hoping it might work some day”.
Current PC is too bad for Cities Skylines 2. Can anyone judge the PCPartPicker list I’ve put together?
Wrong question. The right one would be:
“Based on the PCPartPicker list I’ve put together, how many mods will I be able to add to Cities Skylines 2?”
There is no PC in existence capable of running all of them all at once, but I’d recommend getting as much RAM as possible (256GB better than 32GB), it’s going to be your main bottleneck. Followed by the CPU… and the SSD is only a bottleneck at load time. GPU is optional, CS2 barely uses it.
Also: better to have twice as much RAM, than RAM twice as fast. RAM itself is 100x faster than an SSD, so you’re better off keeping stuff in only 50x faster RAM, rather than going back and forth to a 100x slower SSD.
The game is “cheating” all the time. All the successful games with thousands of repetitive levels, go whale fishing and have engagement promoting strategies.
The general strategy is:
Introduce core mechanics “organically” over the first few levels, then keep a periodic “loading screen tip” reminder
Add a harder level every several easier ones
Introduce “boosters” with a few free ones
Dis-associate booster cost from real money cost by having an “in-game currency” (not actual currency) with some non-intuitive conversion ratios
Add a second kind of free-ish in-game currency to keep players used to making in-game purchases
If a player runs out of boosters, give them some free ones after a while
Improve user engagement with regular reminders and periodic offers
Promote FOMO with limited-time offers
Add mechanics with obvious MiniMax-ing strategies, that are however impossible for a person with a normal life to MiniMax, while offering a way to use in-game currencies to correct for that
Keep adding cosmetic changes
Introduce slightly new mechanics once in a while every a lot of levels, combine mechanics together if you’ve run out of ideas
For each level, have a predefined setup that makes it extremely easy to solve, along with normal generators that make them hard to solve
Use the easy setups to showcase new mechanics and boosters
Use the hard setups to make people want to spend boosters, and buy them, and use real money to purchase in-game currency to do that
Ideally, have a level generator with tunable difficulty that can be adapted for every user
Offer whales big spenders exclusive VIP levels, that require a lot of spending to win
Add one or more “leaderboards” for big spenders to showcase how much they spend good they are
Remove real world time clues for big spenders, don’t let them realize for how many hours they’ve been throwing their money away
If a big spender drops their spending or engagement level, shower them with offers, assign a personal manager, offer invitations to real world events… whatever it takes (up to a certain % of their expected monthly spending)
Periodically expand the game with hundreds and thousands of “new” levels… which follow the same rules
Bonus points if you add “seasons” and a “season pass”.
Extra bonus if you place and cross-promote a number of games with the same strategy but different cosmetic themes.
Casino mode: have thousands of “games” all in one, with different cosmetics, complex winning modes, and very simple mechanics (press button to spin, press button to auto-spin 1000 times, etc)… but in most jurisdictions you need to calculate and disclose the exact odds of winning in each mode for every level generator.
Star Citizen delivers exactly what it promises: an infinitely developing sci-fi starship sandbox simulator.
The pace of development is glacial? Well, yeah, this kind of project should have a thriving community of add-ons to be of any use, or have 1000x the developers/artists working on it 24/7… but they decided to follow a single vision, instead of allowing people to fly in copyright infringing X-Wings and dildo shaped ships, so this is the resulting compromise.