jarfil

@jarfil@beehaw.org

Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

jarfil,

Before Star Citizen got announced, I tried to get up a project that would’ve been better, bigger, and far more revolutionary… only I didn’t lie about it, so funding fell on blank stares at best, and a bunch of insults at worst.

Congrats, you voted with your wallet to get conned, so you got what you voted for. Same with No Man’s Sky.

The average citizen has no vision or perception of the costs involved, so you either con people, or nothing gets done.

jarfil,

Precisely, you just described what’s needed to pull a con. My project was just an engine capable of running a real-scale galaxy with consistent time travel, we had no great concept artists capable of churning out eye candy marketing material. Should have made it a solo project about digging mines, or something.

jarfil,

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.

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...

jarfil, (edited )

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”.

jarfil,

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.

jarfil, (edited )

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:

  1. Suspend all “chrome.exe” processes
  2. 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?

  1. 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.

jarfil,

What fucking engine was this crap written in, electron or what???

Unity with C#.

That’s only half the problem… the add-ons are also written in Unity with C# 🤷

jarfil,

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.

jarfil,

Feel free to use any other browser, they all allocate RAM preemptively just the same.

jarfil,

Not wanting to make you feel old, but… No Man’s Sky botched preorder release was 7 years ago (2016).

I mentioned Kickstarter (est. 2009) as a stepping stone in getting people used to pay for not-yet-existing stuff.

jarfil,

Is unity and c# really that bad by itself?

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.

jarfil,

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. 🤷

Looking for the BEST DEAL on Microsoft products at the CHEAPEST price with a LICENSE KEY? Look no further! (lemmy.opensupply.space) angielski

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jarfil,

Can we stop bumping this while hurling insults?

Report, block, go on with your life.

Current PC is too bad for Cities Skylines 2. Can anyone judge the PCPartPicker list I've put together?

This is based off the “Great tier” AMD build, but I’m waffling a bit on the price. I don’t really know a whole lot about PC specs, but I read this is supposed to be a good long-lasting build based on the DDR5 and something newer in the CPU or Video card. That being said, I’ve only really ever build mid-tier and while I...

jarfil,

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.

jarfil, (edited )

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.

jarfil,

In large corporations, that Hanlon’s Razor seems to have been given to a deranged monkey on speed. It’s weaponized stupidity at this point.

jarfil,

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.

jarfil,

Isn’t that the startup dream? To get acquired, then bail?

jarfil, (edited )

Is it possible to block a domain without blocking the OP?

You mean, block the domain of the link? Maybe you could do that with a keyword filter in an app. Unfortunately it’s not a native Lemmy/kbin function (yet, AFAIK).

jarfil,

The latter.

If you want a balanced conversation, let me start: haven’t played it, likely won’t play it in a long time, what would you want to discuss? 😀

jarfil,

I have to disable HDR on because it’s basically unplayable right now. Flashlight reflections on anything close to shiny are blinding.

Isn’t that the point of HDR, though? 🤨

jarfil, (edited )

iPhone vs. Apple

If you meant iPhone vs. Android… there are actual arguments to support Android if you want a system you can take control of.

jarfil,

The MAC address is the address of the network card, which can be either built into the motherboard, or on a replaceable card… so if that was the only thing they tracked, you could replace everything except that… unless you have a network card with a programmable MAC (they

jarfil,

Saw that game on Steam last year, just as it was time to power wash the terrace.

PowerWash Simulator: IRL edition! 😄

jarfil,

I don’t agree with the name calling, but many content creators have already set a website, with some outside revenue sources like Patreon, selling merchandise, or other stuff.

They can’t leave the most popular platform, but they can set up alternatives for when it stops being the most popular, and in the meantime also target people who are leaving it already.

jarfil,

That sounds like a question about how much you oppose anarchy. Any change, involves some loss of established order, so if the Overton window tells us something, is that “anarchist parties” are just the ones trying to push it stronger. Actual anarchists, wouldn’t try to be part of a government in the first place.

jarfil,

Wouldn’t this show that they failed, if they have to recur to site-based adblocker blocking? Clearly v3 hasn’t stopped people from using Firefox, yt-dl, or whatever.

jarfil,

Advertising is about creating trends, and catching some impulse buyers. Effectiveness is likely overstated, but on the other hand it’s difficult to quantify the effectiveness of a trend. I don’t think it’s likely to ever collapse, people will always want to believe they can influence others more than they actually can.

jarfil,

There was a sweet spot when cat videos went pro. Then the spam killed it.

jarfil,

Sounds like the death knell for YT… what’s the point of a centralized platform, if we’re back to links to discover content. They could link to PeerTube.

jarfil,

(according to latest statistics, Firefox would have an even lower share)

My point is: if v3 were effective at neutralizing ad blockers in 75% of the user base, or even 95% since Safari is supposed to get on board too, why are they developing additional countermeasures?

Or has Safari decided to do like Firefox, and still allow full ad blockers?

jarfil,

Yes, attestation is in line with V3 changes, just that it makes them irrelevant: YouTube’s website could some day ask for environment attestation of “no extension using the intercept hooks”, or “only the approved ones”, and still have the same effect. The fact that they’re implementing a server-side anti-adblock now, while postponing V2 deprecation over and over, makes me think the V3 changes are a flop.

Firefox… would likely require Mozilla to play ball and implement similar attestation in an official binary attestable by the OS. Edge too, just so MS doesn’t mess with Chrome’s binary attestation on Windows.

Safari already has attestation, without extra parameters, but it could be extended:

httptoolkit.com/…/apple-private-access-tokens-att…

jarfil, (edited )

Then you want to fight FPTP and vote pruning by constituency, to make your vote matter.

You could vote blank, or a poop emoji to show your disconformity, but organizing or supporting a protest to reform the voting system might be more effective.

If we counted all those who don’t vote because it “doesn’t change anything”, those who vote blank or null, and those who vote knowing their vote will still get thrown away… it could actually make a majority.

jarfil,

Hey Alexa, how 2 soldier

First step, you need to enlist. A soldiering iron will be issued to you, there will be many like it, but that one will be yours…

jarfil,

You can waterproof anything with a thin latex film…

jarfil,

The image is then uploaded to Yoti’s backend server for estimation

“Images are immediately, permanently deleted, and not used by Yoti for training purposes.”

the facial recognition does not presential a substantial risk to parents’ privacy or potential biases.

“To the extent that there is any risk, it is easily outweighed by the benefits to consumers and businesses of using this [Facial Age Estimation] method.”

Pretty sure only one of those statements can be true. I’d go with “there is a risk”.

jarfil,

The paradox is they start claiming no risk… only to step by step admit there is a risk, to end with a “but it’s all fine, trust us”.

Adding that the images are not going to be used for training purposes by them, is like a robber saying “I didn’t break into that store… just the one next door”.

jarfil,

For a long time, I didn’t feel fully rested with fewer than 11 hours of sleep… meaning, except for some weekends, I felt like a zombie all the time… but could fall asleep and take a nap any moment anywhere, for a few hours of wake up time worth (great for exams, conferences and the like: nap half an hour before, go totally fresh, fall on the nose afterwards). Then, last year, got some serious case of insomnia where I could neither fall asleep nor fully wake up for like a week straight… that was much worse, felt like going crazy, had to start taking meds to sleep 2, then 4, then maybe 5 hours, and still wake up feeling like a train had passed me over. Then like a month ago, suddenly fell asleep at around 7pm, didn’t take my sleeping meds, and woke up totally refreshed at 2am… the F!

So, based on personal anecdotal evidence… I’d say sleep is a mystery, and I want my cyborg on/off switch now, please… 🤖

Looking for a casual game that I can quickly pick up or put down (kbin.social) angielski

I have a few games that I am playing at the moment, but a lot of them require at least some time commitment once you start a round. I'd like something that I can start now and maybe finish later. Something on the line of Solitaire or https://mergetin.com/ .

jarfil,

Overwatch 2. Since the changes from old Overwatch, there is no real point in anything other than Quick Play, which means 5-10 minute games, and you are free to leave at any moment

Stray really disappointed me. I want a real cat game.

Just an open world survival game, only you’re a cat, dealing with regular cat problems. You have to hunt, avoid larger animals, compete with other cats, figure out which humans are dangerous and which will give you treats, judiciously spray things to maintain your territory, maybe mate and reproduce (your sex and fertility...

jarfil,

Not everyone can afford a fursuit capable of “judiciously spraying things to maintain your territory”… or be let anywhere in one 😄

How often have games made you do a double take in real life? (i.imgur.com)

Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?

jarfil,

After playing too much Ghost Recon, I once caught myself looking for a ditch I could jump into before “the guards” would come out of a farmhouse I was going to. Took me a full minute or two to shake off the feeling.

hybridhavoc, do gaming angielski
!deleted4157 avatar

deleted_by_author

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    jarfil,

    From what I’ve heard, Blizzard’s C-suite and company culture was already poison before Activision. I’m not sure Microsoft will care about much more than getting a profit out of the deal.

    jarfil,

    What do you mean? There is an OP indicator (I mean, at least Liftoff shows one).

    jarfil,

    I would download a car and 3D print it. I would NOT download Denuvo and add an(other) backdoor to my kernel.

    jarfil,

    Well… modern computers have crypto accelerating instructions, and games rarely use all the cores to their full potential, offloading as much as they can to the GPU instead, while network traffic is relatively minimal, so it is possible to run a lot of stuff on the same computer without impacting the performance of the game itself.

    That doesn’t fix the rest of the problems, though.

    jarfil,

    Fair point, but does Denuvo apply to games that run on underpowered PCs? I might be mistaken, but I thought Denuvo was only meant for the “AAA” titles that require top tier hardware anyway.

    jarfil,

    Then you’d get a degraded experience anyway, I don’t think the difference would be noticeable. Where it would be noticeable, would be with retro games on pretty old hardware.

    Either way, even if it were to slow a game by 50%, that would still not be the biggest issue with Denuvo.

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