sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

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

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

I’m pretty sure they just don’t care. This was easy and made money.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, how about… no DRM and instead focus on making games people want to buy. It seems to work well for CD Projekt Red, and surely it would work for others as well.

Piracy is a service problem, not a price problem.

sugar_in_your_tea,

What happens if you buy that and then cancel GamePass? Do you keep the game? Just the upgrade? Or do you lose everything? Do you get it back if you resubscribe?

sugar_in_your_tea,

From the article:

Berbach remarks on his time with Riot, where he worked on the launch of its CSGO and Overwatch 2 rival, Valorant, as well as time with the League of Legends team before and during his position as game director for LoL Wild Rift.

So Wild Rift, a 5v5 MOBA on mobile.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The only one I really value is Digital Foundry. I like how they break down games technically and give insight on how to get the most out of them through settings and whatnot.

But outside of that, I generally trust user reviews more.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Hopefully that sends the right message to the rest.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The character models seemed pretty simple for such a demanding game. I was hoping at least major characters would be a little more detailed. Then again, this was from watching a stream on my phone, so maybe it looks better in person.

Aside from looks, the voice acting I saw seemed a little odd. It could also just be a poor script, but it just didn’t seem all that great.

But overall, the game seemed pretty good, but not something I’m dying to run out and buy. I’ll have some more time this fall, so I’ll probably wait for a few patches to land.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Why? They do that pretty much with every major release, especially for demanding titles. People tend to build PCs specifically for a specific game, so the major GPU vendors want to fill that high end need.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, a mix of both would be ideal. The fact that we’re surprised that Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 were solid on release is a problem, all AAA releases should have that level of quality at a minimum on release.

If games are consistently solid at release, I’d probably preorder like I used to. Now I wait and see because, more often than not, it’s a buggy mess the first few weeks.

Baldur's Gate 3 - Patch #2 Now Live! - Steam News (store.steampowered.com) angielski

Patch #2 for Baldur’s Gate 3 is now live, bringing bug fixes, substantial performance improvements and much more! If you missed our latest Community Update, we highly recommend you give it a read here for a glimpse at the future of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the role your feedback is playing in that....

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

No, for releasing a solid game and following it up with a solid performance patch. If the game sucked at launch, I would understand criticism, but it didn’t.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Ok, so make good games and sell them for what they’re worth. I don’t see why they need subscriptions to stay in business.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Which is really dumb. I wish they would just wait to release until the game is done instead of sending a bunch of patches over the first few months after release. It’s that kind of crap that makes me not want to buy games at release or even for the first few months because I know if I wait, I’ll get a better product.

Before digital was a thing, game companies had to fully test their games before releasing because there was no way to patch it later. I wish we would’ve kept the same mindset today, but with the ability to patch in case they missed something.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.

These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).

However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:

  • Dark Forces
  • Lords of the Realm 2
  • Command and Conquer - most titles
  • Warcraft - 1&2
  • Age of Empires
  • Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear

I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).

Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.

sugar_in_your_tea,

According to ProtonDB, it seems to work fine. AOE 2 seems to work after tweaks. AOE 3 seems to work fine if you disable Steam overlay.AOE 4 seems okay for single player, though it seems YMMV with a multiplayer fix.

If in doubt, check proton DB for tweaks.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The most recent comment that claims it works is from 3 days ago, and it seems you need a startup command. So it seems to have been completely broken as of a week or two ago, but potentially there’s a workaround on the latest Proton experimental.

So your experience from a couple months ago may no longer apply.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, XBox GamePass is not available for Steam deck or Linux generally, so I have never used it. I would probably sign up if it was available though.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, it’s a promotion, so it’s available when they want to increase user counts.

sugar_in_your_tea,

If you only ever play games or watch movies/shows once regardless, it’s just a cheaper way to get content. The only reason I don’t use Gamepass is because it doesn’t work on Linux. That’s it.

I have Netflix and Disney+ because it’s way cheaper than buying the movies and shows I watch on it, movies and shows that I’ll only ever watch once.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

I’m talking about GamePass, not Starfield. Gamepass only works on Microsoft OSes AFAIK, so you won’t be able to use it on anything it doesn’t control (i.e. macOS or Linux).

sugar_in_your_tea,

Ikr? That’s one reason why I like Netflix. I don’t like the DRM, but they at least do a good job ensuring it works pretty much everywhere.

In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. (steamdb.info) angielski

After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I need to really want to play a game to make an account outside of whatever launcher I’m using, and that’s just not true here.

sugar_in_your_tea,

IDK, Denuvo + EA account makes this a hard sell for me. If those are removed, I may consider it at $20, but definitely not $60.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Or they could, you know, wait for it to be ready to release. How about they wait to announce it until the game is done, and then spend the last few months polishing it?

sugar_in_your_tea,

GTA V? Really? I absolutely hated the story in that, and I hated the characters. Here are some of my issues with it:

Trevor:

  • interesting epilogue, but otherwise pretty much no character arc
  • really wanted to see him try to take on the Los Santos gangs (DLC!)

Franklin:

  • largely just does whatever Michael says
  • wanted to start a dealership, but he kinda gives up once he makes it big (DLC!)

Michael:

  • arc was okay, but he didn’t seem like a good fit for main character, especially when Franklin gets the ending

All in all, I felt like the three character perspective was largely a distraction from the lack of actual storytelling. SA and IV didn’t have that, so they actually had a meandering plot with some character development to round it all out.

I haven’t finished RDR2 (it’s so long!), but I really loved RDR and heard that story for RDR2 is even better.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’m not expecting RDR-levels of storytelling or anything, and the original RDR is way better than any of the GTAs in terms of storytelling and characters. However, GTA V felt like such a downgrade from previous entries.

GTA V starts out strong, with a fun heist sequence, which gets the player excited for more. And then the next thing we see is Michael at marriage counseling, and then we meet Franklin, who seems ready to take up Michael’s mantle. Then we see Trevor, who is now running drugs in the rural area, which is also pretty exciting. At the start, I was excited to see all three develop their individual storylines, with Franklin just getting into the underground, Trevor establishing himself as a drug kingpin, and Michael getting his last heist in.

But instead of that, Trevor and Franklin kind of give up on their arcs and they just focus on helping Michael with the heist. Why? Why doesn’t Trevor try to take over the drug trade in Los Santos? Why doesn’t Franklin try to start his own dealership? Or at least steal cars as side content? If they’re really interested in heists, why is there only about five of them? Why can’t I go do more after finishing the main storyline? What about Las Venturas, doing heists there would be a ton of fun!

To me, the storytelling really dragged once Trevor came to Los Santos, which was more than half of the game. In fact, I dropped it and came back about three times (restarting twice) because it was so uninteresting, until I finally forced myself to speed through the story just so I could cross it off my list so I wouldn’t feel the need to come back. I didn’t have the same problem with either GTA SA or GTA IV, and I even finished GTA IV after GTA V (played off and on on console before GTA V, then bought and played through on PC).

And the world felt small to me. I know it was physically bigger than every other GTA game, but it felt so much smaller than GTA SA, which was able to fit three cities and a rural area and still make them feel far apart (GTA V just had one city and a rural area), and it felt similar to GTA IV. I didn’t feel any desire to explore like I did with SA. The backstory was interesting, but I think it just highlighted how disappointing the rest of the story was.

In fact, I even like GTA III more than GTA V. It’s pretty janky to play today, but it still has that OG charm to it.

So I honestly don’t understand why it’s so loved. Nothing about it really stood out to me aside from the graphics and performance of the engine. I didn’t like the driving as much as IV (controversial take), the humor felt bland to me, and I didn’t find any of the side characters particularly interesting, except maybe Lamar, and he also largely gave up on his arc.

So GTA V is by far my least favorite of the series, so much so that I’m not looking forward to GTA VI.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Well, FSR is open, as is FreeSync and most other AMD tech, it’s just that NVIDIA is so dominant that there’s really no reason for them to use anything other than their own proprietary tech. If Intel can eat away at NVIDIA market share, maybe we’ll see some more openness.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Last I checked, DLSS requires work by the developers to work properly, so it’s less “leveraging the hardware” and more “leveraging better data,” though maybe FSR 3 has a similar process.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I think it’s more the other way around. They designed the feature around their new hardware as a form of competitive advantage. Most of the time, you can exchange cross platform compatibility for better performance.

Look at CUDA vs OpenCL, for example. Instead of improving OpenCL or making CUDA an open standard, they instead double down on keeping it proprietary. They probably get a small performance advantage here, but the main reason they do this is to secure their monopoly. The same goes for GSync vs FreeSync, but it seems they are backing down and supporting FreeSync as well.

They want you to think it’s a pro-consumer move, but really it’s just a way to keep their competition one step behind.

sugar_in_your_tea,

CUDA is only better because the industry has moved to it, and NVIDIA pumps money into its development. OpenCL could be just as good if the industry adopted it and card manufacturers invested in it. AMD and Intel aren’t going to invest as much in it as NVIDIA invests in CUDA because the marketshare just isn’t there.

Look at Vulkan, it has a ton of potential for greater performance, yet many games (at least Baldur’s Gate) work better with DirectX 12, and that’s because they’ve invested resources into making it work better. If those same resources were out into Vulkan development, Vulkan would outperform DirectX on those games.

The same goes for GSync vs FreeSync, most of the problems with FreeSync were poor implementations by monitors, or poor support from NVIDIA. More people had NVIDIA cards, so GSync monitors tended to work better. If NVIDIA and AMD had worked together at the start, variable refresh would’ve worked better from day one.

Look at web standards, when organizations worked well together (e.g. to overtake IE 6), the web progressed really well and you could largely say “use a modern browser” and things would tend to work well. Now that Chrome has a near monopoly, there’s a ton of little things that don’t work as nicely between Chrome and Firefox. Things were pretty good until Chrome became dominant, and now it’s getting worse.

It absolutely is “pro technology”

Kind of. It’s more of an excuse to be anti-consumer by locking out competition with a somewhat legitimate “pro technology” stance.

If they really were so “pro technology,” why not release DLSS, GSync, and CUDA as open standards? That way other companies could provide that technology in new ways to more segments of the market. But instead of that, they go the proprietary route, and the rest try to make open standards to oppose their monopoly on that tech.

I’m not proposing any solutions here, just pointing out that NVIDIA does this because it works to secure their dominant market share. If AMD and Intel drop out, they’d likely stop the pace of innovation. If AMD and Intel catch up, NVIDIA will likely adopt open standards. But as long as they have a dominant position, there’s no reason for them to play nicely.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Opening the standard… compromise the product massively

Citation needed.

All NVIDIA needs to do is:

  1. release the spec with a license AMD and Intel can use
  2. form a standards group, or submit it to an existing one
  3. ensure any changes to the spec go through the standards group; they can be first to market, provided they agree on the spec change

That’s it. They don’t need to make changes to suit AMD and Intel’s hardware, that’s on those individual companies to make work correctly.

This works really well in many other areas of computing, such as compression algorithms, web standards, USB specs, etc. Once you have a standard, other products can target it and the consumer has a richer selection of compatible products.

Right now, if you want GPGPU, you need to choose between OpenCL and CUDA, and each choice will essentially lock you out of certain product categories. Just a few years ago, the same as true for FreeSync, though FreeSync seems to have won.

But NVIDIA seems to be allergic to open standards, even going so far as to make their own power cable when they could have worked with the existing relevant standards bodies.

sugar_in_your_tea,

How do you explain PCIe, DDR, and M.2 standards? Maybe we could’ve had similar performance sooner if motherboard vendors did their own thing, but with standardization, we get more variety and broader adoption.

If a company wants or needs a major change, they go through the standards body and all competitors benefit from that work. The time to market for an individual feature may be a little longer, but the overall pace is likely pretty similar, they just need to front load the I/O design work.

sugar_in_your_tea,

communicating between two pieces of hardware from different manufacturers

  • like a GPU and a monitor? (FreeSync/GSync)
  • like a GPU and a PSU? (the 12v cable)

DLSS and RTX are the same way, but instead of communicating between two hardware products, it’s communicating between two software components, and then translating those messages onto commands for specialized hardware.

Both DLSS and RTX are a simpler, more specific casez of GPGPU, so they likely could’ve opened and extended CUDA, extended OpenCL, or extended Vulkan/DirectX instead, with the hardware reporting whether it can handle DLSS or RTX extensions efficiently. CPUs do exactly that for things like SIMD instructions, and compilers change the code depending on the features that CPU exposes.

But instead in all of those cases, they went with proprietary and minimal documentation. That means it was intentional that they don’t want competitors to compete directly using those technologies, and instead expect them to make their own competing APIs.

Here’s how the standards track should work:

  1. company proposes new API A for the standards track
  2. company builds a product based on proposal A
  3. standards body considers and debates proposal A
  4. company releases product based on A, ideally after the standards body agrees on A
  5. if there is a change needed to A, company releases a patch to support the new, agreed-upon standard, and competitors start building their own implementations of A

That’s it. Step 1 shouldn’t take much effort, and if they did a good job designing the standard, step 5 should be pretty small.

But instead, NVIDIA ignores the whole process and just does their own thing until either they get their way or they’re essentially forced to adopt the standard. They basically lost the GSync fight (after years of winning), and they seem to have lost the Wayland EGLStream proposal and have adopted the GBM standard. But they win more than they lose, so they keep doing it.

That’s why we need competition, not because NVIDIA isn’t innovating, but because NVIDIA is innovating in a way to lock out competition. If AMD and Intel can eat away at NVIDIA’s dominant market share, NVIDIA will be forced to pay nice more often.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The process I detailed does not require consensus before a product can be released, it just allows for that consensus to happen eventually. So by definition, it won’t impede progress. It does encourage direct competition, and that’s something NVIDIA would rather avoid.

sugar_in_your_tea,

And the few that aren’t PC ports have ports on PC.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I really wish they’d make something more like Saints Row 2. The reboot was about halfway there, but the campaign is too short and just not good enough to really be a return to that style of game, and the gameplay isn’t interesting enough to satisfy fans of later series. Add to that the high number of bugs and it’s just a disappointment all around.

Atari Announces Modernized 2600 Console (Releasing Nov 17th) (www.gameinformer.com) angielski

Before the 1983 video game crash and Nintendo’s subsequent takeover of the industry with the NES, the Atari 2600 reigned supreme. The popular console was pretty much the poster child for ‘late 70s/early ‘80s gaming, boasting a vast library of titles that have since inspired a multitude of games for decades to come. Over 30...

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s pretty cool. I grew up with an Atari 2600 at home and still think about some of the games today. I remember distinctly playing Parachute (I actually remade this for a personal project) and Pitfall, as well as a handful of others. I also had an NES, and those were pretty much my only consoles until much later when we got a Sega Genesis and later I bought an OG Xbox.

However, I won’t be buying this. They should instead just sell an actual emulator for PC and sell a bundle of games to go with it. Maybe sell each game for $1-2, maximum $5, and maybe offer a Switch port as well.

But I don’t want to pay $130 for single use hardware, that’s just dumb.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Are you talking about this Antstream? It’s not released , but I’ll have to check it out when it is.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It turns out, if you make a good game, it’ll probably sell well.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Honestly, that’s exactly what I expect from a puzzle game sequel, the same core gameplay with some new mechanics and nicer graphics.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, like the original.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It wasn’t a scam, it just kinda sucked. They fixed the suck.

That’s exactly what I want to see from a game dev. If the game sucks, make it right. Ideally don’t release a sucky game, but the next best is to fix the sucky game.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Pathing should be low hanging fruit here. Most NPCs don’t need accurate pathing, and can use a much faster algorithm to calculate. Hopefully the devs do a round of optimizations for late game content since that seems to be where most of the issues are.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Oh it’s certainly pushing it to the limits, which is why they need to change things. If it’s pathing, they have a ton of options to make it smoother, since most NPCs don’t need fancy pathing logic.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s optimal if you want to find the best path to a destination, but NPCs milling about a town don’t need the best path, they just need to move toward their goal more or less. And most go on a mostly fixed route, so you can just store the ideal path in memory and let the NPC evade up to some distance from that path.

This makes it a lot more friendly to do a multi-threaded implementation since you don’t need to figure out collision avoidance until it’s about to happen, just look a few steps ahead and course correct as needed.

Enemies should use proper pathing, but NPCs don’t need to be anywhere near that sophisticated.

But I have no idea what they’re actually doing under the hood, it’s just concerning that it gets slow when the player moves without interacting with any NPCs.

sugar_in_your_tea,

In the Digital Foundry review, they saw huge performance dips when just running in small circles, when standing still had no impact. As in, on a high end system, performance dropped from ~90FPS to mid-60s, just by moving in a tight circle (i.e. not enough to actually move the camera).

That sounds a lot like pathing to me, though other things could certainly be causing it.

It just seems like something there is poorly optimized and it shows when there are a lot of NPCs around.

And the game essentially uses last gen tech (DX11, no RTX, performance drop on Vulkan, etc), so it’s not pushing the boundaries all that much, so it’s probably not fully optimized. It should be feasible to optimize it to at least not get FPS dips when moving vs standing still in towns, if not get a bit better performance on older CPUs (e.g. Zen 2 CPUs like 3600 and whatever is in the Steam Deck). It runs pretty well, it they could probably get a bit more.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

But why only when the player is moving? Surely the NPCs are also moving all the time, so just moving the player and maybe nudging the party members (so like 4 new characters moving?) shouldn’t drop frames by ~30%. Something seems off there.

I hope they figure it out and patch it, because it would really impact the experience on lower end hardware, like the Steam Deck (i.e. stable 30 FPS vs stutters in the late game).

sugar_in_your_tea,

I don’t think you do need Steam running. If it’s truly DRM-free, just copy the game directory to a new machine and the game will run. Don’t launch through Steam, launch it directly from the game directory.

I’ve run games directly without Steam running on a handful of occasions, such as when someone else is using my Steam account (e.g. my kids on my other computer) and I want to play a game. I could probably play in offline mode I guess, but running it directly isn’t that hard.

It’s not an installer, but I don’t need an installer when I already have all the game files in one directory.

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