sugar_in_your_tea

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

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, rok temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

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.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

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, rok temu

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, rok temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

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, rok temu

Yup, like the original.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

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, rok temu

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, rok temu

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, rok temu

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, rok temu

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, rok temu (edited rok temu)

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, rok temu

But you need to do the same on GOG, no? So that’s kind of a silly argument imo.

Once it’s downloaded, you can copy the game directory somewhere else and never need to download it again.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

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.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

Or that some people use non-“standard” layouts like Dvorak and Colemak. It’s not hard to just use the key code instead of relying on the key label.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

I was with you until Warcraft 3. Warcraft 2 was the best of the series, fight me.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

IDK, I think Diablo 2 was peak Blizzard. We had StarCraft and Warcraft 2, and imo World of Warcraft was kind of the sign of the end, at least when it seemed they would keep doubling down on expansions instead of new games. I thought StarCraft 2 was just alright (bought Wings of Liberty on launch), and I didn’t bother with Diablo 3 due to it being always online.

So for me, peak Blizzard was around 2001. Granted, I never played Warcraft 3 (was just too different from the earlier Warcraft games), nor did I play World of Warcraft (didn’t have stable Internet, stable income, or stable time), so maybe the peak should be pushed out a few years.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

Yup. We limit our kids (2 under 10)to 2hr/day, though they need to “earn” that time by reading, and we give them a free hour each week.

We think that’s fair, and that’s our choice as parents. As they get older, we’ll give them more freedom to set their own rules.

If my local government made the same restrictions as I make, I would totally oppose it. I as a parent should decide what my house rules are.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

Or worse, fill it with microtransactions.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

I don’t pay for microtransactions out of principle, yet I’m sure there’s someone else who will not than make up for me. I honestly don’t get it.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

That’s the excuse those companies give for it. There’s nothing stopping someone like Microsoft from making “Bedrock” and “Java” Minecraft versions play together. Just establish an API and make separate clients if needed.

sugar_in_your_tea, rok temu

And those separate behaviors would be minimized if they supported cross play between Java and Bedrock.

As for cross play and always online, you’re absolutely right that it doesn’t require it, but it makes things a little simpler. If a game requires you to login with the server on startup, that check only has to happen once, instead of happening when you engage with the multiplayer mode. It also makes it so the game can integrate social aspects pretty easily (friend X is online, do you want to play together?).

So if a game offers multiplayer as it’s intended main gameplay, then it can make sense to require always online.

That said, I still hate it. I would prefer companies be forced to support offline play if they offer a significant single player experience. I know it’s something I consider when buying a game (I play with my Steam Deck offline quite frequently), and ideally game stores would have similar requirements as well.