tias

tias, 2 dni temu (edited 2 dni temu)

I don’t think it’s a big deal where you start. The latest iteration of Riven will likely be the most accessible and that’s probably what matters most if you’re just starting out.

Much of the appeal (for me at least) is that the storyline is a Tolkien-like epic story spanning thousands of years. Myst takes place before Riven, and if you wanted to consume it in chronological order you would start by reading the books (which are surprisingly good). But it’s fine to go back and “fill in the blanks” if you play in a different order. It’s like reading The Hobbit after you read The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Also note that Riven and Riven 2024 are the same story so there’s no need to play both of them. Same with Myst, just pick the most modern iteration of it. The versions that allow you to move and look around freely take away a lot of frustration with trying to make out what the world looks like and finding clues.

tias, miesiąc temu

I was lost when he built that Nether portal at 2:45

tias, 2 miesiące temu

He polled game developers about how Starfield can be fixed, and they answered that it can’t be fixed.

tias, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

I’m 45 y/o with a job, a house and two teenager kids. I can probably count the games I finished on one hand.

tias, 3 miesiące temu

When the C-suite says “innovation” they tend to mean either “things other companies did that this company hasn’t done yet” or “obvious stuff that we should have done already but didn’t”.

tias, 3 miesiące temu

I have lost all interest in playing any future Bethesda games because of their engine. It was pretty crap (but acceptable) back in 2011. Now it feels like a scam to pay for their games. Like one of those “GameStation 5” you can buy on Wish.

tias, 3 miesiące temu

Oh but they’re not selling it, they’re leasing it.

tias, 3 miesiące temu

Even the gigs have a thread running through them, though. You can puzzle together stories by doing them.

tias, 5 miesięcy temu

The problem is that they advertise it a certain way and sell preorders, and then the game doesn’t live up to what they advertised. Worse, they didn’t allow anyone to review the console versions which were so unplayable that Sony removed it from the store. It would have been fine if people knew exactly what they were paying for, but they were misled.

Sure, it was unmet expectations but even if the expectation was just 'it works", they still didn’t meet it. And that’s kind of the bare minimum to even be legal when you’re charging money for it. I disagree that the console versions were 7/10 on release - more like 1/10.

tias, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

Yes, the issue was with last gen consoles. I don’t think that matters to the point I am making, nor that it worked for you personally on your setup. It worked okay for me too, but I was on a high-end PC.

tias, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

Sony literally pulled the game from the PlayStation Store because of the low quality. At that point it’s not just a subjective opinion but fact, so I resent the claim that I’m bending the truth.

tias, 5 miesięcy temu

For most games, I’m fine with renting my games. If they charge a reasonable continuous rental fee and not a crazy one-off price that will make the game available for some unspecified amount of time at the publisher’s discretion. For example, I could imagine paying $2 / month to play Assassin’s Creed. And if it turns out to be boring I can just stop renting it.

tias, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

I think renting should be renting, and purchasing should be purchasing. I’m okay with renting and what that entails (e.g. they might remove the service in the future and I won’t ever own the game). I’m also fine with buying games, and for some games that have a lot of sentimental value or replayability I do want to own them.

What I’m not okay with is the current state of affairs, where they make it seem as if you buy the game and you pay full price, but legally it’s only “licensed” to you and the license can be revoked at any time. It’s all the disadvantages you describe with renting, but with the price of buying. So that’s what I had in mind with my comment: I’d be content instead of angry if they offered a rental service with honest terms of service and a fair price, instead of the bullshit they’re pulling right now.

If there was a proper rental service I would likely rent a lot of games that I wanted to try out. Then I would go to GOG to buy DRM-free versions of the games I want to keep for a long time. Games like Civ5, RimWorld and Cyberpunk 2077. I think I wouldn’t need to rent a game for three years to figure out that I want to buy it, more like a month.

tias, 6 miesięcy temu

The Monster product placement was tone deaf and took away so much from the immersion. IMHO it almost ruined the experience.

tias, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

What the hell. Just a couple of months ago Valve was saying a new Steam Deck was unlikely for the foreseeable future, and I bought one based on that information.

tias, 7 miesięcy temu

The thing that kept turning me off with Cities Skylines was that the range of city services was too small and citizens weren’t using public transportation enough. It felt unrealistic and dumb compared to real life where I live. To get police station, fire station, schools, parks etc all in range of your residents you have to build so much that there’s no room left for the residents. It seems an impossible equation to solve.

For example in real life, my kids take the bus to the other side of town (6 km away) to go to school; in Cities Skylines they need the school to be at most something like two blocks away. I used to walk 3 km to school when I was a kid. And in real life not everybody needs to go by car or even own one. They can walk on the side of the road. But if you are in a car and an ambulance comes up, you move to the side let it through. In Skylines it can take months (!) for an ambulance to reach its destination, because of traffic.

In short, I can’t apply real-world solutions to problems in the game and that makes it not fun for me. Does the sequel have improvements in this regard?

tias, 7 miesięcy temu

I really appreciate the thorough answer, thank you. I think I will give the game a go after they’ve sorted out the worst performance kinks.

tias, 8 miesięcy temu

My only argument against your opinion, is that he actually has a trackable history of poor performance as a CEO and a trackable record of very bad monetization schemes.

…which could be because he has offered this service to many boards in the past.

tias, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

This is from a Swedish perspective, but: My experience with unions has been that they think it’s more important that nobody is paid more, than to pay everyone what they’re worth. In other words they’d prefer everyone being paid equally over raising the minimum wage. Their motivation seems based in jealousy more than a sense of justice. The money they collect from their members is spent on offering stupid IT courses that nobody (except unskilled people) needs, or stuffing their own pockets.

I like the idea of a union, but to me it seems like the actual unions we have today either lack real problems to solve or forgot about them. Every time a representative comes to visit I just get angered by how out of touch they are. They should focus on their core values and get rid of all that idiotic fluff, so they can lower their fees and recruit more members. But like any organization they grew fat and slow.

tias, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

*or forgot about them.

Ensuring that people know how to use Excel is not a problem that the union should be spending money on.

At my office we can work at any hours of the day that we prefer, as long as we check with our coworkers and do our agreed 40 hours / week. When the union heard about this they told my employer that we must do all our work during daytime.

Their reasoning was that our liberal hours give us the opportunity to take on more obligations in our personal life at daytime (such as taking kids to soccer practice) which means we have to work in evenings to make up for lost time. And this, in turn, means we don’t get enough rest. So basically they don’t trust the employees to take responsibility for how much rest they need and want to stop them from doing personal chores during the day.

We (the employees) finally won against the union in this, but what I kept thinking during this ordeal was “jeez, don’t they have more important issues to address?” If they did, why would they be meddling with this.

tias, 8 miesięcy temu

Yes, but then that’s my choice to reduce my working hours, not something my union should force on me. It’s patronizing. All ~100 employees disagreed with the union on this. IMO that’s a sign that they are overreaching and forget who they are working for. They need to realize when they are done and just sit back and enjoy what they’ve accomplished, instead of mindlessly optimizing for the wrong target. At any rate, if this is the kind of stuff they pull I won’t want to support them, because to my mind they are making things worse, not better.

tias, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Yeah I was a game programmer in the early 2000s. Unreal made my jaw drop back then already. They’ve always been state of the art (although arguably CryEngine had the lead for a while), long before Unity came around. As you might remember, it started out in 1998 as the game Unreal (and then Unreal Tournament) which was a kickass first-person shooter. It has been around for 25 years now.

Unreal is now also selling their engine to Hollywood productions that want to replace green screen with real-time effects for the actors to play against. It’s impressive stuff, and I bet they’re going rake in tons of money through that channel as well. Unity is just not in the same ballpark.

That said, there’s room for Unity if they’re willing to find a business model where they don’t compete head-on with Unreal. As the article indicates there is (was) a strong community providing tons of cheap or free-of-charge assets, and it’s been very appreciated among indie devs for these reasons. Unity excels in support for mobile and web platforms. They don’t need to make their engine support all the latest cool technology. They just need good developer relations and tools that make it easy to turn cool ideas into fun games. The fact that they squandered their biggest asset (the community) shows that the leadership does not comprehend Unity’s value proposition. It is being lead by fucking morons.

tias, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m in the camp that is just trying to acclimatize and mentally prepare.

tias, 9 miesięcy temu

Well with Reddit at least, it didn’t make the company change their course.

tias, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

This has been the business model of game engines since at least the early 2000s and I think it’s fine. A significant portion of the code that you ship is theirs, after all. A flat fee would need to be quite high and it would scare developers/investors away since the income of a game is so hard to predict. Unreal and Cryengine work the same way.

tias, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah that shit scared me when I played it at 40 years old. It kind of wears you down when you walk around in dark caves for hours on end.

Another alternative might be Subnautica. It has some jump scares but mostly it’s just the Deep Unknown that gives you chills. Few things in that game are actually dangerous.

tias, 9 miesięcy temu

Bethesda didn’t evolve over the past 10 years. They just added some ambient occlusion and increased the resolution of their textures. The game engine was OK when when Skyrim came out, but it’s really kind of embarrassing that the exact same issues still remain in 2023.

tias, 10 miesięcy temu

I mean they already kinda did

tias, 10 miesięcy temu

Cyan released Firmament not long ago, FYI

tias, 10 miesięcy temu

Games like Populous or Mega-lo-mania.

tias, 10 miesięcy temu

Third person puzzle games with an engaging story like the Space Quest series, or The Dig. Also It Came From The Desert.

tias, 11 miesięcy temu

Let’s say you don’t tie game mechanics to frame rate. How often should you update the state of the game? 50 times / second? 100 times / second? You need to pick a fixed rate if you want to keep the physics engine consistent. If you make the rate too high the game will not run on low-end machines, so you need to find the right balance.

But let’s say you make it 100 times / second. Now between those updates, nothing changes. You can render at 500 FPS, but you’ll be rendering the same thing five times before anything changes, so the extra frames are useless. There are ways around this. You could perform interpolation of object positions between the previous state and the new state (but this introduces input lag). You can keep things that don’t affect gameplay (e.g. eye-candy animations) running at the full FPS. But none of these things are trivially obvious. So it becomes a question of ambition, competence, and the will to put time (i.e. investor’s money) into it. Hence many projects simply prioritize other things.

tias, rok temu

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. After playing it for a while I couldn’t stop until I reached the end. It looks aged now but controls are generally nice and the story is amazing. And I think the character feels feminine, it’s not just a neutral character with a female skin.

tias, rok temu

Loneliness and social-media algorithms are a dangerous combination. I think he could have ended up differently if he had more friends around him that offered a counterbalance to the narrow perspective he has been likely been spoonfed by the likes of Twitter and YouTube. As would many other rich, white men (see: Elon Musk) that unfortunately tend to end up with leeches and yes-men.