Three months of using Arch and you’ve not included your ‘btw’ when claiming to use it? Most suspicious.

But yeah, agree completely. I made a new-years resolution about five years ago to try ‘Linux only gaming for a month’ rather than dual booting; worked so well that I wiped Windows a few months later and have never missed it for a minute. That was for Mint, which is great but hard to keep cutting-edge. Decided to try Arch instead, and after a couple of false starts (hadn’t read the install guide carefully enough to have networking after restart, that kind of thing) it’s been absolutely superb - rock solid, got everything I want at the very latest versions for work and games, best documentation of any distro.

Broke my first one on the final boss of Sekiro, which can be quite intense in places. Bought another one immediately when they announced they weren’t making them any more.

Hesitation is defeat. Although, wish I’d got three as well…

Lunacid is awesome - old-school dungeon crawling with slick controls. The speed and smoothness makes fighting all the old enemies new again.

The Kings Field games are… very hard to love. They’re old-school dungeon crawlers with the most awful, clunky controls that you can imagine. They’re all “pre-Miyazaki” FromSoftware games; don’t expect many Souls-like touches. Getting killed by a skeleton because you can’t turn round to face it in time, or falling down a hole because judging how far you’ve walked forward is difficult? Far more likely.

A Lunacid follow-up with a little more Ultima / Wizardry about it would be amazing. Bit more environmental variety, a few more RPG trappings, and for the love of all that is holy, a minimap. But I can’t see how that would be better done in Sword Of Moonlight rather than just adding them to their existing engine.

Well; I was one of the people that bought Minute Of Islands when it came out. Nice game - mournful tone, but beautiful in places. Bit of a “walking simulator” disguised as a platform game, though - not much replay value, I don’t think.

What does surprise me is that Fizbin had hundreds of employees to lose, however. MoI had a really “art school indie” feel to it - I’d have guessed at more like ten employees having played through it. Gris (by Nomada) is the kind of *art platformer" that I’d draw as a comparison - Gris has much more action - and they look to be about forty people.

Obviously this is bad for everyone involved, but I suspect that the mismanagement that got them here might have been “dreaming too big” rather than purely “screwed by the publisher”.

Presumably whoever took this picture was sat on top of the beer fridge? Otherwise there’s a pretty serious omission here…

Taiwan’s a small-ish country of about 24M people, and also probably the number one producer of advanced semiconductors. Their family tree is basically “rich bastards that own things”; neither Lisa Su or Jensen Huang inherited their firms, but “work your arse off until you’re at the top” looks to be a closely-held family value. So yeah; surprising, but first-cousin-once-removed isn’t that close, and they’ve both got some seriously wealthy closer relatives in diverse fields.

I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.

Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.

For when playing Nethack over telnet just has unacceptable protocol overhead, it’s time to bust out some RPC.

Was it as long ago as that? xcancel.com still works, if you can’t live without your fix of Baalbuddy.

DLSS2.0 is “temporal anti-aliasing on steroids”. TAA works by jiggling the camera a tiny amount, less than a pixel, every frame. If nothing on screen is moving and the camera’s not moving, then you could blend the last dozen or so frames together, and it would appear to have high resolution and smooth edges without doing any extra work. If the camera moves, then you can blend from “where the camera used to be pointing” and get most of the same benefits. If objects in the scene are moving, then you can use the information on “where things used to be” (it’s a graphics engine, we know where things used to be) and blend the same way. If everything’s moving quickly then it doesn’t work, but in that case you won’t notice a few rough edges anyway. Good quality and basically “free” (you were rendering the old frames anyway), especially compared to other ways of doing anti-aliasing.

Nvidia have a honking big supercomputer that renders “perfect very-high resolution frames”, and then tries out untold billions of different possibilities for “the perfect camera jiggle”, “the perfect amount of blending”, “the perfect motion reconstruction” to get the correct result out of lower-quality frames. It’s not just an upscaler, it has a lot of extra information - historic and screen geometry - to work from, and can sometimes generate more accurate renders than rendering at native resolution would do. Getting the information on what the optimal settings are is absolute shitloads of work, but the output is pretty tiny - several thousand matrix operations - which is why it’s cheap enough to apply on every frame. So yeah, not big enough to worry about.

There’s a big fraction of AAA games that use Unreal engine and aim for photorealism, so if you’ve trained it up on that, boom, you’re done in most cases. Indie games with indie game engines tend not to be so demanding, and so don’t need DLSS, so you don’t need to tune it up for them.

Hey! Some of us manage both.

64-bit brings a lot of benefits - can use more RAM directly, more opcodes and lots more registers allow code to run much more efficiently - but for a programme that I just want to open, click on a couple of times and then for it to be almost completely out of the way, those aren’t the biggest selling points. In fact, definitely supporting 32-bit for older games might be better. They might just not want the maintenance headache of supporting two builds.

Think you’re understating it, there. Skyrim’s combat system is terrible, bordering on a placeholder implementation while they worked on something better, and I can’t think of many games with worse. The “stealth” gameplay is ridiculous and immersion-breaking, and the magic consists largely of circle-strafing while line goes up - they get you between the more interesting bits, but little more. However, if you had any dreams of role-playing as some kind of Viking berserker who survives in the icy northlands by their sheer skill with an axe, then I hope you enjoy your combat choices of “bonk” or “charged bonk”, stopping occasionally to consume a few entire wheels of cheese.

Completely with you on Oblivion - rough is a fine word for it. The ‘realistic’ graphics have, ironically, aged much worse than the fantasy world of Morrowind, but the plots and characters are much more interesting than the design-by-committee that they’ve settled into.

I think the “fast travel from the start” and “points of interest visible from miles away” is what really spoils it. Doing a quest in Morrowind felt like an adventure where you had to prepare for the unknown, using all the clues that you’d picked up to your advantage, and it had a world that felt alive when you poked around in it. Frequently, you’d find even more things to do along the way. Doing a quest in Oblivion consists of clicking to get as close to the ready-highlighted destination as you can, zipping through all the meaningless dialogue as quickly as possible since there’s nothing you need to read in it, and then clicking home again to get your reward. Bethesda feeling the need to pad that out with ‘radiant’ quests is completely the wrong direction.

Nah - Doom (DOS): and Doom Eternal are on there, as are Baldur’s Gates 2 and 3.

Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.

There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.

Annoys me that “less” is always correct, which makes “fewer” completely redundant, and yet it’s a short word that could be valuable in conversation if opened up and reused for something everyday that has a long name.

“Before I leave the house, I always check that I’ve got my keys, phone, and fure in my pockets.”

Yeah, it’s always had really strong art direction - still holds up, and you don’t notice missing shadows so much in the middle of a frenetic sequence anyway.

Good to see ray tracing coming along. You could get the same shadows and lighting in a modern rasterising engine now as demonstrated in the RTX version, but at the cost of much more development time. Graphics like that being available to smaller studios and larger games being feasible for bigger studios would be great. HL2 is massive compared to modern shooters, and not having to spend forever tweaking each scene helps with that.

I know you jest, but I’m going to guess it’s for the same reason that the RPCS3 developers didn’t just concentrate on the ‘popular’ games. If they know that all the janky broken games work properly, then they’ll have confidence that there’s no subtle issues hiding in the nearly-perfect ones. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Seems fair both ways to me. That doesn’t seem an unreasonable amount of pay for a day’s work, as even if the ‘final product’ is only a minute, it will still have stopped him from doing much other work that day. Contrariwise, if he’d been asking for any more, the client would have been able to find someone else to do it just as well at the original price, since the requirement is basically ‘clearly spoken’. Wouldn’t make sense to get Ian McKellen in to interpret this bit of acting work.

Such a fan that you’ve gone with the username, too? Good stuff.