AI is quite good at solving captchas; better than many humans. And it doesn’t really slow down the sloppers for them to set their machine running, come back in an hour and then solve a puzzle manually to submit it. Couple of minutes of work every day and they can still drown the world in bullshit.
Something needs to change, but I’m not convinced that would be enough…
Magnet link for the actual mod download? Then you just need some fairly standard forum software in front. Let the users host the decentralised data.
The ArchWiki is the best hand-holding that you’re going to get on Linux, it’s the finest system administration documentation that the OS has available. But Arch doesn’t “do things for you automatically”, that’s not their ethos. So it’s hard mode until you’ve developed enough sysadmin skills to understand what the docs are telling you, and then it’s easy mode because it all works great together and you’ve a phenomenal reference source.
We run SUSE at work; and when SUSE is working, it’s a damn fine Linux - secure by default, up-to-date, efficient. But if it stops working, man alive, I wish we were using Arch instead. (Admittedly, we just redeploy anything on SUSE that stops working, which takes moments, whereas fixing Arch takes a while but at least you can fix it.)
In which case, I’ll set aside a very good bottle of whisky for that day.
I bought Subnautica on Steam when I wanted to replay it, despite having it free on Epic, just because it was easier than dealing with their trash.
I had 32GB of RAM in my desktop as 4x8GB; one of the sticks failed a couple of years ago, and it was cheaper to replace it with 64GB = 4x16GB than it was to get a replacement 8GB.
That’s convenient for work purposes (in fact, I could actually do with more) but massive pointless overkill for most games. Even games which do “big loads” - Witcher 3, say - aren’t noticeably quicker from RAM cache than they are off of an NVMe drive.
Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.
I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.
They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.
Zelda 3? You get fast travel quite early and the world is packed with stuff, it’s not absurdly huge. Doesn’t have that bloody owl in it either, telling you the obvious at great length.
Certainly not Wind Waker, anyway. Now there is a slow game.
No unexpected crashes, no game breaking bugs. Performance was… dubious. It looks amazing, but UE5 has scalability issues. None of the graphics options seemed to do anything for frame count.
The studio is mostly ex-Ubisoft employees. So yeah, it’s their first game as that studio, but they’re by no means novice developers. Fair play to them for following their passion though, it’s paid off.
“Mostly perfectly unless they’ve got anti-cheat, and you’ll be limited to 30 fps for most of the fancy-graphics titles.”
Actually pretty damn good. Considering the difficulty I had getting frames out of E33 on desktop, having it play reasonably on the go is impressive. 60 fps @ 4K made my PC sound like a vacuum cleaner and was warming up the whole house; really needs some of the upscaling trickery to be comfortable to play.
Best story, for sure. Most emotionally affecting is Majora’s, for me, but TP is close.
Don’t think the gameplay holds up. The Wii version is pure waggle, but even on the Gamecube, there’s a lot of filler - empty space and backtracking. Doesn’t respect your gaming time.
Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…
A fine question. But alas, my PC was only up to emulating it at ‘PS4 native res’, so don’t know.
Well, an increase from (60 to 70) fps to (85 to 87) fps is nothing to complain about. It was obviously completely playable when it was managing “a bit over 30” since it was designed that way, but I’ve no problem with more.
Apparently they have fixed the “vertex explosion” bug as well, where your face would occasionally turn into a mass of spikes that obscured what you were doing so much it was unplayable - needed a quit out and restart, and was the major interruption to the game.
Games which run on Vulkan / OpenGL don’t have any GPU translation overhead, and some run straight-up better via Proton than they do on Windows. Doom 2016 does for me, for instance.
Of course, that game is so well optimised it’s the difference between 140 fps and 200+ fps, which is not terribly obvious, but even so.
From the article, sounds like the company founder is a complete bell-end, had no clear vision and kept changing his mind on everything. Half the games developers in Edinburgh probably used to work for Rockstar and will know all the ins-and-outs of developing a GTA clone, but if you keep fucking them around then you’ll end up with a mess.
From the reviews, sounds like even when it’s not being a buggy mess, it’s boring and the plot is completely stupid. You can hotfix the bugs and performance issues away, but if the underlying concept is shite then you can’t really polish that into something good.
Well, there are some ‘poorly optimised’ games out there. Am able to run eg. Cyberpunk 2077 near maximum (non-raytraced) settings and it happily trundles along at 80+ fps. Would really like to play Mind Over Magic, just my kind of game and which looks like it was done on the Quake3 engine, and I’m struggling since it runs like absolute ass regardless of what the settings are. Think that’s the joy of Unity, though.
I think a lot of the problem is that we’re long past the point where diminishing returns kick in. Doubling the amount of processing required for a few percent more lighting fidelity, that kind of thing. Half Life 2 was expensive for its day, mostly due to its extended development - about $40m then, equivalent of ~$70m now - but it still looks great, mostly due to its strong art style. (I realise Valve keep sneakily updating the engine, so things like the water effects are much better now than they were on release.) There’s games that cost ten times as much and which don’t really look a lot better, but which will get tagged as ‘badly optimised’ since they’re chasing the very latest graphical shinies.
I think the sheer price of producing all of those HD assets is a significant risk to any studio, and means that we end up with a lot of cookie-cutter AAA games where the industry is very cautious about taking chances of any kind. Maybe I’m not the main target for the shiniest of graphics, but my Steam games with the most hours - Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, the Dark Souls series, Crusader Kings - run the gamut from ‘charmingly simple’ to ‘functionally realistic’, but I’d not describe any of them as great because of their graphics.
From the couple of games where I’ve been able to compare; frames per second are exactly the same, but the CPU runs a great deal less hot. No concern on desktop, but that would make a difference on the Steam deck.
(Mark Of The Ninja has a deadlocking issue on native that it doesn’t have on proton, got quite a few of Frictional’s games - Penumbra, Amnesia - that just won’t open on my main monitor when native, and most recently Silksong has been really funny about my 8bitdo controller when native. Works great with my fightstick, though.)
“We’ve made a bang-average live service game that both costs money upfront and has ‘monetisation’ features built in. In addition, it’s in a somewhat niche hard-to-describe genre, has a nondescript name, and we pissed our advertising budget up the wall.”
Nice one, AWS. 100K players, easily.
Like you say, if you’re paying money upfront, you want it forever. From the initial “four player dungeon crawler” description, I thought they’d remade Gauntlet or something - I might be up for that, if it was made with love. Instead, they appear to have made an online collection of bonus levels from Spyro, with corporate-approved zaniness and 'tude that’s always asking you for your credit card details, and that they can shut down whenever they like. How about no?