- 0 Posts
- 40 Comments
Ah yeah, I’m not a big mobile game fan and heavily play PC games. I just missed the draw of it, but had wrong expectations probably. In my head it was more of a sandbox combat game with gathering/crafting, so I kept trying to get to the actual game part :)
While I’m not motivated at all by just achievements or grinding for grinding sake (incremental games are a slight exception there, but progress is much faster / you do have some goals dangled in front of your face). You’re probably aiming more for a classic fitness tracker, but instead of step counts, graphs and so on you present it in game form. Which is valid, but just not what I was after.
As it gets brought up in this thread: When it came out I actually liked Pokemon GO, because the gameplay was interesting. Originally it only showed Pokemon near you and how far they are away (with 1, 2 or 3 foot steps). Which meant you wandered around and actually met people back in the city, grouped up to search or they knew where it was. That all got dumbed down until everyone was just sitting at the same spot and farming unfortunately :-/
I tried it out a while ago and didn’t mesh with it at all. Like the options I had was gather things, minor crafting and traveling. But zero goals or combat (as far as I could tell at the beginning). So after going around, gathering and crafting a bit I got bored and gave up.
Hell, I even traveled around to just find if there are any encounters or places with more happening and I didn’t find anything.
So it felt meaningless to grind with nothing to grind for.
No ultrawide support, no DLSS, no removed fps cap, no precompiled shaders to remove the stutter, …
From makes good games, but when it comes to technology they either suck or are just lazy as hell.
The biggest joke is that ultrawide already renders the full screen width, they just put black bars on top to not give the player an advantage, lol.
I mean I didn’t check how long it actually takes, it’s not 500ms.
It opens quick, but I can’t find the default value (you can change the behavior via registry), but it’s definitely less than half a second. Especially when you’re already hovering down there it appears near instant for me.
And let’s be honest: The only reason why multiple icons worked back in the day was because the name of the open workbook was next to it. So you had “(Excel) My Workbook 123.xlsx” in your taskbar. Which ended up as a mess when you had several programs open. Now you have one Excel icon, you hover over it and you see all your open workbooks as a preview so you select the one you want. It’s definitely cleaner.
Of course, but it’s mostly for reading. The color will probably be used for notes and the occasional image, for which it’s easily good enough. When I read it’s usually a foot away, while I keep my monitor at 2 feet.
Black and white content (text) has 300 dpi atleast, so for that it’s perfect.
E-Ink is fantastic for lots of reading and battery life, for everything else an actual screen is leagues ahead. The response time is awful too.
Both use E Ink’s latest Kaleido color screen technology, which has subtle, pastel-like hues and drops from a 300ppi grayscale resolution to 150ppi when you view content in color.
I had to check just how bad 150ppi would be when dropping down the resolution for color.
A 24" Full HD monitor has a PPI of 92. So it’s actually okay.
I’m still using my old Kobo Aura HD (now roughly 11 years old) and the battery still lasts over a month. The screen was already decent back then, but a bit sluggish. I just checked, the old one has 265 ppi. Maybe it’s not time for an upgrade yet :)
I mean for working out and on the go I use Bluetooth ear buds.
But damn do I sometimes wish I still had a headphone jack on my phone. Like just grabbing my nice pair of open ear headphones, throwing down on the couch and listening to music for example.
And of course I always had backup wired ear buds with me, just in case the battery ran out.
But eh, I can live without the headphone jack, now I just wish they would have used the space for a bigger battery.
I got out of the cycle when I finally realized how many cheaters there are. Worthless to play an extraction shooter under those circumstances. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LfGcDB7Ek
What has that to do with this argument? The lay-offs in the last six months were mostly due to massive overhiring while money lending was cheap. Now interest rates are up and those companies are trying to keep their profits up (or become profitable in the first place).
And the thing is: They hired so many people, even with the lay-offs the headcount is still higher than it was a few years ago.
That’s simply not true, projects are usually done in stages. You got pre-production, production, testing, launch, post-production, …
So take an employee who mainly works in pre-production. Based on what you said they’d be laid off after everything is done and production starts, right? But that’s not how it works. Those people immediately start with the pre-production work of either the next project, or the DLCs for the current one.
There’s always more to do, after launch of a game you can’t have your developers sit around idle, you need the next project already prepared and ready to go. That’s why game DLCs sometimes release only months after launch, they have been worked on for a while.
No exception was provided for this last time I looked through the subscriber agreement. I’m not real keen on reading through it again. Can you share the relevant portion?
Ah, it’s unfortunately not in the contract. They do it (See for example this answer where another family member got the account after their little brother died), but it looks like it’s not a guarantee.
As for the big red button at Valve, I can only find snippets of information. The only “official” one: https://imgur.com/4sa1Ln6 Most information is just from interviews or private messages, claiming there is an inner senior circle at Valve and they do have a contingency plan.
Well, physical media breaks, discs get scratched and you might no longer find the updates.
If you want to preserve your games nowadays your best option is buying from GOG and backing up your installers (it’s DRM free and with no launcher). But it’s a massive hassle compared to just using Steam and having auto updates. The GOG launcher that does updates for you exists, but it’s a bit meh.
Anything that’s delisted will, outside of piracy, die when the account holders die.
Not totally true, it’s allowed to bequeath your account to someone through your will. At least for your Steam account. Of course you have to take care to do that before you die…
Valve isn’t going broke anytime soon, they get around a 30% cut of every game sold and on top of that they also get a cut from all the steam market transactions. Valve is a privately owned company, which means no shareholders who want constant growth for any price, so for a company worth around 7.7 billion USD in 2022 I’m really not afraid Steam will go away anytime soon.
And even if Steam has to shut down, Gaben at least made the promise to give you downloads for all your purchased games. You can decide how much that’s worth.
Preservation is a joke. Sure, for super old games sold on cartridges it works. But for anything around… 1998 to 2010 or so? Forget it.
Even when you owned the original PC CDs with the box, the game updates are no longer available (Developer might not even exist anymore, site is shutdown). And if you get the wrong DRM like SecuROM you can’t start your game at all. Valid CD key or not (I tried it with Sacred 2, couldn’t get it to run due to the DRM servers being gone. Support from the shop I bought it years ago just gave me a Steam key afterwards, lol). And of course even if you get things to run, the online servers are no longer available, so that limits it to singleplayer games mostly.
Looking back at all the games I bought right now Steam is doing the best job when it comes to actually keep them running. GOG is a good second place. Hell, my PC doesn’t even have a DVD drive anymore, it’s simply not necessary.
Having played on PC for the last ~27 years I really don’t understand the nostalgia. PC gaming back then was a major hassle between physical media, manual game patching (version 1.01a to 1.01b to 1.02 to 1.1 to …) and shitty DRM that barely worked. We can only hope Steam isn’t going down the gutter, but for now they rake in tons of cash and it’s a privately held company so it should be fine.
and there are absolutely examples of people losing access to large libraries out there.
Do you have an example? I’d love to read it. I only find people who lost their account (like forgetting their credentials), who got hacked or did illegal things (stolen credit cards, scamming, selling stolen items).
I can’t find someone legitimate so far who lost all access to their Steam account for ToS reasons.
Go and do a chargeback on literally any other service on this planet and see what happens, whatever account it is will get nuked from orbit.
Reselling didn’t even work back in the day with physical copies. The CD key was often only good for x activations, then at some point you had to call a support line. It’s a dubious argument.
Yes, pay to license a game that doesn’t belong to you isn’t great, but I’m confident that at least in the EU Valve wouldn’t get away with taking access away from an entire game library. Especially for random TOS violations.
But we haven’t had a single legitimate case so far, so discussing what might or could happen is moot.
Not every game on Steam has DRM. There are plenty of indie games on there where you can download it, copy the files away and play them offline. And for what it’s worth: Gabe Newell did promise that if Steam ever shuts down they’ll offer you all your games as downloads (though so far they have been solid).
I’ve never heard of a legitimate Steam account getting banned. You might be thinking of VAC bans (where your account is flagged as a cheater), which can force you out of multiplayer servers. But losing your entire Steam library? Unheard of so far if you don’t mess up on purpose (like trading stolen items, excessive account sharing, using a stolen credit card, doing chargebacks, etc.).
Really? I was against Steam when it came out, it felt like insanity: I have to create an account, then register my CD key and it’s gone!? How will I be able to share this game with my friends?!
But after a while it’s straight up better. Do you still remember SecuROM (which shut off its servers, so you can’t even get games with it to run nowadays)? Or having to go to the developer’s website to manually download update 1.0.1a to 1.0.1b to 1.1 to 1.1.2 to 1.3a to 1.4 to … (if you were lucky they offered bigger patches where you could directly jump from 1.0.1a to 1.4 or something). And then years later the developer was bought up or shut down, so the patches were no longer available.
Don’t even remind me of having to stand up, go over to my pile of games, find the right box, open it up, grab the CD, go back to the PC, put the CD in, then start the game I want (hopefully the CD wasn’t scratched). Nowadays I don’t even have a CD drive anymore and I currently have ~70 games installed that I can start in a second or two.
I grew up with sharing CDs (and keys) with friends, or putting a CD into one computer, boot the game, put the CD in a second computer, boot the game, then play on LAN. Steam is way better still. If you don’t like it, buy from GOG.
For detailed ships all you need to do is hire a 3D artist, you don’t need a game for that.
The rest is a mess. Free fly weekend? I load in and all the NPCs are T-Posing and standing around. Or sitting half in the ground. The surroundings are lifeless, there is absolutely nothing to interact with besides some doors/elevators. And don’t even get me started on the bugs and performance (I have a 3080 and 5800X3D at 1440p, so it should run fine…).
So no matter how much content they might add in the future, it doesn’t feel like they have the technical side down at all. And the technical part is the entire make or break it topic as they are trying to build something on a scale no one has done before (and a MMO on top…).
For years now my personal bet is that the game will never come out. And if it ever does it will get negative reviews for being an unplayable mess.
That might be the way it works in your head, but the reality looks different.
AAA games make the most money on PC. And even those games despite micro transactions, DLCs and so on are easily overshadowed by mobile games.
My favorite games are indie games, but indie is simply not feasible in some genres. Take MMOs for example, every stab at it has burned to the ground or was abandoned (or a scam).
Criticizing the big publishers is the only thing we have, because obviously voting with your wallet doesn’t work. You might not buy it, but several million other people who saw a shiny cinematic trailer did. And they will continue to do so, even when Call of Duty 23 sucks they’ll go and buy 24 next year.
If you liked Witcher 3, grab Cyberpunk. Better gameplay and very similar approach (main story quests with decisions to make, side quests, tiny bit of exploring). And it’s a western game on top.
Of course this only works if you’re actually interested in the Cyberpunk Scenario and you don’t want to play mostly Fantasy games.
That’s mostly true, but not fully. Models use human drawn images and photos to learn from. So if you put in millions of drawn images and the hands aren’t perfect in all of them, you might mess up the model too. That’s why negative prompts like “malformed”, “bad quality”, “misformed hands” and so on are popular when playing with image generation.
Why are humans so bad with drawing hands?
They are tough, AI isn’t building a logical model of a human when drawing them. It’s more like taking a best guess where pixels should go. So it’s not “thinking”: Alright, drawing a human, human has two hands, each hand has five fingers, the fingers are posed like this, …
It’s drawing a human, so it roughly throws a human shape on there, human shape roughly has a head, when there is a torso two arms should come out (roughly) and on the end of those two arms is something too, but what that is is complicated and always looks different. It’s all approximation, extremely well done, but in the end the AI is just guessing where to put something.
If you trained a model on just a single type of hand and finger position it would perfectly replicate it. But every hand is different and each hand has a near unlimited amount of positions it can be in (including each finger). So it’s usually a mess.
I saw one way to get better results, but that’s pretty much giving the AI beforehand a pose (like a stick figure) so it already knows where things should go. If you just freely generate “Human male, holding hands up” you probably get a mess with 6 fingers out and maybe a third arm going to nowhere in the back.
Well, how far did you actually get?
Maybe you just played the wrong masteries (classes). I’m not a huge fan of guns, grenades and so on, so style wise it took a bit to find something I enjoy playing in Grim Dawn. Playing a mage also didn’t vibe with me too much.
The furthest I got was with Oathkeeper + Soldier (Warlord), throwing your shield, charging groups etc. was super fun.
As for gameplay: The secret areas and chests are neat, you’re getting rewarded for actually exploring the world. Loot is pretty good too, especially as you can target farm because the monster type you kill matters.
Story is there too, but to get fully into it you need to read a lot (as the meat of the world building is in the messages/logs you find strewn around).
The base game is nice, but they really knocked it out of the park with Ashes of Malmouth, it’s a huge expansion with really good set pieces.
Regarding Canada, I do find this: https://globalnews.ca/content/8797002/can-you-get-fired-recording-conversations-work/
So it seems 100% legal to record yourself even at work. Both audio and video? Which would make it rather easy to provide at least some proof (verbal abuse mostly, but if someone groped her at her desk then filming that might have worked too).
She also wrote:
I had co-workers come to me saying "I didn't like how you were treated, glad you got out." And only then did I realize it wasn't me.
So that would mean there might be additional witnesses? I’m really hoping several of them actually come forward and talk about this then.
True, we also have the whole Rammstein issue at the moment (But that’s even more complicated, as the girls were all adults and consented to it at first).
I’m not sure what the recording laws in Canada are, LTT has a hundred cameras around every day and Madison wrote she got regularly assaulted. If it’s legal there I’d film myself to have proof.
Overall I just don’t like the timing, the drama was a year ago and now that other (more objective drama) gets brought up Madison unpacks everything and piles it on top? She was already in public back then and it’s bullshit that she believes the employer handbook would be an NDA covering sexual assault allegations (like Linus himself wrote back then, no NDA can do that in Canada). The other stuff in the post? Totally fine, that’s criticizing internal processes. But mixed right in there are serious criminal allegations.
Ah darn, in Canada this is a bit fucked, true. Just found this: https://lernerspersonalinjury.ca/sexual-abuse/sexual-abuse-cases-who-pays-the-legal-bills/
In Austria and Germany (as far as I’m aware, I’m not a lawyer) when it’s criminal charges the state sues. So you report it to the police and then it’s out of your hand pretty much (besides being a witness). If you want extra compensation you can go the civil case route afterwards as a victim.
Similar to if you stab me and the police notices then they don’t ask me if I want to sue you. They’ll charge you all on their own as it’s a criminal matter, not a civil one.
Edit: See my other comment below, looks like in Canada the legal system can fuck you over with legal costs in these matters https://lemmy.zip/comment/1760082
With the assault and shit that’s straight up criminally illegal.
It is. So where is the police report? She said she was groped on several occasions (which is sexual assault) and quit the job by her own decision, so why not throw the men who groped her under the bus?
I 100% get the fear of a witch hunt from LTT fans (which are overall dumb and rabid most of the time, just read the YouTube comments), but now that she openly accuses them she should file a police report.
Otherwise this is just throwing accusations around at an opportune time, I’d much rather have this proven in court and the men punished (which would also uncover more systemic problems inside of LTT).
Linus did say a year ago:
For obvious reasons, there won’t be an official statement disclosing private details about my dealings with any of our current or former staff. You (and Reddit) can stop asking.
On a separate note, no NDA or other agreement can prevent a Canadian from reporting workplace mistreatment including (but not limited to) harassment, discrimination or unlawful termination. They can post it publicly, submit a statement to the authorities, or do both for good measure. As long as it was true it wouldn’t be defamatory.
If I’m ever actually accused of a crime or other misdemeanor - including any violation of employment law - I’m sure you’ll be able to read all about it on Dexerto. For now, it appears that we are in the clear.
Now that she openly accuses them I’d expect some action there to go with.
It would still be cheaper and safer to sit a few people down, go over every error code and map them to the correct issue.
Yes, you have to do this for every implementation, but what do you think other businesses do? There are software developers (I got offered a job like that once and declined) who do nothing else than map action x to machine signals y and z. You only have to do this once per machine of course, but it’s still shitty work.
A thousand times more reliable than letting text processing AI try and make a best guess based on the error message (which is honestly insanity).
This is probably marketing crap anyway. Either their solution is brittle and breaks on a real error, or they already hardcoded the most important error codes and the rest is fluff.
I think I’m too jaded in this regard. Reading the wiki I don’t really see depth. Sure, there are activities with fun names, but they are all the same (you start the activity, you walk to finish it, you get random rewards). And all the items seem to be either for selling, basic crafting or just giving you a boost percentage for the activities you’re already doing.
What the activities are missing are risk/reward, decision making, surprises, etc. Or as you’d say in game design “meaningful choices”.
Sure, you have the choice on what skill you work on, but besides skill go up, items to make the activity faster and gold (not sure what it’s for, besides buying mats/items again?) that seems to be it.
I guess combat could help if there’s actual resource investment and risk there. Like are you going to tackle this level 10 monster for higher rewards, with more likelihood to either fail (or spend extra resources on healing potions or whatever)? Or play it save and go against weaker monsters? There should also be extra gold sinks to work for / use the money you accumulated, be it limited use items, cosmetics and so on. And of course ways to play the game differently from other players, like classes, masteries, skill trees or whatever (and no, clicking an activity that says “Sandcastle Building” vs clicking “Ship repair” aren’t really choices).
Just from someone who values gameplay a lot, I don’t see much difference in playing the game for an hour or 100 hours, in the end it keeps boiling down to the same actions with no depth attached. Personally I didn’t see the game value of it, compared to a step tracker (just that the step tracker doesn’t stop counting when it’s “full”, I didn’t like the step mechanic either where you get bonus steps only. If I’ve done my walking for the day I want to spend the steps, not select an activity and I get double steps for it next time I walk).