- 0 Posts
- 58 Comments
Was it as long ago as that? xcancel.com still works, if you can’t live without your fix of Baalbuddy.
Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.
Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.
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.
So far we’ve had “amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and “bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.
Larian have said that they’d like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I’m assuming they won’t have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)
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.
Yeah, I was pondering this earlier. In exchange for giving up quite a lot of the CPU die, you can have some NPU functionality instead; rather than having to offload everything to the cloud, you can preprocess some of it first, and then offload it.
Speech-to-text and text-to-speech plus general battery efficiency are reasonable use cases for a phone, certainly more so than a laptop and much more so than a desktop. But as you note, those models are going to be small, and RAM and backing storage on phones tends to be slow and limited.
Was also considering that an NPU gives no benefit at all unless code has been written for it; it’s a bastard to write code for something so concurrent, and giving up CPU die for an NPU instead of more cores and cache means that your phone will generally be slower unless it’s largely used for NPU tasks. Plus if you need to offload to the cloud for most useful tasks anyway, it’s just a marketing gimmick that makes your phone less good for most uses.
A shame that all the really early 3D games use their own software rendering engines, and aren’t so amenable to being “cranked up” like later games when accelerators became common.
Get some of the early freescape games like Total Eclipse or Castle Master, early cyberpunk games like Interphase, or even Frontier: Elite II running in big resolutions with silky framerates and insane draw distances, I’d be so pleased.
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.”
Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.
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.
Genesis is a different style of game tho, isn’t it? Diablo-like rather than third-person hack and slash?
Love the series. Personally prefer 3 due to its more limited scope; the other two are great, but to on for a very long time, and I really can’t be bothered playing through the Portal-like bits again. Happy if 4 is the same length as 3.
Yeah. Unless they’ve some ulterior motive for porting their RE engine to iOS, then this is insane. That kind of cash will barely fund a senior engineer for a month once you’ve paid out overheads as well.
If they’re planning to have some kind of phone tie-in to the next Resi game, then maybe it might have made sense to work the compatibility issues out. An app that runs on your phone that makes it “your phone in game”, so you can receive texts from the president’s daughter while shooting some definitely-not-Spaniards on your Playstation, bit of an augmented-reality thing. Could be a laugh to have your phone be in control of a drone so that you can see round corners, while juggling the other things you’re doing? But probably mostly so that you can get dinged for microtransactions.
Agreed. JSON solves:
- the ‘versioning’ problem, where the data fields change after an update. That’s a nightmare on packed binary; need to write so much code to handle it.
- makes debugging persistence issues easy for developers
- very fast libraries exist for reading and writing it
- actually compresses pretty damn well; you can pass the compress + write to a background thread once you’ve done the fast serialisation, anyway.
For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I’d probably never consider anything else.
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.
Same problem as the old Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide adventure, I think. They’d prioritised making ‘Discworld’ puzzles over puzzles that were fun, interesting or made any sense. The animation, voice acting still make it an entertaining game if you’ve got a guide next to you, and it’s great seeing how they’ve interpreted what’s in the books onto the screen. The design hasn’t aged well, though?
Yeah; I’ve a 6700XT, and it appears to be a pretty even match for a 7600XT, looking at Phoronix’ graphs. Makes a pretty good job of 60 Hz / 1440p on recent games, maybe turn down a setting or two, and can usually do 144Hz / 1440p on games that are a few years old. If you can get one of those for substantially cheaper than one of these, I’d say go for it.
Which makes perfect sense - none of the previous producers have. Mostly, they’ve just used their stock characters and locations, and made a game that they thought would be fun out of them. There’s a couple of games that qualify as ‘direct sequels’ (Ocarina -> Majora’s, Wind Waker -> Hourglass) but even then, it doesn’t benefit you much to have played the preceding one. Would be weird to try and twist the games into a chronology that strikes me mostly as ‘fanon’ anyway.
Since all the games of that era now have laughably out-of-date tech, the fact that Daikatana did at the time doesn’t stand out so much. Played through it again a couple of years ago; it’s more janky-but-interesting than the disaster that you’d believe from its reputation - has some good bits in amongst the mostly-okay.
The Gameboy Color version of Daikatana, which is a top-down JRPG instead? That is genuinely a good fun game. Think JR has it for free download on his home page? Easy to get, anyway.
Previous Dark Souls DLC have required you to complete “about half the game”, and then generally warp you off somewhere. There’s not really a lot of dead space on the map for adding to it. I’m expecting something like a new object in the battlefield outside Leyndell, which when you examine it turns out to be Miquella’s memories and warps you off to another region to play through them.
DS1 and 2 required you to fetch an object and take it somewhere to access the DLC; DS3 just needed you to get to the right place. I’m expecting the ‘right place’ thing to continue. ER did have the three special blue daggers for the bell towers, so they might do a fetch quest, never know.
Seems likely. It only stutters on Windows - run it through Proton on Linux, where it’s translating it all to Vulkan, and it’s silky smooth. Maybe off by a frame or two as well of course, but it’s pretty much locked to 60 fps in either case on my machine and can’t really check. DirectX seems quite bad for hitching when a new shader is loaded - they’d all be pre-compiled on a console since the devs know exactly what the target hardware is, so if you don’t rewrite your engine on Windows to accommodate it, then you’ll have problems.
Well; setting aside the small reference pool of modern gaming journalism, I’m not sure that it is such a big step from HL to CoD, just a bit of a step down. HL is as much of a ‘corridor shooter’ as you could ever hope to find - there’s one path through it, and I doubt that many people deviate from it all that much on a playthrough. The difference is, that HL is super imaginatively dressed up on that one path. The levels have a real sense of place. Like you say, the puzzles are never all that difficult, but they’re extremely well-integrated into the design; they feel like the kind of obstacles that you might have to overcome in a top-secret research facility when disaster has struck. And they’re mainly new puzzles; nothing hackneyed or tropey here.
From the article:
In many ways, Half-Life can be seen as an indictment of the video game industry: how can a 25 year-old game be better than almost every shooter that has followed it? Why has its ambition only ever been exceeded only by its own sequel? It paints a picture of a stagnated industry still playing with toys from the 1990s.
I think there’s two problems here; one is that it’s safer to play follow-the-leader, and one is learning the wrong lesson from the leader. Kind of hard to believe now, but HL was considered a graphic powerhouse when it came out, requiring some of the top class machines of the day. But I think that the kind of ‘immersive feeling of wonder’ that HL has via its design conjuring up a real place is mostly due to its environmental storytelling and the novelty of not knowing what to expect around each corner. The imitators saw the twisty-but-linear game, and decided that the most important thing to copy was to have as much graphics as possible. Can’t copy the imaginativeness and the care, so yeah, perpetually taking control away from you for a shooting gallery setpiece, when in fact that only draws you in in a superficial way.
I wouldn’t mind other games copying HL if what they wanted to copy was inventiveness, experimentation, and non-stop gameplay. Copying the things that were new about HL is the complete wrong thing to copy, though.
Act 1 and at the first half of Act 2 ran pretty well for me, generally 80ish fps on max settings everywhere (6700xt @ 1440p). It’s after that when it started running like a three legged mare; frequent random slowdowns to about 15fps. I suspect that they got the game mostly finished and then started their optimization pass at the beginning, and just hadn’t got to the end of the game by the release date, which was moved forward last-minute to avoid Starfield.
The end of the game doesn’t look any more complicated than the beginning; suspect they just ran out of polishing time.
It’s not really the same Chinese Room any more - they basically closed the studio after Little Orpheus, and have restarted it with a new team.
Now, whether you think a bunch of randoms might make a better or worse job of it than Hardsuit Labs, who for reasons still unclear were dropped by the original publisher, is a reasonable question. I don’t see why they shouldn’t make a better job of it. If they do turn out something with great promise but a slew of game-breaking bugs, it’ll be exactly in the spirit of Troika’s original, for sure, and we can have another twenty years of fan patches trying to put it right.
Rated ‘Gold’, ie. crashes no more or less than Windows.
For when playing Nethack over telnet just has unacceptable protocol overhead, it’s time to bust out some RPC.