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Cake day: Jun 14, 2023

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I’ve found that disabling VSync in games entirely and then letting MangoHud do the limiting works a bit better. Some of that will be because I’m using Proton on Linux, which has DXVK as a translation layer. Games will be trying to limit their frames the DirectX way, whereas MangoHud is limiting them the Vulkan way and is ‘closer to the monitor’ for keeping the pace right.


Also, MangoHud has an ability to set fps_limit in a per-game way that generally results in much smoother frame-pacing than most games achieve by default. That’s awesome for eg. Dark Souls / Elden Ring, which are stuttery at 60 fps but buttery at 59 for some reason, but also for random strategy games which would be just fine at 30 fps but instead have all the fans roaring to render at 144.


Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.

It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(


Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.

I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.

Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.

Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.


They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.

Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.


Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.

There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.

https://lochnits.com/aopid/


Think there should be an ‘accessibility’ option in the settings menu? I remember it being pretty decent - god mode, slow down, item highlighting, and the ‘half damage’ option were in there.


Loved it, but absolutely hit a wall with it until they released the “take half damage” difficulty patch. Then I found it fun again. I love a challenging video game, but the “slightly loose dodging controls” and the requirement for basically perfect execution to defeat the bosses didn’t sit well with me. The Garden Knight was bad enough, the ones that come after it were just silly.


Which is ironic, because Fallout 4 is the game that caused me to no longer be hyped for anything else that Bethesda had coming. Fallout 76 and Starfield didn’t disappoint, because I was expecting them to be shit from a company that had lost its way, and they delivered spectacularly.


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.


I found that too. The animations are misleading - just listen for when you need to press the buttons.


I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.


Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.

Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away.


Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.

I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.

Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.

Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.

Awesome interview as well, @[email protected] - a really interesting read.


The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.


Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.


For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.


To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.

The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.


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.


https://shadps4.net/ to be precise. Differs from other emulators by not emulating the hardware, but by reimplementing the API, from what I’ve read. More like Wine than eg. https://rpcs3.net/


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



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.


Identity is a many-layered thing, and I’d never describe myself as British unless very specifically prompted to do so, but I can at least sign that. 5,071 let’s go!


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.”


Android has a massive built-in library of supporting functions that abstracts away most of the differences between devices, including support libraries for older versions of Android, and Flappy Bird is almost the “hello world” of gamws writing.


Super Mario Bros on the NES came in at 31 kB, and it was a bit more of a game. 100 kB for Flappy Bird isn’t all that impressive.


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.


It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.


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.