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Cake day: Jun 15, 2023

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In the US not all licenses are transferable, and that includes things like “accounts”.

That’s maybe a service that you can’t transfer but it’s still holding property of the account holder. More like escrow.

As to lawyers, well, they aren’t hiring lawyers to follow the intent of the law but to write terms that they think they might get away with, at least for a while, and if not, not be nailed for fraud or such. Corporate lawyers are just as slimy in the EU as they are elsewhere.


With a physical good you’re transferring ownership of that “thing”,

A use-right is also a thing that can be sold and for which stuff like the first sale doctrine applies. Possession and property of the use right is all yours, even if it does not include the right to make additional copies, that is, to sublicense.

At least that’s how it works over here, always has. You can get perfectly valid Windows Pro keys here on the cheap, there’s a small cottage industry buying up volume licenses at bankruptcy proceedings and the like and unbundling them. If Microsoft can’t stop that then Valve won’t, either.


They’ll be forced to accept it, at least in the EU, they will also need to enable you to resell your games. EU law on this is clear, rulings in other cases are clear, all we’re waiting for is for Valve to stop appealing or lose before the ECJ, whatever is first.

The tl;dr is if they want to argue that they’re simply renting out licenses then they shouldn’t be taking one-time but regular payments, or only give out time-limited licenses for one-time payments, or some such. They should also avoid terms such as “buy” and “summer sale” like the plague.


The quality of random no-brand audio cables, connectors, adapters etc. tends to be right-out atrocious. There’s technically going to be metal in there but that “nice”, thick headphone cable that came with those cheap headphones (and even some decent ones, like AKG K240s) is going to consist mostly of insulation, not conductors. Plastic is quite a bit cheaper than copper.

You can get ok jack adapters for 80ct but honestly I wouldn’t trust that thing if I didn’t trust Thomann. Usually I’d be looking for Rean when wanting a cheap one but they’re apparently not in stock. And I kinda doubt Neutrik or Hicon even produce them if you’re spending five bucks on a 3.5mm jack you’re not using adapters, you’re soldering the exact cable you need.

Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude which you can fix with the volume knob, You’re looking for impedance and material boundaries have a habit of being bad for it, as well as signal quality as parts of the signal will propagate through the boundary and parts will reflect. For more information ask an actual electrical engineer I merely wrote an A in a course I had to take and can tell the hot end of a soldering iron from the cold one (it’s the one with the cable).


Textures can be scaled quite easily, at least when talking about 4k to 1k below that could cause GFX people to shout at you because automatic processes are bound to lose the wrong details. Meshes OTOH forget it.

Also I kinda was assuming 4x 1k to throw at a 4k screen as people were talking about home theatre screens. The “uses 4x VRAM” equation is for displaying 4x at 1/4th the resolution as opposed to 1x at 1x the resolution, whatever that resolution may be, and assuming you don’t have a second set of close-up assets – you can’t just take LOD assets, being in the distance is a different thing than being in the forefront at a lower resolution: Foreground assets get way more visual attention, it’s just how human perception works so you can’t get away with auto-decimating and whatnot.


I completely agree but I doubt you can afford a StarWars license if you’re making an indie game. Needs oomph and AAA to repay itself, and that’s before Disney marketing gets their turn to say no because they’ve seen the walk cycles in Clone Wars and went “no, we can’t possibly go worse than that that’d damage the brand”. I’m digressing but those walk cycles really are awful.


Output resolution has negligible impact on VRAM use: 32M for a 4-byte buffer for 4k, 8M for 1080p. It’s texture and mesh data that eats VRAM, texture and mesh data that’s bound to be different between different cameras and thus, as I already said, can’t be shared, you need to calculate with 4x VRAM use because you need to cover the worst-case scenario.


I had no idea and it was the game that was listed without “2” or “3” etc. so that’s the specs I used.

Yeah no the 2004 thing should run in 16x splitscreen on a quadcore Ryzen with a 4G RX 570. With headroom.

The general point still stands, though, you can’t do the same thing with a 2015 game. On the flipside you should be able to run the 2004 game in different VMs on the same box, no native support required.


We had 4 way split on 20inch tube tvs on hardware that measure their ram in MBs

And were still compute-bound. Things like the N64 pretty much used resources per pixel, mesh data being so light that the whole level could be in the limited RAM at the same time – and needed to be because there weren’t CPU cycles left over to implement asset streaming. Nowadays the only stuff that is in RAM is what you actually see, and with four perspectives, yes, you need four times the VRAM as every player can look at something completely different.

Sure you can write the game to use 1/4th the resources but then you either use that for singleplayer and get bad reviews for bad graphics, or you develop two completely different sets of assets, exploding development costs. I’m sure there also exist shady kitten-drowing marketing fucks who would object on reasons of “but hear me out, let’s just sell them four copies instead” but they don’t even get to object because production-wise split-screen isn’t an option nowadays for games which aren’t specifically focussing on that kind of thing. You can’t just add it to any random title for a tenner.


I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game.

How to tell me you’re not a gamedev without telling me you’re not a gamedev. You don’t just turn a knob and the game uses less VRAM, a 4x budget difference is a completely new pipeline, including assets.

Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.

Speaking about redoing mesh assets. Textures are easy, especially if they already exist in a higher resolution which will be the case for a 2015 game, but producing slightly higher-res meshes from the original sculpts is manual work. Topology and weight-painting at minimum.

So, different proposal: Don’t do it yourself. Scrap together a couple of millions to have someone do it for you.


4x splitscreen needs approximately 4x VRAM with modern approaches to graphics: If you’re looking at something sufficiently different than another player there’s going to be nearly zero data in common between them, and you need VRAM for both sets. You go ahead and make a game run in 1/4th of its original budget.


Fair enough but it’s definitely giving you the “throw random stuff at the parser and have the game be snarky” experience. It’s from the point-and-click era, the tail end even, but does a throwback to introduce those elements again.

Definitely another experience than Fallout 4 reducing dialogue to “yeah, nah, question, bail”.


Try for yourself. Long story short: The devs would anticipate a lot of stuff you might try, and given that this is Douglas Adams the game can be quite snarky, but if not then you’ll see “I don’t know the word ‘foo’” or similar.

That particular game is notoriously hard and confusing and meant to be attempted several times before you’re able to get through it without triggering some dead-end in the beginning that will only become apparent in the end. It’s from another era. You might want to try Starship Titanic, also Douglas Adams, pretty much the pinnacle of text adventures (though it’s not a pure text adventure). All in all I’m just a tad too young to really have gotten into the genre, regarding point+click adventures I can recommend anything Terry Pratchett (multiple Discworld adventures) and pretty much anything Lucasarts, though the very early stuff (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken) is quite rough around the edges. All the LucasArts and Discworld stuff is supported by ScummVM, you only have to get your hands on the game files.


Even basic UI and QoL features

Some time ago I made a new modlist for Skyrim from scratch and forgot to include SkyUI, and after starting the game recoiled in horror. How can you make their baseline interface worse.


New Vegas

Mirrors from a tower plant magically turning into solar panels when installed on an airbase? 0/10 unplayable.


Protip: isthereanydeal.com has an RSS feed which will also alert you to other givaways.


the 30% cut is brutal

Reportedly Epic’s 12% barely covers costs and would not if they included transaction fees. 20% seems to be the bare minimum if you want a store to actually have good service, and then I’m giving Valve additional credit for sinking boatloads of money into general infrastructure, in the long term Proton alone is worth those 10%. Much unlike the rest of the stores (exception GOG) which take the same 30% and are run by humongous multinationals.

…and then there’s itch.io. If you’re a small and scrappy indie very much an option: They’re also small and scrappy. And they’ll probably shout at you if you try to upload a 20G game I very much doubt their servers would survive an AAA launch. OTOH, reportedly their average revenue split is 8% (customers can choose).


4.87% on North American Desktops, 6.16% worldwide, 10.77% in Europe, 17.43% in Germany. Not even showing up on mobile and tablet, here’s the numbers.

World-wide usage of adblock is much higher, 42.7%, so if Google actually goes through with their plan Chrome is going to lose market share, massively.



unless Gabe made an unbreakable rule for the company to never go public

Not exactly unprecedented, see e.g. Bosch, Zeiss, or, staying in the US, Mozilla.


Tons of SMEs are world leaders in their domain, you just never heard of them because they produce giant ship propellers, fire hose couplings, surgical instruments, whatnot, not exactly things people not using them ever think about. And of course you don’t have to be a hidden champion to be a SME that owns their market, say, Herrenknecht. Who would be unknown if tunnel boring wasn’t so cool and impactful that there’s tons of documentaries about them doing it.


Being intimidated and lost is completely normal given that it looks like this, and there’s probably not a single person on the world to have ever used all of Blender’s features.

Watch the whole Blender 2.8 fundamentals playlist, things get way easier once you know what to ignore and what UI conventions blender uses as well have a rough overview of the feature set – because that allows you to ignore even more stuff. Then figure out what you want to do, figure out a workflow, customise the UI to make that particular thing convenient (remapping a couple of keys when you need something often, leave other things you need twice a day in the menus, etc), and bob’s your uncle.

Last, but not least: Unless you come from another 3d program and absolutely can’t be bothered to re-train your muscle memory use right-click select. Your index finger is going to thank you, it’s also a better UI convention in general as it leads to way fewer misclicks (selecting instead of manipulating or the other way around). Personally, I use space bar for the context menu (the default is play video which I rarely use, and if then shift+space isn’t exactly awkward). There’s also plenty of extensions focussed on particular workflows, e.g. F2 is very common if you do mesh editing, I also use machin3tools, especially for mode switching.

All major general-purpose 3d packages have a feature set so large that it can’t possibly fit onto keybindings, and you can’t pick them up like picking up a word processor. At the same time it’s professional software used by professionals who want to be fast and efficient, so the optimal UI isn’t “intuitive” (as in: dumbed down) but flexible and customisable. Blender’s defaults aren’t bad for some basic work but ultimately you will find them lacking, that’s not because the defaults are bad but because they are a compromise between 10000 ways to use the program. Ask three blender users how they use blender and you’ll get fifteen answers.





Selecting the sex of the PC has been a standard feature in practically every RPG with character creator ever, and definitely in Bethesda RPGs, what they added is an option to change pronouns the PC is referred to by NPCs from the default. If you want them to match you simply don’t touch that option, done.

From a developer’s perspective it’s dead simple, similar in triviality as allowing people to mix+match any voice to any body type. Cyberpunk’s free choice of genitals needs some implementation care but if you’re planning for it from the start it’s also easy.

Where things get more complicated is things like dresses for male bodies, especially if you don’t have any shape keys in place. But if you use one body mesh for everything and simply shape key it into male and female then it’s again no issue (you also need to lerp animations then, probably, male and female bodies walk differently because hips). Basically it’s hard if your asset pipeline is simple, if the pipeline is sophisticated it’s easy.


Github has other ways to make money, and Microsoft capital to back up everything. And granted Nexus could use a better bug tracker, but you won’t see them getting into the private repository business any time soon.


Why would I want to stare at a man’s ass and hear his grunts for hours on end.


Does any one of those integrate with Mod Organizer or do I have to download the mod (often also with an annoying wait time) and then point Mod Organizer to it. Do they have an API that enables “a new version is out” notifications, or do I have to hunt everything down manually.

It really wouldn’t be that hard, but none of them cares. Nexus kinda has itself positioned well there as they would not have to support any third-party API endpoints in Vortex, but Vortex isn’t even the popular choice for many games.


Their rate-limiting isn’t bad at all, their integration into everything is excellent, and for games without much of a community Vortex is often the only mod manager. Their API isn’t closed down, so Mod Organiser can integrate with Nexus just as well, and they probably would also do it with other mod sites if those ever bothered to set up a version check etc. API. They have an excellent search function.

In short: They provide a good service. Like the most annoying part about Nexus as a freeloader is the five or what seconds wait before your mod manager picks up the download.

And, no, their rate limiting really isn’t bad. 1.5MB/s for people with adblock, 3MB/s for people without. How often do you download gigabytes worth of mods it’s not like they’re bullying you into a subscription.


I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.

I don’t think you’re a bigot, but I also think you’re off the mark.

First off, the mod has quite literally zero value. Installing it is more work than ignoring an option during character creation. I constantly ignore options I don’t care about during character creation, it really isn’t hard. It’s hard to interpret the intent of the creator of the mod, as well as its users, as anything else but being out for blood.

That alone though isn’t a reason to remove the mod – Nexus is full of useless mods. But something neat happens when you do nuke the mod: Bigots come out of the woodwork, you can ban them in one fell stroke, and thereby lessen your moderation load in the long term.

Last, but not least, the curse of neutrality aka the Nazi bar thing.

Oh, EDIT:

Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun. If it is really so pointless, nexus shouldn’t have bothered removing the mod.

You don’t have to select a pronoun. The default will match the phenotype of the body you select.


The issue is that, for a person to ‘derive’ comedy from Sarah Silverman the ‘analogue’ way, you have to get her works legally, be that streaming her comedy specials, or watching movies/shows she’s written for.

I can also talk to a guy in a bar rambling about her work. That guy’s name? ChatGPT.


LLMs have been shown to produce verbatim or almost-verbatim copies of their training data

That’s either overfitting and means the training went wrong, or plain chance. Gazillions of bonkers court cases over “did the artist at some point in their life hear a particular melody” come to mind. Great. Now that’s flanked with allegations of eidetic memory we have reached peak capitalism.


Second, it’s not even clear to me that a model which only saw the text of a book, but not any descriptions or summaries of it, during training would even be particular good at producing a summary.

Summarising stuff is literally all ML models do. It’s their bread and butter: See what’s out there and categorise into a (ridiculously) high-dimensional semantic space. Put a bit flippantly: You shouldn’t be surprised if it’s giving you the same synopsis for both Dances with Wolves and Avatar because they are indeed very similar stories, occupying the same approximate position in that space. If you don’t ask for a summary but a full screenplay it’s going to come up with random details to fill in the details it ignored while categorising, again the results will look similar if you squint right because, again, they’re at the core the same story.

It’s not even really necessary for those models to learn the concept of “summary” – only that, in a prompt, it means “write a 200 word output instead of a 20000 word one”. It will produce a longer or shorter description of that position in space, hallucinating more or less details. It’s really no different than police interviewing you as a witness to a car accident and having to pay attention to not prompt you wrong, including assuming that you saw certain things or you, too, will come up with random bullshit (and believe it): It’s all a reconstructive process, generating a concrete thing from an abstract representation. There’s really no art to summary it’s inherent in how semantic abstraction works.


Two generations. Gen X didn’t really get into gaming that much at all back in the days, by and large at least college age when doom came out.


No it doesn’t. you have have IP68 and a removable battery. What’s not as easy it making them paper-thin as the battery needs to have structural integrity of its own.