If that happens I’d be extremely surprised. They have been really against truly modularizing Windows because of the lack of documentation partly due to the push of “agile” methodologies mixing with top down feature pushes and the effort required to create something that would support Windows applications in a way that users would understand. There are also just too many applications out there that use too many features in unintended ways, including or especially their own.

This doesn’t make any more sense than Windows phones made. They required way too many hardware resources and power to run a system that is designed to do a ton of things on a ton of different types of hardware. Handheld hardware needs specialized OS optimized for the platform and I doubt this will do that. It will likely have a ton of RAM and processing tied up in OS activities just like windows phones making everything slow and/or battery life really bad, but still not be able to run a lot of the stuff that would make this all worth it. Better to start with a more modular system like the base linux kernel and add only what is necessary than to start with the idea of supporting a ton of software and sacrificing the real purpose of the device (handheld gaming) to do it.

Be sure to play Blue Shift as well if you haven’t already. Awesome seeing it from all three perspectives.

Why TF does it matter so much if you cheat in a single player game that they have to take such drastic measures to prevent it? In multiplayer, competitive games, I sort of get it, depending on context, but single player games, no way. I mod single player games all the time. It’s one of the main reasons I like PC gaming over console. I’d never buy a game that went this far to prevent something that has no effect on them or anyone else.

Instead of lowering their prices over time and so sales are less significant of a percentage, they keep the original price indefinitely and just have lots of sales. This makes the percentage off much higher than if they had depreciated the regular price as it should. Pretty common these days.

“Look at you, sailing through the air majestically like an eagle…piloting a blimp.”

I mean just quote every line from the portal games and be done with this thread. :-D

They left it small so that it wouldn’t be worth it to fight in court and they’d either just settle for a license fee or pay the fine. But sounds like the best way would be to get the patents revoked, but that’s probably more expensive than just paying the fine due to the legal fees.

The only issue with current systems is that the “AI” is tweaked to the specific game mechanics. You can easily enough build multiple algorithms for varying play styles and then have it adapt to counter the play style of the player. The problems is that the current way that many games are monetized is through expansions, gameplay tweaks, etc., as well as those being necessary when a game mechanic turns out to be really poorly implemented or just unpopular and the mechanics change. If the “AI” isn’t modified at the same time to rake advantage of the changes, then it becomes easy to beat. The other issue is that eventually a human can learn all of the play style algorithms and learn to counter them and then it becomes boring.

Unfortunately, generative “AI” is not a true learning model and thus not truly intelligent in any sense of the word. It requires that it is only “taught” with good information. So if it gets any data that includes even slight mistakes, it can end up making lots of those mistakes repeatedly. And if those mistakes aren’t corrected by a human, it doesn’t understand which things were mistakes and how they contributed to winning or losing. It can’t learn that they were mistakes or to not do them. It doesn’t truly understand how to decide something is wrong on its own, only that things are related and how often it should use those relationships over others. Which means manual training is required, which due to the sheer volume of information required to train a generative “AI”, is not possible in a complex game where the player has thousand of possible moves that each branch to thousands of possible combinations of moves, etc.

So that’s about 15 hours before exceeding your Comcast data cap for the month (1.2TB) assuming you don’t use your internet for anything else that month. Then after that it starts costing you about $16/hr to play in data usage alone. ($10 per 50GB)

Yeah, just hard to explain that to a layman, whereas “emulator” is a commonly known word. I get the difference, but most people don’t.

It’s not a high end game, so it should be fine to use emulation like proton and wine.

To get sorted to the top of the lists for biggest discount. To claim bigger losses in copyright infringement cases. And to increase the perceived immediacy to buy it to get a good deal to take advantage of impulse buying whereas if they have time to think about it they may not buy it at all. Plus rich people don’t care how much something costs, so you’ll get a few of them here and there buying it at full price.

If you like this genre of games, then this is one of the best, so yes, play it. It’s a great, addictive, one more… kind of game with a ton of stuff to do, lots of goals short and long term.

I never really care for the dating sim portion of these kinds of games all that much, so I can’t comment on that part much, but the rest is great!

Just wish they would have incorporated the fixes into the game engine at some point. I bet some of the devs would have even signed away the code for free or at least very cheap. It was annoying not being able to use mods to fix bugs in Fallout 76 that were patched in Fallout and Elder Scrolls games some as far back as Morrowind. Sure they were mostly rare like being able to get pushed into the void behind what should have been solid meshes and the game engine seeming not to care as you fall endlessly or it crashed.

Nah, Bethesda will just do the same as they did with the Creation Engine. Let the community patch their crap and never fix it.

TechLand isn’t worth the FTC trying to use its clout, especially since the Treasury Department has already blocked action against Tencent previously. It would make the FTC look like fools if they tried to use their clout outside of their jurisdiction and were shut down not just by China, who would love to make the US look foolish in any way, but also by their own government.

The UK is using their clout outside of their jurisdiction on a much more significant market disruption to their own country and in the jurisdiction of a mostly cooperative ally.

I doubt the US will get involved. Tech land is too small of a company for the US to have much leverage. I mean technically they have no direct say in the merger itself. The FTC could prevent their products from being sold in the US, how much would that really hurt them? And the treasury department already blocked the Pentagon and state department from issuing sanctions against Tencent recently. It’s unlikely that will change. Too many billionaires here use China for various nefarious things including, but not even close to limited to, slave wage labor. And the US has no sway with the Chinese government over things like this.

It’s different with the UK and Microsoft/Activision. The UK is a huge market that they would have to give up if the UK put sanctions on them and both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are huge companies, so the merger creates a much bigger impact on the overall marketplace. Significantly reducing competition and significantly increasing the risk of antitrust violations like making Activision Blizzard games only work on Microsoft Consoles.

With the UK,