I don't think the quality of content here has been as high as I would have liked. Over on lemmy.world/c/games, the moderation and post/comment quality are well below below what I would have expected from /r/Games in its glory days. For example, all the highest voted comments on the Starfield impressions thread are karma-whoring single sentence meme responses about pre-orders, "patient gamers", or piracy, all completely off-topic for an impressions thread.
beefcat
0 Post – 251 Comments
Joined 12 months ago
- No ice in their water or soda
- No refills on fountain drinks
These are the things that stood out to me whenever I have visited.
I spent a good while in Berlin once and one of my favorite restaurants was this Australian themed place by the IMAX theater just because I could get a nice big Diet Coke with ice in it. Their kangaroo sandwich also wasn’t half bad.
The author wasn't selling DLSS, they were selling a shim to make it work with Starfield. That does require original work.
an interactive medium offers unique avenues for storytelling not available to something more static like a film or a novel.
think things like environmental storytelling or branching narratives.
blu-rays are often as cheap or cheaper than "digital copies", and ripping them to my NAS is pretty trivial these days thanks to makemkv.
the best part is, uncle jeff cannot legally break into your house and take back the disc just because of some petty rights issue.
Luke is a 19 year old kid with a gift for piloting small spacecraft.
Han Solo is an adult with actual command experience.
Mike Ybarra confirmed on the bird site that these games will launch directly through Steam, no bundled launcher nonsense.
Tesla also refuses to support CarPlay and Android Auto, because they believe their software is better. And why shouldn't we trust them? Tesla has a stellar record for fixing their buggy software even after your car is no longer in warranty. /s
Knowing how to do the work is most of the value here. Yes, it's easy for those of us with the knowhow, but most people do not have that.
Think of an artist who can whip up a cool drawing in about 10 minutes. It was "easy" in the moment, but only because they spent years learning and practicing the skills to make it so. You aren't entitled to that artists labor for free just because it only took them a few minutes.
Sit your average gamer down with a copy of Starfield and nvngx_dlss.dll and they won't be able to do anything useful with it.
It's great that most modders and some artists like to share their work for free with the rest of the world, but the rest of us aren't entitled to any of it.
A lot of cheap kitchen scales are also just crap. Talk to your local drug dealer about what brand of scale might be right for you.
there is no possible way to handle sensitive data without storing it in memory at some point
it’s where you do all the salting, hashing, and encrypting
emailing out credentials like this after sign up is certainly not best practice, but probably not a huge deal for a video game forum of all things. if you are re-using passwords then you already have a way bigger problem.
startrek.website already exists though.
i don’t think unreal is under the same pressure for three reasons:
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they already have a reasonable revenue sharing model. they make a lot more per licensee than unity does because they take a cut of your sales rather than charging a per-engineer license for the dev kit.
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epic’s headcount is not nearly as horrendously bloated, even before the recent layoffs.
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the company is still privately held with Tim Sweeney the majority owner.
points 1 and 2 mean epic is actually profitable, and has been for decades at this point. meanwhile, the publicly traded unity has struggled to break even for most of its existence
Food, especially fresh food, used to be a lot more expensive when adjusting for inflation. A canned chicken like this doesn't look super appetizing right out of the can, but it probably tasted OK after you shredded it and put it in a casserole. And it was significantly cheaper than buying a fresh whole roasted chicken, assuming you lived somewhere that fresh whole roasted chickens were even readily available. Food like this became particularly popular during the great depression, and stuck around for decades afterwards.
Nowadays, between industrialized farming, highly optimized supply chains, and a buttload of government subsidy, fresh food is comparatively cheap. You can get a whole roasted chicken right off the spit for $5-10 at just about any grocery store. So for most people the value proposition of a $3 canned chicken isn't really there anymore, especially if you don't have an enormous baby-boom-era sized family to feed.
Battle.net actually launched in 1996, though the client as it existed back then would hardly be recognizable as a launcher/storefront today. The modern client launched in 2009.
Ice keeps the soda cold throughout your meal.
In Europe my soda was often pretty close to room temperature by the time my food arrived. Not great if you like your beverages “ice cold”. But I get the impression Europeans don’t like their drinks as cold as we do in the US to begin with.
We also use larger glassware in the US, which offsets much of the volume displaced by ice.
So no, ice is not “completely pointless”, it’s just a cultural difference 🙂
The industry should have stopped with the Magnavox Odyssey, every new console released since has been a scam to take more of your money in exchange for faster annd more capable hardware.
anti-cheat and drm aren’t the same thing
complain all you want about anti-cheat, i would rather play a game that has it than one that does not
AAA companies aren’t making these remasters, they are typically handled by small studios that specialize in exactly this kind of work.
Most of the work of re-releasing these old games is porting the old code to new platforms. Making them run at higher resolutions and frame rates is usually not all that much effort in comparison, so you might as well do it.
Frankly it’s kind of weird to complain about the existence of a product nobody is forcing you to buy.
you have to wonder why they even bothered with a switch port
What are you transcoding from, and what is your reason for wanting to do this? It might not be worth th effort. Lossy to lossy transcoding is already not ideal, and hardware encorders end up trading either size or quality in exchange for speed. I've played with NVENC h.265 a lot and found the end results weren't really any smaller than what x264 gives me for similar quality, so I just use x265 and deel with the slower encodes.
It may be cheaper to just buy more storage.
My experience with the /r/startrek mods is that while they aren't super transparent, their actions are usually justified.
A lot of people who get banned for "the wrong opinions" aren't banned for their opinion, they are banned fro their aggressive behavior. Some people want a space where they can be loud and angry, and those mods don't want to provide that space. I'm fine with that. I don't like communities where I log in and the top posts are always people loudly making the same complaints day in and day out. Plenty of negative opinions and discussion were allowed on /r/startrek, as long as it was kept civil and constructive.
Just a few weeks ago we ran into this on tildes, a site not even dedicated to star trek. We had someone complaining about the /r/startrek mods, then going on to post really angry yet lazy comments about Star Trek that do not fit the Tildes community guidelines. They were asked to straighten up. It's not about the opinions, it's about the behavior.
Can we add a cheaper non-portable option to the wishlist? I don't like paying for a screen or battery or junky mobile controllers that I will never use.
These numbers aren’t arbitrary, they are from different base numbering systems.
60 can easily divide by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10.
12 can easily divide by 2, 3, 4, and 6 (notice how much overlap there is).
10 only divides easily by 2 and 5. Common fractions like 1/4 or 1/3 now require decimals.
Basically, base 12 and base 60 make it significantly easier to think and work in common fractions.
It is also historically significant, as base 12 used to be more common than modern base 10. Our timekeeping system dates back to the ancient Babylonians, who worked in base 12. This influence is still felt in other places, such as the fact that eleven and twelve have unique names in many languages rather than following the same pattern as everything that comes after them.
the play store, like other download stores, provides discoverability, trust, and all the infrastructure to distribute and automatically update your software products.
this is not a worthless service, otherwise publishers wouldn’t have flocked to Steam on Windows in the late ‘00s/early ‘10s. only the very biggest ones like EA and Ubisoft felt like they could make more money by rolling their own.
this doesn’t justify using anticompetitive practices to maintain your market position, but there is real value being provided there.
Except now you can’t buy a house or get a loan on a car because you have this massive outstanding debt…
It sounds like this one doesn’t really need patches to be fun, it is in a pretty polished state on day 1. Which is weird for a Bethesda game.
The early seasons were full of jokes that were "of their time". I don't think this is inherently bad. The whole schtick of the show has been to satirize modern life by presenting a wackier futuristic cartoon version of it.
Well this is sure to piss off the snowflakes. Grab yer popcorn.
The Apple TV is quietly the best little streaming box. It is very capable, and according to my PiHole it's far less chatty than my Roku or Android TV devices.
Also, I love Tailscale. I love how this press release reads like it was written by nerds for nerds rather than by writers for investors.
This is so unbelievably shitty, and they’ve been doing it for decades now. The number of times I went in, asked for a new copy of a game, and was told to pay full price for something that came in a grubby open box covered in stickers was infuriating. It’s a big reason I stopped shopping there over 10 years ago.
Other stores figured out how to put games on their shelves without opening the boxes and taking the discs out. In fact, it’s actually less work to not be shitty. Just put the fucking game on the shelf LIKE EVERY OTHER GODDAMN STORE ON THE PLANET.
Fuck GameStop. I hope their CEO gets hemorrhoids regularly.
But regular god is also used to push oppression.
See:
- The Crusades
- Anti gay/trans nonsense going on in the shithole states lately
- The Spanish Inquisition (nobody expected this one)
- Basically the entire Middle-East
People putting their faith in anything they don't control inevitably leads to this.
The only way Unity can realistically fix it at this point is to pull a WotC and not just backtrack all these changes, but implement a legal mechanism that guarantees changes like this cannot ever be retroactively applied to past versions of the engine.
I don’t think Unity will do that.
the games/engines you cite as being “extremely well optimized” are both a lot older than UE5 and do a lot less than some of the “less optimized” games discussed (i.e. simpler lighting, no geometry virtualization, simplistic simulation, very static environments, etc.)
these are very apples and oranges comparisons
the 30% cut is brutal
This part always confuses me. When Steam started allowing non-Valve games on their storefront, 30% was considered a bargain compared to selling your games at retail. In fact, PC versions of games were often $10 cheaper than their console counterparts specifically because distribution and platform fees were lower. It wasn't until MW2 came out that PC prices started reflecting console prices.
"Digital signage" is horribly overpriced, and lacking in features you probably do want (like HDR, HDMI 2.1, VRR, etc).
Just buy a regular TV and don't let it on the internet.
"Arithmancy" is what they call their math disciplines and it's mentioned a fair bit in the books, though understandably never really shown in the movies.
steam is good and egs sucks. it's not worship, just consumers voicing their preference for a better product.
to reduce competition to fortnite
this doesn't make any sense, these games were never competing with fortnite.
delisting these games was a very shitty thing to do, but there is no reason for us to go around fabricating nonsensical motives to explain it. the far simpler explanation is that they didn't want to put in the work to keep these games playable on modern PCs.
"Arithmancy" is their name for math classes and is mentioned several times throughout the books. It is one of Hermione's favorite subjects.
At one point, the real world evil witch that is JK Rowling suggested that Arithmancy is like dviniation, but with math, saying they use numbers to predict the future. I take this to mean that the wizarding community discovered calculus independently from the rest of the world and mistook it for a new form of magic.