Kushan

Thanks for the tip on Read you, I’ve tried a few RSS readers and not been entirely happy but this one seems nice!

Don’t worry about not having any insights, I still valve-ued the pun.

I don’t think you can claim that the team behind concord is incompetent. I think they delivered something that nobody wanted but they delivered that competently.

I agree that incompetence generally doesn’t end up with a good product but sometimes even good competence all around doesn’t win. Sometimes it really is luck and timing.

Corporate meddling gets blamed for ruining things all the time but the truth few want to admit is that some amount of meddling is necessary.

Look at all the big flops Xbox has released over the last year - Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.

When it comes to AAA, it’s so expensive you need some amount of corporate input to make sure people will actually buy the damn game.

Of course there’s extremes to both sides - pretty much anything Activision ever touched was ground to a lifeless micro transaction shell.

But everything we know about concord is trekking6 us that the team itself, including the big bosses, were overly positive internally. Nobody had the balls to interfere.

If they had just one exec who was willing to piss the entire team off, maybe the result would be different.

For that chrome book like experience, the genuinely think Chrome OS flex is probably a better option for most people (privacy concerns not withstanding).

One that always stood out to me was the ending of the Tom Cruise war or the world’s movie.

Now to be clear, this is not a good film and I don’t recommend that anyone bothers to go watch it, but a criticism I regularly saw was that the ending was bad - the aliens all just die suddenly.

That was literally the only thing that film got right from the source material. They changed literally everything else in an attempt to modernise it, it didn’t work but they at least kept the ending and that’s the bit people didn’t like.

I think if you’re comparing open world games to open world games then yeah, BOTW doesn’t do anything too terribl differenty, but when you compare BOTW to other Zelda games then it’s very different and that’s where the criticism comes from.

Personally I feel BOTW is a very competent open world game, probably one of the better ones I’ve played but I still didn’t gel with it because I was already strongly feeling fatigued from too many games becoming open world and not making that leap particularly well (Mass Effect Andromeda and FFXV coming to mind for me personally), what I wanted was a more traditional Zelda game and that’s simply not what BOTW was.

TL;DW the stuttering is also present on console and doesn’t appear to be shader compilation.

Definitely do! It’s entirely command line driven, but don’t let that put you off, it’s quite easy to use and well thought out.

If that’s still a concern, there’s also backrest, a project that puts a web UI in front of restic:

https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest

I have a Nas running nextcloud for general ease of automatically backing up anything important from my phone or pc.

Nextcloud and important things from the server are backed up using a tool called “restic” which honestly does not get enough mention here.

Restic is amazing, it supports just about every cloud storage provider out there - could be Amazon S3 or backblaze, but it could also be OneDrive or Google drive. If you’ve got some cloud storage somewhere, restic will probably support it.

Restic is super clever, it takes snapshots and only backs up any data that has changed - so it’s very space efficient and fast. I back up hourly, it only takes a few mins and if nothing has changed, there cost is also basically nothing. But you can pull back files from any snapshots you keep and when you delete a snapshot, it only deletes data that’s not used by any snapshot.

This means you can have backups going back months or years at very little data cost. You can restore a full backup, or just a specific file if you need.

Seriously, restic is amazing and more people need to know about it.

I don’t think Sony is making much more money than Microsoft is, though. They may have sold twice the consoles, but the generation is brutal in terms of actual profits.

Multicast is a thing, though it doesn’t seem to be widespread. That would make a lot more sense than this weird DRM broadcast system.

That seems entirely pointless then, why not just stream the content.

Interrobang.

It’s this thing: ‽

More people should use the symbol because it looks cool and has a badass name, so for that you need to know what it’s called.

Who’s with me‽

Yup I’m with you here. I love KBM and it’s my preferred way to play for most games, but when it comes to driving I’d much prefer a controller with analogue triggers and a stick (unless it’s a sim racer, in which case a wheel of course) for that extra precision.

Unfortunately I can’t think of a good design to give that level of control to just one hand. Analogue keys are a thing but they sound awful, nowhere near enough precision due to the short travel of them.

The £ key on GB keyboards is shift+3.

Ray tracing actually will directly change the way games are made. A lot of time is spent by artists placing light sources and baking light maps to realistically light scenery - with ray tracing, you get that realism “for free”.

DF did a really interesting video on the purely path traced version of Metro: Exodus and as part of that, the artists talked about how much easier and faster it was to build that version.

I think you just need to look at the PS5 Pro as proof that more GPU power doesn’t translate linearly to better picture quality.

The PS5 Pro has a 67% beefier GPU than the standard PS5 - with a price to match - yet can anyone say the end result is 67% better? Is it even 10% better?

We’ve been hitting diminishing returns on raw rasterising for years now, a different approach is definitely needed.

This is why they’re one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They’re very good at “business”, which is just a way of saying they’re good at maximising profits.

All corporate social media accounts are trying to sell you stuff.