addie @ addie @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

Spot on advice. I'd observe that media files tend to be quite large, and if all that the disk has been used for has been copying these files onto it, then they're likely to be both relatively defragmented and at the start of the disk, so the reduction in partition size isn't going to be as slow as it usually is. (Which is very slow.)

Since media files are relatively infrequently read, I'd probably want to use a filesystem that checks against bit rot instead of ext4 - make sure that they've not become corrupt when you want to use them. But that's Linux holy war territory, so I'll leave it alone.

Previous Dark Souls DLC have required you to complete "about half the game", and then generally warp you off somewhere. There's not really a lot of dead space on the map for adding to it. I'm expecting something like a new object in the battlefield outside Leyndell, which when you examine it turns out to be Miquella's memories and warps you off to another region to play through them.

DS1 and 2 required you to fetch an object and take it somewhere to access the DLC; DS3 just needed you to get to the right place. I'm expecting the 'right place' thing to continue. ER did have the three special blue daggers for the bell towers, so they might do a fetch quest, never know.

Seems likely. It only stutters on Windows - run it through Proton on Linux, where it's translating it all to Vulkan, and it's silky smooth. Maybe off by a frame or two as well of course, but it's pretty much locked to 60 fps in either case on my machine and can't really check. DirectX seems quite bad for hitching when a new shader is loaded - they'd all be pre-compiled on a console since the devs know exactly what the target hardware is, so if you don't rewrite your engine on Windows to accommodate it, then you'll have problems.

Humble guy, but that list of features that they're working on is really impressive. Got a wee DragonFly Black USB audio thing that just never worked quite right with PulseAudio - install PipeWire instead, and it just does all its tricks. Great work team, keep it up.

Friend of mine's dad used to write some Mills and Boon ones, which is the UK equivalent I suppose. We all found it hilarious. Had to sign up for one the '8 pre-approved plots' in advance, and then got paid about a penny a word. You need to be properly cranking out text to even reach minimum wage - it would be easier to work stocking the shelves at a supermarket, quite frankly. But yeah, not an environment that fosters innovation.

Hey! Perks that actually (a) trigger when intended, and aren't bugged out (b) do something actually useful - are quite unusual in Fallout; there's plenty of them that are just a trap for the unwary to waste their slots on.

I'd also nominate the 'lady killer / cherchez la femme' perk as being one of those traps; the vast majority of the enemies you have to kill are male, and certainly all the ones who are difficult. It gives a few interesting dialogue options, but there's more effective perk choices.

I still have a Rage 128 hanging around as a 'temporary head' for installing headless servers. Many happy nights playing Thief: The Dark Project with it, and now it's only good for rendering a TTY at a barely acceptable resolution. And soon, not even that. Goodbye, little e-waste :-(

I think that Python has a bit of a 'Microsoft Word' thing on the go. You know how your own docs are completely editable and print fine, but everyone else's are a complete fucking disaster and pressing a single key will screw up the formatting of the whole document? Your own Python code is full of sensible idioms and pragmatic naming conventions, but everyone else's was plainly written while on mushrooms.

That's a fair comment. But on the other hand, if you are spending a fortune on a CPU the size of your hand (look at that thing in the article!) then there's a good chance you're using it for business purposes, and either you or your IT department will be very keen to have a completely vender-supported stack. Enthusiasts with fresh OS installs will not be representative of users of this tech - AMD haven't really been targetting it at gamer desktops.

Of course, comparing both would be even better, see whether it is an HP crapware issue...

Well; setting aside the small reference pool of modern gaming journalism, I'm not sure that it is such a big step from HL to CoD, just a bit of a step down. HL is as much of a 'corridor shooter' as you could ever hope to find - there's one path through it, and I doubt that many people deviate from it all that much on a playthrough. The difference is, that HL is super imaginatively dressed up on that one path. The levels have a real sense of place. Like you say, the puzzles are never all that difficult, but they're extremely well-integrated into the design; they feel like the kind of obstacles that you might have to overcome in a top-secret research facility when disaster has struck. And they're mainly new puzzles; nothing hackneyed or tropey here.

From the article:

In many ways, Half-Life can be seen as an indictment of the video game industry: how can a 25 year-old game be better than almost every shooter that has followed it? Why has its ambition only ever been exceeded only by its own sequel? It paints a picture of a stagnated industry still playing with toys from the 1990s.

I think there's two problems here; one is that it's safer to play follow-the-leader, and one is learning the wrong lesson from the leader. Kind of hard to believe now, but HL was considered a graphic powerhouse when it came out, requiring some of the top class machines of the day. But I think that the kind of 'immersive feeling of wonder' that HL has via its design conjuring up a real place is mostly due to its environmental storytelling and the novelty of not knowing what to expect around each corner. The imitators saw the twisty-but-linear game, and decided that the most important thing to copy was to have as much graphics as possible. Can't copy the imaginativeness and the care, so yeah, perpetually taking control away from you for a shooting gallery setpiece, when in fact that only draws you in in a superficial way.

I wouldn't mind other games copying HL if what they wanted to copy was inventiveness, experimentation, and non-stop gameplay. Copying the things that were new about HL is the complete wrong thing to copy, though.

Blasphemous 2 has a transgender breastfeeding scene, but only a single-player campaign, seems odd to call it a 'story mode'... Good work getting to that bit in four hours, too.

Fine advice generally, but I don't know that many Panams or Reginas...

With reading the article:

• console discs have 60 GB of space, might as well export your assets at a quality which fills it

Your sight-unseen summary is far too detailed in comparison.

Well now. A few things, here:

• there are not 9 × 9 × 9 × 9 × .... possible ways to play. After the first move, 8 squares remain, and so on, so there's at most 9 × 8 × 7 × ... = 9! = 362880 ways that the game can be played, ignoring the fact that most of those can be eliminated as reflections and rotations, or as win positions before you fill the whole board.
• we don't care how we got there. Each square can either be blank, a cross, or a nought, so 3^9 combos = 19683, and most of those are illegal, as only the boards where there's (one or zero) more crosses than noughts are good. And you don't need to store 'the computer's move', just jump directly to letting the player go again. Let's guess we need at most a quarter of that.
• we could have created a single web page with 5k anchor elements on it back in the HTML 1.0 days, ignoring the fact that it would have taken a while to download on our 28.8K modems. That wouldn't have been 170 Mb of unnecessary tagging, even with the 'lay it out with tables' style we had at the time.

Google do seem to have a predilection for reinventing the past, poorly. I hear that their bonuses are based on inventing 'new' things, though, so it's in their interest to pass it off?

💧🪵(😄)=🪵(😅) 🍑 🪵(😅) ≠💧🪵(😄) when 😄∈Z ?

I'd kind of hope that we're not all like that - I use Arch btw. for my computers at home, but at work we use a combination of Redhat, Centos Stream and Amazon Linux, and I spend a lot of my day helping people with 'Linux admin' issues even though that's not strictly my job.

When getting started with Linux, there's a certain 'glossary gap' if you've come from Windows, not even knowing the right term to search for. Newstarts will complain that "waa! Linux is terrible, doesn't recognise my hardware", to which invoking a couple of udev commands seems like magic. Some people will get irritated when answering the same question in the same way for the tenth time and just post a link; really, those people need to step back and let someone else pick it up. The Arch wiki is fantastic, but it's particularly fantastic if you already know what all the words mean and just need your memory prodding a bit. Having someone able to interpret a page for you is a huge benefit over having to fall down a wiki hole, which is very dispiriting when you're trying to learn.

And yes, Arch is great for gaming - latest version of everything, look at my extra frames - but really, it's only a tiny bit better than eg. Pop! OS, and that's a much better choice for someone who's never used Linux before.

Yeah; my somewhat up-to-date thinkbook with NVMe drive cold boots to Cinnamon desktop in under 8 seconds, terminal window opens in the blink of an eye. BTRFS is not without its problems, but they're more along the lines of specific RAID configs not being what you'd wish for; I've never heard a complaint about speed before, and I've never had that problem myself.

Act 1 and at the first half of Act 2 ran pretty well for me, generally 80ish fps on max settings everywhere (6700xt @ 1440p). It's after that when it started running like a three legged mare; frequent random slowdowns to about 15fps. I suspect that they got the game mostly finished and then started their optimization pass at the beginning, and just hadn't got to the end of the game by the release date, which was moved forward last-minute to avoid Starfield.

The end of the game doesn't look any more complicated than the beginning; suspect they just ran out of polishing time.

It's not really the same Chinese Room any more - they basically closed the studio after Little Orpheus, and have restarted it with a new team.

Now, whether you think a bunch of randoms might make a better or worse job of it than Hardsuit Labs, who for reasons still unclear were dropped by the original publisher, is a reasonable question. I don't see why they shouldn't make a better job of it. If they do turn out something with great promise but a slew of game-breaking bugs, it'll be exactly in the spirit of Troika's original, for sure, and we can have another twenty years of fan patches trying to put it right.

Speaking as someone who has to use Google Cloud Platform most days; they also do some horrific stuff, and their documentation and support are miles behind the AWS and Azure equivalents. And having worse documentation than Azure is quite the achievement.