DdCno1

@ DdCno1 @beehaw.org

Posts

41
Comments

1065
Joined

3 yr. ago

9h ago

Gabe Newell on Steam monopoly accusations: Gamers have 'enormous choice' about where to buy games
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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 9h ago
GOG is absolutely tiny. It was sold by CD Projekt to one of the store's founders for a mere $25 million last year:
https://screenrant.com/gog-sold-cd-projeckt-red-new-owner/
I know several family-owned businesses in my small town (that nobody outside of very specialized industries has ever heard of), which are worth significantly more each.
Profits were just $1.2 million in 2022:
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/wrestling-the-steam-goliath-pulling-a-nightdive-and-seeing-off-vulture-capital-gog-chats-the-risks-and-opportunities-of-its-future-as-a-company-without-cd-projekt/
Again, absolute peanuts compared to other online storefronts.
While the site does provide a highly valuable service, it's far too small, too little known and has been so for such a long time that I doubt it can grow significantly in the foreseeable future.

3d ago

ICE commander Greg Bovino will speak at a white nationalist conference in Portugal today

It's part of the Nazi "silent majority" narrative. They believe that because most people are not saying anything, they must be secretly supporting them. That's why it's so important to confront these fucks everywhere - it shatters this narrative.

3d ago

Remember kids

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 3d ago

Photoshop is perhaps the most complex piece of software you can teach yourself without relying on any external resources. It's the opposite of poor usability and this was even the case decades ago.

Gimp and the Linux desktop experience are not more sane UIs compared to Photoshop and Windows. Both have issues, but usability is not among them.

4d ago

Remember kids

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 4d ago

No, it has special source, because it 1) was literally the first practical photo editing software for home computers 2) has been in continuous development since 1987 and 3) is clearly designed for artists, not programmers. It's not just how long the development has been, but also how much resources have been poured into it compared to open source and other competitors - and to what end. Gimp may only be just nine years younger, but it's clearly (just look at its insane user interface) typical of an issue that is very widespread among open source projects: It's developed by programmers for programmers, with little regard for non-technical users and actual workflows.

Not all open source software suffers from this, but a ton does. It's frustrating any time I'm trying to get people to e.g. switch to Linux and other open source software; they often run into a wall of poor usability. This is the main thing that prevents mass adoption of the Linux desktop. The fact of the matter is, most developers of open source software are highly technical people who are developing this software for themselves and other highly technical people. This might be fine for you and I, but it won't win over the better washed masses.

5d ago

Remember kids

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 5d ago

Some people do actually use this software to make a living. That's not corpo-speak, it's a reality.

Anywho, I've never paid for Photoshop. Just updated my pirated copy every half-decade or so.

5d ago

Remember kids

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 5d ago

The latest flavor of trying to fix Gimp's UI by modifying it to look like Photoshop. These go back decades and usually end up being abandoned after a few years.

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

The whole premise is flawed. Gimp should be a viable program on its own, by having a UI that actually makes sense and not by copying the market leader, because this will always mean playing catch-up, it will always mean being seen as a lesser copy.

5d ago

Remember kids

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 5d ago

Let's be realistic. None of the FOSS alternatives come even close to Photoshop. Gimp has never been a good piece of software. Not to mention, if you're doing commercial work, you need the original software to reliably work with clients and others.

1w ago

Rocket League Set for Unreal Engine 6 Transition -Epic Games confirmed Rocket League will move to Unreal Engine 6 in the future, though no release window was shared.

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

I mean, it's an arena-based game with a small handful of mostly static car models pushing around a ball. Even in the announcement trailer, the new car models aren't exactly looking like they are made out of a billion polygons. This isn't an open world game either, so traversal stutter is out of the question already. Load in the entire arena and done. They can get away with static GI too.

Hardware requirements will be higher, but since this will have to run on Switch 2 and your run of the mill laptop with iGPUs, they won't be outrageous. I'll eat my hat if it doesn't run on the MacBook Neo with an old iPhone chip and 8 GB of total RAM. The overlap between the target audiences of this laptop and this game might as well be a circle.

1w ago

Rocket League Set for Unreal Engine 6 Transition -Epic Games confirmed Rocket League will move to Unreal Engine 6 in the future, though no release window was shared.

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

Yeah, but what else can they do? There's a point where supporting an ancient engine and code base are becoming nothing but a headache and I suspect they are long past this point. Like I said elsewhere in this thread, UE3 originally released in 2004. Most players of this game were likely not even born yet by that year. Even the last stable build is eleven years old now.

You don't want two versions of the game either. This splits the player base in two and you still have to provide support for the old version. Sooner rather than later, this limb needs to be cut off. It's the least terrible option.

1w ago

Google is its own worst enemy

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

They could be used to fold molecules or sift through SETI signals though. The problem is that nobody can really afford to run them.

1w ago

Star Citizen and Squadron 42: founding reached 1 billion .

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

Stutters (on a more than powerful enough PC), glitches and crashes ruined the experience though. Also, none of the spaces are well designed for actual gameplay and instead force the player to endlessly walk for no good reason. This would be fine exactly once in a narrative experience ("Look at this cool set piece we've built!"), but not for routine things like getting to your ship or a store every time.

1w ago

Rocket League Set for Unreal Engine 6 Transition -Epic Games confirmed Rocket League will move to Unreal Engine 6 in the future, though no release window was shared.

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

And I kindly request you to not insult me.

1w ago

Rocket League Set for Unreal Engine 6 Transition -Epic Games confirmed Rocket League will move to Unreal Engine 6 in the future, though no release window was shared.

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

Because they would have to convince the existing player base to move to the new game, which is risky. By making it an update, you get most of them to continue playing the game.

1w ago

Star Citizen and Squadron 42: founding reached 1 billion .

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

I'm getting the same entertainment without having spent any money on the game.

I do want my time back from trying the game during free weekends though. What I had to experience during those was utterly abysmal.

1w ago

Rocket League Set for Unreal Engine 6 Transition -Epic Games confirmed Rocket League will move to Unreal Engine 6 in the future, though no release window was shared.

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

While I agree that there are games that - mostly for a lack of time in an industry that puts ever increasing pressure on developers - are having hardware requirements that are higher than they need to be, the whole picture is a bit more nuanced.

DLSS, FSR 4.1 and (to a lesser degree) Xess are good enough that you're just wasting performance (and even, in some games, image quality) for no reason by not activating them. They are an inherent part of modern rendering pipelines, not mere crutches, a way out of the fact that every tiny improvement to visual fidelity comes with a huge cost to performance. If you have hardware that is still limited to older versions of FSR - which are kind of shitty - then I can understand your sentiment, but if you're not, then I invite you to have a friend help you with a blind test, activating and deactivating current upscalers to find out for yourself if you can spot the difference. You might be surprised.

Also, if you had paid attention to what CDPR developers have published and presented so far, they have optimized UE significantly, dramatically improving performance, both by rewriting parts of the engine entirely (like the geometry streaming system) and throwing out others that they have no need for (like Blueprints). Expect The Witcher 4 to have hardware requirements that are appropriate for the visuals. Note that I'm not saying it will have low hardware requirements - there's a difference. Given the target audience, the expectations and the game's status as a halo game for both CDPR and UE, this game will push technology forward, which is not cheap.

That said, this game has been announced for the current console generation, which includes Xbox Series S, so it'll still have to scale. Expect fallbacks (like possibly software ray-tracing, since UE supports this feature - I doubt it'll allow you to disable RT entirely) and plenty of options to dial it back to run on reasonably modest hardware. It's likely going to be too much for the Steam Deck, but still run on e.g. an RTX 2080, a first-gen RT-capable card with 8GB of VRAM from eight years ago (ebay price: ~200 bucks), which in my experience can handle the most demanding current RT-only games remarkably well.

Do not expect the upgraded version of Rocket League to have hardware requirements as low as the current version. That game officially only needs a GeForce 760, which is an upper entry level card from thirteen years ago that is limited to DirectX feature level 11 and has only 2 GB of VRAM. I honestly doubt that many players are still playing the game on hardware this old (and the developers have the numbers). What we can reasonably hope for, just like with The Witcher 4, is that the new version has hardware requirements that are appropriate for the visuals. I think it's realistic to expect them to be similar to Fortnite, given the developer being part of Epic, scaling on a wide variety of systems. It's still a F2P e-sports title after all, so it will have to remain accessible to a large number of players on hardware ranging from toaster to space ship.

1w ago

Rocket League Set for Unreal Engine 6 Transition -Epic Games confirmed Rocket League will move to Unreal Engine 6 in the future, though no release window was shared.

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DdCno1 @beehaw.org 1w ago

It's embarrassing that this kind of talk is still the norm surrounding Unreal Engine in gaming forums.

Have you two thought about just how difficult it is to maintain a game based on an engine that is now 22 years old? Imagine hiring new developers who taught themselves or already have worked in other studios on UE4 and 5, but now have to go back to a significantly less advanced engine with far more archaic tools. The studio has to move on at some point.

Also, modern versions of UE can be incredibly performant - it entirely depends on the features you're using. Going full-out on Nanite for example is demanding, but it's supposed to be a high-end feature pushing the envelope on the latest hardware. You're not forced to use it as a developer and I doubt they will for an arena-based sports title. Similarly, Lumen is entirely optional as well.