tal

@tal@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New RPG Maker Entry Announced With HD-2D Style Visual Shift⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, gotcha, thanks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New RPG Maker Entry Announced With HD-2D Style Visual Shift⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At least some of the past ones do; they’re on Steam.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the opt-out link.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When I got whatever it was that I got new…I think an Asus device…that I used, I think that I had to order it online, and it sounds like OP was shopping brick-and-mortar. I dunno if he’d be able to find it brick-and-mortar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Many open source operating systems exist that can turn a computer with multiple NIC’s into a router

  Minor nitpick, but if you’re planning on sticking a NIC into a machine to make it a router, it’s probably more cost-effective to get a single NIC with multiple Ethernet ports than multiple NICs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Looking at using older hardware we have spare (a MacBook Pro 2012 or rpi4) seem to have a track record of underperforming

  In what sense?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is on your next-to-buy list?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve got a substantial existing backlog of owned games and am trying not to just jump on more things until I’ve worked through some of that.

  Some things that I’d buy anyway:

  • If Kenshi 2 comes out anytime soon. My expectation is that that’s years out.

  • If something like Caves of Qud comes out. I already have some roguelikes to play.

  • Additional good DLC for some games that I have been playing, like Starfield. The Rimworld DLC has been worthwhile.

  • If something like Steel Division 2 with Wargame: Red Dragon’s modern setting came out. Steel Division 2 has reasonable game AI and good quality-of-life features, but I personally enjoy the newer setting of Wargame: Red Dragon. WARNO isn’t that — it’s much too fast-paced for me and has less unit variety, feels to me like mostly just directing a constant flood of units.

  • If Fallout 5 came out anytime soon, which I am very confident will not happen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Typing into the abyss - need a service⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you don’t want to retain it at all — like, you just want the catharsis of typing it, and definitely want it to go into the void — then I suppose you could use a laptop with no writeable storage and a live-boot Linux distro that boots off a USB key. That never gets retained. Don’t put it on a network.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t played it, but if you can’t skip the animation, that actually highlights the issue I complained about in another comment, where the animation becomes the bottleneck. Say they do this, and it’s tuned to that hard drive. Then someone decides that they’re willing to spend more to improve performance and goes out and gets an SSD for their PS4. Now the game probably doesn’t need to spend all that time hiding the loading, but the player’s still stuck with it in the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Console Commands and Mods Shouldn’t Disable Achievements — Consoles Are Holding Players Back for No Good Reason⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I kind of took the approach of not caring about achievements in the first place.

  I mean, at best, they’re an inexpensive way of adding grind of some premade categories to games. At worst, they’re another source of tracking player activity in games (though I suppose that as data-harvesting goes, this is probably one of the less-objectionable forms).

  I get wanting to do challenge playthroughs to accomplish certain things, but it’s not as if the game developer needs to provide support for that. It’s maybe a quality-of-life improvement, but…shrugs It just isn’t something that matters that much to me.

  I think that there’s a good argument for mods disabling achievements, if one wants the achievement to be meaningful. It’s hard to reliably determine whether a mod (or an updated version of the mod) “helps” or not. You’d likely need human review, which is subject to errors and costs something. If someone permits through a mod that helps and then achievements gotten with that mod are revoked, that’s going to piss some players off.

  All that being said, if someone does care about achievements, I think that one option might be to have two lists of achievements. One is for the vanilla game. One is for the modded game. That doesn’t require human review of mods or hard calls to be made (since all mods “taint” the achievement and move it to the “modded game” achievement list) and it still lets players who just want to track their own progress do so using achievements. It doesn’t mean that a player can enjoy some quality-of-life mod and still prove to their friends that they accomplished Achievement X in an unmodified game in terms of challenge, but that might be fine for a lot of players.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda has no plans to slow down on paid mods, Todd Howard says he wants to get Creations 'in front of more people'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I generally agree that improving mod accessibility to the public is desirable.

  I just stuck maybe a couple hundred mods into Starfield this week using Creations, including a number of paid ones. I’m fine with paid mods, but Bethesda still needs to deal with some basic issues.

  1. While I had fewer problems than I had with installing mods on prior Bethesda games using third-party mod managers, the need to troubleshoot hasn’t gone away. I installed some high-resolution texture mods that crashed Starfield shortly after boot. Bethesda doesn’t detect crashes in that scenario and offer a way to “roll back” to a “safe mode” or anything like that. I poked around a bit, and, as with their prior games, Starfield has a plugins.txt containing a list of modules loaded, and one can just remove the leading asterisk to disable them. But that’s going to be unacceptable for general use if you want all players to have access to mods. Either troubleshooting has to be pretty idiot-proof, or not be necessary at all. You definitely can’t put someone in a situation where they effectively can’t access the mod manager.

  2. For more-advanced users, troubleshooting tools still aren’t great. Bethesda would benefit from something that can at least do a binary-search for a breaking mod: turn off the latter half of a problematic mod list, see if the problem goes away. If it does, the problem is in the latter half; repeat for that half. If it doesn’t, the problem is in the first half; repeat for that half. Various tools that I’ve used in the past can do this, like git bisect. Conflict Catcher on the classic MacOS had a particularly good implementation that could detect multiple extensions that conflicted with each other; I’ve never seen another tool do this.

  3. Bethesda doesn’t, AFAICT, do adult mods in their own mod repository, which are popular for a number of their prior games. Nexusmods carries things that Creations doesn’t. LoversLab carries things that Nexusmods doesn’t. I appreciate if Microsoft doesn’t want to be in the business of distributing adult mods. However, I am confident that a lot of people would like to use those, as with prior Bethesda games. If one wants a lower bar to use, not requiring use of external mod managers would be desirable. I do think that extending the in-game mod manager to support external mod repositories would lower the barrier there. If Bethesda wants their game to be a platform, then that means more stuff strengthens the platform.

  4. Loading time still increases as mod count rises, as with prior Bethesda games. It can easily take minutes. It should be possible, at bare minimum, to have a progress bar up showing about how long it’ll take to complete load based on prior loads, if the mod list hasn’t changed. Personally, I’d like to see the load time reduced. If they have to validate content or something or build an index, only do it the first time a mod list changes and then cache the index.

  5. It’d be nice to have a “recommends” option. That is, if a mod requires another mod, when installing the first mod, ask the user if they want to install the latter mod. Nexusmods can do this. Bethesda’s Creations can’t — they will keep one from enabling an installed mod with missing dependencies, but the user basically needs to read mod descriptions and install appropriate dependency mods. That’s a barrier to use.

  6. Bethesda’s Creations store just has abysmal filtering options. I get that it’s for a single game, and so it’s hard to amortize costs, but browsing through what’s there is just atrocious. You don’t have the ability to apply multiple criteria when searching for games.

  7. The Creations store always re-downloads the list of Creations, instead of caching it. Exit Creations and go back in and everything gets re-downloaded again. This is obnoxious.

  8. I understand that there are some technical limitations associated with the Creations mod manager. The Dark Mode Terminal mod, for example, says that the Creations release cannot work around a bug associated with changing mod load order that the Nexus release doesn’t have a problem with.

  9. One popular thing to make as mods in many games is skins or cosmetic changes, like to clothing or the like. Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 had “cinematic kills”, where sometimes the camera would pan away, allowing one to see one’s own character. Starfield doesn’t do this, which means that there are few opportunities to see one’s character, unless one leaves the camera in third-person (which is generally not great from a gameplay standpoint). This is an issue that I also would say applies to Cyberpunk 2077’s clothing options — lots of work went into creating many clothing options, but one so rarely actually sees oneself in the game that it has little impact. Ditto for a number of cosmetic options, like hairstyle and the like. I think that it’d be beneficial if they could work some way to see oneself more frequently into the game in terms of people reskinning things.

  10. For Fallout 76, Bethesda made money by mostly selling cosmetic items used by people who want to build themed player CAMPs. I was never personally very interested in building elaborate CAMPs just for the sake of looks, though clearly there are some people who are. However, my take is that these items were generally quite expensive compared to the cost of assets in the base game, though I’ll admit that I don’t know what volume they sell at. At least for me, the idea of paying for more content and functionality, to keep expanding that aspect of the game, is interesting. Buying cosmetic clutter items isn’t terribly interesting. I’m sure that they gather statistics on what players actually get, and Starfield’s Creations seem to me to have a different focus than the Fallout 76 Creations, so that’s good so far as it goes from my standpoint. My own interest would be in, say, getting new handcrafted cities and quests and the like. Getting a new player home or a different style of couch to put in it doesn’t really interest me nearly as much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One thing that annoys me about loading animations designed to conceal the game needing to load is that there’s no guarantee that — especially with PC games, as the game is played on faster computers — the bottleneck may become the animation completing rather than the actual loading.

  Static loading screens don’t have this problem.

  I kind of like Fallout 4’s approach of putting a single model up that you can rotate and look at while something is loading. It’ll add to the loading time a bit, but at least there’s something going on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Our commitment to Windows quality⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.

  Today, I’m sharing what we are doing in response. Here are some of the initial changes we will preview in builds with Windows Insiders this month and throughout April.

  More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.

  I actually have seen people here conplaining about the Windows 11 taskbar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My NFS timeouts / dirty page writeback problem.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He could probably run an NFS server that isn’t a closed box, and have that just use the Synology box as storage for that server. That’d give whatever options Linux and/or the NFS server you want to run have for giving fair prioritization to writes, or increasing cache size (like, say he has bursty load and blows through the cache on the Synology NAS, but a Linux NFS server with more write cache available could potentially just slurp up writes quickly and then more-slowly hand them off to the NAS).

  Honestly, though, I think that a preferable option, if one doesn’t want to mess with client global VM options (which wouldn’t be my first choice, but it sounds like OP is okay with it) is just to crank up the timeout options on the NFS clients, as I mention in my other comment, if he just doesn’t want timeout errors to percolate up and doesn’t mind the NAS taking a while to finish whatever it’s doing in some situations. It’s possible that he tried that, but I didn’t see it in his post.

  NFSv4 has leases, and — I haven’t tested it, but it’s plausible to me from a protocol standpoint — it might be possible that it can be set up such that as long as a lease can be re-acquired, it doesn’t time out outstanding file operations, even if they’re taking a long time. The Synology NAS might be able to avoid timing out on that as long as it’s reachable, even if it’s doing a lot of writing. That’d still let you know if you had your NFS server wedge or lost connectivity to it, because your leases would go away within a bounded amount of time, but might not time out on time to complete other operations. No guarantee, just it’s something that I might go look into if I were hitting this myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My NFS timeouts / dirty page writeback problem.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a global VM setting, which is also going to affect your other filesystems, which may or may not be a concern.

  You might also consider — I’m not testing these, but would expect that it should work:

  • Passing the sync mount option. That will use no write caching for that filesystem, which may impact performance more than you want.

  • Increasing the NFS mount options timeo= or retrans=. These will avoid having the client time out and decide that the NFS server is taking excessively long (though an operation may still take longer to complete if the NFS server is taking a while to respond).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hear Quarry Junction is lovely this time of year!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you get past the cazadors, then there are deathclaws on that route.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Public invited to pick Sycamore Gap tree artwork⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding is that the felling didn’t actually kill the tree. There were apparently spouts coming up from the stump.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asset reuse in videogames is essential, and we need to embrace it, says Assassin's Creed and Far Cry director: 'We redo too much stuff'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know what the situation is for commercial games — I don’t know if there’s a marketplace like that — but I do remember someone setting up some repository for free/Creative Commons assets a while back.

  goes looking

  opengameart.org

  It’s not highly-structured in the sense that someone can upload, say, a model in Format X and someone else can upload a patch against that model or something like that, though. Like, it’s not quite a “GitHub of assets”.

  I’m sure that there must be some sort of commercial asset marketplace out there, probably a number, though I don’t know if it spans all game asset types or if it permits easily republishing modifications.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The RAM crisis could completely change how developers make video games⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean because indie games tend not to have high minimum memory requirements, like?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asset reuse in videogames is essential, and we need to embrace it, says Assassin's Creed and Far Cry director: 'We redo too much stuff'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or, to put it another way…if you aren’t spending your assets on modeling and texturing and animating a bear for the thirtieth time, you can be off modeling and texturing and animating a space squid or something new, and having both it in game as well as a bear that looks kind of like bears in other games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The RAM crisis could completely change how developers make video games⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that you have two factors here. GDC isn’t specific to PC gaming, and a lot of titles will see both PC and console releases.

  For a game that is intended to see only a PC release, my guess is that that that might affect system requirements of the game, whereas for games that see console releases, things like “is the Playstation 6 going to be postponed” is a big deal if you were going to release a game for that hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The RAM crisis could completely change how developers make video games⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The title is a little more dramatic than the body — in fact, the article is mostly more of a “yeah, this is something that we’ve seen before, more-or-less” take — but it is interesting to get some actual perspectives on impact from the developer side on what the likely changes are. It does also confirm that some studios are working on reducing the memory requirements for their upcoming games.

• The RAM crisis could completely change how developers make video gameswww.polygon.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨38⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab (2025) - from Anubis creator⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I bet that if someone went to The Internet Archive, they could pay them to get timestamped snapshots of professionally-spidered stuff at zero load to the websites. I’m sure that it’d cost something for all the hard drives and probably something for labor, but so does spidering the whole Internet yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox just revealed Gaming Copilot is coming to "current-generation consoles" later this year⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As it currently exists on other platforms, Gaming Copilot lets you ask guide-like questions about the game you’re currently playing. Microsoft’s official site offers an example question like “Can you remind me what materials I need to craft a sword in Minecraft?”

  I haven’t used consoles for a few generations, but historically, switching between a game and a Web browser on a console wasn’t all that great, and text entry wasn’t all that great. I dunno if things have improved, but it was definitely a pain in the neck to refer to a website in-game historically.

  On Linux, Wayland, I swap between fullscreen desktops when playing games, and often have a Web browser with information relevant to the game on another desktop. If it helps enable some approximation of a workflow like that for console players, that doesn’t sound unreasonable.

  There are other objections I’d have, like not really wanting someone logging what my voice sounds like or giving Microsoft even more data on me to profile with via my searches. But it sounds to me like the basic functionality has a point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab (2025) - from Anubis creator⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  looks at slides

  I see where the anime catgirl logo that Anubis uses came from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab (2025) - from Anubis creator⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What makes this worse is that git servers are the most pathologically vulnerable to the onslaught of doom from modern internet scrapers because remember, they click on every link on every page.

  The especially disappointing thing is that, for the specific case that Xe was running into, a better-written scraper could just recognize that this is a public git repository and just git clone the thing. Like, it’s not even “this scraper is scraping data that I don’t want it to have”, but “this scraper is too dumb to just scrape the thing efficiently and is blowing both the scraper’s resources and the server’s resources downloading innumerable redundant copies of the data”.

  It’s probably just as well, since the protection is relevant for other websites, and he probably wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been getting his git repo hammered, but…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab (2025) - from Anubis creator⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

  The National Helium Reserve, also known as the Federal Helium Reserve, was a strategic reserve of the United States, which once held over 1 billion cubic meters (about 170,000,000 kg)[a] of helium gas.

  The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) transferred the reserve to the General Services Administration (GSA) as surplus property, but a 2022 auction[10] failed to finalize a sale.[11] On June 22, 2023, the GSA announced a new auction of the facilities and remaining helium.[12] The auction of the last helium assets was due to take place in November, 2023.[13] Though the last of the Cliffside reserve was to be sold by November 2023, more natural gas was discovered at the site than was previously known, and the Bureau of Land Management extended the auction to January 25, 2024 to allow for increased bids.[14] In 2024 the remaining reserve was sold to the highest bidder, Messer Group.[15]

  Arguably not the best timing on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure. What that guy is using is actually not the most-interesting diagram style, IMHO, for automatic layout of network maps, if you want large-scale stuff, which is where the automatic layout gets more interesting. I have some scripts floating around somewhere that will generate very large network maps — run a bunch of traceroutes, geolocate IPs, dump the results into an sqlite database, and then generate an automatically laid-out Internet network map. I don’t want to go to the trouble of anonymizing the addresses and locations right now, but if you have a graphviz graph and want to try playing with it, I used:

  goes looking

  Ugh, it’s Python 2, a decade-and-a-half old, and never got ported. Lemme gin up an example for the non-hierarchical graphviz stuff:

  graph.dot:

  graph foo {
      a--b
      a--d
      b--c
      d--e
      c--e
      e--f
      b--d
  }
  

  Processed with:

  $ sfdp -Goverlap=prism -Gsep=+5 -Gesep=+4 -Gremincross -Gpack -Gsplines=true -Tpdf -o graph.pdf graph.dot
  

  Generates something like this:

  Image

  That’ll take a ton of graphviz edges and nicely lay them out, albeit not in that kind of hierachy shown. You can create massive network maps like this. Note that was last looking at graphviz’s automated layout stuff about 15 years ago, so it’s possible that they have better algorithms now, but this can deal with enormous numbers of nodes and will do reasonable things with them.

  I just grabbed his example because it was the first graphviz network map example that came up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digg Shut Down⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We faced an unprecedented bot problem

  When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

  This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.

  It’s a social media problem. It’s going to be hard to provide pseudonymity, low-cost accounts relatively freely, and counter bots spamming the system to manipulate it. The model worked well in an era before there were very human-like bots that were easy to produce.

  It might be possible to build webs of trust with pseudonyms. You can make a new pseudonym, but the influence and visibility gets tied to, for example, what users or curators that you trust trust, so the pseudonym has less weight until it acquires reputation. I do not think that a single global trust “score” will work, because you can always have bot webs of trust.

  Unfortunately, the tools to unmask pseudonyms are also getting better, and throwing away pseudonyms or using more of them is one of the reasonable counters, and that doesn’t play well with relying more on reputation.