NuXCOM_90Percent
@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games] 1 hour ago:
Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.
Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.
- Comment on Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games] 1 hour ago:
Nowhere near it.
The “corporate roles” are likely a case of dwnsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.
And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.
- Comment on OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly 6 hours ago:
Okay, hear me out: How much of that is a function of ChatGPT and how much of that is a function of… gestures at everything else
MOSTLY joking. But had a good talk with my primary care doctor at the bar the other week (only kinda awkward) about how she and her team have had to restructure the questions they use to check for depression and the like because… fucking EVERYONE is depressed and stressed out but for reasons that we “understand”.
- Comment on 23 hours ago:
Aside from the windows and armory crate bullshit (both of which go away if you install bazzite…), the ROG allies are actually pretty good hardware.
Because… you aren’t driving 4k@60 for under a thousand bucks. And while I do not at all think you need that power in a handheld, people are going to notice it when it gets compared to a PS5 pro or a PS6. Which it will.
Let Sony launch the PS6 at 1k or higher. Let Microsoft somehow get the xbox series 2 out at 2k because they are pulling a The Producers or whatever. And if there is demand? Premium ass Steam Box. If there is not? MAYBE do a more premium 500-800 USD NUC. And if people REALLY love the ASUS Bumfuck ROG Seventy Seven Y Y Z or whatever? Give ASUS 20 bucks to sell a shit ton with SteamOS installed by default.
- Comment on 23 hours ago:
All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.
And it is probably in Valve’s best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since “1024 at 40 FPS” doesn’t scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.
And I’ll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle “steam deck games” on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
I want to say that is one of the last bosses of the DLC “narratively”?
But yeah. From love stuff like that. Gargoyles and Maneater in Dark 1 and Demon. The gargoyle gauntlet in Dark 2. The idea being that it is meant to pressure you but is really just a thinly veiled DPS gate.
I forget if the tree fuckers are one at a time or if they can Four Kings to overwhelm you, but the idea is that you are going to take damage but that is what your estus is for. The idea being that you can spike DPS to minimize the damage you take per health bar. And then you cry when you realize you decided to do that on NG+ where you can no longer rush them.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
The one which is like four bosses in a row?
Get more scadutree fragments to increase your DPS and look into weapon arts that drop a DOT blob on the field (e.g. a magma puddle) since those are meant to hurt enemies that walk past and do ridiculous damage on the biggies what barely move.
And if your build supports if (or you want to go hang out with mommy), Great Stars is RIDICULOUSLY good for the DLC due to healing per hit. And the Prayerful Strike weapon art is more or less cheating in the DLC because of a mix of strong healing and holy being one of the few elements DLC bosses tend to at least not be strong against.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Yes. I have a Steam Deck and an HTPC running bazzite. I am aware of what it does. I like what it does.
But what you are now describing is just defaulting all windows to launch in fullscreen. The rest is just the natural stack and focusing. if I double click Warframe in desktop and don’t immediately go off to do other stuff while it launches, it defaults to the launcher in focus. Just like if I launch it in big picture mode it defaults to the launcher in focus.
And you continue to assume that the asus xbox deck is the new xbox. Whereas this lines up with what MS have been saying since the last time they pivoted their entire division a few months back: the next xbox is what is going to do this and it is going to be heavily dependent on windows gaming mode. Which isn’t out yet.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
That isn’t the point.
I was more just pointing out that most (all?) of what you said is… not anything special. In fact, the big advantage seems to just be that SteamOS closes your windows for you rather than expecting you to care about going through your systray to see if you actually need banzai buddy running while you play WoW.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
If you shut off most of your other apps (like fucking discord) you don’t have the popups from that.
As for OS level shenanigans? Steam Big Picture alone can’t stop the mess that is KDE (Wayland?) whinging that steam input looks like a remote desktop session as far as inputs are concerned (although I finally found the setting for that after like 55 hours of Pillars 1). SteamOS/Bazzite “solve” that by having a ridiculously stripped down mode… which is not dissimilar from what MS is arguing as their “gaming mode” that will probably still not work but is conceivably that.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window
Huh? That is kind of just how window managers work. The game launches so it is on top. It may or may not be exclusive fullscreen these days. The game spawns up another window as part of a social media thing or because you typed
/wiki jennah’s feetand then that is on top until you close it. That is, mostly, OS agnostic these days.It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN
Big Picture 100% makes you do that if there is a text input. You can choose to use your controller to navigate the keyboard and… that is a love it or hate it. From a quick google, the asus equivalent (as of 2 years ago) is that you can switch your input to desktop mode to use the joysticks as a mouse. And while that is a step down from automagically “just working”… the fact that I know that it is steam+square kinda sums up just how automagic it is with Big Picture.
My understanding, heavily tainted by Dan Ryckert’s stupidity, is that the big problem the xbox decks have is the OS login window. Yes, Microsoft need to get off their fucking asses and make that work consistently. But Valve mostly bypasses that by having a shitty pin login. That is a “I left my SteamOS laptop on my bed and someone from a dorm down the hallway stole all my money” story away from being a debacle.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Yeah. People very much forget how horrible most online multiplayer infrastructure was back in the early 2000s. Voice chat was a case where you used teamspeak/ventrillo for atrocious quality audio that optimally depended on using an actual phone line in conjunction or it just never worked. Messaging was basically xfire or AIM. And servers were generally listen servers that someone in your clan left running in the background when they forgot about it.
Live provided a messaging system people would actually use and tapped into MS infrastructure for voice chat that actually worked… which was great for playing with your friends and learning all new slurs when you had it on in a pub. Game servers themselves were still generally all listen servers but that changed over time.
These days? Discord has a LOT of problems but it actually works and is a much more universal platform. Server hosting infrastructure is such that there isn’t really a point in paying the platform for it. And EVERYTHING needs to be social media for people to not whinge so having a messaging system loses its value.
But also… have any of the consoles really pushed the online infrastructure as why you pay for premium? Okay, Nintendo have but they REALLY shouldn’t considering what they are offering. It is all about the IGC and has been since Sony got involved as part of the PSN hack.
- Comment on 'Mask of the Betrayer: the last of the boomer cRPG classics' - Warlockracy 1 day ago:
It is just deeply stupid. These were GenX and Millennial games.
I care less for “boomer CRPG” (mostly I just laugh because it isn’t like the genre has evolved significantly since Baldurs Gate. Mostly just polish and folding in more TTRPG mechanics) than I do for “boomer shooters”. Mostly because boomers were the ones trying to get all violent video games, and especially games like DOOM, banned.
Millennials increasingly feel like a forgotten generation that increasingly catches all the hell that boomers and genx have unleashed upon the world (and, in fairness, people don’t often realize that genx aren’t millennials), but whatever. Mostly it is just really stupid and… we can do so much better.
Like… Demon Souls is 16 years old. Let’s start calling Soulsborne games “boomer bonfires”. I mean, it is old, right?
- Comment on ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS 2 days ago:
Heh, my money was on it being shaders like most times this comes up. Steam+Proton gets a downloaded shader precache. Windows does it live.
- Comment on Mini pc for home server? 3 days ago:
For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.
Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.
Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and so forth.
Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.
Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.
- Comment on The Outer Worlds 2 | Review Thread 4 days ago:
Having played the original (and most Obsidian games), I can only partially comment (also: Support BDS, fuck Microsoft, Obsidian are probably dead either way regardless of sales…):
I strongly disagree with that. I think a much better statement is that Obsidian… generally doesn’t super care about the overall plot outside of a few major beats (Pillars of Eternity 1 being their really big exception and it arguably being their greatest work as a result).
They instead care about the moment to moment narrative. They want you to CARE about what is happening in the now. Because the main quest? That is mostly a quick journey. What matters is the people and scenarios you meet along the way. And a huge part of that is writing those chains of quests in a way that it feels like your actions Matter.
And when it works? It fucking WORKS. You really feel like you are part of a living and breathing world in a way that few studios can even hope to manage. Like, yes, the world is ending, but life still moves on and you become deeply invested in this family that refuses to give up and die… even though they probably will. It is very reminiscent of how RGG does the Yakuza/LAD games.
And… like the LADs… it also can mean that you just don’t actually care about what the giant bad vibes tree is actually going to do. But, once you have finished up all the side quests you kind of just don’t care? RGG tends to avert that by making the last hour or two just constant cutscenes, epic fights, and shirts getting ripped off. Obsidian prefer to go much more introspective and… if you vibe with that then it works. If you don’t, it doesn’t.
But yeah. That is a huge chunk of why so many people never finished Outer Worlds 1. They did the three or four planets to get access to the imperial capital world and… were done by then because they had effectively experienced two or three REALLY solid mini stories/arcs and didn’t see much point in moving on.
- Comment on Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition - Reveal Trailer 4 days ago:
I don’t have a particularly large stake in this as I am increasingly on the “wouldn’t it be crazy if I replayed Morrowind again” train but going by (obligatory: Fuck fandom)
fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_4_next_gen_patch#…
Looks like a somewhat decent amount of scripting and placement changes that would definitely cause merge conflict level issues with mods. And enough code changes that it would break the script extender.
You can make the argument that you actively don’t want those fixes but… considering the shitshow that the “unofficial patches” have become, being able to play more “vanilla” holds a lot of appeal to people.
- Comment on Krafton is now an 'AI-first company,' will spend $70 million on a GPU cluster to 'serve as the foundation for accelerating the implementation of agentic AI' 4 days ago:
Not saying krafton deserves the benefit of the doubt but:
Understand that “agentic AI” is almost entirely a buzzword that means “Microservices with an LLM somewhere in the mix”. Which… is what people are already doing.
Yes, there are some (idiots) who think that means EVERY single node in the graph needs to be an LLM and fuck the planet, Jensen needs a new zipper. But, by and large, what that means is they are using the exact same infrastructure they were last week but MAYBE added an LLM for preprocessing or postprocessing. It makes management happy because “We are using AI” and it makes everyone else happy because they can keep using the tools that actually work.
- Comment on Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition - Reveal Trailer 4 days ago:
Yeah. Its one of those things that increasingly annoy me.
People (rightfully) shit on Bethesda for never fixing known bugs. They ALSO shit on Bethesda because any patch potentially breaks mods that use unofficial tools.
I understand that the majority of people online aren’t developers (or are hobbyist/student at best) but… that is development. I actively dread when a major MR is pulled in because that means my merge conflicts are going to be hell. MOST of them are just eyeballing the changed file and saying “that looks right” but there will inevitably be a changed interface that involves very extensive tweaking before I can even think about running my test suite again to find the rest.
But for major forks? There is a reason that so many of them end up using a somewhat dangerously outdated base. Okay, part of that is the nature of a fork and WHY it forked. But it is also because pulling upsteram changes is a REALLY big undertaking.
- Comment on Preserving Play: How Eden Grew Into the Switch Emulator Everyone’s Talking About (my interview with the devs) 4 days ago:
Which… is honestly really shit to the actual yuzu devs who put the work in. And it isn’t like Nintendo is going to say “Wow, that really good emulator might not be the one we had taken down. Let’s actively not look and instead cry into our money”. If they want it down, they’ll look for a reason. And then REALLY quickly see it is the same codebase they had removed already.
- Comment on Preserving Play: How Eden Grew Into the Switch Emulator Everyone’s Talking About (my interview with the devs) 4 days ago:
So I went to their “github” link which goes to their own self hosted (codeberg?)
When a link called “github” goes to a self hosted git instance, it raises flags
because it implies that either they don’t understand what git actually is or they assume their audience doesn’t…
- Comment on Mini pc for home server? 4 days ago:
I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).
Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.
- Comment on Mini pc for home server? 4 days ago:
Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.
Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.
My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.
- Comment on Jellyfin, Traefik and Tailscale Config Question 5 days ago:
Presumably most of those services on the same physical host are running in containers? So just add tailscale as a sidecar to that. The official tailscale youtube has tutorials on that.
- Comment on Jellyfin, Traefik and Tailscale Config Question 5 days ago:
Wait… if you JUST want your domain to point to the tailscale IP and to only work when the client is on the tailnet, this is… super duper easy?
Just install tailscale. Go to your dashboard, and get the IP. And point your domain at that. No tunnels or reverse proxies needed.
- Comment on Jellyfin, Traefik and Tailscale Config Question 5 days ago:
This is one of the big problems with tailscale for home users. For people who only access a system remotely (e.g. a corporate VPN) it is amazing. For people who are both on and off network… yeah.
What I actually settled on was NOT using one of my domains and to instead just use the tailscale FQDNS in all situations. Mostly because I saw they added more human readable names so it is now like
foo.happy-panda.ts.netinstead offoo.tb12415161613616161616.ts.net- Externally? I just activate the tailscale app and I can see
foo.sad-hamster.ts.netwith zero additional config. Which is good if I am using an app on my phone or helping someone I trust set up their own machine without needing to drive/fly out there with a laptop. - Internally? I actually just added a simple DNS override locally (I use unbound via opnsense for this but you can also do it with a pihole if you really want to). So
foo.sad-hamster.ts.netgoes tofoo.localdomainwhich goes to a 192.x IP seamlessly
End result is that I don’t need any special config in any devices or apps and everything just uses the tailscale FQDN regardless of whether it is a “client” connected to the tailscale itself. Which ALSO avoids issues where things stop working during an internet outage.
I’ve seen alternative setups that specify their own DNS server in their tailnet and… that is a lot of effort if you ask me. Also it seems to be the leading cause of “When I connect to my tailnet I can’t see the outside internet anymore”.
- Externally? I just activate the tailscale app and I can see
- Comment on [Mujin] It's Time to Accept That Nintendo is a Supervillain 5 days ago:
Nintendo have ALWAYS been supervillains (at least, since they got into video games).
Like, everyone loves the story about how Nintendo “saved video games” after The Crash by tricking stores into carrying Robby the Robot. And… like most stories that came out of 90s/00s games media, it ignores the existence of PC gaming. But whatever. We got REALLY lucky that people liked the NES because if they didn’t? NOBODY would ever have been able to try that again.
Aside from that? Nintendo is just Disney. They are ridiculously protective of their IP and everyone insists on dragging their kids in because they remember loving it growing up. And they are INCREDIBLY protective of their back catalog (less so in the Switch era where third parties were an active detriment for performance reasons) a la The Disney Vault.
And… all the Nintendo Adults have made it clear over the decades that “Corporations aren’t your friends. Except for the one with Mario. #StandUpForNintendo”
- Comment on Preserving Play: How Eden Grew Into the Switch Emulator Everyone’s Talking About (my interview with the devs) 5 days ago:
I guess I wonder how much of that is just that… yuzu was REAL fucking good and this is Yuzu (if you check the source since their website doesn’t seem to acknowledge that?).
From a skimming of the code (if they aren’t going to do proper code review, why would I?), the main deltas seem to be related to CI/CD, branding, package updates, and MAYBE improved controls/interfaces more geared towards the android client.
And, to be clear, I think there is a lot of value in maintenance. But when you have to dig relatively deep to even see this is a fork and they already have donation links plastered everywhere?
Yeah… I would be a bit more concerned over making sure this is “above board” as it were.
- Comment on Preserving Play: How Eden Grew Into the Switch Emulator Everyone’s Talking About (my interview with the devs) 5 days ago:
Curious. Hadn’t heard of them at all and they seem to have made solid progress.
So I went to their “github” link which goes to their own self hosted (codeberg?) which is a big ol’ orange flag because it implies that either they don’t understand what git actually is or they assume their audience doesn’t… I can see that it is a yuzu fork. Not inherently bad but it does explain the progress for something nobody ever heard of until… today. And that has implications for the project getting a pretty strong C&D because of the shenanigans Yuzu was allegedly doing to get such strong compatibility on release day for so many games. Yellow flag, we’ll say.
Just skimming the last few MRs? Seeing a LOT of “waiting reviews” on the merged side of things which is another orange flag. Best case scenario it means they don’t understand how to map their SDLC to their tools, worst case scenario it means they aren’t actually doing thorough code reviews which is playing with fire when it comes to a console with as many leaks as the Switch.
Also no Releases. Which further suggests they have no idea how to use their tools. So did some digging on the readme and it looks like the project itself probably began 6 months
So yeah. Not sure how much they have contributed to the fork but everything I am seeing is just making me want to remind people that a LOT of people are going to make yuzu forks and you should think about what is going into the code you are going to blindly run. And… it kinda makes me think less of whatever blog site ran this interview.
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 5 days ago:
While I am a strong supporter of independent games media (and am ride or die Remap):
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”This doesn’t scale. The outlets doing this can support MAYBE 3 people with the outliers being Kinda Funny who have never found a sponsorship they didn’t like and Giant Bomb who are pretty much riding on the massive support wave after they got fired AND have THE biggest legacy name out there and… time will really tell if they can keep supporting the whole crew this time next year. Oh, and MinnMax where Ben has to constantly remind people that he is actually the only full time employee and all the cohorts are contractors.
But the other aspect, which Remap (specifically Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny) have pointed out is… when you are part of a big org you have, among other things, lawyers. You can’t really do investigative journalism without those. With the power of (I think at the time it was) Kotaku? Jason Schreier is the “press sneak thief” and Bethesda just puts the outlet on a shitlist for review codes until the end of time. Without the power of Kotaku? Jason gets a letter in the mail and needs to find a lawyer who can protect him.
Outlets like 404 Media (and, to a much lesser extent, Aftermath) have more or less structured themselves entirely around this and I don’t actually know how they are pulling it off.
But Independent Games Media is, by and large, just that: Games Media. Not Games Journalism. And the reason you want the latter can probably be summed up with the Nintendo pricing of the Switch 2. They very specifically did not mention it as part of their press event or in the copy they sent out. And many outlets (including Remap and MinnMax) pointed out why. It is not going to look good for them but by doing it that way they control the message. Because all the Hype is gonna be for the Direct. So they get all the benefits of all your favorite talking heads Talking Over a Mario Kart trailer but the actual pricing? That is MAYBE an updated news article or a tweet. Which becomes “it is what it is” when they go to buy rather than “Wait… IS a gameboy actually worth 500 bucks?” discourse that we see for brands like XBOX that couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag at this point.
And we’ve seen similar with so many controversies over the years. People who are REALLY tuned in might have heard about The mordhau “Show us your kni**a” thread and rampant racism or the black myth wukon sexism. But the majority of outlets people actually go to for coverage/opinions are VERY aware that their legal department is Uncle Jack and don’t want that smoke. So you mostly just get “we aren’t going to cover it” rather than “Yo dog, this shit is fucked” that we would in the old days.