sp3ctr4l

Like its kinda sad that it is the best shooter FO in terms of controls and basically movement/weapon feel and such…

But like, HL2 exists. FEAR exists. TitanFall 2 exists. Literally: ‘insert retro boomer shooter here’ exists.

Congrats guys, good job, you made a solid, basic FPS, with tons of weapon customization (that barely actually matters in gameplay).

While also like, how is any of this supposed to be balanced with your RPG character system?

Auto balancing removes the point, there are basically no enemies or situations that actually demand you have a certain kind of build and/or strategic/tactical approach to defeat a certain enemy or scenario.

The whole point of a traditional western rpg is that the choices you make about your character’s build/skill progression govern the options you’ll have in future situations.

But FO4 basically neuters the entire concept of this. Its genuienly baffling. They’re just flair, they’re damn near entirely pointless.

I completely agree.

FO4 showed to me that they are fundamentally unserious about Fallout as like, a setting of stories, and also that they have no idea how to make compelling gameplay.

Addictive maybe, sure, but not interesting.

I never understood why anyone would play FO76 at all. Just a mess, better alternatives existed at the time for very similar gameplay.

Yeah lol, FO76 is a game the way like, a dead MMO or SecondLife is a game hahaha, its a … digital space, hahaha!

What I’ve said in the past and I still think is that they should have, for FO4 done either:

A) totally drop the base construction schtick, completely redraft the main story, make it a lot more compelling.

Or

B) nearly totally drop the main story, and go full in on the base construction schtick. Other major factions have bases they are building and maintaining, they get different kinds of blue prints, need different kinds of resources, have different styles of overarching like strategic AI governing what the factions act like, what they value materially… turn the game into much more of a procedurally generated like, active sim, of a wasteland.

But they split the diff and went for half baked versions of both, and basically it was bland and boring.

Yeah I mean like… a full on conversion at the level of Fallout London or something like that, but with access to more ‘guts’ of the engine… done by pros?

Yeah, I’d bet Obsidian can do something like that, at the least, and it would be broadly better than FO4, again at the least.

Also my absolute random bet for FO5/ES6 will be radiant enemies along the line of Spore creatures, hahahah!

Tbf I agree that their more recent games haven’t been great… but I do think they are both more lean as a studio, and their recent games have been of better quality than Bethesda’s recent slop.

Well the last time Obsidian got their hands on the then current Creation Engine, they hot rodded it and got it to do things that Bethesda had stated they wanted to be able to do but couldn’t figure out how to do.

What would a wholly updated FO5 even… have be different? What are the systems that would be reworked?

No one has any idea because no one has mentioned anything at that level of detail, at all, that I’m aware of.

Also what, like, Bethesda is going to somehow make the Creation Engine not a giant pile of shit, with now 15 more years of acculumated technical debt from never doing a full ground up rebuild… ?

Anyway my suspicion is that MSFT is generally pissed at Bethesda for spending stupendous amounts of money over the last decade and a half, making basically one decent game that was a commercial success, one maybe commerical success that was a PR disaster, and then a combo PR+commercial disaster.

That, all in addition to FO5 and ES VI are as best we can tell literally just dreams, concepts of a plan.

Sharma’s job is to make Xbox as profitable as it can be, partially to stem the damage from Xbox itself’s fuckups over the last decade, Spencer’s ‘buy every IP’ plan only works if that leads to actually profitable games…

… but Sharma also has to make Xbox as profitable as it can be to cover for the incredible amounts of money MSFT has spent on AI/LLMs, Windows itself going to shit, mass abandonment of Windows and Windows enterprise software thats been going on in Europe since Trump Round 2 started.

They also can’t build a mod manager to save their lives.

God help you if you think they understand anything about how to write any OS agnostic code.

In other news: ModDB still exists. Same with GameBanana.

Well I think Obsidian will be better able to do a Fallout game than Bethesda, but oof yeah maybe fire Emil and Todd, if you want to start fixing Bethesda’s problems.

See the primary problem with Bethesda is that its leadership are incompetent hacks that haven’t had a new idea muchless a good idea in a decade, and they’ve have promoted a hugbox culture with 0 accountability anywhere.

Thats how something like FO76 and Starfield and the FO4 update that broke everything happen.

In case anyone is unaware:

gamingpromax.com/obsidian-new-fallout-game-confir…

Yeah, Asha Sharma told Obsidian to drop basically everything they were doing, and now they’re tasked with making another Fallout game.

Bethesda is also tasked with making a new Fallout game. Well, more accurately, they’ve been tasked with that for years, got a head start.

… only one of these studios is currently publically pissing and shitting themselves over how difficult that will be.

And its not Obsidian. Haven’t heard much from them.

Probably because they are busy, you know, working.

I appreciate the accolades, but really, I’m more of a Cockology Communicator.

My own original ‘research’ is… really more anecdotal, not really rigorous or extensive enough to bother attempting to publish.

I just do my best to feel my way around the current state of the field, get a firm grasp of it, and then gently but firmly impart that understanding unto other cock curious folks.

I do appreciate though, that you’ve found my prose substantial, and impactful, so thank you!

=D

… What indies are working with the Source engine?

S&ndbox?

Black Mesa Source?

G-String?

Do… do you mean modders?

Almost nobody just outright develops a game they intend to sell, on Source, because you’d have to liscense the engine from Valve.

Which costs a significant chunk of change.

The token response is automated.

What, you think theyre gonna hire … corpo social media numbers of content reviewers? Thousands to tens of thousands of people?

The whole company is like 300ish people.

Thats smaller than say… Bethesda.

They use bots, algos, analytic metrics, to evaluate the absurd amount of all kinds of content on Steam.

Yeah I uh… saw a video ahem that made me question my understanding of female anatomy, and then, being autistic, began to work out the physics.

Yep, basically, even though the bad dragons have a core, that core is still ultimately just a more dense kind of a foam/sponge, more or less, than the rest of the… device. The whole thing is very capable of being squished into a smaller volume than it would otherwise assume in just… ambient air pressure.

Basically, the length gets transformed into width, doesn’t even require the cervix to be penetrated, though it… is the kind of thing you’d probably need to legitimately train for.

As far as ‘an actual monster pp would probably itself break before it could totally puncture the vaginal wall itself’…

… yup, ok, I checked. There’s the EHS, but thats just a 4 stage psychometric model, doesn’t actually correspond to … actual material physics values. But there is also this…

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7475665/

… which actually does correspond to an actual physical value. For an EHS grade 4, essentially a raging erection, they got uh, ~225 +/- 25 kPa.

Given that human skin can resist roughly 690 kPa before being punctured, and a vaginal wall is… what, at least as, if not more elastic than skin?

Yeah your monster cock would need to be roughly 3x harder than a human cock seems to be caapble of being, for the scenario in the image to possibly play out.

I guess also for reference, 225 kPa is tougher than cartilidge, but less tough than cancellous bone, such as the ribs and shoulder bones, and also the flat skull bones.

So basically, you’d need to have a cock hard enough you could quite literally fuck someone’s brains out with it, directly through the top of their head, before worrying about blasting through the vaginal wall becomes … physically possible.

Can confirm, have been hotfixed.

… can’t say I noticed anything in particular was amiss, but did get big ole hotfix this morning.

Ok, because it annoyed me that this isn’t in the post itself:

There is an unoffical Arch package.

There is a Flatpak.

github.com/pythonlover02/volt-gui

There are detailed setup instructions, probably you should follow them.

But anyway this seems very neat and good!

To the best of my knowledge, the build itself has not been posted anywhere.

However its not like i know or frequent every existing darknet site or clearnet spot people like this might be on.

The videos that are being ‘leaked’ appear to only be possible to… produce, if one has an actual build of the game.

So, somebody has it, they have yet to share it.

Given that they keep promoting crypto, my bet would be if they do ‘release’ it, it’ll be in exchange for some kind of crypto payment.

Which means you have literally no guarantee you’re not being scammed, and given the we’ve already seen many AI gen fake videos claiming to be ‘legit’ vids from this build out in the wild… if the group that has the build says ‘pay me crypto for link’, copycat scammers will follow.

Edit:

Fuck, honestly?

I would not put it past Rockstar for this to all be an ARG style marketing stunt.

Your first part is ‘more’ right by way of detail, but…

A dev that works for Bethesda should be able to figure out what you just said pretty quickly.

A dev that figures that out and then continues to work for Bethesda is a fool. Sure, that’s maybe a bit harsh for younger devs… but that’s how this industry works … unless you band together and make your own indie studio, you’re going to be the first on the firing line for everyone elses mistakes.

You are correct though that the entire writing team, including Emil, need to be fired. Start over, try again. They are still using the same facial animation tech as from roughly 2008-10, which was already outdated and surpassed at that time by say HL2, when they switched over to it… I could go on. It really cannot be overstated how many technical problems are caused by never doing any real work on their shitty engine, and the management mindset that allows that to happen for 20+ years is basically cancerous.

The second half of what you said, I take issue with. In the last 10 to 15 years, the quality of enviornmental storytelling has gone down, the overall feel of the games has also gone down. Easter eggs? Who cares…?

But yes, all senior managment, including Todd, need to be shit canned as well, for making 10 years of terrible decisions.

Sharma taking an axe to Bethesda is really the only thing that makes sense from MSFT’s business POV… she’s gonna trim down the most financially wasteful things under her control first. ES 6 needs to come out and be very good, relatively quickly, or Bethesda as a studio is a dead man walking.

And even Asha isn’t fully in control of or responsible for how much fat she needs to trim, because MSFT has gone so wildly into AI, and Windows has so much technical debt and bloat, again mostly accrued over the last 10 to 15 years, … that bill is now coming due, and she needs to help figure out how to pay as much of that as well.

We can all be mad that capitalism does capitalism things, or, the talented people that are or were at Bethesda could have made their own studio, refused to work with a publisher, made a structure closer to a worker co-op, or just a more standard indie studio.

Nothing is stopping them, or anyone, from doing that right now. I know that, because modders work for basically free, sometimes patreon donations or something like that, and the more talented of them have out-quality’d Bethesda for a while now.

Look at OpenMW.

Give them a few more years, we’ll have a reworked engine that will also be capable of FO3 and NV.

Volunteers.

Yeah sorry Bethesda hasn’t made a good game in over a decade, found your own studio about it.

Modders have been outdoing you idiots for years, fixing your mistakes.

Devs in general deserve better, not fucking Bethesda devs though, nope.

I fairly frequently try out games made for Windows, released on Itch, me running Linux.

Yeah, some are not well optimized… but these are basically alpha builds of indie games, so, yeah basically, works pretty much as well it can.

Can’t say I’ve ever had a technical issue with anything that his 1.0.

Proton is magic, hooray!

Variations of this idea are genuienly vital health/survival info, right now, and will continue to be going forward.

Yes, one particular design may or may not be more effective than the other, but the basic concept of ‘duct tape a HEPA filter onto a box fan’ is absolutely a critical life hack to know if you live near anywhere that does or can experience signifcantly degraded air quality.

It isn’t perfect, but it immensely better than doing nothing, and most importantly, it is not horrendously cost prohibitive (at least currently, jfc).

Walking around for 30 minutes in wildfire smoke is roughly equivalent to smoking a couple of packs of cigarrettes.

You probably do not want to be inhaling that shit all day long, for many days at a time, if you live in a home/building that does not have its own air purification system.

Chances are you probably don’t.

So have these things on hand, to assemble, when a wildfire or something decides your city is especially beautiful to it.

Fires and smoke can come fast, suddenly, with relatively little warning.

Be prepared.

Unfortunately I cannot get that to load.

Look at it this way:

That means that the cute anime cat girls you do get to see, are that more special and cute.

Oh boy i cannot wait to play remake of game i have already played

The vast majority of the ‘gaming journalism’ exist primarily as functionally but not technically subcontracted PR outlets for major gaming companies.

It ‘works’ because there are a bunch of them, and well, they couldn’t all be like that, right?

They all know they are almost entirely replaceable by AI… when was the last time you read any of these kinds of articles, and were truly impressed by the actual writing?

When was the last time any of them did anything approaching investigative journalism? Almost never, instead they just sqwuak and have opinions about when somebody else does that.

… they’re beholden to their ultimate paymasters, and their paymasters are downsizing.

Thus, they all shape up, real fast, to pushing narratives that will aggrandize them to whom they depend on.

It’s basically ‘Yellow Journalism 2.0’… everything is for sale, integrity doesn’t exist, being professionally exasperated and feigning ignorance is a reputational defense mechanism.

(Also, for the etymylogically challenged, no, ‘Yellow Journalism’ is not primarily a racist term, it derives from a time where the concepts of duplicity and cowardice were strongly associated with the color yellow

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism)

At some point, you would think that just generally, game developers would realize that working for AAA is just uh… dumb? Stupid?

Oh I mean I noticed but everyone just called me insane.

Microsoft has yet to explain how or why the lapse occurred.

Because the NSA told them to have that lapse.

Thus they literally cannot legally tell you.

… are tech writers really this naive?

How is this not obvious?

They’re backdoors. It’s a lock that’s ‘secretly’ broken, on purpose. Duh?

Which means the new paradigm will be ‘every piece of hardware is a supply chain attack.’

In all fairness to Romero, and many other heroes/legends of the ‘birth of fps’ era…

These dudes are getting old.

Getting old sucks.

Everything hurts, you’re always more tired than you used to be, you can’t pull 7 all nighters in a row anymore, it might actually kill you.

While the present circumstances are not … exactly awesome, dignified, ideal in any way…

… there would always one day need to be a changing of the guard.

All our favorite studios from the 90s/00s… they’re all mostly gone, they just have the same name sometimes, like the ship of Theseus. People leave, teams get shuffled… and the captains that are still there, are growing gray.

Don’t mourn this.

Be inspired by it.

Do what they did, but with that extra/other thing that you always thought they should have done, but never actually did.

It doesn’t have to be any graphically fancier than what they did decades ago… graphics age, gameplay is timeless.

You can do it, if you are curious, persistent… and humble.

Yes, yes you can. Initiatives are neat, that way… the sword cuts both ways.

‘Power Tripping Bastard/Bitch’

‘Fascist Personality Disorder’

‘Manipulative Egomaniacal Bully’

‘Malignant Sociopath’

Its because they basically use a fork of Godot as a mod tool / map editor suite for BF… 6?

Are we on six now?.. I literally don’t even remember.

So they’re probably just essentially paying for a bit of extra help with custom tooling.

Hopefully they’re at least paying for a bit more than the actual services they’re getting, but idfk.

I am actually amazed that they open sourced it.

ARMA, old ARMA, Op Flashpoint, is jank as a fuck as an engine, when not running on a supercomputer, but also… it does some pretty insane shit in terms of detail and scale and number of AI/NPC agents active at the same time. And we basically all have ‘supercomputers’ now, by the standards of when it originally came out.

… there could be some interesting patterns/techniques in here, maybe not to emulate or use exactly as is, but try to learn from, if one is insterested in having a game that is basically also a big simulation, in 3D space.