tal
@tal@olio.cafe
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I’ve never played either the original or the remastered version of Oblivion. I got into Bethesda games via the Fallout series rather than the Elder Scrolls series.
I think I did see a friend, who was a big fan of Daggerfall, play that. And I went back and played Morrowind with the open-source GemRB engine. But I never did Oblivion.
- Comment on A.I. Video Generators Are Now So Good You Can No Longer Trust Your Eyes 2 weeks ago:
The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.
We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.
I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.
I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.
And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.
I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:
- Comment on Who's your favorite female protagonist in a video game? (Add pic of character in response) 2 weeks ago:
I don’t see any official announcement of cancellation, but honestly, between its development not going well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2
The game was originally announced at Ubidays 2008, with almost a decade of silence before being re-revealed at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 conference, although no release window or target platforms have been mentioned.
Its development was characterized in the media by uncertainty, doubt, and rumors about the game’s future, and has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[1] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development period of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.
And Ubisoft as a whole having problems recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft
Financial concerns and reorganization (2023–present)
Citing disappointing financial results in the previous quarter, Ubisoft cancelled another three previously unannounced games in January 2023.[86] In an email to staff, Yves Guillemot told employees to take responsibility for the company’s forthcoming projects, asking that “each of you be especially careful and strategic with your spending and initiatives, to ensure we’re being as efficient and lean as possible”, while also saying that “The ball is in your court to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality, and show everyone what we are capable of achieving."[87][88] Union workers at Ubisoft Paris took issue with this message, calling for a strike and demanding higher salaries and improved working conditions.[89]
In August 2023, Ubisoft announced that it had reached a 15-year agreement with Microsoft to license the cloud gaming rights to Activision Blizzard titles; this came as part of efforts by Microsoft to receive approval from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The agreement would allow Activision Blizzard games to appear on Ubisoft+, and allow Ubisoft to sublicense the cloud gaming rights for the games to third-parties.[90][91]
As part of a cost reduction plan, Ubisoft reduced its number of employees from 20,279 in 2022 to 19,410 in September 2023.[92] In November 2023, Ubisoft laid off 124 employees from its VFX and IT teams.[93] In March 2024, Ubisoft laid off 45 employees from its publishing teams.[94] Another 45 employees were cut between its San Francisco and Cary, North Carolina offices in August 2024.[95] By the end of September 2024, Ubisoft had reduced its number of employees to 18,666.[96]
In 2024, Ubisoft released multiple games that experienced underperforming sales and declining playerbases post-launch, which included Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull and Bones, XDefiant, and Star Wars Outlaws, causing its stock to fall to nearly its lowest levels in the previous decade.[97] As a result, the company announced they were launching an investigation of their development cycles to focus on a “player-centric approach”, and opted to delay its next major flagship game, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, from November 2024 to February 2025.[98]
On 16 October 2024, over 700 Ubisoft employees in France began a three-day strike, protesting the company’s requirement to return to the office three days a week. The strike, organized by the STJV union, involved Ubisoft’s offices in Paris, Montpellier, Lyon, and Annecy. Workers expressed dissatisfaction over a lack of flexibility, salary increases, and profit-sharing, which they believe the company has ignored. Ubisoft has yet to address the union’s concerns.[99]
In December 2024, Ubisoft announced that their free-to-play game XDefiant would be shutting down in June 2025, less than a year after its initial release.[100] They also announced that its lead development studio Ubisoft San Francisco, and Ubisoft Osaka, were to close, resulting in up to 277 employees being laid off.[101]
In January 2025, Ubisoft closed the Ubisoft Leamington studio and downsized several other studios, resulting in up to 185 staff being laid off as part of ongoing cost-cutting measures.[102][103]
Around September 2024, one of Ubisoft’s shareholders, AJ Investments, stated they were seeking to have the company purchased by a private equity firm and would push out the Guillemot family and Tencent from ownership of the company.[104] Bloomberg News reported in October 2024 that the Guillemots and Tencent were considering this and other alternatives to shift ownership of the company in light of the recent poor financial performance.[105] Later reports in December 2024 suggested that Tencent was seeking to capture a majority stake in Ubisoft and take the company private, while still giving the Guillemot family control of Ubisoft.[106] In January 2025, it was reported that the Guillemots had also considered carving out certain Ubisoft assets into a new subsidiary, which would allow Tencent to make targeted investments to increase the company’s overall value.[107] Ubisoft announced this subsidiary on 27 March 2025, devoted to its flagship Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six franchises; the subsidiary will consist of the franchises’ assets and development teams, and have dedicated leadership. Tencent will make a €1.16 billion investment in the new subsidiary, giving it a 25% stake at a valuation of €4 billion; the value of this subsidiary is larger than the current valuation of Ubisoft, which is based on Tencent’s belief that these properties are undervalued. Ubisoft stated that the subsidiary would “focus on building game ecosystems designed to become truly evergreen and multi-platform”.[108][109][110] The new subsidiary, Vantage Studios, was unveiled in October 2025,[111] with Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot to be co-CEOs.[112] With its financial quarterly report on July 2025, Ubisoft stated that it will reorganize into “creative houses” that will “enhance quality, focus, autonomy and accountability while fostering closer connections with players”, with the previously announced Tencent-backed subsidiary as an example of such a division.[113] At the end of August, Ubisoft sold the rights to five of their titles, including Grow Home and Cold Fear, to Atari SA.[114]
…my bet would be against it coming out. Or, even if it does…I mean, people who wanted the game want it because the original Beyond Good and Evil was a solid game. That first game came out in 2003, 22 years back. That’s a long gap in time, technology, and people. Someone could probably sit down and try to come up with a list of examples where you had one very successful game in a series and another that far down the road, and my guess is that in most cases, the next game doesn’t live up to the original.
tries to think of an example where someone’s managed something like this
I like Carrier Command 2. That came out 33 years after Carrier Command, though it certainly didn’t meet with the same level of relative success, and there was an (unsuccessful) remake of the original between the two releases.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Starfield was very stable for me.
New Vegas was unstable, especially near the end of a run. And I’d swear that it was worse on the XBox than on the PC. Not just longer load times, but plenty of times that the thing would die when loading an area.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
My impression from playing both was that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were pretty solid when you started playing a game — well, okay, if you get the post-release patches in place — but that the game became less-stable over the course of a run.
The loading times also got a lot more painful over the course of a run. Fallout 76 and Starfield did much better in that respect.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
As much as I hate the idea of remastering all their games instead of just making another fucking game,
I would pretty happily buy the 3D Fallout games remastered for the Starfield engine. Higher texture resolution. Use some of the features that were added to their engine in the years subsequent to release. Capable of being rendered at frame rates that modern monitors can display. Eliminate some of the weird ragdoll stuff they used to have. Modders have improved the models a lot, and I’m sure that that’s doable. Another popular change for Skyrim modders was doing things like opening up the world (because you didn’t need to load towns separately from the outside world on modern computers), adding more foliage and other things that computers couldn’t handle back at release, adding modern shader effects, and all that.
I mean, sure, I’d also like to have Fallout 5*, but I suspect that the cost of doing a remaster is a lot less than a new game, and the earlier games are getting old enough that they’re kinda hard to recommend. I mean, if they release *Fallout 5* in the early 2030s, the last game in the mainline series will be *Fallout 4*, 2015, and before that, *Fallout: New Vegas from 2010. That’ll be a huge gap, if you hope to get players to play the series.
Skyrim got the LE->SE (well, and AE) path, so it got updated to be more-playable over the years. The Fallout games are still running on the old stuff.
- Comment on xkcd #3153: Hot Water Balloon 2 weeks ago:
Death by having the balloon role over and smother you would probably be kind of horrific.
- Comment on Great games you would recommend from before 1990? 2 weeks ago:
Hmm. I think that it’s hard to find games that really stand up on their own, and haven’t had been outclassed in the intervening 35 years. I can think of a lot of games that I enjoyed then, but that’s when they were competing against 1980s games and technology. Honestly, you got some of the ones that I’d have suggested, like Tetris and Pac-Man, and even there…I mean, original *Tetris is perfectly playable, but I’d probably recommend https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003590/Tetris_Effect_Connected/Tetris Effect: Connected* to a new player. Might as well have the extra glitz.
considers
Shmups have generally gotten more fast-moving and bullet-hell oriented. If you prefer slower shmups, you might enjoy playing 1942 or *1943: The Battle of Midway.
I agree with @emb@lemmy.world that Super Mario Brothers 3 for the NES is pretty decent, though I’ve never played fully through the game. Side-view platformers really did have their heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, and that was a strong game.
kagis
These guys show marketshare of video game genres by year; platformers were really big in the 1980s:
https://savvystatistics.com/video-game-genres-by-year-1980-2016/
The arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989) is probably fun if you can get some friends together. Probably need to emulate it with MAME or similar. I don’t think that the beat-em-up genre has changed all that much or seen many entrants since.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jLO1upcd8w
The Simpsons would be a stronger arcade beat-em-up recommend, but that’s 1991, a bit out of your timeframe.
Arcades really peaked in the 1980s, before home console systems and computers started cutting into them. There were some things that arcade games were better at than computers and consoles, like having custom-to-a-game input hardware. If you are willing to get ahold of some arcade-style hardware, like an arcade-style joystick (US-style Happ, or Japanese-style Sanwa), you could play some games that were designed around having a full-size joystick.
There are trackball and spinner games as well.
I think that light gun games are out, unless you’re willing to obtain a CRT. Maybe someone’s made something that can deal with LCD/LED displays.
kagis
Apparently so: https://sindenlightgun.com/
There were a number from the 1980s:
- Comment on The Web is Going to Die 2 weeks ago:
That depends on how you define the web
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)
This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!
- Comment on The Web is Going to Die 2 weeks ago:
I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on Lemmy. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.
- Comment on The Web is Going to Die 2 weeks ago:
How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?
Gopher predated the Web.
I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with
<em></em>, for example. - Comment on Dog attacks are still rising - even after the XL bully ban 2 weeks ago:
Sounds like there’s potential for even more political gains from more political theater, then?
- Comment on Canary Cage 2 weeks ago:
Further complicating this, the Threadiverse also has “display names” for communities — something which I think is probably a mistake — and one has to know how to get the actual name for the bang-syntax link. For example, the display name here is “New Communities”, but the actual community name is “newcommunities”.
- Comment on The most important person in Britain you’ve never heard of 2 weeks ago:
Only the king has more power than this gas executive in a Russian emergency.
I’m pretty confident that the prime minister has a larger role than the king in a “shit hits the fan with Russia” scenario.
- Comment on Canary Cage 2 weeks ago:
Honestly, the bang syntax for instance-agnostic communities isn’t not very obvious to new users. It’s not a piece of standard Markdown syntax, either, so it’s not like someone can use knowledge from Reddit or elsewhere.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals 2026 launch for his AI game alongside Grok-made garbage 2 weeks ago:
There are some existing video games that incorporate LLMs or diffusion models. So in one sense, that’s probably very doable.
But I think that it’s probably going to be a slow process. There are probably going to be dead ends. I kind of suspect that early games, even if they’re technically-novel, probably will suffer the same problems that past video games did before they matured. End of the day, a video game needs to be fun, and just throwing a new technology like a powerful graphics card or a fancy natural-language parser or whatever at it doesn’t get you to that fun game. I think that it’s going to take quite some years of game developers iterating to incorporate generative AI stuff well.
That being said, there are some things I’d like to see tried.
My guess is that it’s probably possible to create to develop some sort of social-media-based video game that generates a choose-your-own-adventure style video game, remembering story branches generated by other users to take advantage of human-assisted creation, and trying to show “top” story forks. Like, make the bar low, use voting or link tracking or something to determine what story branches people like, and show those.
I’d like to see some kind of system for tracking world state that isn’t purely based on having an LLM look at the entire preceding text for context. That’s a pretty inefficient way to store world state, and implementing game logic at the LLM level is, I think, going to be problematic. Think of something like, oh, a game system like Inform/TADS/glulx-based interactive fiction. You have objects and properties and a game engine that handles tracking them and their interactions. But you try to get an LLM to generate text for those objects.
There are some games that use diffusion models, either statically or at runtime, to generate illustrations, where the number of permutations would be impractical for a human artist. The ones I’ve seen have been adult-oriented; I don’t know how the field has developed, and there may well be a lot more out there now.
One thing that I think could be done today is to start using procedurally-generated voices. Generative AI can do pretty decent voice synthesis. Video games are good at doing procedurally-generated text, but if you do that, you don’t get voice audio. That’s not really a game genre, but it’s a way in which one could provide some neat added functionality. I think that to really take advantage of this, there’d need to be a training corpus of text annotated with emotional information and such, but I’ve seen people doing this in a usable form for game mods.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals 2026 launch for his AI game alongside Grok-made garbage 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think that that’d be very analogous. He explicitly said that he wasn’t going to do the Hyperloop himself, just proposed it as an idea that someone else could implement.
That being said, you could dig up something that Musk had said that he would do that he didn’t. considers FSD on Tesla vehicles is probably the prime example.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 2 weeks ago:
I would guess that it’s probably not much by way of change — theoretically, maybe just a single line patch — to cause this check not to take place.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 2 weeks ago:
That’s actually a really interesting question.
I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves “take packages”. But historically, I don’t believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn’t done the registration thing historically, either.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 2 weeks ago:
I don’t see why it would be.
The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.
I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.
I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 2 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t put it entirely outside the realm of possibility, but I think that that’s probably unlikely.
The entire US only has about 161 million people working at the moment In order for a 97 million shift to happen, you’d have to manage to transition most human-done work in the US to machines, using one particular technology, in 10 years.
Is that technically possible? I mean, theoretically.
I’m pretty sure that to do something like that, you’d need AGI. Then you’d need to build systems that leveraged it. Then you’d need to get it deployed.
What we have today is most-certainly not AGI. And I suspect that we’re still some ways from developing AGI. So we aren’t even at Step 1 on that three-part process, and I would not at all be surprised if AGI is a gradual development process, rather than a “Eureka” moment.
- Comment on What FOSS GOG Downloader/Archiver do you recommend? 2 weeks ago:
I use lgogdownloader.
- Comment on Tories set a low bar after misspelling Britain on conference chocolate 2 weeks ago:
Based on current polling the conservatives would be lucky to get third place. Reform on track to get second or third place depending on the pole, Labour and the lib Dems are fighting for the top spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
This graph has the Liberal Democrats at ~14%, the Conservatives at ~16%, Labour at ~20%, and Reform at ~32%.
- Comment on XMPP servers / cokmunities? 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t been using instant messaging programs much for some years, but checking https://old.reddit.com/r/xmpp/ I see:
https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/09/xmpp-jabber-userbase-and-popularity/
This has an estimate of 13–20 million users globally for 2023, but warns that because many servers don’t publish information about their userbase, there’s necessarily uncertainty. According to it, Germany is the country with the largest userbase, followed by Russia, followed by the US.
- Comment on Tories set a low bar after misspelling Britain on conference chocolate 2 weeks ago:
Organisers are reportedly blaming the mistake on a “printing error” and have since removed the chocolate from the bags
Wait a minute. So the organizers dick it up and get rewarded with a bunch of chocolate? This doesn’t seem like proper incentivization.
- Comment on Landmark study shows 1.4m Britons have a gambling problem 2 weeks ago:
An estimated 1.4 million adults in Britain have a gambling problem
Put more optimistically, that’s 67.8 million Britons who don’t have a gambling problem.
- Comment on XMPP servers / cokmunities? 2 weeks ago:
jabber.org is a major server.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 2 weeks ago:
An original consultation took place during 2018 as part of the previous government’s Child Obesity action, and legislation was finally passed in Parliament in December 2021.
The rules only came into force on Wednesday (1 October 2025).
The legislation was actually passed under the Johnson government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Johnson_ministry
I suppose that Labour could have passed a law canceling implementation, though.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 2 weeks ago:
If you put sugar in granulated or powdered solid form into soda, it’ll create a lot of convection points and the soda will rapidly foam up and lose a lot of its carbon dioxide.
You could use a sweet syrup instead.
- Comment on Brits in disbelief as new refillable drinks ban implemented across UK 2 weeks ago:
The notice reads: “Want Coca-Cola Classic? It’s one glass only.
“Based on new government laws, we’ve had to limit Coca-Cola Classic to one glass per customer.
“Still thirsty? Help yourself to any of our low-sugar fizzy Bottomless Soft Drinks.”
Under the new rules, any soft drinks that are low in sugar, for example ‘Zero’ alternative versions of most popular soft drink brands, can be drunk to one’s heart’s content.
I imagine that manufacturers of artificial sweeteners are in for a good time.
