teawrecks
@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime 1 week ago:
Hah well luckily I’ve never seen anything close to a 60 gap squeeze. But if the game is half decent, then there is story being conveyed during that time, not just the shimmy. TLOU has a few sections where you’re squeezing through a cramped wall that most certainly hides loading, but at the same time your character is hiding from an enemy, or some emotion other than bordom is trying to be conveyed.
Obviously I’m not arguing in favor of slow shimmies, I just think the better, well funded devs with the resources often come up with much more immersive excuses for hiding the loading. So at the end of the day, we’re just asking the overworked, under funded, possibly less skilled devs, who are often already crunching for a due date, to also think about how their game will run on hypothetical bandwidths of future hypothetical hardware. That’d be nice, but if they had that time, then they’d just spend it making the experience less boring on current hardware.
- Comment on I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime 1 week ago:
Good point about hardware upgrades, though it doesn’t work for consoles where the hardware will never change.
It’s a difficult problem because it spans multiple domains: part of it is gameplay mechanics (players often get power ups that make them move faster, which could make the same corridor take 10s or 2s), part of it is level design (the layout of the building in the story is compact, but two adjacent rooms both need a lot of content or have complex set pieces), and part of it is artists intention (they want you to feel claustrophobic or like your character is taking an unintended route, which an arbitrarily long hallway wouldn’t convey).
Something related that games used to do (more than they do now) that no one ever complained about were points of no return. Your character would drop down a ledge that they couldn’t climb back up, or they’d walk into a room and the door behind them would lock or debris would fall and block the path. This served a similar purpose: to bar the player from backtracking so they could unload unused assets. I guess it was just a more subtle method of misdirection, people never complained. The sideways slow shimmy is just so in-your-face without anything else to misdirect that it’s become a meme.
- Comment on I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime 1 week ago:
surely there are better solutions to that non-issue. Like a loading screen.
You would rather see a loading screen every 40ft than have them hide asset streaming?
Yes it’s overused, but that just means they need to get a bit more clever with their slow-downs. I would take them over a loading screen any day.
- Comment on is black myth wokong a good game? 1 week ago:
I’ll give wukong a shot eventually, I read journey to the west as a kid, so your description of an actual story in addition to fun movement mechanics sounds enticing. Cheers.
- Comment on is black myth wokong a good game? 2 weeks ago:
I played through Elden Ring, and while it’s not my personal favorite game, it is objectively an excellent game. I never finished any of the DS games, they were too linear for me.
To say that all the wins are based on luck and no skill is objectively false. The most extreme ER enjoyers regularly clear the entire game, entirely naked, without ever once being hit. That means the mechanics are highly deterministic and thus completely learnable. And for the record, spam rolling or spam attacking is the quickest way to die in nearly every fight. If that’s the strat you went with, I could see it being quite the slog.
I agree it doesn’t offer a “power fantasy”, it requires the player to observe, learn from failure, and develop a plan. If you don’t do that, I agree, it can be a very infuriating game loop. But I would argue that’s not the game’s fault.
I agree that sometimes the camera is a total pain to deal with vs the scale of the enemy.
Most games don’t market themselves as a “souls-like”, it’s typically a comparison the gaming community makes, but also it’s definitely over-used to just mean “hard game”. That’s not what I would say makes a souls like. THE “souls like” mechanic, I would say, is the notion of dropping “souls” on death, and having to retrieve them without dying again. Which means there are definitely turn based souls likes, and I would not consider the Megaman series “souls likes”.
But IMO it’s experience vs simulation. If you want your game to inevitably shuffle you through an experience that you will inevitably get through, that’s totally fair and one aspect of gaming that I think closely mirrors film or literature. I would put excellent story experiences like TLOU in that camp. But if you want a game to put you through a simulated challenge which tests your resolve, subverts your expectations, and evokes emotional responses in a unique way that I believe only games can, then the souls games offer one slice of that experience.
- Comment on is black myth wokong a good game? 2 weeks ago:
There is difficulty to be had but not once was it unfair or anger-inducing. A boss defeating you is a lesson to move on and come back.
That is a perfect description of Elden Ring.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
It’s already solved: FOSS means I can always fork/build my own package that does what I want. That’s why I mean it’s immune.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
What concerns me is the implicit association people will make between him and FOSS, and anything they believe about one will carry to the other.
I have to assume there are already people who hear “Linux” and think “ugh, I wouldn’t touch that with a 10ft pole because I don’t want anything to do with Pewdiepie”. Similarly, if he says something dumb next week, and half his audience abandons him, they’ll likely have a negative outlook on FOSS going forward.
Either way, I don’t believe FOSS’ staying power comes from meteoric rises following a fad, it comes from a natural immunity to enshittification over time. On the scale of a few of decades, FOSS seems like it’s struggling against proprietary solutions. But just like the general concept of political democracy, I think on the scale of centuries it will become the clear, time-tested, least-bad option. But I digress.
- Comment on Password manager woes. How have you solved syncing on Android? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve run into this issue with obsidian, but for whatever reason I haven’t had any issues with keepassdx.
When opening an existing keepass vault, on the left there’s an “Open From” pullout menu. You should be able to select your nextcloud from there. Then find your keepass file and it’ll just work.
I don’t know why, but obsidian doesn’t have the same file picker. There’s no “open from” menu. So you just have to drill into the filesystem, find the folder nextcloud is using, and choose your notes vault you’ve sync’ed in there. And for whatever reason, that seems to be the method that breaks Two-Way Sync.
- Comment on Password manager woes. How have you solved syncing on Android? 2 weeks ago:
I use Nextcloud + KeepassDX on android and KeepassXC on PC. Have never had an issue. Changes on desktop/phone are propagated virtually immediately across devices.
- 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' 2 weeks ago:
I mean, yeah, they already release the same game over and over. Not sure why they wouldn’t eventually realize they can also just use the same assets every time.
- Comment on A Fallout 4 QA tester nuked the RPG so hard that Zenimax executives got emails about it: "I was running around super-nuking the entire wasteland and found 4 crashes in a single morning" 2 weeks ago:
100% an AI would find this. Heck, a simple genetic algorithm would eventually try it. From the QA’s description, it would just maximize RAM usage. Researchers regularly see the AI break their simulation to maximize some utility function. The hard part is keeping it from doing that.
- Comment on Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash 3 weeks ago:
That’s a separate problem, tbh. Tell your reps you’re not happy that they’re selling you out.
- Comment on Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash 3 weeks ago:
Amazon is the exception, not the rule. Check the history of the dotcom bubble, including amazon. Uber is no longer allowed to lose money like it once was. That’s why they’ve switched from cheap rides and good pay, to algorithmic pricing and shit pay.
- Comment on Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash 3 weeks ago:
Every extra person using all these AI tools is only adding to the issue.
No, literally the opposite. They are going to do this until it is not financially viable. The more frugal and conscientious people are with their AI, the longer it is financially viable. If you want to pop the bubble, go set up a bot to hammer their free systems with bogus prompts. Run up their bills until they can’t afford to be speculative any more.
- Comment on Do you stick to the same linux distro across your devices? 3 weeks ago:
Alright, windows users, do you run the same version of windows on all your devices? Yes? Oh how surprising.
- Comment on Is there a game that combines Civ with Sims? 4 weeks ago:
Interesting, i’ve heard of it, but I’ve never played it. I’ll have to check it out.
- Comment on Nintendo Suing U.S. Government Over Tariffs 4 weeks ago:
Don’t. Just because a conflict exists doesn’t mean you need to pick a side.
- Comment on Is there a game that combines Civ with Sims? 4 weeks ago:
One of those is turn based, the other is a real time simulation. How were you envisioning time would pass?
Massive Chalice comes to mind, but it’s more like tactics + sim.
- Comment on I built a self-hosted period tracker because I couldn't find one worth using 4 weeks ago:
A bunch of people who couldn’t tell their left shift from their right shoelace think you don’t know what you’re talking about lol.
I agree, to a person who knows the machine, an AI is like a compiler: you know the output you’re going for, the tool helps you get there faster. Expecting you to do something the slow way because someone else doesn’t know how to code is nonsense. There is a massive difference between using it as a tool, and blindly taking generated code.
If the internet existed in the 70s, I bet people would have asked for a disclaimer on compiled assembly.
- Comment on HelixNotes now on Android, same Rust + Tauri codebase 4 weeks ago:
I’ve not heard of those, but to me this is a competitor to the much more ubiquitous Obsidian. Which works great, and has a whole community of support, but is not open source.
Personally, I don’t need my notes app not be responsible for syncing across devices either. I already have that for other file types (photos, media, etc).
I’m not against these features being added, but this app is young, afaik it’s one person writing it, so I’d rather see their time be spent making the note taking experience as good as it can be.
I also generally wouldn’t trust one person to properly audit the security of the networking and encryption features. If I wanted those features, I’d still give the community time to peruse the codebase.
- Comment on HelixNotes now on Android, same Rust + Tauri codebase 4 weeks ago:
I think it makes sense to handle this at a lower level. After using other notes apps, the thing I want is for it to not have some arbitrary opaque file hierarchy that locks me into it. I want a plain dir of .md files, some resources they link to, and that’s it. If I want disk encryption, there are solutions for that. I can use something like LUKs to encrypt my whole drive, or even just the notes directory.
For android, afaik everything uses disk encryption by default.
The unix philosophy is do one thing really well. We don’t need a note taking app that also handles encryption.
- Comment on YSK: 'It turned out to be a tougher one': Trump says he was wrong about ending war in Ukraine 5 weeks ago:
Ahem, you forgot the Console Wars
- Comment on Saying that hardware price increase is good cause it forces the devs to optimize is not as good as it seems. 1 month ago:
They’re mostly not AI specialized, though. That’s why they’re so inefficient and why their demand contends with consumer hardware in the first place. Which makes sense, because AI is still in rapid development. They don’t know what the right answer is yet, but they know they need a bunch of fast memory and parallel processing.
The AI specific hardware being added to GPUs is still pretty general. CUDA cores are just parallel compute. Tensor cores are for doing parallel compute with fewer bits of precision. Yes, there are niche applications for fp16 and lower, but rendering is one of those applications.
We also need to accept that this isn’t the crypto bubble, this is the dotcom bubble. Like it or not, there is a real advancement in technology happening here, and it’s not going away. The bubble will pop because there’s far more money being invested per unit time than can be returned as profit per unit time, not because the tech is a farce. Yes, 99% of AI applications right now are a farce, but that 1% are giving us actual useful abilities we simply didn’t have before. Point being: our world after the bubble pops will still make use of AI, so any hardware over-production will still be useful to the general public for AI applications.
- Comment on Saying that hardware price increase is good cause it forces the devs to optimize is not as good as it seems. 1 month ago:
The big problem is that nobody thinks about those people that don’t have the hardware right now.
Literally yes they do, because even though they don’t have the latest and greatest hardware, they have some money to spend. That’s the argument being made: until now the assumption was that new hardware would get cheaper over time, and people would gradually move to new hardware. Devs spend years making games, and historically bank on that assumption so that when the game comes out, it has the largest audience available to purchase it.
The fact that it looks like that won’t be the case in the near future means devs have to shift their behavior to accommodate what their playerbase has, i.e. continue developing and optimizing the same hardware.
That said, this is all temporary. Whether they widen the pipeline, or the AI bubble bursts, in 2-3 years there will be a deluge of hardware hitting markets. (Provided trade/actual wars don’t get in the way, which is the bigger concern imo).
- Comment on Why are we not getting stress relief games where we take our stresses out on normal people? 1 month ago:
For the record, the science shows that Destruction Therapy is not effective at actually managing anger, and may actually cause more harm long term, as you’re normalizing that behavior in your brain.
But as for why we don’t see more games along those lines, I don’t know. It does seem like a genre that would sell well right now. I remember there was a series of desktop games when I was a kid called Stress Reducer that would give you a set of animated weapons to “destroy” your windows desktop (an image of it).
- Comment on Day 579 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 month ago:
Yes, and it is a masterclass in both narrative and environmental story telling.
- Comment on HelixNotes - a local-first markdown note-taking app (Rust + Tauri, AGPL-3.0) 1 month ago:
Are there plans for mobile apps? In particular, obsidian and nextcloud don’t seem to work well together on android. Changes made to files via obsidian don’t get picked up by nextcloud unless I manually go sync the file. This might just be nextcloud’s app dropping the ball.
- Comment on YSK you can poison your personal data to fight against surveillance capitalism. 1 month ago:
I wonder if you could make a self-hostable data poisoning automation utility. Put in a bunch of credentials for various social media sites, and it creates unintelligible usage patterns associated with your online identities. Not so much for poisoning training of generative AI, but for destroying any internal profiles any party might attempt to build on you by correlating your online behaviour.
- Comment on big list of selfhosted chat apps to meet all your friends on a real "server" 1 month ago:
If everyone else moved, they would too. But no one will, so they won’t. Same as it ever was.