dormedas
@dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com
- Comment on Cyan (Myst, Riven) to lay off 12 people, "roughly half the team" 6 days ago:
Would love to see more of the developer providing good information for those laid off so other companies can more easily ingest possible hires.
- Comment on Pokémon Legends Z-A - Nintendo Direct 3.27.25 1 week ago:
Looking alright. It’s a Pokémon game so I know what I’m getting into but it looks fun.
- Comment on Upscaling is actually good (as an option) 1 week ago:
I’m a game developer and I will 100% confirm that studios have already started and will continue assuming the user has DLSS/FSR/XeSS enabled because it turns out rendering half as many pixels can get you across the finish line.
It was already fairly standard practice to try as hard as you can for performance, and when that fails to bring you to native resolution, just cut some resolution (for example, to 900p from 1080p).
However, I do want to add that DLSS/FSR/XeSS is great technology for the low end of the market who can’t afford insane rigs but do get to have a slightly sharper image than previous upscalers could accomplish.
- Comment on What's up, selfhosters? - The Sunday thread 4 weeks ago:
Finally got my lemmy instance fully updated.
Been improving my backup scripts in advance of adding backup to a server.
Updated servers and other services.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
For context: I was very young around the NES & SNES era, but a lot of kids back then went to play at other kids’ houses. Not every household had one, but one of my friends would and I’d want to go play at their house because they had one. In this way, 30 million NES’ could reach far more million people (kids), leading to modern nostalgia.
Personally, my grandpa had a NES and I ALWAYS wanted to go to his house to play Duck Hunt.
- Comment on Day 214 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing until l forget to post Screenshots 1 month ago:
I’m working my way up the generations and I need to replay Alola in the Ultra games since I only had Pokemon Sun before and had different livingdex rules when I played it. A bit unfortunate for time-sake, but I really liked the Alola games. Good luck on your dex!
To add some naming inspiration, my friend and I like dumb nicknames like:
Blingo Splorp Gunch Slizbop Boizo
- Comment on Playing Dragonsweeper because of Ars' article. Did I have any way out of this without guessing? 1 month ago:
You sort of need to keep track of creature count but I feel like the game should do that for me, and not in a menu.
- Comment on Who's making older games so expensive? 1 month ago:
Scarcity and some artificial scarcity called grading. Take for example Pokémon vintage trading card game packs. Base set has a bunch of print differences but even buying a normal unlimited version pack is $300-400. The value of a Charizard, if you pull it out of that pack, is ~$200-400 raw. However, if you grade it and it comes back a 10, it’s suddenly “worth” $1000+.
This is not quite as prevalent in video games but it is happening. The price of popular Pokémon games that are complete in box are sky high because someone somewhere wants to buy it and submit it for the chance it’s “worth” 10x the price.
Pricecharting.com is your friend. Patience is a virtue.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 1 month ago:
This would basically be my reply as well. Companies are in the game to make money, and setting up all this infrastructure, not to mention maintaining it, is NOT cheap.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 1 month ago:
You apparently can transfer saves on PS4/5 offline. For PS4 they can be copied to a USB drive, but more to your point here, the only way to copy PS5 saves around (besides PS+) are to do console backup and restore processes and then during that process say you want to take save games wholesale (and then restore them wholesale). That’s definitely greedy bullshit.
I don’t know what more to say, consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in. Within those walled gardens, the company dictates the rules. There’s plenty of good arguments for using a more open platform like PC. Not the least of which is that PlayStation has had an abysmal console cycle for trying to prove their console is worth purchasing - what with it having basically no exclusives that won’t eventually come to PC, first-party or otherwise.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 1 month ago:
From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).
No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.
Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 1 month ago:
Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.
It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 1 month ago:
Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.
I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.
However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.
- Comment on PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why 1 month ago:
Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?
Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially in console.
- Comment on The Broken Mindset Of Modern Graphics & Optimization | LTT Response With Industry Breakdown 1 month ago:
Yep, this video is highly antagonistic like the rest of theirs. On the whole, they’re talking about the right thing, but the video tends towards generalization and ragebaiting.
Also months and months later there’s yet to be any news or progress on their “alternative” Unreal Engine fork that fixes TAA or whatever, despite the host talking very quickly over technical rendering jargon. You’d think with the ability to do that, they could manage to … disable TAA in Unreal. Vibes feel like a scam.
- Comment on Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done' 5 months ago:
It was kickstarted a decade ago with release dates which they’ve never kept thanks to a constant modification of what a release looks like - namely splitting the MMO-like Star Citizen out from the single-player blockbuster Squadron 42 - as well as scope bloat. A lot of people originally kickstarted the game (mostly for what we now call Squadron 42 + some multiplayer thing) but now a decade on, the MMO-like Star Citizen is seemingly the priority project and most of the people who are currently funding the game are primarily interested in that.
After hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it seems clear that Squadron 42 in particular is in development hell as it still can’t seem to make it to market. Star Citizen, while playable, teeters back and forth from basically unplayable to playable and all “progress” is subject to wipes.