addie

@addie@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game sequel ruined a beloved franchise or character for you?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Think you could take it back a step there.

  • Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
  • Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
  • Fallout 3 - “Oblivion with guns”, but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what’s available in the world.
  • Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for ‘proper’ RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I’m going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
  • Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. “Talking” interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the “final decision” point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda’s worst habits, given free rein.

  Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of ‘hyped’ is for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If we had the technology to freely form diamond, then it’s exceptionally hard, has incredible chemical resistance, among the very best thermal conductivities of any material, and it isn’t particularly heavy.

  Being able to coat the inside of chemical vessels and pipes with diamond would hugely increase their lifespan, a heat exchanger made out of it would be incredible. Great for food processing, since you’d be able to clean it easily; great for abrasive or highly acid / alkili materials that corrode everything else. Probably awesome as a base layer for semi-conductors, as it would be great for heat dissipation.

  But we are probably talking about nanotechnology to lay it down in sheets, which we don’t have (yet).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Years, sadly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve found that disabling VSync in games entirely and then letting MangoHud do the limiting works a bit better. Some of that will be because I’m using Proton on Linux, which has DXVK as a translation layer. Games will be trying to limit their frames the DirectX way, whereas MangoHud is limiting them the Vulkan way and is ‘closer to the monitor’ for keeping the pace right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Introduces In-Game Performance Monitor⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, MangoHud has an ability to set fps_limit in a per-game way that generally results in much smoother frame-pacing than most games achieve by default. That’s awesome for eg. Dark Souls / Elden Ring, which are stuttery at 60 fps but buttery at 59 for some reason, but also for random strategy games which would be just fine at 30 fps but instead have all the fans roaring to render at 144.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere.

  Qobuz’ recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify’s slop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK’s Major Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks From Next Month; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks by July 25.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.

  It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.

  I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.

  Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.

  Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.

  Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marathon is delayed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.

  There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.

  lochnits.com/aopid/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You are not joking. Comparing a $2000 Purism Liberty with eg. a $200 HMD Fusion. The Fusion has somewhat better screen and battery; much better processor and camera. More RAM, the option of more storage, has NFC. It’s also designed to be easy-to-maintain, but is somewhat thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen area. Are ‘made in USA’ and ‘open-source drivers’ worth paying 10x as much for a noticeably worse phone? (It’s not really ‘made in USA’ either - it’s a mix of US, Chinese and Indian parts assembled in the USA.)

  I think that the people who believe a US-made iPhone will also cost $2k are kidding themselves - economy of scale and all that, but it must be substantially more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Think there should be an ‘accessibility’ option in the settings menu? I remember it being pretty decent - god mode, slow down, item highlighting, and the ‘half damage’ option were in there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Loved it, but absolutely hit a wall with it until they released the “take half damage” difficulty patch. Then I found it fun again. I love a challenging video game, but the “slightly loose dodging controls” and the requirement for basically perfect execution to defeat the bosses didn’t sit well with me. The Garden Knight was bad enough, the ones that come after it were just silly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is ironic, because Fallout 4 is the game that caused me to no longer be hyped for anything else that Bethesda had coming. Fallout 76 and Starfield didn’t disappoint, because I was expecting them to be shit from a company that had lost its way, and they delivered spectacularly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clair Obscur's Composer Talks Going From Unknown To Scoring 2025's Most Celebrated RPG⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I found that too. The animations are misleading - just listen for when you need to press the buttons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Telegraph has deleted this sob story ⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Fark used to be great. That bear headline is a beast.

  And then they got rid of the ‘foobies’ (ie. nudity) links off of the main page in order to appeal to advertisers, then they got rid of lots of extra stuff that upset advertisers, then they started shadow-banning paying subscribers if their posts didn’t fit the narrative. And then all the users got fed up of it all and moved ever to Reddit, where the mods were more transparent and there was more of a sense of community. How ironic.

  If your core site content is users posting links and commenting on them, then there’s probably a lesson to be learned about how important it is to treat your users well and have a welcoming, inclusive community. Probably a lesson that Lemmy users have already learned, mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨if pure water is not conductive why would condensation be an issue for electronics?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not very easy, even then. Very pure water will absorb CO2 out of the air to make carbonates, it will strip ions from the surface of most materials you’d want a make a distillation column from. It’s a very aggressive solvent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.

  Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developer interview: my Q&A with the Heroic Games Launcher team⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.

  I used to dual boot “Windows for games” and “Linux for work”, and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.

  Got rid of Windows years ago because it’s more of a PITA than it’s worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.

  Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.

  Awesome interview as well, @PerfectDark@lemmy.world - a really interesting read.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3085: About 20 Pounds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn’t correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.

  The “simplest” explanation is that there’s a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it’s hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also ‘dark’) don’t have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.

  Simple answer is that we don’t know, and “dark matter” is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there’s a lot of things that we know it isn’t.

  Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don’t fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can’t explain the rest.

  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more “partitioned” than shared - there’s a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it’s usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:

  • load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there’s no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they’re just loaded and accessible.
  • manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whenever a beast is shown on screen⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They’ve got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.

  Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Librarians in UK increasingly asked to remove books, as influence of US pressure groups spreads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Guardian-reading lefty here. You got any links to actual transphobic articles in the Guardian itself? I’ve been reading it for years, and have never noticed anything like that, particularly it being a stance. Would be very disappointed in them if so.

  That link says that there have been 1100 articles in the Guardian, and also well-known right wing rags the Times, Mail and Telegraph, “most of” which are attacks. Bizarre to group those four papers together; one of them is very much not like the others. I would believe it of the other three, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

  I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.