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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I want to like this, but some of that mocap animation looks really off. Especially in those scenes with the idol and where indie is slamming down that stone. Looks like the mocap actor was holding back and that the idol weighs less than it should. It’s probably going to be okay, but after the excellent mocap work in games like God of War, where the animation really conveys a sense of weight, and in comparison to the Indiana Jones films this looks a bit floaty and like Indie is pulling his punches.







  • Why would you want another year of their software for free? This is their second screw up (apparently they sent out a bad update that affected some Debian and RHEL machines a couple years ago). I’d be transitioning to a competitor at the first opportunity. It seems they aren’t testing releases before pushing them out to customers, which is about as crazy to me as running alpha software on a production system.

    I’m sure you have reasons, and this isn’t really meant to be directed at you personally, it’s just boggling to me that the IT sector as a whole hasn’t looked at this situation and collectively said “fuck that.”



  • It’s wild to me that the term “lame duck” has been expanded to include an entire second term. When it was originally coined it was for the period of time between an election in November and the inauguration in January. It’s only in the last 20 years or so that we started calling a second-term president a lame duck, and acting like it’s over at the halfway point.




  • I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine’s social commentary. And while we’ve had Bioshock games that he didn’t write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it’s more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.

    Rapture wasn’t just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the “Big Daddies” and “Little Sisters.”

    Don’t get me wrong. I’d love more Bioshock (if it’s good), but I’m glad we’re also getting Judas from Levine’s new studio, because I have a feeling it’s going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.



  • Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don’t studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.

    Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.

    This isn’t about defending Fromsoft, they’re just another company trying to get your money. I’m just saying that’s how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).


  • From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.

    Difficulty wise, yeah, it’s hard. That’s a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it’s probably better that they launched a game that is “too hard” and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you’ll make things much harder on yourself.




  • Understandably a lot of talk about YouTubers who have changed for the worse, but there have been a few who IMO have changed for the better. Granted, a good number are more towards the burnt-out end of the spectrum, and considering retirement within a few years.

    Jacksepticeye for example, used to put on a more energetic “youtubery” persona that appealed to the algorithm, and now he’s a lot more down to earth and considerably more pleasant to watch. That’s not to say the persona wasn’t still him, or that he was entirely fake for all those years, but I find his new content much more enjoyable than his older stuff - even if there is less of it.