As mammals go, we’re probably pretty good in terms of the direct effects of heat. Humans are exceptional at dumping heat. We have sweat glands all over our body, little hair, and are among the physically-most-capable critters out there capable of sustained physical exertion in hot environments.
Persistence hunting, also known as endurance hunting or long-distance hunting, is a variant of pursuit predation in which a predator will bring down a prey item via indirect means, such as exhaustion, heat illness or injury. Hunters of this type will typically display adaptions for distance running, such as longer legs, temperature regulation, and specialized cardiovascular systems.
Humans are some of the best long distance runners in the animal kingdom; some hunter gatherer tribes practice this form of hunting into the modern era. Homo sapiens have the proportionally longest legs of all known human species, but all members of genus Homo have cursorial adaptions not seen in more arboreal hominids such as chimpanzees and orangutans.
Persistence hunting can be done by walking, but with a 30 to 74% lower rate of success than by running or intermittent running. Further while needing 10 to 30% less energy, it takes twice as long. Walking down prey, however, might have arisen in Homo erectus, preceding endurance running. Homo erectus may have lost its hair to enhance heat dissipation during persistence hunting, which would explain the origin of a characteristic feature of the genus Homo.
We may not be super-fast. We’re not poisonous. Our teeth aren’t all that impressive, nor our “claws”. But we are really good at keeping on going in extreme heat conditions.
You know, they said, ‘An RTS is like PC-only by nature, why would you work on a single platform game when you could have made something multiplatform and another genre?’
Bruno thinks that’s because big publishers are hoping for lightning-in-a-bottle hits that return 10 times their investment—“When you’re operating at that scale, you want to build something that has the potential to sell 30 million copies,” he said—and he doesn’t think the RTS genre is ever going to produce that kind of success. If it did, he’s skeptical the game in question would really be an RTS as he defines it.
So, first, even if the audience is limited, you can make a game that has a 10x return on investment if you can do the game on a smaller investment. A big publisher doesn’t intrinsically need to do big-budget games.
Second, the genre grew up on the PC. And it often has conventions tuned to a PC platform. Precise selection, use of groups off a keyboard. But it seems to me that it’s not impossible to produce new controls. The roguelike genre also was developed on a PC, and had a lot of conventions that were not friendly to other platforms, like use of many keyboard buttons that one would need to tap. But Shattered Pixel Dungeon ( !pixeldungeon ) is a pretty good mobile adaption of the genre.
Based on this chart, video game revenue on the PC is relatively-strong compared to consoles in historical terms. What’s new is mobile.
According to that, in annual game revenue, consoles are about $30B, the PC is about $45B, and mobile – the newcomer – is $101B.
So, first-off, the PC is a quarter that. I’m not sure that it’s unreasonable to do a game that targets a quarter of the market. There are lots of genres that target only some of those platforms. First-person shooters aren’t gonna be all that great on mobile either.
Secondly, there have been console RTS releases. Off the top of my head, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_(video_game) also came out for the XBox 360. That series tends to be less of a clickfest, but it clearly means that doing an RTS on console is doable.
Thirdly, I think that console controllers are the hardest to adapt to that. I think that it’s probably pretty reasonable to do a touch interface. And if you can do PC and mobile, that’s more than three-quarters of the market.
Sales aren’t a good metric of determining whether something is mainstream or not.
Uh.
Maybe you could make a case that the popularity of a genre is separate from the popularity of a game. A single-game genre might be less popular than a genre with ten entries, even if the single game sells better than all of the games in the other genre.
But I have a hard time saying that popularity can’t be linked to something being mainstream.
And some of those are games that I have played or purchased but not played – I can say that there are some decidedly good recent releases.
Like, Carrier Command 2 is on there and is pretty nifty. It doesn’t play much like Starcraft, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not a real-time strategy game.
As Cities Skylines II still isn’t worth it (the sub has a regular thread about that, in summary: no it’s not: old.reddit.com/…/is_cities_skylines_ii_worth_it_m…) which games scratch your city building itch?
I was disappointed by Frostpunk. It checks a ton of boxes that should make me like the thing, but I just did not like the game that much in practice.
I dunno, just felt like it was too much on rails, more-restricted in layout than something like a typical Sim City-ish game.
Like, I felt less like I was just experimenting with how a lot of levers interact, as I do in a typical city-builder, and more like I’m just sussing out the right order of levers to pull.
Not sure if it’d quite qualify as “city builder”. I’d call it “base builder”. But since others mention them:
Dwarf Fortress
Rimworld
Oxygen Not Included
The above games focus on the interactions of various things you build. They have a very high degree of replayability. Dwarf Fortress has a very high bar to entry, but for all of them, you’re going to be reading wikis and spending a lot of time understanding mechanics. I think that they all give very good value for money.
Cities: Skylines (the original). It’s not bad. It’s quite expensive, if you’re going to buy a lot of the DLC – it’s a typical Paradox game, where the cost of the base game isn’t a large chunk of the overall price, where there is a lot of not-cheap DLC that really adds up. It currently has a lot of its content on sale on Steam, and even on sale, a purchase of all of it is $250. But…there’s a lot of neat stuff there. It’s one of the few relatively-modern citybuilders. It has curved roads. I don’t care that much about this – and I think that the focus on graphics was a major contributing factor to Cities: Skylines II doing poorly – but it is relatively-pretty.
Sim City 4. It’s not new, but it should still be perfectly-playable. I still don’t feel that there’s a game series that has really replaced the Sim City series.
The Tropico series. This really hasn’t changed all that much (other than Tropico 2). I don’t think I’ve played Tropico 6, but I’d probably recommend that as just being the latest in the series. It looks like they pulled the campaign from the latest, which is basically fine from my standpoint. More focus on individual characters than most city-builders. A lot of the city-builder genre feels like of Star-Trek-y, kind of a focus on creating a utopian society, so this focus on running a banana republic can be a refreshing change thematically.
Lincity-NG. Not technically the best, but it’s free and open-source, which may appeal. Focus mostly on dealing with freight congestion and achieving sustainability, which is a significant shift from most of the genre in terms of goals.
but the problems you face are also too banal but also devastating for it to be a good city builder.
You do spend more time being reactive to problems the game throws at you, but I’d note that you have a lot of ability to adjust that when starting the world in selecting a storyteller and difficulty level.
I kind of wish that it’d support higher simulation rates and try to multithread at least some of the stuff (like, maybe they can have the pathfinding or temperature propagation span multiple cores or something, which has historically been a drag).
I haven’t been following this, but if I understand, all this flows from Sony’s decision to (a) disallow developers targeting their platform from selling the game in regions that PSN isn’t available, even on other platforms, like Steam, and (b) not to offer PSN service in the Baltics. I’m not actually sure that it’s legal for Sony to do this.
I don’t think that that’d be fraud – as some people are talking about – but I do know that the EU has had some digital single market legislation that doesn’t let you buy something in part of the EU if you can’t use it in another part. I think that their interest is that they don’t want to have companies creating barriers to movement of labor around the EU, where someone can’t move from EU member A to B because it makes all their digital products unusable. If you cannot play a game in the Baltics, I’m not sure that it’s legal to sell it, under EU law, in France or the like.
It might also be legal – not sure. Probably depends on how it’s structured, what exactly Sony is doing, and the specifics of the European Digital Single Market restrictions. And I’m not familiar with the fine points of any of those.
Hundreds of protesters opposed to the expansion of a Tesla plant in Grünheide, near Berlin, clashed with police on Friday as some of them attempted to storm the electric vehicle manufacturing facility....
The group also wants to highlight environmental destruction in countries such as Argentina or Bolivia brought about by lithium mining, according to a Disrupt Tesla spokesperson, Ole Becker. Lithium is a key resource for electric vehicle batteries.
Germany does have a substantial chunk of Europe’s known lithium reserves. So if Germany would mine it, if you feel that it can be done in a less-detrimental way, that’d avoid (or at least mitigate) the problem.
Note that these are the British charts. Fallout: London, a very large and much-anticipated Fallout 4 mod, is about to release. Some of that might be specifically Brits playing through the game prior to installing the London mod.
Some of the games I like the most – some roguelikes fit into this camp – had very small teams working for a long period of time on a game, spending a long time iteratively refining the gameplay.
I’m not so sure that I prefer the “wide” model of many people for a short period of time versus a few people for a long period of time. Certainly there are things that the “narrow” model can and has done well that the “wide” model hasn’t.
I think that many roguelikes or Minecraft wouldn’t really work without procedurally-generated worlds, and that they work fine there.
I think that it’s more that procedurally-generated world still isn’t a substitute for handcrafted world. You can’t just get infinite handcrafted world for free with procedural generation.
I don’t know if I can reduce it to the programmers making the game, though. Like…yeah, the most-replayable games I’ve played rely heavily on the code, and less on the assets.
But there are also games where the art is pretty critical that I enjoy. Like, imagine games in the Myst series without the art and sound. Like, none of the code is particularly impressive. The puzzles are…okay, I guess. You play a game like that for the art and sound.
Or Lumines. I mean, yeah, they had to get the gameplay loop right, but technically, it’s a very simple game, just a falling-blocks game. But the audio and to a lesser degree, the appearance, is important.
And I definitely did enjoy those. In the case of the latter two, those were not AAA games, didn’t have huge teams creating assets, but it was still really the assets that made the game.
I agree that generally the two are linked, but to nitpick, there are some roguelikes – games that I would call roguelikes, at any rate – where the world is to greater or lesser degree hand-crafted.
ToME 2, as I recall, did have a procedurally-generated underworld, but a more-or-less hand-crafted overworld. Been a long time since I’ve played it, though.
Caves of Qud has a most of the underworld being procedurally-generated, and has many individual overworld maps being procedurally-generated, but the overworld map tiles and many individual overworld maps and some underworld maps are static.
But my point is more just that I don’t think that it’s right to say something like “procedural generation of worlds doesn’t work”. I mean, there are games where I think that procedural generation of worlds works, and works well. It’s just that we haven’t hit that Holy Grail where humans don’t have to handcraft worlds for games that rely on handcrafted worlds any more, where the procedural generation engine can just make as much handcrafted-like world as one wants for no cost.
I think that for roguelikes, what makes it work is that rely on creating different, well, tactical scenarios via randomization. Like, you have to play differently based on the environment you’re in, and so random generation gives you a stream of unknown environments so that each session is mixed up.
For many traditional games, where the point is exploration or story…we don’t have procedural generation that can make interesting plot and characters yet. Maybe we could make aesthetically-pretty procedural worlds, but we don’t have software that can generate stories with characters and plot events that we emotionally care about even remotely as well as humans can. Maybe LLMs or something are a tool that can help us get there, but we’re not there in 2024.
I don’t know what exactly makes procedural generation work for Minecraft. I guess it affects how one plays. It’s more-or-less irrelevant from a tactical standpoint, the combat doesn’t change up much, but it affects what resources one has, what problems present themselves, what constraints are imposed on how one has to build and act. Maybe games like Dwarf Fortress and Oxygen Not Included and to some extent Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, all games with procedurally-generated worlds, would fall into that camp. Starbound. Terraria.
I think that one could also say something similar about Hollywood, though there maybe I’d agree that scale is more important.
Terminator II was, for its time, pretty expensive. I’d be sad to not have Terminator II – it was a pretty good movie.
But Twelve Angry Men is a pretty good movie too. It has essentially no special effects. The costumes are mostly everyday business casual. Most of the movie takes place in a conference room, with a very small part in a courtroom and a bathroom. I don’t know what its budget is, but it has to be simply tiny in comparison.
Starfield got a lot of flak for using procedural generation which was technically impressive but…it’s a game that doesn’t really benefit a lot from it. Like, the player doesn’t need to do much to adapt their gameplay to the procedurally-generated environments. It mostly just provides aesthetic variety.
I wonder…like, roguelikes have tactics that rely on the environment. If someone were to go and mod Starfield such that the tactics in the game relied on the environment a lot more, that might be interesting from the game’s shooter side. Like, say someone got the ability to morph into something that could slide through pipes, or there were enemies that could walk up magnetic surfaces, or water had a meaningful role (it did in Fallout, with the Aqua Boy perk). Maybe have vehicles or enemies that can only travel on certain types of terrain. Get the ability to lock doors. Right now, the procedural environments are just outdoors, but if it included indoors, maybe stuff like the ability to leverage with electrical systems or lighting. As it stands, the only things that really affect tactics is the availability of cover and the ability to climb on something so that some melee-only enemies cannot reach someone. The environments are basically just eye candy, don’t really create different gameplay problems for the player.
Or from the base-building aspect. If, for a given outpost, the resources became a lot-more significant, so that a base really had to be designed around the limitations imposed by the environment. Like, I don’t know. Temperature of a given piece of equipment, taking shade into account. Being able to make use of hydropower off waterfalls. Some machines having outputs that create more issues that the player has to deal with, kinda Oxygen Not Included. Designing a defensible base being more-important.
As it stands, the layout of a given base is virtually irrelevant aside from choosing a base location that has a circle that contains a given amount of easy-to-build-on flat ground and as many different types of resource as possible. Like, Bethesda built this whole fancy landscape-generation engine, can create a huge variety of realistic-looking environments, but didn’t really do much with it in terms of gameplay.
Having dropped New Vegas in the past due to lost interest, I decided to try this game out finally since a friend of mine was having a fallout 3 playthrough himself. It was it 8 bucks, so I figured why not. I have to say, I put way more hours into this game than both other Bethesda games I’ve played through (Skyrim and...
I wish that there were an easier route to just let a random player get a reasonably modded install. It’s nice, but getting there is a big barrier. Something like what Wabbajack does, but at a Steam level, like “install community DLC”, and in a way that one could manage mods from that point.
There are hundreds of mods that reasonably improve the gsme, and sorting through and comparing all of then is time-consuming.
That is, make it really accessible to users not familiar with modding who don’t want to put a lot of time in, but let it be a “new base install” for most Fallout 4 players that could itself be nodded.
Heh, I’m probably the opposite. I like the settlement building capability in the engine, but don’t feel that Bethesda’s done a lot with it in any of their games.
In Fallout 4 you can make pretty settlements, but there’s a very minimal degree to which layout interacts with the game. Putting some walls up around expensive stuff and making enemies need to go past turrets or guard posts helps a bit, but it’s basically just SimArchitect. Lay out stuff how you want for fun. That’s not bad as such, but I’d like to have more interaction with the game world. Also, using settlements without the Local Leader ability to let settlements trade goods was a pain, which was one of the few useful things in the Charisma tree. There is one quest where one does lay out defenses for a significant fight, bur that’s about it.
The Sim Settlements mod introduces settlements that build themselves, which gives you elaborate, evolving things without having to manually do all the work of building them (and can take advantage of newer hardware with larger settlements). That’s nice, but it really just provides an opportunity to rebuild nice-looking stuff in without the scrap-hauling and placement drudge work. The mod adds a (fairly extensive) questline, but the actual layout of the cities again doesn’t matter much. Avoids the need for Local Leader as a quality-of-life perk, so provides more character build flexibility.
Fallout 76 has some game-important roles to a player’s CAMP, but it’s basically providing convenient access to workshops and a player vendor. Defensive layout does matter somewhat-more, as attacks when a player isn’t present are actually simulated in the game world. You can take and hold certain map locations, sorta a tower defense mode, but there’s minimal reward in the game for it. The point is still mostly being Sim Architect for player CAMPs, except now you can show your creations to other players. CAMPs are much smaller than Fallout 4 settlements. You can also have Shelters, which are little areas to free-build off the main world. Like CAMPs, but with a few restrictions, like the inability to have resource-producing items (and automated resource production is very limited, rarely worthwhile). Some players have done neat things that add to the game, but again, just doesn’t feel like there’s much “game” to it. Fallout 76 has some hard limits on ability to store things in a CAMP – inventory limitations are a core part of the game.
Starfield has multi-base spanning automated production, and automated production matters, more like a very limited Factorio. However, you can pretty much play the game and ignore that aspect, as the main purpose of getting resources is…building more bases. IIRC, bases don’t get attacked when you’re away, and defenses aren’t an issue. I guess that’s nice for people who don’t like base-building, but it felt like kind of a pointless loop to me. Not like, oh, Egosoft’s X series, where you build out a space empire to get more stuff that unlocks more things. You can buy player homes, but they never felt as useful to me as Home Plate in Fallout 4, as I just usually wasn’t passing by the player homes, and the ships are generally more available. I think that those are more aimed at people who want to do interior decoration. Starfield does let you modify ship interiors, but there just isn’t a lot of gameplay point to it, though it’s probably where I spent the most time. There just isn’t that much that happens in your ship.
None of those are bad things, but the base-building aspects just feel kind of decoupled from the game, like a kind of bolted on architectural program. If you want to create your dream space home, I guess that that’s fine, but I was kind of hoping for something that heads more in the Sim City or Caesar direction, where there’s real gameplay associated with the settlement you build. If one wanted to do just aesthetics, maybe in Fallout 76, let players build new stuff in contests and then whoever builds the neatest gets some award and the structure gets incorporated into the base game, something like that.
So, I’d like it to be even more approachable, so that most people who play Fallout 4 and the DLC can have a reasonable shot at also experiencing a fully-nodded environment. I guarantee that only a tiny fraction of people who have played Fallout 4 have tried a heavily-modded run, be it Wabbajack or mod-manager based.
I also had headaches working on it, but that’s probably because I was trying to run it on Linux.
Lastly, I’d like to be able to use that as a base point for modding. Like, have Wabbajack just essentially creating a Mod Organizer 2 configuration or something like that, so that one can use it as a base for further changes, so that the people who want to really spend the time tweaking their setup can also benefit. I’d just like to get players over the hump of getting a working, heavily-modded environment that can still be modded as easily as possible. Creating a working modded environment with hundreds of mods where one can tweak further as one wants is just a large, time-consuming undertaking that requires some familiarity with the system, as things stand.
I don’t agree with the people who bash Fallout 4, but it’s true that it does have annoyances not present in the previous title…but every title in the series has that. The dialog system was changed in a very unpopular way – one couldn’t see fully what one’s responses were prior to choosing them from the response menu, and the only effect of most dialog was to alter one’s relationship with one’s current companion. The plot interactions based on the player’s actions were much less complicated than in Fallout: New Vegas. And at very late game, high player levels, the enemies turn into bullet sponges due to how the game scales. Doesn’t feel as satisfying to shoot something. And the “legendary” item and enemy system was transplanted from the Elder Scrolls series, and at least to me, feels a bit weird in a non-swords-and-sorcery context thematically. I personally preferred the American Southwest setting where Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: New Vegas took place over the eastern US, where Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 took place. I liked the characters in Fallout: New Vegas more. Fallout 4 felt something like a bunch of mini-stories glommed together, less thematically-consistent than Fallout: New Vegas.
But Fallout 4 also has some things that I really like about it. It had base-building, and – while it still had its share of bugs – was considerably less-buggy than Fallout: New Vegas – which was godawful from a stability standpoint and loaded and saved increasingly-agonizingly-slowly the further one got into a game, and was prone to having the player fall through the map. On a given run, some sort of quest tended to break for me in Fallout: New Vegas. The “skill” system that had been present in the series up until Fallout 4 entirely went away, leaving the stat and perk systems, and I think that that was a good move – the small increases to skills felt grindy, where each increase didn’t produce a meaningful impact. The combat aspect is generally-considered to be better. New Vegas had solid DLC, but I’d rank Fallout 4’s DLC more-highly. Fallout 4 is a little more open in terms of the order in which you play the game – yeah, they’re all technically open-world, but Fallout: New Vegas tries hard to nudge you in at least some general, rough directions. Fallout 4 is closer to just letting someone go and adventure where they want, in whatever order they want. The scale was bigger, had more people running around, felt a little closer to being a “real world” environment. The game was prettier, partly due to just being a newer game – Fallout: New Vegas suffered significantly more from pop-up and limited draw distances, I’d say.
I think that at the time of their release, either Fallout: New Vegas or maybe Fallout were best, just in terms of how they compared to other things at the time.
If I were going to recommend that someone play just one Fallout game in 2024, though, it’d be Fallout 4, as the other games are getting pretty long in the tooth. Also, much more modding work has been done for Fallout 4 (though there are some impressive mods for earlier entries, like Tale of Two Wastelands, which basically imports Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas and makes them one game).
Thematically, I prefer Far Harbor. And Nuka World’s big selling point was letting you play as a raider, which didn’t appeal much to me. But I’m pretty sure that Nuka World has more stuff.
Just out of curiosity, if you don’t mind sharing, which mods did you use? Like, just stuff that adds more items to the world, or stuff that changed gameplay linked to the settlement-building stuff?
not many games go for the scavenger fantasy like fo4. Throw some mods on top of the shaky base and you’ve got the only real good post apocalyptic survival game i can think of.
Not the same genre at all – it’s a turn-based open-world roguelike – but have you played the open-source Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? I mean, it’s directly got some Fallout-inspired content, like power armor, but above-and-beyond that, it’s a post-apocalyptic survival scavenger fantasy, and it’s a hell of a lot more complex.
Like, you’ve got regional weather (fog, precipitation, wind) simulated, several nutritional meters (including stuff like going too far over and getting something like iron poisoning), fat reserves and hydration, several types of diseases, parasites, and fungal infections. Maybe the most-sophisticated gun collection out there in video-game-land, plus modeling firearms stuff like multiple sight and optic systems, multiple barrels, gun weight, recoil, different magazine types, different loading mechanisms (including doing things like having a shotgun or magazine-fed weapon with specific types of ammunition, like buckshot or slugs or Dragon’s Breath loaded into individual cartridge slots), carrying straps, bipods, brass catchers, Picatinny rails, grenade launchers (including attachable), rocket launchers, energy weapons, flame-projecting weapons, thrown explosives, placed traps. Food spoilage. Various types of carrying cases and aspects of them – things like straps to attach items via carabiners on some backpacks, multiple “pockets” per container that may have different volumes and maximum dimension constraints on items and may be able to contain different things, like mesh or rigid/nonrigid. Waterproof cases and water damage to some items, like dissolvable drugs or personal electronics. Vehicle construction and damage – you can build bicycles, cars, tanks, boats, helicopters. Remote cameras and displays. Electrical wiring and power generation and storage systems. Bionic implants. Mutations and associated powers. Various types of melee combat, including a wide variety of martial arts. With mods, multiple magic systems and magic items and psionic powers. Base-building. NPCs. The ability to build and manage NPC camps with NPCs producing things. Agriculture. Ranching. Thermal imaging and electromagnetic vision. Toxins, including airborne and injectable, and protection against same, as well as various environmental hazards, like acid. A cooking system. Food temperature that matters, including freezing damage to some foods. Drugs. Brewing, freezers and refrigerators (both fixed and in vehicles). Biodisel and ethanol fuel production, as well as other various fuel types, including gasoline and JP8. Morale. Sewing, including modification like Kevlar- or fur-lining items, and a material type system including things like removing buttons or zippers or fabric of certain material types (leather, wool, synthetic, cotton, etc) clothing to create something else. Crafting armor. Remote-control vehicles. Quests. Addictions. Radiation. A skill system, with separate “theoretical” and “practical” knowledge in each area. A proficiency system. A perk system. Stats. Personal electronics, like time, temperature-measuring, camera-enabled, display screens (e.g. one can scan books into tablets or smartphones or augmented reality glasses and then read them later). Lighting and shadows. Ocular adjustment time to dark or light conditions. Dwarf Fortress-like underground digging. Procedural map generation including subterranean maps. Enemy tracking via visual, auditory, and olfactory methods (not all of which can use all of these), and methods to mitigate one’s signature in these fields. Corpse dissection and resource extraction. Optional “innawoods” play, where one does a no-civilization survival play, just using primitive technology and food preservation. Achievements. Progressive content unlocking. Scenarios, like playing as a prisoner in a prison. Modeling of fires and smoke; one can have wildfires or buildings burning down. Various enemy factions; these can fight or otherwise interact; for example, a fungal faction can “take over” zombies. Water-gathering via raincatchers. Breaking into computer systems. Automated movement (to reduce drudgery of hiking from one map location to another). A configurable notification system. Rules-based searching through recipes and visible items. Ability to have the character perform automated sorting of items. Multiple competing audio and graphical packs.
Yeah…I guess I shouldn’t be so negative. I mean, I had fun with it, and I certainly think that it’s a worthwhile purchase, along with the other Fallout 4 DLC. Just that I didn’t want to play through a fair bit of the content, whereas in the base game, I was fine playing any of the “faction” routes.
And, I dunno. If someone does want to play as a raider and enslave settlements, they can do that. I don’t have a moral objection to someone else doing that, and I know that many people do feel like they don’t get to play “evil” routes enough in games. Just wasn’t something that I wanted to do.
For the first time in, shit, any Bethesda game ever I found the animations and feedback of moment to moment combat actually enjoyable
I believe that the character movement animation engine in Fallout 4 is capped at something like 30 or maybe 60 fps, can’t tween. When I’m running on my 165 Hz monitor, Fallout 4 animation definitely feels slightly jerky. Starfield doesn’t have this issue, so somewhere along the line, they upgraded the engine.
The legendary system isn’t transplanted from Elder Scrolls, is it?
looks
I thought that Skyrim had legendaries, but apparently I misremembered. It’s got weapons with attributes – like, you can get a weapon that causes additional fire damage – but those apparently are the same as the weapon enchantment system, not distinct from it.
There’s enemies, sure, but they don’t exist past being targets for me to destroy so that I can loot them and whatever structure they’re functionally just guarding. I can’t really influence most of them past killing them and putting the Minutemen there instead.
That’s pretty true of Fallout 3 or New Vegas too, yes? I mean, a deathclaw is a deathclaw.
Sim racers are among the most enthusiastic of all gamers, often spending thousands of dollars on equipment on top of thousands more on PCs and monitors.
These guys are selling a six gauge “starter pack” for about 1500 euros. I imagine that one wants at least the basic controls too.
Looks like 845 euros for the pedals, 500 euros for the yoke, and 230 for the throttle. It also looks like the throttle doesn’t come with the throttle controller, so that’s another 150 euros.
I haven’t built a desktop system for a few years. Last year, went to do so and discovered that virtually all parts from all vendors had RGB LEDs on the same things. I don’t mean case exteriors, but motherboards, DIMMs, etc. I dunno if it’s just Corsair.
That can be used as a heuristic, and that may be good-enough to disrupt widespread use of VPN protocols.
But it’s going to be hard to create an ironclad mechanism against steganographic methods, because any protocol that contains random data or data that can’t be externally validated can be used as a VPN tunnel.
I can create “VPN over FTP”, where I have a piece of software that takes in a binary stream and generates a comma-separated-value file that looks something like this:
So I have an FTP connection that’s transmitting a file that looks like this.
That’s human-readable, but the problem is that it’s hard to identify that maybe all of those fields are actually encoding data which might well be an encrypted VPN connection.
You can do traffic analysis, look for bursty traffic, but the problem is that as long as the VPN user is willing to blow bandwidth on it, that’s easy to counter by just filling in the gaps with padding data.
You can maybe detect one format, but I’d wager that it’s not that hard to (a) produce these manually with a lot less effort than it is to detect new ones, and (b) probably to automatically train one that can “learn” to generate similar-looking data by just being fed a bunch of files to emulate.
A censor can definitely raise the bar to do a VPN. They don’t need a 100% solution. And they can augment automated, firewall blocks with severe legal penalties aimed at people who go out of their way to bypass blocks. They can reduce the reliability of VPNs, make it hard to pay for VPN service, and increase the bandwidth requirements or latency of VPNs.
But on the flip side, steganography is going to be probably impossible to fully counter if one intends to blacklist rather than whitelist traffic. And if you whitelist traffic, you give up the benefits of full access to the Internet. Some countries have chosen to do that – North Korea, for example. But that is a very costly trade to make.
EDIT: Probably an even-more-obnoxious “host file” for steganographic data would be a file format that intrinsically encrypts data, like a password-protected ZIP file. For protocols protected by X.509 certificates, like TLS, China can mandate that everyone trust a CA that they run so that they can conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on connections. But ZIP doesn’t do that – it only uses a password. Users cannot trivially backdoor their ZIP encryption so as to let the Great Firewall see inside. So if someone starts using an encrypted ZIP file format to use as an encrypted VPN tunnel, China would be looking at blocking transfers of encrypted ZIP files. And there’s gonna be less bandwidth overhead to an encrypted ZIP file in terms of encoding than my above CSV file.
And even if China, after a long, arduous effort, transitions people off encrypted ZIP, all one needs is a new file format in use that uses encryption.
As protests at universities across the country—and the responses to them by college authorities and law enforcement—continue to stoke division and anger, the Kremlin appears to have taken a page from its foreign influence playbook, using its disinformation infrastructure in collaboration with state-run media and Telegram influencers in an effort to further divide American society.
That’s not how “taking a page” works. You can’t “take a page” from your own book. The term refers to imitating what someone else has as their own practice.
The site looks identical to the real Washington Post website, except for the fact that it uses a small variation of the real URL
It should be possible to mitigate this sort of attack via some technical methods, like having something that visually indicates in a browser some metric of “prominence” that a given domain has.
In light of the announcement of Mastodon’s US-based 501c3 Non-Profit, and the reveal of that organization’s board members, there has been backlash from members of the Mastodon community. Some people are even saying that this is the last straw, it’s time for a hard fork of the project!
I feel like there’s context missing. What’s the objection to the board of the nonprofit?
The announcement also establishes an interesting board of directors: Esra’a Al Shafei of Majal.org, Karien Bezuidenhout from The Shuttleworth Foundation, Amir Ghavi of Fried Frank, Felix Hlatky of SOLARYS, and former Twitter cofounder Biz Stone.
There are two links in the article to content that talks about forking, but it’s from people who seem to be arguing about the dev team, not the board of a nonprofit set up to handle contributions.
I’m not saying that governments will necessarily take issue.
I’m just saying that that has to also get past publics and their representatives in legislatures.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible to do – people have called this a “Marshall Plan 2.0”, and the original was – ultimately, though not as initially presented – both done and overwhelmingly grants. But my point is that if Russia isn’t actively-invading a country in Europe, I think that it’s gonna be harder to get the political momentum for funds than if Russia is doing so.
And we’re not talking pocket change – it’s hundreds of billions. Russia’s frozen funds are already in the hundreds-of-billions, so that’s a significant chunk of that covered already.
I’d rather have the more-difficult-to-raise-money-for things have the easier-to-get money aimed at them.
I appreciate that there are people who get really into thoroughly beating a video game.
However at the level that they’re beating the game during a play session to fill out the high scores table such that they can exploit bugs to patch code using data in said high scores entries to fix the bugs in the game that prevent further progress, I feel that maybe it’s time to just declare that you have, in fact, thoroughly beat Tetris and try a new game.
It could even just be a newer entry in the Tetris family.
Messing with 18650s is rather risky, I’m not sure if exposing them as individual cells is a good idea.
I mean, there are plenty of devices with them out there. !flashlight seems to only really be interested in lithium-battery-driven flashlights. I don’t think that an 18650 is intrinsically unsafe.
My understanding is that you can get (slightly cheaper) unregulated cells, but that normally, for end users, one uses regulated cells. The electronics on each cell aren’t smart enough to do things like measure and report charged capacity, but they should be adequate to avoid fires if the battery is shorted.
And there’s no standard for a “smarter” battery pack that would do things like report more information.
The native code of the game will be running translated, but the expensive calls to 3D engines and such will all be caught and replaced by native ARM libraries.
Yeah, that’s true – some games are going to be GPU-constrained, and the instruction set isn’t gonna be a factor there.
A significant chunk of what I’m getting at, though, is battery life. Like, my understanding is that Apple’s got somewhat-better compute-per-watt-hour ratings on their ARM laptops than x86 laptops do. But having that is contingent on one running native ARM software, not running emulated x86 software. Apple can say “we’re just gonna break compatibility”, and put down enormous pressure on app vendors to do so because they own the whole ecosystem. They have done multiple instruction set switches across architectures (680x0 to PowerPC to x86 to ARM) and that ability to force switches is something that they clearly feel is important to leverage.
For people who are only gonna run open-source Linux software – and this thing is shipping with Debian, which has a native ARM distribution – then it is possible that you can do this, because for open-source software, you can recompile against a new target architecture.
But Windows can’t do this, because there’s a huge amount of binary software that will never be retargeted for ARM. You’re going to be burning up your battery life in translation overhead. And you can’t do it with Linux if you want to run binary-only software – often Windows software – which is what Steam distributes. That library of software is just never gonna be translated; some of it probably doesn’t even have the source around anywhere. I don’t even know if Steam in 2024 has a native way to distribute ARM binaries (though I assume that one could have the game handle the target and running appropriate code).
I don’t know about M4, but with the M3 Apple’s compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple’s chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they’re nowhere close to native.
Oh, that’s interesting, thanks. I may be a year or two out-of-date. I believe I was looking at M2 hardware.
Europeans view immigration with increasing suspicion. Seven out of 10 Europeans believe that their country takes in too many migrants, according to a survey carried out by BVA Xsight for ARTE Europe Weekly, a project led by the French-German TV channel ARTE GEIE and which EL PAÍS has participated in, as part of the countdown to...
I was taught that the default is to write out numbers, but if you’re comparing multiple numbers, they’re normally supposed to be written in numeric form. I feel like they should have either started with a number or restructured the sentence.
googles
Apparently AP style guidelines say that for ten and above, you should use numeric form. Below that, write it out. That may be the driving factor here.
In general you should spell out numbers one through nine in AP Style. Consider the following examples of AP Style numbers,
The Chicago White Sox finished second.
She had six months left of her pregnancy.
You should use figures for 10 or above and whenever preceding a unit of measure or referring to ages of people, animals, events or things. Also use figures in all tabular matter, and in statistical and sequential forms.
I generally agree with most press conventions, and I’d buy into some of that, but I don’t think I really like the “ten cutoff” convention.
Russia on Monday threatened to strike British military facilities and said it would hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons amid sharply rising tensions over comments by senior Western officials about possibly deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine....
type of heavy, single-edged sword, usually slightly curved, 1670s, from French sabre “heavy, curved sword” (17c.), alteration of sable (1630s), from German Sabel, Säbel, which probably is ultimately from Hungarian szablya “saber,” literally “tool to cut with,” from szabni “to cut.” The Balto-Slavic words (Russian sablya, Polish szabla “sword, saber,” Lithuanian šoblė) perhaps also are via German, but Italian sciabla seems to be directly from Hungarian. Saber-rattling “militarism” is attested from 1922. Saber-toothed cat (originally tiger) is attested from 1849, so named for the long upper canine teeth.
EDIT: Oooh, etymonline is wrong (or at least not complete). Mirriam-Webster has earlier known uses, says that it was used in the UK first, around the late 1870s.
There is no unanimity of opinion on why we came to refer to this kind of behavior as saber-rattling. Some think that it comes from the practice of 18th-century Hungarian cavalry units had of brandishing their sabers at opponents prior to charging. Others have said that it comes from the habit that military officers had in the early 20th century of ominously shaking their scabbard when issuing orders to subordinates. Our records indicate that the two words began seeing use in fixed fashion around 1880, making it unlikely that it was directly related to either of the causes given above.
Of late it has been in some quarters impossible to mention the word patriotism without having the taunt of being a sabre-rattling BOBADIL thrown in one’s face.
— The Standard (London, Eng.), 19 Feb. 1879
The “Sabre Rattling” of M. Coumoundouros, especially his assertion that by the coming spring he will have 86,000 men in the field, and that this number of troops will have been got together by the 10th of December.
— The Leeds Mercury (Leeds, Eng.), 3 Nov. 1880
The word appears to have begun in the press in the United Kingdom first, and by the early 20th century had spread to newspapers in the United States.
Mexico heat wave melts temperature records in 10 cities, including Mexico City (www.nbcnews.com)
In San Luis Potosí at least four people died due to heat stroke and six more deaths are under investigation, according to local health services....
The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO (www.pcgamer.com)
Patient gamers, what are your favourite city builders?
As Cities Skylines II still isn’t worth it (the sub has a regular thread about that, in summary: no it’s not: old.reddit.com/…/is_cities_skylines_ii_worth_it_m…) which games scratch your city building itch?
Steam is now refunding Ghost of Tsushima for people in affected countries. (lemmy.ca)
Here’s the tweet, nitter.poast.org/SteamDB/…/1788981898108182681
Eight hundred protesters attempt to storm German Tesla factory (www.theguardian.com)
Hundreds of protesters opposed to the expansion of a Tesla plant in Grünheide, near Berlin, clashed with police on Friday as some of them attempted to storm the electric vehicle manufacturing facility....
Fallout 4 rules the roost in April. But console market decline continues in 2024 | UK Monthly Charts (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Bungie: Aleph One community is bringing the original 1994-1996 Marathon Trilogy to Steam starting with Marathon 1. (twitter.com)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/e1c27380-523f-4bfb-8d67-6f4a25c88f23.png
Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated” (mynintendonews.com)
9 years later, I finally played fallout 4
Having dropped New Vegas in the past due to lost interest, I decided to try this game out finally since a friend of mine was having a fallout 3 playthrough himself. It was it 8 bucks, so I figured why not. I have to say, I put way more hours into this game than both other Bethesda games I’ve played through (Skyrim and...
Corsair to go all in on sim racing with plans to acquire Fanatec and help with its €70 million debt (www.pcgamer.com)
How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic (gfw.report)
Archived version...
A Russian Influence Campaign Is Exploiting College Campus Protests (www.wired.com)
The Trouble with Forking Mastodon (wedistribute.org)
Big Video Game Publishers Like Microsoft Are Paving Their Own Path To Irrelevance - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
EU agrees €3B raid on Russian assets to buy weapons for Ukraine (www.politico.eu)
Late concession by Belgium paved way for deal on using profits to buy ammo for Kyiv’s war effort....
Hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game (arstechnica.com)
This laptop was MADE to be HACKED! (www.youtube.com)
Seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country takes in too many immigrants (english.elpais.com)
Europeans view immigration with increasing suspicion. Seven out of 10 Europeans believe that their country takes in too many migrants, according to a survey carried out by BVA Xsight for ARTE Europe Weekly, a project led by the French-German TV channel ARTE GEIE and which EL PAÍS has participated in, as part of the countdown to...
Russia threatens Britain with retaliation if involvement in Ukraine war deepens (www.pbs.org)
Russia on Monday threatened to strike British military facilities and said it would hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons amid sharply rising tensions over comments by senior Western officials about possibly deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine....