@dave
Like, I get that the tech is impressive, and I would love to see these cards take on Blender, but outside of professional software, is there even some usage for these cards?

@LukeAlmighty @dave At lot of them are semi gimped so as not to disturb workstation card sales. That and you’re supposedly buying a better driver with ws cards.

@LukeAlmighty Gaming at higher resolutions and higher framerates is nice. The jump to 1440p was very noticeable, 4K is another noticeable bump. Obviously it’s only for people that have the cash, but if you do, it’s a pleasant experience.

@dave
Ok.
I guess.

@LukeAlmighty And to be clear, while the high-end cards of last gen generally deliver very playable 80+ FPS at 4K in most titles, a 50% FPS boost is still very noticeable, and there are also some demanding titles like Cyberpunk that really weren’t playable at 4K unless you turned the settings down on last-gen cards.

@LukeAlmighty @dave It's not just you. The GPU arms race was driven for years by cryptocurrency, not PC gaming. Like you said, the Steam Deck is now the default PC configuration in the minds of developers who like money, so most of this stuff won't be useful for games for many years.

@caekislove @LukeAlmighty A quick google search says they’ve sold “over a million” units. While you can call that a success for a mobile PC and argue that devs will make sure they have a Deck-compatible configuration, if we’re talking consoles that’s peanuts. The Wii U was considered a commercial failure and that still sold 13 million units.

@caekislove @LukeAlmighty The switch is probably the closest console “competitor” and that has sold almost 115 million.

@LukeAlmighty @dave @LukeAlmighty @caekislove nintendo is an established product that has earned the trust of its customers for decades. steam and nintendo should probably be gauged on different metrics. every time ive been an early adopter of some new tech brand it always bit me in the ass so i would expect it to take some time for steam to become competitve.

@PapaPole @dave @LukeAlmighty It's kinda sad that the gold standard for gaming hardware in the year of our lord twenty twenty two is glorified cellphone hardware. 😢

@caekislove @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty 720p-900p 30FPS in some cases, oof

@dave @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty *Cries in Shin Megami Tensei V*

@caekislove @dave @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty Even if V went multiplat + PC i could see them capping at 30fps because Atlus can't program (see Soul Hackers 2 dropping frames on current gen consoles).
They already did this with Nocturne

@caekislove @PapaPole @dave
I think it's good.
While I am not a big fan of "e-wase" argument, it is good to take things slow for a few years. It's not like new games are worth the investment anyway, and less demanding graphics might allow some more creative projects to grab the attention.

All the best games ran on total dog shit software so going from 128KB of RAM on the SNES, which had Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country, games worth playing today, to 16GB of RAM on the PS5 is underwhelming. I’m not sure we need a 125,000-fold increase in RAM to render the blue hair on the mulatto transbian’s head but that’s just me.

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @caekislove @dave
The physics in Star Wars the force unleached was breathtaking. That is what I call next gen. I do not call 3 more hairs in God of War's beard a detail worth mentioning.

15 years ago btw.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7K5euAe6l8w
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6o6YVLmOs74

I don’t want to say “all the cool shit has already been done,” but I think that like the rest of the West, vidya is going through the opposite of a cultural renaissance. Nobody wants to do anything new, and every new kid on the block just wants to make a “game” that’s really just a vehicle for “telling a story” about being a depressed, anxious trans youth, with the “gameplay” part just being an excuse for navel-gazing.

@LukeAlmighty @NEETzsche @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave i think its an immutable law of nature that in every medium the majority of all art has always been shit. its up to you if you like a particular genre enough to dig through it for the good stuff. youll be able to find games worth playing if you look hard enough for them.

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave
Game creation is much more accessible than it was once. Without the gatekeeping, many bad ideas or "the current thing" games can get to some kind of completion. We just have to reward good ideas. It's overload in this just like with most things in modern society. Too much choice, hard to curate things due to complexity, lots of mediocrity.

I guess in leveling the playing field a bit we have made the ever present mediocrity more visible. Could be an incentive to raise the bar.

@corfiot I don't think removing the gatekeeping and lowering the bar to entry is why no new games of note are being created. Quite the opposite, I think it allows for those talented people who would normally be obstructed by bullshit to enter where they might not. I think the issue actually is fundamental to the culture. The issue is not the systems in place to create things, the issue is the population. People today on aggregate suck more than they did in the past, at least in terms of their talent for creative output.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the reality that people don't live real lives anymore. In the 20th century it was normal for people to leave their parents home and find themselves in real danger, to make serious moral choices that actually redeem or destroy themselves or others, experience pain and pleasure that is brought on by real external experience and so on. Now it is only normal for people to leave their parents home to be in some kind of highly controlled institution like a university or a job, they don't get to make any serious choices to prevent them from making the "wrong" ones, and only experience pleasure from drugs and pain from socially contrived punishment.

In other words, people today are more controlled than they ever were in the past, and that is very much the case with young people. Young people are being systematically denied the opportunity to venture forth and write their own destiny, and as a consequence of this none of them have a real source of inspiration for art. It's all abstract to young people today in a way that it wasn't in previous generations. And you can tell when someone hasn't really lived it. And really, what have zoomers lived aside from charge they phone, xanny bars, and egirls? And whose fault is that? (Not theirs, actually)

They can't make a game about street racing because none of them actually do any street racing. So if they try to make a game about street racing it's going to come off as dumb and contrived because it will be. They will never break bad and become a Jesse Pinkman. They will never get into a bar brawl over a tarted up woman. They will never get into a car chase with the police. They will never fire a round in anger, and most won't ever fire a round at all.

@PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave

@NEETzsche @corfiot @LukeAlmighty @PapaPole @caekislove @dave WTH? Why is this showing up when I search for #Parenting go home #plemora, you're drunk

This is a train of thought I also saw in a video interview with Mishima - https://youtu.be/hLGMm6c_BCA?t=271 - in which he mentions along similar lines that society has turned into a "padded room" of sorts and people aren't motivated by death like his peers were when they were young, we don't lead dramatic lives where our choices have substantial impacts on our world or environment, and our deaths lack drama as well. This has the impact of course of making less interesting people or people who are not as invested in reality.

Granted this is all from the perspective of someone who grew up during WWII, but the messaging has been passed along and carried down to the present.

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave
I must say I feel this in my own social environment, too - the padded room lives, for some social classes. Poverty has increased a lot in my area.

Although I don't believe passion only comes from danger, there could possibly be something missing if creators don't have life experiences. I don't know if the actual situation is as bleak as you present it, maybe we are dissappointed by the quality of AAA and AA games because the industry is screwing up and not the people? Is indie stuff worse, too? Because there are pretty niche things out there that would not see the light of day in the past.

Mind you, I'm no game afficcionado. This is a complex issue

@Corfiot @PapaPole @caekislove @dave @NEETzsche
I know, this is a lame example, and I use it all the time, but just think of what you had to do to wake up and go build a bridge 500 years ago VS now.

@LukeAlmighty @LukeAlmighty @corfiot @caekislove @dave @NEETzsche i hear masons had a particularly good union back then

I'd argue a lot of it is also the decay of culture, at least for what people draw influences from.

For every person with taste, there are a lot drawing their influences from shit. It's why games like YIIK or with "that Tumblr/CalArts style you see everywhere" exist, or why Undertale had so many references to Touhou and whatnot. It's why you will see characters who might have been designed better and in an appealing manner if their influences were different (and then fanartists draw them better lmao).

Part of why people have begun to take influence from the PC-98 (and other Japanese micros, such as the X1/PC-88/FM77AV/MSX/X68k/FM Towns and others I probably forgot) is because the games there have a very appealing "80s/90s anime" style to them eeked out with high resolution sprites and a limited color pallette, with FM music that is very unconventional. They're not trying to make mediocre generic breakbeat on the chips, but they were using them to make progressive rock influenced compositions and dramatic orchestral pieces, while other composers made music that sounded a lot like 80s Sega arcade games such as Space Harrier or Outrun. It also depended on the Sound Driver (just like on the Sega Genesis), as some sound drivers used samples for drums and vocal samples as an example.

The same went with Amiga .mod files, and how everyone was influenced by the top club songs of the era, but there were also other styles for the music as well depending on the composer. Turrican II sounds nothing like a demoscene production for example.

As culture homogenizes, it reflects on modern games as well.

@corfiot I don't think passion comes from danger so much as I think it comes from experience. People's art is a reflection of who they are and what they've experienced in life, and if someone's experiences are limited to charging they phone, arguing online, xanny bars, and fapping to e-girls then they're going to have quite a limited range so to speak

@PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave
I agree. The interesting problem is that you cannot really force experience on yourself just by making your life difficult. At least I don't think you can generally move the difficulty slider up a notch yourself to get more XP; maybe you can engineer it up to a point but it feels somehow like setting the clock 5 minutes back to "wake up 5 minutes early".

Like when parents try to toughen up children by placing hurdles in their way, at the right difficulty to be overcome with appropriate effort. It's training for the real thing.

This is why I oriented myself towards danger as opposed to experience, the latter being an outcome of the former.

I suspect I'm getting into philosophical territory I can't quite handle here. I believe we in fact are saying more or less the same thing.

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave @corfiot on the flipside too with gatekeeping and to add what you said, indie games would have been impossible if the environment was still like it was in the PS2 era.

On the 360 you needed a publisher and if no publisher took you than you were fucked.

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave @corfiot Many of those whom write the scripts of the media we consume are, even to the most privileged of us, are extremely pampered and boring lot. "It's very hard to write what you know" when the most traumatic experience you've experience was when you lost your iphone.

Also their uncomfortable urge to inject {current year} political issues into everything, that age badly after a year because they're also shit that people heard about on Twitter as opposed to experiencing IRL; and then they go about it in a preachy manner. Even if it's something you'd experience IRL (healthcare, debt), they go about handling it in the worst manner somehow.

Postal 2's humor still holds up well because on top of mocking stuff people would in the 2000s (terrorist attacks, the people protesting video games for being violent), there's shit like waiting in line forever to cash a check and the fact that everyone has gone crazy and is trying to kill each other for no reason.

@PhenomX6 So, the solution is to make our own shit, from scratch. First small run. Ran out of magenta ink. Still need to cut the rest.

@PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave @corfiot @Nelenese

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @PhenomX6 @caekislove @dave @Corfiot @Nelenese
The font is cool, but I have no idea what the title says.

@LukeAlmighty IDDQD. Mistakes were made.

@PapaPole @PhenomX6 @caekislove @dave @corfiot @Nelenese

@NEETzsche @PhenomX6 @LukeAlmighty @Nelenese @PapaPole @caekislove @corfiot @dave

>saddle stitch
all hope is lost

@xue Saddle stitch is great, what's your problem

@PapaPole @PhenomX6 @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave @corfiot @Nelenese

@NEETzsche @LukeAlmighty @Nelenese @PapaPole @PhenomX6 @caekislove @corfiot @dave
yeah, if you are making walmart flyer

@xue I'm used to magazines coming as saddle stitch and I actually prefer it over perfect binding

@PapaPole @PhenomX6 @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave @corfiot @Nelenese

@LukeAlmighty @NEETzsche @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave one problem is no one knows anything about memory management. even modern low poly indie games require more powerful machines than they should because everyone is just crossing their fingers that unity or godot will figure it out for them

Nobody knows anything about memory management because they don’t want to learn about that, and instead want to get straight to making dildo assets for their non-game.

I know a guy who went through one of the pages of the manual for a leaked 8th console SDK. In it one of the pages about compiler optimizations just said "don't bother using inline ASM or hand optimizing it the compiler knows best bro trust the compiler".

@PhenomX6 @PapaPole @caekislove @dave @NEETzsche
This video is literally called:
Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%

I think that should speak for itself about "compiler knows the best"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c33AZBnRHks

@LukeAlmighty @PhenomX6 @PapaPole @caekislove @dave @NEETzsche The “compiler knows the best” is more about avoiding micro optimizations like the Duff’s device. Compilers are actually pretty good at optimizing code at the dozen-of-lines level. They’ll do loop unrolling, vectorization, and even deduce closed-form versions of given code. The reason inline assembly is frowned upon is that it makes the optimizer retarded; it won’t try to figure out what it does, so it acts like a fence in the code where optimizations on one side can’t affect optimizations on the other. That said, the optimizer optimizes what’s there. It can’t fix bad design, and it isn’t omnipotent to what you want. If you really need that sonic speed you should first make sure what you’re doing is “conceptually optimized” and then hand write assembly at the function level after you’ve started benchmarking for bottlenecks and taken into consideration the branch predictor and CPU cache.

@Coyote @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave @NEETzsche I'm sure a lot had to do with how devs had to abuse cpu tricks during the 360 and PS3 era.

@dave @LukeAlmighty I'm not comparing it to consoles. I'm comparing it to PCs. No other set PC configuration dedicated to gaming has sold anywhere near as much as the Steam Deck. Combined with being locked in to what is the defacto monopoly PC distribution platform, anyone who releases anything on PC (Steam) is leaving money on the table if it won't work on Steam Deck. The bean counters simply wouldn't allow it. These are the same bean counters that increasingly aren't allowing console-exclusive releases, because all of these games are developed on PCs and not having a PC release is basically saying no to free money, since it's usually only a compile flag away.