I didn’t mean it negatively, really - I much prefer that devs add features to polishing them, and the fact that the quests and the world are so interesting makes up for a lot.

Yes, you can see through the level geometry in places. Yes, the enemies repeat the same barks again and again. But hell yes, it’s a lot of fun to play.

Bethesda have been on a serious downhill slide lately. Fallout 4 wasn’t an rpg imho, Fallout 76 wasn’t in anyone’s opinion, and Starfield was a bit of a disaster. I’m whatever the opposite of ‘hyped’ is for ES6. It’s good to play an RPG in this style that’s so blatantly a labour of love.

Enjoyed the first few hours of it. If you’re on the mood for a much more ambitious, Eurojank take on Oblivion, then it’s probably right up your alley. Highlight of the Steam sales for me so far.

Still wishlisted from the time you posted before! Good luck, FirsTimeDev, hope it goes well, and looking forward to it.

Would have posted the same, but this exactly. Don’t know whether it’s a good or a bad thing really. Enthusiasm for niche topics is awesome, but you need to maintain that enthusiasm to have a community, and that’s easier with fewer, larger groups.

We also used to have a lot of ‘porn on the front page’, but that’s gone too. Have no objection to a bit of nudity, but there’s plenty of internet for that elsewhere.

Unreal and Unreal Tournament, sure. I feel like all of their many sequels saw a continuous decline in quality, but the originals were great games. Can’t deny that Gears of War has been influential. Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097 were good for a laugh for ten minutes, but I can’t help but feel that they’ll have aged badly.

Seems crazy to think that Jill of the Jungle, which is an awful game, is what lined their pockets enough to develop the Unreal engine, and they were riding on the success of that all the way up to Fortnite.

Managed to snag free tickets to see them and Buckcherry warming up for Steel Panther a while back.

Bowling for Soup were absolutely superb; charismatic crowd-pleasers, loads of energy, top songs, great to watch. Buckcherry played for about twenty minutes and then fucked off, which is gutting because it was them that I really wanted to see. And then Steel Panther played for about two hours, faaaar too long for a one-joke band, and went past ‘satirically sleazy’ into just ‘sleazy’, which is not the same.

Take home message is really ‘go see Bowling for Soup’, I suppose.

The very last level, rendezvous at the mountain, isn’t all that difficult. Lots of pausing and scrolling to either end of the map, but as long as you can multitask then it’s doable. Playing through all the Mayhem levels to get there? Man alive. Managed it when I was a young teen, couldn’t do it for the life of me now.

The ‘win’ screen - a static picture of the devs, with a sampled sound of them applauding your efforts - is still one of the most rewarding endings to any game, I think. If you can get there, you deserve that.

I wrote one of my own from scratch, back in the day. More to practice my algorithm coding skills than anything else, make sure that I could. Not very difficult - easier than barcodes, in a way.

The thing that I found most interesting was that it uses the same Reed-Solomon error correcting code as CDs and DVDs, and for the same reason. Those codes guarantee that you don’t get too many 1s or 0s in a row. That would cause difficulties with laser tracking in a disc player, or big confusing areas of white or black in a QR code.

The on-off-on-off pattern that joins the inside edge of the three squares isn’t usually that obvious either, but when reading it, makes it quite easy to decide how ‘big the boxes’ are. You can store a very long piece of text in a QR code, although the pattern gets very finely detailed after a while.

Digital scoreboards? No-one will have the cash for that kind of RAM in future, Kolanaki. Going to have to go old-school for keeping our pinball scores.

It’s quite a valuable skill to be able to do it. You appreciate how all the bits of Linux fit together when you’ve done the whole installation from scratch, and know that’s there’s nothing particularly hard about compiling the kernel. Indeed, it’s one of the easiest packages to compile, got a great module selector and very few dependencies. You’re far more likely to be able to recover a borked system if you’ve got all the low-level skills.

Actually using Gentoo as your daily driver? Well, that’s a different matter. The problem with having complete control over every aspect of your system in every detail is that you’re also responsible for it. Arch (btw) is a bit more of a sensible middle ground. You retain most of the control and responsibility, but also have all those packages prebuilt and ready to work together, plus loads of great documentation.

Two mattresses? Is he expecting guests?

I’m assuming that his beer fridge is just out of shot, as well.

We can only hope so.

I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.

Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.

Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.

Should probably run it quite well. BB was ‘designed for 30 fps’ and you’ll get more than that. Certainly run it better than it does on PS4, anyway.

Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.

Harfbuzz though? That’s going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that’s unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.

It doesn’t take too much of a graphics card to push a ten-year old game about, but you need quite a CPU to handle the emulation. I’ve just upgraded from a Ryzen 7 / 2700X (which struggled a bit, kept 30 fps though) to a Ryzen 9 / 5900XT, which does it quite well. Ironically, the RAM crisis seems to have made CPU upgrades a bit more affordable, since not so many people are buying either.

Higher resolutions need a fair amount of RAM, but we’re talking “a fair amount of RAM compared to a PS4” - if you’ve a few gigabytes of system and graphics card RAM, that should be plenty.

The licensing isn’t particularly difficult for Bloodborne - Sony own it, and their video game publishing arm is still a going concern. I doubt there’s any technical problem, since it’s on the same engine as Dark Souls 3, and that’s multi-platform. Could probably recompile it for PC and release it tomorrow, if they wanted to.

From consider it one of their masterpieces, and want to do any ‘HD’ remake themselves. They’ve had quite a few offers (I understand) by other companies who’d like to do it, but I think they’re aiming higher than unlocking 60 fps and a quick upres of the textures.

Sony have a bit of a complicated relationship with ‘primarily single player games’ and ‘multiplatform ports’. Since Xbox appears to be dying, they’ll have the only next-gen walled garden in town. Why share, when they could sell systems?

Any consolation, ShadPS4 can run BB at 4K / 60fps right now, if you want it? Need a bit of a beast of a PC, but can confirm you can play it all the way through, not too many issues.

That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it’s a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

There’s some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn’t take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.