You kind of chose the wrong series laptop to point this out. X series ThinkPad is ultra-portable line where sole focus is on weight and thickness. You can make an argument that memory clip doesn’t weigh a lot, but they really reduce every gram they can. Literally every other series has clip-on RAM.
Even if we ignore RAM, on ThinkPad pretty much everything is replaceable with a single screwdriver. Literally anything. You grab FRU#, find part that matches it and off you go. With Apple it’s ungluing battery, ripping things apart. Hell even keyboard is riveted into the case and you have to drill holes and make threads to replace it. It’s not comparable at the slightest.
It’s funny (or sad I guess) that the current generation of laptops are back on mag chargers (I forget what they’re called) instead of USB C. There was never a time when both iPhones and MacBooks used USB C charging.
Todd forgets this is a game and not real life where you have to train and study for 30 years to go to the moon. He forgot that the main intricacy is the stories you can make for the player.
Like assassins creed has big cities. Which feel dead, not enjoyable.
Some do, but they make it their main draw. The reason Kerbal Space Program is fun, is fun because you can fuck up and die in a million different ways, and not doing so is chalenging and succes is rewarding while failure is hilarious(ly frustrating).
Not fucking up and dying in Starfield means pressing the Use Healthpack frequently enough.
…yes, they do. Soooo many fucking games have that. There’s a whole genre of games built around it. They’re called survival games. A relevant example would be No Man’s Sky.
I am kinda certain no game has dying. I haven’t died in any yet. Although I remember a piece of The Onion of a suicide feature of a car seat. Maybe someone should build a gaming chair with this feature to improve the immersion.
Yes, they do, just not for real. Why would you expect it to kill you for real? What an absurd standard. You’re supposed to be scared for your character’s life, not your own. They’re the one in space, not you…
You do know this threat is about some dev saying the first guys on the moon weren’t bored although there’s basically just sand and rocks to be found? And that because of this it’s fine most planets in a game are baren and uninteresting?
The Bethesda guy compared the game to RL. I am just pointing out why this makes no sense.
In RL most of the “excitement” in space comes from not wanting to fuck up and die. Games don’t have that, Todd.
So many games are all about the struggle to not fuck up and die, and they are plenty tense even though they don’t affect your real body. Ever played Subnautica? I’m not actually underwater but I’m scared of drowning.
I don’t know why the fact that a game can’t actually kill you doesn’t mean it can’t try to introduce tension.
Yeah, planets being barren is shit and realism is a shit excuse for it, but it’s kinda irrelevant to your “games don’t have dying” point, which would apply even if planets were designed better
Dude… You’re even agreeing with me without realizing it. My point is, because a game can’t create tension by threatening you with real death, it needs to be interesting in some way.
It’s a reason why the astronauts weren’t bored on the moon. The fear of death. Games don’t have that and that is one of the reasons games need to be interesting and can’t be dull like the moon. I’ll just rephrase the same thing over and over for you. I do see some things may appear challenging to understand for some.
Read the title of the article and you may be able to piece things together: Bethesda says most of Starfield’s 1000+ planets are dull on purpose because ‘when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there’ but ‘they certainly weren’t bored’
Exactly! Now go tell Todd that his game isn’t real and therefor his example “astronauts on the moon weren’t bored although the moon is dull” doesn’t make any sense.
It’s like you’re getting there without actually ever getting there.
Of course it makes sense. That’s just how games work. You’re pretending you’re in space, and even though you aren’t actually running our of oxygen, your character is. You feel tension for your character.
Y’know playing COD doesn’t mean you’re actually at war, right?
I think you missed the point, lol. Obviously COD isn’t a remotely realistic portrayal of war. You haven’t understood a thing if you seriously thought I was saying that.
But we weren’t discussing realism of mechanics, rather, realism of environment. And the environments are pretty true to life.
It’s the mechanics that make a game fun. Not necessarily the environments. Though they of course help. Fun mechanics are what a game is about.
You mean like a game needs to offer more than dull enviroments to be not boring although the astronauts on the moon didn’t seem to be bored on the dull moon?
Then you have games that do space travel so well that I’m beyond scared shitless in them, like Outer Wilds. So many games have already managed to convey some of these feelings.
Perfect example. Handful of planets, each rich with hand-crafted purpose, space travel is big enough to feel epic, but small enough to not want to skip.
It nails the feeling of exploring a vast area of space, not by being realistic (it is not, by a long shot), but by just making certain experiences feel right.
Yup, classic case of realism not always making the game better.
I went to earth to check it out, I know the lore of why it is a giant sand ball but that also disappoints me. I walked around the approximate area of where I am from and found a small cave. But there was nothing in the cave except some abandoned drugs. I couldn’t interact with the glowing mushrooms, mine any minerals, etc. I was hoping for a sprawling cavern or something and just… nope. I might go back to earth to explore it some more but it’s so bland.
That’s how this comes off. The ultimate non-apology. Fuck off, Unity.
Edit: something to consider is that Unity intentionally made this change as terrible as it is so that they could put out this apology, and roll things back to where their main goal was the entire time. It’s kind of like when you list your house for a high price so that it gets negotiated down to the price range you wanted from the outset. Don’t be shocked if Unity changes this a bit but keeps it essentially the same. It means they can then reflect on history and go “hey, remember that time we listened to the developers?” while still fucking them over.
hindsight is 20-20. My point is not to jump to conclusions, nobody knows what is going on through their head. They may be really that fucking stupid, as most executive staff tend to be.
This is called the “Door in the face method” of bargaining. Start with a request so high and absurd that you “slam the door in their face” because it’s so absurd.
The next time they try, they’ll come back with an offer that sounds far more reasonable than the original request. Since you’re still primed with the previous context, your brain makes it sound less bad than it probably is ("At least it’s not the first offer!). You’re more likely to accept after this.
The opposite technique is called “foot in the door”, start with a small request (get your foot in the door) and then increase the ask after the small request goes over.
These guys are getting harder and harder to take seriously. As disappointing as the game itself is, what the fuck is this? Defensively and passive-aggressively trying to argue with reviewers? Long ramblings on how unfair it is that one of the world's most significant game studios, freshly taken over by enormous capital... gets a little criticism for the flaws it its products? Do you need to be an expert Twinkie mass manufacturing engineer, really, if a new product is, let's say, a tenth of the size and tastes of sawdust?
If they're gonna insinuate it's not the obvious reasons, maybe they should've served up some less obvious reasons - I'm sure they would've been convincing.
“People have unrealistic expectations for AAA games! It’s impossible to make them as good as people expect them to be!”
I remember lots of big studios saying that shit after Baldur’s Gate 3 officially released. The work of a comparatively small studio with a Skyrim budget (100 million USD) did what many bigger budgets failed to do. How was that possible? Clearly, it’s the fault of gamers for expecting too much!
Side note: Witcher 3’s budget was around 34 million USD, with less than 13m for development proper, which is another good example of a game that even at release was already looking and playing great.
And those examples are not hard to come up with either. For example:
any Nintendo game
games with a passionate designer - "Nier: Automata* and Death Stranding come to mind
refined, broad market appeal sequels to popular niche games - as Elden Ring is to Dark Souls
Starfield was a mediocre rehash of their Elder Scrolls formula, but without the interesting variation that Elder Scrolls games have. And performance sucks, so you’re paying a penalty for an average gameplay experience.
Yup, it is an anomaly in that it feels like the quality I used to expect 20 years ago when devs couldn’t just patch flaws after launch and had to actually QA their games before going gold. They rely so much on after launch patches that games often aren’t finished until a year after release.
BG3 is an excellent game, but saying it’s unlike the rest of games because it “does its QA before launch” is very silly. Look at the 100GB of huge patches the game’s received, reading the pages and pages of patch notes for the bug fixes and also the basic RPG features added after launch like the ability to change your character’s appearance.
BG3 had more bugfixes and hotfixes than Starfield did by a long shot, the difference between the two is not the absence of bugs. It’s that BG3 under the bugs was a phenomenally VA’d/Mocapped game with a great story line, memorable characters, meaningful choices, and combat that doesn’t become a rote chore or a numbers go up game with randomized loot.
BG3 was a complete, enjoyable experience all the way through at launch. There were a lot of patches, but those weren’t as necessary as other games, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout: New Vegas. For example, character customization is nice to have, but lots of games don’t bother.
Starfield on the other hand, was relatively bug free at launch, but it didn’t have a good gameplay loop. Outposts were repetitive, gunplay and weapon variety wasn’t particularly interesting, and cities weren’t very plentiful or interesting (Morrowind was way better in all three, and the game is ~20 years old).
Yeah, BG3 wasn’t as solid as launches before OTA updates were a thing, just it felt a lot more like that era than most of the AAA game launches in recent memory.
How many times does Bethesda have to shit in your mouth to realize they themselves are shit? Fallout 4 was a downgrade from NV, then fallout 76, rereleasing the same game over and over again, and now starfield.
We should be way passed “hard to take them seriously”
I bailed after Skyrim. I loved the immersiveness and scale of their previous games, but Skyrim didn’t have that. It was a relatively small world, the storyline was barely even there, and the side content was a lot more limited vs other games. It looked great and had your typical gameplay improvements, but it was just a massive downgrade in terms of overall experience.
I wanted Morrowind in space, and I got stripped-down Skyrim in space, which was already a stripped down experience. Either make a great dup (like Oblivion) or make something completely new and interesting. They went with mediocre dup in a different setting.
Like with pretty much all things for the last decade we hit stagnation and consistent money making with low effort.
So clearly now everyone else is wrong or why are they making so much money? If they throw out garbage that people pay for and then complain about them why should they take the criticism seriously… I’m fact it’s just bad people trying to ruin them because they are perfect and right.
Everyone is right all the time and everything is gold no matter how lazy. No one wants the discussion they want to be told they are right and then to move on to the next thing without stopping or asking questions.
If we can’t impact their bottom lines then nothing will ever change until it collapses.
Steam ended pricing in those currencies and reverted the prices to USD without local adjustment.
Any developers who want to sell in Turkey or Argentina will set a local price in USD.
This really only affects older/abandoned games where the developer never updates pricing. Those games will be left charging US prices in poorer countries.
Yeah it's a nonsense. Argentina and Turkey have atrocious economies, with inflation at crazy levels. Turkey's is at 60% and Argentinas is at 143% currently, on a background of years of terrible economic decisions. Their local currencies are effectively trash so it makes absolute sense for Steam to move to dollars if they're going to continue bothering trading in those countries.
I’m from Argentina, the prices we have now are absolutely ridiculous even with the LATAM USD, an Argentinian might have a monthly income of something around 250-350USD, and some games are something along the lines of 40USD even with the regional pricing, you need to add to that the fact that there is a tax on the dollar of 155%. I assume a normal person from the US earns something along the lines of 1500-3000USD a month, so it’s completely incomparable. To give you an idea, physical retro collectible games are cheaper than virtual ones.
Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.
This machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.
So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinked throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.
Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.
Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for this bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.
Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.
Unfortunately, increasing cache seems to be the direction things are going, what with AMD’s 3D cache initiative and Apple moving RAM closer to the CPU.
So Denuvo could actually get away with it by just pushing the problem onto platforms. Ideally, this would discourage this type of DRM, but it’ll probably just encourage more PC upgrades.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with ram-less systems soon. A lot of programs don’t need much more memory than the cache sizes already available. Things like electron bloat memory use through the roof, but even then it’s likely just a gigabyte or two. Cpus will have that much cache eventually. The few applications that really need tons of memory could be offloaded to a really fast SSD, which are already becoming the standard. I imagine we’ll see it in phones or tablets first, where multitasking isn’t as much of a thing and physical space is at a premium.
That’s just not true, here are a few off the top of my head:
video games
docker containers
web browsers
productivity software
RAM is actually the one resource I run out of in my day to day work as a software developer, and I get close on my gaming PC. I have a really fast SSD in my work computer (MacBook Pro) and my Linux gaming PC (some fast NVME drive), and both grind to a halt when I start swapping (Linux seems to handle it better imo). So no, I don’t think SSDs are enough by any stretch of the imagination.
If anything, our need for high performance RAM is higher today than ever! My SIL just started a graphics program (graphic design or UI/UX or something), so I advised her to prioritize a high amount of RAM over a high number of CPU/GPU cores because that’s how important RAM is to the user experience when deadlines approach.
Large CPU caches are great, but I don’t think you can really compensate for low system memory by having large caches and a fast SSD. What is obvious, though, is that memory latency and bandwidth is an issue, so I could see more Apple-style soldered NAND next to the CPU in the coming board revisions, which isn’t great for DIY systems. NAND modules are just so much cheaper to manufacturer than CPU cache, and they’re also sensitive to heat, so I don’t think embedding them on the CPU die is a great long term solution. I would prefer to see GPU-style memory modules either around or behind the CPU, soldered into the board, before we see on-die caches with multiple GB capacity.
Well you’re right that it’s not practical now. By “soon” I was thinking of like 10+ years from now. And as I said, it would likely start in systems that aren’t used for those applications anyway (aside from web browsers, which use way more ram than necessary anyway). By the time it takes over the applications you listed, we’ll have caches as big as our current ram anyway. And I’m using a loose definition of cache, I really just mean on-package memory of some kind. And we probably will see that GPU style memory before it’s fully integrated.
It’s already sort of a thing in embedded processors, such as ARM SOCs where RAM is glued to the top of the CPU package (I think the OG Raspberry Pi did that). But current iterations run the CPU way too hot for that to work, so the RAM is separate.
I could maybe see it be a thing in kiosks and other limited purpose devices (smart devices, smart watches, etc), but not for PCs, servers, or even smart phones, where we expect a lot higher memory load/multitasking.
Lately the base model is usually last year’s old pro processors and micro controllers. Next year the base 16 will probably have the faster IO if the trend continues.
Completely agree. No company redesigns all of their products each year. They redesign the top tier and then its shifts downward the next year. GPU, CPU, Motherboard, hell even cars do this. Not all models included Carplay and Android Auto when it launched, just the high end cars did, but now all of them do.
USB IO speed aside, Apple’s phones have gotten to the point where 3 and 4 year old chipsets are still VERY performant. They now have the wiggle room to put more bleeding edge silicon in top tier phones, be ok with smaller yields at first, and scale fabrication over the year.
That all being said, given that everyone was going to been eyeing this USB port, they probably should’ve taken one on the chin and changed the stupid IO speed. Although, the people complaining about this probably aren’t Apple’s core market anyway. So maybe they were right.
I suspect next year’s base will have a revised version of this year’s processor. The iPhone 15 Pro has an A17 Pro. This is the first A Series chip with a “Pro” label. I don’t expect something “Pro” to make it into the base model.
What will change between the A17 Pro and the A17? Who knows. It might include the upgraded USB controller though.
Ah, yes last year. Usb 2.0 was invented in, like what, 2001? A shitty phone cpu from 2 years ago is probably at least as powerful as the pentium 4 I had back in the day. Come the fuck on.
Just saying that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were reusing some boards or controllers with limited throughput that their manufacturing plants and fabs were already pumping out. Cook got famous for being an operational efficiency nerd that made sure Apple had very little spare parts and inventory on the books.
But yeah, iPhone physical IO speeds have been slow for a looong time. My guess is that so much of Apple’s install base is syncing over the cloud that it hasn’t been a priority.
The biggest applause at the in-person event was, no lie, for the larger cloud storage plans.
This is Apple at it again, do bare minimum and charge premium. They left USB2 because it required no work, but they had to put type C because EU regulation. Since USB is backwards compatible, solution is just solder half of the connector, charge premium price and fuck you customers. And they are right, people don’t care. Instead they go defending it like “I don’t need it anyway”, “Am not a pro, I don’t need it”, etc.
If they use the blockchain as designed, there will be no central server to switch off - it’s just running in a bunch of basements. They rarely do, though.
The person who stated this a while ago deleted their comment so the reply may not have made sense:
The blockchain does not contain the digital assets. it is just a ledger saying who owns the assets.
If the place the blockchain ledger points to no longer exists, the ledger is useless.
Same with NFT's, they are digital receipts that point to a web address, If the web address closes down, the NFT is useless.
For a real world analogy.
A deed (blockchain ledger) proves you own a house (digital asset stored on the game server). If the house burns down (game server is switched off), the deed still exists but it is useless as the asset it describes no longer does.
An NFT doesn’t need to point to a web address - the ape picture can be stored on the blockchain too.
So on the case of a game, everyone can be running their own server, using a blockchain to keep the shared world in sync. There’s no physical product to begin with.
Years and years ago, I got two books in a series published by a tiny imprint that did zero marketing, and I was too noob to do any myself. Didn’t sell shit. Had trouble even getting anyone to read the damn things.
Years pass. I get disabled, and make new friends. One of them asks to read the shit, so I send him some epub files I made for my own use.
He, being the awesome fucktard he is,promptly puts copies in his book folder. Which is one of the folders he shares via soulseek.
A few weeks later, I start getting emails from random people asking if the third book is available. My files have my author email in them, so it wasn’t super confusing, but it did take a bit to figure out where the files came from for these strangers.
To date, more people have asked about the third book than ever read the printed version.
Now, would I rather have gotten paid for those reads? Fuck yeah. But, when I sent the small list of interested people a link to the series I’m currently publishing via amazon, maybe ten percent went and bought a copy of the file.
So, despite having had maybe fifty people “steal” my two books, those thefts resulted in sales anyway. Sales that I absolutely would not have gotten from those same people if they hadn’t read and liked the older stuff.
Piracy is not some noble pursuit. But, realistically, it can be an advantage if you’re small enough that it serves as advertising, or big enough that it won’t decrease sales enough to matter monetarily. Mid range “creatives”, though? They’re going to be in a bad spot from it. The conversion from pirated works to sold works is fucking SMALL. It’s small enough that if you’re struggling to make enough income to create full time, you’re fucked because you aren’t going to get serious grass roots awareness pushing sales to bump you up like that. People are going to pirate instead of buying at that popularity level.
But me? I’m fine with it. My old books, I may put up on Amazon at some point, but since I am unlikely to finish the third in the series (which is a long story), I don’t see the point. So, they’re out there, and that makes me happy. Now, maybe once or twice a year, I get a new email. That, for a no name hack like me, is better than the chump change I’ll ever get from Amazon.
This is a good example and it is hard to attribute a lost sale to pirating as it is more likely there would be no sale if the pirate were unable to obtain it. In some cases it works the other way because someone liked something so much they want to purchase it. Or it helps folks like you gain visibility.
Your story reminded of something Paulo coelho said. “Some call this “piracy". I call it a medal to any writer who understands that there are no better reward than to be read."
That’s pretty much where I am. If I was trying to make money as a primary goal, I might be a bit miffed, but then I’d have to deal with deadlines and editors and bullshit, when the truth is that I just want to make stories like I enjoy reading, and hope that letters enjoy it. Hard for that to happen if there’s a wall between readers and the stories
Reputation is a perishable commodity. It is very hard to replenish it once gone.
Xwitter and Reddit understood it the hard way. Even if Unity goes back to exactly where they were before this ruckus - people will think twice before trusting them again.
I would say so. Their front page is way different, and, in my opinion, worse now. Not sure if it’s made a noticeable difference to their customer base, but from a consumer standpoint 100%.
I’m not sure they have, there’s plenty complaints from users about the bad mods and so forth, but the numbers the C-level’s look at have probably not changed enough to worry them. Let’s see in a year or two if the user base has changed significantly.
The bucket is also increasingly full of bots and astroturfers. I think they’re doing a half decent job of hiding the impact when it comes to numbers, but the drop in quality sheds a little more light.
Sir, I will make you aware of your error. Children (innocent!) may be exposed to the naked breast from birth to age 1.5, and then again from age 18 until death. Any exposure to the unaugmented protuberances of the female form during which the victim has witnessed the earth revolve around the sun more than twice but fewer than one score times has been scientifically proven to corrupt the youth and chasten the modest!
Sort of. They present a straw man about tournaments and other public events, and while that’s a fair point, those can (and probably already do) have rules about it.
You should always have the option to use a mod in your home. If companies don’t want to support running a game with mods, that should be the first thing support asks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with nudity and sexuality.
It only makes you uncomfortable because of the way you were raised. But it’s difficult for you to see that you are looking at this with those set of values.
Tell me the irony isn’t lost on anyone else that this website article about users being frustrated by min maxing profits and inorganic design language is designed exactly like the kind of site that they are talking about.
BTW, you might like catbox.moe for images. Much easier to use than imgur, cause it doesn’t make you jump through hoops. No account needed and straight up gives you a direct link.
Thank you for the suggestion, thankfully the imgur hosting was built into memmy so I had no hoops to jump through, basically just click the image button and pick the image.
I’ll certainly implement that when I have more granular control of the process though.
Brave browser is the best solution I’ve found for my mobile workflow. Doesn’t help when the app opens the website link using the native in app browser, though.
No, the scandal they got caught up in was basically if you typed “Coinbase” into the search bar it would suggest the autocomplete response for their affiliate link to Coinbase, it wasn’t limited to just coinbase however, and it wasn’t a forced redirect, just didn’t pass the sniff test, and while that doesn’t mean it’s bad or malicious, that also doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good.
It just happens to be the best solo solution on the application layer that works well with other complimentary services on other layers to fit my good enough criteria for now based on the hardware I currently have available to me.
When I get a different phone (read as migrated off of Apple [current] and Google [past] phone OS’s) I will reevaluate my mobile opsec and most likely chose from the other solutions available on the platform of my choice.
pcgamer.com
Top