apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
100% this. The whole process of creation and critique goes way back to the dawn of film and probably before. The entire construction of positions and job titles (creative director, design lead, etc) all draw from these theories. This requires the critique to be separate from the process of creation.
OK so I came up with a slightly crazy idea. Do you know how cars are emblazoned with logos and emblems? Like the brand name (Toyota), the car name (Kluger), engine and other doodads (V6 etc etc). What if we made like jokey versions of these to replace on our cars? Like make a Toyota logo but it looks a bit more like a penis....
I think this is less corruption and more vanity. There are a lot of charitable organisations out there who will routinely donate over a million dollars. They’ll get a hospital wing or entrance or statue or something named after them. I think compared to those charities, open hand is incredibly small.
My guess is their strategy was to do a bulk donation to get some kind of recognition for their mum. They were probably hoping they’d have much larger sums in a shorter time, and then time just kept on going.
The problem is, that would have been fine if it was their money they were doing this with, but they’re doing these shenanigans with other people’s money, and now open hand is probably done for as a charity.
Putting aside apocalyptic cli-fi, Solarpunk specifically and optimistic cli-fi is meant to keep the same space as hard sci-fi, the kind of imaginative work which spurs budding scientists with new ideas, just as cyberpunk did for computers or space sci-fi did for space research. There was optimism about a possible future world, and we largely built it.
I just think the “direct action” the writer talks about is fighting against something, not fighting towards something, and the latter is what we need.
I think a lot of arguments put money at the root. The point of money is to remove context from the equation. The example is:
I will bake you a cake because I like you, but
I will not bake a cake for the king because fuck that guy.
Oh wait he’s threatening to kill me.
The king is annoyed that he has to threaten to kill everyone all the time.
King invents money and taxes. Now he only threatens people who don’t pay tax
He has money so he can ask baker to make him a cake.
Baker now has no option. Money is effectively a proxy to violence
Baker has to buy cheaper flour from his enemies across the river
Enemies across the river get flour from slave labour and profit massively
Globalisation.
So, money is the tool, yes, but it’s also how the king can be completely evil and get away with it. Being evil in non-fungible, but you can turn that into money, which is fungible.
the King could very well go through Martha, that everyone loves, because “she doesn’t do politics”.
What do you mean “go through”? You mean Martha would just do the King a favour by asking everyone for cakes and things? And Martha would do this because??? Remember the King needs to do this at scale, so eventually I think people would get sick of Martha asking for everything all the time.
the threat of violence was there
Yes, that’s what I said, but the king needs some way to be a middleman between soldiers and cake. Otherwise the soldiers can just be warlords. Yeah, kings do try on the whole “we are ordained by god” or whatever, but I think the only thing which sticks is the knife.
Money starts being necessary at the scale where you do not know all the people
“necessary” would imply that it would exist without the king, which is not the case. Not knowing the people means not knowing the context. My whole point is: “The point of money is to remove context from the equation”. It doesn’t matter that my flour is from slavers. Money launders the context. The only people who actively want to do this are bad people.
They don’t do it through money (if we talk actual slavery) but through weapons, whips and chains
Err no, they do it through money? Almost all slavery today happens through a debt.You could call the debt “made up” or whatever, but the intent of the debt is to claim that the slave could theoretically pay it off and then they are free. It’s not an equal contract.
Money only has the purpose of exploitation, it is only a proxy for violence. If you didn’t have to pay your debts, then how exactly would a monetary system work?
The phantom liberty expansion is out now, and something to note is just how many roads and cars are in the game considering… well… how are they still burning fossil fuels in 2077?...
My issue is who is driving and what the roads look like. Somehow the government still pays for roads? No road rolls? Petrol / biofuel at reasonable prices? All cars aren’t for the ultra rich?
I’m sorry but this is rubbish. It’s a hellscape but also very fun and easy. The government or similar entity still pays for road infrastructure. Biofuel is cheap or free (do you ever fill up in game?). Hellscape but your character isn’t effectively a chattel slave and you don’t have any debt. At least have the design explore the problem. Make it so if you use a car in your heist you will end up losing money. Do something with the premise. Anything. Don’t be like “whee this is fun and consequence free wow this is a corporate hellscape”
Upvoting. Thanks for understanding my premise. Firstly, there are a lot of cars in the game, and you can still carjack, and the requisite physics must exist. You are a cop, so obviously cop chases don’t make sense, but an enormous amount of time and effort was put into driving given it’s got nothing to do with the game.
All the stuff you talk about is either hard sci-fi, or an inch away from hard sci-fi. A car that is efficient and makes a vroom vroom noise is not hard sci-fi. It’s fantasy.
it’s not like 20 eddies a litre would be cost prohibitive anyway? You drop 10-15k on implants all the time.
This part is a fair point, you are incredibly consequential in the world, but that kind of adds to the idea that a car is not something everyday people can afford.
it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it The game is just software. It will execute on the GPU and CPU. DLSS (proprietary) and XeSS (OSS) are both libraries to run the AI bits of the cards for upscaling, because they weren’t really being used for anything. Gamedevs have the skills to use them just like regular AI devs do.
By AI here I mean what is traditionally meant by “game AI”, pathfinding, decisionmaking, co-ordination, etc. There is a counterstrike bot which uses neural nets (CPU), and it’s been around for decades now. It is trained like normal bots are trained. You can train an AI in a game and then have the AI as NPCs, enemies, etc.
what is the benefit over just using classical algorithms
Utilisation. A CPU isn’t really built for deep AI code, so it can’t really do realistic AI given the frame budget of doing other things. This is famously why games have bad AI. Training AI via AI algorithms could make the NPCs more realistic or smarter, and you could do this within reasonable frame budgets.
Fair point, but having not read the comics, I can hardly copy them unless I pirate the original comics now can I. The author would probably be on board with me doing that.
I want to separate my critique from a critique of Solarpunk itself. I love the stories and I want to see more, but the “and then everyone came together and held hands and now we have paradise” trope is bad.
As for fantasy, I think other than the hardest of science fictions, we need a bit of fantasy, if only because no one can really create a future world from whole cloth and have it obey the laws of physics and social dynamics. It’s just too hard. So some unrealistic stuff is OK, but That One Trope!
I don’t mind optimism. We can be optimistic, we can have happy endings, we can have decent beginnings, but it doesn’t need to be one beat. I haven’t read The Postman, I’ll put it on the pile.
I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox’s current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:...
The Series S and X are extremely similar hardware wise. Games really just need to scale to fit the two targets. The real issue is that the games and game makers which MS owns largely use a lot more CPU power, which doesn’t really scale down as easily as GPU power. Having a PC game maker act like a console game maker is the real gap in skillset, not the dual targets.
The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,
Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.
I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.
I don’t think there are palette limitations, but many games are running on the Series S at SD with FSR upscaling to 1080P. Quality wise they do look acceptable. See Immportals of Aveum as an example
who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…
Supply chains are complicated, and MS probably did their due diligence to ensure minimal blockages. From seeing the memory structures of newer video cards, I’m pretty sure there are supply constraints to memory to think of.
Honestly I think gamedevs leaning on memory this hard instead of compute is a mistake. You can have intelligently tiled, procedurally generated textures and have a lot more of them, but instead everyone is leaning on authored content on disc. This goes against industry trends in non-game rendering where procedural generation is the norm. If Doom Eternal can look that good with forward rendering, there are no excuses.
My main beef with the hate on the Series S is that both times it’s been a big deal (BG3 and Halo Infinite), it has been split screen which has held back shipping. The community would be as justified going after split screen as they are going after the Series S.
OK so this is now offtopic for the conversation, but…
However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work.
To some extent, it’s authoring tools which affect how they work. A procedural materials pipeline can help them compose on top of already procedural content. In a way, you could see PBR as a part of that pipeline because PBR materials are physics modelled. Having said that I do take your point, even building out that pipeline takes time. Creating a PBR materials library is not super easy, and obviously organic stuff is very hard to model as a material.
meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage
From watching blender modelling, I thought the pattern was to have minimal rigging on the base mesh and then tesselation via normal maps + subdivision (apparently this is very doable even with sculpting). Obviously for animation you need a certain quality but beyond that I thought everything would be normal maps, reflection maps, etc etc.
TIL for no tessellation on skeletal meshes. I hope over time Unreal / Epic will put some effort in on minimising memory usage, even though I know they “just” got done with Nanite and friends.
I am probably unqualified to speak about this, as I am using an RX 550 low profile and a 768P monitor and almost never play newer titles, but I want to kickstart a discussion, so hear me out....
If Rambo The Video Game (2014) was made with the tech of today, it would look much better while costing the devs the same amount of time.
I don’t think this is quite correct. A while back devs were talking about a AAApocalypse. Basically as budgets keep on growing, having a game make its money back is exceedingly hard. This is why today’s games need all sorts of monetisation, are always sequels, have low-risk game mechanics, and ship in half broken states. Regardless of the industry basically abandoning novel game engines to focus on Unreal (which is also a bad thing for other reasons), game production times are increasing, and the reason is that while some of the time is amortised, the greater graphical fidelity makes the lower fidelity work stand out. I believe an “indie” or even AA game could look better today for the same amount of effort than 10 years ago, but not a AAA game.
For example, you could not build Baldur’s Gate 3 in Unreal. This is an unhealthy state for the industry to be in.
Surprised to hear Singapore has a law which states that any building must create equal square footage of green space as the footprint it occupies. That’s pretty solarpunk, and probably something lawmakers anywhere could adopt.
Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com)
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
Idea for disrespecting cars
OK so I came up with a slightly crazy idea. Do you know how cars are emblazoned with logos and emblems? Like the brand name (Toyota), the car name (Kluger), engine and other doodads (V6 etc etc). What if we made like jokey versions of these to replace on our cars? Like make a Toyota logo but it looks a bit more like a penis....
Gabe Newell ordered to make in-person deposition for Valve v. Wolfire Games lawsuit (www.gamesindustry.biz)
YouTuber The Completionist's Open Hand Foundation Accused of Keeping Charitable Donations - IGN (www.ign.com)
Karl Jobst’s video...
On the False Promise of Climate Fiction (lithub.com)
I’m curious what people think of this article with regard to the solarpunk literary movement, past present and future.
What solarpunkers think about money?
Capitalism is obviously destroyed but I read very little on “money”.
KAKOMANDO (www.youtube.com)
Pretty strong solarpunk vibes from this one.
Is Solarpunk the Hippie Movement Redux? (solarpunkpresents.com)
How Talking With Animals Would Change Our World (www.youtube.com)
I don’t think Solarpunk has normalised the idea that we could just routinely talk to animals.
Introducing Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, content classifier and torrent search engine with web UI, GraphQL API and Servarr stack integration (bitmagnet.io)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/6301281...
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Was cyberpunk 2077 ruined by carbrain?
The phantom liberty expansion is out now, and something to note is just how many roads and cars are in the game considering… well… how are they still burning fossil fuels in 2077?...
What type of game you want to see that doesn't fully exist yet?
Fables comic series is now in the public domain (billwillingham.substack.com)
So, where do I download it from?
PS Plus price hike: We'll all pay for a subscription-based future | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz)
[RANT] I'm sick of the ocean boiling in Solarpunk fiction
This is a Rant. I know I should write my own fiction with blackjack and hookers but just let me get it out of my system....
Xbox at the Crossroads | Opinion by Rob Fahey (www.gamesindustry.biz)
I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox’s current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:...
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Larian drops Series S split-screen as "solution" to bring Baldur's Gate 3 to Xbox this year (www.eurogamer.net)
Should put this whole issue to rest (for a while, at least 😉).
Why even push for more realistic graphics anymore? (infosec.pub)
I am probably unqualified to speak about this, as I am using an RX 550 low profile and a 768P monitor and almost never play newer titles, but I want to kickstart a discussion, so hear me out....
Singapore: Designing a Megacity in Harmony with Nature 🌳 (www.youtube.com)
Surprised to hear Singapore has a law which states that any building must create equal square footage of green space as the footprint it occupies. That’s pretty solarpunk, and probably something lawmakers anywhere could adopt.