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tal

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Trying a switch to [email protected], at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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tal,
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https://archive.ph/4OTBi

tal,
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Yeah, vaping is growing in the US too.

tal,
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https://archive.ph/u1dAy

tal,
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Iceland and the Faroe Islands are normally grouped with Europe, and Greenland with North America.

tal,
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That sounds like a problem with scooters rather than specifically with rental scooters. I mean, you can just go get one yourself and still break rules with them.

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How do these things even work without being docked? When do they recharge?

tal, (edited )
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The OECD report shows the risk of rider death per trip on motorcycles or mopeds is five times higher than that for e-scooters.

I would think that the relevant statistic would be death per unit of distance traveled, not per trip. If the typical scooter trip is much shorter than the typical motorcycle trip -- which seems very plausible, given range and speed limitations -- then "per trip" and "per unit of distance traveled" statistics could differ a lot.

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I mean for walking, that seems straightforward. A scooter is slower and you're exposed to the elements. A scooter is more of a drop-in replacement for walking than riding in a car.

tal,
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e-bikes

Do e-bikes not have the same problems as e-scooters? If no, why not?

tal, (edited )
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I liked Fallout 4. I mean, the dialog was annoying compared to New Vegas, but the story was fine. That was 2016 for the initial game, and the DLC later.

EDIT: 2015. 2016 for the DLC.

tal, (edited )
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I'm not going to wait two years -- though I'm opposed to preordering -- but there are other benefits too. Two years down the line:

  • A bunch of bugs are patched. Even if Starfield is relatively free of bugs, there will be some.
  • The wikis for the game have been written up. Some obsessive person will have sat down and figured out the quirks of game mechanics and documented them. Understanding stuff like the relative merits of armor-piercing, bleeding, and so forth in Fallout 4 was complicated.
  • Starfield's expansion packs will be out.
  • Mods will be out, and there will probably be some pretty "must have" ones.
  • You'll have more hardware oomph to throw at the game, make it smoother/higher res.
tal,
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If you mean just the Creation Engine, that was 2011.

If you trace it back to Gamebryo, then Morrowind was 20 years ago, but I don't think that one can say that even Skyrim looks much like Morrowind.

tal,
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textures

What about the textures? Like, higher texture resolution?

tal, (edited )
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One thing I did want in Fallout 4 that I don't believe it presently does is dynamic generation of polygons in curves.

The game has environments with kinda curvy surfaces, but aside from the dynamic level of detail models, the engine can't go throw spare horsepower at generating more polygons to make smoother curves. I think that that's a good match with long-lived PC games, because people playing it years later on more-powerful hardware can burn their extra cycles on making things pretty.

It's not vital or anything, just think that if there's one game where it'd be neat, it'd be Bethesda-type games.

tal,
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VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there

In all seriousness, might be worth just setting up a physical server separate from your gaming system.

I mean, I've thrown out many computers that would be entirely capable of running a mail server and the like.

tal,
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From ping-pong balls to dynamically-resizing horse balls.

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Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”.

Outer Worlds really did not scratch my Fallout itch.

Yeah, superficially it's similar in a number of ways, but:

  • For all practical purposes, the game is fairly linear. The world is open, but you have little reason to go back.
  • The Fallout perk system introduces a lot of interesting mechanics, is an important part of the game. The Outer Worlds perk system was almost entirely flat bonuses to one thing or another. Didn't change much how one would play the game.
  • I rarely found myself stumbling into new and interesting situations just walking around the world.
  • The weapons weren't all that interesting or customizable. That includes the uniques, other than the science weapons.
tal, (edited )
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Some people in this thread are apparently streaming it to their Deck from their PC. If you're set on playing it on a Deck, that might be an option.

tal, (edited )
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The New Vegas dialog system is much better.

However, the graphics are getting kinda long in the tooth.

And it is significantly less-stable. I've definitely fallen out of the map a number of times, too.

And without hitting a wiki, you can lock yourself out of a lot of things that aren't obvious. Choices matter, but often in not-immediately-apparent ways.

tal,
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my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go

Try a shorter monitor cable? I had a really long cable that did not deal well with high refresh rates.

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If you liked Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, have you tried the Wasteland series? It's what Fallout 1 was modeled on, and that series kept going.

It's not Fallout, but it's the closest I have found to "more Fallout 1 and Fallout 2".

That being said, I thought that the Fallout jump to 3D would not work well, and I think I was very much wrong there -- the series did a pretty good job jumping the gap.

feels like Fallout

If you like the desert American Southwest "New Old West" theme in Fallout 1 and 2 and New Vegas, the Wasteland series does that.

tal, (edited )
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Music is great!

Thanks. I specifically meant to ask about this in this thread and forgot.

I liked the music in New Vegas a lot, liked Fallout 4. Fallout 76 was a disappointment music-wise -- I'm not a fan of country, and didn't think that the DJing was good, left the radio off. Was really hoping that the Starfield music would be good.

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To be fair, the realistic space combat video game genre really doesn't exist, that I've seen.

You can get pretty hard-realistic combat aircraft sims. Not many, but they exist.

But in space combat games, you're always playing something roughly like Star Wars. Which is cool and all, but just not what actual space combat would likely look like.

googles for one of the pages talking about the issues

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/real-life-space-combat-would-look-nothing-like-star-wars

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Thanks, haven't seen it before. If it does a release, I'll take a look.

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I can see why you would not like it if you were expecting NMS but it was never intended to be that.

Come to think of it, most of the comments in this thread that are unhappy about it seem to be comparing it unfavorably to No Man's Sky.

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Ah, I gotcha, yeah, I guess I can see that.

Yeah, from that standpoint, I imagine that Fallout 76 must have been a complete disappointment, because that element is almost nonexistent there.

You ever play Jagged Alliance 2? It's pretty old now, got more of a combat focus, but has a lot of the "multiple ways to pull things off".

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I was fine with the music in Fallout 4, and Bethesda did that.

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Kind of wish that there was an icon in the Steam store for it, like with VR headset support.

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I dunno.

Real life naval warfare is generally slow and boring, but by using a variety of tricks, like time compression and only having the player involved in actual combat, many games have made that palatable.

I think it could be done.

tal, (edited )
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Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games.

Ehhhh.

I dunno about No Man's Sky.

But in X3 (and X2, for that matter), you don't really seamlessly enter stations. In X4, you do, but it felt like a gimmick to me -- there's not much interesting gameplay on a station.

And there are loading screens between sectors in those games. Short ones, but they're there. Freelancer too.

tal, (edited )
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What specific functionality is it that you want?

I listed one feature that I'd like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.

But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I'm curious what particular functionality it is that you're after.

EDIT: Another: I don't think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you've built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don't think that that's actually a fundamental engine limitation -- you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn't do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it's not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.

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I'm also not convinced that ladder-climbing, whether one wants it or not, is a fundamental engine limitation. It might not be in the game, but that doesn't imply that it's an engine limitation.

googles

This guy modded climbable ladders into Fallout 4, which seems like a pretty good argument that it's not an engine limitation.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/62738

And not that I object per se to ladders, but when was the last time you climbed a ladder in real life? I haven't in quite some years. I mean, sure, it's one more interaction, and IIRC there are some fire escapes that had ladders somewhere in Fallout 4 in Boston. But you could make the same argument about interacting with all kinds of things, and it just seems odd for so many people here to mention specifically climbing ladders. I mean, you could fall and catch yourself, drive vehicles, rappel on a rope, skateboard, ice skate, grapple with enemies, zipline, sail a sailing boat, or God knows, any number of other player-object interaction functionality things that might be added. I suppose that any of them could theoretically add gameplay, but I don't see why the criticality of ladders.

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It's legitimately important if you want to be able to pull random software from places and not have your system compromised, a la smartphone OSes.

It's not the whole story -- things still aren't entirely sandboxed aside from that -- but without it, the GUI is a big security hole.

Critics are mostly positive on Starfield, but not unanimous: From 10/10s to 'cold, lifeless, and uninspired' (www.pcgamer.com)

Starfield is here, and after dozens of hours floating in space our reviewer Chris Livingston liked it—but didn't love it. "Starfield is Bethesda's biggest RPG ever, and it shares even more DNA with Skyrim and Fallout 4 than I expected—but it ultimately falls far short of the greatness of both of those games," he wrote in his...

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That means there are still more reviews to come—but with 97 reviews already collected on OpenCritic, there's already a wide spread of reactions,

Now I'm kind of curious. I wonder what a typical spread is.

Be interesting for "meta review" sites to give a standard deviation of scores. Maybe normalize the score for each review source first.

tal, (edited )
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Ehhh. I think it would be doable. I'm not saying that it would be worthwhile, but I don't think that it would be technically not doable.

From an engine standpoint, they already had an open world for exteriors. Doing the same thing in 3d should be viable.

Separate interiors just lets you devote more memory to an interior because it doesn't need to compete with the exterior. It's an optimization, reduces resource consumption so that you can use that elsewhere.

People have gone back and modded Skyrim to make the closed cities open, and have kind of the same issue:

Open Cities Skyrim should not produce a significant change in your frame rates and performance. Due to the liberal use of occlusion planes in the mod, the game will not render anything on the opposite side of the city walls in any given location. So your viewing content will be limited to roughly what you'd see if you were in the closed city worldspaces. The closed city worldspace system was NOT devised by Bethesda to improve frame rates. It was devised to conserve system memory on the XBox 360 and PS3. You're playing on a PC.

If you are either (a) willing to reduce interior complexity/quality or (b) aren't resource-constrained because you're willing to have fat system requirements, you can avoid loading interiors separately.

As to Bethesda's ability to rip out the guts and change things...from a purely-technical standpoint, going from Fallout 4 -- a single-player game on an engine with a lot of legacy weight -- to Fallout 76 -- a multiplayer game -- was a pretty drastic technical change. I would not have wanted to be the one to do that. Decisions about single-player/multi-player permeate internals all over the place.

By comparison, what would they need to technically do to fly to a planet? Having support for some kind of better lazy loading/preloading stuff. I mean, a planet is gonna have to have a texture. Create a billboard for any structures you put on the surface, and then progressively load them as you zoom in. I dunno if the engine does dynamic level-of-detail stuff in the Z plane today (I think yes? When you're on some of the elevated structures in Fallout 4, I think I recall models way down on the ground being lower-detail), but even if not, I doubt that adding that would be that hard.

I think that a better question would be...how much would it add? I mean, there's an immersion factor, but is doing reentries honestly that much fun?

I've liked open-world space trading games, so I was pretty hopeful when I played Elite: Dangerous, but I wound up kind of disappointed. It's pretty, and maybe if you have a VR rig, it's a good example of something that can create an immersive experience around you. But a lot of elements of the game seem to be aimed more at creating a visual experience than there because they're really great for gameplay. Which for me, at least, was neat at first from a novelty standpoint, but kinda didn't buy me much in the long run.

I mean, I assume that most of the interesting stuff going on is probably gonna be on the ground. I guess you could create some kind of reentry game (flying around storms or something?) but I'm not sure how fantastic of a concept it'd be. My question would be more "what would it buy the player in terms of gameplay to have another few minutes spent doing reentry per planet?"

I'd be more interested in how the character/trait system compares to earlier Bethesda games, how the combat mechanics work, how the dialog with other characters works (a sore point for many in Fallout 4), the kinda meat-and-potatoes Bethesda stuff. Bethesda's had configurable "houses" in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and while I felt that there was potential there, I never really felt like the game really took advantage of it; I'm curious how the customizable spaceship plays into this. How well do the new procedural elements work with the static stuff? How readily-modded is the game?

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The first few companions of Constellation I met were disappointing, too: a pleasant man, a pleasant woman, and another pleasant man. They were all extremely nice and agreeable, but that's not really what I'm looking for in a follower. Where were the weirdos Bethesda is so good at creating? Where were Starfield's versions of Nick Valentine, or Cicero, or Curie? Even Vasco the robot is kind of a bore—wait, didn't Bethesda used to be great at making entertaining robots?

Actually, this was a complaint I had about Fallout 4 -- that a large percentage of the NPCs seemed unhinged in one way or another. Nothing wrong with that to a limited degree, but Fallout 76 had more people who were just living their lives, and acted more like I'd expect ordinary people just put in difficult situations to act.

As the hours pass, travel starts to feel somehow both too fast (I clicked a location on the map and now I'm already standing on it?) and too slow (do I really have to watch the same docking cutscene every single time I visit a space station?).

I'll give decent odds that they're using that to cover up loading of the interior.

tal, (edited )
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I mean, Danse may be weird, but he's not insane. I'm talking about characters who have a completely bizarre view of the world.

I'm talking about stuff like Codsworth retreating into his inner world at the start of the game, Pickman the serial killer and blood artist, Lorenzo Cabot being driven insane by the mysterious serum, Tinker Tom being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, Captain Ironsides trying to fight China with the USS Constitution, Kyle shooting his brother, the Mechanist, or Kent Connolly with the Silver Shroud obsession. The characters in Dunwich Borers. Hugo. Kasumi Nanako thinking that she's a synth. Malcom the cannibal. Theodore Croup.

Fallout 1, say, had some pretty unusual characters, but it didn't use insanity to the extent that Fallout 4 did.

tal,
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And I get your meaning here,

Yeah, and reading over my original comment, I can see where you are coming from, because I was just responding to a snippet about characters being unusual, not insane, and was kind of going off on a tangent. Not everyone who is weird is insane.

It's just specifically the insane bit that has bugged me.

Hancock is unusual, a kind of hardcore anarchist/libertarian. But he's not what I'd call insane.

Father has a worldview that has driven him to do some pretty extreme things, but he's not nuts; you can see how, from his position, what he's doing is a reasonable approach.

It's the characters where they just don't act the way that a regular person would, to the point that they'd probably be unable to function in the present-day world, much less in a post-apocalyptic one.

And while I agree that adding quirks can make a character more memorable, I don't think that making memorable characters it requires mucking with their head.

Abernathy Farm has a collection of pretty "ordinary" characters in Fallout 4, but I think that they're reasonably memorable; they have a personal tragedy and some grievances.

Whereas the Children of Atom have a lot of people who have a pretty bizarre worldview, yet most of them just blur into each other for me, aside from a few characters who stand out for other reasons.

Not Fallout 4, but in Fallout: New Vegas, I think that Veronica Santangelo was a pretty interesting character, but she was maybe one of the most "normal" people in her Brotherhood of Steel bunker.

Jake Finch running off to become a raider with the Forged at Saugus Ironworks is a storyline that I have no problem remembering, but he wasn't insane -- just an ordinary person in a pretty brutal environment.

Billy in Kid in a Fridge, where a kid gets trapped in a fridge at the time of the war, ghoulified, and then you take him back to his parents who were also ghoulified and happy to see him. Everyone there was sane, just in a weird situation.

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I was gonna say that it matters on laptops, and I don't know if I'd say that most people playing games are doing so on the desktop, but the actual quote is more reasonable than the title:

In notebooks, it matters greatly. In desktop, however, it matters, but not to everyone.

tal,
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I've seen people experimenting with using insulated flex duct out of a PC case exhaust out a window.

I would imagine that one could hypothetically have an intake, a case that seals well, and just have one of those window vent panels and route outside air in, through the PC, and then back outside.

Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN. (variety.com)

CNN Max is likely to evolve over time. Among the features the company will try out are ways of alerting Max viewers to breaking news while they are watching something else on the service, whether it be an HBO series, a Turner Classic Movies selection or an old episode of Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”...

tal, (edited )
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Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN.

I could maybe see there being a market for this if the default is not to show them, and there's an option to receive notification of developments on a specific topic. It's better than rabidly refreshing a particular topic that you are specially interested in.

Like, say you live in an area with an approaching hurricane, and you wanted to be alerted if there are any new developments on that particular topic.

However, I have a hard time believing that, in the general case, people want alerts popping up.

tal,
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We still haven't established whether some form of warp drive is doable or not. Even if you can't move faster than light, if you can distort spacetime around yourself sufficiently in the right way, you can maybe get a functionally-similar effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The Alcubierre drive ([alkuˈβjere]) is a speculative warp drive idea according to which a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, under the assumption that a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (that is, negative mass) could be created.[1][2] Proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the Alcubierre drive is based on a solution of Einstein's field equations. Since those solutions are metric tensors, the Alcubierre drive is also referred to as Alcubierre metric.

Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination more quickly than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.[3]

The local velocity relative to the deformed space-time would be subluminal, but the speed at which a spacecraft could move would be superluminal, thereby rendering possible interstellar flight, such as a visit to Proxima Centauri within a few days.

tal,
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The night/day thematic thing, where sunshine kinda comes back to Paris as you liberate areas, was really nifty.

tal,
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I thought I remembered playing it on my Linux machine, but maybe I'm misremembering.

ProtonDB doesn't have any data:

https://www.protondb.com/app/1785600

googles

This guy is running it on the Steam Deck:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ua89ot/one_of_the_best_games_ever_the_saboteur_works/

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