So, I’ve seen this phenomenon discussed before, though I don’t think it was from the Crysis guys. They’ve got a legit point, and I don’t think that this article does a very clear job of describing the problem.

Basically, the problem is this: as a developer, you want to make your game able to take advantage of computing advances over the next N years other than just running faster. Okay, that’s legit, right? You want people to be able to jack up the draw distance, use higher-res textures further out, whatever. You’re trying to make life good for the players. You know what the game can do on current hardware, but you don’t want to restrict players to just that, so you let the sliders enable those draw distances or shadow resolutions that current hardware can’t reasonably handle.

The problem is that the UI doesn’t typically indicate this in very helpful ways. What happens is that a lot of players who have just gotten themselves a fancy gaming machine, immediately upon getting a game, go to the settings, and turn them all up to maximum so that they can take advantage of their new hardware. If the game doesn’t run smoothly at those settings, then they complain that the game is badly-written. “I got a top of the line Geforce RTX 4090, and it still can’t run Game X at a reasonable framerate. Don’t the developers know how to do game development?”

To some extent, developers have tried to deal with this by using terms that sound unreasonable, like “Extreme” or “Insane” instead of “High” to help to hint to players that they shouldn’t be expecting to just go run at those settings on current hardware. I am not sure that they have succeeded.

I think that this is really a UI problem. That is, the idea should be to clearly communicate to the user that some settings are really intended for future computers. Maybe “Future computers”, or “Try this in the year 2028” or something. I suppose that games could just hide some settings and push an update down the line that unlocks them, though I think that that’s a little obnoxious and would rather not have that happen on games that I buy – and if a game company goes under, they might never get around to being unlocked. Maybe if games consistently had some kind of really reliable auto-profiling mechanism that could go run various “stress test” scenes with a variety of settings to find reasonable settings for given hardware, players wouldn’t head straight for all-maximum settings. That requires that pretty much all games do a good job of implementing that, or I expect that players won’t trust the feature to take advantage of their hardware. And if mods enter the picture, then it’s hard for developers to create a reliable stress-test scene to render, since they don’t know what mods will do.

Console games tend to solve the problem by just taking the controls out of the player’s hands. The developers decide where the quality controls are, since players have – mostly – one set of hardware, and then you don’t get to touch them. The issue is really on the PC, where the question is “should the player be permitted to push the levers past what current hardware can reasonably do?”

I don’t have a problem with a model where I pay more money and get more content. And I do think that there are certain things that can only really be done with live service that some people will really enjoy – I don’t think that live service shouldn’t exist. But I generally prefer the DLC model to the live service model.

• Live service games probably won’t be playable after some point. That sucks if you get invested in them…and for live service games do aim at people who are really invested in playing them.

• I have increasingly shifted away from multiplayer games over the years. Yeah, there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans make for a sophisticated alternative to AI. But they bring a lot of baggage. Humans mean griefing. Humans mean needing to have their own incentives taken care of – like, they want to win a certain percentage of the time, aren’t just there to amuse other humans. Most real-time multiplayer games aren’t pausable, which especially is a pain for people with kids, who may need to deal with random-kid-induced-emergencies at unexpected times. Humans optimize to win in competitive games, and what they do to win might not be fun for other players. Humans may not want to stay in character (“xXxPussySlayer69xXx”), which isn’t fantastic for immersion – and even in roleplay-enforced environments, that places load on other players. Multiplayer games generally require always-online Internet connectivity, and service disruption – even an increase in latency, for real-time games – can be really irritating. Humans cheat, and in a multiplayer game, cheating can impact the experience of other players, so that either means dealing with cheating or with anti-cheat stuff that creates its own host of irritations (especially on Linux, as it’s often low-level and one of the major remaining sources of compatibility issues).

• If there are server problems, you can’t play.

• My one foray where I was willing to play a live service game was Fallout 76; Fallout 5 wasn’t coming out any time soon, and it was the closest thing that was going to be an option. One major drawback for me was the requirements of making grindable (i.e. inexpensive to develop relative to amount of playtime) multiplayer gameplay was also immersion-breaking – instead of running around in a world where I can lose myself, I’m being notified that random player has initiated an event, which kind of breaks the suspension of disbelief. It also places constraints on the plot. In prior entrants in the Fallout series, you could significantly change the world, and doing so was a signature of the series. In Fallout 76, you’ve got a shared world, so that’s pretty hard to do, other than in some limited, instanced ways. Not an issue for every type of game out there, but was annoying for that game. Elite: Dangerous has an offline mode that pretends to be faux-online – again, the game design constraints from being multiplayer kind of limit my immersion.

They do provide a way to do DRM – if part of the game that you need to play lives on the publisher’s servers, then absent reimplementing it, pirates can’t play it. And I get that that’s appealing for a publisher. But it just comes with a mess of disadvantages.

Link: [email protected]

Not to mention that the article author apparently likes dark-on-light coloration (“light mode”), whereas I like light-on-dark (“dark mode”).

Traditionally, most computers were light-on-dark. I think it was the Mac that really shifted things to dark-on-light:

My understanding from past reading was that that change was made because of the observation that at the time, people were generally working with computer representations of paper documents. For ink economy reasons, paper documents were normally dark-on-light. Ink costs something, so normally you’d rather put ink on 5% of the page rather than 95% of the page. If you had a computer showing a light-on-dark image of a document that would be subsequently printed and be dark-on-light on paper, that’d really break the WYSIWYG paradigm emerging at the time. So word processors and the like drove that decision to move to dark-on-light:

Prior to that, a word processor might have looked something like this (WordPerfect for DOS):

Technically, I suppose it wasn’t the Mac where that “dark-on-light-following-paper” convention originated, just where it was popularized. The Apple IIgs had some kind of optional graphical environment that looked like a proto-Mac environment, though I rarely saw it used:

Update: apparently that wasn’t actually released until after the Mac. This says that that graphical desktop was released in 1985, while the original 128K Mac came out in 1984. So it’s really a dead-end side branch offshoot, rather than a predecessor.

The Mac derived from the Lisa at Apple (which never became very widespread):

And that derived from the Xerox Alto:

But for practical purposes, I think that it’s reasonably fair to say that the Mac was really what spread dark-on-light. Then Windows picked up the convention, and it was really firmly entrenched:

Prior to that, MS-DOS was normally light-on-dark (with the basic command line environment being white-on-black, though with some apps following a convention of light on blue):

Apple ProDOS, widely used on Apple computers prior to the Mac, was light-on-dark:

The same was true of other early text-based PC environments, like the Commodore 64:

Or the TRS-80:

When I used VAX/VMS, it was normally off a VT terminal that would have been light-on-dark, normally green, amber, or white on black, depending upon the terminal:

And as far as I can recall, terminals for Unix were light-on-dark.

If you go all the way back before video terminals to teleprinters, those were putting their output directly on paper, so the ink issue comes up again, and they were dark-on-light:

But I think that there’s a pretty good argument that, absent ink economy constraints, the historical preference has been to use light-on-dark on video displays.

There’s also some argument that for OLED displays – and, one assumes, any future displays, where you only light up what needs to be light, rather than the LCD approach of lighting the whole thing up and then blocking and converting to heat what you don’t want to be light – draw somewhat less power for light-on-dark. That provides some battery benefits on portable devices, though in most cases, that’s probably not a huge issue compared to eye comfort.

Heh. From a legal standpoint, if you burgle the ISS, it sounds like you can manage to get in trouble in an impressive number of jurisdictions.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10869/2

Congressional Research Service

If You Do the Space Crime, You May Do the Space Time

International Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement

Commercial space flights from the United States have included at least one purely private visit to the International Space Station (ISS), a permanently inhabited research-oriented facility in low Earth orbit cooperatively operated by the United States, Member States of the European Space Agency, Russia, Canada, and Japan. Criminal conduct on the ISS implicates an ISS-specific agreement. Modifying and displacing an earlier agreement, the 1998 ISS Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) signed by the governments of the cooperating countries provides that, in general, each country retains “jurisdiction and control” over (1) the “flight elements” or areas it provides and registers in accordance with the agreement (for instance, the habitation module provided by the United States); and (2) “personnel in or on the Space Station who are its nationals.” In other words, unless a more specific provision of the IGA applies, each signatory retains jurisdiction over the areas and personnel it has provided to the project.

So it sounds like basically, from a criminal jurisdiction standpoint, the ISS is a bunch of little territories, made up of bus-length modules.

So if you go through the ISS grabbing stuff, you’re probably now committing crimes in US territory, territory of European states, Russian territory, Canadian territory and Japanese territory.

The President can’t amend the Constitution. In fact, the entire federal government’s only role – not talking just the Executive Branch, but also the Legislative and Judicial – is, in one of the two amendment routes, to propose the amendment. In the other, they have no involvement at all. The amending process is really a process done by the states.

I mean, if you have the ability to build a spacecraft and get there, you’ve already overcome far larger barriers. Any physical security on the door is going to be comparatively irrelevant as a barrier.

Locks, like walls and other passive defenses, aren’t designed to stop people. They’re designed to keep basically-honest people honest and slow down the rest to the point where other things, like people, can deal with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe#Burglary_ratings

The highest safe rating here against burglary is 30 minutes of resistance against someone equipped with suitable tools (like, cutting torches and such).

If you can get up to the ISS, it’s a pretty safe bet that nobody’s going to show up in 30 minutes to do anything about you entering.

Unless they’ve removed it from the game, I assume so.

obsolete knowledge

doom cheat codes

The second article on [email protected] is about Doom (running on PDFs)

Every user creates an account on one instance. You did so on lemmy.world, which is the largest instance out there, a popular one. That is their home instance.

Posts and comments from other instances will be visible to an instance as long as the two instances are federated – that is, the instance admins have not explicitly cut them off from each other. Lemmy.world and lemmy.today are federated.

Normally, any user from any instance can see and post to any community on a federated instance.

A given community on a source instance will not actually see its content be copied to a destination instance until at least one user on the destination instance has subscribed to that community – this helps reduce bandwidth usage on the network. I’m subscribed to [email protected], and probably other users on lemmy.today are as well, so we can see this community.

EDIT: Oh, sorry, I think I see the confusion. I meant that of the instances I listed, lemmy.world was defederated with all except lemmy.ml, not that it was defederated with all instances out there except lemmy.ml.

You can see instance relationships at /instances, so for lemmy.world, https://lemmy.world/instances

It can theoretically alter it in any way. I mean, that’s up to the instance admin.

Read the instance rules in the sidebar of the main page, and see if you’re okay with them. That won’t tell you everything, but it might give you a rough idea of the specifics of the instance. For mbin instances, rather than the sidebar, look at /terms, like https://fedia.io/terms for fedia.io.

I personally avoid communities on lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml if possible, and am not currently subscribed to any. Your home instance is lemmy.world, which is outright defederated with all but lemmy.ml, so you won’t even see some of those. I’m fine with other instances. But that’s gonna vary on a personal basis, so there’s no global answer for that.

There are small devices with directional antennas, often gun-shaped, intended to jam the datalink. Not really “electromagnetic pulse”, though.

I think that it’s more likely that the other half of the dev team probably knew about the charges, saw this sentence likely coming and didn’t want to sink more time into the project. Which, I mean, I can understand if it’s a two person company. If you’re doing a company like this, you’re betting that the product is going to be successful, and “maybe half the company will vanish” is kind of a huge risk factor.

Frankly, if Musk were President instead of Trump, I’d be rather happier about this upcoming four years.

He can’t be President absent amending the US Constitution, though, as he’d run afoul of the “natural-born citizen” requirement for the office.

Cars are totally out of control, have been for a few years, and it doesn’t seem like there’s an end in sight.

I don’t know where you’re located, but looking at a new, plain-Jane Toyota Corolla in the US:

https://www.toyota.com/corolla/2024/

A 2024 new base Toyota Corolla has an MSRP of $22,050.

https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla/2004/

A 2004 new base Toyota Corolla had an MSRP of $14,220. In 2024 dollars, that 2004 Corolla cost $23,613.86. That is, the price for a new Corolla has slightly dropped in real terms over that period of time.

I’m very much interested in what they intend to use to shoot the drones. Missiles? Way to expensive.

Well, if we’re talking about a policing role, it may be fine.

In war, if Country A and Country B are arm-wrestling, and Country A can launch a drone that costs a tenth of what Country B’s missiles do, you can probably guess that Country A is going to keep sending drones, because that’s a pretty favorable exchange. Gotta worry about what happens if it scales up.

But if we’re talking a policing role and don’t expect hundreds or thousands of drones to be sent out – like, the aim is countering espionage or sabotage – that might be okay.

Now, granted, one possibility is that someone might try to figure out a way to send large numbers of drones to do the above, but then that starts to stand out. I think that the current situation is probably more of one where the concern is that malicious drone operators are trying to hide in the noise created by benign drone operators. We don’t easily know whether a given drone is just some random person flying a drone where it shouldn’t be, or whether it’s someone trying to gather intelligence. But if spies start launching a hundred drones at a go, it’s going to be pretty obvious that it’s not just some random person making a mistake.

EDIT:

Not sure the Bundeswehr got any and if not it’ll take fives years of debate if this is technology we actually need and another ten to procure the necessary equipment.

I remember just reading about some kind of programmable-airburst SPAAG that Germany’s sending Ukraine, think it was on a Boxer chassis. Assuming that Germany isn’t sending every one of those that they have, they probably have some to stick around sensitive areas of their own.

kagis

https://mil.in.ua/en/news/ukraine-is-likely-to-receive-boxer-infantry-fighting-vehicles/

The Boxer RCT30 combat module combines the unmanned turret from KNDS Germany with the proven Boxer control module from ARTEC – a joint venture between Rheinmetall and KNDS Germany. The module is armed with the MK 30-2/ABM 30×173 mm stabilized automatic cannon from Rheinmetall. It provides accurate engagement of moving targets both on the ground and in motion.

The German army intends to purchase about 150 systems of this type, and the Netherlands – 72 systems.

The vehicle also has a landing compartment that can accommodate up to six fully equipped infantrymen. However, as the publication notes, the name “command support vehicle” may indicate that these combat vehicles will not be used as an infantry fighting vehicle, but can be used to protect the RCH 155 self-propelled howitzers from drones.

https://www.rheinmetall.com/Rheinmetall Group/brochure-download/Weapon-Ammmunition/B305e0424-MK30-2-ABM-automatic-cannon.pdf

Within a range up to 3,000 metres the MK30-2/ABM delivers maximum effectiveness against land-, air- and sea targets.

So if you plonk one of those in the middle of a military base or whatever, you’ve got a sphere of something like 3km radius.

looks further

It also looks like there’s some fancier thing that has both a gun and missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyranger_30

The Skyranger 30 is a short range air defense turret system developed by Rheinmetall Air Defence AG (formerly Oerlikon) and first revealed in March 2021. Its role is to provide ground units with a mobile system capable of engaging fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, Group I and II unmanned aerial systems (UAS), loitering munitions and cruise missiles.[1][2]

Assuming that the “Group I” here is the same as the US classification scheme for UASes and Germany isn’t doing some unrelated-but-similarly-named classification system, it’s intended for use against fairly small drones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle#Terminology

Group 1: Max take-off weight: < 20 lb (9.1 kg)

Group 2: Max take-off weight: > 20 & < 55

It won’t help with weather or provide a lot of cargo space or passenger room, but depending upon one’s use case, an ebike or motorcycle may work, and can provide fast road transit for less than a car.

It looks like the Hulu subreddit is full of unhappy people complaining about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Hulu/comments/1i1km60/hulu_just_logged_itself_out_on_my_roku_now_trying/

Doesn’t appear to be a Hulu Threadiverse community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

The video game crash of 1983 (known in Japan as the Atari shock)[1] was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985 in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of video game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality.

After this removed support of two libraries from curl, there is still support for ten different TLS libraries.

That’s bonkers. I didn’t even know that curl supported more than OpenSSL and GnuTLS.