January 2026 PCG Article Discussion

[BeardyHat]

As it turns out, I said a normal diffusion model couldn't do this, but they actually made a separate model to use with Flux that can do it.

That it can understand age as it relates to human physiology?

Generating images of minors aside, I still would like to get Flux working on SDXL, just because I'm curious to see how it works over various SD models. Can't recall if I tried it on my AMD setup or not yet.

Divinity: Original Sin 2's brilliant armor system is one of a kind in RPGs, and I'm bummed we'll apparently never see it again

Sic transit gloria mundi.

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I absolutely hated the armor system in DOS2. There's some comments attesting to this, but it felt like as soon as you broke someones armor, it just made more sense to try and fully kill them than it did to muck around with crowd control.

Crowd control is what made the first game so much fun. Opening a fight and immediately teleporting someone into some poison and then sending a fireball at them to get them to explode. I absolutely adored this style of combat in the first game and the second one pretty much ruined all of that for me; I never did get into the second game like I did the first and whenever I think about replaying one of the games again, it's always the first game that comes to mind.

 

[Zed Clampet]

That it can understand age as it relates to human physiology?

No, I meant Flux couldn't put a specific person into a picture without being trained on that person, but there's a separate model to use with Flux that will do it inside something called ControlNet.

Flux definitely understands age and human physiology. It also has gleaned lots of other not necessarily helpful things from looking at pictures of people. Like the older you get, the fatter you are and older women have shorter hair than younger women. Of course you can override that in the prompts, but you can't override the physiology, as I found when I was trying to make halflings. It refused not to make them children. If you put an age into your prompt, but Flux sees a physiological discrepancy, it will ignore the age you put in every single time. I ended up manually editing the pictures myself and then doing a training where I explained what they were, and then it was fine.

 

[BeardyHat]

No, I meant Flux couldn't put a specific person into a picture without being trained on that person, but there's a separate model to use with Flux that will do it inside something called ControlNet.

Flux definitely understands age and human physiology. It also has gleaned lots of other not necessarily helpful things from looking at pictures of people. Like the older you get, the fatter you are and older women have shorter hair than younger women. Of course you can override that in the prompts, but you can't override the physiology, as I found when I was trying to make halflings. It refused not to make them children. If you put an age into your prompt, but Flux sees a physiological discrepancy, it will ignore the age you put in every single time. I ended up manually editing the pictures myself and then doing a training where I explained what they were, and then it was fine.

That actually explains some things for me. I was trying to get Stable Diffusion to generate some pictures of my Halfling character in my D&D game and it was basically just making children. My Halfling is older and has grey hair, so...

 

[BeardyHat]

GOG's new owner can't stand Windows either: 'It's such poor-quality software… I can't believe it!'

He's just like me, for real.

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I agree with your comment on this one, Zed.

That said, Linux isn't the way yet, still. I do really like it, for all my grousing. Just yesterday I reinstalled it on my Surface Pro 7, because I was trying to resolve an issue with Civ 6 on that PC. Primarily, running Civ 6 at the native resolution in Windows is very slow, even on the lowest settings. Switching to a lower resolution causes the game to run in an unusable window that is only resolved by lowering DPI scaling to 100%, which causes the OS to become essentially unusable but then also causes the a graphics freeze, even though the program is still running. Think I mentioned all this in the gaming thread.

Anyway, I figured, let's install Linux and see what happens. So I installed Pop!_OS this time and got things (aside from the Surface Pen) working great. I even resolved the issue of the 200mhz throttling bug with the help of Copilot ( ) and I was on my way! Unfortunately, while I could now play Civ 6 at a low resolution full screen, the mouse was completely off. I had to move it half an inch above or to the side (it was variable) to get it to click what I wanted. Going native resolution fixed this, but of course, then the game ran terribly.

So I tried another game. Strategic Command: War in Europe. This one launched fine after a few different Proton selections, but only in a window (go figure), trying to change the graphics settings resulted in the game popping up another window that was half off the screen and immovable, making configuring the graphics options completely useless.

So I reinstalled Windows again.

I do suspect a lot of this on both Windows and Linux has to do with Intel and shoddy drivers in Windows and patchwork support in Linux. Because trying the same games on Steam Deck with the AMD APU works great, no issues at all. I'm half tempted to buy myself an all AMD laptop (wish I could find a tablet PC as nice as the Surface) just to experiment with Linux on it, because I feel like that would work much better. I could try my all AMD desktop, but again, I don't want to have to reconfigure all my server software. Perhaps I need another SSD to throw in there so I don't lose all my data...

 

[Pifanjr]

GOG's new owner can't stand Windows either: 'It's such poor-quality software… I can't believe it!'

He's just like me, for real.

www.pcgamer.com

I agree with your comment on this one, Zed.

That said, Linux isn't the way yet, still. I do really like it, for all my grousing. Just yesterday I reinstalled it on my Surface Pro 7, because I was trying to resolve an issue with Civ 6 on that PC. Primarily, running Civ 6 at the native resolution in Windows is very slow, even on the lowest settings. Switching to a lower resolution causes the game to run in an unusable window that is only resolved by lowering DPI scaling to 100%, which causes the OS to become essentially unusable but then also causes the a graphics freeze, even though the program is still running. Think I mentioned all this in the gaming thread.

Anyway, I figured, let's install Linux and see what happens. So I installed Pop!_OS this time and got things (aside from the Surface Pen) working great. I even resolved the issue of the 200mhz throttling bug with the help of Copilot ( ) and I was on my way! Unfortunately, while I could now play Civ 6 at a low resolution full screen, the mouse was completely off. I had to move it half an inch above or to the side (it was variable) to get it to click what I wanted. Going native resolution fixed this, but of course, then the game ran terribly.

So I tried another game. Strategic Command: War in Europe. This one launched fine after a few different Proton selections, but only in a window (go figure), trying to change the graphics settings resulted in the game popping up another window that was half off the screen and immovable, making configuring the graphics options completely useless.

So I reinstalled Windows again.

I do suspect a lot of this on both Windows and Linux has to do with Intel and shoddy drivers in Windows and patchwork support in Linux. Because trying the same games on Steam Deck with the AMD APU works great, no issues at all. I'm half tempted to buy myself an all AMD laptop (wish I could find a tablet PC as nice as the Surface) just to experiment with Linux on it, because I feel like that would work much better. I could try my all AMD desktop, but again, I don't want to have to reconfigure all my server software. Perhaps I need another SSD to throw in there so I don't lose all my data...

I've had issues with games not recognising where the mouse cursor was before (on Windows). I think that some games just don't do well if you screw around with the resolution.

As for Windows, I've been waiting on Steam OS to become available before I try to switch to Linux, because I don't want to spend too much time researching and trying out different Linux distros and I trust Steam OS to just work. Hopefully it becomes available for desktops before my extended Windows 10 support expires.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Gaming on Linux has just gotten better with the launch of Wine 11

We can expect better and more robust compatibility.

www.pcgamer.com

And we get closer....This will greatly help SteamOS apparently.