September 2023 Random Game Thoughts Thread

[Colif]

The only people who wanted a metaverse were the people who were trying to make a metaverse,

They all wanted to be the one to start it, weren't really willing to share. So you probably right, it will happen... but how its started will be interesting. I expect there are going to be lots of fails, Meta was just first to try big.

now you hear about as much about it as NFT... remember those? Seemingly vanished overnight

 

[ZedClampet]

They all wanted to be the one to start it, weren't really willing to share. So you probably right, it will happen... but how its started will be interesting. I expect there are going to be lots of fails, Meta was just first to try big.

now you hear about as much about it as NFT... remember those? Seemingly vanished overnight

NFTs were worthless even before AI generated art. Now they are also hilarious. Somewhere out there is someone who is holding onto a million dollar collection of "bored ape" pictures. Makes me laugh.

 

[Colif]

Someone will make NFT work in a way that doesn't rely on scamming people, but actually uses technology right. They may not make it rich doing it, but there is possibly a use for it.

 

[Brian Boru]

patch had set default res to 8k

Geez. Was that for everyone, or maybe only for people with horrible taste in colors?

there have never been beavers in Ireland

Hey, I've always liked… Oh! Uh, never mind

metaverse idea seemed interesting

I agree with Zed's take, it's a certainty sometime. Bill Gates says we over-estimate what we can do in 2 years, and under-estimate what we can do in 10 years.

Probably serious effort later this decade, and into public in 30s.

 

[Zloth]

No Man's Sky seems to be getting a collection of ideas which seemed like they would be good but didn't pan out. One of those appears to be having a squadron. From what I've read, your squadron ships just don't do all that much damage compared to your own.

That makes sense when I think about it. If they were as capable as I was, I would only be getting the kill one in four times. I wouldn't be the hero anymore! PERISH the thought!!

That makes me wonder about the AI in Mechwarrior 5. Your buddies in that game are... kinda dumb. Not nearly as bad as the NMS case, but when the final scores are tallied, you'll likely have more kills than the other three mechs combined. (Unless you get a mod to help them out.) Could that be done on purpose so you can feel superior? Plenty of people complain about how dumb the other mechs are, but maybe there are legions that are happy with the situation?

 

[Pifanjr]

No Man's Sky seems to be getting a collection of ideas which seemed like they would be good but didn't pan out. One of those appears to be having a squadron. From what I've read, your squadron ships just don't do all that much damage compared to your own.

That makes sense when I think about it. If they were as capable as I was, I would only be getting the kill one in four times. I wouldn't be the hero anymore! PERISH the thought!!

That makes me wonder about the AI in Mechwarrior 5. Your buddies in that game are... kinda dumb. Not nearly as bad as the NMS case, but when the final scores are tallied, you'll likely have more kills than the other three mechs combined. (Unless you get a mod to help them out.) Could that be done on purpose so you can feel superior? Plenty of people complain about how dumb the other mechs are, but maybe there are legions that are happy with the situation?

It's probably a very hard balance act to have companions that feel useful without making the player feel obsolete, since player skill varies so wildly.

 

[Johnway]

so i saw that planet coaster was going for just over £5 (after paypal charges etc) so i decided to snag it. I doubt i was going to get it at any better price. now i turn my attention to getting the DLC and yeah... i was somewhat taken aback by the cost. The irony is that the DLC would have cost MORE then the base game. I only want 5 of them (world pack, studio, spooky, adventure and at a push classic). i'm probably in no rush to get them as i'm not buying the game but it still leaves a bad taste.

Still playing Path of exile. i thought i was out, but i had enough to push for another 4 challenges to get the helmet. question is whether after that i could do 6 more to get the torso i wanted. A tricky situation either lots of needless grinding or need to splash the cash.

 

[ZedClampet]

No Man's Sky seems to be getting a collection of ideas which seemed like they would be good but didn't pan out. One of those appears to be having a squadron. From what I've read, your squadron ships just don't do all that much damage compared to your own.

That makes sense when I think about it. If they were as capable as I was, I would only be getting the kill one in four times. I wouldn't be the hero anymore! PERISH the thought!!

That makes me wonder about the AI in Mechwarrior 5. Your buddies in that game are... kinda dumb. Not nearly as bad as the NMS case, but when the final scores are tallied, you'll likely have more kills than the other three mechs combined. (Unless you get a mod to help them out.) Could that be done on purpose so you can feel superior? Plenty of people complain about how dumb the other mechs are, but maybe there are legions that are happy with the situation?

Except that in Mechwarrior, you have to pay to repair those idiots. I was basically going to have to start my game over and ended up never going back to it.

In NMS are you talking about the ships you hire to follow your freighter? If so, those are mostly just for sending out on missions, and they do a great job at that. But, of course, they will fight if there's a fight nearby or if something is endangering the freighter. I didn't notice them being worse than any other companion NPCs. They're better than the enemies, whom they will defeat if you wander off in the middle of a fight. One time I had been in so many consecutive fights that I just left. I wanted a new freighter anyway, but they won the fight with no apparent problems.

They just aren't as fast at killing things as you are, so you always get most of the kills. Of course, their ships don't have nearly the firepower or maneuverability that mine had, either. My ship was essentially a maxed out fighter while they were just normal NPC ships. I could have killed them all with no problems, so I always kind of thought that the game cheated in their favor since I never lost any of them. You do have to board them and repair their ships from time to time (rarely), so maybe I was just lucky that I didn't lose any.

 

[ZedClampet]

Hahaha I just found a cheese in Big Ambitions that destroys the huge nerf they just put out. There's no way I'm going to say what it is, and I doubt that hardly anyone has noticed it since hardly anyone plays the game correctly (does things the developer tells them not to do). If I mention what it is, they might find out and they would definitely nerf it with an emergency patch. Every update includes more and more nerfs. For some reason they hate you making money.

 

[Colif]

SO i beat first area of Pile Up. It took a while to work out a strategy, I won't say I can do it every time...
Second area might take a while. But that is fine.

Doesn't help the item drops are random and you rarely get them in the order you want.

 

[ZedClampet]

Well, naturally I wasn't the first who noticed the cheese. Someone else uploaded a blueprint that takes advantage of it. Hopefully the devs don't notice and wonder why it's built that way.

I'm usually pretty good at interior decorating, but I made a hideous clothing store tonight. I couldn't get the right shade of blue on the color wheel, and every time I tried, it cost me $2000, so I finally gave up. I'll probably never go back to that store again anyway.

This is kind of a generic, mini-department store if you ever wondered what a store in Big Ambitions looks like. The glass walls are pointless except that they create a more ordered look. I didn't put any other decorations in this store because I just wanted it simple and because there really isn't enough room in this sized store because the NPCs get stuck on everything. I have some crazy looking stores that I built with the Fire and Ice theme that I'm using this game. If I end up in the right neighborhood, I might take a screenshot of one or two.

You would never put a register where this one is in a real store, but it makes it easier to order your products in small stores if you just ignore where a register should actually go and just put it in the middle of the store.

 

[Colif]

90% of the time in this game, I fail because I blew up half my town... One of the buildings is a casino, and 2 out of 3 of the rewards are harmless, the 3rd is a stick of dynamite and well, I just give up at that point as generally no safe place to put it... its an AOE so I have blown up half my town with one placement... hard to remember where you have other things that explode... like electricity substations and gas tanks

Very few times do I fail because I have too many demands... below was one such

still on island two. MIght take a while. Its harder when you have all the items unlocked, some of them just aren't much fun.

Game needs to stop taking me to shop after end of game... I have all the items now... its a waste of time.

 

[ZedClampet]

It's interesting that so many people who have hardware questions are using or planning to use AMD, and yet the Steam hardware survey suggests that hardly anyone is on AMD.

Maybe people who build their own rigs frequently use AMD, but people who buy prebuilt usually end up with Nvidia and Intel?

****

I bet EA is having fits over the fact that BG3 is selling millions and millions of copies after EA and Bioware decided to make the next Dragon Age an action RPG.

 

[Colif]

its unclear how Steam actually collects that data so whether its accurate or not is a good question

Proper statistics is that the survey should run randomly, with no way to circumvent that. It doesn't matter that you just upgraded hardware! You're still just a single potential sample point. If it ran automatically for everyone that swapped a component, it would skew massively toward new hardware.

The real problem is that Valve has never given any fully clear indication of how it does the sampling. Is it truly random, like it should be? We don't know. Probably. But then you were able to give instructions that show how to circumvent the random sampling. How many people are using that to mess up the data gathering, and can Valve do anything to eliminate those results? Again, we don't know.

What Valve should do is provide some formalized statement on the statistics used. Something like: "We use random sampling, gathering data from over 100,000 selected Steam PCs every month. This gives us a 95% confidence level and helps to explain minor month-to-month fluctuations."

It would also be good to automatically pull out any GPU with over 0.01% of the market share. It looks like Valve does this on the API page, but I seriously doubt that's correct. Otherwise, why are there still 0.73% of GPUs that are "unknown," and are you really telling me that the 7900 XTX has 0.23% (but doesn't show up on the API pages!), while the 7900 XT and 7600 have less than 0.01%? I call shenanigans!

More critically, why do all of the numbers for DirectX 12 sum up to 89.92% in August? That literally makes zero sense. I could see if the numbers summed to maybe 98% or more, but there are only 213 GPUs for DX12. With a maximum 0.01 rounding error, that means only a 2.13% total error would be possible. That would require every GPU to be rounded down from for example 0.0199 to 0.01, and the total would still sum up to around 98%. Which means Valve is doing something else, without explanation. (And the Vulkan numbers are even more stupid, as they sum up to around 180% total — looks like everything gets counted twice.)

https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...g-rx-7000-market-share.3819373/#post-23091553 - it was talked about here a few weeks ago.

There is a distinct lack of any new AMD cards on current charts. Would expect some 7900 on there by now. I have played Steam games all year, I must be invisible.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

It's interesting that so many people who have hardware questions are using or planning to use AMD, and yet the Steam hardware survey suggests that hardly anyone is on AMD.

Maybe people who build their own rigs frequently use AMD, but people who buy prebuilt usually end up with Nvidia and Intel?

****

There's a lot to that question. Basically AMD cards are really good value at the middle and lower end, so when youre speccing a rig out they make a lot of sense. AMD also tends to have more VRAM at the same price point which is a better value for longevity.

The drivers are on a par and have been for a long time in my experience. Had AMD HD7950 from 2012-2014, then Nvidia GTX 780 and 980Ti until 2020 when I bought my current RX5700XT. Equally decent experience with both companies software.

Nvidia always had better marketing, and almost always has the fastest card on the market so theres a prestige to the brand which helps sell to people with only a passing interest in the tech.

 

[ZedClampet]

its unclear how Steam actually collects that data so whether its accurate or not is a good question




https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...g-rx-7000-market-share.3819373/#post-23091553 - it was talked about here a few weeks ago.

There is a distinct lack of any new AMD cards on current charts. Would expect some 7900 on there by now. I have played Steam games all year, I must be invisible.

I think, overall, it gives a ballpark figure that is somewhat reliable, but should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. Their sampling is not the best and some months you can look at previous results and realize that something is definitely wrong somewhere. I think the survey must not take a random sampling from all over the world because some of these results can only be explained by concentrating samples in a single area.

It needs to be weighted by number of users per country. If China is #1 or #2 in number of active Steam users, then they need to be surveyed accordingly. Instead, I have a feeling that developing countries with relatively few users must be oversampled.

It also needs to be weighted towards buyers, people who actively purchase games. Steam has hundreds of millions of members, but how many of those only play one game? The survey is supposed to be for developers. Developers shouldn't care about the 50 million people who only play CSGO, a game that could literally run on a smart toaster. To be useful to developers you need to survey people from their actual market.

 

[ZedClampet]

There's a lot to that question. Basically AMD cards are really good value at the middle and lower end, so when youre speccing a rig out they make a lot of sense. AMD also tends to have more VRAM at the same price point which is a better value for longevity.

The drivers are on a par and have been for a long time in my experience. Had AMD HD7950 from 2012-2014, then Nvidia GTX 780 and 980Ti until 2020 when I bought my current RX5700XT. Equally decent experience with both companies software.

Nvidia always had better marketing, and almost always has the fastest card on the market so theres a prestige to the brand which helps sell to people with only a passing interest in the tech.

As far as the drivers go, I just go off of past PCG articles and user complaints. I researched a long-standing CSGO/AMD driver problem just a couple of weeks ago. Of course, there could be similar problems with some Nvidia cards/drivers that I just don't know about. I know that the 3070ti hasn't always had a smooth ride.

As for the PCG articles, I can't remember any details, so I should probably stop using that as evidence

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

As far as the drivers go, I just go off of past PCG articles and user complaints. I researched a long-standing CSGO/AMD driver problem just a couple of weeks ago. Of course, there could be similar problems with some Nvidia cards/drivers that I just don't know about. I know that the 3070ti hasn't always had a smooth ride.

As for the PCG articles, I can't remember any details, so I should probably stop using that as evidence

Both AMD and Nvidia's latest drivers can do very bad things to your gaming PC

But there are workarounds should even the worst happen.

www.pcgamer.com

Amazon's New World MMO is reportedly killing $1,500 Nvidia GPUs

Amazon says that the game is safe, but is patching it following "a few" reports of bricked graphics cards.

www.pcgamer.com

Revisiting AMD's 19.7.1 drivers and the RX 5700 launch

A closer look at AMD's 19.7.1 drivers and an explanation for the RX 5700's sometimes questionable performance.

www.pcgamer.com

Some of the bigger one I remember from the last few years. Probably other on both sides

 

[Colif]

like I said in that thread I quoted, I really don't take any notice of it. Its only really useful for devs who might want to aim games at most common level of graphics. Or people who like to buy what everyone else is buying... I generally don't follow crowds.

i used to fix BSOD on Toms, I saw way more Nvidia driver problems than AMD. They do have market share though, so there is that. I could identify AMD cards by specific errors. But they weren't common.

Only had a AMD GPU since January but so far no driver problems for me. I think there is just a belief their drivers are bad, I don't see much evidence recently. Adrenalin has features Geforce Experience doesn't. Can't overclock from inside drivers for instance.

 

[Pifanjr]

My kid gets bored of video games about as quickly as I do, which is a bit of a problem as my backlog doesn't contain that many child friendly games and she's fairly picky about what she'll play.

So I decided to check an abandonware site for old games I used to play as a kid. Most of the educational ones are still a bit above her level. We played some Treasure Mathstorm! and the very start was doable for her, but the difficulty jumped quite a bit after the first two rounds. I'm hoping I can get her to stick with it, as it is great practice.

I also got her Petz! 5, which was a great success so far. I suspect she'll get bored of it pretty quickly as well, but so far she's really into it.

 

[ZedClampet]

My kid gets bored of video games about as quickly as I do, which is a bit of a problem as my backlog doesn't contain that many child friendly games and she's fairly picky about what she'll play.

So I decided to check an abandonware site for old games I used to play as a kid. Most of the educational ones are still a bit above her level. We played some Treasure Mathstorm! and the very start was doable for her, but the difficulty jumped quite a bit after the first two rounds. I'm hoping I can get her to stick with it, as it is great practice.

I also got her Petz! 5, which was a great success so far. I suspect she'll get bored of it pretty quickly as well, but so far she's really into it.

When my niece was really little, she had zero experience with games (unlike your child who is already getting game savvy, I suspect), and when she would come over, she and I would sit in the floor with the Sega Genesis and play Sonic, except that her controller didn't do anything. I was the one playing. But she would sit there forever, wrestling with her controller, pushing buttons, etc. She absolutely loved it. Every time she came over that was the first thing she wanted to do.

When she got in her twenties, we were all together one time, and my wife mentioned to her that when we played Sonic it was actually just me, and she said, "Aw! I remembered being really good at that!"

 

[ZedClampet]

Bunch of AMD fanboys Just kidding.

I honestly couldn't care less either way, but Nvidia is the clear technology leader, and AMD is struggling to catch up with ray tracing, path tracing, super sampling and especially AI. Meanwhile AMD is trying to brute force performance parity by squeezing more VRAM into every card.

I've had AMD before and loved it and would gladly buy it again the next time I upgrade my desktop if the price/performance is correct, and if they won't hamper my ability to run the latest graphics fads and AI. I really don't care that much about ray tracing and such, but I'm running a lot of AI on my computers, and pretty much all the AI needs Nvidia to run properly. They don't even have instructions for AMD. If you don't have Nvidia, you have to use your CPU, which takes forever.

 

[Zloth]

Except that in Mechwarrior, you have to pay to repair those idiots. I was basically going to have to start my game over and ended up never going back to it.

Heheh, that's true! I'm dubious about a lot of those repairs - I think the chief engineer might be in cahoots with the mech pilots.

Sorry, I'm confused as to whether you were talking about frigates or fighters - probably because I haven't gotten my 'free freighter' yet, so most of my knowledge is 3 years old.

 

[ZedClampet]

Heheh, that's true! I'm dubious about a lot of those repairs - I think the chief engineer might be in cahoots with the mech pilots.

Sorry, I'm confused as to whether you were talking about frigates or fighters - probably because I haven't gotten my 'free freighter' yet, so most of my knowledge is 3 years old.

Eh, never mind. If you already have a squadron but don't have your free freighter, then we are talking about two different things. The squadron must be something new. It has been a good while since I played.

Hey, I don't have it downloaded, so I can't check. Can you have more than one game going at a time? I wouldn't mind starting fresh, but I'm hesitant to delete all my old progress. I put a lot of hours into that. Plus if I ever play with Guido again, that would be the save I would need.

******

Random thought. If I'm playing a game and press the <escape> key, I expect to see the options to save and to exit the game. Developers usually get the "save" part right, but I have a bunch of games that I have no idea how to quit. Granted, I'm putting more time into this post than I spent looking for how to quit. I just force shut them down. I feel strongly, however, that closing the game should be a basic feature that you don't have to spend time looking around for. I've played The Crew Motorfest and Megaaquarium several times in the last few days and haven't properly shut down either one because I refuse to spend any of my life searching for the "exit" option.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Bunch of AMD fanboys Just kidding.

I honestly couldn't care less either way, but Nvidia is the clear technology leader, and AMD is struggling to catch up with ray tracing, path tracing, super sampling and especially AI. Meanwhile AMD is trying to brute force performance parity by squeezing more VRAM into every card.

I've had AMD before and loved it and would gladly buy it again the next time I upgrade my desktop if the price/performance is correct, and if they won't hamper my ability to run the latest graphics fads and AI. I really don't care that much about ray tracing and such, but I'm running a lot of AI on my computers, and pretty much all the AI needs Nvidia to run properly. They don't even have instructions for AMD. If you don't have Nvidia, you have to use your CPU, which takes forever.

Yea CUDA is used a ton in the professional space as well as the tensor cores., I dont think theres much contest in most stuff outside of gaming. At least not last time I actually looked.

What Nvidia has been doing for the last 10 years at least is release prorietary technologies that only work on their GPUs and charge a massive premium to access them. There was PhysX, (which they bought) stuff like TXAA, GameWorks(Hair works!) games, then we had Gsync, now Ray Tracing and DLSS. AMD then tends to come along and provide an alternative to Nvidias tech that doesnt quite work as well, but well enough, and is platform agnostic plus cheaper to access which after a couple years becomes the market norm.

I'd bet stuff like DLSS/FSR/XESS goes exactly the same way. At teh end of the day game devs dont really want to work with one company or the other, I'm sure theyd much rather just make games that work on all hardware.