dmir

Battlefield + Counter-Strike.

Battlefield for scale and gameplay, Counter-Strike (like, 1.6) for paying for everything on your loadout, including guns, attachments, grenades, ammunition, other utility, and whatever vehicular stuff goes into this, because of the Battlefield aspect.

I’m finding the progression to be very smart - earlier levels felt more difficult actually because I wasn’t accustomed to the way the developers set things up. I can’t describe it too well, but as you keep solving stuff, you kind of know what to expect and have the idea of the what the solution might look like sooner, and you sort of work backwards from there.

If you want more puzzles, The Witness is also a great title. Although I found it to be downright maddening at times despite being able to beat it. I really like the variety of puzzles there, realy unique in that regard and its design. Hunting for secrets and extra stuff there takes lot, tol, though, but it’s all so beautiful and rewarding.

Times are tough, but I think a security architect is one of the positions that lets you choose an employer based on morals as well, because it pays well, and if Flock is already considering you, you probably have experience and money to pursue some integrity.

Pretty much this. I’ve been living under authoritarianism my whole life and such things are just clear as day.

Same reason so many social media or tech CEOs don’t really let their kids use the product: they know it sucks and it’s not good for you nor does it respect you or your data, they know how important privacy is - just not for you.

Is The Talos Principle old enough to end up here? If it is, then I’m recommending it with great ease. Feels like such a great puzzler with little to no action or reflexes required, a lovely magnitudes of secrets to hunt, both apparently tied to progression and just Easter eggs, and a lot of optional reading if you’re into lore-diving.

It’s from Croteam, the people behind Serious Sam, although I can’t say how much of the original crew worked on The Talos Principle. Still, their own engine offers itself very well to puzzle-solving and exploration through walking (or sprinting).

Such a gem.

If you can’t make the decision for yourself, especially such a inconsequential one, probably just rolle the dice or something. It can even be fun when you define multiple criteria and roll of each, ending up doing something that you already might have anyway, because it’s in your pool, but there’s still kind of discovery here, like you stumble upon something from your own collection.

I was thinking of the pressure difference and a spacesuit that allowed enough dexterity to do combat.

And again, with Xenonite, shooting it even in the right spot is kinda too tricky for the terrans.

There actually might be no war at all, because some things make warfare between these two species that much more difficult.

Behind the spoiler are details from Project Hail Mary, so if you’re planning on reading/watching it yourself, best not to look there.

Sugar free drinks are taxed at 20c/l

Does that include artificial sweeteners? I have some sort of prejudice against them that I couldn’t substantiate with research, but one thing is certain: none of them felt good to me.

I am much happier with drinking less sweet beverages overall, but made with regular sugar. Actually tend to spend less that way, even if I pay more for less - I just happen to be buying that much less frequently that way.

I feel like this comment covers this pretty well: https://lemmy.world/comment/25336159

Every time I read something like this I realize just how little people understand how these things work.

The tiniest LLMs you can run on your machine are 1B, those take around 10TB of unrepeatable and well varied text to train. Let me put this into perspective, if you downloaded the whole Wikipedia, you would get 1% of the amount of data needed to train the tiniest LLM you can run. Do you think you can ethically source the remaining 99%?

What kind of game size should we expect then? Or have another “reason” to let a single-player game connect to the internet all the time so it can make API calls to remote datacenters? Isn’t it hot enough? Aren’t we in a bad enough point in time in this planet’s climate and economy?

Not to mention that having such NPCs would become the perfect excuse for the executives to expand the initiative, gradually onto the more regular and crucial NPCs and story bits, because to them, the more they can replace with AI, maybe the more KPI they get to meet and grow even fatter wallets, which is really all they care about - that will likely be coupled with increased pressure on the remaining writers, what with the beloved downsizing and all, rapidly leading to poorer quality. I don’t see how AI slop dialogue lines that definitely won’t be as instant as it is now, because whether it’s a local model or an API call, you’re subject to waiting for the lines to generate and make it to you.

There’s just no angle where even this case of only having AI take over backdrop NPCs is justifiable. The little fun that is poses is only appealing because of its novelty, but it won’t lead to a revolution in engagement and rich worldbuilding or interaction that would make the resources wasted make any sense.

There are already comments, even here, saying that it’s okay for filler NPCs and non-crucial interactions. And with the executives, this might be the perfect start, an Overton window that they slowly (if that) push open further and further, replacing more and more of the human in the art process in the name of profit.

The latter is especially disappointing, not because these people don’t care or understand art, but because the profit here is illusory, almost entirely upstream, lies in pure speculation, and kills the planet and economies at a pace that’s practically unseen. They only do it because they think everybody else is doing it and they can’t be left behind, lest the line doesn’t up and they don’t talk about the current trend on another bullshit meeting.

The corporate world is such a mistake.

The difference is real life has immeasurably more entropy and variance and randomness. Fiction is created, with intention, and good open world game design is one that leads and pushes and hints at things, preferably without being explicit - unless this explicitness is itself (mis)leading you somewhere or is just the McGuffin of the story.

Fiction without intention, even in its smaller, seemingly random encounters and details, is just messy and disrespects your time.

I love Remedy games, but Alan Wake 2 makes me think they’re not that into performance and optimization. Control mostly did okay in this regard probably thanks to being developed before such a heavy reliance on upscaling and ray tracing.

I think we have reasons to suspect that Control Resonant is going to both be a fantastic action game with some great worldbuilding, and run pretty terribly.

Stuff like this makes me think that upgrading my GPU is actually not as daunting, because how powerful the upgrade will be is going to be heavily negated by some games’ architecture.

That actually makes me wonder how come there’s relatively few such universes and stories arouns, given that suits and highly-secretive special forces are actually pretty popular in fiction. Maybe I’m overestimating the interest in such fiction.

I would like more stuff like Control and Men in Black, especially in gaming, with deep and explorable lore and world. But I think such stories basically happen as a response to something, like the SCP and the likes being a phenomenon rather than somethin (easily) reproducible, and Men in Black being a metaphor for migration and assimilation more than anything. At some point, there’s just nothing else to say about a thing from a given angle, and instead of feeling fresh and welcome and exciting, a new entry to a theme feels stale and meaningless, completely lacking anything interesting or captivating.

Which, I think, is what Control Resonant seems to try and do right by going outside The Oldest House and turning to a different kind of gameplay and worldbuilding. I think we’ll still be able to uncover stuff through reading and optional dialogue, but I doubt it will have the same form or extent as the first game.

Speaking of Control Resonant - are you even interested in it given this shift? Please be careful with plot details, as I haven’t finished the first game yet.

I was really into SCP when it came out, and it was such a gift. Probably my favorite third-person shooter, both for its atmosphere and combat. I especially like the amount of stuff to just read and get absorbed in the lore, wonder at how the place used to look like under non-crisis circumstances.

Great screenshots! Really capture the enigmatic feel that invites you to explore the world.

Any people waiting for the sequel here, how do you feel about combat in the upcoming game? Seems like it’s going to be more melee-focused, which isn’t my thing, but I like and respect that they’re trying to do something different as opposed to making more of the same thing. That’s the same reason I love the DOOM series - that variety helps each entry have its place instead of feeling like a DLC essentially.

Hard disagree.

There’s some debate to have here about neuroplasticity and whether cursive handwriting (or the process of learning something involving both the cognitive resources and some rather fine hand, wrist, fingers, a bit of an arm movement), but one thing is certain: it’s a faster way to write stuff down.

I have tried journaling and other writing both in printed and cursive, and the former makes me not write at all, because there’s not enough time in this world for me to be my verbose self on paper when trying to write legible printed letters.

Cursive is just that fast. Faster if you learn to write shorter forms of the same words. Even faster if you learn some special systems, but that’s a different rabbit hole.

But I will admit that learning to be concise with one’s words without losing meaning and gravity is also beneficial, even if only for trying to push Alzheimer’s and others further into the future.

The senile presidents, ministers, MPs and other officials are salivating so hard right now.

Very much this.

I remember being so excited for cloud gaming as a kid, before the term was coined or the concept was widely there - I just kept thinking to myself how cool it would be to be able to play any games I want on my less-than-capable PC. Couldn’t even imagine the tech actually arriving one day.

And by the time it did, I’ve become so disenchanted with technology that reaches mainstream, because you’re just so right: it becomes a very aggressive money-making machine that treats you without any respect and only wants more.

I would rather pay more for less thanks to the rampocalypse, play with stutters and terrible FPS on lowest settings, than let a Take-Two CEO and others have us rent games and computing power.

What you’re describing is exactly what I’m wondering. Maybe I’m just not too deep into the topic, but it seems so arbitrary to me that they went with the whole isolation thing in the first place for no reason that I can see, other than the “oh no, it’s hacking stuff!” narrative being pre-planned and orchestrated for.

In other words, I am siding with the accusations of this whole wave of “AI” suddenly hacking into stuff, with different models from different companies wondrously doing the same thing one after another, being a publicity stunt that one company started and others, as they do, copying just to stay relevant.

Although I feel like maybe I’m going Chuck McGill here because I am very biased.

Am I just stupid for not believing that any of the models actually did any of that on their own? I feel like the companies behind them start claiming crazy shit like this every time people start questioning “AI” more and/or losing interest. Isn’t that how OpenAI dropped Sora amidst the dwindling hype to keep the investors hooked? Now it’s back to scary stories about “AI” being so good and advanced that it’s about to hack everything and what, actually think for itself?

There is no X big enough for me to press to doubt this enough.