Enjoyed the first few hours of it. If you’re on the mood for a much more ambitious, Eurojank take on Oblivion, then it’s probably right up your alley. Highlight of the Steam sales for me so far.

Still wishlisted from the time you posted before! Good luck, FirsTimeDev, hope it goes well, and looking forward to it.

Unreal and Unreal Tournament, sure. I feel like all of their many sequels saw a continuous decline in quality, but the originals were great games. Can’t deny that Gears of War has been influential. Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097 were good for a laugh for ten minutes, but I can’t help but feel that they’ll have aged badly.

Seems crazy to think that Jill of the Jungle, which is an awful game, is what lined their pockets enough to develop the Unreal engine, and they were riding on the success of that all the way up to Fortnite.

Managed to snag free tickets to see them and Buckcherry warming up for Steel Panther a while back.

Bowling for Soup were absolutely superb; charismatic crowd-pleasers, loads of energy, top songs, great to watch. Buckcherry played for about twenty minutes and then fucked off, which is gutting because it was them that I really wanted to see. And then Steel Panther played for about two hours, faaaar too long for a one-joke band, and went past ‘satirically sleazy’ into just ‘sleazy’, which is not the same.

Take home message is really ‘go see Bowling for Soup’, I suppose.

The very last level, rendezvous at the mountain, isn’t all that difficult. Lots of pausing and scrolling to either end of the map, but as long as you can multitask then it’s doable. Playing through all the Mayhem levels to get there? Man alive. Managed it when I was a young teen, couldn’t do it for the life of me now.

The ‘win’ screen - a static picture of the devs, with a sampled sound of them applauding your efforts - is still one of the most rewarding endings to any game, I think. If you can get there, you deserve that.

GA is already fun size, so those greys must be teeny tiny.

Digital scoreboards? No-one will have the cash for that kind of RAM in future, Kolanaki. Going to have to go old-school for keeping our pinball scores.

It’s quite a valuable skill to be able to do it. You appreciate how all the bits of Linux fit together when you’ve done the whole installation from scratch, and know that’s there’s nothing particularly hard about compiling the kernel. Indeed, it’s one of the easiest packages to compile, got a great module selector and very few dependencies. You’re far more likely to be able to recover a borked system if you’ve got all the low-level skills.

Actually using Gentoo as your daily driver? Well, that’s a different matter. The problem with having complete control over every aspect of your system in every detail is that you’re also responsible for it. Arch (btw) is a bit more of a sensible middle ground. You retain most of the control and responsibility, but also have all those packages prebuilt and ready to work together, plus loads of great documentation.

Two mattresses? Is he expecting guests?

I’m assuming that his beer fridge is just out of shot, as well.

StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.

A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you’d expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don’t just have ‘colour textures’, they’re likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that’s another three times. The voice acting isn’t likely to be in a single language any more either, so there’ll be several copies of all the sound files.

A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. ‘Biggest’ game I have is Baldur’s Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That’s quite good, considering how much game that is!

I do agree with you. I can’t think of a single useful feature that’s been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it’s worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.

We can only hope so.

I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.

Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.

Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.

Well, you’ve had a lucky few months off. Our three just did not stop this year.

If your cat could explain to ours how to either eat all of the mouse or none of the mouse, that would be amazing. I don’t mind them feeding on low-carbon organic meals hand-prepared by local artisans, the hipsters. But I do mind stepping in all the bits and pieces that they didn’t care to finish.

Should probably run it quite well. BB was ‘designed for 30 fps’ and you’ll get more than that. Certainly run it better than it does on PS4, anyway.

Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.

Harfbuzz though? That’s going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that’s unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.

It doesn’t take too much of a graphics card to push a ten-year old game about, but you need quite a CPU to handle the emulation. I’ve just upgraded from a Ryzen 7 / 2700X (which struggled a bit, kept 30 fps though) to a Ryzen 9 / 5900XT, which does it quite well. Ironically, the RAM crisis seems to have made CPU upgrades a bit more affordable, since not so many people are buying either.

Higher resolutions need a fair amount of RAM, but we’re talking “a fair amount of RAM compared to a PS4” - if you’ve a few gigabytes of system and graphics card RAM, that should be plenty.

The licensing isn’t particularly difficult for Bloodborne - Sony own it, and their video game publishing arm is still a going concern. I doubt there’s any technical problem, since it’s on the same engine as Dark Souls 3, and that’s multi-platform. Could probably recompile it for PC and release it tomorrow, if they wanted to.

From consider it one of their masterpieces, and want to do any ‘HD’ remake themselves. They’ve had quite a few offers (I understand) by other companies who’d like to do it, but I think they’re aiming higher than unlocking 60 fps and a quick upres of the textures.

Sony have a bit of a complicated relationship with ‘primarily single player games’ and ‘multiplatform ports’. Since Xbox appears to be dying, they’ll have the only next-gen walled garden in town. Why share, when they could sell systems?

Any consolation, ShadPS4 can run BB at 4K / 60fps right now, if you want it? Need a bit of a beast of a PC, but can confirm you can play it all the way through, not too many issues.

Or that it’s the only link to the image; you just own one of the links.

I’ve installed both Arch (systemd) and Void (runit) on the same laptop as an experiment to see whether you could have them both coexisting on the same filesystem. (Which you can - main difficulty is keeping their kernel names separate in /boot.) There was very little difference between them in time-to-desktop. Arch was faster, if anything. And I run more services on a desktop than I would on a server.

Choosing init scripts over systemd is fine for philosophical reasons or if you prefer it for maintenance, but speed isn’t an issue. Init scripts are simpler, but systemd goes to great efforts to start things in parallel. Critical servers should be load-balanced and redundant anyway so that you can restart them for updates; whether they take a second longer to start-up doesn’t matter.

Maximum settings at 4K = rock-steady 144 fps. Not in power-saving mode, however! Rig is a Ryzen 9 5900XT cpu paired with a RX6700XT gpu, so probably higher-end but not top-tier.

It is a truly exceptional engine, that’s for sure. Have you seen Adrian Courrèges’ breakdown of a rendered frame? That tricks that it gets up to to keep things fast and smooth are really impressive.