I make comments to the effect of that article, and I still get replies like ‘gotta eat somehow’.

Yeah, x2, Fuck’ em.

I could have made more money working for an evil company as a sysadmin.

You know what I did?

I made less money working for a considerably less evil Non Profit that helped homeless people, instead.

Fuck 'em.

Please Iran, you have very correctly identified critical components of the US intelligence system, which spies domestically and internationally.

… That answer exists in the top comment.

It’s from an episode of Magnum PI.

No, because it’s the property of a business.

Ah, well, I’ve never had a partner with any interest in strategy games.

Foreign concept to me.

That is a pretty good reason to care about multiplayer tho, lol.

I mean they have been rolling out updates and fixes since launch, couple of content packs, balance tweaks, reworked a number of systems…

They’re currently working on a scenario, WW2 Pacific, sounds at least broadly similar to the kinds of scenarios in earlier Civ games, in concept.

I would hope that after that, they can eventually get to something approaching proper mod tools.

Yeah, it was a bit of a buggy mess of a launch, no arguing that, but they have been and are still just slowly refining and improving the game.

Of the seemingly fairly small number of people still playing it… Recent Reviews = Mostly Positive.

Personally, I don’t know why you’d play any deep strategy game multiplayer.

Every time I’ve tried multiplayer, in any 4X / Grand Strategy game… everyone is annoyed that I am taking too long, to, you know, evaluate this considerably complex strategy game, with tons of potential upside to taking your time to micro manage things.

If I am able to take my time, I tend to snowball and by mid or late game, be either winning to the point everyone else quits, or be the only reason why a group of players vs group of AIs game has not totally fallen apart yet.

But I am one of those apparently rare people who plays single player on the biggest maps and slowest time scales my system can manage…

… I just have way more enjoyment that way, and I appreciate that the AI in Humankind at least seems to me to be generally better at playing the game than most AIs in most 4X / Grand Strat games, when the player and AIs are on an equal footing in terms of bonuses/maluses.

I do not know what that is, but now I need to go find out.

Uh, ‘hot take’:

People who do this are inconsiderate assholes, in one way or another.

Peaked at Civ 4, been downhill from there.

If the idea of having Civs that change with the era, but Leaders who stay the same appeals to you…

Humankind did it better than Civ 7.

Star Wars Galaxies Emu is still going strong, and is more recently undergoing a massive renovation with one private server expanding/reworking parts of it.

https://swgr.org/pages/about/

IIRC, she is actually pulling out a gun to shoot him, but he is faster.

I mean, they stopped having good stories and worlds 10 years ago.

If the demand is for business use cases… its more so that yes the demand is there, or at least was, but the returns are not.

Every industry projection of productivity gains from implementing LLMs into their businesses was wildly, wildly overestimsating how much it would actually help any given business.

So its basically all a massive leveraged bet on the idea that LLMs will be able to usefully automate tasks that used to be done by people… but for the most part, it can’t.

And that’s partially because the capabilities of LLMs are absurdly overhyped, and partially because most businesses internal software set up is a clusterfuck nightmare of smashed together contractor modules and services that barely works, because management tells developers to just keep putting bandaids on things snd writing spaghetti code, never letting them do a proper refactor/restructure.

Yep.

They need us willing to die and fight over the scraps, not think about why.

I was going to make a Kosher joke, but it felt like it was missing something…

Yeah, you kinda defeated your own argument there, but you do seem to recognize that.

You can instant resume on a Steam Deck, basically.

You can alt tab on a PC, at least with a stable game that is well made and not memory leaking.

Yeah, better RAM / SSDs does mean lower loading times, higher streaming speeds/bus bandwidths, but literally, at what cost?

You could just actually take the time to optimize things, find non insanely computationally expensive ways to do things that are more clever, instead of just saying throw more/faster ram at it.

RAM and SSD costs per gig are going up now.

Moore’s Law is not only dead, it has inverted.

Constantly cheaper memory going forward turned out to not the best assumption to make.

By taking away bread and security from others, with extra steps?

It is our collective propsenity to shrug at the inevitability of the system that makes the system inevitable.

FAB is the merger of the Unreal Asset Store, Quixel, and Sketchfab, which increasingly has more and more Unity assets on it.

Unity is no longer doing HDRP.

Unity is also generally financially floundering.

Tencent owns 40% of Unreal.

Tencent bails out financially floundering gaming companies by purchasing significant controlling stakes in those companies.

… conclusion:

Tencent owns a large share of Unity, we just don’t know about it officially/publically yet.

Large known investors in Unity include:

Vanguard

BlackRock

Sequoia Capital

Silver Lake Technology Management

Wellington Capital Management

… all of these either literally are Private Credit/Equity firms, or they have significant exposure to Private Credit/Equity firms.

At the moment, and over the last 6 months roughly… Private Credit/Equity firms are basically all undergoing the Private Credit/Equity equivalent of a bank run.

They need cash NOW, so they sell to Tencent, Tencent establishes said controlling or at least substantial position, starts giving orders to Unity.

Thus, Tencent owns substantial parts of both Unreal and Unity.

… but thats just a GAME theory!!!

PC games are software.

Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.

Proton can only do so much.

… and Metal basically can’t do that that much.

Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.

They haven’t really.

They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.

Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.

Anon, both you and your dad are probably autistic.

XiaoXiao stick fighter games were absolutely awesome.