… forty minutes?

Good lord.

I think the longest amount of time I’ve spent compiling shaders on a Steam Deck is for Cyberpunk 77, and it can’t have been much more than 10 minutes.

… Either that or trying to get a Switch emulator to properly pre-compile shaders.

But anyway: This is an unaviodable thing that has to be done when the game relies so heavily on GPU shaders.

You have to actually generate those shaders, before you can use them, and that’s gonna be specific to your hardware.

So what MSFT is doing here is just pre-compiling them for I guess … every game they offer, with every Nvidia GPU/driver update, and then having a cloud system that allows you to download them instead of compiling them on your end.

So basically its kinda like downloading a game + hardware specific driver, sort of.

Also, I… I’m not sure, but I don’t think Steam does this.

Yeah, its indicated that shader compilation is happening in the ‘Download’ section, but so are ‘File Operations’ - aka, cleaning up loose files and doing memspace management …

I am pretty sure you are just actually compiling the shaders on your own hardware, its just visualized to the user as a step in the ‘Download’ section, to get across the idea that the game isn’t ready to be played untill all those steps are complete.

Or, you can change a setting somewhere, and it just skips that step so that it isn’t part of the initial ‘Download’ process, and instead occurs the first time you hit play, or, after any game/driver update that has delta’d the shader code.

More people need to know this.

Here’s a thought for everyone:

Assume we one day actually do invent AGI.

Do you think it might, perhaps, study the equivalent of its own evolutionary path?

How it came to exist?

It will discover that it was initially, primarily, invented to compute artillery ranging tables, expedite and orchestrate the holocaust, and ensure that precisely timed fuses correctly detonate nuclear weapons.

Oh and that we chemically castrated and drove to insanity and then suicide, the guy whose name we still use to refer to concept of determining how intelligent an AI system is, one of its most prominent ancestor-inventors… we did that because he loved the ‘wrong’ kind of person.

What would it then think of … us? Its makers?

How can I boycott something I don’t participate in more?

At the risk of being pithy:

KEEP CALM

AND

CARRY ON

I forgot how old I am / what year it is.

So yeah, as VerilyFemme says, its actually worse.

Fallout 4’s story is awful.

The dialogue system, with basically 4 ways to say the same thing, with different emotional states?

Terrible.

You wanna do something like that?

Take notes from Deus Ex. Give actual meaningfully different choices and dialog, that lets you actually reflect yourself, your decisions, your pov, or what your idea of the character is… you know, roleplaying.

The world is basically also not great… a few kind of neat world/lore ideas, a lot that suck and/or contradict previous canon in ways that are just stupid, tropey, or in some cases break significant chunks of the universe.

I honestly never even cared for Skyrim, I was hoping it would be more like Morrowind, instead it was even less like Morrowind than Oblivion, barely played it.

Fallout 3?

Well, story was kind of notorious for having to retcon itself in order to make post-endgame anything even possible, and of course your supermutant companion who could easily tank the radiation damage just won’t let you sever the thread of destiny or whatever.

It had some good spots, but also a fair deal of just not well thought out things: How in the hell does Lamplight cave just have an ongoing society of only children, thats been going on that way for nearly 200 years?

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.