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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I want to like this, but some of that mocap animation looks really off. Especially in those scenes with the idol and where indie is slamming down that stone. Looks like the mocap actor was holding back and that the idol weighs less than it should. It’s probably going to be okay, but after the excellent mocap work in games like God of War, where the animation really conveys a sense of weight, and in comparison to the Indiana Jones films this looks a bit floaty and like Indie is pulling his punches.








  • Why would you want another year of their software for free? This is their second screw up (apparently they sent out a bad update that affected some Debian and RHEL machines a couple years ago). I’d be transitioning to a competitor at the first opportunity. It seems they aren’t testing releases before pushing them out to customers, which is about as crazy to me as running alpha software on a production system.

    I’m sure you have reasons, and this isn’t really meant to be directed at you personally, it’s just boggling to me that the IT sector as a whole hasn’t looked at this situation and collectively said “fuck that.”



  • I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine’s social commentary. And while we’ve had Bioshock games that he didn’t write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it’s more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.

    Rapture wasn’t just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the “Big Daddies” and “Little Sisters.”

    Don’t get me wrong. I’d love more Bioshock (if it’s good), but I’m glad we’re also getting Judas from Levine’s new studio, because I have a feeling it’s going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.



  • Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don’t studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.

    Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.

    This isn’t about defending Fromsoft, they’re just another company trying to get your money. I’m just saying that’s how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).


  • From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.

    Difficulty wise, yeah, it’s hard. That’s a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it’s probably better that they launched a game that is “too hard” and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you’ll make things much harder on yourself.






  • I remember seeing an interview with the model, who at the time of the interview was in her 70s or 80s, she apparently wasn’t enthusiastic about having become a common test image. But since she had technically consented to be in Playboy (which was only a magazine at the time), there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. I think in this case it’s probably best to stop using her image specifically, as it does kinda get into a weird messy situation of consent, and how her consent to be in a magazine morphed through technology into something more “permanent” than she originally realized. There are plenty of other models who would absolutely be down for that, and given enough time, knowing how nerds are, there will be other test images of women. But I think it’s probably for the best that this one gets retired from this use.

    And yes, there are people who have tried to use this instance as a “there shouldn’t be images of attractive/implied nude women a standard test images, because it can cause body image issues for women who go into that field.” Which on one hand, I can see where they’re coming from, but also people take pictures of people, and some people do look better than most of us, having more diverse test images would be a good thing, because we don’t all look like that. But some do, and they’re probably going to get more pictures taken of them than the rest if us.


  • Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it’s been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the “newer, right way” to do what I’m doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

    Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.