canis_majoris

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to games in Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

I play a lot of games on Gamepass so I am basically just renting it.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to games in Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.

I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to games in Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.

Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to games in Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect progress from a sequel. I think it’s even more reasonable to expect progress from a reboot.

The whole point of rebooting something is to be able to bring fresh ideas into the system, which can include stories or mechanics. At the very least a sequel should have some kind of feature parity with the first game, otherwise you’ve essentially just made a shitty DLC as the next iteration by dropping features.

Saint’s Row 2 had a great amount of content, and even when we were playing over LAN with Hamachi, the game was somehow smart enough to figure out what stupid shit we were getting up to, and it prompted us to play “death tag”. We didn’t even know it was a built in feature in the game, we had just been running around killing each other in various funny ways until the game said “hey, we have a structured way you can do this” and we had a blast.

Saint’s Row 3 expanded on everything SR2 had set up. It drove the story forward, the engine was much better than the original PS2 iteration and there were just as many minigames if not more.

Saint’s Row 4 took everything to the extreme though, which is unfortunate because that’s really where the death starts happening. When they literally blew up the planet as a plot point and turned it into a Matrix parody it lost a ton of focus and grounding that made it enjoyable long-term.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to games in Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to games in Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

I’d say that was probably the general attitude for SR1 and 2 overall - they were largely GTA clones, but when GTA took a turn into gritty and realistic, SR3 took a left on silly and surreal which allowed it to separate itself from the stigma of being a “GTA clone” and into its own category.

Even SR2 has a lot of really silly stuff that they don’t really do in GTA games, like the property value minigame where you spray literal shit over everything. Stuff like that eventually became too absurd for Rockstar to want to do but it was perfect for SR.

3 is one of the only games I managed to 100% because I enjoyed it greatly. 4 was funny at first but then it became boring after a while when you had all your superpowers and it got boring to keep fighting the same alien SWAT cops over and over again.

For Gat out of Hell, I never bought into the “Johnny Gat is the GOAT” attitude that SR tries to get everybody to acknowledge. It was literally just a filler game comprised of mini-games, and I would often opt to play Kinzie instead of Johnny because I just like her character more.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to worldnews in How China became the king of new nuclear power, and how the U.S. is trying to stage a comeback

The only reported incident has been from one of the European designed EPR reactors, which had a faulty fuel cladding that released some radioactive steam within the system.

Other than that, they’ve been pretty good. The main reason the reactors are safe is because we’ve designed them, especially with post-Fukushima improvements, to have a lot of passive safety built in by default.

Post-Fukushima improvements include, in addition to baseline passive nuclear safety, things like being able to take direct strikes from artillery without melting down. That’s also in addition to the natural disaster proofing we’ve done for earthquakes, floods and tsunamis. We’ve generally done a good job of over-engineering our reactors so that we can minimize any potential disasters.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to worldnews in How China became the king of new nuclear power, and how the U.S. is trying to stage a comeback

Well, all the reactors in Europe are supposed to be of a similar design – they had a big push to make the EPR reactors, which are a pressurized heavy water system, which is a bit old fashioned and requires a decent amount of passive safety to be built into the system. One of the first of those series to function was actually the one built in China which saw very few cost overruns and was generally finished within the original timeframe.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to worldnews in How China became the king of new nuclear power, and how the U.S. is trying to stage a comeback

China is ahead because of their advanced manufacturing economy. They literally build every single reactor component in house and don’t have to really rely on any outside companies for basically anything.

They have mostly North American designed reactors, ranging from CANDUs to their version of the Westinghouse AP-1000. Westinghouse basically went bankrupt trying to make the AP-1000 a viable reactor and when they started slipping, China came in and bought the schematics, modified them, and that’s their primary reactor design these days.

If you look at all the reactors worldwide that are being built, the majority of them in Europe are massively behind schedule for various reasons that probably get ignored by the Chinese. For example, one of the reactors in France is multiple billions above budget and about a decade behind due to the lack of precision of the builders, forcing them to re-assess and re-build key structural components multiple times over.

canis_majoris , 9 months ago to linux in How can I use my linux tablet as input method for my laptop?

I second KDE Connect, especially if you’re already invested in the KDE ecosystem.

I have it on my phone and it allows me to do remote access, in addition to using the device as an input. It also does handoff stuff like letting you answer your texts on your desktop, and I find that feature set works more consistently than Your Phone by MS.

canis_majoris , 10 months ago to worldnews in U.S. government hits Bankman-Fried and attorneys with 4 million pages of discovery. His lawyers argue that the government is overwhelming their client, without allowing him to prepare for court.

lmao you don’t even know what legal tools exist to examine this volume of documents.

Do some research if you’re going to be up in arms about stuff. Do even more research when you decide to be up in arms about how a billionaire gaming the system is somehow being treated unfairly after ripping millions of dollars off people, creating these terabyte repositories of illegal transactions.

canis_majoris , 10 months ago to technology in GTA 6 Hacker Found To Be Teen With Amazon Fire Stick In Small Town Hotel Room

I like the Arc series as a concept, because they’re the only value-driven option. Nvidia is just about pumping power and AMD is about trying cool gimmicks like dual clocks and chiplets.

Eventually I hope that the Arc series contributes to an Intel chiplet series similar to the APUs available on handhelds.

canis_majoris , 10 months ago to technology in Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype. Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It

Huh, the time machine must be off. This was news from a decade ago.

It’s actually one of the main reasons we switched off Skype to Discord for most gaming socialization.

canis_majoris , 10 months ago to technology in Pentagon combat drones: “I’m flying off the wing of something that’s making its own decisions.” (Aug. 27)

Looks like even the original article I could find was updated to state that it was a hypothetical.

canis_majoris , 10 months ago to technology in Pentagon combat drones: “I’m flying off the wing of something that’s making its own decisions.” (Aug. 27)

The last time they tried this the UAV decided that the operator was interfering in their goal so it adapted to try to kill the home base because the operators were telling it not to destroy targets, and all it understood was “killing targets = good”.