soulsource

soulsource , 9 months ago

My recommendation list is going to be a wild mix of different styles. Basically aynthing in my Games Library that I find visually appealing…

• Gibbous - A Cthulu Adventure: While it isn’t my favourite point&click (that price goes to the Deponia Trilogy), it’s by far the most beautiful I’ve played up to now. The attention the devs paid to detail is astounding. The animations are perfect. In other words: A work of art.
• Euro Truck Simulator 2: I might be an exception here, but to me the main selling point of this game is the scenery, not the trucks.
• Elite: Dangerous: Most of the times this game looks utterly boring. Sometimes however, you catch an exceptional sight. Here’s a screenshot of an eclipse in a binary system, as seen from an icy moon of a gas giant (behind which the primary star is hidden).
• Space Engine: Same argument as for Elite. Most of the stuff is boring. Sometimes you find an exceptional sight. Also, Space Engine isn’t really a game, but rather a “beautiful picture generator”, as there is no real gameplay as of yet.
• Dwarf Fortress in ASCII mode: The ASCII “graphics” are a work of art on their own. Especially the animations. And the best part: The ASCII version can be downloaded for free, while the (imho less beautiful) graphical version costs money.
• Pyre: A mix of Visual Novel and Sports Game. The backgrounds and characters are beautifully drawn.
• Beat Hazard: The colours of the effects are stunning.

soulsource , 9 months ago

Thanks! I caught it more or less by chance though. I was just scanning all moons in the system, and thought that landing would be a nice break from the scanning routine. And then this happened. It looked even better a few moments before, when the sun that’s visible in the shot was still partially occluded by the gas giant. Took me too long to fire up camera mode to catch that though…

soulsource , 9 months ago

Whoever made that decision obviously never worked in gamedev.

soulsource , 9 months ago

Yes. It’s in the Xbox Requirements, as in, the checklist of stuff you need to fulfill if you want to release a game on Xbox. To be precise, it’s test case 130-04: Featured Game Modes.

soulsource , 9 months ago

I was talking about the person(s) at Microsoft, who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…

(And for context: I work in gamedev, and in my experience making games stay within the memory budget is one of the toughest parts of porting games to consoles.)

soulsource , 9 months ago

Tell that to our artists 😉. As a coder I’m all for procedurally generated content. I did replace several heavy textures in our games by procedural materials, to squeeze out a couple of extra MB. However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work. They often don’t have the programming knowledge needed to develop procedural materials on their own, and would need to rely on technical artists or programmers to do so. Drawing a texture however, is very much part of their skillset…

But yeah, the mention of “squeezing out a couple of MB” brings me to another topic, namely that (at least in our games) the on-disk textures are only part of the RAM usage, and a relativley small one on comparison. In the games I worked on, meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage. We have several unique assets, which need to fulfill a certain quality standard due to licensing terms, such that in the end we had several dozens of meshes, each over 100 MB, that the player can freely place… Of course there would still be optimization potential on those assets, but as always, there’s a point where further optimization hits diminishing returns… In the end we had to resort to brute-force solutions, like unloading high quality LODs for meshes even if they are relatively close to the player… Not the most beautiful solution, but luckily not often needed during normal gameplay (that is: if the player doesn’t intentioally try to make the game go out-of-memory).

But I’m rambling. The tl;dr is: The memory constraints would not be a big deal if there was enough time/money for optimization. If there is one thing that’s never enough in game dev, it’s time/money.

soulsource , 9 months ago

Yep. The Series S gives games even less RAM than the One X did.

soulsource , 9 months ago

That number is - well, let’s just say, the correct value can be found in the docs here: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/…/whats-new-2206

soulsource , 9 months ago

For obvious reasons I can’t post it publicly before MS discloses it. They are currently migrating more and more GDK docs to the public site, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the link became publicly available soon, but currently one still needs to register a dev account to access it.

soulsource , 9 months ago

direct3d Direct3D 11 and Direct3D12, to be precise. Direct3D9 was working fine before - and there even was native driver support for it in Mesa, that could be used together with a patched WINE.

soulsource , 9 months ago

Also, the tutorial has suffered bitrot quite a lot. The game has seen many significant changes since release, but the tuturial was only partially updated to reflect them.

soulsource , 9 months ago

To be fair, when starting a new game you were told to check the wiki. Which has a very long and detailed tutorial.

soulsource , 9 months ago

Cultist Simulator. However, finding out how stuff works is half the game…

(The devs also posted a manual meanwhile, that explains the most obsucre mechanics.)

soulsource , 9 months ago

Relevant xkcd: xkcd.com/1356/

soulsource , 9 months ago

Book of Hours

In my case: Instead of Baldur’s Gate 3. I can’t find time for Baldur’s Gate any more since I started Book of Hours. It’s just too good. It’s one of those games where I just don’t want to stop playing. Just one more book. Light LEAKS through the CRACKS. My mind is BRIGHTER than it EVER was. THE HIGHER I RISE THE MORE I SEE.

soulsource , 9 months ago

At least Slack has a usable user interface… Teams is, well, I’d rather sit on a cactus. Let me phrase it like this: We have Office at work. We also have a Slack subscription, because Teams is just so much worse in comparison…

soulsource , 9 months ago

I have to second the mentions of OpenTTD, Battle for Wesnoth, Ur-Quan Masters and Nethack.

I’d also like to add:

• Widelands: A Settlers 2 clone.
• Chromium B.S.U.: A top-down scrolling shooter. Don’t let any enemies pass. Perfect if you need 5 minutes of adrenaline.
• Scorched 3D: It’s Scorched Earth, but 3D.
• Frozen Bubble: Hard to describe. It’s a bit like Dr. Mario.
• GL-117: 3D air combat. The graphics are “a bit” dated, but the game is a lot of fun still.
• Kobo Deluxe: A 2D action-puzzler. It doesn’t have the most stunning graphics, but it sure is fun to play.

Then there are also some open-source re-implementations of commercial games (that need the original game files) that haven’t been mentioned yet:

• CorsixTH: Theme Hospital.
• OpenMW: Morrowind
• OpenRA: Red Alert (and others)
• ScummVM: Various point&click adventure games (Monkey Island, Legend of Kyrandia, Loom,…)
• Return to the Roots: Settlers 2
• VCMI: Heroes of Might and Magic 3

soulsource , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Some games, like the Pathfinder games by Owlcat, use that initial input to determine if you are playing with mouse/keyboard or a gamepad. Depending on that, you get presented with a different UI in the main menu.

Another reason for such a screen could also be Xbox support. Nowadays it’s no longer necessary, because user-handling has been vastly improved with the GDK, but before the GDK was released a splash screen was the most user-friendly way to do user-handling in a single-player or online-multiplayer game on Xbox.

soulsource , 10 months ago

As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).

Nowadays it’s mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice… Publishers and players expect “Early Access” games to be feature complete and polished before the “Early Access” launch…

soulsource , 10 months ago

Yep, that’s probably the most helpful thing for devs. This sadly often conflicts with publishers’ announcement schedules. There are, however, companies that do NDA-protected play-tests, where you get the same kind of information, without publicly announcing the game.

soulsource , 10 months ago

I’d also suggest a Steam Deck, but for a different reason. My experiences with switchable graphics (both, nVidia and AMD) have been extremely disappointing. It’s quite frustrating to spend €1500 on a gaming laptop, and then constantly facing driver issues, tearing,…

If I were to buy a laptop, I’d therefore also go with an AMD integrated graphics unit, and no switchable graphics. Performance would be comparably bad, but at least an integrated (non-switchable) card works… And now we are at the point of having a dedicated gaming device like the Deck, which lets you have both: A performant enough gaming device, and a laptop that isn’t burdened by the price and issues of switchable graphics.

soulsource , 10 months ago

Cool! It even has an unintentionally belly-operated off-button!

(Sorry, but this design looks like a UX nightmare. The Sticks feel barely reachable, the buttons on the bottom will be touched unintentionally, the shoulder pads aren’t clearly separated, the ABXY buttons are way too small, the speaker seems to be mono,… The list of shortcomings could go on forever…)

soulsource , 10 months ago

I’ve been playing it quite a bit on the Deck, and it’s running fine. I left the settings on default, except for upscaling, where I enabled XeSS, which makes some things much more beautiful, for instance fur.

With XeSS enabled, I had to set display refresh rate to 40 Hz though.

soulsource , 10 months ago

With the release of Book of Hours just around the corner, I dug out Cultist Simulator again. It runs well enough on the Steam Deck, but it needs mouse input (-> touchpads), and sometimes it flickers (this seems to be related to autosaves).

Overall it works well enough on the Deck so that it’s fun to play. The flickering is annoying though.

soulsource , 10 months ago

Fourth? The last real Settlers was Settlers 2.