Yeah, definitely hoping they consider bringing that to windows at some point, because it could be incredible. Obviously ultra-complicated, but it works unbelievably well on Series X. Being able to say, skip the loading of an emulator and hop directly back into the middle of a level in Demon Souls, jumping past all the logos and whatnot, would be amazing.

Man, I’ve been console for ages, but this January I bought a gaming PC and hooked it up as my dedicated console, and it’s been amazing. If you like a bit of tinkering, PC can dominate as a console.

• Playnite makes an amazing front end, stitching together everything my PC can do. Emulators, Steam, itch.io stuff, GoG and Epic and Xbox Game Pass, all seamlessly stitched together and 100% controller accessible.
• Emulators are fantastic, my PC plays Switch, PS3, Wii, everything.
• Real settings are a godsend, as is more powerful hardware. Actually play Elden Ring at a proper framerate. Play old games in true 4K/120.
• Tinker like crazy. Mods, ReShade, actual in-game settings, GPU Driver settings, if it bugs you, you can do something about it. Currently messing with emulating Demon Souls with ReShade, some mods, and connecting to RPCN for online multiplayer, and it’s a delight.
• More powerful hardware too. Great to be able to push games past console, in whatever way you prefer. I’m already planning a GPU upgrade to be able to do more.
• Heck, even sharing features. My GPU can save 5 minutes or more of instant replay clips, which I used to save all of my Elden Ring boss fights, just hitting a controller shortcut when I killed the boss. My PC shares those via FTP, so I can just grab those on my phone and upload them to YouTube. Faster than Xbox uploads, and actually my files, with no arbitrary storage cutoff like I hit on Xbox.

Basically the only thing I miss is Xbox’s Quick Resume, or suspending a game on Switch. But a good PC fires up games fast, so it’s really not a huge loss in the face of all the benefits.

100%, but ideologically she’s every bit as much a Jedi as Luke is here. He’s not had any formal induction to an organization, so that can’t be what Yoda means here.

Yoda is also shown quite clearly regretting the kind of stagnation he allowed in the Jedi Order, which is exactly the reason Ahsoka was put in the hard situation she was. The Clone Wars very much set up her character as an emblem to show the rot that allowed Palpatine to rise, which Yoda acknowledges and regrets quite explicitly there. It’s not a ridiculous inference to assume he respects her and would validate Ahsoka as part of the “good side”, which is about all “Jedi” can mean in this context. She even explicitly and repeatedly tries to turn Darth Vader.

Anyway, I do agree in that it’s not a massive plot hole or anything, but I’d say that if we’re ever explicitly shown Yoda meeting Ahsoka pre-Empire, this scene will be weird.

They’ve done a surprisingly good job of maintaining this scene, actually.

Rebels: Kanan is dead by now, and Ezra would be lost in deep space at this point. Yoda also wouldn’t know about either.

Mara Jade: 100% still a Sith Assassin right now. Also not Disney canon or anyone Yoda would hear about.

Ahsoka: This is the best candidate, since Yoda would know about her, and likely regret the decisions that forced her to leave the Jedi Council, making it weird to dispute her status as “Jedi”. The most favourable assumption is that he assumes she’s dead.

All said, remarkable protection of an Episode 5 made before episodes 1, 2, 3, multiple TV shows, novels, and sequels.

Honestly… I kinda can. This is an extreme and unlikely scenario, but there’s a few things that make me think it’s not impossible.

A) Trump has publicly promised to back out of NATO.

B) Trump is generally very pro-Russia.

C) Trump has generally had poor relations with Canada.

If the US backed out of NATO, they’d have a lot of military power sitting idle, and NATO would be significantly weaker, as well as doubly occupied in Ukraine. Russia would certainly be interested in such a thing happening, given the strategic importance of Antarctica, and how much it would take eyes away from them. I also don’t doubt for a second that Trump would love to exploit our natural resources, especially oil, and the military importance of the top of the world. Not to mention it’d be an excuse to continue creating expensive military contracts and posturing as tough.

This is of course, mostly fantasy, but Trump is nothing if not unpredictable.

Twins can be very close, especially as a kid with no concept of twins or sense to pick out distinctive details.

My father has a twin brother who lives far away, with the most obvious difference between them that my father generally keeps a beard. One night, when my Dad shaved and came to tuck me into bed, he was met with an “Uncle so and so, when did you get here?”.

Of course now as an adult, I’d be able to tell them apart no problem, even if they did dress and style the same. I’ve observed their mannerisms and minor cosmetic marks with a keener eye as an adult. But as a young kid who couldn’t even clearly tell his own father from his twin, I find a kid being unable to recognize a chance encounter he wasn’t expecting very believable.

My issue is more with the math of it. Since it requires holding your frames until you’ve got one in reserve (can’t generate an in-between until you know what’s next), it fundamentally makes the game less responsive.

That said, if you understand that, and like the visual smoothness of motion with more frames, then it’s super cool tech. Not every game has to be treated like it’s competitive Counter Strike, and I think it’s really cool if you like it, but it frustrates me how poorly marketed and understood the actual technology and its compromises are.

Eh, FSR3 upscaling and FSR3 frame generation are different things. I’m personally a fan of upscaling, it’s great for a sharper picture on my large 4k TV without spending a fortune on a massive GPU (I use a living room gaming PC), but not at all a fan of frame generation, as it introduces more input lag for the illusion of more frames. Not a tradeoff I’m ever willing to make, especially when VRR already does an incredible job of creating the illusion (and a degree of reality) of good performance when my framerate drops.

Sounds like a CEO who doesn’t have a damn clue how code works. His description sounds like he thinks every line of code takes the same amount of time to execute, as if x = 1; takes as long as calling an encryption/decryption function.

“Adding” code to bypass your encryption is obviously going to make things run way faster.

100%. I literally bought Echoes of Wisdom on Switch day one, dumped it, and played it in Ryujinx, installing mods to increase settings.

I have the money, and am willing to part with it, but prefer a PC Quality experience. Heck, I’d even pay more for a PC version that didn’t have shader stutter and had real PC options.

That said… I don’t expect it. Nintendo is very stuck in their ways, which has pros and cons. On the one hand, we’re getting good traditional game design, no layoffs, and no micro transactions, which is wonderful. On the other, we’re getting outdated hardware that’s just powerful enough to support their game design ideas (although we’re even seeing the cracks there now), and a diehard dedication to the old console exclusivity model.

Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?

Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.

Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.

What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.

Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?

Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?

So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.

I think it is a problem. Maybe not for people like us, that understand the concept and its limitations, but “formal reasoning” is exactly how this technology is being pitched to the masses. “Take a picture of your homework and OpenAI will solve it”, “have it reply to your emails”, “have it write code for you”. All reasoning-heavy tasks.

On top of that, Google/Bing have it answering user questions directly, it’s commonly pitched as a “tutor”, or an “assistant”, the OpenAI API is being shoved everywhere under the sun for anything you can imagine for all kinds of tasks, and nobody is attempting to clarify it’s weaknesses in their marketing.

As it becomes more and more common, more and more users who don’t understand it’s fundamentally incapable of reliably doing these things will crop up.

Dang, this full out fooled me. Concerning, I guess we’re here now. Lots to catch once you’re aware of it, but totally passed by me while scrolling, even as someone who’s well aware of AI Image Generation, even in an image that’s intentionally ridiculous.

Unsurprised. I was involved in some great discussion on SBMM on Lemmy recently, and people’s issues with it, but this confirms what I suspected. SBMM is better for companies, maximizing player on-boarding and player retention, which is what’s necessary to get more players and revenue. Even if I honestly think it’s a worse experience than the old school way, and keeps me from personally enjoying these games.

I’m inclined to agree! That’s awesome, adding that to my following immediately.

Ooh, this is very interesting. I’m a sucker for emulator progress reports, just a fascinating intersection of programming, graphics, and gaming. My personal RSS feeds right now (which I’d love to add lemmy discussion to) are:

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/feeds/ https://pcsx2.net/blog/rss.xml https://www.libretro.com/index.php/feed/ https://blog.ryujinx.org/rss/ https://xenia.jp/feed.xml

Yeah, agreed, a good DLC is awesome. The example that comes to mind for me is From Soft. Top notch content, delivered well after the release of top notch games, at a fair price, which expand on the level and boss design and improve it every time, while stepping up the difficulty for those who loved and fully completed the base content.

I wish every game I ever loved would get DLC like that.

Yeah, personally I’ve always enjoyed playing IRL with people who are better than me. Having a real person gives me that constant measuring stick I’m looking for, and playing with someone better gives me someone to watch and learn from, which helps me improve way more quickly. But that’s… not what gets you the big sales numbers and a smooth player onboarding.

For PvP stuff, the experience I enjoyed the most was playing Smash with dorm mates in college. Getting my ass handed to me in 1v1 matches for months by the guy who owned the console, but learning, grinding, letting that guy I wanted to beat motivate me to use the training room, to watch YouTube videos, study techniques, and try to really master my character, learning how to be unpredictable and perform mix ups that needed to fool an experienced player who knew my weaknesses better than anyone, it was so satisfying. And by the end of the year we were on even footing, and I was maybe even a little better, which just felt incredible and so well earned.

That experience is what ranked PvP just completely lacks. Every time you win they just swap in new players who are that little step better than you until you’re perfectly even again. Which is great on a game-to-game scale, each battle is hard fought, but just offers nothing on that wider timescale that I need to really care.

Fair, you definitely become more skilled (I put 500 or so hours into DotA 2 years ago), and you can somewhat measure that, but I find it’s not nearly as potent.

My additional issue, if you take a long break like I did, is that the MMR somewhat traps you. When I came back, not only was it extremely frustrating to have the head knowledge about what I needed to do (I.E. denying creeps and stealing last hits for optimal farming) while not having the skill to execute it anymore, but I was also trapped in matches with only players who had the skill to capitalize on those mistakes and destroy me. Add to that the pressure of letting down a whole team of 5 players, and my attempts to get back into the game later were miserable.

By comparison, I’m returning to Celeste right now, and checking out the strawberry jam mod. It’s been incredibly satisfying to see how quickly I pick up and relearn those mechanics, and I’m just crushing the base game levels that gave me so much trouble the first time, while giving me an enjoyable de-rust. It’s been a pleasure to dive back in, and I’m excited to see what heights I can reach, eager to beat the Farewell DLC that I gave up on before and to push myself to even harder modded content.

Maybe I could get a similar experience in DotA, by playing hours of bot matches to relearn fundamentals, and watching lots of YouTube content to learn how the meta is shifted in my absence, but that’s a much different grind than I’m having in Celeste, just enjoying the nostalgia of the game and revelling in how much quicker relearning is than the initial learning. And I never have to cope with any social pressures of letting my team down, or watching my hard earned MMR crumble away as the game repeatedly reminds me how much worse I’ve gotten.