Topic-Free Mega Thread - v 1.11.2020

Yeah, thanks

… I’m out of interesting games to play… Having spent some 80 hours on Horizon and 30 hours on Control these last few weeks, I’m actually not sure what to play next – especially not with a new potential GPU on the way that will allow me to play some of the games in my pipeline (Death Stranding in particular) at a higher quality level… :conwayshrug:

What a stereotypical first-world problem :expressionless:

I’d hope that the Kingdoms of Amalur ‘remaster’ cleaned up and improved the gameplay a bit but it still feels rather… janky and arcadey… playing it on a keyboard and mouse. Not at all like say Control or Horizon. I think I’ve grown too used to modern games.

Try crusader kings 3, that will keep you busy

Or factorio

Or satisfactory

Ghost of Tsushima? I hear very varying opinions from friends of mines, and i haven’t tried it myself, but a couple have told me its one of the best games they’ve played.

Amazon has pre-orders up for 3080 msi gaming x trio and ventus 3x, and the msi 3090

Edit: if you are reading this now, you are waaaay too late

I’m holding out for the RTX 3090 K|NGP|N :slight_smile: The Godzilla of graphics cards.

But … seeing as nobody knows when that card’s coming out and I want to play Watch_Dogs Legion w/ RTX features on at a playable framerate … I may buy a 3080, upgrade later and then raffle the 3080 off to one of my patrons.

Lol if you do a raffle like that, make sure you change your Patreon to charge immediately instead of the start of each month.

That’s interesting, been looking at Sin, Kingpin, Iron Maiden/Fury’s expansion and other retro games and remaster efforts of these (System Shock 1 as well.) because modern games just haven’t been as good or fun to play ha ha.

Guess I’ll find out how Horizon is once I’ve worked out the backlog a bit, a few hundred games more but it should see some more patches finalize support for the game at least.

Replayed the Mercury Steam Castlevania games recently too, art style and gameplay works really well and the second game looks spectacular other than some of the shaders being a bit aged since these came out before and just around the time when physically based shading became a big thing.

Shame the second game had executive meddling and mixes in some really fun highs with some of the worst lows as well.

Next up probably more 1990’s fun where everything was hitscan based ha ha.
Yeah maybe a few things improved over time.

EDIT: Maybe a mix of the whole GAAS thing and tight release schedules patching the games up if they sell well and over time plus the formula for what sells and what’s the popular topics and gameplay.

Though both existed back then too cloning and copying way back to the early arcade industry days.

Should pick up Amalur while the discount is active though I hope they can fix it up a bit but it always was a bit of a prequel or prologue of sorts to a MMO that isn’t happening but stands well enough on it’s own though a bit with feeling like it’s a MMO-lite and a ton of progression stopping bugs and issues which I expect are still mostly there so the usual Bethesda (Daggerfall in particular.) logic applies of saving often. :smiley:

I know it’s probably just a coincidence, but I found the timing of these two announcements rather funny none the less:

$9.99 is a bit too steep for me for a subscription service that I only use like one or twice a month, so I ended up unsubbing from it as well today.

Shame… I was hoping the $4.99 would’ve been the standard price and not merely an “introduction” price.

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It’s The Verge, they don’t know anything about PCs, just ignore them :clown_face:

Random Thought:

Is SHA1 adequate to identify one game from another? I know it can distinguish two copies of the same game, but could I turn around and use a game executable’s sha1sum to try and identify it given no other identifiers (e.g. Steam AppID)?

Obviously the sum would change with every game patch, but I could just give users a nag screen asking them to submit a game entry corresponding to their executable (assuming the executable is stock).

Theoretically, yes, I guess so, but collisions can happen, and as SHA-1 is basically broken entirely nowadays it’s not necessarily the most optimal to use if you want something scalable or “trustworthy.”

https://shattered.io/

However if you were to implement some form of “multiple matching records found – please select right one” dialogue or something like that in case of a collision, then yes, you could rely on it.

Could work if they also merge it with the Premium so it’s a single 10$ = Everything cost but I suspect that’s not the case here.
(EDIT: Well, per month.)

I assume the Game Pass stuff also means console only or at least the 1$ trial and refund and re-use is over now ha ha.

Glad I’m not using SHA1 for any kind of security :wink:

Yeah, I guess I’ll have to work in some kind of collision resolution. Things would be so much easier if all games were code signed. I think Publisher (from code certificate) + file hash would be pretty much foolproof.

@Aemony
Did you see Control is on GOG?
I’m kinda surprised tbh!

Mhm, I was the same when I first heard of the announcement a while back. But it makes sense though, and I hope we’ll see more modern games do such a move to GOG as well.

This looks awesome:

But it appears they did it again – if you want the full experience, buy new 360 Hz (WTF?!) G-Sync monitors. Nevermind the $2,000 G-Sync HDR monitor you already own uses a freaking FPGA and NV should try extend these features back a little bit.

Also, and again … 360 Hz … WTF?!

I think at those speeds the eye can only detect changes in brightness, color and motion are perceived at much slower speeds. We could stop at 240 Hz and then just render > refresh Hz and throw out all but the newest frame and that would be every bit the same experience for 98% of the population as these additional 120 frames.


That said,

The SDK is something I will try to integrate into Special K. I have a feeling NV’s license terms are going to be not compatible, so it’ll probably have to be a standalone plug-in or something. No biggie, I’ve done it before (for Tobii eye tracker).

I think I pretty much nailed framerate stability with SK’s framerate limiter, so now I’m focused on latency… seems I picked a good time to suddenly start caring about latency, lol. That SDK is a game changer and if I can integrate it into my framerate limiter, it’ll be unstoppable.

Thought it needed game side implementation but I guess if that would be doable it could be interesting.
Also thought the refresh rate advantage was way higher (1000’s) with advantages into the 600’s gradually reducing and eliminating motion blur though I can’t imagine any GPU hitting actual 300+ FPS even on lower settings it’s going to be if not GPU then CPU bound but it’s a interesting feature and I guess we’ll see how the hardware looks like. :slight_smile:

Uh… what do you think Special K is? :slight_smile:

I inject code into your game and do beneficial things on its behalf, lol. Whenever you see “needs game implementation,” that is code for either the game does it or Special K does it, but it’s happening one way or the other :stuck_out_tongue: