MudMan

Man, English is a mess.

I don’t know how you fix that problem, but I’ll admit that you do need some functional anti-cheat. Nobody wants to go back to the days of PC gaming being the wild west while consoles were nice and secure.

I wonder if in a world less focused on Windows some multiplayer games would just work on some secure container type of thing, or just have most of the gameplay run on server or something. There are definitely other solutions that wouldn’t rely on the Windows-specific crutches of the current implementations.

But they fussed about Call of Duty.

If I’m annoyed about anything it’s that. Gamers are so often using these ostensible customer protection or political affinity issues as a cudgel for what is ultimately a branding preference. This results on excusing some crappy stuff from people they semi-irrationally like (loot boxes on Steam games are fine!, we don’t talk about GenAI on InZOI!) but give extreme amounts of crap to companies they semi-irrationally dislike even for relatively positive things they do.

I’d mind less if the difference was based on size or artistic quality, but dude, InZOI is from Krafton. I don’t know that the PUBG guys are the plucky indies I want to stretch my moral stances to support.

I heard they finally have official support. How well it works I don’t know. I haven’t tested it yet.

I think the assumption that people are going to have AMD hardware is a bit of an issue with this argument. Even with their current gen success they are under 10% of the market. That’s all good for committed Linux users who built their PCs with Linux compatibility in mind, but 90% of the desktop market (for gaming at least) is going to be repurposing a Windows device with a dedicated Nvidia GPU.

I think that’s fair. And for a whole bunch of device types, it’s obviously the default (and often only) option. I think Linux users get too stuck on desktop usage viability. Linux is best when tuned for specific hardware and function, not trying to be everything for everybody at the user level.

Hey, at least you’re honest about it.

I don’t shill for software, man. Not for free, anyway.

But, you know, I talk to enough people about tech stuff to know that Linux getting name dropped generates at most some brief flicker of recognition in like 95% of adults, not some half-remembered decades-old stereotypes. There just isn’t enough awareness to support misconception here. And some of the misconception isn’t that “mis” in the first place, for the standards of non-technical normies.

FWIW, I’d love a free, usable mainstream OS alternative to Apple and Microsoft. I don’t think Linux as currently designed is built to be that effectively, but it’d sure be nice if somebody figured it out. Someone that isn’t Google trying to open yet another revenue stream for ads.

Man, scale is such a hard thing to get intuitively.

I mean, yeah, Linus Sebastian has a huge following. It’s a huge following of self-selected nerds, though. Most people have no idea who he is. Wouldn’t even know what he’s talking about if you showed it to them.

And that was one thing that he did once. That mostly nobody cared about unless they are an active Linux fan. Which is itself a tiny niche.

Humans just have a hard time parsing when things are big or small, particularly if it’s things they are a part of. This is not stupidity, it’s just how human perception works. It works both ways, too. A lot of mondern media is about having these parasocial relationships with huge media personalities and thinking you’ve found some hidden gem only to find out that your grandma follows them already.

It’s not that we’re dumb as a species, it’s that we’ve created this ecosystem built specifically to exploit human perceptual limits for profit and now it’s all we have. It kinda sucks.

Sorry, I went places there, but this whole thread (and honestly, the entire Lemmy linux community) makes me think about this constantly.

You’d think, but at least in my Manjaro install I had the exact same, if not a bit worse, of an experience trying to share an exFAT drive than a NTFS drive. I don’t recommend it either way.

I definitely play enough games without full Linux support that I wouldn’t have switched fully, even if I didn’t need Windows for work. The anticheat issues are one thing, but with a high end Nvidia card I found a bunch of proprietary features either didn’t work or underperformed compared to Windows. Mix that with a HDR, VRR display and it was a bit of a mess.

Linux was snappier for desktop office work most of the time, though.

Hosting the games on NTFS and loading them into Steam from there under Linux is possible. It is inconsistent and a hasssle, though.

I will say the setup the OP suggests is totally doable, but when I’ve had it that way it turned out to be easier to just do everything else on Windows than to flip back and forth, so after I updated some hardware I haven’t been on a hurry to set up Linux again.

I’d say it’s more convenient to do this long term if you have two PCs. Maybe a laptop for Linux work and a desktop with a powerful GPU for gaming. Being able to have both on sleep and quickly switching back and forth is less likely to make you (well, me, at least) lazy than having to reboot each time.

I don’t think they expect gaming on Linux to be anything. I don’t think they consider gaming on Linux at all.

Here’s my alternative proposal for their thought process:

“Linux?”

Alternately “I wonder what’s for dinner”.

People really overestimate how top of mind Linux is for the average Windows user.

Those goalposts are moving at supersonic speeds, man.

“AI driven NPCs” are just chatbots, and generative AI is generative AI. I thought the issue with GenAI was supposed to be that the data for training was of dubious legitimacy (which these models certainly still are) and that they were cutting real artists, writers and developers out of the workforce (which these by definition are).

Nobody seemed to be particularly fine with Stable Diffusion when that came out and could be run locally. I guess we’ve found the level of convenience against which activism will just deal with it.

Which, again, is fine. I don’t have a massive hate boner against GenAI, even if I do think it needs specific regulation for both training and usage. But there is ZERO meaningful difference between InZOI using AI generation for textures, dialogue and props and Call of Duty using it to make gun skins. Those are the same picture.

Wait, which of these Windows users are aware enough of Linux to have a formed expectation of Steam working under it or not? Like, they don’t know enough to understand what it is, but they’re super concerned that Steam, of all things, won’t run on it?

Are these Very Real Windows Users from Canada? Did they approach the poster with tears in their eyes?

Yeah, there were a few attempts in the 00s (including several NSFW ones, for some reason). It’s definitely tough to get right. I see the on-paper appeal of InZOI, in that it seems to be going for the same “we’ll do what Maxis won’t” appeal the original Cities: Skylines had. It’s just that with The Sims you risk finding out there was a good reason for what they weren’t doing, I guess.

I don’t know what’s going on at Maxis. I don’t know that rolling a whole modern platform, games-as-service approach into Sims 4 retroactively is the right call, regardless of it’s due to a lack of capacity to do it or a strategic choice. I am pretty sure that a lot of the stuff in InZOI isn’t doing it for me, though. Those two ideas can be held at once.

I see how some of the weirdness in InZOI is in “so bad it’s hilarious” territory.

I am not an anti-GenAI zealot, myself. I actually think a few of the ways they use it there are perfectly valid and make sense to support user generation… but are almost certainly a moderation nightmare that is about to go extremely off the rails. Others are more powerful than Sims on paper but the UI seems bonkers and borderline unusable.

I can see the idea of wanting another Sims successor, or both a successor and a competitor, but it’s hard to see the treatment as anything but hypocritical at this point. If anything, I think it shows that there is a reason why there is such a gap between The Sims’ success and how many viable competitors have surfaced. Turns out The Sims is REALLY hard to get right. Even Sim City, which feels more complex at a glance, was much easier to clone or improve.

Gamora is definitely the straight man in Guardians. Suicide Squad is a lot less even. Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is played mostly straight, the humor is in interacting with everybody else, and the same goes for Rick Flag, Amanda Waller and arguably Ratcatcher.

I mean, they’re comedies, but they aren’t gag-a-minute comedies. Some characters are much more out there than others, but every one of them has some heart, a thing they want but can’t have and typically a tragic backstory. Guardians 3 in particular is such an oppressively sad movie. That goes for the Creature Commandos spinoff, too, which while keeping the tone is just trauma city.

How that balance works in Superman I don’t know. The original Reeve movie plays Krypton very straight, but also very 50s sci-fi. If there is a baseline for reality in that movie it’s definitely the Smallville segment in the middle, where they set the stakes for both mortality and the version of Americana that Donner sees Superman as representing. The Metropolis segments are just a conservative parody of 80s society mixed with an over the top cartoon. Supes is played straight, and Reeve manages to suggest there is a real person there, to his credit, but… I mean, the superheroing he does is taking cats down trees and giving out corny speeches about how “statistically speaking flying is the safest way to travel”. A thief clocks him with a crowbar over the head and it goes “boing-ing”, leaving him shaking. Had the cast misunderstood the assignment even a little bit we’d be in Adam West territory.

You think Reeve was “straightforward with moments of humor”?

Were we watching the same movie? When was the last time you sat down to watch it? I mean, it’s such a classic, you can barely analyze it as a movie anymore, but… I mean, Lex Luthor and his gang is fundamentally comic relief. Luthor steals nukes by having his hot assistant pretend to have a car crash while Otis changes the launch codes or whatever.

Gunn has suggested it is a big influence, and I can see how that tone is a challenge outside of the context of having seen the 78 film as a kid, but the notion that you’re going to outsilly the first Reeve movie in 2025 seems absurd. Unsure as I am about Guy Gardner’s bowl cut, the bar is at “MISS TESSMACHEEEER!” here.

I’m a bit surprised about the coverage of InZOI so far. You’d think that the extensive use of generative AI would be driving a bit more outrage, going by how the Internet has treated the issue when it comes to Activision recently. Or the extreme amounts of jank, while we’re at it. People seem… reluctant to appear to be defending The Sims, I suppose.

I mean, the article is right there:

Despite this, Kjun says he believes in the value of InZOI’s visual direction. “The realistic graphics also have clear advantages,” he explains, “they enhance immersion in both building and character customization, and the detailed world design has even led to some interesting moments during development. There were times when we looked at screenshots and had to double-check whether they were from the game or real-life photos.

Cool.

So?

I mean, you are assuming “decentralized” is good, but it’s only as good as what it gets you. On paper, and until proven otherwise, I may choose less decentralized and more “capable of proper, effective moderation” instead. Especially if “less decentralized” is actually “somewhat decentralized”. I haven’t seen a case that fundamental decentralization trumps all so far.