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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yeah, as said, that’s going to be due to however your TV upscales things.

    Getting a dedicated scaler will help, but bear in mind that you’re taking an image that’s at least 1/4 smaller (might be less than that, can’t remember the math off hand) than your screen’s native resolution and zooming in on it.

    Using most scalers gives you a ton of options for how to zoom in. Straight pixels, bilinear (or trilinear) filtering, and some have various shader effects as well to emulate the style of TVs these consoles were made for.

    By using HDMI/VGA you are getting the clearest digital signal version of that image possible, but it’s still tiny, and any way you choose to expand it will have pros and cons.




  • If you were being properly pendantic, you’d realize that the term AI has existed for fucking decades prior to the current LLM boom and even machine learning, and has regularly and repeatedly been used to describe the type of (comparatively) simple algorithms used to manage NPC actions in video games.

    You may also know that Valve recieved a shit ton of press praise for the complexity of the algorithms and tricks they used to give their NPCs life in a large number of their previous games. Simulating predator/prey dynamics in aliens, command structure in soldiers, and even making the appearance of troops communicating information audibly (both human soldiers and aliens having specific phrases and sounds for different situations) all in Half Life 1.

    With Half Life 2, they made a large stride pushing back against the uncanny valley through how they managed facial animations. They also made groundbreaking use of pathing nodes with different contexts which allowed NPCs to build off the communication and dynamically flank you (outside of the previously common scripted set pieces). Also some stuff that’s escaping me right now with player led platoons.

    In Left 4 Dead, they used one set of algorithms to direct the overall PvE match flow, a separate one to handle large groups of enemies as a group, and then even more to manage individual enemy entities when they were close enough to players. Again, groundbreaking for the time, with many PvE and horde defense games since adopting similar “director” algorithms.

    In every single aritcle written about this shit, the term AI was used. In articles about monsters in the original DOOM, the term AI was used.

    Effectively “it was our word first”.







  • I find this particularly funny, because the scene for Wii homebrew felt like the wild west for a decent while. There were many different iOS (think kind of like drivers, you’d install ones with patches applied so you could run non-nintendo code) installers that were almost all doing the exact same thing. Multiple loaders to run ISOs off USB drives. A couple of games leaked early. I remember playing Skyward Sword with a friend a few days early.

    There were a small few that tried to enforce not being able to use their homebrew apps for piracy, but they were largely derided for it. Riivolution was a groundbreaking app for arbitrarily replacing game files on the fly, but it had numerous things built in to prevent people from using it on anything but real discs. There was a decent amount of drama around that.

    Smash Bros Brawl mods were fucking amazing. There just wasn’t much like that on consoles before then.









  • With Cyberpunk 2077 “complete and fixed”, I’m finally checking it out. Been using the Welcome to Night City modpack. Act 1 and all the content in Watson (starting area) was amazing. Very immersive. Completed all of that, about halfway through Judy’s missions, and most of Panam’s missions. I think I’m around 40 hours in.

    Quality starts dipping outside of the main story missions outside of Watson. Nothing so far has been anywhere close to bad, and there’s still some absolutely amazing things sprinkled here and there, but it’s frustrating how just good some of it is given how strong the start is.

    It’s incredibly obvious that the game was meant to be much more. Like Watson district’s fixer (person who gives you missions) has 39 gigs, and she has Cyberpsycho fights across the whole map. I don’t think any other fixer has more than 15 gigs for their own area, and most don’t have any other “gimmick” missions like the Cyberpsycho missions.

    I’m already planning to replay it with mods that add more gang activity and give the gangs “memory” so they hold grudges if you keep doing missions against them. Also, unscaling the stat checks. Stupid that I go from being able to comment on certain topics (the psuedomyth of Rache Bartmoss specifically) in conversations to not being able to because I got too high a level and the stat check jumped from 10 to 15.

    I don’t know how to put it. The great stuff is some of the best gaming experience I’ve had in a long time, where I can’t wait to get back to it. Most of the game is good, but not “can’t wait to get back into it”. But there’s a big feeling of missing “what could have been”.

    Like the Watson Fixer Regina has extra rewards for you capturing Cyberpsychos alive, but in any of the actual fixer gigs with Cyberpsychos it doesn’t matter if you kill them or incapacitate and Regina has no comments on it. There’s a lot of emphasis put on customizing your character for you to not see them outside of a few cutscenes (most are first person) and driving a motorcycle. Lots of NPC visual cyberware just isn’t available for the player character.

    Maybe it’s just residuals from the collective overhyping of the game, but I feel it hard when stuff like that pulls me out of things.