addie

Seems likely. It only stutters on Windows - run it through Proton on Linux, where it's translating it all to Vulkan, and it's silky smooth. Maybe off by a frame or two as well of course, but it's pretty much locked to 60 fps in either case on my machine and can't really check. DirectX seems quite bad for hitching when a new shader is loaded - they'd all be pre-compiled on a console since the devs know exactly what the target hardware is, so if you don't rewrite your engine on Windows to accommodate it, then you'll have problems.

Humble guy, but that list of features that they're working on is really impressive. Got a wee DragonFly Black USB audio thing that just never worked quite right with PulseAudio - install PipeWire instead, and it just does all its tricks. Great work team, keep it up.

Friend of mine's dad used to write some Mills and Boon ones, which is the UK equivalent I suppose. We all found it hilarious. Had to sign up for one the '8 pre-approved plots' in advance, and then got paid about a penny a word. You need to be properly cranking out text to even reach minimum wage - it would be easier to work stocking the shelves at a supermarket, quite frankly. But yeah, not an environment that fosters innovation.

Hey! Perks that actually (a) trigger when intended, and aren't bugged out (b) do something actually useful - are quite unusual in Fallout; there's plenty of them that are just a trap for the unwary to waste their slots on.

I'd also nominate the 'lady killer / cherchez la femme' perk as being one of those traps; the vast majority of the enemies you have to kill are male, and certainly all the ones who are difficult. It gives a few interesting dialogue options, but there's more effective perk choices.

Where he's likely to be going with this is "war ends, but Russia gets to keep the territory they've illegally annexed". And that will not do. They stole Crimea; if they get to steal more, then they'll just be back again in a few years once they've licked their wounds. All territory must be returned to Ukraine, and then they can pay reparations and fuck off, and we'll welcome Ukraine into the EU and NATO so this shit never happens again.

I still have a Rage 128 hanging around as a 'temporary head' for installing headless servers. Many happy nights playing Thief: The Dark Project with it, and now it's only good for rendering a TTY at a barely acceptable resolution. And soon, not even that. Goodbye, little e-waste :-(

I think that Python has a bit of a 'Microsoft Word' thing on the go. You know how your own docs are completely editable and print fine, but everyone else's are a complete fucking disaster and pressing a single key will screw up the formatting of the whole document? Your own Python code is full of sensible idioms and pragmatic naming conventions, but everyone else's was plainly written while on mushrooms.

That's a fair comment. But on the other hand, if you are spending a fortune on a CPU the size of your hand (look at that thing in the article!) then there's a good chance you're using it for business purposes, and either you or your IT department will be very keen to have a completely vender-supported stack. Enthusiasts with fresh OS installs will not be representative of users of this tech - AMD haven't really been targetting it at gamer desktops.

Of course, comparing both would be even better, see whether it is an HP crapware issue...

Well; setting aside the small reference pool of modern gaming journalism, I'm not sure that it is such a big step from HL to CoD, just a bit of a step down. HL is as much of a 'corridor shooter' as you could ever hope to find - there's one path through it, and I doubt that many people deviate from it all that much on a playthrough. The difference is, that HL is super imaginatively dressed up on that one path. The levels have a real sense of place. Like you say, the puzzles are never all that difficult, but they're extremely well-integrated into the design; they feel like the kind of obstacles that you might have to overcome in a top-secret research facility when disaster has struck. And they're mainly new puzzles; nothing hackneyed or tropey here.

From the article:

In many ways, Half-Life can be seen as an indictment of the video game industry: how can a 25 year-old game be better than almost every shooter that has followed it? Why has its ambition only ever been exceeded only by its own sequel? It paints a picture of a stagnated industry still playing with toys from the 1990s.

I think there's two problems here; one is that it's safer to play follow-the-leader, and one is learning the wrong lesson from the leader. Kind of hard to believe now, but HL was considered a graphic powerhouse when it came out, requiring some of the top class machines of the day. But I think that the kind of 'immersive feeling of wonder' that HL has via its design conjuring up a real place is mostly due to its environmental storytelling and the novelty of not knowing what to expect around each corner. The imitators saw the twisty-but-linear game, and decided that the most important thing to copy was to have as much graphics as possible. Can't copy the imaginativeness and the care, so yeah, perpetually taking control away from you for a shooting gallery setpiece, when in fact that only draws you in in a superficial way.

I wouldn't mind other games copying HL if what they wanted to copy was inventiveness, experimentation, and non-stop gameplay. Copying the things that were new about HL is the complete wrong thing to copy, though.

Also 4/50. Get back here and enjoy some socialising! There'll be time for your hobbies later.

Izolda A and stockings are just a match made in heaven.

Blasphemous 2 has a transgender breastfeeding scene, but only a single-player campaign, seems odd to call it a 'story mode'... Good work getting to that bit in four hours, too.