mox

joined 9 months ago
[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 21 minutes ago (1 children)

That would effectively lock participation behind Discord's terms and conditions. No thanks.

(But thanks for sharing that info. :)

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Conal’s point is that no, in fact there are almost zero programmers that fully understand even the simplest Python code

Can you summarize the reasoning there, for those of us who are mildly curious but don't have time to spend on a podcast?

By "fully understand", does he mean knowing exactly how data are being laid out in memory, or when it is reclaimed? Knowing exactly what CPU instructions are being executed, registers used, and stack frames created behind the abstractions? Something else?

since it is a dynamically typed language.

What does Python's type system have to do with it? Python doesn't quietly convert objects of one type to another behind your back, like some other languages do.

What concerns me is your condescending tone.

I didn't read condescension in that comment. It's possible that none was intended.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 2 hours ago (17 children)

Is there anything in Bluesky's design that prevents the company from attracting a critical mass of users and then restricting federation, or cutting it off entirely?

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

You're talking about different things. I love a well-crafted puzzle, but that's not what most people mean when talking about game depth.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 30 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Meta-comment:

To the people who come into point-of-view threads like this one and downvote what other people took the time to share, how about describing your own experiences instead? It would make Lemmy a nicer place to be, and might even add something of value to the discussion.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

I don't understand this item listed under Long-Term Goals:

Build PureDarwin on BSD/linux.

Does this mean porting their not-yet-created desktop environment to a BSD variant and Linux? Are they planning to abandon the Darwin kernel, or do they intend to maintain their DE on three different kernel/library stacks?

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 22 hours ago

Seems like a lot of people step away for a while only to return to it. I had hundreds of hours before taking a break, came back with new hardware, and have been playing hundreds of hours more. At this rate, it might end up overtaking Civilization as my most played game.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

I mostly had fun, and felt the work they did to make Night City feel like a proper city, as opposed to the tiny village-sized "city" typical of open world games, really showed. (For example, the fact that people walking down the street had different ages, body types, and walking styles made it easy for me to forgive the occasional pair of NPC clones spawning next to each other.)

But yes, many of the activities/events offered by the game ended up seeming a bit pointless because their outcome was more or less predetermined.

Moreover, the RPG aspect of the game lacked depth, which seemed like a lot of wasted potential given that there were plenty of characters that could have been really interesting to get to know. Instead, the character development was nearly all Silverhand, nearly all the time, and I didn't even have much influence over how that relationship developed.

Spoilers ahead:

What about Jackie? He was supposed to be my best friend, but I never had experiences with him to make me feel that way, and then he was gone in just a few scenes. What about Panam? She was so determined to make a difference in the lives of the people who mattered to her, yet she all but vanished once we bonded, after just a couple of missions. What about Judy?? Her personal mission-like encounter was really promising. We supposedly fell in love and were planning to leave the city together, yet for the rest of the game, we had no interaction but "dates" consisting of the same half-dozen lines of dialogue and two or three brief animations, repeated over and over again. I'm sure there are more examples, but I think I've made my point.

I think the biggest disappointment for me was the ending, though. And the other ending that I got by reloading and picking different options, and then the third ending, and the fourth. They all felt like such empty let-downs that I went online to read about the rest. [Edit: These might have been Phantom Liberty endings; I don't remember for sure.] Surely there must be some good ones, right? Right?

The only vaguely satisfying ending that I found was a secret one that (IIRC) requires specific choices early in the game, and a very strong bond with Silverhand, and letting the game sit at a particular dialogue screen for several minutes without picking any option. The endings that players are actually meant to experience left me feeling empty. The great deal of time I had sunk into the game was for nothing after all. I guess that could be considered appropriate for a cyberpunk dystopia, but as an experience and a story, it left me feeling cheated. I wished I had my time back.

So, as I said, I mostly had fun playing it, and it had its share of highlights, but I don't expect to ever play it again. I hope CD Projekt Red keep much of the technical progress they made with this game (I was so relieved that my character's movement was responsive for a change!) and work more on character development and player agency in the next one.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Elite Dangerous is my go-to lately.

It's different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.

(To give an idea of the simulation's scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what's out there. Space is big.)

I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.

It's an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.

One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they're better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren't enough buttons on a controller for everything.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

tl;dr: It's a Yuzu fork.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I feel Tears of the Kingdom is overrated. Yes, it has some welcome quality-of-life improvements, and yes, it has more content than its predecessor, but I find the characters less interesting, the environments less inspired, and the encounters more repetitive. Every time I pick it up again, I get bored within a couple hours and go back to another play-through of Breath of the Wild.

I would vote for Baldur's Gate 3 over TotK without hesitation.

 

The EFF is urging people to contact their legislators now, before the vote.

https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-we-can-t-afford-more-bad-patents

 

Memory managment

Resource and memory management were completely rewritten in order to use allocated video memory more efficiently:

  • Reduced fragmentation may reduce peak memory usage in games such as God of War by up to 1 GiB in extreme cases.
  • Memory defragmentation is now performed periodically to return some unused memory back to the system. The goal is not to reduce VRAM usage at all costs; instead this is done conservatively if the system is under memory pressure, or if a significant amount of allocated memory is unused. Keeping some unused memory is useful to quickly service subsequent allocations.

Note: Defragmentation is currently disabled on Intel's ANV driver, see #4434. The dxvk.enableMemoryDefrag config option can be set to enable or disable this feature via the the Configuration file.

Driver support

While technically not required, the new memory management works best on drivers that support both VK_EXT_memory_budget and VK_KHR_maintenance5. The Driver Support page was updated accordingly.

D3D8 / D3D9

Software cursor

Support for emulated cursors was implemented for the D3D9 cursor API, which allows games to set an arbitrary image as the mouse cursor. This fixes an issue in Dungeon Siege 2 (#3020) and makes the cursor appear correctly in Act of War and various older D3D8 games. (PR #4302)

Bildschirmfoto-693

Sampler pool

Unreal Engine 3 games using D3D9 have a quirk in that they pass a seemingly uninitialized value as the mipmap LOD bias. In order to avoid creating more Vulkan sampler objects than the driver supports, previous versions of DXVK would round the LOD bias to a multiple of 0.5, which could introduce visual inaccuracies. As a more correct soluition, DXVK will now destroy unused Vulkan samplers on the fly and use the correct LOD bias.

Note: The aforementioned workaround was never needed or used in the D3D11 implementation, it only affected D3D9.

Bug fixes and Improvements

  • On Nvidia driver version 565.57.01 and newer, strict float emulation is enabled by default for improved correctness. Games for which this option was already enabled may see a small performance uplift on this driver.
  • Made various changes to potentially improve performace on certain mobile GPUs. (includes PR #4358)
  • Display modes are now ordered by refresh rate to be more consistent with wined3d and fix issues with some games picking the wrong display mode.
  • Fixed a large number of wine test failures.
  • Ascension to the Throne: Fixed old regression that would cause parts of the ground to render black. (#4338, PR #4341)
  • Command & Conquer: Generals: Fixed performance issue caused by a missing D3D8 entry point. (PR #4342)
  • King's Bounty: Warriors of the North: Fixed water rendering issue. (#4344, PR #4350)
  • Tomb Raider: Legend: Fixed flickering geometry with strict float emulation. (#4319, PR #4442)
  • Rayman 3: Fixed a regression that caused rendering issues. (#4422, PR #4423)

D3D11 / DXGI

Resource management changes

In order to reduce system memory pressure and improve stability in 32-bit games, creating, uploading and discarding resources is now throttled if the amount of temporary staging memory allocations exceed a certain threshold. This fixes crashes in Total War: Rome II and a number of other games. Additionally, large DYNAMIC textures commonly used for video playback will no longer use a staging buffer.

The d3d11.maxDynamicImageBufferSize and d3d11.maxImplicitDiscardSize options were removed accordingly; affected games such as Total War: Warhammer III and Ryse: Son of Rome should now perform well by default, without excessive memory usage.

Note: These changes negatively affect CPU-bound performance in a number of games, including Shadow Warrior 2.

Bug fixes and Improvements

  • SEQUENTIAL swap effects are now implemented for DXGI swap chains, which allows games to read previously presented backbuffers. This fixes an issue wherein savegame thumbnails would appear black in certain visual novels. (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7017)
  • Devirtualized some D3D11 method calls to improve compatibility with Special K.
  • Fixed incorrect shader code generation for EvaluateAttributeSnapped.
  • Lock contention is reduced in certain games that use Deferred Contexts for rendering. This may improve performance on older CPUs in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and some other games.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered: Fixed a possible GPU hang. (#3884)
  • Diablo 4: Work around an issue where the game does not start if an integrated GPU is exposed.
  • The Sims 4: Work around a use-after-free bug in the game's D3D11 renderer for real this time. (#4360)
  • Vindictus: Work around potential rendering issues caused by uninitialized constant buffer data. (#4405, #4406)
  • Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami: Fixed a regression introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 that would cause these games to lock up on start. (PR #4297)

Miscellaneous changes

  • An SDL3 backend was added for dxvk-native. (PR #4326, #4404)
  • Fixed an issue introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 which would lead to error messages about failed buffer creation.
  • Fixed a long-standing issue where overlapping occlusion queries would lead to incorrect Vulkan usage. (#2698)
  • Fixed a rare issue wherein timestamp queries would not be tracked correctly and could read incorrect data.
  • Fixed various other issues that led to Vulkan validation errors in games such as Dishonored 2, Tales of Arise and The Sims 4.
  • Fixed various issues with MSVC builds. (PR #4444)
  • Disabled a workaround for boken render target clears on Nvidia drivers prior to version 560.28.03 on unaffected drivers.
  • If supported, VK_EXT_pageable_device_local_memory is now used to enable better driver-side memory management.
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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by mox@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
 

This first video from Xiph.Org presents the technical foundations of modern digital media via a half-hour firehose of information. One community member called it "a Uni lecture I never got but really wanted."

Video Presentation

23
LXQt 2.1.0 (lxqt-project.org)
 

LXQt - The Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment

 

Navi 10: RX 5700, 5600
Navi 14: RX 5500, 5300

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