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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Let’s start with the word “blame”: Veilguard isn’t bad on the whole. It’s possibly good, even. I think a lot of the problem with how it’s been received is that it’s not “Bioware good”, which can be a disappontment even for a good game, especially after coming down from Baldur’s fucking Gate 3, a once in a generation game.

    So maybe if we said “credit” instead, and I think we can say yeah she sort of can take credit for the game. They offered her game director and she took it, and she put her name to it. I know it’s a shit position to be in, but if you look at Whedon and the Justice League, he passed the “credit” onto Snyder. Busche could have done the same if she chose, but she chose to put her name to it.

    Getting a game which is going off the rails back onto the rails is really tough. Kudos to her.






  • I think this is less corruption and more vanity. There are a lot of charitable organisations out there who will routinely donate over a million dollars. They’ll get a hospital wing or entrance or statue or something named after them. I think compared to those charities, open hand is incredibly small.

    My guess is their strategy was to do a bulk donation to get some kind of recognition for their mum. They were probably hoping they’d have much larger sums in a shorter time, and then time just kept on going.

    The problem is, that would have been fine if it was their money they were doing this with, but they’re doing these shenanigans with other people’s money, and now open hand is probably done for as a charity.





  • it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it The game is just software. It will execute on the GPU and CPU. DLSS (proprietary) and XeSS (OSS) are both libraries to run the AI bits of the cards for upscaling, because they weren’t really being used for anything. Gamedevs have the skills to use them just like regular AI devs do.

    By AI here I mean what is traditionally meant by “game AI”, pathfinding, decisionmaking, co-ordination, etc. There is a counterstrike bot which uses neural nets (CPU), and it’s been around for decades now. It is trained like normal bots are trained. You can train an AI in a game and then have the AI as NPCs, enemies, etc.

    We should use the AI cores to do AI.






  • OK so this is now offtopic for the conversation, but…

    However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work.

    To some extent, it’s authoring tools which affect how they work. A procedural materials pipeline can help them compose on top of already procedural content. In a way, you could see PBR as a part of that pipeline because PBR materials are physics modelled. Having said that I do take your point, even building out that pipeline takes time. Creating a PBR materials library is not super easy, and obviously organic stuff is very hard to model as a material.

    meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage

    From watching blender modelling, I thought the pattern was to have minimal rigging on the base mesh and then tesselation via normal maps + subdivision (apparently this is very doable even with sculpting). Obviously for animation you need a certain quality but beyond that I thought everything would be normal maps, reflection maps, etc etc.


  • who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…

    Supply chains are complicated, and MS probably did their due diligence to ensure minimal blockages. From seeing the memory structures of newer video cards, I’m pretty sure there are supply constraints to memory to think of.

    Honestly I think gamedevs leaning on memory this hard instead of compute is a mistake. You can have intelligently tiled, procedurally generated textures and have a lot more of them, but instead everyone is leaning on authored content on disc. This goes against industry trends in non-game rendering where procedural generation is the norm. If Doom Eternal can look that good with forward rendering, there are no excuses.

    My main beef with the hate on the Series S is that both times it’s been a big deal (BG3 and Halo Infinite), it has been split screen which has held back shipping. The community would be as justified going after split screen as they are going after the Series S.




  • The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,

    Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.

    I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.