Do the humane thing and just abort them in the womb with an adblocker.

If you are using some app where that isn’t possible, stop using it.

I’ve hated him since before Trump’s first election, correctly realizing he is a fradulent try hard con man megalomaniac, and have had to endure a decade of people mocking me ‘oh yeah like you are smarter than the richest man on earth yeah right fuck off’.

Yep. I am smarter than him. So were half the people hurling those insults at me, actually.

Elon is actually quite stupid at everything other than conning people.

Much like Trump.

Hehe sounds about right.

Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…

And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.

I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.

But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.

We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.

This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.

Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.

It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.

It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.

But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.

Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.

Exactly.

In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.

You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.

Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.

… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.

-.-

In the last minutes of the stream, Musk made a hardcore difficulty character he named Kekius Maximus, a 4chan-esque meme name he’s used as his display name on X. But Kekius Maximus was not long for the world. Musk died to one of the game’s tutorial bosses due to a bad connection, which subsequently concluded the stream, ending another sad, weird data point in the Elon Musk fake gamer saga.

The guy who claimed he was a top tier Quake player… who in actuality, was only scoring well in online matches, because he played on the T1 high speed, stupid expensive business line at his Zip2 business in the 90s… and performed terribly at LANs…

Well here he is 30 years later, now dying to a tutorial boss, partially due to the shitty connection of his own ISP.

Amazing.

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

Yeah, asterisk to indicate multiplication is much, much more common amongst coders.

… And script kiddie DOGE interns.

Alternate solution: Live in a studio apartment lol?

Yeah, you’re on top of this and know your shit.

I just originally wanted to point out that there are generally workable solutions in case you had no idea… but yeah, you know your shit, and with games that need both super low latency on input registry and display output… yep, basicslly you still gotta go wired.

… Maybe get swoll, or put your existing PC on some kind of wheeled base, set a cable management situation with the living room TV and your room monitors and controller for just… moving the PC around?

Yeah I can’t think of much more than that -.-

Ofc building a second machine is also a reasonable solution if that fits your preferences/budget situation.

That all sounds about right, yeah, a DisplayPort cable would work… but basically yeah, there aren’t many (any?) TVs that have DP … ports, and a long DP cable can be fairly pricey…

A … relatively cheap wireless solution might work if you dropped the resolution down to 2K or 1080, but it sounds like you’re going for 4k?

But Im just spitballing, sounds like you know your setup and have looked into this.

Ah, true, thats fair, with the input latency.

There may be more effective solutions to that, but that gets complicated fast depending on a lot of technical factors, layout of your home, budget constraints, etc.

1: I agree that the remaining exclusives are still annoying, but it is quite a far cry from the 00s and early 10s, where … with some notable exceptions, basically only shovelware corpo IP slop was not console exclusive, and the norm was largely based on picking a console for a its game library as a huge factor, as almost everything super popular/good was exclusive.

2: You… know you can set up some kind of streaming box or other wireless solution from your PC to your living room TV, right?

I used to just carry my rig into the living room and hardwire connect it to my TV for certain occasions… now there are many ways to just do that wirelessly.

I rocked a multi monitor set up that also included the TV in my room for a while as well, all hardwired, would just set up the TV as an optional 3rd monitor to put on movies and lounge on my bed.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

I prefer a good, old fashioned, no bo-shit, big stick.

I mean … sai … its not like everyone has finely crafted throwing stars lying around, but kama(n) farming tools?

Much more practical.

((Apologies for the rough final pun, doing my best lol.))

Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.

Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

… Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

… It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.

… You’re right.

People get abaolutely addicted to mtx, and at this point, you’d have to societally treat mtx, and legally regulate mtx like cigarettes, to actually address the problem.

Todd may have… invented the potion, or uncorked the bottle… but way, way too many people just keep gulping it down.

Pretty much haha.

I have distinct memories of… actually having to look away when Alyx first gets sent through Kleiner’s teleport in the beginning of HL2…

Because my piece of crap eMachine could not handle the scene, when your view is centered on Alyx.

It would ctd every single time time, the 100% reliable work around was to look at the ground before the screen flashing/color inversion thing happens… I’m pretty sure my rig just could not handle that ‘negative’ effect on top of the … bloomy, glowing sparks/lightning from the teleporter, at the same time.

Other than only that scene in particular, the game ran well, lol.

Its Todd’s fault.

Fucking horse armor.

I remeber seeing my lifelong, die hard Nintendo fan brother, play BotW.

After watching for about 30 minutes, I said something like ‘oh neat, its like an open world, version of a Zelda game, with more voice acting, open world item durability mechanics, and Garry’s Mod style physics/build nonsense!’

I meant it in earnest. I did think this was neat, though maybe the item durabilty values or mechanics could have been tweaked a bit, seems like you often spend a bunch of time just re-grinding for good weapons that break too fast, with no straightforward repair mechanic.

But he thought this was entirely an insult.

He rarely played non Nintendo games, hated online multiplayer and never played an open world survival craft game, had never played GMod, and seemed to actually think these were all revolutionary game design concepts.

Meanwhile I’d been a mostly PC gamer since like 2003, played too much GMod, DayZ (back when it was an Arma 2 mod), and had even written some fairly comprehensive game modes (mods, basically?) for GMod, and had… just in general played a much wider variety of games.

When he decided to finally get a gaming laptop, he found Black Mesa when it formally, fully released for $$$, and he entirely did not believe me when I said that I had actually chatted with some of their dev team before, waaaay back when Black Mesa was just an insane dream of a bunch of HL2 adjacent dorks, many of whom talked and argued on ModDB and the old Facepunch forums before Garry nuked them.

… He also did not believe me when I told him I actually met, and took a picture with Ashley Burch at PAX, back when she was just Ash from ‘Hey Ash Watcha Playin?’, waaay before she became the voice of Aloy, and she and her brother did panels at PAX.

Same with Jonathan Coulton, the guy who wrote the ending songs for Portal and Portal 2, which my brother now finally discovered in like … 2022? When he finally got a gaming laptop.

I had the pictures, from a decade ago at that point, but he was so convinced I was lying he wouldn’t even look at them.

I mean, yes, but you need a … fairly out of comparable price range to a console, pc, to be able to emulate … most wiiU forward games? depending on specific game, your definition of a playable frame rate?

I was trying to mostly focus on the ‘console wars’ aspect of the whole thing, and how official releases that were console exclusives a decade ago on an Xbox or PS… basically those all just come out on PC a few years later now, though there are a few exceptions to this, I think.

Bringing emulation into the discussion makes the comparison exceptionally complicated, because PCs vary so much, in so many ways, and of course the legal … dark gray area, and how its often considerably more complicated than just plug and play.