Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

Planning holiday trips to family has got me thinking about the value of Project xCloud. It's not the streaming itself, it's access to Game Pass & my existing library.
Previously I threw a PS4 into a backpack. The beta means I've got a selection of games via my phone but next year I'll be able to play anything on console Game Pass via my laptop. Game Pass Ultimate then means "stream to PC the XB1/Scarlett games you want without ever owning a console".

Starting to feel the pinch of 8GB VRAM (I output 4K, I hate aliasing flicker) which makes me hope nVidia (& Intel) don't try to tell us 8GB is enough for 2020's generation of affordable enthusiast cards (before new consoles make clear that 2021 game assets will be exported for larger RAM pools).
Closing all apps before I start gaming not because they steal Ryzen CPU cycles or pressure 16GB system RAM but because every MB of VRAM might count.

I've long advocated for more granular downloaders* but is Gears 5 really a 75GB install with a 4.3GB optional Ultra texture pack? Something seems weird with how that just happened; why even bother for 5% difference?
* We live in the shadow of Guild Wars 1's streaming client. Commonly implemented today as leaving the highest texture detail as a free DLC. Next consoles look to be working on a system UI for more.

Either EA are having an amazingly good month or when Sony added EA Access to PSN, they counted every game activation as a purchase for generating the Top Sellers list (I'm not sure that's great for other publishers).

There is huge power to clearly denoting the line between "this is your system & your copy of the game - go wild" and "this is a mediated environment where we all agree to the same rules of play".
Banning people who want to mess with custom textures or whatever in their solo game is a terrible move; banning wallhacks etc maintains a viable online experience.

Smart move for PC ports. People will hack your game (so work on various P2P validation methods or good old "server is king & flags suspicious users") but, when part of your game is a solo experience, let people run that part without even trying to lock down an open system. https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/e515d6/weekly_discussion_thread/f9i352z/

Crowdsourcing technical Q: Google say their entire Stadia pipeline is 4K (GPU, encoder, output). Does this mean it's RGB / 4:4:4 encoded video or is this actually 4K luma, 1080p chroma (4:2:0)? Anyone got up close with fine sharp coloured text?

One of the fun things about RSS that I fear we'll lose is taking an epic break.
Did I remember I still followed this blog, which last posted six and a half years ago? No. But I'm glad my feed tracker informed me of a new post. https://hylobatidae.org/minerva/blogsheep.php?action=articleinfo&id=122

(Re)playing the Dead Space & Batman Arkham series recently. Unfortunately they feel like examples of how increased budgets come with feature creep resulting in a much larger versions of the first games but which have lost a strong identity.
Wondering what games would be like if sequels mainly aimed to cut down to the very core of what players loved in the first game.

me: I'm over Half-Life. Those games came out so long ago so it's fine that we're not getting more. How could it ever live up to the hype?
also me: So how long until the hardware to put my hands inside the HL universe and play a new game is proper consumer tier (like $300)?

A positive thing about my community interactions in the last 20 years (of having some idea about technical stuff through work) is good blog posts & commentary (+ wikis filled with hacks or tweak guides) bubble up from AAA pros, indies, & amateur dabblers alike. A lot of this stuff is not that hard (Digital Foundry tier technical breakdowns are a pretty broad skill in the community).
Also: https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1195955024133869568

Cool that we're reached the point in the pro critic vs influencer to social media post divide that ordinary people mentioning that the new Pokemon looks (technically) one of the weaker games on the Switch is rallied against. The same week that pop-in & framerate drops in the new Star Wars game are front & centre in quite a few pro reviews.
"These fans use technical terms but probably have no idea what they mean" isn't a great response from critics who are also not devs.

There are 10 days left to register to vote. https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote
This is a pivotal election for the UK (potentially even the last, depending how the fracturing of the four nations goes in the next 5 years) so everyone should vote. Be informed, don't just read reporting (read the actual manifestos when they're released), think about the future world you want to live in. Vote.

I have on a few occasions muttered about current digital rental offerings & how much money big players are prepared to lose to normalise/thin out competition.
Peak "you can't compete": Game Pass Ultimate for 3 months: just $1 total.
But that's not all... includes 1 month EA Access
... and 3 months Discord Nitro
... and 6 months Spotify Premium.

Pay $1, get $100 of external subscriptions on top of 3 months of games rentals on two platforms & Gold perks.

Me, doing absolutely anything with frequencies above about 14kHz: "this is for all the young people out there!" (also welcome to the "relaxed attentional state" fellow adults https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285336/)

I've not really looked that much into Swift (not a language primarily targeting the systems I build for) but this was an interesting wander into Swift polymorphism & the new ABI (from perspective of already familiar with Rust). https://gankra.github.io/blah/swift-abi/

So Bloodstained is a rare game that was (until I figured out what was going on) anxiety inducing when watching a stream of someone playing in the background as I worked. https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1192493851358969856

Having a quick look at this, Skia + Vulkan but make it Rusty, as a way to add debugging overlays (& 2D UI) to a Vk app. Seems like a more minimal option than adding the entire Chromium engine (to generate & manipulate the Skia draw commands). https://github.com/aclysma/skulpin

"The John Lewis Partnership [founded 1864] is the largest employee-owned business in the UK with gross sales of over £11.7bn [>US$15bn] and a workforce of 81,500 Partners."
Just wanted to put this out there, in case anyone thought a co-op didn't scale beyond 8-10 people. We can democratise large corporations & enjoy the synergy of a board/executives who do what is best for the long term goals of the company & all employee-owners.