Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

[A matter of hours passes] Wow, patch is out & publicised. Extremely good of the devs to continue to support all customers, however they came to own KR0.
https://twitter.com/cardboardcompy/status/1222327717028339712

I've hit one of the weird points of our subscription-based future: I own Kentucky Route Zero on PC, via Amazon/Twitch. The first four acts are there, as they were when I got it in 2017. I have no idea if an update will complete this store's version (it has not arrived at the same time as the other stores still selling the game) &, while episodic, there is no way for me to just buy act five elsewhere outside of buying the entire game at full price.

I'm not sure where we'd be without good community wikis. Trying to get a game that's eight (years) behind the currently released version working, through GfWL DRM (doing a bit of a dive into how a series evolved)? There's two different potential fixes for that: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/F1_2011

HowLongToBeat is a pretty useful community aggregation site. One area I find it really interesting is where it shows a huge divergence in my own experience vs average play time.
The Dishonored series have always been Thief games to me & unseen runs are how I engage with those systems (something the game explicitly grades you on). I slowly, methodically work through every inch of each level. Most players really don't.

A painful read at times but good notes on porting a large project & how decisions have long tails. I was nodding along (a lot of my PhD was coded in Python) even before it talked up Rust. https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/13/mercurial's-journey-to-and-reflections-on-python-3/

The GTA IV story is a great reminder that if the only version of your game requires someone else's server generating valid keys, you are only selling a copy of your game with their permission. You're paying them for this "service".
DRM is a bad deal for everyone except the DRM seller.

Does anyone have any advice for capturing a frame from inside a shipping UWP app?
I'm used to basic use of Nsight & despite checking permissions, I'm getting "you don't have permission to open this file" when selecting the relevant exe to launch. (The only UWP guide I can find is for when it's your app inside Visual Studio - I realise one of the "features" of UWP is making working with the shipping app files hard/unpleasant for end users.)

You ever turn on a setting combo (DSR + FXAA here) in a shipping, patched game and wonder if you've accidentally cursed your PC?
More pics: https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1215547721387597825

Just realised it was over 20 years ago when I first wrote professionally about video games.
Counting profit-share indie (that never make significant profits) then not that long until the same happens for my commercial game development history.

"The idea is to first determine which parts of the screen will require what kind of complexity [then only use a shader as complex as is required in each tile]." https://wickedengine.net/2020/01/05/tile-based-optimization-for-post-processing/
[via @KostasAAA (on Twitter)]

At the time (early '90s), I had absolutely no idea what went into porting Another World to the PC I played it on.
http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_PC_DOS/index.html

So an area I found this particularly noticeable recently - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
You hit orbit from the cockpit & you're about to get that iconic FTL jump (check the films for how black the sky is before the streaks of light - tiny dim distant stars). You move the camera slightly & every star in the (too) busy sky & LED panel control smears all over your screen as if hyperspace started early.

One of those "we're so close" areas I hope is fixed next gen: metal/glass reflections in uniformly dark environments (we rarely notice are off in lit environs). https://photos.app.goo.gl/xeCJbHQB5gBcTjNd7
Interested to see how many recent exclusives get lavish ports up, grabbing new players (especially who swap console brands) & helping train up engineers on new consoles inside a known codebase.

In 2020, let's make our motion blurs energy-preserving in our HDR/tonemapped pipelines (rather than every bright light source becoming, effectively, impossibly strong but only as directly observed when a player moves the camera quickly).

It's 2020 throughout Europe so let's have a look back at some of the games from 2019 I found notable. https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html

Excited that a load of real-time rendering engineers are being asked "so what do you think you can do with these new consoles?" with Into the Spider-Verse fresh in their minds.

I think everyone is interested to see what a new independent team does with GTA-tier money (even making both a solo game and an MMO with it - probably more ambitious than GTA V + GTA:O). I could see these flyby incomplete areas becoming a finished game in under 18 months. https://youtu.be/_aCE7gxQOVY

Playing a driving game on a streaming service really shows where you are working at refining a known input challenge vs an unknown or even unknowable one.
I can get down a good qualifying pace but going into the first corner while in the middle of the pack - avoiding being rear-ended or breaking my front wing is a supreme challenge of guesstimating where a space will exist as I can't react fast enough.

Aha, so this mapping seems to be unchangeable for 360 pads (Android remapper apps create a new keyboard, which isn't getting me what I need) and was fixed on the Xbox One controllers via a firmware update.
Old lady yells at cloud (using outdated hardware which will never get a fix).

Feeling like I'm slowly losing it. Android with 360 pad plugged in binds Xbox button to OS Home & select/back button to OS Back. I am unable to find how you disable this so select works as a real button in games expecting it. Surely this hasn't just been "how it is" for years.