Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

I wrote a quick explainer for the long running "DIY trainer" program Cheat Engine (that the ESA threw lawyers at a couple of years ago), at least how most DIY users will engage with it, and how it's actually a good thing for understand lines between user-hostile design and just protecting your product. https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/10/cheat-engine-dev-basics.html

Had not looked at Inside on a 4K HDR screen before (on PC, feeding it an RGB 8-bit 60Hz signal so not actually "HDR") but that dithering work really is top tier. Better gradients & detail than quite a few 10-bit HDR games manage to output.
Jpegs can't do it justice & PNGs are rather large to attach to social media. https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1183493352605519882

(Didn't mean for this to come off as dismissive. This could end up being great. It's more senior folks using their clout to expand the "triple I" space.) But I'd really love to see more studios with the clout to take risks trying to do "comic book" visuals with 2020 real-time rendering. TTG's technical evolution was very limited even before they imploded but seems to have defined the popular vision of "3D comic book on a medium budget".

Maybe this is from spending too long thinking about rendering but I was initially more interested in this when I thought header images/snippets were from in-engine 3D renders rather than (as the trailer makes clear) being a 2D painted art game. https://youtu.be/GP5NHmUF6js

Directly linking to the social media of one member of G*merG*te in a broadly unrelated news article? Coincidence. But two out of two who get that mainstream, high traffic link?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49985747
Do BBC writers swim in misogynistic seas and are their editors too overworked to catch something like this (maybe because they don't have the expertise to instantly remember who quoted people are)?

What an odd blip of a product along the Intel timeline. I know a lot of people assumed this was something Apple requested that Intel just made widely available but AFAIK Apple never actually did anything with it (despite being their favoured CPU-GPU combo in a single socket). https://www.anandtech.com/show/14957/intel-starts-endoflife-plan-for-kaby-lakeg-processors

Well, that at least seems confirmed (can't imagine MS will step back from 100GB disc option on next console as current XB1 supports it already; would they go "GDROM" & offer a custom 150-200GB media variant?)
PS5 officially using 100GB Ultra HD drive. https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-playstation-5/

Condolences to those Bungie engineers who have probably spent over two years trying to get the resources approved to get a really good temporal AA solution built.
Maybe it's being worked on for the next-gen versions (that are surely in development).

A studio leadership may not consider it management vs employees but when only one of those fires the others for union organising then it's pretty clear. If leadership want everyone to be the same, it's called a co-op & everyone owns the company so makes leadership decisions democratically. https://www.gameworkersunite.org/post/union-busting-at-ustwo-games

So are all new consoles getting Ultra HD Blu-ray drives? Even if so, does that mean games can't get larger than they are today (~100GB) without returning to current issue with tens of GBs of launch patch for disc users or needing to ship on several discs?
Getting close to a weird ratio between total RAM and media capacity (even if games have to be mainly installed to SSD before being playable).

Me, often pushing it to stay safely above 4K30 (or even 1836p30) in a few modern AAA releases: "Hmm, I wonder if we'll get a flood of 4K 100Hz & beyond HDR monitors/TVs once HDMI 2.1 is common."

One thing I'd not realised about uPlay+ is that how it's implemented you can't opt out of patches (unlike purchased games).
To opt out of patches with uPlay you have to ask it to go offline rather than update. If you go into offline mode, your uPlay+ licenses can't be validated so the game can't start. Oversight or intended limitation for rental players?

The more I play Odyssey, the more I wonder if the Assassin's Creed brand, rather than selling the game, might have actually held it back from a larger audience eager for a new IP: "What if Skyrim but Ancient Greece?"

It is possible that years of cd keys tied to multiplayer access & then an early move to digital/DRM on PC has given a false impression of just what an aberration denying any borrowing/resale/rental path is.
Here's Sony, talking about this console generation: https://youtu.be/kWSIFh8ICaA (if I then buy you a pint & you keep the game, this is a zero-friction, zero-fee resale).

Unionised US journalists writing about crunch culture while also saying it's not part of their billable labour when they put 40+ hrs/week into gaming, despite that work being core to their company's tentpole media output (podcast etc), are possibly indicating limitations of unions when not operating in a legal landscape that also believes in worker rights.
It's much easier to see exploitation when you're looking in.

So this is now getting fixed-fixed: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup.rs/pull/1997
(Previously it was patched to explain to users how to manually find the last working build & install it - something the error message didn't make clear back in Feb was the expected process.)

My real concern is that a slight occasional stutter in a couple of games I'm playing is being caused by my preferred settings being ok for not overloading the shader cores but is pushing the engines to slightly over-allocate VRAM, so getting silently swapped out by WDDM (which definitely can cause such unpredictable but rare extended stall issue). Or maybe it's just a driver or game bug?

I did not think "only 8GB of VRAM" was going to be something I thought about already (but maybe I'm stuck in a ~2016 mindset).
Starting to see games using up every inch of VRAM they can get their hands on (7.5GB in Division 2 for 4K high). Wonder how much is "just stream in as many assets as will fit" vs feeling real pressure (games that estimate usage in settings warn of huge VRAM jumps for some temporal AA & other choices @ 4K).

I've been going through a lot of semi-recent Ubisoft games (in uPlay+) - nVidia really "owned" high-end PC gaming for a few years with TWIMTBP.
These games are mainly console-first, optimised for GCN, but on PC the quality dials go up to 11 with nVidia tech. If you want much better SSAO or soft shadows you couldn't get on consoles then you have to run them on an nVidia card (for HBAO+ HFTS etc).