marelooke

Keep having connection issues in Destiny 2 and I'm simply about to give up. The last three missions I've done I've gotten disconnected partway through each time and I've pretty much had it at this point. Can't even blame it on the new expansion rush either as this crap had been going on prior to the Steam move. Ugh, well, new dungeon in Conan Exiles, let's go check that out instead I guess.

If it takes their entertainment being affected for some more people to wake up to how the system works then I'll take that as a win.

EGS does not allow reviews, nor does it have forums, ergo the Matrix quote. Whether Mr. Sweeney's words carry any weight when it comes to their events will remain to be seen when push comes to shove. So far he's been about as reliable as your average politician, I'm going to just assume there's no public events coming up anytime soon with any risk of him having to eat his words (iirc the "big" Fortnite event already happened this year).

"What use is freedom of speech, if you are unable to speak."

Moon's haunted...

More Destiny 2, tried some Gambit. Seems like the improvements to connectivity don't extend to PvP. Nothing's as demotivating like getting booted from a match because the game's networking is trash, especially if you've been doing really well too. Wouldn't be nearly as bad if PvP wasn't basically mandatory in Destiny 2 (but then I would never play it as the terrible servers suck all the fun out of it)

Weird, many in my clan (mostly US, afaiu) also had queues, wasn't a problem for me (EU). Though the game was constantly "connecting to servers" (meaning it was teetering on the verge of timeout, as far as I can tell) but I managed to get through the first two missions on the Moon fine and also completed the Black Armory mission I got disconnected from before (non-Moon areas appear to run a lot better, so I might just go and level my Titan for now) Bit of a shame about them being unable to handle the load but honestly the game experience has, barring the fact that everything requiring network is slow (like buying things from vendors etc), been a lot better than what I experienced prior to the Steam switch (where I'd regularly lose progress due to disconnects, at some point I half-joked that half my game time on D2 was re-doing progress I lost due to disconnects) Haven't tried any PvP or Strikes yet, so maybe disconnects will still turn out to be a big issue there but so far so good and if they finally manage to gracefully handle overloaded servers and other types of disconnects now then I might play quite a bit more of the game (and maybe even more PvP, heh)

Are you telling me that Fat Larry or officer Chunk weren't serious characters?

Depending on your needs the supported file systems are also something to look at, modern Synology products supports Btrfs which can protect your files against corruption, the only other file system with that functionality is zfs, as far as I'm aware.

Oh yes, technically I also bought Elite: Dangerous on sale, but after putting in a support request due to keyboard layout issues that didn't get a response in over 5 days I've just submitted my first ever Steam refund request. Congratulations, Frontier Support.

I should add this for more evidence

Well, someone must've brought that Kickstarter to my attention, I'm betting it was you!

I'm sure that was earlier in the year, when those new year's resolutions were still going strong

What both Microsoft and Sony "sell" is a walled garden, the hardware is usually sold at break even. Moreover modern consoles are basically purpose built PCs with a custom OS (not unlike a Macintosh, really), so difficulty in porting is mostly a thing because it benefits console makers. Meaning that if you ignore the hardware what MS and Sony do isn't particularly much different from what Epic is doing. People just accept it because consoles used to be purpose built devices with custom hardware, so the segmentation was somewhat justified. This hasn't really been the case for Xbox and PS for a while now but they've successfully managed to maintain that perception with the general public. EDIT: and I purposefully don't mention Nintendo because, afaict they still actually do build "real" consoles.

Well, "bought", is a big word, but these are new to my (Gog) library: Freespace 2 (giveaway) Stygian - Reign of the Old Ones (backed a long time ago)

Someone had to go with the "average Obsidianite"... Gets me a free way to regain sanity through...entertainment This was initial character creation, game hung after it so I had to start over, current character is Middle-Aged rather than Adult, everything else remained the same though.

tl;dr Bottom line, if you have a beefy CPU with a bunch of bored cores (so any CPU with more than 4 cores for Arkham Knight) then Denuvo is likely to have little impact on your average FPS, while it does have a minor but noticeable impact on loading times and very much impacts initial game game startup time. There's also a minor increase in memory usage with Denuvo. No testing has been done with any hardware that has 4 cores or less (like i5 CPUs which are quite common still), as far as I know, and no testing has been done where the impact on the CPU has been measured either (as an alternative to using CPUs with less cores). Long version: Article doesn't list hardware used for testing, that I could find, so I'm going to assume they tested on some top of the line system, which obviously is not representative of what most people actually use. They also don't say anything substantial about testing methodology This makes their conclusions essentially worthless, so we'll have to focus on the linked YouTube video (which had a Reddit thread that was quite interesting and included a lot of details about the testing methodology and its shortcomings, but at least gave us something tangible to work with). Since most current day games are GPU limited, not CPU limited (barring certain strategy games, especially the turn based ones), using top-of-the-line hardware is likely not going to result in a noticeable difference in FPS, so if they don't actually measure CPU load it's hard to tell how much extra work the CPU needs, or does not need, to do (and it obviously will need to do extra work, encryption is not free). Testing on something that's more reasonable (eg. a quad core system) would be interesting to see since most games are incapable of using more than 4 cores (and afaiu Arkham Knight is among those), so a system where Denuvo actually has to share a core with the game would, imho, be a lot more representative and indicative of the effect it has (or doesn't have) than a system where there's a bunch of cores that are doing sod all anyway. The tests in the YouTube video linked from the article video appear to have indicated that while the FPS differences were minor on midrange hardware they were there (which makes sense, given that on-the-fly decryption can't be a "free" operation and will become more detrimental the slower your CPU gets), moreover they indicated a massive decrease in initial game loading times without Denuvo (which isn't taken into account with the benchmark) and minor increases of in-game loading times. It should also be noted that he only ran tests 3 times and let the game "warm up" each time (iow, only the first run for each (Denuvo and non-Denuvo) was from a "cold" boot, while in successive runs data was already cached from prior runs, as indicated by the fact that only the first Denuvo run had the slow game startup). This kind of decreases the value of the results, small sample size and not rebooting between tests isn't ideal, I'd argue. Whether 1-3 fps is significant is debatable, it probably isn't on a high-end system (then again, it might well be more than this on a lower end system), whether the extra CPU cycles amount to anything tangible has, as far as I can tell, been tested by nobody, so far. There also wasn't any testing done with regards FPS stability (people noted on the video that the Denuvo version appeared to microstutter at points, can't say I noticed, but hey), if the Denuvo version results in less stable FPS then an average isn't necessarily going to really tell us much about the actual quality of the gameplay experience. Whether the increased initial loading times (40 or so extra seconds, iirc) are significant is also debatable, and probably up to the individual. I know slow loading games irritate me (hi Destiny 2), but ymmv. The slower in-game loading times might be worrying to people on lower end systems since Arkham Knight streams data while playing, so quick movement around the game world might lead to more issues with Denuvo enabled (like there used to be at the game's release)

Been a while, but I've been busy building stuff (surprise!) My humble abode: By night: I've sort of slowed down working on it (which was mostly decorating the inside and removing some of the leftover T1 stuff) because it, errr, kinda starts to break the server (collision won't properly load, stuff like that). Inside: As I've never lived in the jungle before I started looking for a good spot there, which I found, at least for a humbly sized vacation home. The building to the left, in the back is the actual house, to the right (with the gate) is the Derketo temple, and the main plaza with a well, and the housing for my, errr, employees, as well as basement access. Some more environment shots: It's Lemurian architecture, so lots of bling, especially with torches at night (rather hard to capture in a screenshot) There's a pretty sizeable cellar underneath that has most of the crafting stations (except for the blacksmith/smelter) Eventually shoe-horned in a wheel of pain (which there really isn't room for), but I might just build something nearby just to house a Map room and that Wheel of pain without having to expand this in rather ugly ways. Mod-wise this uses: Lemurian Architect (didn't see that one coming, did you? ) Glass Constructions and more (for the marble floors) Pythagoras Support Beams (to be able to have the giant maproom without having to pollute it with pillars in really inconvenient spots) Limestone Buildings, a Greek server mod (the light touches on the desert base; like the white inner circles on the towers and the main stairs) LBPROE - No NPC camps edition (because building without is just a royal pain) EDIT: poor Kush-ites, getting censored...

I'm not too far in (somewhere in the second major area, the Waterworks), unlike Legend of Grimrock you play as only one character. You have an exoskeleton that you wear which specializes in certain areas (tech, combat, tankyness. The choice is permanent too, fwiw) but as far as I can tell it doesn't lock you out of anything, relying entirely on gadgets if you're not tech specced appears like it would just be inefficient. Weapons are a mix of melee and ranged so far, haven't bothered with the ranged weapons yet so can't say anything about those, except that they require ammo. And then there's "gadgets" that sort of act like slottable spells since you can swap them in and out and they use a regenerating resource (stamina), these range from damage abilities to shields and there might be others as well. So far I've run into box pushing puzzles and timed button press puzzles and the pressure plate puzzles, so kinda Grimrock like. There's also pits to fall in (which I haven't, wonder if there's things below like there was in Grimrock, hmmmm) There are various upgrade trees that I haven't really looked at so far as I'm trying to figure out my playstyle. But so far it feels very much like steampunk Legends of Grimrock 1. Which is good, I feel, as my Grimrock 2 playthrough kinda fizzled out.

Been playing some Vaporum, feels like the first Grimrock, but steampunk, so far. Also got Elite: Dangerous because it was on sale and I got curious. Game insists on ignoring my keyboard settings and instead setting the layout based on my locale (which I verified by changing my locale, and I don't even have the layout it insists on installed). Not sure if I can be bothered dealing with that level of wilful incompetence so I might just refund it (which would be my first refund ever on Steam). Game is complex enough that having to deal with the keyboard mapping not matching my keyboard is not something I care to deal with (tutorial was interesting...) and messing up my locale settings because of this isn't something I fancy dealing with either. How hard is it to just use the system keyboard layout. Ugh.

I doubt it will destroy Steam, despite you wishing it so. It will, however impact other digital storefronts as well if this is upheld.

Never owned a console, never been good playing most things with controllers either (might be some correlation there) and MS thankfully releases through the Windows Store as well so the few games I care about (aka Forza) I can get that way as well nowadays. Even better now that some things have been coming to Steam as well, because, honestly, the Windows Store isn't exactly good.

It apparently also retroactively turns GTA V into a always-online game, even for the single player. This is supposedly a bug. Also appears to make the game unplayable on Linux through Proton at this time.

Yes, yes it is. My Witcher 3 playthrough has been dragging on since its release. Not sure why but it doesn't seem to drive me forward. When I do play it it's a case of "Whoa, is it that late already?" but once I quit the game I feel no urge to pick it up again. Kinda weird. Anyway, so far I've only ever had to do sections as Ciri, which wasn't bad at all, and none of those have been particularly long.

Hmm.. (gets interesting around halfway), or you can just read the Polygon article. The parts about technical issues are rather interesting as the game is supposed to be out rather soon...