Various video game stuff not deserving its own thread

[aweigh]

obligatory

this stone-cold classic was ******* prescient

[rusty_shackleford]

Did any "clone" genre (-like) ever get termed -killer other than the games referred to as "halokiller"?

[aweigh]

another classic

[Emphyrio]

Did any "clone" genre (-like) ever get termed -killer other than the games referred to as "halokiller"?

wowkiller

[Vergil]

suicide squad game looks like a 2008 mmorpg

Maybe that one dev's suicide was a coverup and he had an aneurysm after trying to keep track of all the ******** UI elements.

[rusty_shackleford]

When I see graphics brought up, why does nobody ever bring up Doom 3?
It looked exceedingly good for the time and still does. I'd be entirely fine if graphics just froze at that level.


Hard shadows also look better most of the time imo, and stencil shadows are inherently hard without post-processing the result.

[edit]
I think Doom 3 was also one of the few big budget games of the time made for PC first and ported to console after rather than the reverse.

[Roguey]

When I see graphics brought up, why does nobody ever bring up Doom 3?
It looked exceedingly good for the time and still does. I'd be entirely fine if graphics just froze at that level.


Hard shadows also look better most of the time imo, and stencil shadows are inherently hard without post-processing the result.

[edit]
I think Doom 3 was also one of the few big budget games of the time made for PC first and ported to console after rather than the reverse.

Too dark to see most of the time and outshined by Half-Life 2 in all aspects.

[Rand]

When I see graphics brought up, why does nobody ever bring up Doom 3?
It looked exceedingly good for the time and still does. I'd be entirely fine if graphics just froze at that level.


Hard shadows also look better most of the time imo, and stencil shadows are inherently hard without post-processing the result.

[edit]
I think Doom 3 was also one of the few big budget games of the time made for PC first and ported to console after rather than the reverse.

Too dark to see most of the time and outshined by Half-Life 2 in all aspects.

Doom 3 actually had better and better running graphics.
I'll agree that due to the level design, it was too damned dark, but that's not the engine's fault.

[Vergil]

When I see graphics brought up, why does nobody ever bring up Doom 3?
It looked exceedingly good for the time and still does. I'd be entirely fine if graphics just froze at that level.


Hard shadows also look better most of the time imo, and stencil shadows are inherently hard without post-processing the result.

[edit]
I think Doom 3 was also one of the few big budget games of the time made for PC first and ported to console after rather than the reverse.

Too dark to see most of the time and outshined by Half-Life 2 in all aspects.

Except the being fun as a first person shooter part of course.

[rusty_shackleford]

do3m looks better than hl2

[KnightoftheWind]

If Doom 3 was remade with Unreal Engine 5 today, it wouldn't look much better yet be 50x more expensive to run. That's the importance of aesthetics, coupled with a good engine. John Carmack is unmatched in skill, and his absence is sorely missed. He's so based he even made his engines freely available under the GPL after a few years, which led to a thriving mod community for Doom and Quake that continues to this day. Not even the likes of Half-Life 2/Source compare.

That's one thing Valve hasn't done with Source, despite how much they "heckin' love" Linux they refuse to follow it's example and actually make their 'own stuff' Free. But as a game, HL2 compares favourably to Doom 3, more or less. From a purely technical perspective, HL2 beats Doom 3 with it's superior facial animation and physics system, but in all other areas Doom 3 has it beat. Despite how dark and moody the game is, you can see the competence involved in all areas of design, including gameplay. Meanwhile HL2 was basically a glorified tech demo. You rarely hear mention of how the game brought the genre forward in 'gameplay', rather how impressive the physics and graphics were at the time. That's the hallmark of a tech demo game.

[rusty_shackleford]

If Doom 3 was remade with Unreal Engine 5 today, it wouldn't look much better yet be 50x more expensive to run. That's the importance of aesthetics, coupled with a good engine. John Carmack is unmatched in skill, and his absence is sorely missed. He's so based he even made his engines freely available under the GPL after a few years, which led to a thriving mod community for Doom and Quake that continues to this day. Not even the likes of Half-Life 2/Source compare.

That's one thing Valve hasn't done with Source, despite how much they "heckin' love" Linux they refuse to follow it's example and actually make their 'own stuff' Free. But as a game, HL2 compares favourably to Doom 3, more or less. From a purely technical perspective, HL2 beats Doom 3 with it's superior facial animation and physics system, but in all other areas Doom 3 has it beat. Despite how dark and moody the game is, you can see the competence involved in all areas of design, including gameplay. Meanwhile HL2 was basically a glorified tech demo. You rarely hear mention of how the game brought the genre forward in 'gameplay', rather how impressive the physics and graphics were at the time. That's the hallmark of a tech demo game.

The reason most engines aren't open-sourced is because of the overreliance on proprietary middleware, and software patents.
If the latter sounds ridiculous, it's not. Carmack found out that the method he used for creating shadow volumes was actually patented by someone else and was forced to license it, they didn't have permission to release the code, so it had to be replaced prior to doom 3 being GPL'd.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/pa ... -doom-3-i-

Pretty sure some of the idtech releases had to replace some middleware to get them working too. Original GPL DOOM source code was the linux port which had proprietary middleware already stripped out.

[Rand]

If Doom 3 was remade with Unreal Engine 5 today, it wouldn't look much better yet be 50x more expensive to run. That's the importance of aesthetics, coupled with a good engine. John Carmack is unmatched in skill, and his absence is sorely missed. He's so based he even made his engines freely available under the GPL after a few years, which led to a thriving mod community for Doom and Quake that continues to this day. Not even the likes of Half-Life 2/Source compare.

That's one thing Valve hasn't done with Source, despite how much they "heckin' love" Linux they refuse to follow it's example and actually make their 'own stuff' Free. But as a game, HL2 compares favourably to Doom 3, more or less. From a purely technical perspective, HL2 beats Doom 3 with it's superior facial animation and physics system, but in all other areas Doom 3 has it beat. Despite how dark and moody the game is, you can see the competence involved in all areas of design, including gameplay. Meanwhile HL2 was basically a glorified tech demo. You rarely hear mention of how the game brought the genre forward in 'gameplay', rather how impressive the physics and graphics were at the time. That's the hallmark of a tech demo game.

The reason most engines aren't open-sourced is because of the overreliance on proprietary middleware, and software patents.
If the latter sounds ridiculous, it's not. Carmack found out that the method he used for creating shadow volumes was actually patented by someone else and was forced to license it, they didn't have permission to release the code, so it had to be replaced prior to doom 3 being GPL'd.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/pa ... -doom-3-i-

Pretty sure some of the idtech releases had to replace some middleware to get them working too. Original GPL DOOM source code was the linux port which had proprietary middleware already stripped out.

******* American patent law...
It's patent ********.

[Roguey]

Doom 3 actually had better and better running graphics.
I'll agree that due to the level design, it was too damned dark, but that's not the engine's fault.

Doom 3's level design is incredibly cramped compared to Half-Life 2's, though that's likely because they were making it with the xbox in mind. Valve didn't go console until Episode 2 when the 360 was out.

[Segata]

Riddick mogs.

[Wretch]

You know what would be cool? Elder Scrolls Warriors. I imagine it to be a vastly superior version of Dynasty Warriors 9's open world, with the budget of a full AAA release. There would be two aspects of play, the first would be a tactics/overview screen of Tamriel, where you command various units to attack provinces and the settlements within them, with varying chances of success. And the second is of course, traditional Dynasty Warriors fare. However this time the world is massive, and more detailed than ever before. You can explore dungeons and caves solo to discover loot to empower yourself or your armies, and conquered settlements that can supply you with gear and helpful services. The scale would be unlike anything ever seen in the series, with the whole of the continent rendered on the scale of Oblivion or Skyrim at the very least. (Edit: Each individual province I mean)

The Imperial Province of Cyrodill would of course be central to the game, and taking control of it would boost your resources significantly. Likewise if the enemy takes it before you can, they would be given bonuses as well. And if you start off in Cyrodill, you would have these advantages from the get-go but with the downside of being attacked on multiple fronts. Finally, you can of course design your own "general" in the traditional method, regardless of which province you start off in. And I imagine the gameplay being more dynamic than ever, with large boss monsters and things that you can climb on top of ala Dragon's Dogma. This is just a random thought of course, but I would play the heck out of this game.

The Elder Scrolls (and Fallout for that matter) have so much potential for good spin offs instead of one mainline release (of worse quality each time) every blue moon and a ****** skinnerbox MMO.

The good elderscrolls spinoffs are mods, both total overhauls and just collecting good ones for the base game. The trouble is for every good mod there is a terrible one with some inexplicable huge popularity. It takes ages to sift through to find the good ones or decent modding capability to fix them.

There are going to be no more good AAA games from the western world and even japan will rarely drop one.

[maidenhaver]

Riddick mogs.

I've always got it installed.

[Oyster Sauce]

Riddick mogs.

Never finished Dark Athena. Felt more shootery than the first one. Should go back to it one day.

[aweigh]

[Segata]

I like the occasional good success story

[Emphyrio]

I like the occasional good success story

"americans sometimes want to make very ugly characters" lmao

[KnightoftheWind]

So why are some random Japanese developers still opting for the "Body Type A" and "Body Type B" nonsense?.

[Breathe]

Randos keep ******** on established studios. Gotta love it.

[gerey]

So why are some random Japanese developers still opting for the "Body Type A" and "Body Type B" nonsense?.

Because Marxist ****** use the fading might of the West to make sure the rest of the world panders to their Jewish death cult, or else they get called out by the UN, get embarged and fined by the US and EU, and global megacorporations refuse to do business with them.

The West is now a cultural Chernobyl reaching critical mass and spewing gay, radioactive fumes into the noosphere. The sooner the West dies, the sooner we can start rounding up **** and ****** and putting bullets in their heads.

[Wretch]

I like the occasional good success story

Love this. It’s such a joy to see humble people succeed.

[maidenhaver]

So why are some random Japanese developers still opting for the "Body Type A" and "Body Type B" nonsense?.

Maybe there are no words to convey just how ****** up psychotic devs are.

[rusty_shackleford]

[Nemesis]

Simpler times.

[Oyster Sauce]

Helldivers 2 & nProtect GameGuard (anti-cheat)
Hi everyone,

My name is Peter Lindgren and I'm the Technical Director of HELLDIVERS 2. I've been making games at Arrowhead since the Magicka-days and I've been involved in every game we've released to date.

I will do my best in this post to address the concerns and confusion that's come up recently regarding the choice of Anti-Cheat software in HELLDIVERS 2.

So, let's start off with the more urgent questions:

Is GameGuard a kernel-level / administrator-priviledge anti-cheat?

Yes, GameGuard is a "kernel-level", aka rootkit, anti-cheat. Most anti-cheat run at "kernel-level", especially all of the popular ones. It's unfortunately one of the more effective ways to combat cheating.

There are some anti-cheat that can run in "user-mode", but they are much less effective and tend to be cracked very quickly, resulting in widespread cheating.

Will GameGuard stay installed on my system after I've uninstalled HELLDIVERS 2?

No, GameGuard is removed at the same time as the game is uninstalled.

The installer and uninstaller for GameGuard is visibly included with the game in <install-dir>/tools/GGSetup.exe and <install-dir>/tools/gguninst.exe.

I'm worried about my privacy, will GameGuard collect sensitive information about me?

No, GameGuard does not collect any personally identifiable information (PII). And doing so would be a GDPR/ADPPA nightmare as well. I can speak from experience that we're all bending over backwards to be compliant with these regulations.

On a more technical note, GameGuard is scanning the running processes (applications) for malicious software and attempts to block such software from manipulating the game client.

Will GameGuard reduce the performance of my PC?

GameGuard is only active while the game is running and after thousands of hours of testing we’ve not noticed any noteworthy degradations of performance on our developer and QA workstations.

And the big one that needs plenty of context:

HELLDIVERS 2 is a co-op/PvE game, why do we even need Anti-Cheat?

That's a great question, and there's two related but separate points to it:

First, we want everyone to have a great time playing HELLDIVERS 2, with friends, ex-friends or randoms. What we've seen in some of our and others' games is that rampant cheating tends to have a very negative effect on players openness to playing, especially with randoms.

There's an anecdote from HELLDIVERS 1 I'd like to share:

When we released HELLDIVERS 1 on PC there was effectively no anti-cheat implemented. Additionally HELLDIVERS 1 uses a peer-to-peer networking model, and that means, from a security perspective, each game client will blindly trust each other.

Shortly after release we noticed there was a cheat going around which granted 9999 research samples. Unfortunately any non-cheaters in the same mission would also be granted 9999 research samples. These non-cheating players now had their entire progression ruined through no fault of their own.

We were able to deal with a lot of these early issues without using a third party solution, but it took a lot of work, and most of it was done reactively.

Incidentally HELLDIVERS 2 also uses a peer-to-peer networking model, but this time around we're trying to be more proactive and make sure everyone can play the intended experience.

Second is the Galactic War. There's this huge metagame going in the cloud which all players (and game clients) participate in. Even though we have other countermeasures in place, a cracked game client could make it easier to disrupt the Galactic War, which would sour everyone’s experience.

As a final note, on an open platform like PC it's not possible to stop cheating from ever happening. Someone with the skills, dedication and resources will ultimately succeed. The point of anti-cheat is to make it more difficult and time consuming to develop cheats.

Needless to say we will be keeping a very close eye for any issues that may be encountered at release.

See you on the battlefield

-Peter

tldr 4 player exclusively coop game is adding kernel-level rootkit anti-cheat, which also prevents the game from being played on Linux/Steam Deck

[Emphyrio]

helldivers is **** btw