PBR isn’t shit, and it doesn’t necessarily mean targeting photorealism.

It’s just a benchmark for material rendering that means once all your assets come out the other end of production, they work consistently with each other.

You could shift that benchmark towards cartoony or painterly or whatever you like, and even with assets produced using PBR, it’s easier to “style” your game later because all your different assets are at the same starting point, and will therefore react to rendering changes consistently across the board.

Basically if your entire team is making metal materials by eyeballing it, and you then put it all together in a scene, you won’t be able to get all the different metal objects to look like metal at the same time as you make changes to the lighting in the scene, because the asset team made all of them using slightly different material parameters.

If you make your entire asset production pipeline PBR, all metal assets will behave the same, all glass materials will behave the same, flesh, fabric, fur…

You get the idea.

I adore Fires of Rubicon. They know how to design games, and how to pull off an aesthetic. That side of the studio has serious world-class talent.

But fromsoft has some big issues on the graphics tech expertise side of things.

I don’t think I’ve seen any subsurface scattering in their games, or proper multi-texture materials. I don’t think they are on a PBR workflow (physically based rendering) though they couldn’t achieve their “style” if they were. And the way they still rely on shell texturing in places they really, really shouldn’t, actually hurts.

My problem isn’t with their style. It’s that they don’t seem to know all the industry standard solutions and techniques that exist and have been developed, and shoot themselves in the foot both in terms of performance and fidelity, by achieving things in ways that an expert could immediately tell is a bad idea.

I know.

But only games running dx12/Vulkan must compile shaders.

The “normalcy” of sutters on linux is because dx7-11 games are running through vulkan, and those games were never coded to account for the way Vulkan works. Hence the shaders are compiled (by VKD3D/DXVK, not the game) during gameplay when first needed.

Like I said, if games must compile shaders during gameplay, they should do so asynchronously in order to not impact frametimes. This only applies to titles actually coded with the intention of being run under dx12/vulkan. Elden Ring in particular straight up violates the dx12 spec.

Compiling the shaders in advance also doesn’t take 30 minutes, and doesn’t require doing so for the entire game. Many games will only compile the shaders for the immediate area that a player is in. (Apex Legends in dx12 mode for example processes only the current map in rotation and lets you play when it’s done)

Games that precompile shaders when running using Vulkan/dx12 have never made me wait longer than a few minutes at most, and only at first launch.

There is no excuse.

Shader compilation stuttering only happens if a game was coded incorrectly to begin with.

Shaders should never ever be compiled during gameplay, and if it has to be done, done so asynchronously.

Either way it should never be dismissed as a problem that is “common in new games”. It’s amateurish and completely avoidable.

This feature is epic. Being able to save a file to my phone from my tablet or vice versa is fantastic.

Incredible art.

I think that’s supposed to be a gingerbread tram. The lights are like icing you’d do on a gingerbread house.

“Hoo boy, a car? Those take a while to sell, but I know someone who can scrap it for parts, so I’ll do you a favour and take it off your hands… Ten bucks?”

Yuss. My life can finally have some more blue plate specials in it.

Oh cool! It’s like four-lane Muse Dash?

I’m really keen on playing a rhythm game with this level of presentation. Hi-Fi Rush left me thirsting for more rhythm games that have more character and impeccable style.

Indeed. Looks like Muse Dash on steroids.

Those are still what I would consider “sketches”. Just not the two-dimensional kind.

There are a couple more detailed assets, but tubes and boxes laying out locations, interiors and buildings is something you do when still exploring ideas and don’t want to lock anything down.

The written material suggests the writers got the furthest into it. But this is very much planning, not production.

The title suggests that there are files for an actual expansion, half-finished and unpublished.

When really it’s just some concept art and initial design sketches.

“Unrealized plans for Cyberpunk ‘Moon’ expansion appear online” would be more accurate.

The chose title is technically accurate, but also pretty clearly chosen to make this out to be more than it is.

There has always been ways to make stupid money in the game.

My favorite has been to cozy up to a local faction so I can get assassination assignments that pay the big bucks, and void opal mining was still super lucrative last I checked.

Bounty hunting is a bit slow, but taking on a a mercenary contract with a faction to fight for them in conflict zones pays well IIRC.

The real grind is engineering your ships and weapons, though that was also improved significantly by making it so re-rolling your mods can only make them better, never worse.

No, raw audio from the controllers mic only!

There’s also the fact that they can’t tell reality apart from fiction in general, because they don’t understand anything in the first place.

LLMs have no way of differentiating fantasy RPG elements from IRL things. So they can lose the plot on what is being discussed suddenly, and for seemingly no reason.

LLMs don’t just “learn” facts from their training data. They learn how to pretend to be thinking, they can mimic but not really comprehend. If there were facts in the training data, it can regurgitate them, but it doesn’t actually know which facts apply to which subjects, or when to not make some up.

• Wipeout HD/Fury can be played using RPCS3
• 2048 can be played using vita3k
• Original/2097/3 can be played using any PSX emulator

There is also BallisticNG, which replicates the various flight physics of the various titles 1 to 1 (excluding Fusion), and faithfully recreates the PS1 aesthetic (right down to the polygons jiggling, if you want that). It has mods, custom tracks, crafts and campaigns. If the old graphics style does it for you, it’s basically endless wipeout content.

It’s insanely amazing on the deck. I recommend binding the back buttons to discard/use pickups, so you never have to move your thumb off throttle.

Other titles worth mentioning are both Readout games. They have an immaculate sense of speed, though have quite different gameplay systems and track design. (No weapons, strafing replaces air breaks)

No it isn’t, I didn’t claim it was, and Valve is doing a good bit more than mere pre-configuration.

Valve is contributing efforts to improve Wine, DXVK, VK3D, shader-cache management, and making their use simple and easy.

If I figure out how to use Bottles, then in a literary sense it is completely correct to say: I figured out how to run windows software on Linux.

The sentence doesn’t suddenly become false if I didn’t write every line of code, from kernel to compatibility layer, that my PC is executing to do it.

This from the man who thinks he’s “competing” with Valve.

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