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Latest Comments by Valck
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D releases April 20, more Zen processors on the way
17 March 2022 at 11:57 am UTC

If board manufacturers actually manage to support these CPUs even on older main boards, I must say I'm quite excited about that line up. If one can actually buy them that is, physically as well as monetarily...
My B350 has served me well beyond all expectation, and I'd rather get another AM4 CPU that can last a good while, instead of having to buy an entire new system – CPU, board, RAM – when AM5 comes out, with all the first-gen issues that will come with it.

Core Keeper is the latest indie hit with over 250,000 sales in one week
17 March 2022 at 11:09 am UTC Likes: 2

I wonder if there are similar games built on an open engine; I don't trust Unity3D as far as I could throw it, and I'd prefer a mode of distribution that doesn't require me to log in and run third party apps whenever I want to play a single player game ("offline mode" or no)... *cough cough* Godot/itch.io? Anybody? Please? ;)

Until such time, I've grudgingly bitten, and enjoyed the game play so far.
However I was surprised how resource intensive the apparently simple graphics are (on max settings admittedly); especially the mouse pointer feels terribly sluggish, even with power turned up to eleven.
For comparison, this game happily sucks 250W from the wall, while Factorio rarely requires more than half of that, with definitely more going on in the background. Goes to show how well a custom-built engine can be optimized, I guess.

EDIT: Oh, and absolutely agree about it being too dark, same here. But I was impressed by the brightness slider, AFAICT it doesn't change how far you can see, at least not significantly, nor does it turn everything into grey wash-out.

Blender 3.1 is out with better performance, new advanced features
10 March 2022 at 6:32 pm UTC Likes: 1

There's this Youtube channel I came across a couple of years ago: https://yewtu.be/user/MikeycalDOTcom
Looks like they haven't posted new stuff in a while, but I'd guess most of the principles probably still apply.

NVIDIA upgrades their open source Image Scaling SDK
16 February 2022 at 3:12 pm UTC Likes: 1

Now I'm just waiting to see the upcoming announcement: "Micro Nvidia Loves Lin Open Source".
Why should EEE only work for Microsoft.
Enjoy the competition while we have it.
I mean, if Nvidia embraces M$'s strategy, maybe it even manages to somehow extend it ;)

Roma Invicta is a like an indie Total War out now
13 February 2022 at 12:46 am UTC

Quoting: mircalla
Quoting: Valck
Quote> reasonably historically accurate
> craters from cannon fire
Did I miss something here?
Cannons were developed at the earliest in 11th or 12th century (CE) China before making their way over to Europe, by which time Roma was thoroughly victa.
I guess I was taking the quote from your comment when I was thinking I was looking at the article.

Basically, I was trying to say the same, ie. cannons being anachronistic in a game about the Roman Empire, except I didn't care enough to look up the publisher's site to see where that bit came from (which realistically, should be the journalist's job to spot, stop, and think twice *wink*)

In today's internet, you never know who might fall for Roman cannons as historical fact. Or is that "alternative truth"? :D

Roma Invicta is a like an indie Total War out now
11 February 2022 at 11:15 pm UTC

Quote> reasonably historically accurate
> craters from cannon fire
Did I miss something here?

Check out the original Half-Life with Ray Tracing
11 January 2022 at 5:56 am UTC

Quoting: UnixOutlawI assume an NVidia RTX is required for any realtime ray tracing?
Note the quote says "interactive" frame rates, not "real time". A web site is "interactive", if hardly anywhere near "real time".
I have no idea how close this mod is to being "real time", just throwing this out as a caveat ;)

Little Big Adventure 1 & 2 get open sourced under the GPL
30 October 2021 at 9:47 am UTC

I remember LBA as a game I absolutely wanted to love, but one of those where I hit a wall relatively early on and couldn't figure out the solution no matter what I tried, and that was that.
Funny to think of it, when now you just DuckDuck for a walkthrough and are on your merry way in minutes.

And I definitely remember hints at some very dark undertones in the story, but sadly I never got to uncover more than a few early steps. And now... I somehow feel I've seen and heard enough dark mysteries and conspiracies in RL for a lifetime already that I don't want to go back to add a few old fictional ones on top of that...

Q1K3 is a homage to Quake made with 13 kb of JavaScript
23 September 2021 at 10:05 pm UTC

Quoting: DuncSo this guy remakes Quake in 13K of Javascript which loads instantly, but some major websites need megabytes in order to display a couple of hundred words of text.
Are there any "major" web sites that actually don't?
The more "major" it gets, the more the Web is broken.
Looking at the game industry, I can definitely see the parallels. Suffice to say, a part of me hopes there will never be a year of the Linux desktop, we're already in very dangerous waters. The masses next door cheering for kernel mode anticheat? You got to be kidding me... and unless I stop right now, I couldwill go on ranting for hours.

Creative farming and village life game Staxel is now available for Linux
23 September 2021 at 9:51 pm UTC

QuoteAccording to their update notes this is what has been improved with the new Staxel CE version:

QuoteSave files are 100x smaller (1-4 mb per world compared to 100mb+ in the original PC version)
What do they call this then, the "novel Workstation version"? The "visionary Mainframe" version? The "derived Supercomputer" version?
I'm probably supposed to be thankful that there even is a non-Windows version, but when they can't tell the difference between an operating system and a hardware platform, I'm more than slightly sceptical about their capability of supporting anything besides the "PC" version. Even if "it's just the marketing guy got it wrong", what good are they at marketing if they can't do the most basic research.