legend

I really does feel safer to just assume that every actor in hollywood is horrible.

I don't think you need a final clear goal to accomplish like it's a video game.

The story seems pretty focused on what it means to be Mandalorian and how that interacts with the characters current beliefs and motivations. It's using both Mando and Bo as opposing sides.

Mando grew up in the cultish set of beliefs, but his own journey brought him in conflict with his core beliefs. He's struggling to hold on to how things were before and to be reunited with his former home and people. But the problem that's probably always at the back of his mind is his conflict with the beliefs remain. He would still violate his oaths for Grogu and probably others he cares about. It's a ticking time bomb.

On the other hand, Bo came from a more modern concept of what it means to be Mandalorian, but in her journey that "way" has failed her. She lost everything. But the cult she previously mocked very readily accepts her and offers her a new home. She's seen things she didn't think were even possible before. Her new experiences are causing her to rethink her beliefs and whether "the way" has value.

The conflict is palpable for both characters, yet the tension is in opposite directions. I'm not sure how they're going to resolve it, but something is going to happen.

Of course, if nothing does come to a head with these conflicting trajectories then that will be a disappointment  

1 hour ago, stepee said:

I’m seriously considering the Rokid Max even if these are super early beta still. I wish it had 6dof even if the apps aren’t there just to be able to play the screen so it’s not right in front of me but I don’t see any good competitors that aren’t 3dof.

They're very tempting, but I probably have few uses for them ATM. I may eventually succumb to temptation though!

13 hours ago, TheLeon said:

I'm disappointed in myself. I should have known this wouldn't work for me, but I let myself get caught up in the oddly sustained hype around this thing. The short version is: my neck and wrists are bad. There's really only one way I can comfortably game for more than a few minutes: controller in lap, looking at a screen straight ahead. I don't know why I thought a fancy piece of tech would make any difference there. I have a dock coming, I'll see how hooking it up to a TV works, but then, what's the point? I guess in a house-sitting scenario, for example, it would be an easy way to play my Steam library on their TV. But did I need to spend $500+ on a device I'll use a couple times a year at most? I already have a Switch I barely use, I could just bring that instead. 

 

I'm going to give it a few more days, but I'm probably going to end up returning it and put that money towards upgrading my desktop. I'll get more use out of that. 

I realize you probably don't want to spend a bunch more money, but @Rev swears by these: 

There's also a newer version coming out:

The battery life on the steam deck is actually better when using these glasses as the monitor because it turns the main screen off, and it basically gives you a big screen where ever you look while you can hold the controller in your lap.

2 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

 

 

 

Cyberpunk 2077’ Brings Beautiful Path-Traced Visuals to GDC | NVIDIA Blog

BLOGS.NVIDIA.COM

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Game developer CD PROJEKT RED today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco unveiled a technology preview for Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing, coming April 11. Path tracing, also known as full ray tracing, accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It’s used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that Read article >

 

Jesus Christ!

54 minutes ago, unogueen said:

Yes but a cow isn't the problem you may think it is.

1 hour ago, unogueen said:

Sure, if you think that humanity has some intrinsic quality unlike any native species. There's too much huff and puff about societal values and performance for my liking. With all the civic push for personal acceptance I still see no end to photo filters, cosmetic reconstruction, tips and tricks for an impossible body. For all the argument of intellect we're still capable of the same mortality and morbidity as any previous time. There's a reason that physical solutions exist for every problem that's been a constant to the human experience. It's simply that we're not that unique.

Who said anything about that? Other animals are wildly complex too! 

7 minutes ago, unogueen said:

People are certainly not complex. Hold any fucker in the water and we struggle all the same. This insistence of the western notion of human divinity is just a drama machine that stalls more than it solves. The modern problem is that we've managed to fly off the sustainable path WITH redundancies in place. It's hard to find consensus when half the planet verges on starvation on the daily.

Counter point: people are wildly complicated and variable in behavior. Don't tell me otherwise until you've tried to model the behavior of people with scientific precision.

Never liked it. I think I was just old enough by a few years to not care and I won't watch this.

But I'm happy for the actors. Must be fun to come back to!

24 minutes ago, best3444 said:

Then yea, that's good for you pc snobs!

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Kidding! 

 

If we're lucky, consoles will eventually get something similar! In fact, I'm confident they will, but I'm not sure if it will make it into this gen or not  

7 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

What does DLSS do?

Short answer: it's an image upscaler.

Slightly longer answer:

Rendering 4K images is taxing on GPUs.

DLSS renders the game at a lower resolution and using Deep Neural Networks up-scales the lower res image to 4K. The deep net has been trained on a lot and lots of images and so it's quite good at guessing what the additional pixels should be. Ultimately, you get a 4K image that looks quite close to as if it was rendered at 4K, but the whole process is much less taxing on the GPU. That translates into 4K gameplay with high frame rates.

Yeah I'm willing to see where the season goes before judging the time they spent on it.

I've never understood the appeal of The Sims.

13 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

Same problem I had. The game is incredible, but this needs to be fixed. And this is happening way too much on PC lately. At this point, is it EVERY dev, or is it a hardware issue? Stuttering is out of control. The RE4 beta was full of it. 

My uninformed guess is for Diablo it's a network issue. It's always talking to the game server to keep things in sync on your cloud character and they were not prepared for this open beta. Then, whenever there is a blip, its locking the whole game up. It even does this funny thing where when it unlocks my character's cape goes flying forward because it just auto advanced me forward when it synced back up  

For RE4, I'm guessing it's just a bad port of the game engine rather than network, but I didn't play any of the RE4 beta and I'm assuming it didn't have network troubles, but I could be completely wrong!

I couldn't latch into the first. It has some good concepts, but didn't click with me.

But this looks good and I'll be giving it another chance unless its tanks it reviews!

This reminds me I never did the DLC! I was waiting till I had a PS5, which I’ve had for some time now

This stuttering is killing me. "Stutter" is kind of the wrong work. It locks up for like a quarter second at random times at least once every 10 seconds regardless of what's happening. I'm enjoying the game except that that made the last boss fight I did extremely annoying! (I still won though)

Finally got to play a bit before it kicked me out and told me my account was temporarily locked!

I'm digging it so far. *This* is what D3 should have felt like. This is a return to form in terms of atmosphere and general gameplay. Hopefully I continue to feel that way!

I am getting a fair amount of quarter second stutters/locks at times. I'm guessing that's a symptom of their servers buckling?

Fucking blows. He was awesome.

Queued for 105 minutes. Yeah, fuck off.

13 hours ago, imthesoldier said:

 

"What do you have in mind?" 

 

A great question. I already mentioned briefly about things like Sound in video games because of waves. But what also has waves? This ties more into physics, but a physical thing such as water could be calculated like it since it's both waves, and particles like any fluid is. But take a step further, and gravitational waves. So physics interactions that are dynamically tied to the environment you sit on. 

 

Another "particle" based one could be the use of Wind in a game, which we haven't really seen yet. Wind, Water, and Gravity all tie into Physics calculations, but in a more ray-traced way, they could all be completely dynamic in ways we haven't seen before. That said, fluid simulations themselves are nothing new in the realm of enterprises such as the engineering side, so how that truly differs than what I'm imagining for a ray-traced version (or maybe that's how fluid simulations work? I'm not sure. I don't do engineering design), I'm not sure. 

Light is well described by wave functions as well as particles (in fact, you need to model it as both for complex physics!), but to my knowledge the RT cores are not going to help with wave calculations. It's just line intersection and bouncing calculations on geometry (which are normally very computationally hard to do, but that's its limiting function all the same). Given that, I'm not sure some of your examples would really benefit. Sound could be plausible because 3D sound and propagation can be well simulated by bouncing particles.

13 hours ago, imthesoldier said:

 

As far as your second part, I'm glad you brought up things such as gameplay elements tide to Stealth, and Horror because that was the first thing I thought Ray-Tracing could truly have a benefit in gameplay design. Someone else also mentioned above concerning how the use of SSDs in PS5, and XSeries would also have effects. Mark Cerny even detailed how such things could work with say no longer needing duplicate assets to save on file sizes, which is a good thing. Loading times could also be a eliminated practically entirely, and level design could be dynamically changed without having to account for "loading" between sections (i.e. Elevators, small corridors, etc). I'm sure there are other gameplay elements that could be "improved" wit ray-tracing, but stealth, and horror were the first ones I thought of. 

 

Going back to SSDs, it does go without saying that only the drives themselves are only one part of the picture. The issue then comes with decompressing all that information, which is where "Kraken" comes in for the PS5. Hardware-based decompression is the secret sauce for SSD tech, and how it'll be utilized in future titles that are built from scratch around it. I'm excited to see what developers have in mind with it, and same on XSeries. 

 

So factoring in Ray-tracing + the use of SSDs w/ HW Decompression will I think have a much bigger impact. Wonder if developers may have to almost relearn some aspects of game and level design because they will no longer be tied to, "Oh, I need this small hallway to hide in streaming assets," or "This elevator is crucial to load the next bit of data." How that'll also reflect (no pun intended) on the use of Ray-Tracing I'm excited to see. 

 

So yeah, I'm more concerned on how Ray-tracing will affect gameplay vs. simply how pretty will the game look. We're already approaching that plateau in photorealism where the differences are getting more and more minute every generation. PS2 era was a massive step up from PS1, and PS3 was a huge leap from PS2. But PS3 to PS4? The difference was less, and PS5, and PS4? Well, we're just starting to get out of cross-gen, so you can make your own interpretation. 

Don't get me wrong, I think the SSD is great. It's probably my favorite hardware choice in the PS5 because of how important streaming is to gaming! But I don't think we have to have direct "gameplay mechanic" differences from ray tracing for it to be valuable, because as I described, graphics are important for the entire game experience even when they are not changing how you behave.

1 hour ago, imthesoldier said:

 

Given that practically anything that has waves, or particles can be simulated using ray-tracing techniques, I can't see why other things besides just graphics fidelity can't be calculated using the hardware.

Plausibly, but I would still guess fewer than tensor cores. What do you have in mind?

1 hour ago, imthesoldier said:

If Ray-Tracing is here to stay, then it has to a lot of ground to cover before it's the standard across the board. Graphics alone imo is not enough to make Ray-tracing relevant. 

I think dividing games into "graphics" and "gameplay" and bemoaning that raytracing only impacts "graphics" is an overly simplistic way to critique games. Graphics have an enormous impact on the entire experience. Have you ever played a game with developer art? It doesn't hit the same way at all. Graphics are inherently entwined in games because they're the medium by which feedback, rewards, etc. are conveyed to players. And even if you want to talk about the artistic angle and how "low tech games" can have good art direction, new technology gives artists new tools to do things they couldn't' do before. Minimizing graphics technology as this less important auxiliary aspect would be like telling film directors the lighting doesn't matter. Of course it does. Again, there is a reason ray tracing is the standard in CGI movies. It's maximally enables artists to realize their vision.

And even putting all that aside, you have more explicit impact of graphics on the "gameplay." It's easy to imagine how things like reflections affect how you play in an environment and how shadows impact stealth and horror games. 

8 hours ago, imthesoldier said:

 

RT is just this generations version of Blast Processing. 

 

 

But seriously, besides saying, "Better shadows, better lighting, better reflections!" what is the actual mainstream draw for Ray-Tracing? CG Animators know what it is as they've been using it for almost two decades now. We know what it is because we're enthusiasts, but the general populace? Like you said, how you convince the public that "Improved Ray-Tracing!" is a big selling point? (Spoiler: It's not) 

 

Now saying things such as "8K Ready!" or "120FPS, or 240FPS modes included!" Now those have more sway I think in terms of what the mainstream would look for. The age of prettier graphics just doesn't have the same ring to it like it did back in the 2000s, let alone in the 80s, and 90s when things like 8-Bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit graphics was all the rage in advertisements. 

Blast processing is at best a hardware architecture (and in reality more a marketing term). Ray tracing is a categorically different rendering methodology that better simulates how light actually works. It is the standard for all pre-rendered movies for a reason. But it seems you know this, so I'm not sure why you would draw the comparison!  

3 hours ago, imthesoldier said:

 

I could be wrong, but considering RT uses the dedicated cores on the silicon for Ray-Tracing, I can't see any reason why they can't be used for things besides graphics. I mean, it's possible to use CPU resources for graphics, though it's typically not recommended. Same with the tensor cores for AI upscaling. Why couldn't they be used for other AI-based uses besides resolution scaling, and frame interpolation? 

 

It's all down to how you use the hardware from my understanding. 

Tensor cores can, and are, used for more than than just image upscaling. For games, they've primarily been used for AI upscaling, but in research they're used to accelerate any AI models that use deep learning methods (which is almost all of modern AI), and even could be used for anything that involves very large matrix operations. As games integrate more AI technology, they'll absolutely benefit from tensor cores.

RTX cores I'm less certain about it. If you can cast an operation as ray intersection, they're probably useful for it! But maybe less general than tensor cores.

1 hour ago, Brian said:

Come on bud. If Nintendo can do it, anyone can.

As Nintendo as Nintendo is, they are well acquainted with large hardware launches. Valve is new to hardware and their previous efforts are on a much smaller scale. The manufacturing pipeline alone is probably a bitch to get settled. So sure, one of their engineers could probably get something working, but that doesn't mean they can start shipping it.