legend

Well, my game is basically broken at this point and I can't recommend it with this very bad gameplay design.

Up until now I'd been enjoying it, fights were getting hard but doable as long as you worked at it.

But now I've reached a point in the game where they split your party and make it impossible to backtrack. I've pushed forward a bunch and now am just getting utterly clowned by two regular enemies. Can't beat them for the life of me. They hit all characters hard and I barely do any damage to them. At this point in the game you cannot change your party make up, because you only have access to three characters.

I figure I must be missing something about how to fight them, so I look up some video walkthroughs online at that fight. In all the videos, the players in the walkthrough are doing *vastly* more damage than I am, like 3x more or something. There's no strategy, they just crush them with basic attacks.

And it's not as though I hadn't upgraded the weapons I have. So all I can figure is somehow I missed finding better weapons somewhere in the world that have all of sudden made it impossible to progress. I'd backtrack, except it's impossible to backtrack at this part of the game. I'd have to load an old enough save hours ago because of how the story funneled things and maybe find weapon pick ups I missed.

I'm not doing that and am not going to play a game where you lose hours of progress because you missed something that's gated you from progressing.

I was curious why my achievements were so crazy high this year (I'd love to know what percentage it is, because the bar looks full!), but it seems at least part of it was due to my temporary obsession with Vampire Survivors  

That sucks. I've managed only small groups of people for the best six years or so and being that they've been small groups, conflicts or other problems are fortunately uncommon and I've never had to deal with sexual harassment issues, thankfully. But doing the *actual* management part of managing employee problems when they do occur is extremely uncomfortable. Management is often considered a useless job, but I have to wonder if people who think that have never actually managed people before. It's important and emotionally challenging if you actually want your organization to be a good place to work.

12 minutes ago, Bacon said:

Oh god, I have a sudden feeling ME3 will want me to broker some kind of peace with the batarians. I can only hope I don't need them for the best ending. But at the same time, more might bite the dust if they join the fight. God such hard decisions. 

Don't worry, none of the endings to ME3 are good  

29 minutes ago, Bacon said:

I was going to post my video, but it turns out I didn't save my collector ship gameplay.

 

Overall tho, Vanguard wasn't that bad except for the instances I listed. Please ignore my shitty console aim but here is some of my shitty Vanguard footage @legend

 

Steam, finally! I've been waiting for it to release there before purchasing.

1 hour ago, stepee said:

 

I think it’ll depend! Spider-man makes sense (and they improved this since launch) because it has a 60fps ray tracing mode on ps5. Calisto and Batman which both have awful cpu utilization with ray tracing only have 30fps RT modes on console. Not that they couldn’t have still programmed the RT to use more threads, but they sure as hell didn’t!

 

For some reason I didn't think CP had ray tracing. But given what we heard about crunch, I wouldn't be surprised if it was kind of tacked on despite being "built" for it  

1 hour ago, stepee said:

 

I think developers got complacent with not needing to optimize to pc cpus at all. I haven’t ran the actual math but my theory is that core for core desktop cpus were so much more powerful than the jaguar cpus, optimization wasn’t needed to just brute force the 30fps console games to 60-144fps because each core was that much more powerful.

 

Then with the increased cpu performance of the new consoles, that is no longer the case and devs are still designing ray tracing in games with the idea of it running at 30fps on console, so they are optimizing RT just enough so that consoles can hit that. Then when it comes to pc, the cpu is utilized the same way but core for core we aren’t far enough away from the consoles to brute force past and double/quadruple the cpu performance. Or something.

I suspect console games including ray tracing are probably making better use of the CPUs and will translate better to PC as a result. According to that DF video, Spider-man PC had much better CPU utilization, for example. That doesn't mean the same was true on the PS build, but seems plausible and ray tracing would certainly be a forcing function for that.

I think the Witcher was just fucked because it was built before ray tracing was a thing to think about, and to your point, games back then didn't care as much about CPU utilization and now we're paying the cost. We'll I am, at least. Maybe people like you with fancy frame generation are fine  

2 hours ago, stepee said:

 

While in this case it could have been fixed with better cpu optimization (i’m guessing this would have been a lot more work with it being tacked on to an older game here) it still goes to show how important the cpu is again in the age of ray tracing, after being mostly an afterthought the past decade or so.

 

We’ve seen it from several games this year like Calisto Protocol and Gotham Knights, where even the best cpu out there can’t hold 60fps. The CPU is now the biggest bottleneck for progress with ray tracing.

 

The main takeaway is that better optimization is needed, this had it tacked on to an old Dx11 game and that’s why CDPR probably struggles here, but that isn’t the excuse for some other games. And probably not the best excuse here either but it’s a free update so I get it. It seems to me when viewing something like Spider-man post updates, that you indeed are able to program so the ray tracing functions are not on the same threads as the rest of your game. Developers need to pay attention to optimization now and can no longer rely on the brute force of desktop cpus vs the old jaguar ones from last gen consoles. 
 

As more games come out that DO actually optimize right, the more games like Calisto will get slammed for their poor performance. I think it’s something that has to be thought about early on though. I don’t think it’s something they will bother to fix in that game as they would have to reprogram so much.

 

The bright side right now is that there is magic button (the technical term for dlss3 frame generation) here to save the day. They mention the input latency is the same as native here, and from playing it, it indeed just feels like I’m flying around with a great frame rate with all the bells and whistles on.

 

But as I’ve talked about before, we are in early stages, the demand is going to ramp up, and the 2x cpu bump from dlss fg is just enough for right now. The only option moving forward to not let cpu hold the tech back is to optimize to spread operations around more on the cpu AND combine that with a hopefully standardized FG that is on everything from low to high end.

 

And on top of that, we are all still going to be needing to upgrade our cpus to keep up.

 

edit: As for this game it looks fucking amazing and runs great on a 4090 so fuck y’all got mine suckkkkaz

Oh yeah, I can absolutely imagine how it would be hard to tack on good thread utilization for ray tracing. When I built my current computer, I opted for the 3900x because it has very strong multi-threading performance and I knew that would be important for ray tracing that would be increasingly popular.

And it seems that was true, but in this case, it's not helping me because the game was not designed to make use of it  

1 hour ago, crispy4000 said:

 

Sounds like the biggest issues are:

1. The game is not well optimized for multiple threads, but is heavily CPU bound with ray tracing. In contrast, Cyberpunk which was developed for ray tracing, is much better at using all your cores.

2. DX12 sucks for no good reason, but is also the only way to get RTX.

3. Shader compilation is the bane of the gaming world.

My wife and I watched the first episode and weren't very excited by it. It felt like they wanted us to empathize immediately with these characters, but were given no reason to. It felt like a series of events.

1 hour ago, Bloodporne said:

I was expecting an epilogue of sorts. I thought we would circle back to the people in the fishing huts where we initially got the boat. I didn't mind the weirdness but I felt the abruptness of the end left me hanging. Again, I was firmly expecting to circle back with the folks in the room. I guess I should've brought the Meter back earlier. 

 

One of my biggest questions really is 

  Hide contents

why don't Kay and Blake have faces? Is this supposed to be an "immersive" thing? Weirdly enough, this is the only thing I flat-out didn't like about the game. Blake especially is barely existent as a character who is a focal point. 

 

The abruptness didn't help for sure. I just wasn't sure what I was supposed to take away from the end and I don't really have any sense about the characters having changed in some important way. It was just this very weird event that then ended.

I have absolutely no idea what to make of Norco after finishing it. The end is really fucking weird and not in a way that made me think. My reaction was "oh okay." I played it with my wife and she felt similarly.

But the entire game was worth for the hotdog story. 

On 12/18/2022 at 6:43 AM, Bacon said:

I've been rewatching part of NeverKnowsBest's video on Mass Effect and there is something I felt he missed, but it still mostly correct, and ME2 then makes a reason why. He points out there is no reason for a class. Why not have skill trees instead where you can pick guns, tech, and biotics. Then he goes on to ask why are classes represented with certain weapons. Why can you be a sniper focused Vanguard instead of a Shotgunning one? And that is a fair point. ME2 then doubles down on that and takes away the weapons that don't rep you chosen class, but you may acquire one later. But what he didn't understand is that the reason for that shotgun representation in Mass Effect 1. The goal what to put you into a specific playstyle. They wanted you to run across the battlefield with barrier up and become a close combat fighter. Your biotics where there to stun and weaken your enemies to prevent harm to yourself and to make it so you could kill even faster. 

 

ME2 then forces the intended playstyles on players. You no longer have access to all of your weapons. Unless you are a Soldier, you will always lack at least 1 weapon from the original game. I mostly disagree with the stronger focus on classes but that is because they took away how I play vanguard. You are still expected to charge across the battlefield, hence the charge skill, but insanity is much more cruel and you can't really be the menace you once were because of all the shields. Most of the time, if you charge in, ya gonna die. Heavy Charge does restore your shields, but that will vanish faster that you obtained it. Pull is locked behind 3 requirements and even then you can't pull unless enemy shields are down. There is no Barrier skill on this class anymore. Sure, you can get it from a squad member, but you can't use other biotic abilities due to all abilities sharing the same cooldown. You would have to wait up to 12 seconds max before you could use something else and Barrier in this game is only as strong as your shield. Barrier as a bonus power is mostly for Soldiers. 

FWIW, charge for vanguard is pretty great, but it requires a very aggressive play style and specing. There was video a long time ago I saw that really changed how I played it. Not sure this was the one because he seems to be using his gun far too often  but something like this:

I also played a ton of the ME2 multiplayer and really honed the vanguard charge build to the point that it was crazy OP and I reliably had the most damage output of anyone by a large margin.

I can't remember all the details of how to spec it right, but the crux of what you want to do is really get the cooldown fast and build things so that you get the shields/barrier when you charge. Then you just fly across the map as often as possible to keep your health up. It makes for a very intense experience and you tend to level the battle field really fast  

Horizon Forbidden West.

9 hours ago, Jason said:

 

A lot of sites will have you select some topics you're interested in when you create an account. Not like you can't add and remove topics you have set as your favorites later, but the point is to get some basic curation in to make sure you'll have a decent first impression before they let you jump in. I haven't set up my Mastadon account yet but from what you've said above it sounds like something like that would go a long way toward fixing things.

It would. Another thing would be to just have more tutorial bubbles or something that will pop up when you start explaining what you should do and why. E.g., "Here is you home timeline, unlike other social media, your home timeline does not include any content that you haven't followed. The best way to to get more content you care about it is to follow *hashtags* so that you get content you care about even from people you don't follow. Would you like to add some hashtag interests now?"

And 

"Here is the federated timeline. This timeline..."

Etc. I'm sure someone who actually works on UX could come up with better ideas. But right now it's just like "Here it is."

9 hours ago, Jason said:

Also apparently the admin of whichever server you select has full access to your DMs and this isn't really made obvious to you at any point during signup. You know whoever runs a site has that unless it's proper E2EE for the messages, but there's a big difference between say Google in principle having access to your emails and whichever random guy is running your instance having access to your DMs. Not just in terms of they can look in, but if law enforcement comes knocking the random guy will probably just fold (and may not even know it's in principle possible to fight the request/demand a warrant).

Yeah that does seem like a problem. They should absolutely implement E2EE to messages to avoid this scenario. (They will likely have to change how messages work in general to do it, but they should just do it!)

16 minutes ago, johnny said:

sorry i don’t have a fuckin AI brain im too stupid to use mastodon 

TBC, I didn't mean that as a criticism of you! It's a failing of Mastodon's UX that it has thoroughly confused people about how it works. If you spend some time with it, you can get the hang of it of better, but that barrier they've put between people and using it effectively may prevent it from becoming more popular. Which is a shame because there are a lot of good ideas in it that *could* be solved with better UX.

28 minutes ago, johnny said:

i tried using mastodon and it was kind of a piece of shit and i don’t like how it has different, like, feeds you sign up for. twitter has it right. 

You don't need to sign up to different feeds. It's just it works differently than anyone expects  

21 minutes ago, Ricofoley said:

There's some more in the pipeline from the sound of it, but right now the two big ones people are migrating to are Post and Mastodon. I don't know as much about Post. It's in kind of a closed beta right now and you need to get on a wait-list to join. Mastodon you can just sign up right away.

 

The look and feel of Mastodon is very similar to Twitter, but what's turning some people off is they have this weird philosophy where they seem to want to try and be Discord and Twitter at the same time. Basically you don't just sign up for Mastodon, you pick one of a bunch of different decentralized servers. Some are very general--like you can just sign up for mastodon.social which is the closest thing to a "main" Mastodon site, but you can also pick a specialized one based around a certain topic. You can still follow people from different servers and view everyone's posts in a single timeline, but there's basically one annoying extra step in following someone on a different server unless you download some browser extensions.

I think the biggest problem Mastodon has is your home timeline works *very* differently from other social media. Other social media just shoves all kinds of stuff in your home timeline. In Mastodon, it's *only* content you follow. You have to go to the "local" or "federated" timeline to get aggregate data. But those timelines have two problems.

1) It just doesn't refresh as smoothly because of the nature of the operation it's doing.

2) There is no curation on those aggregate timelines at all. It's really just the live dump of what's happening.

There is, however, a good way to make your home timeline much better. Don't just follow people, follow hashtags. That makes your home timeline include content from people you don't follow, but whom are tweeting  tooting about stuff you care about it. It also is quite nice because it doesn't feed you the viral social war drama that twitter does.

However, the fact that it's different and requires some upfront effort to get a good timeline is probably going to turn people off at first and I'm not sure it will survive that.

37 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

@legend, I’m curious about your perspective on something I ponder on a fairly regular basis.

 

Is rationality actually superior to emotionality, and how do we measure the difference?

 

Anybody else is also free to answer

To answer that question you would have to formally define what you mean by each of those terms! Although the very act of formalizing it kind of builds in an answer to "yes, rationality is better" because once you define the terms, the "rational" optimization is always what works best, and therefore it cannot be that what is rational is ever worse definitionally!

But let's maybe ask a slightly different question that yields more insight than a question doomed to favor "rationality." We'll ask "does emotional and intuitional reason have benefits toward humans acting effectively?" Where "effectively" can mean optimizing any standard set of human values for the world (health, pleasure, social connectedness, societal success, etc.).  The answer to that is yes, absolutely, emotional and intuitional reasoning can be beneficial in many ways. 

The crux of the issue here is even if we could perfectly describe the decision problem for maximizing some human's value (which is a big ask in itself), that doesn't mean any person has any hope of perfectly solving it nor any hope of having time to get close to perfectly solving it before they have to make a decision (The world keeps going whether you've reached a decision or not). Ultimately, we have bounded cognitive resources and bounded time to make decisions that are far less than we'd need to perfectly solve the decision problem. Given such constraints, heuristics that tend to work on average, but not all the time, are a necessary evil.

Even in modern AI built in simulations where the problem is fully controlled we have to rely on reactive heuristics. These days, modern AI methods typically learn these heuristics over time, but they're reactive heuristics all the same. In game theoretic problems (read: social systems), these heuristics are even more critical because game theory introduces a huge mess in other ways I won't get into here (but I have published some work in collaboration with psychologists on the evolution of decision heuristics around moral dilemmas and it's fun and mind warping).

With that in mind, note that many human emotions and intuitions are ones that exist in us because evolution has done the work of finding good heuristics that tend to work quite well on the space of problems evolution tuned humanity for. So yay, our intuitions and emotions can be useful and even necessary!

But there is a catch there. The operating environment of humans has changed *far* faster than evolution could tune for. Most of our intuitions are outright bad for reasoning about the world as it is now. Science came into being precisely because our intuitions are so bad in this new extended world in which we live. If our intuitions were always good, no one would have ever bothered with developing science.

So as far as as philosophy of life I think the best we can do is be cognizant about where and when we are employing heuristics and be aware of when those are more or less likely to be useful. We'll make mistakes, but being cognizant of it gives us a route to correct them and we can lean on the sheer population of people and time of civilization to help reach better solutions we can adopt.

I can probably get a bit deeper than that, but I'll refrain from making this post any longer than it already is  

1 hour ago, TUFKAK said:

Humans aren’t rational, we’re emotionally driven, it’s innate to our humanity. Catchphrases are absolutely an argument, you can hand-wave away human nature with an appeal to rationalism if you wish, but you’re wrong lol

 

I see this play out daily at work.

Repeating that it’s a argument doesn’t make it so  You might say it is if you define the word “argument” very loosely, but I would hope from context that I’m clearly not using the word in that loose way. 

But who said anything about hand waving away human nature? My first response is how people’s penchant for catch phrases is a failing of humanity and that if later if you expect a catch phrase to be persuasive to someone you must not think very much of them! That’s a pretty direct statement about my displeasure with the way people operate, not a refusal to believe that some do operate that way!

13 hours ago, TUFKAK said:

Rallies and protest are democracy my friend. They’re an argument all on to themselves.

I’m not sure what aspect of my post that’s responding to? I’m not opposed to rallies and protests. I’m saying their goal and usage of catchphrases is categorically different from persuading someone to some position and consequently not subject to my criticism of replacing arguments with catchphrases. 

3 hours ago, Phaseknox said:

You’re offering to buy it for me if I don’t get it for Christmas, that’s really cool of you. Thanks.

I am and you’re welcome!  

4 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

AI has infinite time to practice art. A better way to go about this, instead of reference, would be for the AI to keep making stuff and then get feedback from a human if it looks good, and then after enough feedback the AI would figure out how to get something aesthetically pleasing without having to reference something else.

 

I think back of the open AI playing the dota games. The AI did things no human had ever done but at the same time they were smart things (like putting down an observer ward in tower range when attacking the tower so the tower would attack the ward instead of the player), then eventually it got really good at playing the game. If an AI did the same thing with art it would be impressive.

Learning from human feedback with experimentation is a great way for an AI to go beyond pure mimicry for sure. The biggest barrier is it's hard to get enough data of human feedback. However, ChatGPT (pure language model) works by fine tuning from human feedback about what good responses are, so this is certainly an avenue of active research. Simple feedback modeling still has serious limitations, but it is a step in the right direction.

(It also starts breaking into reinforcement learning, which is my topic of interest and incidentally the best AI topic  )