I haven’t even watched 20 minutes about it and already know about as much as I want to know about it.

Microsoft is looking for it and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are paying a decent penny for it to try to stop the Linux gaming momentum the deck is driving.

It’s entirely irrelevant to me. I don’t care what the specs are if it’s just running Windows.

Could be that their audio playback is done by hardware reading from a low address buffer in parallel to the rest of the logic and just relies on that logic to update pointers otherwise it will run through the entire address space.

Or it could be their way of implementing a full address space dump on a crash without large amounts of storage available and that just includes the ROM because it’s a part of that address space. But in the video, they were able to get a 100% match for the ROM using an emulator, so this isn’t it unless they didn’t mention chopping off a RAM section.

It’s all data, whether that data is text, an image, audio, or a binary containing computer code.

Raw audio data is just a series of amplitudes. It has a bit depth (which says how many bits are in each amplitude sample) and a frequency (what is the change in time going from one amplitude to the next). Using those, you can convert it to an analog signal that can be played on a speaker. And if you use the same values to convert that signal back to digital, you end up with the same input signal (though with some random noise added and if you get unlucky and your sample phase lines up with the player’s transition phase, you won’t be able to extract the original signal, though it might sound similar). The multiple recordings help mitigate these issues.

Given that data format, any arbitrary file can be treated as raw sound that can be transmitted as analog audio.

The only real difference between this and other transfer methods we use to transfer files is that this involves a less reliable conversion from digital to analog back to digital because it wasn’t designed to do that like USB, COM, wifi, etc connections are.

Even with good internet infrastructure that can handle the bandwidth, I’m not really interested in cloud gaming because of the latency.

Though I do think that it’s a better way to handle anti-cheat than allowing the companies to install rootkits in your kernel. And you can’t really get around the latency issue with online shooters, either you run the game locally and have cases where it looks like you hit on your end but didn’t on the server’s end, or you have a case where you hit the trigger on your controller when the shot was lined up but don’t see the shot go off until it’s no longer lined up. Ultimately, I think the latter is a bit better because then you at least see reality on your screen, even if it’s more frustrating to interact with. Better than a more interactive reality that is more like a hallucination.

I believe PlayStations tend to become profitable a few years into the cycle.

Being able to pivot is an important part of being a software developer. Technologies come and go faster than careers do.

Sometimes they do, but they usually have a golden parachute that makes it still a win for them.

It’s on game pass if you want a (potentially) cheaper way to try it.

Not only that, but most people who wanted to get Diablo 4 already got it through Blizzard’s store/launcher. Despite their drop in popularity over the last decade or so, they are still very visible, so it’s not like going on Steam exposed the game to many people who wouldn’t have been aware of it if they pay any attention to gaming news.

I only get mine from browsing Lemmy and formerly Reddit. I haven’t been paying any specific attention to Blizzard but I still knew when Diablo 4 was released and that the Overwatch I paid for has been replaced with a f2p Overwatch 2.

On the other hand, I saw it on gamepass when looking for interesting looking games to try this weekend and passed it over. So even though I didn’t have to pay anything to try it, I didn’t. Maybe that’s a trend they are seeing on that platform, that interest is low even though it’s free access. Though it’s also competing with starfield and lies of P on there.

You can have missing objects with real ray tracing. Like the player object itself generally doesn’t need to be rendered so it might not even be added to the scene. Unless the player is looking down. If their arms are holding a gun or reloading, it might just be disembodied arms if you could move the camera to see it from another angle.

Or, different game, but in GT7, the ray tracing doesn’t include vehicles’ self reflections. Which is probably an optimization because every reflection ray trivially intersects with the object it is reflecting from, so it makes sense to skip the reflecting object, but then you miss cases where it should be reflecting another part of itself.

Well then I hope the West continues to provide that help and that Ukraine makes improvements in the areas it needs to so it can launch attacks into Russia without that help. Assuming it really does need western help. Given Russia’s track record for honesty, it might be more likely that Ukraine is doing this with Russian help.

Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.

There’s copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There’s parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn’t use copy/paste). And there’s precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).

Oops thanks for putting that out, corrected.

For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else’s invention.

Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn’t gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don’t agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don’t think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.

That’s not to say that it’s legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there’s just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.

If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.

If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.

If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person’s code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn’t been noticed or isn’t being pursued because there’s not likely any money in it anyways.

It’s that murky area that I’m guessing they’d want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.

Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)

Rewording things is also one of the few things that LLMs seem to be able to reliably do, too.

Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn’t make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.

Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.