Video Game News and Miscellany
- Thread starter figmentPez
- Start date
Sure, but if you bought skins or anything you lose them. Keep in mind that they are all Epic accounts, for a free to play game, and you can crossplay PS4 and PC afaik.
I *think* that when you play with your Epic account on PS4 for the first time, it intertwines it with your PlayStation account.
figmentPez
Staff member
Steam has a new version of chat in beta
Not sure what the changes are they've made to voice that supposedly improve it, but adding an invisible mode, and the ability to have a favorites list are nice.
EDIT: The announcement page has more details. Most of the way down is the important bullet points. "Also in this update"
Not sure what the changes are they've made to voice that supposedly improve it, but adding an invisible mode, and the ability to have a favorites list are nice.
EDIT: The announcement page has more details. Most of the way down is the important bullet points. "Also in this update"
figmentPez
Staff member
I continue to be in love with 8BitDo's product line. Their new announcements at E3:
The N30 Pro 2 adds a bunch of new color options, but more importantly it has vibration and motion controls:
I'm not sold on the color choices for the SN30 Pro+, and I really want to know if they have analog triggers, but they do fill the need for an 8BitDo controller with handles. (These also feature vibration, and motion control.)
The N30 Pro 2 adds a bunch of new color options, but more importantly it has vibration and motion controls:
I'm not sold on the color choices for the SN30 Pro+, and I really want to know if they have analog triggers, but they do fill the need for an 8BitDo controller with handles. (These also feature vibration, and motion control.)
It's been a long time coming, but Resident Evil 2 remake is coming and it looks terrifying. I never thought they'd remake one of the older games in the same vein as Resident Evil 7, but that's what we're getting.
This E3 is too much. Too many games I actually want to play. Last couple years, there hasn't been much to interest me. This year, I feel overwhelmed.
So apparently Cyberpunk 2077 will be in first-person, not third-person like The Witcher games. Still an RPG and they've specifically said it's NOT a shooter, but still first-person.
I don't know how I feel about this. Part of what pulled me into Witcher was the third person because I could see Geralt interacting with the world.
Still, I'm about 80% sure I'll be pre-ordering the game. I want to see some gameplay footage, first.
I don't know how I feel about this. Part of what pulled me into Witcher was the third person because I could see Geralt interacting with the world.
Still, I'm about 80% sure I'll be pre-ordering the game. I want to see some gameplay footage, first.
Death Stranding 2017 - "I have no idea what the fuck this is...."
Death Stranding 2018 - "I still have no idea what the fuck this is, other then being a postal service simulator with evil invisible baby men."
Death Stranding 2018 - "I still have no idea what the fuck this is, other then being a postal service simulator with evil invisible baby men."
See, this I find fucked up. It's fine to fence off newer features to people running older OSes, but what if the person is on a computer that is unable to upgrade, or they simply don't want to? One day they are capable of playing all of the games they legally purchased, the next they're locked out, all because valve says so.
GasBandit
Staff member
I mostly agree with the sentiment (which is why I was such a reluctant late comer to steam and other online DRM platforms), but Steam still lets you play your games even if it can't connect to steam servers. I doubt they'd be issuing a patch to decommission existing 32 bit steam installations, they probably just won't be getting new updates, and so things like multiplayer might stop working (if it relies on Steamworks).
figmentPez
Staff member
Windows XP and Vista are no longer supported by Microsoft. They are no longer getting security patches. No one should be running either of those operating systems in an online environment. I don't blame Valve at all for not wanting to deal with the security problems that come with that.
I understand the reasons why, I just don't like them.
Though, that there are people that don't want to update to Microsoft's newer version OSes should maybe make Microsoft look at what they're doing that turn people off so much (but they won't)
GasBandit
Staff member
All the shit that's been going on with Win 10 lately has REALLY got me considering just switching to ubuntu or something when Win 7 stops being supported, and suffering through WINE for any games I have that don't support linux.
figmentPez
Staff member
Good luck with that. Empyrion can be made to run in WINE, but with a HUGE performance penalty.
—Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
It's got a few years left to improve. 2020, IIRC. And I'll probably keep using 7 after that for a while until it becomes completely untenable like XP has.
Remind me again what makes Windows 10 so horrific?
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, as others have noted, it has a tendency to go and replace your drivers without consulting you, often breaking the functionality of the devices the drivers are for. That's REAL fun when it is a network card driver.
Update 1803.
Constant attempts to spy on users and euphemize it by calling it "telemetry."
The attempt to get rid of "safe mode" options on bootup - or rather, to make it so you have to already be booted into windows to "reboot" into safe mode, which kind of defeats the purpose of "safe mode" being an if-all-else-fails option when windows won't boot. You have to use BCDEDIT to "hack" windows 10 back into letting you use F8 on bootup.
For about a year, at my office, all the machines running windows 10 refused to play nice on the network with any machine NOT running windows 10. And not a week goes by without someone's computer deciding to patch and reboot itself, often discarding work in progress on the machine. I tell ya, if any of our actual critical automation systems were on windows 10, we'd be out of business and I'd be in an insane asylum.
And of course, the general principles of the OS design changing drastically from "Open and versatile like a PC should be" to "A walled garden where we decide what you're allowed to run, and fucking buy it from the Windows App Store, you fucking peasant, GOD WE WISH WE WERE APPLE SO BAD." To say nothing of DX12 being limited to release only on windows 10 solely to try to force people to get windows 10 because not enough people were abandoning the still-perfectly-fine Windows 7.
Just, all of it put together paints a picture I don't wanna hang on my wall, if you get my meaning. What I have works with no fuss, and I'm going to keep it that way as long as possible, and when they finally come 'round to take it, fuck em.
I spent an hour yesterday trying to figure out wtf was wrong with my laptop track pad (two figure gesture to scroll was instead sending a command to turn off the screen) and lo and behold, it's because win10 fucked up the drivers without so much as consulting me.
On my gaming PC, I use a saitek x52 pro flight stick, THE MOST COMMON HOTAS FLIGHT STICK IN THE WORLD, and even when downloading the proper drivers directly from the website and manually loading them, win10 will immediately try to "fix" it by auto replacing them with generic USB drivers, forcing me to roll back and go out of my way to stop it from Auto-fucking-updating to the wrong goddamn driver.
And fuck me of I ever need to unplug it, then I gotta go through all that again
You know, when Apple releases a macOS update and says, “This update enhances the safety and security of your Mac," I'm more inclined to believe it. They built the hardware, they probably understand it better than I do, and anyway if there's something I want to install that isn't on their "approved" list, there's actually a place I can go where it asks, "Install it anyway?" and I can say yes and it does it and then doesn't bother me again about it.
When WinX releases an update, it's like having a new boss come into the department. "I don't care what procedures are already in place, we're going to do things This New Way now! Ok everyone, let's change a bunch of things up because obviously I know better than y'all how to go about doing stuff oh and also I'm not going to explain why I'm making these changes." Hey now, I built this computer with my own two credit cards, every piece of hardware in it was meticulously chosen by me for a specific purpose. You are not the ghost in my machine, you are the guest in my machine, and you had better start behaving like it. Now excuse me while I go turn off all the stuff you went ahead and reenabled "...for your pleasure."
--Patrick
These two posts are related, even if they don't seem to be: https://www.zdnet.com/article/remote-code-execution-vulnerability-patched-in-valve-steam-client/
Steam needs to update to patch security holes, and doing it with still supporting back to XP means using compilers that target such, which can be... challenging for those on the dev team. I've been there personally. It's UGLY to see all these new shiny features and be told "no, you can't use them because people want to install this on an out-of-support OS, and we don't want the POSSIBILITY of bad press with one of our customers." So I completely understand where Valve is with this, of a "we're not supporting OSs that aren't supported by MS either." It's a reasonable position.
But back to Windows, updates are automatic now because too many people never updated. That's the simple, no-nonsense reason why they're automatic now, without being able to defer them. Many many people deferred FOREVER. This leads to more viruses going around, and worse reputation for the company as a result. "Windows is so full of holes!" is the cry from the public, when 99% of viruses don't work on a fully-patched system. MS finally took the approach of "there's too many people that will never follow good practices, so we're forcing it on everybody to catch the 10% (20%?) that account for 95% of the problems." And given that (most) crashes are caused by faulty drivers, again, 90%+ of crashes are due to drivers being out-of-date, hence putting them on the auto-update list as well. And that's what led to where we are today.
It's a completely logical set of steps when you're the #1 provider of OSs and do NOT control the hardware 100% like Apple does. You HAVE to take these steps to keep everything relatively secure and relatively stable compared to trusting your users, because enough of your users are morons, and so you have to treat them all like that.
I get that. As someone whose job all day long literally IS to tell people what they should’ve done, how they could’ve avoided their disaster with a backup or other (usually simple) task, and to run their updates for them rather than just clicking “not now” whenever it comes up, I really do get it.
But the arrogance in assuming that something as functionally important as drivers MUST be forced into some sort of default is inexcusable in an environment where you do not have control over the hardware. They can’t know WHY someone stuck with a particular driver. You and I both already know that it would be disgustingly easy to add in code that checks the driver, checks the vendor/hardware ID, compares against a database, and then decides whether or not it is worth replacing, or else says “hey I don’t have this combination in my db yet, better add it and flag as needing investigation so we can be ready for next time.” At the very least, it could alert the user with some kind of “these drivers were automatically updated” or else stick that in a log file so that power users would not have to sift through everything after every update trying to find out what broke what.
—Patrick
You've basically described the WHQL process there Patrick. And vendors are continually trying to find ways to break it because having high standards is too much trouble. And thus we get the "we're rolling your drivers automatically to WHQL ones because that's the best we have right now" problem that you describe. The problem is, even those are frequently crap too.
Remember, you have the dual problem of enough users are morons, and enough companies are lying bastards who put out hardware with crap drivers and are trying to cheat the WHQL standards left and right. That is exactly why Vista was such a dumpster-fire, because they were trying to enforce those standards, and basically NOBODY complied. Windows 7 is Vista with a new name, but with 2 years worth of driver manufacturers getting their crap together enough and that's it. Now 10 is enforcing driver updates and it's bringing to light a problem that was "simmering" already, where people went to a "working" driver level and STAYED THERE. 10 is making them stay to "manufacturer latest" which we're finding out frequently enough is crap.
IMO MS isn't the problem, MS is exposing the problem. But concealing it (deferring updates) was causing OTHER problems.
Yes, and that’s the joke.
And I don’t really think Microsoft is 100% to blame, because I know that hardware manufacturers just literally stop caring about hardware support once a product reaches a certain age (meltdown/spectre BIOS updates, anyone?). And this is why Open Source is making such headway in the world right now...in OSes, drivers, etc. because if a company dies/stops caring, there are usually others who take up development just because they can’t stand to see something languish.
—Patrick
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Except they're not. WIN X is too often replacing an up to date manufacturer driver with a shitty MS one which. Does. Not. Work.
But that's the part about WHQL stuff: MS doesn't MAKE those drivers, the manufacturers do (a few "generic" exceptions to this). But if the manufacturer STOPS submitting to the database, but release drivers through their own "update" application, then you can have newer, and then the OS looks against the "master" DB and says "you got a rogue driver from somewhere" and overwrites it. It's bad manufacturer behavior that's to blame there.