ascagnel_

7 ms·

31.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
UT3 was a dismal failure both critically and commercially, while Gears of War was a huge success. Epic rode that for a while as they worked on Fortnite, and then they put out the battle royale mode in 2017 and the thing took off.
32.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
UT2004 (and its Xbox counterpart Unreal Championship 2) were great experiences. UT3 tried to set itself apart by tuning its pace significantly higher, and it lost its audience, and UT2016 was never going to be a significant title given its
33.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.
34.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
It'll never happen for a whole bunch of reasons, but a phone with Apple's hardware, Valve's OS, and Nintendo's game library would be amazing.
35.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
This is really the endgame, I think. A modern smartphone with a controller attached is effectively the same as a Steam Deck or Switch 2, just with a different OS. Apple has been pushing higher-end games on phones lately (this year has seen
36.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
Agreed. Mad Men premiered in 2007, well into the HD era, and was already composed for 16:9. The issue here is that the 4K "remaster" seemingly wasn't mastered at all, just a re-scan of the original negatives at a higher resol
37.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
And so is CableCARD, for that matter.
38.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
> I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed
39.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
> I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event. Go visit a pulmonologist and get a diagnosis. Getting one and starting on a CPAP was life-changing fo
40.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
Also, it's not clear who actually owns the thing -- the original game was developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive (PC) and Sierra (PS2). Following the tree of deals, there's a bunch of different big cor
41.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allow
42.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
> every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value) I view this as a positive -- it's not feasible to maintain a build for every game and storefront's DRM/auth (unless you
43.
by ascagnel_ 11mo ago
My thought has been a 20- or 30-year term, with one or two renewals at a nominal fee, would work wonders. Orphaned works basically disappear overnight, and the vast majority of works will have exhausted their useful commercial life within t
44.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
At least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing access to their 20+ year old email address if they stopped paying. I don't know if it was founded on anything, but it got them to keep paying through a decade-plus of non-AOL br
45.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
I always look at the AOLTimeWarner merger as the thing that broke them, distracting them at the moment they should've been prepping to roll out broadband. I also look at that merger through the lens of "don't fight a land wa
46.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
Ah this is what I get for trying to write code on my phone. I'm specifically thinking of cases within useEffects, where the state setter is constant between renders but the state itself is not, so you can wind up with an infinite re-r
47.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
You can actually further simplify the functional component by using setState's callback form. You don't always need to do this, but it makes setting state from within a useEffect much safer in that it won't need the current s
48.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
This week the GZDoom project forked into UZDoom after a maintainer force-pushed AI-generated code into the repo. Thankfully, it failed to compile and other maintainers caught it before it made it out, but the decision to fork came down pre
49.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
The YouTube app has never been good and never felt like a native app -- it's a wrapper around web tech. More importantly for games, though, is the awful storage architecture around the TV boxes. Games have to slice themselves up into
50.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
Apple's mistake was allowing 32-bit stuff on Intel in the first place -- if they had delayed the migration ~6 months and passed on the Core Duo for Core 2 Duo, it would've negated the need to ever allow 32-bit code on x86.
51.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
Apex Legends is an interesting case because EA/Respawn initially shipped with first-class support for the Steam Deck (going as far as to make changes to the game client so it would get a "Verified" badge from Valve) -- includ
52.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
For comparison, the lifetime sales of the first Nintendo Switch would be considered a good year for iPhone sales -- six generations of phones sold >150MM units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobi
53.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
I'm hoping the rumored revision of the Apple TV can slot in as a game console. Apple has been pushing AAA games on iOS/iPadOS over the past few years, but there's no good user story if I want to have that traditional experie
54.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
One of my biggest complaints with Steam is that it's basically an unlicensed casino with extra steps -- and one of the things you could do at one point was buy a "challenge pass" for a major tournament that was effectively a
55.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
The MLB package is very up-front about not being all-inclusive: it advertises "out-of-market" games -- games you can't otherwise access. Games on streaming services like Apple and Peacock count the same as broadcasts on ESPN,
56.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
Gridiron football would probably work well for something like this: each play has a line of scrimmage, yards gained or lost, and a summary of the play (eg: from their own 47 yard- line, QB#3 threw a lateral to RB#8 with 3:08 remaining in th
57.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
Baseball's biggest issue is that their biggest teams are also co-owners of their cable channels (and were trailblazers in this, with the Yankees and the YES Network). They don't care if you go to the game, they want you to get a
58.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
The one-time payment app and NetNewsWire (both excellent RSS readers themselves!) take a different approach than the subscription-only version of Reeder: they treat RSS more like email (with an emphasis on reading everything, or at least ma
59.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
I mean it more as a counterpoint to what Valve is doing: games are automatically opted-in to working with Proton and pass through a Valve-operated certification program. Because developers aren't part of that loop, you see occasional c
60.
by ascagnel_ 1y ago
This is one of the big reasons I've gravitated towards a reverse-chronological feed that takes you from the past to the present -- at some point you hit a natural end, which is a natural prompt to go do something else. I've picke

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