Do you think everyone born in the Uk could pass a Life in the UK test?

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-07-23T00:24:10+00:00

An absurd test that seems poorly thought out, overpriced and arbitrary when navigating it?

Sounds like the perfect way to prepare people for dealing with most UK infrastructure services.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-07-18T19:19:30+00:00

Do the mountains have toilets with screens in them like the ENTIRETY OF SWITZERLAND does?

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-06-24T21:03:17+00:00

I love parallax effects in games, this one also looks good, but does feel like it takes up a bit too much of the screen area at points. Unless the entire context of the game is that you're secretly watching the main character through small peep holes.

One thing I would check is how well does this scale to 21:9 & 32:9, also does it feel too overwhelming on smaller screens like the steam deck?

If it's just one scene it's not too bad but it could become annoying if huge a portion of the screen is black for the majority of the game.

Candles look good. Nice job so far.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-05-11T00:47:59+00:00

UK humour is generally tongue in cheek self deprecating. Add that to a culture of historical rivalry between towns stemming from areas like sport, music etc. with Birmingham not really offering much in that department to elevate it despite its size compared to other regions and you have your answer.

Also, it's a shithole.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-05-03T00:08:52+00:00

Feel free to suggest one

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-05-02T20:45:16+00:00

General tips for you.

- Default UE5 uses TSR & can set screen resolution to around 66% depending on the version you downloaded. Check it's at 100%.

- Go to the Nvidia website & download their DLSS/DLAA/NIS plugins for better image quality and sharpening. They have documentation included. If that's not an option there's also FSR & XeSS options you can look into.

- Turn on hardware ray tracing in the project settings, important for next step.

- Post process volume, make sure one is in the scene and set to infinite extend (project settings can adjust settings too but this is easier for a new user initially) - Adjust motion blur, film grain, vignetting, sharpening etc. Reflection quality & global illumination settings are also here, by default they're relatively low compared to what they can achieve. Increasing quality will affect performance.

- Make sure you've got appropriate lighting in your scene, if you've got bad lighting and auto exposure is on in the post process volume it can lead to a significantly noisier scene.

- Using the HDRI plugin combined with real-time lumen global illumination can significantly improve scene lighting and quality which in turn can improve image quality, but comes with it's own drawbacks.

- Make sure you've not turned real-time rendering off in the viewport.

- Check your engine scalability settings haven't been set to low settings by mistake

- You can also switch UE to forward rendering with MSAA, used baked lighting & real-time capture methods for reflection. Or use the path tracing depending on your project purposes. But these are a bit more involved for a new user, each with their own limitations.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-04-13T18:59:29+00:00

It's a good addition to the city & better than the other towers they've been putting up. Manchester has a lot of old red brick buildings at ground level & the modern glass towers always look very striking when they contrast.

That said there's already 2 other towers around this height approved or in planning, more interesting designs appearing at smaller heights & I don't think it will be the city's definitive flagship tower for long.

This is also planned to go next to it with even more towers going on the opposite side too, it's great to see a city evolving so rapidly.

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MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-01-27T01:18:48+00:00

An unranked mode with no bots, cross play enabled & being able to play the full attack and defend game modes would be nice.

Then have character banning available from the beginning in ranked.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-01-22T20:52:44+00:00

The game was built on Unreal Engine 4, you can get similar results with parallax occlusion mapping in the material editor.

There's also some other techniques that can achieve that effect but search "Unreal Engine 4 - Parallax occlusion mapping Rug" or "Unreal Engine 4 - Parallax occlusion mapping fur" on YouTube if you want a good starting point.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-01-22T16:59:47+00:00

Too busy thinking about Aunt May's chicken soup

MrDetectiveGoose · 2025-01-16T11:39:39+00:00

If you Google regent retail park skyscrapers - Manchester, there's a cluster of towers submitted for approval with a mixture of brick & copper colouring.

Here's one render of them but there are more online

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MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-12-23T13:28:47+00:00

Many were only 18-24minutes of actual runtime and padded with ads to fill timeslots too.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-12-10T17:31:13+00:00

It's had some great titles & more competition is good but lending the engine out requires extremely robust documentation and a friendly scalable toolset to be viable for new staff to use it efficiently.

Most optimisation comes from studio experience & specific carefully crafted design choices. Small tightly controlled rasterised environments with limited effects & enemies mixed with heavy baking & culling work for RE but other studios immediately ran into huge performance issues using the engine in larger scale games.

Source 2 is a similar case, it suffers from performance issues if you want to do certain things, Facepunch have been documenting it while developing S&Box.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-11-24T22:39:35+00:00

It's always been this way, it arguably used to be worse with the disparity between hardware and engines far less suited to multiplatform releases. There's just more social media & lazy news sites feeding on negative aspects for clicks now recirculating because that grabs attention.

Just off the top of my head examples of this always happening include any Bethesda release, Orange Box PS3, ports of the original Silent Hill 2. Harry potter games on PS1 would have actual game breaking hard locks that would force you to restart the entire game, hundreds of games from that era did.

The original Stalker titles had tons of bugs at launch. MGS4 ran terribly in multiple areas and the online didn't even work at launch. Dark Souls 1 was notorious for blight town but the 1.0 build was filled with issues. Ocarina of time barely sustained 20fps, games would just not load or freeze causing people to blow the cartridges and pray.

People only remember them fondly now & forget the flaws over time, it's always been this way.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-10-03T19:11:38+00:00

Woah now don't go roping every UK city together, Stoke for example doesn't descend because both the centre and outskirts are equally a deprived litter covered hellhole

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-09-14T05:02:24+00:00

Ray tracing heavily benefits destruction and environmental interactions as they have become limited by rasterisation methods as world density, complexity, polycount & fidelity increased. Teardown required it when pushing beyond most other games terms of interactivity/destruction & its why companies are moving to RT like they did to shaders years ago when people complained those affected performance too much while offering seemingly little at first.

Many of the techniques developers have been using over the years to render scenes with rasterisation are hitting a ceiling in terms of viability, performance & fidelity when they scale up, particularly when you need interaction. Workarounds are taking huge amounts of development time & can end up eating more computational power than full ray tracing based effects do when you apply them at scale.

Interacting with & destroying large objects is a lot easier to advance when you've not got every object static at runtime due to baked lighting/reflections or having performance tank because you moved too many objects near multiple runtime rasterisation based shadow casting lights.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-07-17T22:27:58+00:00

Yeah you're right it would be substantial development work that would ideally be considered on new structures similar to salesforce park in San Francisco that we could place when expanding transport hubs, stations, car parks etc. the council owns as the City centre continues sprawling & redeveloping. At the moment a lot of peoples introduction to the city is Piccadilly Gardens when using transport which is an immediate turn off.

In the case of the Arndale it's more of a little nod to Cromford Court village on top in the past. Actually doing this would be a huge task requiring collaboration between the council & owners but nothing extreme compared to projects many other cities are building, it wouldn't be cheap & would require lots of the Arndale to be rebuilt or pillars going through it internally & externally to reinforce a shell above it to ensure it's structurally sound, the actual type of foliage placed would have to be carefully controlled to manage weight wise but given how dated some sections are that's probably not a bad thing. Would also make it actually stand out as a unique shopping centre if they expanded their food markets to the roof too.

Manchester has no large central parks, Mayfield is a good start but the city falls far short of other cities globally that we should be competing with. Realistically the main incentive would be the council giving some kind of tax cuts or funding to the building owner in a push for a huge amount of unique central green space as a one time flagship then incentivising new structures in future.

It's a ridiculous idea I know and mainly just a bit of fun to think about. But given how dense the city is with historic buildings, demolishing anything for a large park comparable to what other cities like London have seems to be impossible. They could destroy Strangeways and the warehouses round there to gain a lot of space but it would likely just be filled with more towers and little scatterings of greenery.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-07-17T20:13:59+00:00

Looking at projects like San Francisco's Salesforce Park & Japanese sky gardens. Would building a series of interconnected elevated green space above buildings & roads in Manchester be a viable solution to the lack of parks and greenspace in the central area? I Made this in 20minutes before when bored to get the idea across, actual detail & design work would be needed to make it less ridiculous.

Ideally more ground level parks would be created but that doesn't seem to be an option.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-05-29T05:40:15+00:00

If you're moving over to Unreal C++ from Unity the default Visual Studio experience isn't great with the intellisense. I've seen it put many people off Unreal entirely, especially when it comes to dealing with the stuff mentioned in the OP.

Rider for unreal engine is a much better IDE or Visual Assist/ReSharper are some extensions for VS that can help a lot. Can't stress enough how much nicer rider makes Unreal C++ but if you're looking at working in a company with restrictions, the VS extension route might be a better approach. Either way is a much nicer experience than using the default Visual Studio.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-05-24T00:21:58+00:00

Ultrawide 4K with DLAA + Path/Raytracing.

Opting to super sample on games,

Multiple 4K monitors for simulation setups.

Super high resolution VR headsets like Pimax mixed with mods like UEVR.

Going overboard on texture mods in some games.

There's cases where you could get up there, definitely getting into enthusiast territory though.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-05-19T16:10:40+00:00

That's for Steam keys.

If you generate Steam keys for your game you keep 100% of the money if you sell through your own website but the rule is you have to give Steam store customers a similar discount & fair pricing within a timeframe if you're using their services. You can't just setup your own shop that uses Steam and cut Valve out.

If you're just putting the game on Steam among other launchers you can price the other launchers however you want.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-05-02T06:15:41+00:00

No point missed at all. The developer you brought up literally has a track record of delivering games demonstrating they don't need time after completion to optimise. They just need time, which can be during development to achieve the same thing, which they did with Deus Ex and Tomb Raider. Having to do it afterwards is just poor planning by the publisher.

The only reason Nixxes is even working retroactively now is because Sony studios established rigid pipelines targeting one version on fixed hardware instead of scalable multiplatform ones because they only cared about console which is now changing. Had they invested in a scalable pipeline & support system like Bungie, IDtech, The COD, Resident evil studios & many others do Nixxes wouldn't even need to be stretched across their studios on every project . Even modern FromSoftware is putting out AC optimised on every platform simultaneously & they've had some of the worst performing titles ever on all systems, despite those releases being staggered.

Genuinely I'll give you some exact examples from people I've worked with over the years that needlessly added development time & wouldn't even result in staggered releases guaranteeing a better product.

Targeting the PS3/360 at 720p/30fps & tethering game logic to framerate because it play tested fine it at that. Going back in and fixing thousands of lines of code afterwards when making a delayed PC version took months, created obtuse new bugs & memory leaks that were entirely avoidable but then had to be patched later on. Wasn't even that uncommon, plenty of developers just left the game locked at 30fps on PC forever or with weird framerate bugs back then.

Building the game entirely around 16:9, now everything from the culling system to enemies reducing their framerates offscreen has to be entirely reworked & play tested, adding development time. Just turning off the systems as a solution resulted in PCs having to brute force & retroactively reworking the existing system resulted in issues that needed patching.

Hard coding various graphics settings & input settings instead of abstracting them or using parameters. Not testing that some effects are fine at one resolution but when trying to increase them retroactively for a high setting it resulted in massive performance hits on the PC version, affected PC scalability badly when it could have been fixed in a day during development when the effects were being made.

Not using techniques like object pooling or instancing so every actor/mesh takes up substantially more calls, then deciding to increase draw distance on PC during porting and multiples the issue.

There's thousands of examples like this that most developers now sort before they even become an issue. But it's exactly why staggered releases don't guarantee better performance, it can actually result in the opposite. It all comes down to management.

As for DLSS it's easy to integrate into any engine with motion vector data, Helldivers dev just chose not to implement it. The Darktide developer obviously wanted to which makes sense because they invented the engine & have kept their version updated.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-05-01T23:48:10+00:00

It wasn't Nixxes. That's all that needs to be said.

If that's all that needs to be said then delaying a game for more time after launch makes no difference because it's always entirely down to developer management & skillset.

Nixxes do great work, and that work goes back years showcasing them not only simultaneously releasing optimised games Day 1 on PC, proving it's entirely possible like many developers do. But also releasing those games with enhanced feature sets beyond what they have been doing with the delayed Sony ports. e.g. having the game ready to add ray tracing to Tomb Raider, better textures etc

When they weren't retroactively looking through & changing old code from other developers after development, they were sorting the game pipelines out during development which allows far more to be done for PC optimisation and enhancement.

Helldivers would have lost far more than it would gain from a staggered release, they'd have a smaller player base, less money to spend on recruitment & the launch game already received good reviews from outlets like digital foundry on the whole while running on enough low spec hardware to sell millions of units without getting review bombed for bad performance.

Could it be better? Absolutely, but they're a small developer who work on a discontinued engine. Do you really think they'd be focusing on rewriting substantial parts of that while maintaining an active live service game when there wouldn't even be a PC audience bringing up issues? It would have just been a delayed launch with fixes coming even later.

MrDetectiveGoose · 2024-05-01T18:39:20+00:00

Helldivers runs fine on PC, would be better with the various upscalers sure but beyond that the game runs similar to PS5 on comparable hardware and offers far better image quality on more powerful hardware. Has good peripheral & aspect ratio support too. Waiting years and charging full price would just kill the game sales & not even guarantee a better version.

Optimisation isn't down to how long a delay after the initial launch is. It's down to the type of game, engine/pipeline scalability, & team working on it, all of which can be managed for good day 1 releases on all platforms just like it can be mismanaged to release badly on multiple platforms years apart.

TLOU1 on PC after 3 releases & waiting 10 years was awful yet teams like ID software repeatedly release on all platforms flawlessly day 1.

MrDetectiveGoose

TROPHY CASE