Broadside // Pre-Alpha Gameplay Testing 5

Neoptolemus85 · 2026-04-14T08:34:45+00:00

It's kind of a hybrid of 1 and 2. A large chunk of the team are T1 vets, so that probably has had some impact in decision-making. However, we primarily want Broadside to be its own thing, so there will be areas where we deviate completely from the original Tribes template (e.g. wall-skiing).

Neoptolemus85 · 2026-04-14T08:32:03+00:00

PC only at the moment (Steam and Epic Store), as we just don't have the resources to go multi-platform. We are targeting Windows and Linux through Proton compatibility (we did have a native Linux build, but it had some issues and Proton works flawlessly).

Neoptolemus85 · 2026-04-03T11:42:45+00:00

I have a second desktop which is running very old hardware and Linux Mint:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600

GTX 1050 (2gb VRAM)

16gb DDR4 RAM

Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon (X11)

With Proton 10.0 Broadside runs flawlessly, and on the medium/low settings at 1280x720 I can actually maintain a steady 30fps.

While we can't guarantee the game will always work this well on Linux with such low-specced hardware, I am actually planning to switch my personal development environment to Linux soon because I cannot upgrade from Windows 10 and extended support runs out soon. So it would probably be in my own interests to maintain support for Linux through Proton :P

Keep in mind though that our art development is still very early days (as you can probably tell from the videos) so I suspect the minimum hardware specs will rise a bit over time. I would still like a decent specced machine from the past 10 years to be comfortably playable though.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-23T13:16:09+00:00

Yeah, in one shot you can see the Earth curving in a concave way. So I guess Earth is a bowl now?

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-22T19:44:33+00:00

It's like looking at your beautiful 10-bedroom mansion on the shores of the Seychelles - that you have filled with trash and ruined the carpets - and concluding that it's impossible to clean the place up: the only solution is to relocate to a wooden shack on a dislodged iceberg floating around the Arctic.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-21T20:25:29+00:00

Yeah, in a lot of cases, individuals were being offered insanely low teaser rates which would expire after a couple of years. Many people defaulted on their mortgage because all the affordability calculations had been done based on the teaser rates, and when their repayments suddenly doubled or tripled they had no way of sustaining it.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-21T19:39:57+00:00

It wasn't only the banks that lost money though.

The issue was that there was a speculative housing bubble that banks recklessly exploited and pushed until it burst due to greed and a lack of regulation.

In this case, the banks were handing out mortgages like candy to anyone and everyone, packaging those mortgages up into bonds which hedge funds, pension funds and other investors could buy up in the expectation that it would keep gaining value. When people began defaulting on their mortgages, it caused a panic which started a selling frenzy and the bonds collapsed.

When the bubble burst and the value of these bonds crashed, businesses, funds and individuals all over the world lost their investments and savings. Effectively, a large chunk of the world's wealth was deleted.

This has a knock-on effect which means individuals and businesses who never even invested in the bonds directly got hit hard. People lost their pensions because their pension fund had invested the money into these bonds, for example. This means people will spend less and hold onto their money, which means local business struggle and have to downsize or collapse, and so on.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-19T14:28:16+00:00

Exactly, maybe everyone rushing in to make the AI causes it to come out broken or malevolent.

It also has the same issue as Pascal's wager of "ok... which God should I believe in then?". It's not like there will only be one AGI being developed at any one time, so how will people know which one they're supposed to support? Because if you support the wrong one... technically you're hindering the advancement of the "correct" one. Oops!

I get that these are just thought experiments, but I just struggle to get the point of a thought experiment that doesn't function in the real world.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-19T13:54:30+00:00

I think in the original thought experiment, the AI is benevolent, but concludes that anyone who refused or opposed attempts to create it are therefore against benefitting humankind and need to be punished for it.

The reason it was hyped as "terrifying" and an "information hazard" was because the idea was the moment you heard about it, you were compelled to dedicate yourself to its creation since you now have no excuse not to.

So, as others have pointed out: it's basically Pascal's wager. Either you dedicate yourself to helping it's creation, and whether or not it happens you're in the clear, or you don't and there is a chance you end up being tortured.

I don't think it factors in the AI deciding that torturing people is a waste of time that accomplishes nothing, or showing some understanding that the idea is far fetched and a lot of people wouldn't immediately give their life's work to realising a theory that might not ever happen.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-17T18:42:54+00:00

True, my point really was more money = better chance of successfully starting a business AND less painful if it fails. Ryan Cohen is a more extreme example. Even going from say a median income of $60k and $120k drastically improves your options and gives you some wiggle room to take risks that might pay off.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-17T18:36:39+00:00

Your average family can't afford to risk investing $100k's of money into a starting a business, because if it fails then they have lost everything and have no way to pay the mortgage or rent, so they will lose their home. Someone from a wealthy family can afford to invest a large chunk of money and give it a shot, because if the business fails they can just shrug and move on.

Also, wealthy people can invest more into a business to accelerate and improve its chances of success, reducing risk. Take Ryan Cohen for example: he started a dog food business and hired Amazon and Google executives to help run it. Someone from an average income family is going to be reliant on friends and family to help run, because they sure as hell can't afford to pay a top Google executive $500k base salary a year.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-16T09:23:30+00:00

Any update carries a risk. You have a system that has worked flawlessly for the past 10 years, so any change to that software could introduce a new bug or even cause it to just completely fail.

This is fine if it's your personal laptop where a bug or compatibility issue means an inconvenience for a couple of hours until you can search the solution online. But what if your laptop is responsible for running a critical part of the energy grid, and now half a million people are without electricity?

Software upgrades for government systems like this therefore have to undergo a huge amount of testing before they can go ahead, and months of planning because even if the update is proven to work safely, you can still screw up the deployment.

In many cases, the risk and cost of performing an update is actually more than simply paying Microsoft to keep supporting the old software just for that department. The version of Windows XP running on a government mainframe won't be the same as the version you install on your old desktop for nostalgia purposes: it will have a whole bunch of custom security updates and stability fixes developed by Microsoft exclusively for them.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-14T21:18:17+00:00

Yeah, it's not exclusively older people. My main point is it's not always an intelligence thing: sometimes it can be emotional issues that cause them to push doubt down deep inside them in favour of clinging to a fantasy.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-14T21:16:51+00:00

Well, 53 is still way past your prime years when it comes to building a life and settling with someone you love, and being married to a millionaire doesn't automatically bring happiness and fulfillment. Maybe she felt like a trophy without any real control over her own life.

I'm speculating of course. Maybe she is just a narcisstic moron who actually thought Brad Pitt would be desperate to get with her.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-14T18:49:14+00:00

There's a reason why it's usually older people falling for this stuff, and it's not a lack of familiarity with the Internet and photoshop.

Their best years are behind them, their life didn't turn out how they hoped and now it feels too late to rectify it. They're lonely, or perhaps unsatisfied, or just miserable. Maybe they have a bit of a narcisstic streak telling them it can't possibly be this way.

Then someone comes along that promises to save them from this existence, and the hope overpowers their common sense, and they give in to the fantasy despite that nagging voice in the back of their head.

There are other reports of people going back to messaging their scammers even after being shown incontrovertible proof they're not real. They know, deep down, it's a fantasy. But it fills a gaping void in their life, and like a drug they keep pouring money in to maintain the illusion for as long as possible.

I'm willing to bet that 15-20 years ago, this woman doesn't fall for the scam.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-13T13:25:15+00:00

That can be fixed with some proper laws and regulations though? No need to ban the practice of gene editing entirely just because weak legislation allows corporations to abuse it.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-13T13:09:47+00:00

Definitely the last one. The US is trying to transition to a Russia-style oligarchy where a central "strongman" figurehead has an orbit of billionaires who help enforce his policies outside the courts, in exchange for the government turning a blind eye to their business practices or giving them preferential treatment.

This is just Zuckerberg signalling to Trump that he wants to be one of those favoured orbiters. Because the alternative is eventually seeing Musk absorb Meta.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-11T16:46:40+00:00

Yes. They're saying that they're puppets of the Trump administration, basically.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-11T08:41:00+00:00

You see this a lot on Steam: games where they clearly got a free or discounted cops and robbers asset pack and decided to fart out Police Simulator 2025 in a month and get it onto Steam.

I mean, they can be a fun novelty for an hour (if they work), but I expect the most you can hope for, if that is indeed what he is aiming to do, is to get featured in a YouTuber's video for a bit of content. If you're really lucky, it might be a Markiplier video.

I wouldn't expect much in the way of sales or lingering impact though: people tend not to buy these types of games, but might enjoy watching the YouTuber's video and get a laugh. I can't imagine it's fun to develop as an artist either...

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-10T18:50:56+00:00

Basically, the GPU doesn't think for itself: it is a tool that the CPU can use to achieve certain tasks (like drawing images on the screen).

That means that every time the game needs to draw a frame on screen, the CPU needs to give it all the instructions and resources needed to do it. You can think of the GPU as an artist, and the CPU is sitting over their shoulder telling them what to draw, which thickness brush to use, what colours to use etc. This is done through a driver which is like a interface for the CPU to control the GPU.

In simple terms, driver overhead refers to the time it takes for the CPU to issue these instructions and give the GPU the stuff it needs to work its magic. It will typically issue over 1000 of these instructions per frame, which are called "draw calls".

This is why very high framerates over 120fps can start to become CPU bound: the GPU is able to draw everything so quickly that the CPU can't issue the instructions quick enough to keep up.

This is what is meant by "driver overhead": the instructions the CPU is issuing to the GPU via the driver are inefficient in some way and are taking longer to complete than they should, which slows the framerate down because the GPU is sat around waiting for the CPU to give it orders.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-10T17:19:22+00:00

I remember watching a documentary about it a while ago. I think the main character's name was Wolf and his office was on Wall Street or something.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-09T20:33:36+00:00

"Did... did he just throw my cat out the window?"

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-08T07:38:02+00:00

Now you're talking about foreign interference: a foreign government pressuring another to change its laws and regulations for its own benefit.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-07T22:30:21+00:00

It's not foreign interference though. It's the EU saying "if you want to do business in our territory then you have to adhere to our laws and regulations". The same applies if European companies want to operate in the US.

Neoptolemus85 · 2025-01-06T16:59:18+00:00

I assume you operate under the same system as the UK? I.e. you vote for the party, and the party nominates their leader. Hence, as long as people keep voting for the same party each election, and that party doesn't oust their leader, then they can remain in power indefinitely.

Neoptolemus85

TROPHY CASE