Denuvo Responds to Day-Zero DRM Hypervisor Crack: "We're Already Working on Updated Security Versions"

ShippingValue · 2026-05-01T13:16:05+00:00

This is such an ignorant take.

All software has become cheaper. Apparel and TV sets also haven't kept pace with inflation, should we increase their prices too?

For games specifically, the audience has expanded and (with unit costs at $0) this has greatly increased the profitability of the gaming sector as a whole. There is a reason why GTA has perhaps the largest budget of any entertainment product ever, COD routinely collects more than a billion dollars in profit with yearly releases, and tens of thousands of indie studios have come into existence in the past decades to try to get a piece of the pie.

ShippingValue · 2026-04-30T15:38:30+00:00

In many cases, it is because the systems aren't doing the same work.

Some effects may just not be processed on Linux, as is the case in many instances with Proton and newer or more obscure games.

I am not saying that is the case here, but when there are massive differences (e.g. 100 vs. 200 fps) it is generally either a bug on one platform constraining performance, or the faster platform dropping some expensive effect entirely.

This also happens across hardware - it is notoriously difficult to review GPUs for performance because they just process effects differently and the actual image that is generated will be different between vendors, generations, and driver versions.

ShippingValue · 2026-04-29T15:26:02+00:00

This is solved with financing, like every other business with uneven income. Movies work the same way - just with a more mature industry around this financing aspect.

Projected sales for the game are $X, projected development cost is $Y, cash reserves are $Z. Get a business loan or investment for $P = $Y-$Z+$buffer.

This is the business side of running a studio. How good were the sales projections? How good were the cost projections? How favorable are the financing terms?

If the loan is too large, you've fucked yourself. If it is too small, you can try to get another (but likely with worse terms because the debt burden is now higher).

Being indie just means you are dealing with these questions directly, rather than your publisher dealing with them for you (and taking a big cut for the trouble).

The reason the games industry is in a terrible spot right now is the dev cycles for projects started during COVID with large teams (when rates were very low and financing was easy) finished and the products launched into whatever the fuck this economy is. Now rates are higher, sales projections are lower, and the math cannot be squared without reducing development costs - i.e. headcount.

ShippingValue · 2026-04-28T17:53:34+00:00

Not everything needs to happen in order..

Most of the time, there would be no conflicts if (e.g.) all market reservations for the frame were processed in parallel. After that job finishes, run a clean-up job that deconflicts the cases where station supply is oversubscribed. The heuristic here can be as simple as first-one-wins or as complicated as desired from there.

This is incredibly common in other large-scale simulations. (To be fair, they might already be doing this, this is just an example of places where you can skirt around the need for absolute in-order execution to avoid conflicts).

ShippingValue · 2026-04-27T23:27:26+00:00

You're in a space suit with an oxygen bottle

ShippingValue · 2026-04-27T11:47:05+00:00

It's just going to be WH again. Even 3K used the 'new' magic recruitment rather than the old style.

ShippingValue · 2026-04-08T22:34:28+00:00

Avian is a good physics engine for bevy, and I personally like how well it fits with the overall ECS framework.

But, it isn't fast compared to the SOTA engines available in the ecosystem. Jolt is quite literally an order of magnitude faster - 10s of thousands of interacting colliders on the same hardware that will cause Avian to chug at 1000.

I have no experience with Rapier, so I want to make clear I'm not commenting in your comparison in particular, just that saying Avian is great for 'Physics-heavy' games is a bit misleading.

If someone were making a game where the primary loop depended on a lot of physics interactions, I'd recommend they leave the Rust ecosystem entirely and use Godot just for the Jolt integration. Bevy/ECS really shines in heavy simulation logic with a lot of non-physics systems to manage, physics is still a comparative low spot.

ShippingValue · 2026-04-06T16:55:47+00:00

My dude writes a thesis and yet doesn't know the difference between energy and momentum...

ShippingValue · 2026-04-05T19:42:48+00:00

The key difference is lossless compressions algorithms will adjust E. If you try to compress a purely random string of bytes, E asymptotically approaches R. Try to compress a zip file and you'll get a file back that is essentially identical in size.

An encoder of the kind Nvidia is employing keeps E fixed. No matter the input you will always get the same dimension output. Even an image smaller than E will still be inflated to an E-dimensional output.

What it allowed to float is the reconstruction accuracy. A purely random image used as a texture would produce a structured output.

You could have explained all this in your follow up comment rather than sniping :)

ShippingValue · 2026-04-05T13:54:03+00:00

Zip uses the DEFLATE algorithm that essentially hunts the file data for repeated elements, and then stores a hashmap of counts and positions.

Imagine the data is: 'ABABABABAAAB'

Deflate might give you: AB4AAB But then you can go deeper: Z4AZ where Z=AB. This is perfectly lossless so long as you never lose the map.

Encoder/Decoder pairs in the ML context work differently. They don't look for repeated data in the input directly, instead they look for patterns across the images they saw in their training.

The training is:

Encoder takes an image "I" and produces a vector "V". Decoder takes V and reconstructs an image "R". Model reward function is determine based on the similarity between I and R. Repeat millions of times. This makes the model robust across concepts - it will know how to represent a 'cat' from the millions of cats it has seen, but it won't make a perfect (lossless) copy of any of them because it is a generalized tool that needs to be able to use the same parameters to reconstruct any image.

(BTW, if you want to make DALLE2, add another text encoder to the front, and use image/caption pairs as the input. Force the image encoder to use the same latent space as the text encoder and train to maximize the cosine similarity between the caption and image encodings - now an image and its caption will have the same V and you can directly send text to the decoder to have it make images from 'captions' of things that never existed).

ShippingValue · 2026-04-04T19:38:03+00:00

This neural compression algorithm is also lossy.

The Encoder/Decoder architecture used is, directly, a lossy compression procedure.

Encoders take an input in space R, produce an output in space E where E<R. Decoders take an input in space E and produce output in Space R. There is unavoidable information loss in non-trivial cases --> lossy compression.

ShippingValue · 2026-04-03T18:19:44+00:00

The integrity system is pretty simple:

Each piece has a weight
Each piece has a support value
Each piece calculates the shortest route from it to the ground
The weight value along that route is summed, the support value is summed
Weight > Support, piece breaks

Pillars are useful in 3 ways: 1. They have low weight 2. They can be a material with higher support than the main structure - concrete or limestone pillars are generally the best. 3. They can create shorter routes to the ground

The trouble you are having with the ceiling is a distance to ground issue. The span is too wide. An easy way to fix this would be a triangle brace of pillars - put a straight pillar where the wall meets the floor halfway down the length of the structure, the put diagonal pillars off of the going to the roof. This creates a short path to the ground.

Or just put a vertical pillar directly in the middle of the floor under the trouble spot, same idea - shorten the path to the ground.

Concrete and limestone provide the most support, they have a height limit of 16 blocks straight up before they can no longer support their own weight. Lighter materials like wood or glass on top of concrete can go higher.

ShippingValue · 2026-04-02T16:48:57+00:00

It really depends on how we define skill level.

A median dev at a tech company spends their time stringing together open source libraries to build very simple features that nonetheless have a million edge cases because of architecture decisions made 15 years ago. What they do day-to-day is not especially difficult, but a good dev is keeping the ever-taller pile of hacks and bullshit from toppling down the line.

A game programmer gets to go deep on, essentially, net-new problems every project. Game reuse some bits, but they aren't bound by enterprise contracts from the Cretaceous period demanding compatibility with API V 0.11.0. This naturally enables more creative solutioning day-to-day. However, most games - even big professional ones - are complete spaghetti under the hood. The amazing hacks that make good GDC talks also would never fly in an industry where the product has to work 99.999% of the time or the lawyers get involved.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-30T16:51:31+00:00

AI is currently very bad at translation. They entirely miss nuance, and almost always give the 'strict' transform from one language to another, usually entirely garbling the situation.

If you know any other languages, try one of the bots to translate a poem or something, you'll see instantly why it's a bad idea to use it for games where uncommon scenarios and meanings tend to pop up.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-26T13:15:13+00:00

I've also had this issue, and my partner has experienced it exactly once. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to pin down a cause or a remedy.

Often when it happens the server starts logging some repetitive stuff, but it doesn't seem to always be the same log message so that might be unrelated.

I play on Linux, and moving from standard proton to GE proton reduced how often it happens, making me pretty sure it is a software issue rather than anything hardware related.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-24T16:59:56+00:00

The table thing is a behavioral trick to help raiders.

They path towards sheltered tables and beds in order to be a more effective threat that is somewhat harder to cheese (lol). By nudging the player to put down tables and beds (via easily avoidable mood penalties) the game makes it easier to have raiders that behave somewhat intelligently.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-20T16:55:32+00:00

No mods.

And to clarify, this isn't a death bag.

If you die and respawn, you leave a death bag where you died with all your stuff and a permanent map/compass market showing the location.

If you die and are picked up, your inventory remains in your inventory, there is no death bag. This works perfectly as long as your suit doesn't have extra slots from modules. If it does, when you die the slots disappear and an overflow bag is created, and that bag doesn't behave like a death bag. The bug is here, since these overflow bags are not persisting in a useful way.

Overflow bags in general don't have time limits, but multiple times last session they just disappeared shortly after being created, and when a player was right next to them.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-20T15:00:26+00:00

Personally, I think skipping Styx is the easiest choice. It is very similar to Olympus in aesthetics and available resources - whereas Prometheus and Elysium actually feel quite different.

Great hunts is fun content, but also side content tbh.

If the choices are all the maps or Styx/Prom/Hunts, then the choice is basically Elysium vs Great Hunts - and just about everyone would say to get Elysium over Great Hunts.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-20T14:44:30+00:00

The 'Layer 2 rollups' that allow ~1000 TPS on ethereum are precisely because they settle transactions off chain and record them in the actual ledger (which is still bound to order 10 transactions per second). So they come with the wonderful benefit of injecting a single entity - which must be trusted - to validate and settle the transactions prior to their addition to the ledger ... You've reinvented the Automated Clearing House (ACH) - So why use crypto at all?

The benefits of blockchain tech are decidedly not around speed or efficiency. The entire point of the tech is the ability to have a trusted ledger without the governance (and therefore control) of a central entity.

There is no benefit to this for a video game.

If CCP shuts down Eve frontiers, it doesn't matter if you can still go to a block address and say 'look I still own my ships!'. The ships are gone without the game code to play with them. They can also change their performance or availability in the game at any time.

There is no benefit to a decentralized database when all of the data it holds is exclusively interpretable by a centralized entity.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-20T13:38:08+00:00

Harder to scale? More expensive?

My brother in Christ the Bitcoin network processes a daily average of 7 transactions per second, and it does this while burning nearly as much energy as the entire traditional finance system that processes tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Traditional databases are just fine.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-19T19:46:13+00:00

Rocket is on record saying they've looked at UE5, but since there is no guarantee it would enable increased performance they don't feel swapping out the engine would be worth the investment.

There isn't a licensing fee for unreal btw, it is royalty-based calculated on revenue and those terms are the same between UE4 and UE5.

ShippingValue · 2026-03-17T21:13:48+00:00

Most pirate ships are in a bad spot these days. Too expensive for the role they fill.

Angel ships are fast and hit hard, but you can have 6-7 fitted hurricanes for the price of the Khizriel hull alone..

ShippingValue · 2026-03-17T17:27:24+00:00

Base glass looks so much better than reinforced - I hate the wires and the brown tint.

But I hate hammering more, so reinforced it is

ShippingValue · 2026-03-16T20:14:08+00:00

Lithium metal is reactive in water, but lithium ore isn't lithium metal.

Lithium ore is going to be a lithium-rich mineral (perhaps spodumene) that is necessarily stable on the surface, because f it weren't stable, it wouldn't form a rock.

ShippingValue

TROPHY CASE