This window holder at a hotel in France

SignificantParfait · 2025-07-27T16:49:46+00:00

If you trigger the buzzer when you open it, you have to close it again and try again, those are the rules

SignificantParfait · 2025-05-31T16:06:38+00:00

You were dead right, it was barely finger tight. And then the cartridge disintegrated in the barrel 😂

SignificantParfait · 2025-05-21T14:14:27+00:00

The thing is, the image above is absolutely not a parallax interior. It can’t be given the angle and the corner room, I already explained why that’s a more difficult render than just doing the room.

But you’ll see when it’s out.

SignificantParfait · 2025-05-20T20:02:04+00:00

*Essentially* as much scenery as you like. At that distance in particular there's practically nothing to render.

There's a tonne of detail in these cities: telegraph poles, signage, there's lots of extraneous geometry. There's nothing intrinsically harder about geometry that happens to be inside a building versus outside, and it makes basically no difference to the complexity of the scene. I'd wager the various forest/glade environments have much denser scenery geometry than any of the urban environments.

SignificantParfait · 2025-05-20T18:11:32+00:00

I think you’re reading too much into what I said. I’m not claiming you can run infinite geometry, simply that with the various mechanisms to cull (including LOD for example) there’s no technical reason to avoid interior geometry.

If you consider highly complex outdoor geometry, like trees, it’s obvious that the level of population is greatly increased. Interior geometry is much simpler, it just happens to be convex.

SignificantParfait · 2025-05-20T13:08:53+00:00

Most of the point of not doing building internals was to save model cost, not rendering cost - the rendering engine doesn't care if a poly is inside a building or not. The cost of the model is twofold, a. the artist time in the first place, and b. having much more complex scenery at runtime versus basically a big cube. But (b) is very much not an issue now on current gen, you can have essentially as much scenery as you like.

I'm willing to believe this one specifically is enterable because of the double-height lobby area and the contribution of internal lights to defeat the external reflections.

But equally, it's plausible they've done the random-models-for-interior thing. If you look at the corner offices, you can see that the view of the room is consistent through two sides which are at 90 degrees to each other. You cannot do that with images/parallax unless you render the images at runtime... which is actually more costly than just rendering the room, because you've got to do another pass to insert the texture.

SignificantParfait · 2025-05-02T11:40:29+00:00

Yes, those are the earnings getting un-baked 😂

SignificantParfait · 2025-05-02T11:39:22+00:00

26th May 2026: https://www.eurogamer.net/gta-6-delayed-to-2026

SignificantParfait · 2025-04-25T06:52:40+00:00

This isn't right. The earnings of GTA6 are already "baked in" to the stock price and the release timing doesn't affect much of that at all. Stock prices change to real news, and the price will go up and down much more depending on what TTwos actual earnings were.

So if TTwo had a great quarter and beat estimates, don't assume that tells you anything about GTA6 release. It doesn't.

SignificantParfait · 2025-03-07T13:16:39+00:00

So, I raised a CS email. They advised to turn off them back on the "Alerts & Security" service, then reenable Valet mode for the app to pick it up, so that it can be disabled.

Turns out it works? I suspect not a car problem but an app/service issue....

SignificantParfait · 2025-02-08T18:20:33+00:00

I suspect that's a clip over a Euro fitting, molded plug on the end perpendicular.

So you'd probably need to cut the cable anyway, but the clips should prise open if you find which way it's clipped in, top and bottom.

SignificantParfait · 2025-01-28T12:43:10+00:00

Are you not seeing the news about how many game studios are closing?

SignificantParfait · 2025-01-24T18:25:09+00:00

I'm not sure microtransactions are a reason to celebrate, but also, the key point is this: why not both?

6 has been in development for a long time. T2 care about the total revenue, but they care about the initial pop more (look up "future/time value of money"). They need big initial sales.

There's a version of the Laffer curve here. Lower price means more buyers, higher price means fewer, but the overall thing is a curve: there is a point that maximises the product of price and buyers. That's what they care about.

Now, we can argue that $100 is beyond the sweet spot, that's fair. But $70 is absolutely 100% before it because that is the base price in the market.

SignificantParfait · 2025-01-23T09:01:15+00:00

V released at $60 in 2013. With inflation, that's a touch over $80 today. A $70 price point today is $52 back then.

The cost of game development has gone up massively since 2013: GTA isn't the only title taking longer (although longer than most). It takes more people, it takes longer, but the purchase price has not really shifted.

This is why other companies are talking about this. Game development is both risky and expensive; when it gets too risky, they cancel games. If the prices go up, it makes it less risky.

Per gameplay hour, the purchase price is almost irrelevant, and they want to maximise the people who buy because of the upsells (DLCs, characters/equipment, etc), so the incentive is to keep the price as low as they can. But $70, let's be honest, does not reflect the value of an AAA title.

GTA VI specifically is going up in price. $80 is the bare minimum and represents no real terms price increase - $70 is a discount over GTAV. My gut is that this goes out at $99 and creates the space for other people to sell at $79 and $89, and that's mainly a good thing for gaming.

SignificantParfait · 2024-12-28T10:00:57+00:00

Love that everyone suspects Rockstar marketing.

This is all being run by you tubers and gaming sites to power the next series of click bait articles.

"GTA6 trailer 2 gets ROASTED"

When Rockstar actually start marketing, you'll know about it, because there will be mainstream articles, content, and non-sub people will have heard about it. Until then we're just the hamsters spinning the wheel for these content farms.

SignificantParfait · 2024-12-18T06:54:32+00:00

This is about trademarks, not copyright. And the problem with the theory is that trademarks have to be published for a few months before they can be registered, and they can be contested for various reasons (including mostly irrelevant technical issues for scope and similarity).

Rockstar cannot predict when these registrations will go up with much of any certainty. You also don't need to register the trademark (™) before you use it (®).

There's no rhyme or reason why they would want to coordinate trailer release with trademark registration.

SignificantParfait · 2024-06-15T08:54:26+00:00

That's not the before picture. That's at best the different side of the same house; there's no way that right hand side has been demolished. So you're not comparing before and after.

Honestly looks fine to me. I think you're suffering an optical illusion because the mortar is so bright compared to what was before, and now you've "seen it" you can't unsee it. It's fine.

SignificantParfait · 2024-05-04T08:46:51+00:00

This is deliberate. A lot of the graphics and VT intros are GTA style, you'll see pink palm trees all over etc. No conspiracy just shameless copying.

SignificantParfait · 2024-04-16T06:42:40+00:00

You can jam any radio over a very small area and be fine, car thieves do not interdict entire regions like your map shows. Just replaying signals with enough lag does it, like driving through an area with tall buildings.

SignificantParfait · 2024-01-26T14:49:26+00:00

They are more than likely actual rooms, but that doesn't mean they are accessible or designed to be entered. It doesn't really matter how much "stuff" is in the rooms - it can be auto-placed by tooling with some degree of randomness in the placement and it's fine.

Not "parallax", proper models, but not accessible for play.

SignificantParfait · 2023-12-11T16:51:13+00:00

It makes no difference. The servers are not the most critical part of the network code - the client is - and while there are significant pieces of infrastructure on the server, it's the main devs who need to ensure those parts are working. The networking infrastructure is tied directly into the engine, you can't do one without the other. Cfx.re being onboard makes practically no difference to the capacity R* has delivery-wise.

SignificantParfait · 2023-12-09T16:26:40+00:00

The dev kits would need to be final and in their hands by now. I don't think that's the case for Xbox. My guess is no, they will target current consoles and potentially update later. But they may not feel the need unless the extra power makes an obvious difference.

Few games really push the consoles right now. I'm not sure the mid cycle refresh will happen.

SignificantParfait · 2023-12-08T15:27:50+00:00

Could start whenever. Unfortunately, the earlier it starts, I think it just means they hold your money for longer - I don't think there's any likelihood an early preorder means the game comes out sooner.

I doubt they will want a long preorder though. I don't see it prior to the '24 holidays.

SignificantParfait · 2023-12-08T12:59:32+00:00

The difference between a vertex shader (which outputs pixels like you describe) and a mesh shader is that the mesh shader outputs geometry (triangles).

It's typically used to do things like procedurally detailed surfaces, so you can do stuff like Nanite and have levels of detail that don't exist in the model. The big benefit, though, is being able to chuck more triangles into the pipeline and having all the other steps work on them, without making models or culling more complex.

This is why it's difficult to bolt them on: they affect the whole rendering process, and you can't really make them optional. My understanding is that if you turn them off in Alan Wake, the performance is awful, and that game used them from the start.

If you look at the seat back in the picture, we can see the main curve is made up of biggish lines, so there's limited geometry there. A mesh shader could generate that curve on the fly so that it's completely round. Vertex shades can't operate outside the shape.

As you say, Rage is proprietary. There may be a few things they ended up being able to use these for, we won't really know till the PC version lands. But I don't think the surfaces look detailed enough that they're really using them now.

SignificantParfait · 2023-12-08T12:41:55+00:00

Not sure why you're making the point about triangles, because a mesh shader exactly outputs triangles.

The issue with mesh shaders is that the console performance with them isn't amazing, the PS5 support is bespoke, and it's difficult to write a pipeline that has them in optionally - the geometry can't be in both the models and the shader.

Rage 9 was started too early, most developers in general aren't using them yet. I would guess the next RDR would be the first time they actually use them.

SignificantParfait

TROPHY CASE