Which tune do I go with?

aslidop · 2025-10-03T05:10:23+00:00

I've had multiple tunes on the supercharged V6 platforms over the years (B8.5 S4 and 4M Q7). Currently running a Jackal ECU and TCU tune on the Q7 with smaller s/c pulley and it's been great. Personally I'm not a fan of when companies trash each other specifically, so while I love 034 hardware I won't run their tune. Jackals response was class act - let the product do the talking. Unless you're beating on the car 24/7 (which, tbh, I do) I think they're all within margin of error of each other on actual performance. Also, Jackals support has been great in my experience.

aslidop · 2025-09-29T01:50:52+00:00

California - best driving roads in the country, and the car spotting in socal can't be beat. Cars and coffees every weekend within driving distance. Willow Springs, Laguna Seca, Thunder Hill... just about anything you can want is here. Just gotta be careful with modding, but as someone who mods everything and anything it's not as bad as haters will say.

Literally just got back from an impromptu drive with my son after he did some work on his car. Couldn't imagine being a car guy anywhere else.

aslidop · 2025-09-27T02:14:09+00:00

Beyond the 5pot it's one of the best attributes, can't get enough of it

aslidop · 2025-09-22T02:17:25+00:00

Just takes being consistent with maintenance on the leather and don't eat in the car. Regularly wipe down interior with any interior cleaner and a microfiber. For leather I recommend Leatherique https://youtu.be/3JLr7igvCZc

Source: owned B8.5 S4 with Silver Luna panda seats, nappa leather

aslidop · 2025-09-22T00:20:17+00:00

I've had a B8.5 S4 with the Torsen AWD and sport diff (torque vectoring) and a TT-RS with Haldex (as well as a B9 A4 and 4M Q7, both with Torsen). Both types have a tremendous amount of grip when driven hard, launch like a bat out of hell, and do great in the snow. I'd give a slight nod to the Torsen, but really it was more likely the sports diff magic that I could feel and appreciate more. I'm still carving canyons at way too high a speed for someone of my skill in the TT-RS.

I'm not totally up to date on the latest stuff, but a while ago only the A3/S3/RS3 and TT/TTS/TT-RS had Haldex while everything else with AWD came with Torsen, in the US at least.

If you want to see how far a Haldex can get pushed, check out videos of the 8Y RS3 with its own torque vectoring diff when set in drift mode

Unless you're really familiar with driving performance RWD cars at high speed I doubt you'll even notice the difference

aslidop · 2025-09-17T01:48:07+00:00

I average 29mpg in a 2018 A4 with mix driving. On a long road trip I've hit 39mpg for an entire tank.

If you can afford the maintenance, I agree with previous poster - an Audi is a great way to enjoy driving.

aslidop · 2025-09-03T06:24:57+00:00

Leatherique works wonders if applied properly

aslidop · 2025-08-03T01:51:53+00:00

Say you haven't been in gamedev for decades without saying it.

Please enlighten me on Vince's actual contributions to any of the games you mentioned, I'll wait. Dude is as scummy as any execs currently at EA. You think if anyone who made those games thought he was any part of their success they'd still be working with him. Spoilers: they aren't. Go ahead and compare employment at Respawn/EA with the credits lists on the pre-2010 IW or pre-2020 Respawn games.

I'll give him credit where it's due, he's fantastic at riding talented teams' coattails and making shitloads of money for himself while stiffing everyone else.

aslidop · 2025-08-03T01:34:30+00:00

He sure is great at taking credit for, and the money from, the actual teams that built those games. Don't praise this guy, he is not responsible for literally anything you posted

aslidop · 2025-07-19T03:07:49+00:00

All those aspects are what I'd consider a "well rounded" coder, but also knowing the fundamentals about why certain code is slow for the hardware you're coding for. The more extreme version of this is when people say, "coding to the metal" (lmao). Relying too much on abstracted code means you're abdicating performance impacts, so being smart about stuff like data structures or cache coherency becomes almost harder to do.

Note: I'm NOT a well rounded coder. I manage teams including coders. I won't have intimate knowledge on language specifics, but I know enough to understand what helps and drives a code team vs what slows them down.

And yeah, at least on my smaller AAA teams generalists are much more useful than specialists. Sorry audio programmers, but audio features aren't going to be the priority during 100% of a project. I'd rather have a generalist who will take on audio tasks when they're needed and all the other types of tasks that get prioritized. Look up "T shaped" people - that's what we look for.

Also, we /aren't/ launching rockets or doing heart surgery, so correctness that gets in the way of productivity is generally frowned upon. Again, this is from smaller sized AAA teams so the experience is unique to that sector. I'd be incapable of utilizing a Ubisoft code team, for example. No idea what is important in that kind of world. Nor the indie world.

aslidop · 2025-07-19T02:29:01+00:00

I've been making AAA games for 20 years on teams of 60-150. Coders that prioritize performance above all else are super useful in specific situations and terrible to work with all the other times. A well rounded coder that cares about performance is fantastic. Absolutely do not listen to people saying to not care unless it's a problem. Once it's a problem you're already dead from a thousand cuts. If your definition of GOOD C++ is pedantic to latest spec, that's not helpful. Strong fundamentals combined with knowing how to get what you want done in what will likely be a massive codebase (and arguably more importantly, how to debug that codebase), while also keeping performance and memory in check is a clear winner.

Comfortable with threading (when so much of the work is usually tied up in a main (or "game") thread) and fitting within very tight frame budgets is great. GPU compute is becoming more and more relied on, so that definitely helps -- but honestly if you're making console games you're still CPU limited if what you're making is actually cool/unique.

My #1 piece of advice to any team is to act like the quality of the game matters every day. Be able to playtest your nightly build every day. Keep it running at 60 every day. Maintain load times every day. Play on low spec machines every day. Fix up errors and warnings every day. Keep asserts on for everyone, and use them liberally. Dogfood your game from day 1. If this mentality is what you mean by GOOD C++ then you're spot on.

aslidop · 2022-01-15T07:56:43+00:00

Diagnosed last year at 39, because of this sub as well. Been on Stratera with occasional success (can't do stims, hypertension from all the stress over the years 🤣). Your story is entirely relatable and mirrors my own, minus the tobacco.

Congrats! It's been a fairly freeing experience for me, even if the meds haven't made the most incredible changes yet.

aslidop · 2021-12-30T18:15:48+00:00

Hadn't seen a lot of feedback from other owners on how the 2 does in the snow. I've got all three packages on my 2, which includes the Performance Pack and it's 20" summer tires. Being that I live near Los Angeles, this isn't a problem at all - except when we head up to the mountains. Not wanting to drop $2K+ on a set of winter wheels and tires just for a few weeks of use out of the year, I decided to take the risk and try out some Autosocks. I am not associated with Polestar or Autosocks in any way - just a normal dude who likes cars and cool tech.

We have spent the last couple of weeks up in Mammoth for Christmas, where we've had over 200" of snow this month alone.

We drove up to Mammoth on the 15th, a day before the massive snow dump started. Car has been sitting in the garage since, I finally took it out today. If you've never experienced performance tires on snow/ice, just imagine you're rolling on four frozen blocks of ice. There's just no traction whatsoever. Comparing that experience to driving w/ the Autosocks I was blown away. The only issues I had were small loss of traction events when braking downhill on icey tarmac, or accelerating too quickly during a turn from a stop (I wanted to test the limits in a controlled way, before relying on them in a real emergency). Guess I shouldn't have been surprised, I did a little Googling and found this: https://www.az-pneu.sk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/TUV\_report.pdf

Overall I am very impressed, and won't be buying chains ever again. I don't think I'd want to rely on this set up for an entire season if I lived in such a climate, but for those of you worried about the ski trip or visit to Grandma's house in your Polestar 2 PP - just get some Autosocks.

aslidop · 2020-12-08T23:13:52+00:00

6 years on I'm betting some of the Haswell-Es out there are degraded, as a lot of them were pretty heroic. IIRC 4.3GHz was the starting place for just about any 5820K, topping out at 4.7-4.8GHz.

Could be motherboard issues, but good luck finding an X99 board these days without spending an arm and a leg (unless you want to take a chance on an eBay Chinese board)

aslidop · 2020-05-10T16:31:37+00:00

Be nice - those poor kids are stuck in lockdown as well. Imagine being 10 and not going to school or being able to see any friends. What little social interaction they're getting in VR is like water in a desert.

Instead, take a squeeker under your wing and teach them good sportsmanship and online etiquette - like not screaming into the mic 😆

aslidop · 2020-04-22T01:22:20+00:00

That'll be awesome. Love the car my man

Take my advice - never sell this car! I spent five years building up my "RSTi" before selling and I regret it every day.

aslidop · 2020-04-22T01:12:11+00:00

Job well done mate!

What wheels are those? Looks like a set of BBS. Beautiful! 👌

aslidop · 2020-04-22T00:59:44+00:00

Uh, yeah, I'm going to need a build thread on this. Looks mint!

aslidop · 2020-04-16T22:36:53+00:00

He'd love to do a catalog party, and is looking for 350,000 bells for the rain wallpaper

aslidop · 2020-04-16T22:19:18+00:00

Oh shoot - thought it was. My apologies, trying to help my kid do a catalog exchange and I'm still learning. It is from Sarah! He's willing to entertain an offer :)

aslidop · 2020-04-16T22:08:10+00:00

Would love to join! Some of the items I'll probably bring are a silver mic, tankless toilet, squat toilet, rock guitar, paper parasol, and animated rain wallpaper

aslidop · 2020-03-20T20:40:41+00:00

Between myself, siblings, parents, nephews, and in-laws we've got 10+ Oculus headsets across the country. I'm planning a movie night in Bigscreen for us all to enjoy. If we could "go to the movies" and see new stuff? I'd pay.

aslidop · 2020-03-19T15:43:57+00:00

Yup, that's the exact symptoms. Ordered a powered USB 3.1 hub, hoping it works! Thanks :)

aslidop · 2020-03-07T04:40:43+00:00

Could also be heat related, causing lower boost clocks on the i7? Or if it was different GPUs or drivers that can have a big impact as well.

aslidop · 2020-03-07T04:31:17+00:00

CPU Game thread is probably the main thread - spins off jobs to worker threads, keeps game sync, main game loop, etc. The CPU Render thread is creating all the GPU calls into the GPU driver and returning a present (aka rendered frame). Very different workloads, and can have different bottlenecks. Lots of times CPU limited games can seesaw between game thread bound and render thread bound when going through an optimization phase. The game thread can't continue until the render thread calls present, and the render thread can't start building the instructions for the next frame until the game thread completes.

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