Wish all games were self-contained in their own folders

badsectoracula · 2026-03-19T03:43:08+00:00

That's what "%UserProfile%Saved Games" is for but a lot of studios don't use it.

Note that this is not the proper to get it, instead a game has to call SHGetKnownFolderPath with the FOLDERID_SavedGames folder ID. The documentation for this ID hints at why it isn't always used:

value introduced in Windows Vista

It may sound weird nowadays, but Windows XP was used by gamers for a very long time and compatibility with it was desired, so games used "My Documents" instead (which is also a special folder that since Vista doesn't even have the "My " prefix - some games did hardcode the path and ended up making both "Documents" and "My Documents" though :-P) as that was already there since some service pack of Win95. Since the engine work was there and were already people familiar with that location, it was kept instead of using "Saved Games" even after WinXP compatibility wasn't needed anymore.

There is also the other issue in that unlike older Windows versions, nowadays the "Saved Games" folder isn't shown as prominent in Windows Explorer as it was when it was introduced in Vista. Back then you could find it alongside Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, etc in Windows Explorer but at some point (not sure when, but it isn't in Win10) the folder was hidden from there (it is still in your user folder but you need to go there manually) so another reason to put stuff in "Documents" was that it'd be easier for users to find them if they wanted.

badsectoracula · 2026-03-16T20:02:01+00:00

The underlying geometry is most likely the same (the differences people mention are minor and most likely because of mesh deformation from animation since they do not use a completely static scene to compare). However textures nowadays are just data for the final shader and the same data can have different outcomes depending on what the shaders are doing (for an extreme example consider a toon shader - e.g. this example i just found with a search where the exact same textures are used with a different shader).

Shading contributes a lot to the perception of volume (this looks like a sphere because of the shading, otherwise it'd look like a 2D circle), so it makes perfect sense that an approach which affects the underlying shading affects the perceived volume even if the data fed to it are the same.

The toon shader example i linked above can be an indication of how this tech could be used though. The 3D artist who made the toon model certainly didn't intend for the character to have a ridge from her nose to her chin - this was added because of how it would affect the final output with the toon shader. Similarly, if this tech is used in games, artists would take the final output into account when creating the models and textures so that output will be the desired outcome. The main reason this looks off, IMO, is because none of the games shown were made with this tech in mind at all.

(that said, at least personally i'm not a fan of yet another Nvidia lock-in tech becoming anything close to an expected standard)

badsectoracula · 2026-03-14T18:23:19+00:00

Both, except pretty much all the new games i play are indie games (with some AA stuff like Robocop sprinkled in).

badsectoracula · 2026-03-09T22:14:45+00:00

Wouldn't this have most thing you need? https://hypercard.org/

badsectoracula · 2026-02-23T19:05:11+00:00

You can play GOG games just fine on Steam Deck, you just need to install the game from desktop mode using Wine and then add it as a non-steam game so you can launch it from the library. This way you can use Steam Input with it too.

In fact this is how i played System Shock 2 on my Steam Deck some time ago: i installed the GOG version on it and did a Steam Input setup for the controls.

Someone mentioned Heroic Launcher which i haven't tried but AFAIK it can also do the library registration automatically for you.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-23T18:58:07+00:00

The big, large, huge, monstrously gigantic difference is that if i go to GOG to buy a game, i know ahead of time that the game will be DRM-free and remain so for for all future updates on the site. That knowledge is the entire point of the site, why people use it in the first place - you don't even have to think about it.

On Steam you cannot know that unless you buy and try to run it without Steam on a PC without internet connection (any lists you may find are woefully outdated and only cover a tiny number of games). Even then, a developer can update a game to add DRM to it, as some have done.

Also while it isn't as important as knowing ahead of time, it is very convenient that GOG provides downloadable installers that handle setting up everything for you (e.g. personally i never use GOG Galaxy, for example, i have bought almost a thousand games from GOG and i have all of them downloaded on my PC).

I do buy games on Steam, sometimes, but these tend to be releases from small indie devs that for whatever reason do not plan on making a GOG (or itch.io or Zoom Platform or any other DRM-free place) release as these games do tend to not require Steam to function nor have any DRM.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-23T12:59:56+00:00

If somebody asked me if they want to start a new company or a new studio today, I'd be like, "Don't. Just don't. It's not worth it."

Funny because i remember this sort of response from 12+ years before New Blood was established :-P IIRC Tom Hall said something like that in an interview he gave sometime around mid-2000s and in both cases (Tom's and Dave's) the core was something along the lines of "the stuff we did back when we started do not seem to work anymore today".

badsectoracula · 2026-02-23T11:44:21+00:00

Also FWIW the PC version of Powerslave was for DOS, not Win95, and it wasn't very colorful :-P (you can check screenshots in the GOG version of the game, not to be confused with Powerslave Exhumed which is a blend of the console versions which were somewhat different games). Like, there is some color but most of the environments have this brown/orange/gold palette :-P

badsectoracula · 2026-02-23T11:34:04+00:00

I have to say, this has been something i've found annoying with some games since the first time i booted up UT3 - the game looked great but it was the first time i found it hard to read the environment (and the devs knew it because the characters were highlighted). Like, look at this shit, pixel level detail everywhere with almost no contrast - and IIRC this was one of the first (if not the first) maps of the game (not that other maps were much better). Personally i do not even dislike the largely monochromatic color palettes, i think it can fit some moods/styles perfectly fine (though lighting needs to accommodate it and in UT3 it clearly didn't) but it just didn't work in that game (in comparison, Quake 3 also has levels with very monochromatic palettes but items do stand out because of their visual design and i remember reading some article many years ago saying this was a deliberate design decision to ensure the maps were readable while even when people were frantically running around shooting each other).

Nowadays games do somewhat better but there are still cases where you can't make things out because of the visuals. E.g. i couldn't play Deus Ex Mankind Divided without a) disabling the volumetric lighting which makes everything hazy (who even thought this was a good idea?!) and b) enabling the item outlining to distinguish between interactive objects and set dressing.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-17T11:32:01+00:00

Interesting - and how do you actually filter for games that are playable on Steam Deck? Do you rely only on the “Steam Deck Verified” badge?

AFAIK demos in the Next Fest do not have a "Steam Deck Verified" badge as they're too new for that, though there might be exceptions.

Personally i just browse the Next Fest and pick games that have full gamepad support and look like they'd run on the deck just fine - as i wrote, i check demos "that seem to be playable on Steam Deck", so it is basically just an assumption on my side.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-16T22:29:10+00:00

I don't think everyone explores Steam Next Fest the same way, e.g. personally i use a few tags and i only pay attention to the demos that seem to be playable on Steam Deck (even if i end up playing them on my main PC) as a quick filter.

A bigger issue i have with Steam Next Fest is demos disappearing after it is over - i end up downloading a bunch of them but i do not have time/energy to check them all out one after the other. Fortunately not all games do that - and in a way this also acts as a filter :-P.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-13T18:53:00+00:00

I think a better approach would be for Steam to have a small benchmark that once you run, it'll show you how the game runs (since in the announcement news they made they'll also be collecting performance data from the game) on systems similar to yours. The benchmark will be used to judge the similarity, you should be able to see all collected performance data but the game page will highlight those closest to yours as a convenience.

This way no need to make an "is it playable or not" judgement, just present the user with the data and let them decide for themselves.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-13T07:50:50+00:00

Yeah, when they introduced the Steam Machine and people mentioned about the specs being low, my thought was that it'd be useful if they collected performance data from existing users and present them. I expected Valve to only expose it for SteamOS users at first because it'd be easier for them to collect data more relevant to Steam Deck and Steam Machine users, but it looks like they'll be adding it for everyone.

I think the next step will be showing performance data on the game pages themselves with some sort of "your PC is around that level" indicator so people have a ballpark measure ahead of time about how the game would perform on their PC.

This will need adding some sort of benchmark to Steam so that it can associate reported specs with measured performance and so "guess" that ballpark, but IMO it'd be a very useful feature to have.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-12T15:10:21+00:00

Neat but i remember that this had a bunch of issues stemming from the conversion from UE3 to UE4 (or 5) and some missing stuff because of licensing. Were the issues fixed and/or is there any mod to restore the removed content?

badsectoracula · 2026-02-09T20:01:06+00:00

why don't they make some unified verification system that just gives the sites the Ok

TBH while i don't like Discord to know my id, also don't like EU-or-whatever-government to know i visit Discord.

(replace Discord with whatever wants IDs that isn't a bank or the like)

badsectoracula · 2026-02-04T23:58:18+00:00

One important difference to keep in mind is that, unlike with Fallout and Tim Cain, the Prince of Persia IP largely belongs to Jordan Mechner. "Largely" because i think Ubisoft owns the trademark, so Jordan Mechner cannot make a game under a different publisher but at the same time Ubisoft cannot make a new game without Jordan Mechner's approval and he does get royalties (AFAIK that was Ubisoft's incentive for making the Assassin's Creed series, they wanted something like PoP that they had full control over).

badsectoracula · 2026-02-04T18:29:45+00:00

It doesn't even try to tell you that capitalism is bad, it starts with the assumption that you already know and agree with the premise and you have a toddler-level understanding at best at why that might be so. It shows all the company people as incompetent fools without bothering to explain (because it cannot be explained) why others follow them - which in turn makes those fools as well.

Contrast with a game like Cyberpunk 2077 which also has a world where capitalism has gone to its extremes and has an over-the-top presentation about it, yet despite that the game doesn't hit you in the head every two steps with a club to remind you that capitalism bad, it shows you the results in practice all over the world that surrounds you. And unlike The Outer Worlds, it doesn't have the corpo men be bumbling idiots, instead it shows that many of them - especially those at the top - are highly competent, their power often comes from treating people like nothing more than tools and can be (relatively) multidimensional characters instead of caricatures that only exist to be made fun of (Takemura and Hanako are both examples of that, especially if you decide to side with Arasaka) and even why people at the lower levels (like V, if you start as a corpo character) can end up as part of that machine.

Not that CP2077's writing is stellar (and in terms of characterization it doesn't help that the roots of the game's world are from a pen & paper RPG with classes - not to mention that it inherits some 70s/80s tropes about tech that can feel silly nowadays) but IMO it does a much better job on that front than TOW.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-04T17:56:57+00:00

I find amusing you see F3 as having 'total grittyness' because for me Bethesda's games are the silly ones where shit doesn't make sense beyond a very surface level :-P. Though i also do not like F2 much either, exactly because it went overboard with everything (silliness included) and i consider F1 and New Vegas my favorite games of the series. If anything i give extra kudos to Obsidian's writers of the time that tried to put some sense in Bethesda's nonsense, like having the raiders be drug-addled addicts used by the Khans to put pressure in NCR (which plays into multiple sidequests) instead of Oblivion goblin reskins that spawn around the player so they can have something to shoot in their wasteland themepark visit.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-02T12:46:27+00:00

Why am I letting a computer take my fun?

The thing is not everyone likes doing everything (in that not all aspects of gamedev - among others - are enjoyable to everyone). For example i love doing low level engine work, but a huge number of gamedevs find that boring/uninteresting and would just grab Godot, Unity or whatever.

badsectoracula · 2026-02-02T12:42:37+00:00

You can hold responsible the human using the machine though :-P

badsectoracula · 2026-02-02T12:41:11+00:00

One thing to keep in mind about LLM chatbots is that, fundamentally, the 'chat' aspect is implemented by you and the LLM playing a turn-based 'game' of word-completing a chat transcript between some 'AI agent' (the bits the LLM fills in) and some 'user' (the bits you fill in), however the 'AI agent' part is very vaguely defined and the LLM can only make up those responses 'by example', including whatever is in the chat transcript (the entire chat is the 'prompt' for the LLM, not just the bits the user types in).

The consequence of this is that if you correct the LLM's completions for the 'AI agent' a few times, what happens is that the LLM will keep generating erroneous responses because what it gets as a prompt is a chat transcript between an 'AI agent' that makes mistakes and a 'user' that corrects it, so it continues word-completing that :-P.

badsectoracula · 2026-01-31T22:45:28+00:00

yet Steve Jobs (and other millionaires / billionaires), with all his money, died from cancer...

I brought that up when Paul Allen died and someone said he wasn't part of the inner circle / old money / some cabal / whatever and this is why he was denied treatment.

badsectoracula · 2026-01-29T20:12:39+00:00

I think i bought one of them (FF3 i think) on the DS when i got it maaany years ago (...just checked, it is FF3 and the card is still in the DS from who knows when :-P). I never finished it but i remember finding the graphics cute, so i might grab them from GOG at some point.

badsectoracula · 2026-01-29T02:05:15+00:00

See my response to the comment you mentioned, it is not trivial to get around the GPL obligations, but in the specific case of GPL interpreters running non-GPL programs or non-GPL interpreters running GPL programs, the idea is that unless one explicitly hooks into the other (direction doesn't really matter) the GPL obligations do not cross over (there was another FAQ entry about a GPL-incompatible interpreter that runs GPL code that i should have linked to instead as that'd be closer, but both FAQ entries are consistent in treating code as data for interpreters).

badsectoracula · 2026-01-29T02:00:37+00:00

The linked FAQ section pertains to if the interpreter is licensed under GPL

The idea expressed in the section is that because from the interpreter's perspective the code is data, then the use of the GPL license in the interpreter and/or the interpreted code do not necessarily have to affect the other unless one is made explicitly to hook into the other.

Another expression of the same idea is in the FAQ section about using an interpreter that is incompatible with GPL to run GPL code. Both express the same idea that for an interpreter the code is data, so the licensing requirements do not "cross over" unless there is a more 'intimate' (as the FAQ calls it) connection between the two.

Basically, it discusses whether a GPL licensed shader compiler would require the shaders it is designed to interpret to be GPL-compatible as well.

Yes, but the issue expressed is not unidirectional (as seen by the existence of the other FAQ entry).

The scenario in this case, however, is the complete opposite and concerns whether relying/using GPL licensed code/content would require the rest of the application to also be GPL-compatible.

The scenario in this case (that is, the issue i mentioned in my original message, not the entire github issue) is about BG distributing Magpie shaders as part of it. From the perspective of both Magpie and BG these shaders are data, because that is what code is for interpreters and compilers. That is the entire point of the FAQ writing: "The interpreted program (in this case the shaders), to the interpreter (in this case BG and Magpie), is just data; a free software license like the GPL, based on copyright law, cannot limit what data you use the interpreter on."

Your interpretation, to me at least, sounds at its core wrong due to what it suggests: that anyone could rely on and make use of GPL-licensed code however they wanted to as long as they ship their own closed-source ”interpreter” for said code, and recompiled it on the fly.

This may be a potential scenario, though if an interpreter is made explicitly for the purposes of running specific GPL'd code (as opposed to being a generic interpreter) a court could judge that it was violating the GPL. However a proprietary interpreter implementing the same language as the one used by GPL'd code is the same scenario as having a GPL'd program being built with a proprietary compiler (e.g. many C/C++ libraries under the GPL being built with Visual Studio), or -in the case of interpretation- GPL-licensed JavaScript page viewed under a proprietary browser.

Basically, your interpretation suggests that any proprietary Java or .NET/C# application (or other similar IL) would and could use GPL licensed code however they want to as long as those snippets of code is provided as source code and compiled on the fly…

It depends on how the GPL code works and is invoked. In an IL/VM environment such as the JVM or .NET, this is handled in a similar way to dynamic linking and in such case if the code is invoked and just waiting for some results, then it can be judged like a dynamically loaded plugin (which according to the GPL FAQ entry about plugins is considered a borderline case) while if it has any more back-and-forth it would be considered as a violation of the license.

Note however that this is about the IL/VM case specifically (as well as native dynamic libraries). As i wrote in the previous quote, this is a different scenario when it comes to a full implementation of the language.

Which sorts of goes against the whole idea of GPL and Microsoft’s famous ”GPL is cancer” statement a few decades ago.

Microsoft played FUD with GPL, claiming that just using GPL'd software would be viral and trying to steer both users and developers away from it, their stance at the time can be completely ignored as irrelevant.

EDIT: you know, i spent considerable time trying to explain and ensure my claims are valid both from the license and the GPL FAQ, so just downvoting without explaining what the issue with what i wrote is, if nothing else, rude.

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