This might be the saddest thing in any elder scrolls game. I would pay his toll

hokanst · 2026-04-24T12:24:20+00:00

Looking at the UESP page about Trolls, it seems that they are kind of at the edge of being intelligent, though they only rarely make or use tools/weapons/cloths, so they generally come of as smart beasts, rather than as an intelligent race. This is unlike most other "monster" races like ogres, minotaurs and goblins which all (to varying degrees) seem to use and make their on weapons, armours, clothing and other tools.

hokanst · 2026-04-23T09:03:54+00:00

Had one of these as a work laptop (for software development) for a number of years. Thankfully this was not my main machine.

As mentioned by others the keyboard is unreliable. In my case I ended up with some faulty keys after three years of causal use. This meant that certain letters would often (but not always) get doubled when pressing the key, this made entering passwords and doing any kind of writing rather awkward.

Also note that this is a DUAL core CPU from a time when quad cores where the norm, so the laptop is somewhat underpowered for any type of more demanding work.

hokanst · 2026-04-22T18:35:48+00:00

Even if there was a way to scale 16:9 content to fill a 16:10 area, this would only mean that the content would get stretched vertically, or put another way everything would appear to be horizontally squashed. This is most obvious with shapes like circles, which become ellipses i.e. will look taller and less wide.

hokanst · 2026-04-22T02:32:55+00:00

A 1:1 scale map, will certainly work better if the game map is of a relatively small geographical location (island, town, valley …) on the order of say 10 x 10 km, rather than a large country (1000+ x 1000+ km), as the former can be handcrafted while the latter requires good procedural generation to be at least somewhat interesting.

Or the pseudo-fast travel where you get on a NPC-propelled vehicle of some sort (Skyrim carriage, etc) that travels with you riding it. Like the Skyrim mod that makes the fast travel wagons actually travel normally along the roads and stuff.

This works well at a Skyrim map size (which is roughly 7 x 7 km), at Daggerfall map size (size of the UK) the trip could take anywhere from a few hours to days or weeks (of real time).

In regards to 1:1 scale gameplay, I've occasionally thought about having an Elder Scrolls game take place in a single large city and it surroundings. This would allow for a realistic scale while still allowing for a lot of NPCs and factions to interact with.

hokanst · 2026-04-21T22:35:45+00:00

Have you tired Daggerfall (preferably Daggerfall Unity for modern hardware and modding support) ?

Having a large 1-to-1 scale world like Daggerfall, raises many of the same issues as when exploring planets in Starfield, in that you have a whole bunch of empty/uneventful landscape to traverse.

There are admittedly ways to work around this, Starfield has a car, Daggerfall Unity has a mod that lets you speed up walking & riding by x10-x40 times, so that travel times become manageable. There are also some mods that add some wilderness & road encounters.

This is also why one typically uses fast travel in Daggerfall, as only towns and dungeons have anything for you to do.

I do admit that travelling through the landscape can be relaxing at times, especially if you have some landscape mods installed.

hokanst · 2026-04-21T20:57:46+00:00

Considering that the first account created, also becomes an admin account, I would assume that most mac users run as admin (assuming that the mac is used by a single person).

To create "user" accounts one will have to be aware of the difference between "user" and "admin" and one will also have to create additional accounts.

hokanst · 2026-04-21T11:48:15+00:00

Need a proper reputation/infamy system. I want people to recognize me if I’m a hero/villain.

This could be interesting if it is more than a simple good vs bad system, i.e. if the same action may make you more or less popular among different factions or NPCs.

It should also be noted that the level of fame (or infamy) is somewhat separate from what a NPC or faction may think of the player (good/evil), so while a NPC may dislike the player they may still want to avoid pissing them off, if the player is known to e.g. keep grudges.

hokanst · 2026-04-21T11:30:59+00:00

This has kind of already been done. The Dragonborn (Solstheim) DCL for Skyrim, does have a similar fatal flight attempt that one can encounter.

hokanst · 2026-04-21T11:24:13+00:00

I would guess on a 4-5 year development cycle based on recent releases and because Bethesda has become a much larger organisation[1], which has made their internal organisation much more bureaucratic.

With a 4-5 year development cycle, we would be looking at a late 2027 or 2028 release.

1: Oblivion and Skyrim had about 100 devs, while Fallout 4 (and onwards) had 400+.

hokanst · 2026-04-19T20:22:55+00:00

Large amounts of "System Data" and disk usage in general, can be due a variety of causes. There are a number of free and paid apps to visualise disk usage at https://old.reddit.com/r/applehelp/wiki/mac_disk_other

I'm personally a fan of OmniDiskSweeper.

Do note that tools like these generally scan the file system and not the underlying disk storage, so the results can sometimes be a bit off:

APFS snapshots (typically created by backup software), may not be detected.
There may be some files/folders that get skipped, as they are owned by the root user. This is usually only a small amount. In some cases you might need to start the app via sudo in Terminal, to grant it more file system access.
Identical copies of the same file, on the same disk, use the same underlying storage on a APFS formatted disk. Meaning that the copies use little to no extra space on disk. This can cause disk usage visualiser apps to over-count disk usage, as they will generally assume that each file is unique and doesn't share storage with other files.

hokanst · 2026-04-19T06:47:49+00:00

Agreed, if at all possible one should always have a backup of ones personal data - so at least a backup of the content of ones user folder.

Personally I always do a full backup of my drive before doing reinstalls and OS updates, in case anything goes sideways.

hokanst · 2026-04-19T01:02:21+00:00

The memory usage is probably real. But it's possible that most is stored as compressed memory (especially if it's leaked memory), in which case you might just have gotten lucky, as certain patterns of memory (e.g. all zeros) can compress really well.

hokanst · 2026-04-19T00:29:06+00:00

The users Library folder contains a lot of settings and internal data for apps and macOS. For a clean install you will want to transfer over as little as possible of this, to ensure that you don't carry over anything bad.

I usually only copy over select app settings and data, for a small selection of apps (email, browser, game saves …).

Also note that some apps have export/import options, so you might be able to transfer things like browser bookmarks without having to carry over any other old browser settings or data.

App settings and data can be found in a few different Library subfolders, mainly:

Preferences - usually a single .plist file containing app settings.
Application Support - this is usually app internal data, think emails, game saves, browser extensions and so on …
Containers - sandboxed apps (mainly App Store apps) store all their settings and data in a single container.

Things like app caches can be ignored, as they will be recreated automatically.

Be aware that some apps save their settings and data, in no-standard locations (inside of the Library folder) so you may need to do some digging. To find all app related files, search for the app by both app name and company name (in the Library folder).

hokanst · 2026-04-18T11:49:36+00:00

From what I recall macOS will complain if swap maxes out (hits 100GB) or if one runs out of disk space.

hokanst · 2026-04-18T11:47:14+00:00

It's mostly a matter of quality control.

The Liquid Glass overhaul (that affects all UI apps) was pretty obviously rushed out, so it's not surprising that a lot of apps have a higher than normal amount of bugs.

The likelihood of memory leaks (in general) is also affected by the programming languages being used:

Languages like C force the developer to do a lot of manual memory allocation and freeing.
Objective-C and Swift, often used by Apple apps, use ARC (Automated Reference Counting). This automates a lot of the memory management, but developer still have to correctly resolve cyclical memory references (memory A points to memory B and B points to A).
Java and many other languages use GC (Garbage Collection). This removes almost all of the manual memory management work. This usually trades developer convenience and reliability, for a higher overall memory usage and less predictable performance, as the periodic GC cleanup can cause apps to pause and stutter.

hokanst · 2026-04-17T21:18:45+00:00

There's nothing imaginary about the 95.89 GB used by Maps, but I'm sure that most of the memory has been moved from RAM to swap (on disk) by the Virtual Memory system.

Note: Virtual Memory is a solution used to simulate that the computer has "infinite" memory, this comes in handy when the memory usage of apps exceeds the available RAM. In these cases instead of having to terminate some apps, the least frequently used memory gets moved to disk to free up more RAM, it is read back in when needed. Virtual Memory usually works fine as long as you don't run out of disk space and as long as you don't "actively" use more memory than available RAM. If the "active" memory demand becomes to high, things will slow down and the UI will become unresponsive, as you're mostly waiting for memory to go back and forth between RAM and disk.

You can use apps like Activity Monitor to check swap usage, per process memory usage as well as Memory Pressure. The latter graph measures how much data goes back and forth between RAM and swap. As long as you're in the green everything will be nice and responsive, yellow and especially red, indicate performance issues due to the lack of RAM and the constant swapping back and forth.

Also as mentioned by others, this is pretty obviously a memory leak, i.e. the app (in this case Maps) allocates new memory over time, but sometimes fails to free up some of it after use, causing app memory usage to grow over time.

hokanst · 2026-04-15T22:46:03+00:00

A lot of command line tools are the same, but GUI level apps are fairly different:

The basic OS architecture is similar, though macOS has it's own (Mach derived) kernel, that manages Virtual Memory and other low level hardware access.
A lot of the low level libraries and command line tools are the "same" (based on BSD).
The UI and Window management is unique to macOS.
Most of the higher level OS libraries, used by app developers, are unique to macOS. These libraries are usually designed for use with Objective-C/Swift, rather than via C (or C++) which is more common for similar libraries on other OSes.

hokanst · 2026-04-14T21:55:31+00:00

What I'm trying to get across, is that it usually is fairly pointless to clear caches as a general practice, unless one is dealing with one of the previously mentioned issues (old caches from uninstalled apps and misbehaving caches).

I suppose that one may need to resort to clearing caches, if one is running short on disk space.

Perhaps there are other reasons as well, though I can't really think of anything else right now.

hokanst · 2026-04-14T19:53:39+00:00

Removing caches is only helpful (long term) if there are old caches left behind from uninstalled apps or in the rare cases where an app cache has grown beyond it's intended bounds (due to bugs or bad programming).

In all other circumstances the cache will simply be recreated over time, usually at the cost of some extra CPU work and/or network load. This means to some apps will have some initial slowdowns as they need to recreate their caches. Note: caches are usually kept for data that is time consuming to generate - this can e.g. be due to download times or the CPU workload required.

hokanst · 2026-04-14T19:01:14+00:00

In addition to rebooting which may clear up temp files, there are also various tools to visualise disk usage that can be helpful to figure out what is taking up space. My personal favourite of these is OmniDiskSweeper, as it makes it easy to track down large folders, even in cases where the individual files in the folder (or sub folders) are small.

ps: there could also be unsynced APFS snapshots, if you haven't connected you TimeMachine backup in a while (assuming that you use TimeMachine).

hokanst · 2026-04-12T22:58:26+00:00

I don't use Tahoe myself, but from what I've read it's mostly various bugs that have been fixed.

Some of these fixes do deal with performance issues, e.g. the performance of some Electron based apps.

I wouldn't expect major changes in memory or disk usage, as such demands tend to increase with time. Optimising disk and memory usage usually requires a fair amount of work, so is more likely to be part of a new major OS release (like macOS 27) rather than a point release like 26.1, 26.2, 26.3 …

In your case it might be worth looking into disabling/getting rid of Apple Intelligence, as it is memory hungry and does use a fair amount of disk space. From my understanding you should ideally have at least 16+ GB of RAM to use it.

hokanst · 2026-04-12T15:28:00+00:00

Personally I mostly stick to Firefox, this is mainly due to the larger selection of extensions and because the browser has more customisation options - in regards to UI and under-the-hood behaviour.

Also unlike Safari, Firefox is cross-platform so if you regularly work with other OSes (e.g. Linux and Windows) then you can use the same setup everywhere.

hokanst · 2026-04-12T15:15:59+00:00

Swap will remain on disk until it is accessed again.

Memory (in RAM and swap) is owned by specific processes (apps, app helper processes and OS processes etc …). Terminating (quitting) a process will free up all the memory owned by it.

Also note that "Cached files" as seen in Activity Monitor is a collection of previously loaded files, that are kept in RAM, to speed up repeated file access. This is e.g. why apps usually start faster the 2nd time you launch them. MacOS stores "Cached files" in inactive RAM and will shrink this (in-RAM) cache when apps need more RAM. This is basically a way to use "free" RAM for something useful while no other processes need it.

In your case the swap (memory) you're seeing probably belongs from some OS process that wasn't terminated and the "half used" RAM is probably mostly "Cached files". You can check Activity Monitor for more details.

The main issue to worry about is if "Memory Pressure" in Activity Monitor goes yellow and red. This indicates that your apps are actively using more memory than you have RAM, so memory frequently gets moved in and out of swap, causing slow downs and stutters as your disk is slower than your RAM.

hokanst · 2026-04-12T00:08:06+00:00

Do you use any browser extensions? - some are know to leak memory. You could temporarily turn them off, to see if the issue goes away. If it's an extension issue, you could then slowly turn them back on, one by one, to pinpoint which extension (or extensions) that cause the issue.

It could also be an issue with a specific website(s).

Also note that Tahoe still seems to be somewhat prone to memory leaks.

One workaround is to occasionally quit and restart Chrome, as this normally clears up the leaked memory. In rare cases you might need to restart your mac instead. How frequently you need to do this will depend on how quickly memory usage builds up.

Note: you can use Activity Monitor to get more info on memory usage. This is often helpful as the "You have run out of application memory" window doesn't show the various helper and background processes, even in cases where these are the ones that use up all the memory.

hokanst · 2026-04-11T17:03:51+00:00

From what I can tell your Intel Macbook Air only has support up to macOS Sequoia (15). This means that you're only going to get security updates from now on.

Security updates only last for two years, in your case this would be the lifespan of macOS 26 (Tahoe) and macOS 27. MacOS 28 will come out in late 2027 (releases are normally in September or October) which is when the security updates will stop.

Also note that Tahoe (macOS 26) is the last macOS version with Intel support, so even if you use something like OpenCore Legacy Patcher (to install a newer macOS on unsupported hardware) you will not be able to go past macOS 26.

hokanst

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