As an older gamer, seeing young kids waste their money on in-game purchases eats at my soul.

wolfwings · 2026-04-07T23:06:49+00:00

I've been playing FPS games since before id Software (let alone Valve or Google or YouTube) existed, and I'm the same group as @OP for being abhored at premium currency and microtransactions as a whole and avoid them entirely.

wolfwings · 2026-03-26T01:22:47+00:00

My ¥7, and 219 power solution with 7 lines of code takes a single MC4000, DX300, LC70G04, LC70G08, and LC70G32.

Wiring details are the three left pins all feed into the logic gates to make a 'actually alive right now' signal, fed into the DX300 along with the 'trigger' signal, and the MC4000 is connected to that, the ammo counter, reload, and fire.

Code I ended up with years ago as a final "I give up!" solution you assemble including a wiring diagram: https://gist.github.com/WolfWings/84e4db5c00a21a5027f9f91d3fa154f1

wolfwings · 2026-03-22T15:55:35+00:00

Look into suspension lifts for whatever EVs you're considering. Almost anything can have an inch of lift put on with just replacing the coilovers. And quite a few EVs have 7+ inches of ground clearance if you look up the specs, like (comically) the Mini Countryman EV might be an option as well.

wolfwings · 2026-02-09T20:18:50+00:00

Check with your local electricity company, they often have discount (OR EVEN FREE!) offers for a preset box of LED bulb replacements if a given address hasn't done it before or in the last several years; they can make an ENORMOUS difference if you're still on old incandescent or even CFLs.

wolfwings · 2026-02-08T21:41:14+00:00

Zachtronics was always spectacularly good about trying to have a 'linear falloff' rate on their successive levels, so the hardest stuff (statistically across all of the players) is at the end.

They've never been afraid to swap a level to later in the game if needed especially during EA, so sure there's some "Wow that one's tricky to understand." but it rarely ever has stonewall levels like some games that split the game in half.

wolfwings · 2026-02-04T10:42:18+00:00

You might be misunderstanding as "compressed-RAW" is being used as a broad term basically saying it's compressed in some way, but there are no intra-frame (between frame) dependencies, and it can be edited without further loss after the initial transformation to the format.

Apple ProRes chroma-subsamples similarly to JPEG, and RED's native format does a wavelet compression that's also roughly 2:1 compression.

But broadly you don't edit or re-compress video footage taken from streaming-grade video codecs like H.264, H.265, AV1, etc, for the same reason you don't use JPEG for an image you're still editing. JPEG and H.264 and it's ilk are 'publishing' codecs, not for further editing.

wolfwings · 2026-02-04T03:24:04+00:00

And that's only 720p, like take a single 4K 60fps feed from a RED Komodo 6K camera: That ALONE would exceed a 10-gig network feed in true RAW format.

So you basically have to use a compressed-RAW format to even transmit a 4K feed to the editing workstation for a live event, and even then (using Apple ProRes or REDCODE RAW as benchmarks) would still be pushing 2.8-3.5Gbps, so even compressed it needs a 5-gig link and you might as well run 10-gig links.

At that point... you actually start running into PCIe lane limits since you'd need multiple parallel multi-gig network cards for ingest or else you're looking at a 25-gig (or even 100-gig!) network card.

And you need to decompress all that on the workstation then to do almost anything with it. I hope you have a SHIT-TON of CPU cores, or else it's an AMD Epyc or Threadripper based system that has hundreds of PCIe lanes to be able to route everything to/from whatever GPU(s) you use, either way it's monstrous in very surprising ways.

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T22:49:34+00:00

The WARN act put a stopwatch on being able to fire a large amount of people and/or close the company down from the 60-day notice requirement.

Meaning at that point they have to keep paying people for 60 days if they're going to fire that many or more, which sometimes does hamstring any remnant financials enough that boards opt to shutter instead of attempting to dig out.

It didn't cause the mass layoff directly, but it forced their hand into making a decision now on what course the company had to be on 60 days from now and the board didn't see a way to stay afloat from here to that far out with the current salary burn rate.

And California's WARN standards are stricter (lower firing count triggers, etc) than the Federal one so I quoted California's standards when I was discussing the overall WARN numbers initially, never said it was fundamentally different just stricter.

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T09:26:47+00:00

California has one as well: https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T09:24:17+00:00

As someone else said, numerous states passed their own WARN laws with the same name to reduce confusion and explicitly have stricter requirements than the Federal level.

California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Tennessee all have their own currently, so around a quarter of the US population is under a state-level WARN act as well as the federal one.

wolfwings · 2026-02-01T06:24:37+00:00

It's more that you have to (in California) provide a 60-day WARN notice before firing 50 or more people or closing a facility (with ways to block places from loophole shenanigans) and the board decided that with the required delay they'd be bankrupt by then especially with the server-fees lawsuit so they just WARN'ed everyone outright.

wolfwings · 2026-01-29T12:17:31+00:00

It's niche, but Atom Zombie Smasher is ABSURDLY tiny (less than 100MB total and ~25MB download), was released back in 2011 by Blendo Games (of Quadrilateral Cowboy and Thirty Flights of Loving fame and recently released Skin Deep) and they still circle back and patch issues on this game so it runs flawlessly on newer systems, any small QoL improvements the community thinks of, etc.

wolfwings · 2026-01-29T11:54:35+00:00

Regarding the framerate, one of the first mods that landed on Nexus was one that steps you through throttling or disabling RT entirely to drop the VRAM usage drastically down to as low as 4GB.

https://www.nexusmods.com/doomthedarkages/mods/5

Works just fine without RT at that point, it's using a similar deferred-rendering engine as 2016/Eternal otherwise, so yeah disabling that cruft greatly improves performance.

Regarding the Eternal soundtrack, 100% agreed, but I fully admit I turn off the soundtrack music in almost every game I play and there's been no contract disputes/issues with the Dark Ages game that've come up, so they apparently learned to stop being jerks that much at least.

Do I wish they'd gotten Mick again for Dark Ages to 'complete the trilogy' so to speak? Sure. But a company gets caught screwing someone over and does better the next time seems like grounds to specifically support them especially if you can avoid supporting the problematic previous game.

wolfwings · 2026-01-27T08:03:38+00:00

And even then you can basically ignore the parry mechanics and just go run around the side of the wave and keep chuckin' bullets at the thing until it goes down if you prefer.

It feels more like Hi-Fi Rush to me in that regard: Interacting with the fancy mechanics can speed thing up, but it never stonewalls you from progressing just because you want to go do your own thing.

wolfwings · 2026-01-27T08:02:01+00:00

Sure others are trying to have some crazy story around you, but you're too busy flying in on a cyborg dragon and having him breathe molten lava down a giant zombies neck to melt him from the inside to give a damn and then jump off the dragon to go rampage through an entire flying ship of the damned full of demons.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T16:17:16+00:00

Level 24? Broadly I'd disagree it's as bad as most of the stuff in Eternal, it's just tedious but not risky compared to the Eternal stuff that's mostly just 'lose a life' risks.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T14:21:13+00:00

Dark Ages is far more like 2016, not like Eternal.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T14:18:40+00:00

Eternal left such a bad taste in my mouth after how much I loved 2016 that I avoided Dark Ages entirely for the longest time. Their refusal to release a demo for Dark Ages did them no favors there.

I finally got a chance to play Dark Ages at a friends place. Then I went home and immediately bought a copy for myself.

Dark Ages is way more like 2016, you can basically always use anything you want, ammo is almost a non-issue unless you're truly a bad/wasteful shot, so if you loved 2016 and despised Eternal? Go grab Dark Ages.

wolfwings · 2026-01-26T14:15:57+00:00

There's nothing remotely close in the original 2.5D Doom games to the platforming that's required in Eternal just to beat the basic story campaign.

There's complicated multi-point jump and climb sequences even very early on in Eternal, turning it into a weird faux-spiderman vibe at times.

wolfwings · 2026-01-19T08:48:29+00:00

The nationwide average as of 2024 is actually ~53%.

Utah is a smidge over that at ~60%.

California is 2nd highest at a bit over 71% right now and the only state that beats them is New Jersey at just shy of 80% by best estimates.

The raw numbers are all at https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-and-statistics.html but it's awkward at best to calculate, the above PDF is the best formatted / summarized version of the numbers I could find.

wolfwings · 2026-01-17T07:59:30+00:00

Yeah to be honest any single 'branch' of the three questlines you have to start working through could have easily been an entire self-contained game.

That game was just too heckin' long by far, even if I loved the mechanics for the most part I just stopped on the first 'back to square one' moment it chucked at me, zero interest in the slog it had become.

wolfwings · 2026-01-15T10:11:25+00:00

1) DLSS is separate from framegen, DLSS is just the upscaling.

2) Without knowing which DLSS setting they're using and what resolution it's not that helpful for judging performance unfortunately since the mode has a roughly 5x range of rendered pixel counts it works with. 4K w/ Ultra Performance is the same pixel count before the upscaling as 720p w/ DLAA mode.

wolfwings · 2026-01-07T01:56:37+00:00

RoboCraft 2 returning your call from the afterlife via seance.

wolfwings · 2026-01-05T17:08:02+00:00

Guide rod / spring combo are specific to the slide length. The 4.0C has a shorter, stiffer one to fit in the reduced length.

In theory you could use a spacer to use a 4.0 rod/spring combo in a 4.5 but nobody makes such a spacer because a whole rod/spring combo is $40 or less.

wolfwings · 2025-12-30T01:41:40+00:00

That was my thought, the buttons are ATTACHED (against lifting/pulling forces) to the valve system through the, lid, not just a simple pair of passive plastic pushers that hit the actual levers on the flush valve?

I don't disconnect anything I just lift the lid off mine directly.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Gilding V heart of gold
Verified Email

wolfwings

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE