addie

If you've eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn't read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it's still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it's already on disk, don't have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like 'swappiness' so you could fine-tune how aggressively it's done by setting the value in a file, too.

Doesn't stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I've allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.

It doesn't even weigh a kilogram. It masses one kilogram. It's weight will be something like 9.8 Newtons.

Got two letter 'e's in it, and they're both pronounced differently. To be fair, it's far from the most divergent spelling-to-saying word in English. Some wrong-looking abomination like 'meetir' would be even better.

PS5 has 'unified' memory - the CPU and the GPU both read from the same location. Normal desktop PCs have separate memory for the CPU and GPU. That's incredibly problematic for emulation - you have to keep track of the CPU preparing drawlists and be sure to transfer them to the GPU before issuing draw calls, and conversely, you may have to copy frame buffer data back to main memory if the CPU is used for calculating tone mapping. That's incredibly slow if you do it naively, and likely to cause crashes and corruption if you don't have the timing right.

The reason that RPCS3 and ShadPS4 run faster than a couple of frames per second is that they've put huge effort into optimising this, and you still have to disable tone mapping on eg. Demon's Souls, as it brings a game you could otherwise run at 4K/120 to a standstill.

Yes, you wouldn't have to translate the x64 bytecode into the platform-native equivalent, although dynamic recompilers are pretty good at that. Lots of high-end emulators will include something like Clang's LLVM and call it a day. But you still have to emulate the platform, and that's pretty painful.

Conversely, the reason why a lot of console conversions suck, even on powerful PCs, is because they were optimised around GPU memory updates being cheap. Something like the new Doom engine, that has separate paths and doesn't make those assumptions, runs amazingly on all platforms.

The "rug with concentric patterns" was his Achilles heel for a long time - one of his book collections has a gallery where he's fouled them up - and I see he's bust one out in this cartoon. Probably decided to quit with large area of solid colour while he's ahead.

That's the reason that consumables and money don't carry over between levels in Thief: The Dark Project. No point in hoarding stuff, you might as well use it. Except of course that if you're good, you don't need to use any items at all - not even the blackjack.

Need to stop and stare at this image for twenty minutes and listen to chiptunes before I continue scrolling Lemmy, be an old-school gamer again.

I think that Unreal's real advantage is its ubiquity - all the tools that you might want to use for game creation, from mocap to modelling, with with it; and there's a near-endless supply of programmers and artists that know how to use it. The licensing is just a bonus. idTech is infamous for its bad tool support; Raven software basically needed a whole pile of direct contacts in id in order to develop games on that engine. But yes - Unreal 5 basically means that you'll struggle to hold 30 fps even with framegen and upscaling, whereas idTech is silky smooth and efficient.

Carmack was at his best working near-solo, solving some tricky optimisation problem and getting Mike Abrash to tweak up the resulting assembly. Some of the comments that came out of Meta suggest to me that he finds large teams frustrating and stilting. Can't blame him there, really. Am not sure he's the man for modern AAAA+ gaming, with huge teams and massive pipelines. Besides, he's more interested in messing about with AGI now; best leave him to that.

In fact, I don't think you could even get tired of punching it.

Likewise, but the code is pretty far from perfect. "Future maintenance hazard", but half my colleagues can't even see what's wrong with it, and the bot tells them it's all fine so they don't think about it any further.

Can't wait for that bubble to burst. Burn the whole lot down.

Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi's are pure ass as media servers. They're profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.

Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it's too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.

A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes 'media' activities while gently sipping at electricity.

A shame. I liked Enslaved, loved DmC, and really liked Hellblade. They made quite a big thing at the time they were making Hellblade about wanting to be 'double A' publishers - making highly polished indie games on a sensible budget, basically. And then they sold out to Microsoft, which has screwed them over - all those publishers needing to make a non-stop stream of big budget megahits or they'll be hung out to dry.

Consolations to all affected. It has been an absolute bloodbath in games development recently.