Good point. And sounds like you’re in a similar headspace to.me on the topic. Personally I’m not a huge fan of live service games, but I can see why a lot of people would want to avoid killing them.

Not saying you’re wrong, but how can the source code be “open” and not publicly accessible? If it’s not, that’s just a closed codebase that is shared with some external people, surely?

If they let it cook this time it could be good… human kissing aside.

A laudable goal. Can they pull it off, tho?

As with intel, I would recommend not really paying attention to the 3, 5, 7, 9 numbers. Those are just marketing vague indicators; ideally of performance, but realistically just of cost.

Instead, look at the actual model numbers and seek out benchmarks performed by groups you trust with workloads similar to what you might actually do with them. E.g. If you are a gamer, look for comparisons between CPUs as to how they perform in various games. Linus Tech Tips do videos about recent CPU releases and compare how they do vs the competition in a bunch of games, and it shouldn’t be hard to find websites with the same kind of comparisons.

But also, yes, they are due to release a 9900x3D and 9950x3D early next year, supposedly. I am keen to see if the 9950x3D is symmetrical this time around; the 7950x3D was asymmetrical so I avoided it.

I don’t have VR so I haven’t played that one.

Oooo! Thanks! That’s way more interesting.

It feels like we only just recently got the HL1 fan remake done, and now we have what I assume is a HL2 remake?

I’m tempted, but I would miss the raw core count of my 7950x for my workloads. Hope those vague rumours I heard about the 9950x3D having the extra cache on both chiplets are true, because then I’d just get that one.

Streaming the game is never gonna be viable for me because of where I live, even if I wanted it, and I very much don’t. But then I don’t care for the kind of competitive games where what hardware you run on makes that much difference, anyway.

I don’t think we need “the best”. Just to be able to detect and ban the egregious offenders would be enough.

I will say we agree on one thing; competitive games should not be taken as seriously as they are. But then I’m of the controversial opinion that esports made gaming worse.

Client-side anti-cheat is effectively pointless in the long run. The software is running on a machine the devs do not control, and ultimately that means it cannot be trusted. They should be working harder on server-side detection, but that requires work not just buying a product and dusting your hands off…

KDE Plasma. I just like it. It seems to have options to do what I want, for the most part. There’s some things I wish it had, like a way to programmatically get the active window under Wayland, so StreamController could automatically change pages.

Yeah, I was all like “Wait, Telltale still exists?”

I know it’s tangential to your comment, but I need to get this off my chest. I hate when things like Epic’s stance is framed as “not supporting” linux, when in reality they barely need to do anything to let the game run there. What they’re doing is actively detecting and blocking it.

Using pipewire, and I’ve tried both the SB X4 USB DAC, and a SBX AE-5 PCIe card. Obviously being Creative products that’s the cause of my issues, but I have found it very very hard to find alternatives. Every recommended option just supports stereo, it seems.

I think the audio interface thing needs a big asterisk; IF you are only interested in stereo, then it’s not much of an issue. But getting 5.1 to work has been a huge hassle for me.

The only real difference is being fairly certain that anything you buy on GOG will be DRM-free, since that is their stated policy and they offer the standalone installers for download. Granted they also offer a launcher like Steam, and if you’re only using that then you’re no better off; if a game gets delisted and you don’t have the installers archived you may be out of luck, depending on the details.

That said you are right, the problem is the laws and the publishers. But getting access to those offline installers certainly doesn’t hurt, in the meantime.

This will almost certainly happen.

There’s no way Unreal is completely free of inherent tech debt. But at the same time, there’s no way it doesn’t have way less baggage than the creation engine. Epic actually work on it, for a start.

They should. They don’t really have a good track record for quality, but the first step is trying.