Unreal and Unreal Tournament, sure. I feel like all of their many sequels saw a continuous decline in quality, but the originals were great games. Can’t deny that Gears of War has been influential. Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097 were good for a laugh for ten minutes, but I can’t help but feel that they’ll have aged badly.

Seems crazy to think that Jill of the Jungle, which is an awful game, is what lined their pockets enough to develop the Unreal engine, and they were riding on the success of that all the way up to Fortnite.

Yes, it’s painful as an environmentalist to see the infrastructure burning, but if it had reached its destination then it would have been burned just the same. Probably more cleanly than this mess, and the fine soot particles contribute more to global heating than ‘complete combustion’, but the carbon would still have been released to atmosphere. Doing it this way will at least halt the flow for a good long while, which has real environmental benefits.

I do hope the wind isn’t blowing that shit over our friends in Estonia and Finland; that stuff looks like cancer.

Managed to snag free tickets to see them and Buckcherry warming up for Steel Panther a while back.

Bowling for Soup were absolutely superb; charismatic crowd-pleasers, loads of energy, top songs, great to watch. Buckcherry played for about twenty minutes and then fucked off, which is gutting because it was them that I really wanted to see. And then Steel Panther played for about two hours, faaaar too long for a one-joke band, and went past ‘satirically sleazy’ into just ‘sleazy’, which is not the same.

Take home message is really ‘go see Bowling for Soup’, I suppose.

The very last level, rendezvous at the mountain, isn’t all that difficult. Lots of pausing and scrolling to either end of the map, but as long as you can multitask then it’s doable. Playing through all the Mayhem levels to get there? Man alive. Managed it when I was a young teen, couldn’t do it for the life of me now.

The ‘win’ screen - a static picture of the devs, with a sampled sound of them applauding your efforts - is still one of the most rewarding endings to any game, I think. If you can get there, you deserve that.

Assembly is the ‘human-readable’ version. It has mnemonic values for the opcodes, so you can write eg. RET to return from a subroutine rather than the machine code 0xC3 / 195. It also lets you write named labels for offsets in the code which are substituted for their number values during assembly, which saves a lot of tedious counting, and macros, which are expanded into a longer list of instructions, saving lots of copy-paste.

So yeah, machine code is a step down. Not a big step down, there’s pretty much a 1:1 conversion between either form, but assembly has a couple of niceties that make it much easier for humans to work with.

GA is already fun size, so those greys must be teeny tiny.

I wrote one of my own from scratch, back in the day. More to practice my algorithm coding skills than anything else, make sure that I could. Not very difficult - easier than barcodes, in a way.

The thing that I found most interesting was that it uses the same Reed-Solomon error correcting code as CDs and DVDs, and for the same reason. Those codes guarantee that you don’t get too many 1s or 0s in a row. That would cause difficulties with laser tracking in a disc player, or big confusing areas of white or black in a QR code.

The on-off-on-off pattern that joins the inside edge of the three squares isn’t usually that obvious either, but when reading it, makes it quite easy to decide how ‘big the boxes’ are. You can store a very long piece of text in a QR code, although the pattern gets very finely detailed after a while.

Or in the case of UK users, provide an absolutely absurd amount of PII to demonstrate that you’re of age.

I have Monster Girl Island: Prologue from back in the day, that’s fine. Sits in my games list causing no trouble. Can I look at the release notes for updates? Not without entering credit card details. Makes perfect sense.

Another Crab’s Treasure might scratch that itch for you? Be warned that it is bastard hard despite how it looks - first couple of bosses are okay, but it quickly ramps up to be much more unforgiving than From’s output.

Digital scoreboards? No-one will have the cash for that kind of RAM in future, Kolanaki. Going to have to go old-school for keeping our pinball scores.

It’s quite a valuable skill to be able to do it. You appreciate how all the bits of Linux fit together when you’ve done the whole installation from scratch, and know that’s there’s nothing particularly hard about compiling the kernel. Indeed, it’s one of the easiest packages to compile, got a great module selector and very few dependencies. You’re far more likely to be able to recover a borked system if you’ve got all the low-level skills.

Actually using Gentoo as your daily driver? Well, that’s a different matter. The problem with having complete control over every aspect of your system in every detail is that you’re also responsible for it. Arch (btw) is a bit more of a sensible middle ground. You retain most of the control and responsibility, but also have all those packages prebuilt and ready to work together, plus loads of great documentation.

But at least the Trump phone will be okay, right?

Two mattresses? Is he expecting guests?

I’m assuming that his beer fridge is just out of shot, as well.

StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.

A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you’d expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don’t just have ‘colour textures’, they’re likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that’s another three times. The voice acting isn’t likely to be in a single language any more either, so there’ll be several copies of all the sound files.

A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. ‘Biggest’ game I have is Baldur’s Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That’s quite good, considering how much game that is!

I do agree with you. I can’t think of a single useful feature that’s been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it’s worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.

We can only hope so.

I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.

Heroic is best for PC games from GOG, and Epic and Amazon I suppose. Got quite a stock of free games from Epic that I’ve never bothered to start up.

Lutris did fill a hole for ‘emulation’, all your console games, dosbox &c all in one place. Heroic doesn’t really do that. Looks like it’s time to find another tool that will…

They required a change request, but it was being signed off by the same AI that made the change in the first place, and possibly by a junior dev that doesn’t really know what they’re looking at.

Requiring that the senior devs review absolutely everything will be like trying to hold back a tsunami of shite with their bare hands. The amount of code with absolutely no thought put into it that can be produced with these tools is unbelievable.

Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.

Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.

Well, you’ve had a lucky few months off. Our three just did not stop this year.

If your cat could explain to ours how to either eat all of the mouse or none of the mouse, that would be amazing. I don’t mind them feeding on low-carbon organic meals hand-prepared by local artisans, the hipsters. But I do mind stepping in all the bits and pieces that they didn’t care to finish.

Should probably run it quite well. BB was ‘designed for 30 fps’ and you’ll get more than that. Certainly run it better than it does on PS4, anyway.