MudMan
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It is a hardware issue, in the way that those kitchen gadgets to peel eggs or neatly slice butter into perfect cubes are a hardware issue. The application is just not mainstream and the usability of it has built-in challenges that aren’t about improving the specs.
VR is cool and I hope it remains viable for enthusiasts, but it’s definitely not the next cell phone and it’s never going to be as long as it involves strapping a screen to your face.
Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.
I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it’s two instances at most, so… I don’t know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It’d pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you’re only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you’re playing.
But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that’s the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I’ve done that before for that reason.
I suppose it’s why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.
OK, yeah, that makes sense. And it IS pretty unique, to have a multi-GPU system available at home but just idling when not at work. I think I’d still try to build a standalone second machine for that second user, though. You can then focus on making the big boy accessible from wherever you want to use it for gaming, which seems like a much more manageable, much less finicky challenge. That second computer would probably end up being relatively inexpensive to match the average use case for half of the big server thing. Definitely much less of a hassle. I’ve even had a gaming laptop serve that kind of purpose just because I needed a portable workstation with a GPU anyway, so it could double as a desktop replacement for gaming with someone else at home, but of course that depends on your needs.
And in that scenario you could also just run all that LLM/SD stuff in the background and make it accessible across your network, I think that’s pretty trivial whether it’s inside a VM or running directly on the same environment as everything else as a background process. Trivial compared to a fully virtualized gaming computer sharing a pool of GPUs, anyway.
Feel free to tell us where you land, it certainly seems like a fun, quirky setup etiher way.
Yeah, but if you’re this deep into the self hosting rabbit hole what circumstances lead to having an extra GPU laying around without an extra everything else, even if it’s relartively underpowered? You’ll probably be able to upgrade it later by recycling whatever is in your nice PC next time you upgrade something.
At this point most of my household is running some frankenstein of phased out parts just to justify my main build. It’s a bit of a problem, actually.
OK, but why?
Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don’t let me stop you.
But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?
For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you’d probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you’re smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.
I mean, no thanks.
But they did this already, right? Their “Timeline” feature in Windows 10 recorded a log of your activities to display it in your Win+Tab menu screen. I switched it off immediately, but the point is this is a new approach to an old feature they have done in the past.
Everybody must have turned it off, though, because it hadn’t been present in Win 11 until now. It’s still a dumb idea.
Nah, you have a point. There are a bunch of “2D soulslikes” that get advertised as “Metroidvanias”, and I wish we had better language to split that difference, because there’s a big conceptual shift between the “parry and dodge” souls style and the genuine Metroid/Castlevania style of movement and aggression. It feels very different and honestly the last time something scratched that itch it was Bloodstained.
So yeah, Hollow Kinght is a very well made game, but it’s not what I’m looking for every time I fire up one of the DSvanias for yet another run.
Well… you know, it’s the same people exploring the same ideas through the same archetypes. I think that comes through pretty clearly. All joking about specifics aside, it’s kinda hard to miss once you notice.
At some point we’re gonna get to the synths parts and I’m expecting blow for blow repeated scenes at this point.
Yeah, so… no, that’s fanboy stuff. That’s not how massive corporations make their decisions, not how artists make their decisions and, very specifically, not what is actually in the show.
Plus of course what you’re saying is different to the online panic about NV “not being canon”, which Bethesda has now explicitly denied. The NCR very much exists in the show, it’s just been significantly downsized to early Fallout levels. Not because Bethesda is “diminishing the creations of everyone who isn’t Bethesda”, though. If I had to make an educated guess based on how reality actually operates, I’d assume it’s because Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan wanted to make a show about a postapocalyptic wasteland and having a democratic government that has been running mostly fine for the past 100 years kinda gets in the way of that.
So yeah, welcome to franchising, where war never changes and neither does the status quo. It’s mostly absurd that people in Fallout are still roaming around in reclaimed pre-war gear and doing the Mad Max schtick five generations into the postapocalypse, but Fallout gotta look like Fallout, so Fallout will look like Fallout until Fallout stops making money, at which point it will not look like anything anymore. Yay capitalism.
Hey, wanna know what they’ll do to New Vegas? They’ll probably do some variation on the plot of New Vegas. Mr. House and the Legion will probably still be around in some form despite it not making a ton of sense in continuity. Just like this season was all about leaving a vault to look for your missing dad, just like Filly just happens to have the same layout and landmarks as Megaton, just like there’s a Dogmeat and just like Vault 33 now needs a water chip and will probably have to send someone outside to look for it. Because it’s recognizable IP and recognizable IP has to be in the show so it can be fueled by recognizable IP.
I think the show is solid, but I did notice at one point that it’s basically a reskin of Westworld and now I can’t unsee it.
I mean, naive girl gets the nature of her world redefined for her and is poised to become a revolutionary fighter? That happens.
A ruthless, cruel cowboy who isn’t a cowboy but plays one for a long time, has god mode on and looks like an actor you know was left in the sun for too long? Surprisingly specific, but yep.
Is actually based on a videogame full of NPCs? In different ways but yeah.
Beloved older actor plays a figure of corporate authority with a secret plan? Getting into stretch territory but I see it.
I still enjoyed it, though. Looks so much better than the trailers, too, and it took me a while to realize it’s because the trailers really had to hide the gore so they looked really cosplay-y. Hard to look cosplay-y with so many chunks flying around.
They are, though, by any reasonable definition. Despite what the cryptobros would have you believe, there is no need for a blockchain to have a tradable, persistent token associated to an asset. Besides the fact that the tokens are stored on Valve’s servers instead of a distributed blockchain, there is no difference in how those work.
The cryptobros tried to convince everybody that a blockchain made the tokens “non-fungible” as in automatically interoperable and endlessly persistent, which was a lie that only survived until the first time the assets, which were all stored on servers and not in a blockchain, got deleted.
That’s a different discussion in any case. The point is it’s a stock market of tokenized, tradable items where the transactions are monetized by the company by taxing the trades. It’s the same on Roblox and Steam (and in all the NFTs people dumped all that money on).
I disagree with the author, the enshittification of Steam started ages ago. Day one, in fact. It’s come and gone in waves.
Yesterday there was an article on the exploitative practices of Roblox doing the rounds around here. Some of the bad praxis around monetized UGC called out there was pioneered by Steam. Online DRM for single player games? Steam was there at ground level. NFT stock markets? Steam tried really hard, they were just bad at it. Gig economy automation replacing human moderation and greenlight processes? They banged their head against that wall until they uberified PC game development successfully. Loot boxes? They are remarkably resilient. Where others have moved on, Valve insists on keeping them around for CounterStrike 2.
Also, CounterStrike 2.
There are also ways in which Steam is ahead of the competition, or they wouldn’t have the near-monopolistic position they have. Their Linux support may be motivated entirely out of spite and an ironic fear of Microsoft’s monopoly, but it’s welcomed. Their client is easily the best in the market and there are crucial features from it that should have been universalized by MS or Nvidia and still haven’t been, somehow. It’s good stuff.
But it’s been enshittified since day one of Steam, when it launched torjan horsed with CS and Half Life 2, and it remains problematic in many areas, including its role as a single point of failure for game preservation on PC.
I do find it weird how much of a fuss the second video makes about the pseudo-NFT marketplace in Roblox considering Steam has had every single one of those features in place for a while.
These are good videos, as usual for PMG, and they do highlight relevant issues, but I’m sometimes frustrated by these things in that they mix genuine, dealbreaking concerns with things they flag for this example but not when they surface elsewhere and with things that are legitimately either standard practice, long term gaming-wide concerns or… just fine, actually.
Which is not me defending Roblox, to be clear. Roblox is a mess and it’s crazy how successful they are at keeping a low profile about some of the stuff they do compared to other successful games and platforms and relative to their size. For an American company it’s insane how little they are on the spotlight for some of this stuff. But “some” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. These videos run the gamut.
I’ll take persona, although it’s been way too many games with the same setup. Ditto for the Trails series.
Honestly, I don’t think it got any better than ATB systems in FF 6 and 7. Everybody else is either riffing on those or spending so much money they think they can’t be those and need to be Devil May Cry instead.