Get your game on!

Culture
1026

Recently I’ve been playing Fortnite again. Late at night, when I’m too wound up to sleep, it lets me get out some mental energy and focus. And after a game or two, I’m ready to relax.

I think it’s kind of amusing because I quit playing it a few years ago. Most other people seemed so much better at it - faster, able to quickly build, etc. I rarely did well. Kids, I figured, with faster reflexes and plenty of time to put into practicing the game. It wasn’t fun doing so badly all the time, getting eliminated in the first minutes of the game.

But now, I’m having a lot of fun with it. My reflexes aren’t any better, and I’m still not spending much time on it (1-2 games at a time). But I can get in there and with stealth and situational awareness usually end up in the top 10 if not the top 5.

I was playing 2 games at a time - one to warm up and then one to try to place. But this week has been especially fun. Monday night - won my first game, got the victory crown. Tuesday night, won my first game again, and got a ‘crowned victory’ achievement.

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I guess tonight I’ll either get a triple crown or lose my crown. Either way it’ll be fun. The game now has vehicles, ziplines, ventilation ducts to crawl through, and other fun stuff. I don’t even see people building all that much anymore. I did learn how to build, but I only do it as a decoy - throw up some walls and then duck back and wait for someone to investigate or start shooting at the walls while I flank them.

My favorite though, is winning with 0 kills. Let the first 98 people take each other out while I’m sneaking around, so I only have one left to deal with. Then let that one either fall off of a tower they built and die from the fall damage, or get caught in the storm looking for me while I’m watching from a safe hiding spot. The nature of the game might be geared toward shooting and running over people, but the fact that you can win with 1 or even 0 kills is something. That’s the achievement I aim for.

Edit: And I did get the triple crown! After the last remaining opponent shot down one of my decoy walls, I ran out from cover and emptied a magazine into him, which he was not expecting.

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1027

Wow… for a pretty tiny web app, that’s crazy.

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1028

So Chaosium has gone into the NFT scam… cue To Be Eaten First.

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1030

Oh how I love that classic 1-bit Mac aesthetic. Its many graphical limitations were actually a wonderful vehicle for creativity.

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1031

I’m debating my options on dealing with a running issue with a game I’m playing.

Quick recap: the game in question, Shadow of Death (mobile game, Android/iPhone) has been allowing a player to use a very objectionable username (N-slur+raper). There’s really no direct player-to-player contact in the game; the one “multi-player” segment (Arena) uses player names and stats for their opponent-bots. Nevertheless, it’s not a good experience to come up against someone with a horribly offensive name like that during play.

I have raised the issue three times (last May, November, and January) with Facebook-based customer support, only to get vague “we’ll look into it” responses at best. I still keep “meeting” the player, with our most recent bout occurring last night.

I sent a DM to the moderator on the game’s Discord, but have not received any response. I’ve made note of the game’s parent company, and assuming the Discord mod ignores me, they will get a strongly worded e-mail calling them to account for perpetuating in-game harrassment.

I’m not sure what to do next. I’ve reviewed the Google Play rules, and I’m not sure whether or not I can report them for not moderating their game properly. I could put them on blast on Twitter, but the company’s accounts there aren’t used often so I’m not sure they’d even notice, and the potential blowback could be severe.

I’m honestly questioning whether or not it’s even worth the effort, whether or not I should just drop the game instead. But I’ve been playing this for over two years, 1600+ hours total, so why should I be the one who’s run out of the game for this? I’m mostly sure the answer to “AITA?” here is no… but I’m not sure how much impact I’m gonna make.

Any thoughts?

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1032

5.5 years ago, I built this computer to replace my old one. And I built it well, spent about $1000 on it, got the dust filters and everything. I intended it to last at least 5 years, 10 years with upgrades.

Now I’m past the 5 year mark and parts are starting to show their age. Not the RAM, which was the bottleneck on my old system, I did well there. But notably, I could run any/every game at high/ultra/maximum graphics levels back then. But new games are recommending a better graphics card than I have.

Got RDR2 on a deep discount sale. It works. But the settings are mostly low, and can’t go much above that. Some of the other new games I have, the little utility program says it can’t optimize settings for them. I can play and enjoy them, but not to their potential.

So ok, time for a new graphics card. But the new ones are selling at more than triple MSRP, if you can even find them. More than my entire system cost. Tried EVGA, which has had a waiting list program. But they shut down the waiting list, and the people who used it are saying it took about a year to get their order. Mid-range cards aren’t any better. So ok, no graphics card for me, not yet anyway.

But I built this with a small SSD for the OS and a big hard drive for data. In the last half decade, SSDs have increased in capacity and come way down in price. And games have grown large enough that I now put them on the hard drive instead of the SSD. But I have a free M2 slot. So maybe adding a new SSD for a couple hundred would be worth it. 2TB of games with lightning fast load times.

However, that would mean disassembling the entire computer to get at the M2 slot on the bottom of the motherboard, then reassembling it all afterward (which is tricky in a tight Mini-ITX system) . And it wouldn’t even help with multiplayer games since it wouldn’t affect their time connecting to servers, sitting in the matchmaking queue, etc.

So here I am, ready for upgrades, kinda needing them, wanting them. But it’s really hard to justify it. Part of me really wants to, but then the other part thinks it seems like a waste to do so.

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1033

They’ve raised $5.3m so far, with 3 days to go.

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1034

Also:

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1035

Have you looked into Virtual Computers?

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1036

I have VMs for Ubuntu and for older stuff - Windows XP and even Windows 2000. But you can’t give a VM more hardware than you have.

If you mean streaming via something like Stadia or Luna, I haven’t tried that. The idea always sounded loony to me, especially having used some remote desktop stuff in the past. But I guess if you can play online games and stream online video, it makes sense that it could work. Maybe I should give that a try.

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Disclaimer: I haven’t watched the video yet. I promise I’ll watch it later.

I don’t know that Azure has any VM SKUs that are particularly well suited to gaming, and would likely not be cost effective on an ongoing basis. In my experience, Cloud VMs work well when you have either well defined workloads that have a limited time scope. For example, if you have a process that you run periodically (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) but you don’t need running 24/7, it can be cost effective to create a VM, run the process, then destroy the VM. In some cases, it can even enable you to use higher-spec hardware to complete the process faster since you won’t need it as long. The key thing to understand about cloud VMs is that you are paying for capacity, not usage. If you leave the VM running, or even off but allocated, you will be paying a per-minute charge for it. Contrast that with more elastic resources like functions, containers, and other Platform as a Service offerings, which bill based on usage. To my knowledge, none of the major cloud providers have this option for a desktop/gaming purpose.

There are some consumer offerings worth looking at, though:

  • Stadia (mentioned above): This is Google’s offering. It allows you to stream games in a (Chrome) browser or via an (Android) app. I’ve used it, and it absolutely works. It’s not perfect by any means, but it works better than you might expect. If you are very frame rate sensitive or want above 60fps, this isn’t going to be a great time. The major downsides are that it has its own marketplace, so you can’t bring any games with you that you already purchased. Anything you buy via their marketplace, however, can be played for no extra charge at 1080p. If you want 4k and a library of bundled games, there’s a monthly fee you can pay for that. It’s worth mentioning that Google seems to be de-prioritizing Stadia going forward, with it likely becoming a white-box offering they sell to distributors, so I’d be cautious about spending your money there.
  • Luna (Also mentioned above): I haven’t used Luna yet, so I don’t know much about it. It’s Amazon’s offering. I believe they’re using Windows-based compute resources, so porting is less of an issue than Stadia (which uses Linux-based compute). It has some level of benefit for Prime members, so you may already be paying for it. I’m pretty sure it’s also a separate marketplace like Stadia, so you’d likely have to re-buy any games you want to play via Luna.
  • XBox Cloud Gaming: This is Microsoft’s offering. It’s currently in beta, for Game Pass Ultimate Subscribers only, and limited to around 100 games. That said, it’s still impressive. If you are an XBox or Windows PC gamer and have Game Pass, it’s an easy recommendation. I suspect that at some point it will be possible to play purchased games via the cloud in addition to Game Pass titles. It’s technically a separate marketplace, but it’s XBox, so it’s not a new one, but you can’t import your games from Steam, GoG, or EGS if that’s important to you.
  • GeForce Now: This is probably the most interesting of the group if you already have a substantial PC Games library already. It’s capable of connecting to your Steam, Epic Games, Ubisoft, and a few niche marketplaces to verify ownership. There is a free tier with limits, which is great if you just want to try it out, and a couple of tiers that improve queue times and performance. I’ve tested this out briefly, and it works about as well as the others. I’ve haven’t tried it in a while, but when I did it required my Steam profile to be public, so be aware of that.

Those are the services that I’m aware of. I think I’ve seen at least one service that allows you to rent a cloud VM specifically tailored for gaming, but I can’t remember the name at the moment, and don’t know enough about the pricing to know whether or not it makes sense financially. I also expect that there will be more cloud services that become available over time. In particular, I can see Steam going down that path, especially with the work they’ve been doing on Proton to get it working with the Steam Deck, which could easily be adapted for a streaming platform.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that cloud game services really only make sense if you have a fast, reliable, unmetered Internet connection. Local gaming can work around any or all of those.

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1039

Ok, I’ve watched it now. I think my statements above still stand, but here are a few items specific to this video:

  • This technique is currently only applicable to general computing tasks. He uses the phrase “pretty fast” several times to describe the experience, but it’s not suitable to anything that is frame or latency sensitive, like games.
    • At one point, he loads up the Movies and TV app, but I’m skeptical that video playback would be smooth enough for most people.
  • He mentions a setting for automatically turning off the VM at a certain time every day.
    • It’s possible that this is oversimplified in the UI, but there is (was?) a distinct difference in Azure between a VM that is turned off and one that is deallocated. If I remember correctly, there is no difference in billing rate between a VM that is on vs. off, and the only price advantage comes when it is deallocated. Hopefully this setting takes care of that.
    • It’s also worth mentioning that I’m not aware of a setting to automatically turn the VM back on later. allocating a VM is relatively fast, but it’s not instant. I’ve seen it take around 20 minutes.
  • The VM he creates in the demo would cost ~$100 CAD to run 24/7 per month. He correctly points out that it’s only cost effective if you keep if off (deallocated) most of the time. This is an additional responsibility that doesn’t exist for a local PC.
  • It’s also worth noting that the SKU he used is fairly low-spec (2 cpus, 7GiB RAM), so consider that a more robust configuration would cost more, possibly significantly.
  • Even when a VM is deallocated, the storage remains, and has a cost associated with it. Storage is significantly cheaper than compute, but it’s not free.
  • He glosses over many of the details of actually setting up the VM. There are a couple that stood out to me.
    • He checks a box about Windows licensing. If I understood it correctly, by checking it, you’re affirming that you have a volume license agreement with Microsoft. This makes perfect sense in a corporate environment, but I’m not sure how licensing would be handled for an individual. This is a potential cost and legal issue that shouldn’t be ignored.
    • By opening up the RDP port, it should be understood that you are exposing this VM to the Internet. That is a very different scenario to how most (I hope) people’s home computers are set up, with them being behind a router, so there’s at least one layer of indirection. It’s possible to better secure your connection to the VM, but it’s certainly more complicated than the average user is comfortable with.
  • The Azure products and user interface are not designed with the average user in mind. This is not a consumer product, so I wouldn’t recommend someone go down this path without at least some research and study. Maybe there will be a more consumer-level product created under the Office365 brand at some point. I do think there’s an opportunity there. If they were to bundle it with their cloud gaming product and price it appropriately, they could have a useful and valuable product on their hands.
  • A very minor quibble: He makes an off-hand remark about how using a cloud VM to skirt around regional video restrictions is illegal THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE: This seems suspiciously broad, and could be misinterpreting against the TOS as illegal. It’s also a weird thing to bring up, because I don’t think this would even be a very good way to do that.
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1040

Humble Bundle has launched their Ukraine bundle today:

100% to charity. They’ve raised over $1m so far, in just over 2 hours.

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1041

I just gave this (well, the Oz subsidiary, anyway) a try.

The queue to get a game was around twenty minutes (Saturday, midday, free tier; allegedly ~30 seconds if you pay) but once it was going it ran perfectly.

I hadn’t been able to play any graphics-intensive games (i.e. basically anything except for Clausewitz-engine strategy games such as Stellaris and Crusader Kings) since my old PC died; the replacement I managed to get has no room for a graphics card.

With this thingie, Mechwarrior V was running better than it did even when I did have a graphics card.

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1042

… was a crypto-Nazi.

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After reading that (thank you!) and checking them out, I think the GeForce Now is probably closest to right for me. Mostly because it can use my existing games and not make me re-buy them all.

I’ll likely try that. But with a cranky starting opinion. Not sure it’s worth yet another subscription fee just to play games I already own. But if it does work well and give me value, then I’ll be all for it.

May have to run an ethernet line from the internet ingress point to my office. Wifi is good enough, but maybe not for that. Or maybe it is. It can directly feed music and full video. Why wouldn’t it be good enough, if it can do that?

Maybe I’m getting old, don’t understand why the stuff that can do previously-unthinkable things and now does them routinely isn’t good enough anymore. Yeah, reading that, I must be getting old.

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1045

I had the paid service for a month, which was long enough for me to finish the Mechwarrior V story campaign and then burn through a non-story mercenary runthrough with the Heroes of the Inner Sphere DLC. The cloud gaming thingie was completely satisfactory throughout.

However, I cancelled it after that. I can’t justify $30/month for a pure luxury on my income.

But, if an interesting new game is released, I might pay for another month. It’s certainly cheaper than trying to maintain an up-to-date gaming PC.

—

In other news, I ordered myself a birthday present:

…which is mostly just so I can paint the miniatures. I’d have very little chance of finding any local players even if there weren’t a plague on.

There’s a weekly games club in Launceston that might have some willing opponents, but going to that would require riding home in the dark for an hour over heavily wallaby-laden forest roads, which is basically suicidal.

But my brother’s coming to visit in a few months, so I might get some games in then.

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