FishFace

@FishFace@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AMD say the Steam Machine is "on track" for an early 2026 release⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would it be soldered? It’s not like it’s in a laptop with space constraints.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The sorry state of saving (mostly a rant)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s cool but so far I’m not really that impressed. It has had one interesting idea, employed in an often frustrating way, and now its frustrating implementation and glitchiness mean I’m probably not going back to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The sorry state of saving (mostly a rant)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, pause menu then quit, and you’ll restore into the current chamber.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The sorry state of saving (mostly a rant)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right, it’s not about that. It’s about how long it takes for a developer to create the saving and loading routines, how complex they are, and the risk of there being things wrong with them.

  Suppose you want to introduce at arbitrary points in Blue Prince. It means you now have to track:

  • the location & orientation of the player
  • the player’s stats (steps left, money, gems, keys)
  • the location & orientation of every room in the house
  • the state of all doors in the house (open/closed, locked/unlocked, normal/metal)
  • all the hidden state relating to luck and room drawing
  • the time of day
  • the state of each Mora Jai box - where its tiles are and whether it has been opened
  • the state of each pick-upable entity
  • the state of the dartboard, parlor and other puzzles
  • the location of all elevators
  • many more things which are spoilers
  • many more things I can’t think of

  If you forget a single one of these, loading the game will break in some way - possibly in some niche way that will never come up in testing. Suppose the thing you forgot was the state of some late-game puzzle, and in playtesting no-one ever saved and reloaded after doing that puzzle?

  Maybe the consequences are that the puzzle is just reset in that save - that’s fine, right? Well, not if the consequence of doing the puzzle is saved, and you can then do it again. Maybe you just put an infinite money glitch into the game, or maybe when doing the puzzle again, the game code tries to re-enact whatever happens when you solve it, which has already been done, and because some assumption is invalid the game just crashes.

  None of this information is stored in a “database text file” at all. It is stored in RAM alongside vastly more information in a manner which makes writing it to disk impractical. Some games do essentially dump their entire in-memory state to disk, but this is only possible if the game is very small and simple: the size on disk will be roughly the same as the size in memory, and games often take up several GB of RAM; it is not acceptable to write out multi-gigabyte save files to disk unless there is simply no alternative.

  Game saving and loading is extremely complicated.

  The complexity may even extend beyond the save/load part of the game code. For example, in Superliminal you can create a lot of physics objects. Continuing with my assumption that the game doesn’t save the location of them, this means that when you load, they’re all gone. That means there is no possibility that physics objects build up over the course of playing the game and cause performance problems or simulation instability. There are other ways of tackling this problem that may be more elegant - but developer time is limited, and if you can solve a problem decently with a shortcut, then it is often a good idea to do so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The sorry state of saving (mostly a rant)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean it is harder to save at arbitrary points because the amount of information you have to save and restore can be a lot more. Blue Prince doesn’t allow you to save except between days - and a game day can last a couple of hours. To me that’s far from acceptable. Hades which I just got only allows you to save at the end of a chamber, but tbh each chamber is short and fairly frantic so that seems OK. I’ve been playing Superliminal and that has extremely weird, seemingly arbitrary save points, which can lose you several minutes of game time. That and the fact that where I am now is less a puzzle and more a matter of clicking on the exact pixel which will convince the shitty physics to not fuck up while also allowing me to traverse the room means I’ve given up on that particular game.

  Superliminal though is a good example of how arbitrary save would be more complicated: I imagine it only lets you save when you go between doors which prevent you from carrying items through them. This separates the game world into areas within which there are a known set of items, and moreover, on your entry into each area, the items in that area start off in known places. That means the save format doesn’t have to store the location of items in new areas, and indeed could discard the locations of items in old areas too (it could set their locations to some hard-coded “solved” locations for consistency, or it could just leave them in their initial locations if backtracking is not important).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck Beta Client Update: December 30th⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this written by AI? It flips between PC and Steam Deck without apparent reason.

  But yeah, you can use them wirelessly and Steam even allows you to remap the buttons if you want them to be more like normal controllers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game recently hooked you on the Deck, more than on PC ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess I normally wouldn’t use the deck in an environment where that works!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game recently hooked you on the Deck, more than on PC ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Can’t imagine playing any strategy game without a mouse!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, Mr. Snaffleburger

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  USB-C probably cannot replace either, because the unmating force is too light. A typical HDMI or DisplayPort cable is much thicker, longer and hence heavier than a typical USB-C cable (even those specced to carry high bandwidth, like a thunderbolt cable) because they need better shielding to carry high bandwidth signals long distances - it’s not unusual to need to route HDMI several metres (but USB-C cables that long are unusual because of the different purposes)

  For TVs and such it’s useful to have the inputs connect vertically, so that they don’t stick out the back of the device and cause problems pushing it against a wall. Then the weight of the end of the cable is going to be trying to pull the connector out of the TV. DisplayPort connectors can have a latch to deal with this.

  Of course, there a ways around this: a new connector, for example. But it does mean that you can’t just leverage the existing pool of USB-C connectors and cables to make this ubiquitous.