I do some game modding, and sometimes have to hack together software to help with it, some of which ends up public.

One of my programs relied on the location of other, existing files and so would poke around at runtime to see where the user had launched it from, alerting the user if it was in a location where it wasn’t supported. If that happened, an interactive message box pops up with the title “UNSUPPORTED LOCATION” and text that says, verbatim sans my [notes]:

"Running [this program] from [unsupported] folder is NOT SUPPORTED, and is likely to produce errors. Run [other program] instead.

If you want to run [this program] from here anyway, type “I understand”.

You can’t skip or just “OK” the message to dismiss it, otherwise the program just immediately begins a managed shutdown of itself to prevent any of the aforementioned potential errors from occurring. I STILL had a user message me saying how making them type in “I understand” was a weird thing to make them do in order to use the program. Thankfully I think they’ve been the only one so far so it’s certainly not the norm, but the average computer user is also much less tech-savvy than someone downloading mods for a video game.

They are different, but to clarify, Linus Sebastian worked at NCIX (defunct computer parts / tech retailer), not NZXT (computer hardware manufacturer).

Yeah I’m also confused about its current state / status in currently-released games. It looks like a significant enough of a feature that I would naively assume that if it was implemented in a currently-released game that the devs would boast about it, so I guess it’s not there yet?

Different people also have different sensitivity to different types of artifacts. No doubt a degree of the complaints is overblown due to a big of tribal / mob mentality going on, but a few of the people complaining might just be more sensitive to it.

With TAA specifically there’s probably also implementation differences going on, where someone has a bad experience with it once or twice and then generalizes that experience to all implementations of it.

Someone mentioned Neural Radiance Caching to me recently, which Nvidia’s been working on for a while. They presented about it at an event in 2023 (disclaimer: account-gated and I haven’t watched - but a 6-minute “teaser” is available: YouTube).

I don’t really understand how it works after having skimmed through some stuff about it, but it sounds like it could be one of several ways to improve this specific problem?

Haha, opposite experience for me! I don’t play it but know some people that do, and I only ever heard about them playing it on their PCs, so it was their comment that made me realize it was also available on phones :P

Might be talking within the context of PC gaming, where even a relative potato will beat the performance of a flagship phone.

The process described and shown by the screenshots does seem a bit much for a cancellation. Suing feels disproportionate when I first hear it, but are there many other recourses to force it to become more user friendly?

Is it a legal liability thing to avoid using specific words? It’s hard to imagine it being bad PR to “properly” apologize (at least compared to releasing a non-apology apology statement).

Fair point, but I guess I would hope that the person being paid to write the copy would check it, since getting that right seems like it’s part of their job description ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit if you believe whoever wrote the page for Nissan lmao. I guess they just typed it into a converter with no context, and the converter spat out an answer amounting to “if your thermometer says it’s 12 degrees C, that would be 53.6 degrees F”… but without that context.

Thanks for so politely and cordially sharing that information

edit: I would be even more appreciative if it were true: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rocket-league-ending-mac-and-linux-support-because-they-represent-less-than-0-3-of-active-players

Quoting their statement:

Regarding our decision to end support for macOS and Linux:

Rocket League is an evolving game, and part of that evolution is keeping our game client up to date with modern features. As part of that evolution, we’ll be updating our Windows version from 32-bit to 64-bit later this year, as well as updating to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9.

There are multiple reasons for this change, but the primary one is that there are new types of content and features we’d like to develop, but cannot support on DirectX 9. This means when we fully release DX11 on Windows, we’ll no longer support DX9 as it will be incompatible with future content.

Unfortunately, our macOS and Linux native clients depend on our DX9 implementation for their OpenGL renderer to function. When we stop supporting DX9, those clients stop working. To keep these versions functional, we would need to invest significant additional time and resources in a replacement rendering pipeline such as Metal on macOS or Vulkan/OpenGL4 on Linux. We’d also need to invest perpetual support to ensure new content and releases work as intended on those replacement pipelines.

The number of active players on macOS and Linux combined represents less than 0.3% of our active player base. Given that, we cannot justify the additional and ongoing investment in developing native clients for those platforms, especially when viable workarounds exist like Bootcamp or Wine to keep those users playing.

Fair enough! I barely use its social side since most of the games I’ve played on there are singleplayer titles - honestly didn’t even know that wasn’t there yet!

I kinda understand it not being a priority; even if they dedicated the resources to both create and adequately maintain Linux support, I imagine very few of the games on the platform have native support anyway. Sure, many would work (to varying degrees) with the various bags of tricks available, but it’s still an extra step of compatibility that’s sort of beyond their immediate control.

I guess our opinions differ, because I don’t consider either of those to be “basics”. They’re nice features for e.g., Steam to have, sure, but they’re not “game launcher 101” imo.

What do you consider basic that it’s still missing? To be honest I’ve felt content with it as a game launcher for a while now, but I admittedly don’t use it that often either.

FYI: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/9785

So consider using the official website, which is currently: https://lubuntu.me

Intel fumbled hard with some of their recent NICs including the I225-V,[1][2] which took them multiple hardware revisions in addition to software updates to fix.

AMD also had to be dragged kicking and screaming to support earlier AM4 motherboard buyers to upgrade to Ryzen 5000 chips,[3][4] and basically lied to buyers about support for sTRX4, requiring an upgrade from the earlier TR4 to support third-gen Threadripper but at least committing to “long-term” longevity in return.[5][6] They then turned around and released no new CPUs for the chipset platform, leaving people stranded on it despite the earlier promises.[7]

I know it’s appealing to blindly trust one company’s products (or specific lineup of products) because it simplifies buying decisions, but no company or person is infallible (and companies in particular are generally going to profit-max even at your expense). Blindly trusting one unfortunately does not reliably lead to good outcomes for end-users.

edit: “chipset” (incorrectly implying TRX40) changed to “platform” (correctly implying sTRX4); added explicit mention of “AM4” in the context of the early motherboard buyers.

There’s currently no implementation (the repos are currently just skeletons), so it could just be a semantics difference right now.

I thought Frozen Synapse’s ability to let you simulate your opponent’s moves was super cool - surprised I didn’t end up seeing it in more strategy games (obviously not so much applicable to the normal real-time stuff though!).