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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’ve joined one of the Steam Dev Days conference in Seattle. It’s around time where people was still doing things like cross buy etc. (so buying the game on website unlocks both steam, dev’s own drm free version, maybe even console version.) I do not know if any of the actual developer term is updated after that time, but during the conference, one dev asked question exactly like this, can he sell his version without the 30% cut from valve if it does not going through Steam while giving away the steam key for free. The answer is no.

    During the time it was explained that if you sell on different platform, that gives better sale %, steam can also impost that sale % on it’s platform. At the time EGS was still not a thing but people asked about can they have different price on different platform, I think the answer is also no or not recommended, as they can request you to match say the base price of itch.io but they don’t mind if that sale and software never use anything from steam. They specifically mention if any steam feature, like invite steam friend is used, then no, even if your game are not downloaded or use any steam distribution feature.









  • Someone will have it and then later if necessary there will be community re-written version. (crowd funded for example ) Doesn’t make sense to chase down a taken down version at this point.

    edit: article was updated, the maker gonna re-do the parts from pre-AMD funding point so it’s a clean one.

    Andrzej Janik updated the GitHub repository a few minutes ago with the message:

    IMPORTANT

    What happened

    The code that was previously here has been taken down at AMD’s request. The code was released with AMD’s approval through an email. AMD’s legal department now says it’s not legally binding, hence the rollback. Before anyone asks: I have received no legal threats or any communication from NVIDIA.

    What now

    At this point, one more hostile corporation does not make much difference. I plan to rebuild ZLUDA starting from the pre-AMD codebase. Funding for the project is coming along and I hope to be able to share the details in the coming weeks. It will have a different scope and certain features will not come back. I wanted it to be a surprise, but one of those features was support for NVIDIA GameWorks. I got it working in Batman: Arkham Knight, but I never finished it, and now that code will never see the light of the day:

    So six months after the code was made public as open-source, at the request of AMD’s legal department, that ZLUDA code has now been removed. Though given it’s Git and may have been cloned, the open-source code likely exists elsewhere by those that were intrigued by this effort.


  • recall, immediately foot the bill and still have to fix something they probably haven’t fix yet. (the article mention maybe microcode update in August. ) taking lawsuits, they can drag it on and buy themselves time to figure out how to deal with it.

    the legal side thing is, unless the claimant can prove that intel “knew” about this and still selling the broken item, there is not much they can do about it other than going through warranty process and get a replacement. However, now many outlet prove that to be a case from small companies to big data centers, they can’t keep selling those units as if they are not broken. Some thing needs to be done properly(like as MS for a mandatory update if detect such CPU or work with MB for BIOS update with a feature block) from their legal dept and make sure new buyers have ways to mitigate it.







  • Yeah, they know they are doing though, they are aiming for those that work 9-5 have life and kids and some spare changes and milk them hard. Like this game would take 200 hours to complete fully with X hundreds of hours of post game content that was designed to make your grind, but you can also pay for this [xp booster, resource pack, legendary set, etc] to make sure you can enjoy the post game content if you don’t have the time to grind the game how it’s “meant to be played”.

    In my AC:Odessey example, I think at one point the designer might be doing a heavy zelda influenced where you just pick up stuff enemies dropped and the blacksmiths are there for you to repair items broken as resource dump. (which make sense and very fitting of that era and how resource would work) But once that MTX department put their finger in now you have a derailed system. There is a spread sheet that list the hours required to upgrade a legendary piece to which level, and recommended level to get them(as their starting level is fixed and not like the enemy droppped item that matches your level), I saw the numbers and downloaded the cheat engine table the next hour.


  • I got AC:Odyssey during one of the sale cause I dig Greek mythology, had to get cheat engine and spare me the grind for upgrading gears and ship. Like sure you can just keep picking up randomly dropped Epic/Rare and replacement them when you leveling up(there are even player quest that put in specific spot to give you resource for those upgrades, just so other players can farm it) But I ain’t get any time for that, I just cheat engine in max out resource and upgrade my Legendary gears I found through out the game. And you know what? By the end of the game(and I didn’t find every Legendary, like maybe 60~70% of them) it would take me setting the resource to max twice to fully upgrade all my legendary + epic(with perks I like) gears. It would take probably months of my gaming time should I got it on console and can not use cheat engine.

    No, upgrade gear is not required to finish the game. But after this experience I decides to never get another Ubisoft AC game nor any RPG on console or with always online feature(which means all transaction are done and authenticated to prevent cheating. ) I’ve done plenty open world, RPG, Monster Hunters without having to cheat. But the recent single player grinding + selling time saver booster pack make me whip out the cheat engine again. And I only cheat those stupid resource gating game that are designed to pad hours in to your play through.


  • Because FSR3 is really new, released Sep 2023. Even the games that actually can patch in FSR3 didn’t get to do it properly until Avatar nailed it and just earlier this month released another update to push it further. In short, AMD is working with devs to improve their plugin integration to various engine devs, and I don’t think 3.1 is the “end goal”.

    FSR 3’s result really depends on how developer understand and work with the proposed render pipeline compare to DLSS(which basically runs AI kernal to guess what pixel values to fill). Especially with games that features pip scope(fake UI scopes with on the fly fov changes are fine) or some translucent elements where it can not do the velocity buffer properly. (basically most of the fringeness on edge or flickering/swimming are mostly from precision, and ghosting are from wrong velocity when you see the old FSR artifacts).


  • cause commercial rental is a commitment, if you can’t find another company to take over your lease, chances are you have to pay the majority of left over amount + penalty + restoration. Licensor commitments are similar but probably on tech/software licensing, ie. server rentals, Maya/Speedtree licensing agreement for the site, whatever cloud service they use for backup and share stuff, etc. Those at bigger scale aren’t paid year to year like your regular indie studio just subscribe to Adobe/Autodesk for app uses per seat.