For a first time don’t try to get the strongest character possible. It’s a time sink to do that. Usually the main campaign of games are beatable even if you screw up something. The worst that can happen is you backtracking a bit and spending time to level up before doing the next quest.

When you played the game once and got used to the mechanics you can make a 2nd char and plan it more deeply ahead if you wish. You know what mechanics you like so the prospect of finding what to invest in what is worth etc… becomes more streamlined. But you don’t have to. You can just be happy to have finished the game and call it a day.

That’s what I did for Diablo 4. After the main campaign I did not feel like venturing more into the game or making another character so I started playing another game. If you really want to 100% a game it does require a ton of time and planning but you don’t have to

Looks cool! This reminds me of Freespace, another beautiful space fighter game

Yeah exactly. Here follows some spoiler for those who have never played Dark Souls

The bottom line is that I think you need to have someone telling you where not to go to really enjoy Dark souls. Because its not obvious whether you die because of your incompetence or just because you were not supposed to be there right now. I wouldn’t say its bad design though - but it’s not for everyone for sure

I used to dislike dark souls. Recently I tried it again - I struggled but I finally got the hang of it!

I think the hardest is to know what to do. I figured out I was struggling because I kept going in zones I was not expected to go yet.

Also it’s such a big shift compared to what I was used to. You have to wait for the right opportunity to attack rather than going in there and relying on reflexes.

I see. You want to offload AI-specific computations to the Nvidia AI cores. Not a bad idea, although it does mean that hardware that do not have them will have more CPU load so perhaps the AI will have to be tuned down based on the hardware they run on…

You could imagine training one AI for each game AI problem like pathfinding but what is see the benefit over just using classical algorithms?

Can DLSS and XeSS be used for something else than upscaling?

They are for providing special hardware for Neural Network inference (most likely convolutional). Meaning they provide a bunch of matrix multiplication capabilities and other operations that are required for executing a neural network.

Look at this page for more info : https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/tensor-cores/

They can be leveraged for generative AI needs. And I bet that’s how Nvidia provides the feature of automatic upscaling - it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it. Leveraging AI of video games (like using the core to generate text like ChatGPT) is another matter - you want to have a game that works on all platforms even those that do not have such cores. Having code that says “if it has such cores execute that code on them. Otherwise execute it on CPU” is possible but imo that is more the domain of the computational libraries or the game engine - not the game developer (unless that developer develops its own engine)

But my point is that it’s not as simple as “just have each core implement an AI for my game”. These cores are just accelerators of matrix multiplication operations. Which are themselves used in generative AI. They need to be leveraged within the game dev software ecosystem before the game dev can use those features.

It’s not as simple as that. Those cores are specialised in handling graphics. Game devs have 0 control over it

My laptop is about 5 or 6 years old. It’s all HDD I have no SSD at all

Yes. My windows takes literally 10 minutes to boot. I am counting here from the moment i press the button to the moment it is usable (when I can run applications and use them). I have a HDD and each time I boot windows services are always looking to update something which starves the other apps. It’s really a clog. If I want to use it faster I need to bring up the task manager and kill each update thing one by one until I killed them all.

Program easily and efficiently. Not having to wait 5 minutes for a window to come. Fast boot/reboot times (less than 10 minutes). Native support for many things without having to install them. Installing is usually as easy as running an apt-get command. Not having to kill update processes because they take 100% of your disk bandwidth and starve all your other apps.

Windows feels like an ugly and sloggy system with a ton of duck tapes. Only reason I use it on my gaming laptop is for games.

Linux on the other hand just works. Nothing fancy, but it’s just what someone who wants efficiency needs.

Absolutely. Just yesterday I tried asking stable diffusion to draw me “An elephant and a monkey dance while two cheetahs drink punch. The elephant and monkey look very happy. The cheetahs look bored.”

It drew me two elephants with monkey hair and two cheetahs. No punch, no dance.

If what you ask is somewhere in the bank of images it will draw it. But if what you ask is a situation the AI has never encountered before in any image, it will fail to invent it.

If all artists used AI we would be stuck on a loop of content that is not novel. Years from now we would stop seeing amazing incredible art. There would be no evolution at all in the styles.

I am glad that there are artists who continue to draw without AI even if it must be hard for them.

I understand that video games dev and Web dev does not overlap but the developer field is more vast than just Web. For example embedded development uses a lot of C/C++ so knowledge would be transferable there.

I would also say that even though the engines or framework is not the same, surely there are human skills that can be transferred like managing a project, solving problems, algorithms, performance analytics and debugging.

But that’s only my theory and I have no experience on switching field like that

Do you know why is that so?

Video games devs have it much worse than other developers though

I highly disagree with the 2nd point

I hate RTS because there are so much going on everywhere at the same time that I just can’t handle it. You gotta master your production while scouting while repelling raids while strategizing to see what kind of army the opponent is building while exploring the tech tree and… damn how did they just send an army of 50 fellas??

MOBAs allow me to fully focus on the moment and whatever I’m doing instead of being perpetually late on the actions that need doing

That explains a lot of things! I couldn’t get into Morrowind for this very reason

Any game that requires regular playtime is a nope for me now. I switched to games that you can put off easily - games that are playable under a fixed amount of hours and that do not require dedication.

Typically right now i am playing Dark Souls on twitch - I can turn it on, play a bit (even just 30 minutes) then put it down easily.

I also switched to board games - my SO is not into video games but she is into board games so we can enjoy that together. We are playing Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion right now it’s a blast

Apologies - I am not good with names and the “Show context” feature only shows one message. I did not even realize I was talking to a different person. Thanks for clarifying

I loved every second of playing Undertale. I got genuinely happy for the characters and I even cried a little. Definitely a masterpiece!