Very cool! I’ve only just recently gotten to experience the joys of AV1 for my own game recordings (Linux is way ahead of Windows here), and dang is it nice. 10 minute flashback recordings of 4K HDR@60 for only 2.5GB, and the results look fantastic. Can just drag and drop it over to YouTube as well, it’s fully supported over there.

Glad to see things moving, I’ll be eager to check this out in a few years once it has wider support!

I doubt this’ll be well received, but I actually don’t think Silksong should be used to set price expectations. Hollow Knight made a shocking amount of money, massive sales were guaranteed, and the tiny dev team has enough money to pretty much vibe and make cool stuff forever.

Please don’t compare other indie game prices to this, when those games can’t guarantee their financial security, or massive sales number to turn a profit regardless of price.

Also, unrelated, but reading through the Bloomberg interview, and knowing what they charged for HK, 20$ is actually exactly what I assumed Silksong would cost well before it was announced, the shock for that kinda caught me off guard.

I’d assume the biggest reason, in addition to what others have said, is the difference in user numbers. It’s a lot easier to be a good mod at this scale than at the massive scale of Reddit, especially with the rampant AI bots, and without powerful tools like defederation, the clearly visible mod log, etc.

I’d assume most people bothering to moderate, even on Reddit, intend to do a good job with every report, but being overworked forces people’s hand.

Ugh, it’s incredible. Hollow Knight has been one of my favourite games for years, and thus far my expectations for Silksong have actually been exceeded, not just met. Utterly loving it.

Seemed flawless besides the external controller issues. It’s already steam deck verified, after all, so hopefully this is a quick fix for them.

But yeah, until that patch comes, I’ll be forcing proton :/

Yes! I had that issue as well. I managed to sidestep that one by screwing with gamescope, scopebuddy, steam input, switching the controller to 2.4GHz, and restarting the game several times.

Once I unlocked Sprint everything fell apart again, and that’s when I did some googling and realized I was running the native Linux version.

Yeah, proton is a bit of an odd dual edged sword like that. Obviously the dream would be the Linux market share getting large enough that it’s a no-brainer to focus on that version and make it as excellent as possible, and proton is essential for that, but at least for now, proton is so good that it makes it hard to justify a native version.

If you can’t maintain a high standard of excellence for your Linux port, savvy players will just use your Windows version through proton anyway, because it’s already a high quality port. Easy to understand why many studios forego a native Linux version altogether.

This was also the solution to me for a weirder problem, running on Bazzite with an 8BitDo Ultimate 2, I was sprinting randomly, especially when cresting ledges, and the dash button was inconsistent.

Extremely frustrating, the game feels significantly better with sprinting working as intended via Proton (I used GE-latest, but I assume it works with most proton versions). Would be nice to see the native version fixed, but proton is perfectly fine for now, and “external controller on Linux” is likely a lower priority bugfix.

The way I imagine it in my head is like a text autocomplete trying to carry on a story about a person talking to a brilliant AI.

If something is real, of course the hypothetical author would try to get those details correct, so as not to break the illusion for educated readers. But if something is fake (or the LLM just doesn’t know about it), well of course the all knowing fictional AI it’s emulating would know about it. This is a fictional story, whatever your character is asking about it is probably just part of the setting. It wouldn’t make sense for the all knowing AI in this story to just not know.

Obviously, OpenAI or whoever would try to prompt their LLMs to believe they’re not in a fictional setting, but the LLMs are trained on as much fiction as non-fiction, and fiction doesn’t usually break to tell you it’s fiction, but often does the opposite. And even in non fiction there aren’t many examples of people saying they don’t know things. I wouldn’t write a book review just to say I haven’t heard of the book. Not to mention the non-fiction examples of people confidently being wrong or flat out lying.

Simply based on the nature of human writing, I frankly wouldn’t ever expect LLMs to be immune to writing fiction. I expect that it’s fundamental to the technology, and “hallucinations” (a metaphor that gives far too much credit, IMO) and jailbreaks won’t ever be fully stamped out.

Good point, 4K text for programming is pretty fantastic, if you don’t mind small text and use a big monitor, I could see 8K bringing some worthwhile clarity improvements to some productivity workflows. It’s probably better for monitors than it is for TVs.

Yeah, legitimate 8K use cases are ridiculously niche, and I mean… really only have value if you’re talking about an utterly massive display, probably around 90 inches or larger, and even then in a pretty small room.

The best use cases I can think of are for games where you’re already using DLSS, and can just upscale from the same source resolution to 8K rather than 4K? Maybe something like an advanced CRT filter that can better emulate a real CRT with more resolution to work with, where a pixel art game leaves you with lots of headroom for that effect? Maybe there’s value in something like an emulated split screen game, to effectively give 4 players their own 4K TV in an N64 game or something?

But uh… yeah, all use cases that are far from the average consumer. Most people I talk to don’t even really appreciate 1080p->4K, and 4X-ing your resolution again is a massive processing power ask in a world where you can’t just… throw together multiple GPUs in SLI or something. Even if money is no object, 8K in mainline gaming will require some ugly tradeoffs for the next several years, and probably even forever if devs keep pushing visuals and targeting upscaled 4K 30/60 on the latest consoles.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this would work.

The answer to where you should plug in is directly into your GPU, as streaming the data from your external GPU to your iGPU will cause data throughput issues as it has to constantly stream data back and forth through the PCIE bus. Even in simple games at low resolutions where that wouldn’t be an issue, you’d still be introducing more input lag. That’s why connecting your display to your motherboard is usually considered a rookie mistake.

But obviously, if you’re outputting from your external GPU, that silicon is still being used while rendering on the iGPU, which I believe would erase any potential power savings.

I think the better solution if you really want to maximize power savings, would be to use a conservative power setting on your main GPU, and do things like limiting your framerate/selecting lower resolutions to reduce your power draw in applications where you don’t need the extra grunt. Modern GPUs should be pretty good at minimizing idle power draw.

People do all the time and it makes no sense to me.

I assume it’s people who are highly motivated by hype and the community conversation to play something while it’s in the zeitgeist, the same as people who want to skip stuff to play story games that are direct narrative sequels without bothering to play anything before it, presumably just because it’s popular and catches their eye.

Probably the same drive that keeps pre-orders and day one sales so high, despite it pretty much always being a better idea to wait a year or so for sales/updates/etc.

The problem isn’t the tech itself. Getting a pretty darn clean 4k output from 1080p or 1440p, at a small static frametime cost is amazing.

The problem is that the tech has been abused as permission to slack on optimization, or used in contexts where there just isn’t enough data for a clean picture, like in upscaling to 1080p or less. Used properly, on a well optimized title, this stuff is an incredible proposition for the end user, and I’m excited to see it keep improving.

I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.

More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.

The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.

Honestly, I’m a bit relieved that OpenAI is at least trying to intervene here. When I heard they backtracked and re-released 4o, alarm bells went off for me that they were going to give in and just rake in profit off this type of dangerous AI addiction. Sounds like at least some of that original non-profit “managing the future of AI” concern is still there, if obviously far less than I’d like.

Honestly, the delays have increased my hype more than decreased it. I’m not one to obsess over a release, I’ve played other things and enjoyed them in the interim, so I really have no resentment for the long dev cycle.

Lately my habits have been to try to avoid games for a couple months to let them get polished up anyway (I recently regretted picking up DOOM TDA at launch after they reworked combat across the whole game, and that would’ve been a better first playthrough experience). Team Cherry is a team I know can use time well like that, in fact, HK did get broad balance overhauls before I discovered it. They also added an astounding amount of well integrated post-launch content, so I’m excited to see just how much they’ve managed to create and polish Silksong with all this time, and will feel comfortable playing at or close to launch now due to these delays.

Mhm, fair point. Although… I would say the steam deck’s popularity and proof of viability as a gaming device is doing an immense amount of work on its own. I built a gaming PC ~2 years ago, and even as a long time developer and someone comfortable with a UNIX terminal I opted to get a copy of Windows for gaming, and had to awkwardly get to grips with it and find tools to get it playing the way I wanted.

It’s only ~1 month ago that the prevalence and maturity of the steam deck (combined with Windows recall re-emerging🤮) finally had me at ease enough to give Bazzite a shot, and since jumping myself and expressing how happy I am with it, 2 of my long term “on the fence” friends have asked me questions and are starting to try Linux themselves.

Larger Linux market share, regardless of how it gets there, gives broad confidence in Linux, and also pushes developers and Steam itself to maintain Linux support and tools like Proton, which reinforces the cycle, even if it doesn’t help us “kill Windows” for as long as users don’t understand how to install it.

Agreed that the Bananzas are a little weird. Personally I find myself toggling it on and off (you can drumbeat again to transform back), which causes it to use so little meter that it’s recovered almost instantly, if not already recovered by the coins I earned doing the thing.

I’m definitely not using it as a transformation as much as I am just using it as a move in the kit though, so I’m not feeling like I’m using it as intended either.

Bit of an odd answer, but for me (and my wife), the last piece of the puzzle was really budgeting. The invisible, constant financial stress is a lot, and adds to that feeling of “pretending” when you’re not even sure if buying groceries will cause a bill to bounce, let alone hanging out with friends who always seem to comfortably have the money to do whatever it is you’re doing.

It’s been several years now (early 30s, started budgeting in late 20s), it took us a while to figure it out and progress was slow, but I can “see the line” now, towards retirement, towards home ownership, we have no more credit card debt (just student loans left, which we’re working on), and we budget “fun money” that I save up to make big purchases like a 7900XTX without any guilt or credit.

We’re also having our first kid soon, and at least financially, I’m not stressed about it at all, which would’ve been impossible in our twenties. Getting our financials in hand and headed in the right direction has just done massive work in helping me feel like I know what I’m doing, and that our life is actually getting better rather than stuck in place.