As regards the data centre equipment; the SSDs and hard drives used for storage would be reusable by regular people. Those will be nice to have.

The memory is the high-bandwidth kind that is not be usable on consumer motherboards. The ‘graphics cards’ are the size of filling cabinets, require external power supplies and cooling, don’t have video outputs, don’t have drivers for graphics output. If you don’t have a requirement for serious parallel computation with a very high uptime, then it’s not worth the cost of powering them up. If/when the bubble bursts, all that shit is going to landfill.

Latest version of Unreal engine plus a fully slop game on top? Reckon you might get 13 fps to go with those 13 fingers.

It’s correct if they’re talking about multiple different kinds of psychological harm - depression and psychosis, say. Much like if I go and buy both full-fat and semi-skimmed, then I’m buying milks; or if I’m checking the hardness of river and tap samples, then I’m testing waters.

Yeah. Most big games tend to be on a five-year turnaround, and Godot got a massive investment in extra resources in September 2023 when Unity shit the bed and changed their licensing terms. Indie games don’t tend to take so long to develop, but then as you say, all the indie developers need to have a little trial run so that they know how to use it before committing to it for a project.

I’m thinking that there will be a lot more high-profile Godot releases next year, and into 2028. All of the “higher profile” indie stuff that would have used Unity before.

You don’t have to do anything fancy, I don’t think. Initialise your RNG with the seed that you have stored, shuffle the list, and then rotate the list to get to the ‘first song’. Every RNG seed will give a correct result.

If you shuffle using eg. Durstenfeld/Knuth shuffle, which is O(n), then you can make a note of the ‘first song’s position’ and do the rotation at the end of shuffling straight to the first song, in a single pass.

You’ll still get a repeatable ordering if songs are added or removed from the playlist - the order will be different, of course - and it takes a lot less storage to write down the seed and the ID of the ‘first song’, which might matter if you’re using a crappy old music player with very limited storage space.

If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.

Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.

Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.

Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.

A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.

A shame. I liked Enslaved, loved DmC, and really liked Hellblade. They made quite a big thing at the time they were making Hellblade about wanting to be ‘double A’ publishers - making highly polished indie games on a sensible budget, basically. And then they sold out to Microsoft, which has screwed them over - all those publishers needing to make a non-stop stream of big budget megahits or they’ll be hung out to dry.

Consolations to all affected. It has been an absolute bloodbath in games development recently.

It’s one of the best ones, get playing it. Lots of shooting up Nazis, zombies and death robots; a little bit of stealth, lots of Quake 3 bunny hopping, plenty of action.

Not like the new ones, which make you watch 45 minutes of torture porn before letting you do five minutes of corridor shooting, and which just can’t commit to deciding whether killing Nazis is bad.

Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.

Likewise. Bought a three-month sub so’s that I wouldn’t have to top it up too often, and then they came out with all that shit. Subscription expires in two days - forever. Hello, iVPN.

I think that “more fps” is important when there’s things that move quickly compared to their size. My go-to game here is Batman: Arkham City - in the steel mill sections, there’s a lot of “sparky” particle effects; in general, there’s a lot of dust flying about. That stuff does look noticeably better at 90 fps than it does at 60 fps. My eyes can’t really see the difference at 120 fps, but I can definitely hear the GPU fans, so locked to 90 is fine. Makes absolutely no difference to the gameplay at all, of course.

Games that are designed for 30 fps tend not to have the same kind of particle effects, mostly because they would look terrible. I do feel sorry for the graphics artists having their hands tied, rather than being able to fully express themselves, but all engineering is about weighing things up and finding the right compromise, of course.

Yassifying all of your games with a slop filter is the complete opposite of artistic expression, of course.

Can’t remember any particular performance problems with ET - it’s no more flickery than any other 2600 game, sound plays fine, screen changes when you fall in a hole are prompt, all that kind of thing. Now, utterly bizarre and unintuitive gameplay, yes; it has that in spades. Also quite unfinished, but Howard Scott Warshaw only got five weeks to develop it so I’m prepared to point the blame at Atari for that.

Speaking as an Arch btw user, my socks match, thank you very much. How rude.