Microsoft is looking for it and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are paying a decent penny for it to try to stop the Linux gaming momentum the deck is driving.
It’s entirely irrelevant to me. I don’t care what the specs are if it’s just running Windows.
I wonder what mundane items from today will be found far in the future and speculated about what they could be for. And if our plastic world will leave more or fewer of these artifacts.
I believe PlayStations tend to become profitable a few years into the cycle.
Sometimes they do, but they usually have a golden parachute that makes it still a win for them.
Not only that, but most people who wanted to get Diablo 4 already got it through Blizzard’s store/launcher. Despite their drop in popularity over the last decade or so, they are still very visible, so it’s not like going on Steam exposed the game to many people who wouldn’t have been aware of it if they pay any attention to gaming news.
I only get mine from browsing Lemmy and formerly Reddit. I haven’t been paying any specific attention to Blizzard but I still knew when Diablo 4 was released and that the Overwatch I paid for has been replaced with a f2p Overwatch 2.
On the other hand, I saw it on gamepass when looking for interesting looking games to try this weekend and passed it over. So even though I didn’t have to pay anything to try it, I didn’t. Maybe that’s a trend they are seeing on that platform, that interest is low even though it’s free access. Though it’s also competing with starfield and lies of P on there.
You can have missing objects with real ray tracing. Like the player object itself generally doesn’t need to be rendered so it might not even be added to the scene. Unless the player is looking down. If their arms are holding a gun or reloading, it might just be disembodied arms if you could move the camera to see it from another angle.
Or, different game, but in GT7, the ray tracing doesn’t include vehicles’ self reflections. Which is probably an optimization because every reflection ray trivially intersects with the object it is reflecting from, so it makes sense to skip the reflecting object, but then you miss cases where it should be reflecting another part of itself.
Yeah, it feels kinda like OP is really wondering if what’s there now is just as good as what used to be there because it might still be labeled “art”. Not all art is equal, and I’d much rather have nice looking art than art that says “this used to look nice but now it’s just dicks”. But, given that some asshole decided to just paint over it with monocolour, I’d rather have that “fuck you” than to see it left blank.
I hope the 2nd artist has the determination to put it back if the owners try to get rid of it again, but the patience to wait until they stop watching it so they don’t get caught. Or make them spend money on a surveillance system and someone to monitor it but still put it back one or two lines at a time. Until the owners have an aneurysm and it eventually ends up in the hands of someone more chill.
Well then I hope the West continues to provide that help and that Ukraine makes improvements in the areas it needs to so it can launch attacks into Russia without that help. Assuming it really does need western help. Given Russia’s track record for honesty, it might be more likely that Ukraine is doing this with Russian help.
I was part of an ISP that was a customer coop. I bought a share when I signed up and then sold it when I moved away.
Another way it could be done is via dilution. Like every so often, new shares are issued to current employees based on whatever criteria they use to determine division of ownership. Existing shares remain outstanding so former employees still get dividends and voting rights, but the guy that worked there for 3 months 8 years ago isn’t an equal owner to someone who joined 3 years ago and hasn’t left. Though there’s then the question of can people sell their shares to someone else, potentially leaving the door open for a hostile takeover when a large enough group of former employees want to cash out? If they can’t sell them, what happens to the shares when an owner dies?
The first one is cleaner. Personally, I’d go with the first option but have an exception for people retiring so their shares can act as a non-transferable pension but then the shares cease to exist once they die (or exist for a limited amount of time after death for their next of kin).
Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.
There’s copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There’s parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn’t use copy/paste). And there’s precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).
Oops thanks for putting that out, corrected.
For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else’s invention.
Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn’t gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don’t agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don’t think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.
That’s not to say that it’s legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there’s just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.
If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.
If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.
If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person’s code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn’t been noticed or isn’t being pursued because there’s not likely any money in it anyways.
It’s that murky area that I’m guessing they’d want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.
Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)
Rewording things is also one of the few things that LLMs seem to be able to reliably do, too.
Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn’t make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.
Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.
Why is this being looked at from the angle of “law enforcement shouldn’t be buying this information” instead of “companies shouldn’t be selling this information”?