If there was rationalist hell pit

[ZenRaiden]

..... I think the people of facebook, youtube, quora, and google, would go there and burn for eternity for cardinal sins.
Seriously its cancer on to brain and society.
Never mind linkenedin and windows, and all the "major" players.
I have used these sites, and I think they got something going, but search engines and algorithms don't work.
They are and always will be by me seen as cancer.
The only respect I have is for search engines like duck duck go and that has its limits.
I also endorse piratebay cause when you go there you get what you want.
I would honestly not endorse piratebay and I felt a modicum of guilt over pirating shit.

Now that I pay for shit, I realized that marketing is a scam and you aren't getting the best services.
Netflix case in point is cancer.
The fact it has some good production and movies, does not detract from fact that this company actually has the nerve to simply not allow movies to be viewed on basis of location.
I don't know what twisted legal shit that is, but why buy a service that allows you to view only some movies then does not allow you to view some movies and I can just buy the damn movies my self somewhere for full price rather.
The only reason I tolerate netflix I am depressed and currently I am better of watching Star Trek voyager rather than not.

I also miss the times when you got a damn CD installed the game and played it.
Recently bought full game il sturmovik one of my favorite games in life.
I was total ace at that game and spent whole summer playing just it.
Now I wanted buy the new version. Went to the trouble of buying a fucking game graphic card for 1900 euro.
DOWNLOADED the thing and I can play the game, but apparently the graphic card cant run on the game.
Despite me having all the fucking system requirements above average.
So I spent 70 euro on a game and that does not work.
Best part there is no help.
They simply don't give shit.

Then I bought movies on youtube, that I could not watch on netflix, and let me tell you the sound was too low, the movies were more expensive then ever, and the vid quality is youtube.

Who fucking says capitalism brings the best to the market?
These companies are the best we got for consumers of entertainment?

This is not some Karen shit or anything.
I am not complaining.
I payed I got what I got, and that is it.
But honestly the narrative that capitalism works is not true.
Because there is no way in hell these things are working like this, because these people can't do any better.
They suck because there is not competition for these companies.
And they have fucking low standards.

Honestly Id rather pay 50 euro a month for a service library that lets me see all movies ever made than for 11.99 watching few movies hand picked by some retard decision person in marketing.

 

[Cognisant]

I also miss the times when you got a damn CD installed the game and played it.

Oh man, I feel that.

I think I'm a bit older than you, I miss the days of N64 cartridges and yeah I remember when buying a PC game meant the disc in the box actually had the game on it. One school summer break I spent all my money on three Ubisoft games, that I specifically bought from a store because my internet was really slow (Australia) and there was nothing on the discs, just a link and a code to redeem the download.
To this day I still hold a grudge against Ubisoft.

The only reason I tolerate netflix I am depressed and currently I am better of watching Star Trek voyager rather than not.

I don't bother with any streaming services, hell I don't even watch TV.
I get my news and entertainment primarily from Reddit and Youtube, and I buy mostly Indie games on Steam, I'm all about the small content creators, imo the corpos can't make anything worth a damn.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Grew up around a lot of older people, so I can say that these were simpler times. I did think things were getting better with online stuff.

My parents were oblivious to the consequences of making everything a digital transaction I guess. It was so much easier that they could take out their card and pay at home. Oof xbox 360 was great when they weren't imploding

 

[Black Rose]

I lose things all the time.
It is good to have backups.
I remember I had my hard drive from 1998, 25GB.
I paid $120 at best buy to have it put on a 64GB jump drive.
Then I tried to edit certain things and it got corrupted.
I only saved 50 files to my main 2014 computer.
My computer from 2010 crashed in 2011, I lost 500+ files.
I also lost my Facebook in 2016 and two youtube channels because of password corruption.
I make sure I can access all public things on my current youtube channel. I only have a few things private that I don't care about recovering.

In 2024 I will buy a new computer but I need to make sure I lose no files/passwords at all.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Why didn't you check if a game from 20 years ago will be compatible with a modern system? I bet there is a dosbox or a modern version of your game that runs without emulation.

There fixed it for you. An updated release of your game compatible with modern systems https://www.gog.com/en/game/il_2_sturmovik_1946

As a bonus you get a refund if it doesn't run. A lot of whining over nothing old man

My PC hasn't had a DVD reader for a decade it was honestly such a hassle as CDs got scratched and stopped working. Obsolete tech.

Pirate bay causes most indie developers to go out of business and is not healthy for the market. Big companies are not affected by a 50% revenue loss caused by piracy, small studios die because their sales dropped by 10% since COVID and are much more prone to fluctuations in expendable income.

Ultimately there is less games and more low quality games because of "free download" sites.

As a game dev I can tell you that when we release a game it's already pirated and available for free download the next day. And the sites make money from ad revenue and crapware that's packed with the genuine download files. So in the end the thief doesn't do it for free and earns money and the Dev gets nothing.

The only defense for devs is diverting time away from making the best games into improving protection or paying more and making the whole game online.

 

[Cognisant]

As a game dev I can tell you

Oh?
Now you have to tell us what game you've worked on.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Why didn't you check if a game from 20 years ago will be compatible with a modern system? I bet there is a dosbox or a modern version of your game that runs without emulation.

No man, did not make it clear, but the game for 70 euro is actually the newer version of the game.
Its downloadable and takes out massive space.
It took me like 2 days to download.
So I was pretty pissed, because of that.

 

[ZenRaiden]

IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles

IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles is a historically based game. It is the next generation of the legendary Sturmovik series of WWII flight-sim games

il2sturmovik.com

this is the actual game now.
Its really one of the most advanced flight sims out there.
They even had the things tested by actual vets from wwII, has ton of details and variable models, flight characteristics are much more real, the battle field is very detailed and physics are very good.
The gameplay is hard to guess, but if they improved on the original it must be rad.
I had played many flight sims, so when I got my hands on IL2 sturmovik as a kid I was blown away. Now they made it even more real, which is insane.
I like games that are challenging.
I mean the original first sim had details like overheating of engines, realistic amount of ammo, different ballistic trajectories of different bullets depending on caliber.
For example the p39 had different flight characteristics since the engine was behind the pilot.
The planes had multiple ways of being damaged such as having the engine hit and oil leaking, which eventually lead to the engine getting stuck.
You had ways to stall and spin the plane out of control, but if you knew how you could use it areal combat like real aces did in real war, and fight using all kinds of unconventional maneuvers.
I literally worn out the joystick playing that game.
I am more mad I bought a cat in a bag.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Pirate bay causes most indie developers to go out of business and is not healthy for the market. Big companies are not affected by a 50% revenue loss caused by piracy, small studios die because their sales dropped by 10% since COVID and are much more prone to fluctuations in expendable income.

I guess this did not occur to me, because until recently few years back indie games were not even on my radar except minecraft, and I never played that game.

As for indie games I would be pissed.

Here is the thing and my take on pirating.
Back in my days, as kids we only played pirated games.
We did not buy them at all.
Few people who had actually the game, burned them on CD and gave them to us, before that we copied games on floppy discs.

The games were in price ranges normal people simply did not have the money.
It was mostly for niche hobby players and mostly grown ups or richer kids.
SO if it were not for pirating many kids would have never even played games at all in my town. They would not grow up playing them and hence they would not buy them today. I mean the first game I bought was in 2000 in UK, which was I think need for speed II and airwarrior. That was fucking long time ago, and even today people sometimes pirate games first and then buy the full version.
So I got to know games a lot of time by playing demos that were also pirated in a way copies XD.
So from business point of view pirating in my country did a lot of good marketing for games, and kids my age were hooked on them since the at least the late 90s.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

As a game dev I can tell you

Oh?
Now you have to tell us what game you've worked on.

Sure thing, right after I get the business address of your employer
Asking because I want to send a postcard.

Why didn't you check if a game from 20 years ago will be compatible with a modern system? I bet there is a dosbox or a modern version of your game that runs without emulation.

No man, did not make it clear, but the game for 70 euro is actually the newer version of the game.
Its downloadable and takes out massive space.
It took me like 2 days to download.
So I was pretty pissed, because of that.

Sounds like a scam. Can you get a refund? If it's a retailer in the EU then it should be possible.
These games here should work on a standard pc and you can always get a refund if the game doesn't run.

Steam Developer: 1C Game Studios

1C Game Studios is the developer of technologically advanced combat flight sims including the next-gen IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles series of products set during WWII and the WWI flight simulator Rise of Flight.

store.steampowered.com

 

[Daddy]

Who fucking says capitalism brings the best to the market?
These companies are the best we got for consumers of entertainment?

Capitalism kind of sucks. It's not about competition and bringing the best to market, it's about subscription models - making you pay as much as possible, monopolies, middlemen that take from you, underpaying and taking from workers, while overpaying business owners, high level managers, and execs, and increasing the stock price, scams, and legal scams, and taking advantage of people. It's about governments that overtax you without any real say and manipulate your cash currency by causing inflation over time (further taking from those that don't own appreciating assets like houses and investment accounts that adjust upward for inflation).

It's really about pretending we still don't live in a feudal society with peasants (low paying workers or manual labor jobs), knights (lawyers and soldiers), nobles (high level managers and execs), and kings (those with money and power, usually high level business owners). It's not a good system, but it does seem to be a direct product of human nature, so I guess it's hard to really complain about it.

edit: also, I got a bunch of 3060ti I never got rid of when the mining died. Too bad you didn't ask, I always sell shit to people I know for lower than market price so I don't have to go through the bother of selling it. Would be a lot cheaper than 1900 euros, but I hope you got something top of the line for that price.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Yeah, I got a good graphic card.
I kind of bought it, because it was best performance vs cost thing, as cheaper cards were not that much available since there was shortage at that time due to logistic hang ups.

 

[scorpiomover]

Who fucking says capitalism brings the best to the market?

Adam Smith said that capitalism brings the best to the market, when the environment is such that companies try to compete for customers by making better and better products and services.

If, however, the environment has not been set up to encourage companies to make more money by making better products & services, then you get something different.

So the results of capitalism are dependent on political legislation, social structures and cultural assumptions.

 

[scorpiomover]

Who fucking says capitalism brings the best to the market?
These companies are the best we got for consumers of entertainment?

Capitalism kind of sucks. It's not about competition and bringing the best to market, it's about subscription models - making you pay as much as possible, monopolies,

I've been observing the trend towards subscription models ever since the late 1990s, when IT managers started complaining about Microsoft pushing a per-connection licence system, over a per-user licence system.

The desire to move towards subscription models in the software market is a result of software companies selling their products to millions of users. Byt the late 1990s, office software reached a point where (a) everyone who wanted the software had already bought it, and (b) the software had been developed to a point where it did pretty much everything that users needed. So there were hardly any new customers and there was no point in existing customers spending lots of money buying later versions of the software. So revenues started slacking off.

However, because these companies had grown so fast, they now had thousands of employees, and so they would have had to lay off most of them. They also grew so quickly because they got major investment by becoming PLCs. So they stood to lose the majority of their revenue, which would have hurt their shareholders, who would have sold their shares, and thus their share prices would have plummeted.

So they needed to find a different business model to be able to get regular revenues on a regular basis.

Of course, there were alternatives:
1) government making a massive scheme to make sure all the employees who would have been made redundant, would find similar jobs in other companies who were on the rise.
2) Discouraging PLCs, and encouraging family-owned businesses.
3) Encouraging an attitude that companies were there to provide a regular revenue, not a get-rich-quick scheme for young upwardly-mobile professionals.
4) Encouraging shareholders to spread their investment porftolios.

All sorts of things could have been done. But governments didn't do them.

There was a reason for the attitudes that were encouraged:

1) They allowed millions of people with working-class parents to be catapaulted immediately into the middle-classes. The middle classes have usually been considered to be the most compliant and the least violent. Thus, the perfect model citizens.

2) It brought about an attitude of mass-production and consumerism, where most people would feel satisfied with their lives, because if they needed anything, they could just buy it. Even if they couldn't buy it now, they could buy it within 6 months to a year, because this was all based on the Rapid Application Development (RAD) model, and the speed of RAD was about 6 months. People who tend to be able to get what they want, shouldn't really feel a need to bring about right-wing fascism or left-wing communism, due to never having what they need.

3) Companies rising quickly with new products, also meant that new technologies could quickly be swept across the nation. This allowed new developments in science that could solve society's problems could be applied very quickly, as we saw with the swift development and implementation of the COVID vaccine to deal with a plague.

4) The speed of rising companies allowed young people to get into good positions in the workplace, which in turn meant that young people were far less likely to feel disadvantaged, and the disadvantaged youth were the main source of revolutionary fascist movements and revolutionary communist movements, which brought about the deaths of millions in wars and massive revolutionary purges.

So RAD, mass-production, consumerism, and the majority becoming middle-class, suggested that human society would soon reach a human Utopia, a virtual Heaven on Earth.

middlemen that take from you, underpaying and taking from workers, while overpaying business owners, high level managers, and execs,

This came about because the big problem was that with companies rising and falling so quickly, the job market became highly unstable.

Young people were usually quick to adapt, because they had just finished school/university and so had been taught about the latest technologies that were popular with new companies. Young people didn't mind jumping ship, because even though they might have to start at the bottom again, they hadn't really climbed that far to begin with, and still had their parents to rely on in the meantime.

But employees in their middle-age who were made redundant by these rapid rises and falls of the companies they worked for, usually found that they would struggle to find new work, and when they did, they would be likely to have to start at the bottom. They didn't have their parents to fall back on while they were rebuilding their careers, because their parents were retired.

So older employees started panicking that they would work for a company for their entire life, only to find that they would be on the scrap-heap, with their lifestyles and pensions decimated by losing their jobs and having to start at the bottom again.

So mid-level & high-level employees started doing whatever they could to report record profits and claim lots of money quickly, so that if/when the company shrank soon, they still had the money they would have expected to have earned if the company had been stable and employed them for the long term.

and increasing the stock price, scams, and legal scams, and taking advantage of people.

Similar problem, except these are more stock market investors who in the past would have made their money from the housing market, until the housing market crashed in 2008.

It's about governments that overtax you without any real say and manipulate your cash currency by causing inflation over time (further taking from those that don't own appreciating assets like houses and investment accounts that adjust upward for inflation).

Those are usually due to mid-level & high-level employees in the public sector, who have the same problem as those in the private sector. They're usually looking to increase government revenues to offset any losses in any other way, so their salaries remain untouched.

It's really about pretending we still don't live in a feudal society with peasants (low paying workers or manual labor jobs), knights (lawyers and soldiers), nobles (high level managers and execs), and kings (those with money and power, usually high level business owners). It's not a good system, but it does seem to be a direct product of human nature, so I guess it's hard to really complain about it.

I had to think about this: From what I recall of reading about the Feudal system, it was a pretty stable society where people had a job for life, and usually the pay and conditions were pretty stable as well.

So I would say that the issue sounds more like people want to pretend that we still live in a society with the stable benefits of the Feudal system.

But we are living in a mercantile, technology-oriented & youth-oriented system, which has given us flexibility and progressiveness, but at the cost of far less job security, and far less stable pay.

It might be possible to have both. But the conflict needs to be resolved. The people at the top either don't know how to resolve the issue, or don't want to.

edit: also, I got a bunch of 3060ti I never got rid of when the mining died. Too bad you didn't ask, I always sell shit to people I know for lower than market price so I don't have to go through the bother of selling it. Would be a lot cheaper than 1900 euros, but I hope you got something top of the line for that price.

Nice. I'd like to make something with a 3060Ti, not for graphics, but for general data processing. From what I just looked up, CPUs do between 0.1 teraflops a second and 1.3 teraflops a second, while the 3060Ti can do 16.2 teraflops a second.

A human brain is estimated to be around 100 teraflops. So effectively, with 10 3060Ti cards on the same computer, you could have a computer as smart as a human being. Now wouldn't THAT be something?

 

[ZenRaiden]

I see your point @scorpiomover .

Makes sense.

My point in this thread was not to bitch in vain though.

My aim was to compare before and now in the way things work.

As a consumer who had been playing games, I see two fold problem.

First quality of gameplay goes down.

Availability of games and systems that run those game is high.

But that means lot of issues.

I know complexity breeds problems.

My main beef would be that companies making huge money should sort those problems.

Not that I cannot try to sort this technical issue my self.

But the time I would spend fixing the problem could take days if not weeks if not months.

In pragmatic terms I could do it.

But my main beef is the principal here not the pragmatic angle.

The pragmatic level here is either not sink time into something I might never be able to fix. Or maybe find a solution by luck quickly if I happen to find it by myself.

Which is possible, but I am not sure. The manual does not exist for this solution.

Windows is not exactly a perfect platform once you go off script.

It would not bother me if systems like windows were so closed off, or companies making graphic cards had better info why graphics work or not.


But even reading Microsoft webpage gives you a clue that lots of people asking for help don't actually get it.


Usually the microsoft reply is standard to non standard issue.

Which is like, yeah your car broke down and we gonna fix your tires for no reason, because thats all we know how to do. Instead of fixing the actual problem.

For companies that are in business for so long, and are makers of the system that is just weird.
Same problem with graphic card and its incompatibility with computer I have.


I don't even know if there is solution.

But the information given is pretty general and not applicable to my problem.

Anything I can do will be just experimenting and repeating steps, by someone telling me to do something I have not a single clue what it means or is even the solution.

I could try, but this was not the problem in the past.

And systems in the past were also different. Games were also different.

They were less complicated, but it was not a freaking problem searching for solutions.

Even with no internet advice you could kind of figure it out somewhat.

 

[scorpiomover]

My point in this thread was not to bitch in vain though.

My aim was to compare before and now in the way things work.

I appreciate that. I used to play Space Invaders, Chuckie Egg, Defender, Doom and Duke Nukem on my home computer Also, Galaga, Asteroids, and lots of others at arcades and on friends' consoles and computers. I'd say that I enjoyed Duke Nukem the most. I've played other games since, like Halo and Project Gotham. But despite the better graphics, and more animated characters, I still had far more fun playing Doom and Duke Nukem.

As a consumer who had been playing games, I see two fold problem.

First quality of gameplay goes down.

Availability of games and systems that run those game is high.

But that means lot of issues.

I'd agree with that.

Considering how much so many people enjoyed Doom which ran on PCs that would be ridiculously slow compared to even a cheap modern laptop., I doubt the issue with games today is the lack of GPU capability.

I'd say that making games that can only run on the latest consoles, means that anyone who can't afford a console that costs hundreds of dollars, can't get to play the game. That wasn't an issue before 2010 when the economy was up and most people seemed to be able to afford consoles and games. But since I see lots of people worrying about being able to heat their homes, games have to be cheap nowadays, or only people from rich families will be able to afford to play them.

I also agree with your point about gameplay. Space Invaders had awful graphics and yet still was incredibly addictive. So I suspect that what we might be seeing here, is that people are replacing effort to make a really good game, with more computing power and more graphics. I see the same issue with films: better CGI, more sex, more violence, more martial arts, more special effects. But if the story is rubbish, the lines are rubbish and the acting is rubbish, then it's still rubbish.

Time to go back to basics. Make simple, playable games that focus on the basics, and are cheap.

I know complexity breeds problems.

My main beef would be that companies making huge money should sort those problems.

Not that I cannot try to sort this technical issue my self.

But the time I would spend fixing the problem could take days if not weeks if not months.

In pragmatic terms I could do it.

Pragmatically, you're just one user of video games. You trying to fix the problem, would be like one patient trying to fix the NHS.

The issue is more a matter of making video game manufacturers aware of what most users really want. So I'd say that game players need to use the power of the internet to make online petitions to make their voice heard, as a collective.

Windows is not exactly a perfect platform once you go off script.

Yes. But I was still able to play Duke Nukem every day on my Windows 95. Just needed to boot into a game-based OS (can't remember what it was called), to play it properly. Not a big deal when you're having fun playing anyway.

It would not bother me if systems like windows were so closed off, or companies making graphic cards had better info why graphics work or not.

Graphics cards have been standard for like 20 years. It would make more sense if your USB drive failed to work, than your game failed. So that's either the graphics cards are not worth it anymore, and you're better off with an old one, or more likely, the software that supports them is rubbish. You should just need to download a decent graphics library to play your games.

And systems in the past were also different. Games were also different.

They were less complicated, but it was not a freaking problem searching for solutions.

Even with no internet advice you could kind of figure it out somewhat.

Yes. That's so annoying. The very worst thing that could happen to my Windows 95 machine, was that it crashed, and I needed to reboot, which in those days took a few seconds.

 

[Daddy]

This is kind of why I love the Steam Deck. It's one platform and if they make something work on it, you can expect it to work on yours.

And it's PC games on steam, so you aren't locked into paying full price for everything and you can request refunds if something happens to not work. And you can play all your games on one device, instead of having all these previous generation consoles for different games, not to mention the potential for emulation and setting up a portable arcade emulation box that you can take to somebody's house or move to another room easily.

If the Steam Deck ends up being a failure, I will actually be sad.