https://xkcd.com/1170/

That isn’t the first impression that I got, although of course I’m just one data-point. The composition, lighting, and post-processing of the stills are really good which is not common for games that are actually lazily thrown together assets. Looking a bit closer though, I do see what you mean and I think the main problem is that the level of quality doesn’t seem that consistent. IDK what’s going on on that 13th still with the monitor. A lot of the scenery in the trailer looks worse that the scenery in the stills, and some of the UI stuff seems a bit meh. I get that as an indie dev it takes forever to do this sort of stuff, and definitely there’s very little that looks outright bad, the problem is mostly the inconsistency in quality. People only have so much time to play games, and it’s not that easy to judge how fun a game is from it’s trailers and description, so they look for any clues they can of less than complete effort, as any inattention to detail could indicate a lack of attention to the actual gameplay parts as well. Unfortunately for both gamers and developers, how fun or engaging your game is doesn’t necessarily correspond that well with how appealing it is to people who see the trailer.

IDK, this is all kind of unfounded speculation from someone who really doesn’t have much personal experience in the area, so take it with a grain of salt

I think the money accumulates over time, so you’ll eventually get a payment once you have $100 at the start of a month after fees. But there’s also the $100 up front cost to list a game, so even after the first payment you haven’t really made money

You’d probably have to get like $200 in sales from a game before you have actually started to make money (from taxes and steam’s 30% cut)

Idk this is just what I’ve heard on the internet, I haven’t experienced it myself

Yes, Google Translate has used neural networks for quite a while. Recently they’ve also switched it to using the same Gemini LLMs that they give you chat interfaces with, so it’s pretty equivalent to using ChatGPT for translations. It’s just another company’s version of the same thing, wrapped in a translation interface.

Can get a used quest 2 for like $100, not crazy but not nothing. Unfortunately not powerful enough to view the more detailed rooms or avatars, or so I’ve heard.

It’s good to encourage reuse, which is eBay’s main thing. I wouldn’t have a reason to buy anything new from them however.

I got my home server (Lenovo thinkcentre, i7 6700) for $30 minus ram or storage at my local university surplus store a few years ago, and I have no regrets. Added a 256gb sata SSD, 16 gb RAM, 8tb HDD all refurbished for like +$150 when that was still cheap.

it’s a reference to this xkcd

edit: as an april fools thing probably

Oh, yeah, I didn’t see those. I think my point still stands though, really those specular highlights shouldn’t be that bright, but the AI can figure out that it’s plausible for them to be brighter and that it would fit the target style better.

Yeah, probably the main reason it’s getting the little bit of praise that it does is that they’re showing it off on games with fairly flat-looking skin shaders. Unfortunately a problem with this sort of thing is that getting that “2023” image is the result of giving a whole team a huge amount of time to model one man’s face. If you’re Bethesda and you just want to get NPCs into Starfield, it would be a similar amount of work. A bit less, since the first people already gave a talk on it, but still much more work then just getting a diffuse BRDF with some subsurface scattering and calling it good. But you also need a process that can be applied to every single NPC…

And looking at Striking Distance Studios, the company where that 2023 image is from:

In February 2025, it was reported that most of the studio’s developers had been laid off.

Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that the work those people put in will never be directly reused.

Another reason the DLSS version looks a bit more realistic there is because of the specular highlights on the eyes, for example. They probably aren’t reflecting anything real, or else they would be there in the original. But the AI knows that specular highlights add realism and are plausible in this scene, so it puts them there. That’s something that an artist could do if given a specific shot and camera angle, but in the general case they can’t really do that without causing problems.

Fun fact that you may or may not have heard before: the light flicker animation in Half Life Alyx is actually the exact same one used in the original Quake. Half Life 1 was built on the Quake engine, and the same animation was carried over into Source and then Source 2.

https://www.alanzucconi.com/2021/06/15/valve-flickering-lights/

I have a 2 core, 2 thread, 4gb RAM 3855u Chromebook that I installed Plasma on, and it’s usually pretty responsive.

sounds like that’s planned but maybe not in yet

big in music performance, composition, physical instrument design, etc as well

i would be surprised if there are more than a few musicians above a typical high school level that don’t have at least a surface level understanding of overtones

at least in wind/percussion instruments, i have no idea about vocal people as i’ve never done any of that

Lead is actually a slight concern with new nozzles or abrasive filaments especially, as there’s usually a bit of lead in brass

Sure, I could definitely see situations where it would be useful, but I’m fairly confident that no current games are doing that. First of all, it is a whole lot easier said than done to get real-world data for that type of thing. Even if you manage to find a dataset with positions of various features across various biomes and train an AI model on that, in 99% of cases it will still take a whole lot more development time and probably be a whole lot less flexible than manually setting up rulesets, blending different noise maps, having artists scatter objects in an area, etc. It will probably also have problems generating unusual terrain types, which is a problem if the game is set in a fantasy world with terrain that is unlike what you would find in the real world. So then, you’d need artists to come up with a whole lot of datat to train the model with, when they could just be making the terrain directly. I’m sure Google DeepMind or Meta AI whatever or some team of university researchers could come up with a way to do ai terrain generation very well, but game studios are not typically connected to those sorts of people, even if they technically are under the same company of Microsoft or Meta.

You can get very far with conventional procedural generation techniques, hydraulic erosion, climate simulation, maybe even a model of an ecosystem. And all of those things together would probably still be much more approvable for a game studio than some sort of machine learning landscape prediction.

I don’t know of any games that use machine learning for procedural generation and would be slightly surprised if there are any. But there is a little bit of a distinction there because that is required at runtime, so it’s not something an artist could possibly be involved in.

You know, the new word is ‘affordability.’ Another word is just ‘groceries.’ It’s sort of an old-fashioned word but it’s very accurate. And they’re coming down

such an eloquent speaker

people are saying that the witcher 3 works really well with the winulator app (uses wine and box86, which i’ve heard usually performs a tiny bit better than FEX, what valve is using, at the cost of occasional innacuracies)

not disagreeing, but if you just want to run the witcher 3 on your phone you can do it right now

get rid of the vr stuff and add a normal touchscreen instead, make the UI a bit more phone-like, add a cellular connection, get rid of monochrome and add color cameras, make it a little thinner, integrate the battery, add a bunch of phone apps (calculator, texts, calls, browser, notes, email, camera, etc)

computing-wise, it is very similar tho, it has the exact same processor that’s in my phone, just a bit more ram, can be configured to have the same amount of storage