Finally got my lemmy instance fully updated.

Been improving my backup scripts in advance of adding backup to a server.

Updated servers and other services.

I’m working my way up the generations and I need to replay Alola in the Ultra games since I only had Pokemon Sun before and had different livingdex rules when I played it. A bit unfortunate for time-sake, but I really liked the Alola games. Good luck on your dex!

To add some naming inspiration, my friend and I like dumb nicknames like:

Blingo Splorp Gunch Slizbop Boizo

You sort of need to keep track of creature count but I feel like the game should do that for me, and not in a menu.

This would basically be my reply as well. Companies are in the game to make money, and setting up all this infrastructure, not to mention maintaining it, is NOT cheap.

You apparently can transfer saves on PS4/5 offline. For PS4 they can be copied to a USB drive, but more to your point here, the only way to copy PS5 saves around (besides PS+) are to do console backup and restore processes and then during that process say you want to take save games wholesale (and then restore them wholesale). That’s definitely greedy bullshit.

I don’t know what more to say, consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in. Within those walled gardens, the company dictates the rules. There’s plenty of good arguments for using a more open platform like PC. Not the least of which is that PlayStation has had an abysmal console cycle for trying to prove their console is worth purchasing - what with it having basically no exclusives that won’t eventually come to PC, first-party or otherwise.

From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).

No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.

Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.

Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.

It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.

Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.

I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.

Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?

Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially on console.

Yep, this video is highly antagonistic like the rest of theirs. On the whole, they’re talking about the right thing, but the video tends towards generalization and ragebaiting.

Also months and months later there’s yet to be any news or progress on their “alternative” Unreal Engine fork that fixes TAA or whatever, despite the host talking very quickly over technical rendering jargon. You’d think with the ability to do that, they could manage to … disable TAA in Unreal. Vibes feel like a scam.

I’m going to say a few things about food and also assuming prices will go up and not quite reach an economic collapse:

Secure your food, learn to prepare cheaper, more plentiful foods in a way that is tasty to you (look to rice and beans). Consider purchasing or creating emergency food reserves. Consider purchasing more canned foods which can last for years. If you have freezer space, consider vacuum sealing food to keep them for longer.

Generally, look for ways to reduce extraneous cost and rely more on yourself and your immediate community. (This will be difficult to do, no mistaking it)

I use LibreWolf and then turn a fair chunk of the mitigations off. It’d be nice to have all the mitigations on, but I started to tire of every site not being dark mode at night, or the time being incorrect, or the JavaScript on the site breaking, or various other things when I don’t really care about the tracking.

It was also difficult or annoying to turn these mitigations off on a site-by-site basis for known-okay or trusted sites. Maybe someone could educate me, here though.

Okay, to preface I really hate giving Google money, but I hate ads more, and paying for Premium also removes ads on YouTube apps across platforms. It also in some minuscule way rewards the creators I watch, but real support comes from Patreon.

Yes. Red flags all around

I agree with and support TikTok being banned as I believe it’s a detriment to society, and the sole reason why I’m okay with the government doing it is because they refuse to sell the company to some shell US one which would be more privy to our government’s oversight. If ByteDance were in it for the money, selling to a US shell company and trying to get as much money back to China as possible from the #1 social media app in the world would be THE priority. They flatly refuse to sell, so it’s not about the money, and that’s suspicious to me.

I do not yet have a PS3 and did not have one in the past, so the answer from me is no, and I unfortunately know nothing about that.

Hacked mine recently and have been playing some PSP games in multiplayer with a real PSP over ad-hoc wireless that just works. It’s beautiful.

The AAA industry has made some really great games but I see - increasingly over time - a lack of interactivity in the games in favor of heavy movie-like narrative. It is unfortunate that adding depth of interactivity in a AAA space requires an immense amount of work to polish those interactions to look good / real / natural. However, we’re running up against graphical performance issues. It’s time to bring back those interactions, perhaps sacrifice a bit of quality to polish these interactions up, and make games that have more player choice.

100%.

I know this is a thread for someone new, but perhaps as a future fix: I grabbed a mini PC to do plex transcoding and all of Plex’s content is on a separate NAS with a 14TB RAID. I think the mini PC has 500GB by default

PS2 base models were BC to PS1

PS3 base models were BC to PS2 (and PS1) even before they added digital-purchased emulated copies.

PS Vita has a built-in PSP that can play digital versions of those games as well as PS2 ones.

PS4 had a very limited selection of PS2 games released digitally for it.

PS5 is BC with PS4.

They could do a lot better, though. Their digital offerings are extremely limited and have yet to tackle the issue of emulating the cell processor at reasonable speeds.