It is very rare that I login to GTA Online PC and there isn't a cheater on the server. Fortunately they aren't always griefers anymore.
It has been a long time since I saw UFOs all over the place, or random vehicles dropping down from above my head. It is still fairly common to have it raining money bags.
Now randomly blowing up, or someone using a unlimited, no cool down orbital cannon is still very common. I find the cheat that forces you out of any vehicle especially annoying, but the most common one I see used is the invulnerable vehicle.
It is annoying when someone comes and kills you, then keeps killing you and there is nothing you can do about it. This one guys killed me, kept coming after me, I went and got my jet and hit his vehicle with at least 12 direct missile hits. There were a few other misses, but this was a vehicle which may have taken max 3 hits to blow up. Or the guy coming after me in his jet, slams into the ground, skids along it almost complete nose down, runs into a building, getting stuck in it for a while, then manages to wiggle out and fly away.
Sometimes it is hard to tell if someone is using a cheat, because there are some really good griefers that aren't cheating, they are just really good at the game. I have run into some of those too, but those are few and far between.

In the presentation they also talked about reworking water generation. Before you would just get rivers above land. Now you can get underground rivers and waterfalls. Or even flooded caves.

Wolfen wrote on Oct 3, 2020, 23:09:

jdreyer wrote on Oct 3, 2020, 20:43:
Hmm, there are already caves. And the Extreme Hills environment is pretty mountainous. I guess it will be interesting to see what they add.

Says it right in the second sentence. Improved generation and new features like lush caves and dripstone caves. Admittedly the caves were pretty boring over time so it's nice to see they may add something new to that.

I think it would have been better to call them spyglasses. The Telescopes allow you to see things in the distance without having to actually go there.

Mr. Tact wrote on Oct 4, 2020, 15:25:
Telescopes? Which do what...?

There is actually a very valid case here against Apple.
My worry is that if Epic fails, it will make it harder for someone else to win the case.
I don't know if Tim Sweeney is doing this for the people, like he says he is. Maybe he is just doing it for the profit of his own company. He may even be doing it for Epic Games Store IOS.
What ever the reason, he has been going about this the wrong way.
Fortunately Apple has as big an ego as Sweeney does. While some of the false representations may not be directly relevant to the case, you don't ever tick off a judge by making false representations.
Either way, this probably isn't going to have an outcome for at least a couple of years.

The case against Google on the other hand is on shattered thin ice. Samsung is one of the major Android phone sellers, and they have their Galaxy Store on every device they ship, no extra clicks. Installing other app stores isn't that hard either. That being said, this will probably drag out for years as well.

I don't think Descendant Studios were very good in negotiating dates.
I haven't read all the court documents, but it sounds like like they entered into a contract with Little Orbit LLC that they would release Decent in 2019.
When it became apparent that Decent was not going to be released in 2019 Little Orbit LLC put pressure on them to get it done. This lead to to member of Descendant Studios to, according to Little Orbit LLC, make disparaging remarks about Little Orbit LLC. Thus the defamation part of the lawsuit.
Descendant Studios claims that Little Orbit LLC signed the contract late, delaying their ability to get it completed on time.
In the court filings, Little Orbit LLC was late in filing some required paperwork, which has held up the case.
Part of Descendant Studio's defense is that the CEO did not know the some of the terms in the agreement with Little Orbit LLC.

I don't know the validity of these claims, but from partial quick reading of the court filings, it sounds like both companies lack proper organization. If you are going to launch a lawsuit, you think you'd have everything in order first. If you are going to sign an agreement for help from another company, your CEO should know what is in that contract.

I'm not sure why people are worried about the longevity of their drives with it "defragging" every startup.
According to Microsoft, when disk optimizer runs on an SSD, it just executes a trim command. It isn't supposed to move data around on a SSD. Moving data around on a SSD doesn't really help performance.
Now it might be that people don't trust Microsoft to be telling the truth. It might be that people don't trust Microsoft to properly detect their drive is a SSD, or maybe they don't understand how Windows 10 is supposed to work with drives.

"Apple has a well-earned reputation for security"
Starting with a flat out lie isn't a good start to the story.
Then I go to read that you have to use Safari. Who uses Safari unless they are on iOS, and thus have no choice?

OSX/MacOS has a long history of extreme poor security. Mostly stemming from using out of date third party tools. We aren't talking partially out of date either. One third party tool hadn't had its version updated for 8 years. The group maintaining the tool were constantly updating it and making security fixes, but Apple didn't consume them.

There have been times that reporters have asked hacking groups about if they go after Macs. The general consensus was there aren't enough Macs, and they don't pose enough of a challenge.

It is sad to hear you are shutting down in 12 months, but that is kind of expected when you get bought by EA.
Hopefully the 2 ex Bioware employees now at Wizards of the Coast will come out with the good games you used to make.

Lucky and stupid are not the same thing. Apple has survived in spite of constant stupid decisions. We aren't talking about slightly stupid decisions, we are talking completely stupid.
We are talking about being the market leader in computers and loosing it.
We are talking about being able to become tge market leaders again and squandering it.
We are tslking about being the market leader in music devices and squandering it.
We are talking about the ability to be the world leader in cellphones and squandering it.
We are talking about being the world leader in music and squandering it.

.This isn't stumbling, this is showing a level of incompetence that most companies couldn't afford to do once. Just look at Nokia. Apple has done this at least 8 times.

They are going from an unimaginable stupid development cycle, to an extremely stupid one!
Sure that is an improvement, but not much of one.
How do inept people keep ending up as team leads at large companies?

Is that Overwatch 2 for mobile?

And here I thought it was actually, "People using Two-factor Authentication are putting their security at risk."
Honestly, both Facebook snd Twitter have been found exposing the second factor contact information to external entities risking our security in the process. This secondary factor already being bypassed by finding the phone number of people and intercepting the time limited codes.

Epic Games: Please use our store, we know it sucks, but we will give you more of the money.
Gearbox: More of the money! YES!!!
Epic Games: *looks at Borderlands 2 sales* We can't preload that to that many people our store sucks too much.
Customers: Screw EGS, I'll wait for the sale on Steam
Epic Games: Wait, pre-sales of this game are sucking so badly that we can handle that load. Hood news everyone!
Epic Games: Everyone?

Creston wrote on Jul 31, 2019, 11:19:
Can't fault his math, but I find it curious that he says he can stay on the front page of the EGS for a longer time than with Steam (Certainly a possibility), but then he releases around the same time as BL3.

No offense, buddy, but which of these two games do you think is going to be front and center?

Maybe thats the plan. Release with BL3 and hope that both bring enough people with money to actually buy the games. After all, isn't EGS just filled with poor steamers, 13 yo with no money and people waiting on the next free game?

Someone else has already stated a short list of their long list of high profile product shutdowns. My worry is that he mentioned music and video.

I consider digital video a complete failure now. Apple Video is useless unless you bend over for an iDevice. Play For Sure, or was it play absolutely nowhere? Disney Anywhere shutdown, except for the US. Ultraviolet is gone soon. Flixster is shutting down the last pieces. Netflix, Prime, Crave, HBO Now, CBS All Access, Hulu you have no idea if the program you want to watch will still be there tomorrow. Even if they own the full rights, it can disappear, or be altered.

Microsoft's R&D team back in 1997 found out through extensive research that password change requirements were mostly harmful to security.

Non-technical people it was safe to get them to change their passwords every 2 years. It could be pushed as low as 1 year, but it would start creating security problems.

Technical people it was safe to get them to change their passwords every year. It could be pushed as low as 6 months, but it would start creating security problems.

Even with this research, the Server Team still recommends changing domain passwords every 30 days. I know at one point the Windows Server default was to change every 45 days.

DrEvil wrote on Apr 17, 2019, 11:49:
Everything that was actually promised was there at launch unless you believe conspiracy theories or pretend English doesn’t have context and subtext.

Yes, content matters, let me show you the lies of Sean Murray. Most of the videos people link to were within the last month before No Man's Sky released. As this had a disk release it meant that the game went gold (was completed) at least a month before. A quick search shows it went gold on July 7, 2016. Released August 8, 2016 for PS4, August 12, 2016 PC.

After it went gold, Sean Murray started to do press interviews and appearances on TV.
A short list of what he talked about:
-Being able to fly between galaxies if you want
-Something amazing at the centre of the universe
-You can run into other people on the same planet
-You will be able to play with your friends
-Name things and other people coming to that planet will see your names permanently
-Massive space battles with two sides that you can join in with one side
-Making friends with races
-Large number of unique procedurally generated spacecraft
-Planets rotating around the sun
-Landing on asteroids
-Destroying entire space stations
-*Early tech demo being used to represent final game up to, and post release*

Okay, so people were amazed when they made it to the centre of the universe and the game and there wasn't anything, the game just reset. I know since then they've added more, but the released game didn't have that.

Some of these other things have been added since, but Sean was saying these were already in the game, after he knew exactly what had made it in, and what had been cut.

Using the early tech demo to represent the final game was a complete and blatant lie! It is one thing to capture in game footage and try to find the stuff that looks the best, it is another thing to use something that while at one point it looked like that, doesn't represent the final product.

Now some of these things are minor, but it doesn't change the fact that he lied about them. Also, with the naming of things, why did he lie about that. I don't know what it is now, but they made the design choice that names would only be kept for, I think, 1 week. Why say it is permanent, when you know it isn't?

The multi-player part was what really ticked people off. The PS4 cover did not list multi-player. It wasn't until launch day that they put a message up on their web site saying that there was no multi-player. Until that point, multi-player was heavily hyped by Murray in many interviews.

While I don't think the response of death threats was warranted, there is overwhelming evidence that Murray lied, continued to lie, then lied in his defense of his lies.

* REMOVED *
This comment was deleted on Apr 11, 2019, 16:29.

Avus wrote on Apr 8, 2019, 10:57:

Kajetan wrote on Apr 8, 2019, 09:59:
"Steam killing PC gaming" is THE most ridiculous nonsense i have heard in this context.

Valve was solely responsible for the indie boom, providing a 70% percent cut of all revenue to a developer where there was NONE before, only milestone payments and sometimes royalties for the big studios.

200% agreed. Steam was there when even the fxxking MS abandoned PC game and created XBox division and most "AAA" developers like "E fxxking A", Ubisuck... were concentrating on making console games. Did you remember how many sh!tty console port PC got within original Xbox to Xbox360 period. How many time Ubisuck said PC game is dead.

I will say the 2 things that kept PC gaming "alive" in the "dark age" were: Steam and World of Warcraft. And now all these fxxking devs and Steam haters are saying how bad is Steam when PC gaming is strong and console is sucking.

BTW, do anyone know how much MS/Sony's cut for PSN/Xbox store?

Having troubles finding the current numbers.

It used to be that Microsoft/Sony would take $10 per game sold. That is one of the main reasons console games used to be $10 more than their PC counterparts.

Microsoft added small ($5) and Indie ($3) flat fees later. These smaller prices had to only be digital distributions though.
Sony also added some lower price points. I have never seen anything public saying what those prices were.

Sony has been praised for their not charging for patches for digital downloads, and reasonable pricing to attract indie developers.
It is never said directly, but it sounds like Sony still just charges the flat fee and doesn't take anything extra for being in the store.

If you look at the shelf distribution model, you used to have to figure in 50% going to stores and distributors. So for a $60 game, $30 would go to retailers, $10 to Sony/Microsoft, leaving $20 for the development studio - taxes.

Beamer wrote on Apr 4, 2019, 07:00:
As I've posted on every single thread:

1) EPIC CANNOT GIVE YOU PRICE COMPETITION! THE MARKETPLACES DO NOT OWN PRICING, THE PUBLISHERS DO. Bolding, so hopefully people read it, but neither Valve nor Epic control pricing.

2) Epic is not reducing options, nor choice. The truth is, you've only ever had one option and no choices. Steam has been your only choice for nearly every game. Seriously, look through your library and see how many are available without Steam. You'll probably find less than 20% available elsewhere (at least when they launched.)

3) PRICES ARE NOT BEING "INFLATED LONGER." Again, pricing is controlled by the publisher. It will be change every bit as often as pricing had been changed before Epic, when that game was solely on Steam. The number of marketplaces has no impact on pricing, because, again, it isn't the marketplace picking prices, but the publisher, meaning they have one pricing strategy across every single marketplace.

As you have posted everywhere else, so it must be true.

1) This is 100% false. As part of these exclusive deals, combined with the lower selling charge, Epic can request the publisher to have slightly lower prices. They can even lower the selling charge as part of the deal. If the store becomes big enough they can even use refusal to list games as a negotiation tactic.

2) While I agree on not reducing choices, I do not agree on Steam being the only other choice right now. *Looks at his GOG library with many games that released on Steam the same day* It could be argued that Epic is fragmenting the market too much, but as they support other publishers, and most other stores do not, I don't agree with the fragmentation view.

3) Marketing 101, for hundreds of years limited time exclusives have been proven to keep the original price of goods up for an extended period of time. While this will not help Epic, it can help the publishers if they are willing to sacrifice initial sales and are confident that they have a good product.