Dr Jess Birch

Researcher (program analysis); technical artist turned (sometime graphics) programmer; long-retired game critic; reader of the Local timeline; very tall queer enby.
Paid to do a great many different things over the years.

Public Key

npub1tqdn4a4l9vdazgenen6asmy3vwpc4qjmasmu0a0m2ja8v3lpa58qnctrwa

NIP-05 Address

shivoa_at_mastodon.gamedev.place@mostr.pub

Profile Code

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relay.mostr.pub

relay.nostr.band

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Last Notes

2024-11-10 12:27:21

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@npub14yq…rfl3 I'm glad I'm not going mad.
I was at "I want to say Halo but it's too nice for any of the older games and Infinite, which is what I'm steering towards, doesn't have meaningful shadow tech for the distant terrain/tree cover". Especially the waterfall was making me think about maybe new God of War or what even has this kind of imposing cliff faces at this fidelity.

2024-10-28 07:51:54

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@npub10rx…h0m0 Is this CoD new achievements or are they bundled in with the last CoD-launcher? I know the previous game had the same achievement list as the game from the year before + the F2P Warfare 2.0 title so it was bundling all these together (so "have you played this CoD" population also included anyone who played any multiplayer or campaign the previous year's release and also all F2P players; a huge player population many of whom may not even have digital entitlement to new campaign).

2024-10-02 08:41:42

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 The details from Valve when posting about this many months ago was that Germany is totally happy for this to be purely the Steam internal survey rating, not the German government rating. (I think the captured message there says this, but with possibly less clarity than the Steam post from March 1st that also makes clear this is a legacy game issue because all new games already ran into this rule.) https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/4183351393029705362

2024-06-26 01:03:29

"This game has X 'routes' & so, to get my 'value' out of the game, I must experience them all so I got everything I paid for."
How common is this view in the playerbase? How can we write meaningful narrative choices with consequences (ignoring the economics of doing so) if players are unable to accept that they have agency to choose paths & doing so does close off the path not taken? I hate the idea of people "farming" all paths because they feel like unseen content 'steals' from their value.

2024-03-22 10:19:34

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 👵 Oh no, I wasn't prepared for hearing this!

2024-02-19 15:13:17

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 Or even "remind me my password" rather than "reset my password" - they should never know and so can only reset it, not tell you what it is.

2024-02-09 04:53:53

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@npub1j6x…q4dz In the advanced view (may be at the top of the single column when you select it) then at the top right of the Notifications list is a settings icon (3 horizontal bars with squares on them - like a sound mixer). You can turn off "Play sound" for each type of notification individually so you avoid the audio feedback.

2024-02-09 04:53:53

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2024-01-25 19:25:47

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@npub1a8d…5dtz That is my reading of the situation.
Malicious compliance with the EU ruling on their store operations being anti-competitive. Their marketplace is now charging a fee to access the OS features ("core technology") when you go over a million new installs.

2024-01-21 19:18:02

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 Paid about that too. Same of one of the 3400 UK New Vegas CE boxes they made, including branded playing cards. Or the Halo 3 cat helmet. Bioshock box including Big Daddy figure. Alan Wake 1 box.
All far cheaper than the $70 digital edition of the base game we're expected to pay for a code that lasts only as long as the CDN servers are up (and self-destructs upon our death / cannot ever be resold or gifted to a new player who wants to legally experience a classic). 😩

2024-01-17 09:37:37

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 Due to modern data privacy laws, I think currently you have to "link your accounts" (at last once per publisher, if not once per game) rather than it happening automatically in the background. But back in the day I remember some stink about sharing of details without any user interaction (on the Xbox side, because back in the PS2 days it was up to the publisher to run all the online services themselves rather than Sony).

2024-01-17 09:26:45

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 Didn't we lose this battle the day EA killed the Dreamcast by not turning up for it?
That gave EA the leverage to demand that when Xbox Live was created that they would get access to email details & run their own shadow servers for their games on OG Xbox. This has led to that sort of thing being demanded by others, so our details are harvested by publishers from our console online accounts (this stuff just surfaces that process by making explicit you have a publisher account).

2024-01-04 14:25:13

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 I'm sure that some of what I do today can still be traced back to Torque Game Engine, or maybe even earlier engines that I was building mods on & how they exposed their internals via the modding API.

2024-01-02 12:55:00

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 This is basically Bing (with some custom tweaks and some secondary source). On my (personalised as logged in) Bing results, Steam is even lower (under wiki & pcgamer article), Itch still #1

2023-12-22 15:02:00

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 Gotta be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(video_game)#Expansions

2023-12-21 14:28:53

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@npub10r2…w6yx Politicians where I am are all cheering inflation getting below 4%, meanwhile food inflation is still over 9% and some stores are selling basic items at well over twice the price they were a few years ago (many of which have similar lying labels like "price promise" or "great value"). ☹️

2023-12-20 08:27:49

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 TIL! https://smwspeedruns.com/Score_Manipulation

2023-11-28 07:51:19

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 Feels like a huge difference between having your independent studio make payroll & happens to have a deal with an external publisher to help funding (miss a milestone build or some other contract stipulation & the studio internal mgmt would need to pivot hard to find alternative income but it's in-house) vs being a subsidiary of a major publisher (who are the ones who run your payroll & could reassign anyone on the project at any moment).

2023-11-14 13:52:35

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 It's a shame they copy in charts for average game size and average cost per year to buy storage but don't chart the combined result (eg cost to buy enough storage space to hold 15 average size games released that year). If storage is getting cheaper faster than game sizes are growing then it's a win in terms of cost to buy a suitably large drive for your next gaming system.

2023-11-08 08:34:55

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 I finally upgraded my old desktop from an overclocked 1070 to a 4070 (which I'm running at TDPdown to use less power on average than a stock 1070) and the upgrade in settings + performance is not staggering (it has been many years and the $550 4070 is not quite a direct price swap for the $400 1070 from 2016) but is very substantial. Almost modern games which maxed out a 1070 to hit a 60fps game limit now run at ~50W idling, no fans spinning up on the 4070.

2023-11-08 08:30:36

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 Really depends on the game and setting though, right? Put Alan Wake 2 into the mix and it's a very different story. Also note that the board power is almost halving there, in some cases your "upgrade" is working within the 125W window that laptop dGPUs operate within.

2023-09-12 19:22:37

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@npub1dd2…lvc5 Absolutely. People suggesting that 5% royalties is the thing to move to are clearly not against paying a decent fee for engine use as long as it's proportional to revenue rather than capable of exceeding total revenue from the user via some stupid system of metrics for how much you owe.

2023-09-08 07:00:32

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 I hear it's going to be as fast as a Series S, as light as a DualSense, and get 5 hours of gaming out of a 10 Whr battery! 😆

2023-09-01 06:19:48

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@npub1aw2…8vv5 I'm reminded of the classic caveat on top of this, "lifetime only means the lifetime of the product so can be terminated at any point".
10TB of storage until the moment the company decides it no longer makes sense for them to keep giving you that access because there aren't enough new customers buying new accounts or uploading novel data (for their AI) to make it worth it.

2023-07-07 13:41:44

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@npub1nhw…g2sy Only with the multiplayer titles (that can have their servers taken down before I even think about them). Otherwise it's always worth having something in case I want to inspect some aspect of them one day. And Epic can afford whatever they're paying the devs/publisher, if there is a per activation fee in the payment agreed.