Rest of the world: We’re deprecating C++ due to lack of memory safety. Please consider doing something for safety.

C++ commite: Here’s a new convenient operator to make it easier to do a potentially unsafe, multi-level pointer dereference.

Thanks for the interesting details. Glad to see there’s an offline version that disables photogrammetry.

The church in england is a good example where a a generic rectangle building model doesn’t work. They could improve the offline version by adding a church model in the set of offline models, and use it for 90% of church in western Europe.

A fully realistic model of every single building may be cool for architects, future historians, city planners, gamers that are sightseeing… but don’t help much when learning to pilot. Having a virtual world that look similar to the real one, with buildings of the right size and positions, landmarks, and hero buildings is good enough, and doesn’t require that much resources. There are others parts of flight simulators that are more important to work on.

I happen to know a bit about game and simulators. From a plane’s point of view, houses dont look unique. A small number of models is enough to fairly represent most houses. There may be a minority of structures that are really unique (stadiums, bridges, landmarks, …) but the vast majority of buildings aren’t unique. Even if two building have different heights, it’s possible to reuse textures if they’re built from the same material.

MSFT appears to have designed the simulator by considering every building is unique, but if they compared buildings and textures, ideally using automation, they would see there’s a massive amount of duplication.

I’m not suggesting putting the whole world on a 120GB disk.

That being said, most of the textures and building geometries used for San Andreas may be reused for other cities in the west coast. Areas between cities that have a lower density could take much less space.

So doubling the physical area covered doesn’t necessarily require doubling the amount of data. But the bandwidth usage from MSFT’s simulator suggest they are not reusing data when they could be.

GTA 5 require 120GB of disk size, not 500GB. And this include everything, game engine, assets, and the whole area. https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/203428177/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PC-system-requirements

Because everything has to fit on the average game PC or console storage, they have some pressure to optimize data size. A simulator that streams everything have less constraints on data size, less motivation to keep size reasonable.

This shows they’re not trying very hard to optimize the simulator, but instead throw hardware and bandwidth at it, and expect users do the same.

Open world games like GTA allow flying over dense areas without using 180Mbps of bandwidth.

Translation: We’re extremely short staffed, so we are shaming our employees into sacrificing their vacation

That’s interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.

My point is having a very old constitution isn’t much of a boast if keeping it as-is causes political issues.

Tradition and inertia.

The USA is proud to have the oldest and longest-standing written constitution. The fact it hasn’t been rewriteen in a long time help explain why there’s still an electoral college, slavery for prisoners (13th amendements), and weak regulation of campaign finance.

Arkane is a gem, don’t close it damnit

That may be stretching the definition of the survival genre a bit, but the game does have some survival characteristics.

Anyway that's the closest thing to a survival game that I enjoyed playing.

Prey

It has a good storyline. It's not horror focused, and ennemies won't suprise as much as in resident evil or doom. They're mostly there to add difficulty or be part to the mission. Recycling makes the low amount of munitions/inventory tolerable.

Please enforce this for console games as well. Digical games and DLCs are typically more expensive than both new and used physical games. Physical games prices usually decrease few months after release, digital one rarely do.

It's obvious that vendors rely on digital restriction (aka DRMs) to kill the used market and sell older games at higher price. I'm avoiding digital games and DLC because of this, and I'm reluctant to buy a new console given the hard push toward digital games and attempts to kill the used market.

Half Life 25th confirmed

Prices definitely increased, over the last 20 years new AAA games price increased from 45-50 EUR to 70 EUR.

With inflation taken into account that would probably mean flat prices.

With the increase in the numbers of players, the spread of DLCs and micro transactions, I suspect revenue increased even with inflation taken into account.

Could it be the cost of creating game is rising faster than inflation? Or game studio just got more greedy?

Well, another Mass Effect now looks less likely.

How many people work at Bioware right now? I wonder how big of a cut it is for the company.

My guess is either gambling addiction or money laundering.

I wonder to what extent gambling addiction is fueling the growth of casual/social gaming.

Loot boxes in video games have been linked to problem gambling.

Candy Crush is using a strategy that is “known as a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement and is the same tactic used in slot machines”.

I played Watch Dogs 2 back when there were enough players to make it interesting, then Watch Dogs Legion but didn’t enjoy as much as the previous one. Played a couple single-player video games since.

NFT sounds like a convoluted way to earn money for games. If a company can make a exciting, engaging, fun to play game, can’t they just sell them? Adding NFTs into the game/gameplay might just annoy players and scare people away.