Comments 7,425

Re: This Gorgeous 'Stop-Motion' Adventure Swims Onto Switch 2 Next Month

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@Indielink
I do agree with the last part! With so many characters and animation blending and everthing, it'd be a bit much. :v

In regards to the real-ness of the stuff, if you're telling me they did 360 scans of the real-world lit miniature sets, and cleaned up the scans to run real-time, then that's pretty cool. Even if that still gives off a bit less of a tactile feel than photographs/recording from the actual gameplay angle would.

Re: Upcoming Resident Evil Remakes Have Pretty Tiny File Sizes On Switch 2

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@johnedwin
Oh, I know, but over the course of a system's life, Nintendo themselves will be renegotiating production prices, and the price for larger cartridges typically comes down for third parties as well.
It becomes easier to strike a good deal when they know at Nintendo that a system is a success, and that they will be ordering in large bulks.

But. If not many use cartridges at all, prices won't ever come down. :--/

Re: Nintendo States That It Has No Plans To Ditch Physical Media

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@NintendoWife
They ARE also constantly in the market for eliminating physical products when they can elsewhere.
The only Club Nintendo rewards were all physical, but had to be shipped around, and it was a hassle. All the stuff you can get for your points now are digital trinkets. :-/

Re: Capcom Is Looking To Evolve Its RE Engine Into An 'AI-Era Game Engine'

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@jsty3105
Oh sure, I know that we only have as nice tools as we do now BECAUSE money was invested in letting the creators spend more time on creating and less time on technical challenges.

Development time and team sizes still both bloated violently though, because everyone was competing to put MORE in their games. Bigger, better, faster, cheaper, as Jeffrey Katzenberg puts it.

When we hear about tools like this being developed, to me it smells like wishing to enable smaller teams with shorter time to STILL output the same board-approved "AAAA" products. Which isn't evil by itself.
But, it likely isn't REALLY about creativity, and more about production capacity.

Re: Opinion: I Played Mario Kart Tour Every Day For Seven Years, And What Am I Left With?

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I'm quitting my final "daily game" in less than a month. That's Duo Lingo, once I hit my first 1000 day streak (and the family plan I'm part of gets canceled).

Never will I allow any game of any genre to hook me like that again, with all these little retention schemes and mind games. I've been through quite a few of them over the last fifteen years, and when it ends it's that same hollow feeling of having wasted hours, days, and weeks of my life.

Re: Final Fantasy VII Revelation Is A Game-Key Card On Switch 2, And It's No Wonder With That File Size

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@DennisReynolds
As a technical director of graphics for animation and videogames I can tell you that you are largely wrong.
The general size of a game doesn't grow that rapidly from the individual texture being large, but rather from having three or more different version of it for normal maps, specular maps, and so on, as well as multiple versions of each map type in different resolutions, for facilitatating graphics setting on PC (and leaving them in in console versions out of laziness) or for LOD adjustments, to avoid relying on automatic mip-mapping, or coming up with other solutions.

Then there's the general unwillingness in modern production settings to make sure you reuse existing assets throughout a game when appropriate, when this could and should be done to reduce file size. This is purely a production issue. In modern games, you'll even find the same exact model and texture (even whole texture packs) existing multiple times in the game files. You'll also find many entirely unused assets, and older or broken versions of the ones used.

While I sound antagonistic here, I don't mean to say that YOU as a person are largely wrong. Just that it is a largely wrong assumption (that game publishers have had luck propagating) that the file sizes of games grew this big because of their visual fidelity, and an entirely wrong assumption that in this specific case the game couldn't look exactly the same, and take up half the space (or less), if it mattered to the heads of production that they meet such a target. But, it would cost money they aren't willing to spend, and consumers will accept the file size anyway, believing that they're paying for great graphics.

4K textures you actually see are NOT what makes a game take up over one hundred gigabyte.

Re: Hideki Kamiya Says Capcom Has "No Awareness" Of How Scary Resident Evil Is

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Newer RE game are very different from the original trilogy.
I do understand what he's saying.
In growing with the audience, it's no longer enough for a new RE to be able to scare a 12-year-old. You must be able to frighten a seasoned horror player of 40.

This is likely part of the reason why the next generation played Five Nights at Freddy's instead.

Re: James Pond Publisher Denies AI-Generated Trailer, But No One's Buying It

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@Aquinas
I'm not complaining. I'm actively resisting.
Monetarily, intellectually, and politically.

Adapting for me is developing methods to avoid having to look at AI-art and text, while providing tools to others for doing the same. Adapting is charting and documenting the ways in which data harvesting and non-human processing of my sensitive information is infringing on my creator rights, legal rights, and human rights.
Adapting is following the moneyflows and contributing what I can to holding investors, politicians, and pundits responsible.

I'm not pretending the next generation hates AI. I'm observing the 20-somethings I teach clearly take a stance of avoiding to interact with it when at all possible, while requesting ways in which they can be assured they will be interacting with humans and things made by humans.

The bits of AI that are acceptable are the same bits that have always been acceptable. The specially trained learning tree algorithms that perform specific tasks which a human have asked them to perform, where the same human will assume responsibility for both the severity of any errors and the morality of the process.

Re: James Pond Publisher Denies AI-Generated Trailer, But No One's Buying It

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@Aquinas
Very polite of you to assume that the "next generation" after me is gen alpha. I'm talking about gen Z.

And 10 year olds do stupid stuff they shouldn't be doing all the time. They haven't learned to understand the consequences of their actions.

I have a fair amount of confidence they will grow up to distance themself from AI to a larger extend, and I'm certainly not seeing any of the ten-year-olds I know enjoy AI-art at all, which is most of the "AI" we are covering in this thread.

Re: James Pond Publisher Denies AI-Generated Trailer, But No One's Buying It

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@Aquinas
I teach the next generation, and I can tell you for a fact that most of them hate AI with a burning passion. But sure. They too will eventually die.

I joke here, but really, the only ones that seem to really love AI are gen-X, and I suspect they will die before the rest of us, nomatter how hard they try to bring forth machine-god to grant them eternal life.

Re: James Pond Publisher Denies AI-Generated Trailer, But No One's Buying It

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@Aquinas
I'm not going to move on.
And I do notice it even if they have "fixed" the more obvious mistakes. And I won't accept the crap as neither the present nor the future. Studios who use it -should- be ratted out and -should- be punished.
I don't care if some of them get away with it. I'm not on a holy crusade to personally spot them all and throw them to the dogs, I'm genuinely more set on just avoiding looking at anything made with AI. Meaning I'd rather not give anyone the benefit of the doubt in this regard.

I'm part of several global movements fighting generative AI in media production, and while you think it isn't true that more people are speaking up, I'm certainly experiencing it to a much larger degree than was the case two years ago. The general audiences now raising their voices against slop may not catch all of it, as you say, and may even catch a lower total percentage than they used to, but they certainly don't like it and definitely don't want more of it if they had the option to go without.

Re: James Pond Publisher Denies AI-Generated Trailer, But No One's Buying It

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@JohnnyMind
I'm tired of the witch hunts too. A lot of small artists have really suffered because of them. In this case, however, a publisher is doing a barebones compilation of old games and are quite obviously using AI to promote it.

It'd be what it is if they didn't also lie about it. But you're right that none of this will have any effect on the quality of the games.

Re: James Pond Publisher Denies AI-Generated Trailer, But No One's Buying It

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Not going to watch the trailer. That bovine bomber "pipeline" is bad enough.

That absolutely is NOT a manual photoshop/illustrator redraw, and the following drawing is NOT an actual 3D render.
It doesn't even make sense why the redraw-step would be necessary. Or why you would paint over a 3D-render in photoshop there at the end.

This is generative trash. It looks bad, and they should be ashamed.