The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming / Technology

Microsoft wants to make an Upgradable Console

I thought I’d be done talking about the latest Microsoft hooplah that’s been taking place, but the other day not long after talking about Microsoft’s attempt to get everyone to go over to their UWP platform I read an article that forced my head to hit my solid oak desk. Microsoft wants to make the XBox One an upgradable device.

“We see on other platforms whether it be mobile or PC that you get a continuous innovation that you rarely see on console,” he said. “Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger. And then you wait for the next big step function.”

I can only speculate at this point, but knowing Microsoft the XBox One’s upgrade path would probably consist of starting out the consumer with what one would consider bottom tier hardware, and give them the option of upgrading using Microsoft’s proprietary hardware. Basically the Mac of PC Gaming, only with a Mac at least you can still mod games far more openly than you can with Microsoft’s proposed walled gardened ecosystem.

Even other people, such as the CEO of Epic (makers of the Unreal Engine) has spoken out about how foolish this is.

“Unless Microsoft changes course,” Sweeney says, “all of the independent companies comprising the PC ecosystem have a decision to make: to oppose this, or cede control of their existing customer relationships and commerce to Microsoft’s exclusive control.”

Meanwhile on the Microsoft side:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX (user experience) required.”

Really? Then how come there are two different versions of the new Tomb Raider floating around with Microsoft’s being the one with issues such as missing features from the Steam release? If you buy The Witcher 3 from GOG or Steam for example, you won’t notice a difference. Same with most Steam and Nonsteam games as they both use the same executable and get the same updates. Microsoft’s method fragments the PC Gaming ecosystem by making dev’s choose between UWP and the more traditional means of developing a game, and consumers go over to yet another application (and OS if they haven’t moved to 10 yet) to grab these titles.

This move isn’t Boneheaded, it’s XBoneheaded.

Oh, and on a funnier note I had to change the brackets around user experience. In the original article they used [] instead of (). If I left the quote in it’s original state it would have read as:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX [user experience] required.”

Yeah, I’m happy with my current gaming experience thanks. 😛

News

Valve speaks out about the Winter Sale breach

Some say that it took too long getting back to everyone about it, people like myself say they responded in Valve Time. 😛

Link.

Dear Steam User,

As you may know, for a brief period on December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some Steam users seeing incorrectly cached Steam Store pages generated for other Steam users. If you are not familiar with the issue, an overview of what happened is available at http://store.steampowered.com/news/19852/.

If you accessed the Steam Store between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST on December 25th, your account could have been affected by this issue. If you did not use the Steam Store during that time, your account was not affected.

Between the times above, a requested web page for information about your Steam account may have been incorrectly displayed to another Steam user in your local area. This page may have included your email address, country, purchase history and last 4 digits of your phone number if one was associated with your account. It may have also included the last two digits of a credit card number or a PayPal email address, if previously saved for future purchases. It did not include full credit card numbers, Steam account passwords, or other information that would allow another user to complete a transaction with your billing information.

We are contacting you because an IP address previously used by your account to access Steam made a web page request as described above. Because IP addresses are commonly shared for home networks, mobile devices and by internet providers, we are unable to verify that your account was actually the one that made this request. For example one affected IP address was previously used by over 1,700 Steam accounts. Consequently we are notifying all users who have previously used this IP address.

This event did not make it possible to compromise your Steam account or make a fraudulent transaction from your account, but we want you to be aware of what information could have been seen by another Steam user.

We’re sorry this happened and have taken steps to prevent this problem from occurring in the future.

If you used the store between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST on December 25th and you have questions please email cachingissue@steampowered.com.

– Valve

They responded on March 3rd… 3/3 Half Life 3 Confirmed.

Gaming / Technology

Oh look, another Microsoft post.

Microsoft

Well, it must be that time of the year again where Microsoft dusts off the Phil Spencer bot to talk about how totally involved Microsoft wants to be in the PC Gaming market. Or sorry… I mean how totally involved Microsoft wants everyone to move to Windows 10 to partake in GFWL 2.0

PC Gamer held an interview with ol Phil, the guy known for telling people about their focus on engaging PC Gamers since 2014 and not really doing much about it… UNTIL NOW!

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming.

Oops, he misspoke. Let me correct that:

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming… By trying to make Windows 10 and our App Store relevant.

Fixed for accuracy.

There are games I was talking about earlier, like Ashes of the Singularity, a fast-paced RTS game—probably not the best controller game, and I want to make sure those games are great.

Don’t worry Phil. I hear Ashes of the Singularity runs great with the Steam Controller, even if you have a nonsteam version! You just need the exe and…. oh right.

What I want to make sure is that gamers on our platforms, you feel like you have access to as many games as you can, and as a developer you feel like you have the tools and service to reach as many gamers as you can.

As usual Microsoft continues to be unfashionably late to the party. Steam kinda beat you to that… years ago. They even tried to get you guys on board and you pretty much laughed at them and went off doing your own thing. Hell, GOG’s store is becoming great enough to compete with Steam. Meaning even they can go to town bitchslapping your sorry excuse for a store.

I think there are a real two factors that today differentiate what I consider PC and console gaming. One is input. We’ve said we’re going to support keyboard and mouse on console, and clearly you can plug a controller into a PC, so that’s not a trump card, but PC games have to—PC games can support keyboard and mouse, console games today usually don’t and for the most part can’t. The other thing is the play space itself. I’m usually closer to my monitor, it’s a smaller screen. All these are ‘usually’s. And my TV experience on a console, I’m further away, it’s more of a communal play experience. If I take my PC and I HDMI it into my television, and I use my wireless dongle to play with controllers, is it now a console or a PC?

I gotta hand it to him. He really has a way of stating the obvious. He sounds like he could just empty his bowels in amazement if he also found out you could store more than 1 TB of games on the average PC Master Race gamers system.

I think you could kind of get into scenarios where the hardware specs kind of overlap, probably at the fundamental level, or the hardware capabilities overlap enough where the differentiation kind of blurs. But the console experience is a dedicated gaming hardware device that is very appliance-like, instant on, ability to basically do one thing, which is play games, very well.

Really? Fascinating. Lots of people have instant on gaming systems these days too thanks to SSD’s. They make great boot drives, and you can even have more than one mechanical hard drive for storage. Mindblowing amirite?

PC is a multi-purpose device. I love that people play games on their PC. You see a ton of people playing games, even on Windows 10 already.

Good job! Gotta shoehorn Windows 10 in there! After all you guys have been doing a bang up job trying to shoehorn it into peoples Windows 7/8 updates.

But it also can do Outlook and load Photoshop and browse the web. So there are some fundamental differences about the hardware between the two that I think will always mean there are differences between console and PC gaming, and I want to embrace those differences, not try to get rid of them.

YouDontSayBlackWithTextSS

Thanks for clarifying. I was worried you were going to take away the ability to use Photoshop and the internet etc etc etc. I cried for weeks mourning the possible loss and much like a shining beacon of wisdom you confirmed that you are going to let us do computer things on our computers. Thank you Microsoft, thank you…

We talked about Halo Wars, we’ve talked about things that… it’s not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna wait and see.’ We’re in, right. We are in, and we want to make sure that PC gamers are able to play PC games that we can go build. I love investing more in PC games. It would be nice to invest in some very tried-and-true PC genres when we think about that, of, ‘hey, let’s go and build some great PC games as part of our portfolio.’ But no, the Quantum Break thing is definitely not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna try this out and see how it does.’ From the top of the company on down, we’re committed to making sure gaming is great on Windows, and we think first-party content has a role to play there.

Gaming was great on Windows. Anyone remember how often Microsoft released new versions of Direct X? From 1995 to 2003 we went from Direct X 1.0 to Direct X 9.0b. Then they kept using 9.0c for from 2004 to 2008 because gamers had better performance on 9c than 10 under Vista, which was maintained between 2006 to 2009. Then from 2009 to 2013 they developed Direct X 11. Then in 2015 they announced Direct X 12 because they needed something new to move people to a shitty operating system so that people could forget about Windows 8. Yeah, PC Gaming is important to Microsoft these days. We went from having a new version practically every year to having to run on the same API’s for over a decade. I feel your love Microsoft…

Phil: Yeah, well, we obviously have the same list, and maybe even a little longer than what the community has brought up around Rise of the Tomb Raider. Certain things will happen very quickly in terms of, like, mGPU support and stuff where there’s no policy, it’s just us working through the timeline of implementation. VSync lock, kind of the same thing. There’s specific reasons that it’s there, but it’s not something that’s kind of a religion on our side that this has to work. Modding, we’re focused on modding even on console with, like, Fallout. We obviously own Minecraft, we understand the importance of modding, and making sure that we support that in the PC ecosystem is critical to UWA success. Our goal is to make UWP [Universal Windows Platform] the best platform for game developers and gamers to support, but we know we’ve got room to grow.

Things would go better for Microsoft if they didn’t try to shove people into their own little world. Heck, even PlayStation is finally jumping on the Streaming bandwagon. Soon people will be able to stream their PlayStation games onto Windows and even Mac (No love for Linux though), and with Steam we already have the option of streaming from one system to another regardless of OS. Meanwhile you have to own Windows 10 if you want to stream your games from the XBone.

They are not Pro PC Gamer, they’re pro PC Gamer for Windows 10… and the fact that they’re using games like Gears Of War to lure people over to their new OS is absurd. They pulled this shit with Halo back in the Vista days and it failed miserably. Microsoft never learns.

Gaming / News / Technology

In other news: Microsoft is still as clueless about PC Gaming as ever

Microsoft doesn’t have much in terms of games on their App store, but if anyone is contemplating buying either their version or the Steam version it’s pretty much a no brainer.

You can buy Rise of the Tomb Raider from Steam, or you can buy it from Microsoft. The price is the same, but as How-To Geek recently explained, the games themselves are not. The Windows Store version does not allow vsync to be disabled, and it always runs in “borderless fullscreen” mode, which can potentially limit performance. Even more problematic, because Microsoft Store games are built on the new “Universal Windows Platform” rather than as conventional executable files, modding isn’t possible, nor can it be added to your Steam library, which means you can’t play it with the Steam controller.

Not that I would have much of a reason to mod a Tomb Raider game (since most of them don’t offer much other than graphical changes if even that), nor would I want to buy anything from Microsoft’s store. As far as I’m concerned Microsoft turned a blind eye to PC Gaming a long time ago. I’m sure they’re still kicking themselves for not taking Gabe’s idea for Steam back when it was just a concept.

Gaming

The Skyrim is still strong in this one

2016-02-27_00001

I’ve gotten back into Skyrim again over the last few days. Partly because there’s still so much to do in it, and so many more places to visit since I’ve installed more mods. We’ve also been taking ideas from my dreams, like throwing the idea around of creating a custom adventure. If this became an actual thing it would probably remain a private adventure because it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. But basically we’re giving my character a story. We already have a book and a ring, so that’s pretty cool.

2016-02-29_00004

I won’t go into full detail about it, as that could become a novel. But the ring is cursed and the book I found explains what the curse does among other things. The curse itself isn’t really terrible either. In fact it’s quite fabulous you could say, and overall strange. I can’t really explain it without going into full detail. And the details would ruin most peoples Skyrim immersions. :v

But ever since I was younger I’ve always liked taking my dreams and doing things with them. I would turn them into stories, and later on when software and computers became more powerful I would turn them into animations, now my Skyrim dreams seem to be transforming into a mod. 😀

Gaming / Technology

Some interesting discoveries in Valve’s VR test program

Valve leaked a test that people can use to confirm if they are ready for the new HTC Vive. I haven’t used it myself because I’m not really interested in getting into VR at this time as it’s a little too bleeding edge for this one. But since this is a Valve program people over at ValveTime have been having fun going through all the assets. It’s definitely worth a read. It has new models, newer versions of older models such as DOG from Half Life 2, a texture map for what is supposed to be the “Retired Engineer”, “Red Chell” and a lot more. Here’s an extremely creepy example of one of the many things found hidden in this program so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoucoXFPLPQ

I’m guessing those are headcrabs? I never knew how easily a dark map with nothing but errors and a random trickle of water could make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up like exclamations…

Work

May the storm bring forth the stupid

last night there was Thunder and Lightning while I was sleeping, it woke me in the middle of the night and gave me a weird dream I’ll have to divulge in a particular circle at some point. But on another note I think some of that stormy weather brought out the weird folk. I had to deal with a guy who claimed to be a homeless businessman who wanted to launch a new type of business where people could learn anything for free, ANYTHING! I won’t go into the full story because talking to him was like dealing with a man with 23 snakes in his mouth, and I’ve been called in to work on my day off tomorrow and I need sleep. But felt the need to write something up to get the annoyance out of my system. I’m sure if you catch up with me at some point I can give you the details on the whole score. I had to laugh that he didn’t know me at all and wanted me to design him a website… that day, for an entire $10 an hour… I actually make more than that now. He was also suspicious of me because I stayed mostly quiet while he spoke. He was unsure if I even knew what encryption was.

Oh well, I’ll save the rest of the story for another time.

Technology

Vulkan 1.0 arrives.

This will be good news on the Linux front (and for a bunch of people overall). Vulkan 1.0 released today!

Khronos’ aim with Vulkan is implementing a low-level API that is simpler and more efficient than its predecessor. The company says that “simple drivers allow for low-overhead efficiency and cross vendor consistency,” and that there is “layered architecture so validation and debug layers can be loaded only when needed.” Another benefit over OpenGL is Vulkan’s ability for multiple threads / cores to handle graphics work.

The Talos Principle has already called dibs as the first game to have implemented Vulkan support.

WBpMvLa

I think Vulkan is the kick in the pants needed to start off a proper competition between Linux and Windows, because unfortunately OpenGL as it stands is not up to par with Direct X. And I want to see Linux succeed as a gaming Operating System. Once things start to move I might have to open up Talos Principle under both OS’s and see how well things handle.

Site Related2

Some Blog Changes

With the help of my friends I recolored the website. It’s a new year and rather than get a new theme right now I’d rather stick with this one and give it a new color scheme. Another change that I did was make it so no one can comment on threads older than 31 days. If you have anything you want to say, say it in a thread within 31 days.