People do all the time and it makes no sense to me.

I assume it’s people who are highly motivated by hype and the community conversation to play something while it’s in the zeitgeist, the same as people who want to skip stuff to play story games that are direct narrative sequels without bothering to play anything before it, presumably just because it’s popular and catches their eye.

Probably the same drive that keeps pre-orders and day one sales so high, despite it pretty much always being a better idea to wait a year or so for sales/updates/etc.

Oh, does it? I was literally thinking to myself that Teardown was an interesting example of destruction, and wondering how they did their lighting. RT makes perfect sense, that must be one of the earliest examples of actually doing something you really couldn’t without RT (at least not while lighting it well).

But yes, agreed that recent performance trends are frustrating, smearing DLSS and frame gen to cover for terrible performance. Feels like we’re in a painful tween period with a lot of awkward stuff going on, and also deadlines/crunch/corporate meddling etc causing games to come out half-baked. Hopefully this stuff does reach maturity soon and we can have some of this cool new stuff without so many other compromises.

The big benefit of raytracing now, imo (which most games aren’t doing), is that it frees games up to introduce dynamic destruction again. We used to have all kinds of destructible walls and bits and bobs around, with flat lighting, but baked lighting has really limited what devs can do, because if you break something you need a solution to handle all the ways the lighting changes, and for the majority of games they just make everything stiff and unbreakable.

Raytracing is that solution. Plug and play, the lighting just works when you blow stuff up. DOOM: TDA is the best example of this currently (although still not a direct part of gameplay), with a bunch of destructible stuff everywhere, and that actually blows up with a physics sim rather than a canned animation. All the little boards have perfect ambient occlusion and shadows, because raytracing just does that.

It’s really fun, if minor, and one of the things I actually look forward to more games doing with raytracing. IMO that’s why raytracing has whelmed most people, because we’re used to near-flawless baked lighting, and haven’t really noticed the compromises that baked lighting has pushed on us.

Mhm, fair point. Although… I would say the steam deck’s popularity and proof of viability as a gaming device is doing an immense amount of work on its own. I built a gaming PC ~2 years ago, and even as a long time developer and someone comfortable with a UNIX terminal I opted to get a copy of Windows for gaming, and had to awkwardly get to grips with it and find tools to get it playing the way I wanted.

It’s only ~1 month ago that the prevalence and maturity of the steam deck (combined with Windows recall re-emerging🤮) finally had me at ease enough to give Bazzite a shot, and since jumping myself and expressing how happy I am with it, 2 of my long term “on the fence” friends have asked me questions and are starting to try Linux themselves.

Larger Linux market share, regardless of how it gets there, gives broad confidence in Linux, and also pushes developers and Steam itself to maintain Linux support and tools like Proton, which reinforces the cycle, even if it doesn’t help us “kill Windows” for as long as users don’t understand how to install it.

Might be a good use case for Anubis, in addition to the URLParam passwords mentioned elsewhere. Enough protection to prevent trivial brute force scraping, while also being basically invisible to users.