MudMan

I feel like the real lesson is being missed here:

Do not mess with Mbappé.

Hah. I almost wrote that I also think the two Ultima Undergrounds are better than Deus Ex despite being much older and having an objectively very clumsy interface. Then I thought that’d get us in the weeds and pull us too far back, so I took it out.

Look, yeah, Deus Ex rolled in elements from CRPGs and had good production values for the time. But all those things were nothing new for an RPG, they were just new for a shooter. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were a few years old. The entire Ultima franchise had been messing around with procedural, simulated worlds for almost a decade at that point, which in the 90s was a technological eon.

And yeah, System Shock had created a template for a shooter RPG, they just applied it to a lone survivor dungeon crawly horror thing, rather than try to marry it to the narrative elements of NPC-focused CRPGs, which is admittedly a lot more complicated. And Deus Ex was fully voiced and had… well, a semblance of cutscenes. In context it’s hilariously naive compared to what Japanese devs were doing in Metal Gear or Final Fantasy, but it was a lot for western PC game standards.

But it wasn’t… great to play? I don’t know what to tell you. Thief and Hitman both had nailed the clockwork living stage thing, and at the time I was more than happy to give up the Matrix-at-home narrative and the DnD-style questing for that. The pitch was compelling, but it didn’t necessarily make for a great playable experience against its peers.

I didn’t hate it or anything. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it. That corny main theme still pops up in my head with no effort on demand. I spent more time using it as a benchmark than Unreal, which I also thought wasn’t a great game.

Also, while I’m here pissing people off, can we all agree that “immersive sim” is a terrible name for a genre? What exactly is “simulated”? Why is it immersive? Immerisve as opposed to what? At the time we tended to lump them in with stealth games, so the name is just an attempt to reverse engineer a genre name by using loose words that weren’t already taken, and I hate it. See also: character action game. Which action games do NOT have characters?

Man, I am a grumpy old fart today.

Thanks for the link! International press is still running the 33% estimate they probably got from the French morning papers or have taken down the results, so my references hadn’t updated the number.

For the record, the image is not new, there was a lot of international coverage regarding Le Pen’s presidential chances in 2022. But presidentials are presidentials, only one person gets to win. Legislatives raise a lot of questions about parliamentary dynamics, alliances and the potential for the second round to generate another bout of Macron shooting himself in the foot followed by him shooting everybody else in the foot for good measure. That, and there is more paranoia about the tilt right across the EU and internationally about the US.

The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point. Well, that and the trenchcoats and shades. The Matrix was such a big deal.

But even then, each of those elements were already present in different mixes in several late 90s games. Deus Ex by some counts was one of the early culminations of the genre blending “everything game” we were all chasing during the 90s. The other was probably GTA 3. I think both of those are fine and they are certainly important games, but I never enjoyed playing them as much as less zeitgeist-y games that were around at the same time. I did spend a lot of time getting Deus Ex to look as pretty as possible, but I certainly didn’t finish it and, like a lot of people, I mostly ran around Liberty Island a bunch.

I played more Thief 2 that year, honestly. I played WAY more Hitman than Deus Ex that year. I certainly thought System Shock 2 was better. Deus Ex is a big, ambitious, important game, for sure, but I never felt it quite stuck the landing when playing it, even at the time.

I’m not of the opinion that more simulation and more “realism” are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.

FWIW, I’m seeing projections based on the counts that still have them at 34, but I guess we’ll see.

I agree that a resurrection of the cordon sanitaire is probably a positive and I agree that Macron was extremely clumsy, like much of the EU’s centre and demochristian right, in sliding towards far right positions they just can’t defend any better than the actual fascists. But still, from an international perspective France is now firmly in the club of Central European countries with a major fascist problem in a way it wasn’t yesterday, even if the outcome was already understood to be going this way.

Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.

I get that immersion tends to normalization…

… but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it’s 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.

It’ll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it’s still an underpants-threatening result in my book.

Oh, yeah, it’s ALL handwavy bulls#!t. It’s a 60s sci-fi TV show. A great one, but… you know.

I’ll say that the transporters are some of the most consistent pieces of tech they came up with, though, at least as they get explored over time. They need a beam, they are disrupted by shields and interference, they turn people into a data buffer “pattern” that seems to follow the way data would behave, in that they can add and substract to it. You need to assume they don’t use them as full-on cloning machines because of regulations, rather than tech limits, but it mostly makes sense.

Unfortunately the version that makes sense is the most disturbing interpretation, so they still need to handwave the crap out of it.

Yeah, I think in canon the curvy bit at the front of the ship (or the nacelles, sometimes) is just gathering dust to then burn into energy. It gets trickier with the transporter, because in theory the dust is going into a matter/antimatter thing, but if the transporter is fueling itself from the body it’s disintegrating… well, where’s the antimatter?

I think in their minds the transporter isn’t doing that, and is instead taking energy to both turn a person into a pattern and then build the pattern back into a person. Seems like a waste, but I guess the raw matter isn’t the real concern here.

But we know that’s not how transporters work. If that was the case you wouldn’t be able to get “accidents” where you end up with two copies of the same guy. The transporter must work like the replicator, not the other way around.

Also, that doesn’t work with some of the stuff they say, like how they don’t replicate anything alive, and so food does taste noticeably different. Plus… you know, no massive farm deck anywhere on the Enterprise and no transwarp to beam that in from a planet, so… we’re going to have to accept this stuff may be just handwavy bulls#!t at some point.

I’m a bit shocked that nobody has pointed out the obvious:

The economics of Star Trek are super inconsistent and make no sense because multiple writers had a crack and they each liked and believed different things.

Sometimes it’s a post-scarcity socialist utopia where money is obsolete. Other times, Picard invites someone out on a date and she answers “you buying?”.

This is obvious enough that multiple people have tried to fix it, which as always in franchise worldbuilding only makes things less consistent and more complicated. So now some things just can’t be properly replicated. Sometimes it’s because of regulations and laws, other times it’s because of technology limitations. Sometimes the Federation doesn’t use money but they still have it for trade, other times they use money, just for random commodities.

The middle of the road for Trek seems to be some form of socialdemocracy where you’re provided with anything you need and labor is largely vocational, but out in space there is enough variation over time and different areas that there is still a bit of a pseudo-capitalist economy even in regions where Federation-level post-scarcity tech is still available. Go into any more detail and the whole thing breaks down.

This goes for other political elements of the series, too. Picard gets super mad at the notion of endorsing religious beliefs in a prewarp society because he finds it barbaric. Meanwhile, Sisko is out there becoming Bajoran Space Jesus and everybody is just cool with that.

It’s almost like Rick Berman’s, Ronald D. Moore’s and Gene Roddenberry’s political beliefs were different from each other’s, huh?

You know the irony of this interpretation? By canon, replicators are energy to matter conversion devices. Basically a 3D printer using relativity to poof atoms into existence from an energy source.

Replicators are straight-up the most expensive way to make anything. Using that technology to make you a cup of tea is the most inefficient use of any resource put on screen in media history. It’s absurd. The notion that instead of heating up water you would go ahead and make the atoms out of energy is so much worse than just filling in a space station’s worth of water and carrying it with you into space just to keep Picard’s Earl Grey habit going.

It’s not the replicator at all that drives the post-scarcity, it’s whatever nonsense antimatter generator stuff dilithium is enabling where they get infinite energy forever. Although we know dilithium is a limited resource, since they don’t seem to just replicate some when they need it, so… somebody should do the math there and figure out how expensive all those Janeway coffees actually are.

Hi.

That’s called “socialdemocracy” and it’s been around for centuries. It’s actually older than the marxist concept of socialism, if you’re gonna get pedantic about it.

I get that Americans have completely sandblasted off any remaining meaning in the word “socialism”, first by having conservatives use it as an insult and then by having weird US lefties get all purity test about it, but most of the world has a pretty clear picture of socialdemocracy, it’s not that ambiguous. Most socialdemocrat parties across the planet are called some version of “Socialist Party”, “Labour Party” or “Worker’s Party”. It’s a thing.

So no, it’s not a bad habit. It’s just… what that’s called. It does get easy to mix up with the Marxist concept of socialism, which is likely why most marxist parties advocating for a socialist society are called “Communist Party” instead. The bad habit is to not challenge the fundamentally conservative, deliberate confusion between the two that any range of neoliberals and protofascists continue to use to pretend milquetoast socialdemocratic policy is some form of revolutionary action.

Man, US politics are so weird.

Italians will cook your pasta inside a whole wheel of cheese. Spaniards deep fry pork belly and serve it as a snack. Last time I was in Eastern Europe I thought something was a sweet only to discover it was a lump of straight-up pork fat. Just raw. To munch on.

Americans may be more consistent at eating gross murderfood regularly and in large quantities, but they sure aren’t the only ones to have it.

Fun fact, in many places, soft-serve ice cream is known as “Italian ice cream”.

What we are seeing here is a slightly botched traditional Italian lunch.

Don’t eat free to use sandwiches, either. Ew.

The UX is mostly garbage on those anyway.

Man, you must be a riot at parties.

Technically all sandwiches are proprietary. Don’t eat public sandwiches, we went through a pandemic, we should know better.

I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it’s two instances at most, so… I don’t know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It’d pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you’re only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you’re playing.

But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that’s the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I’ve done that before for that reason.

I suppose it’s why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.

OK, yeah, that makes sense. And it IS pretty unique, to have a multi-GPU system available at home but just idling when not at work. I think I’d still try to build a standalone second machine for that second user, though. You can then focus on making the big boy accessible from wherever you want to use it for gaming, which seems like a much more manageable, much less finicky challenge. That second computer would probably end up being relatively inexpensive to match the average use case for half of the big server thing. Definitely much less of a hassle. I’ve even had a gaming laptop serve that kind of purpose just because I needed a portable workstation with a GPU anyway, so it could double as a desktop replacement for gaming with someone else at home, but of course that depends on your needs.

And in that scenario you could also just run all that LLM/SD stuff in the background and make it accessible across your network, I think that’s pretty trivial whether it’s inside a VM or running directly on the same environment as everything else as a background process. Trivial compared to a fully virtualized gaming computer sharing a pool of GPUs, anyway.

Feel free to tell us where you land, it certainly seems like a fun, quirky setup etiher way.