dudacles

Not sure if this violates advertising rules on the forums, but it is a free alpha version, so I assume it's okay? Anyway, I spent about 10 minutes in this. It's pretty cool, good job on making this! It probably ran about at 15 fps on my (by this point decidedly mid-tier) GTX 1060, but that comes with it being in alpha. Not sure how much the quality of my PC is related to the performance though, with it working in a browser? It's a cool concept and it could be great for some mindless fun if you refine it, but (perhaps partly due to the low framerate) the thing that you should then chase is exactly what Rocket League does absurdly well, which is the feel of the controls. The weight of the cars and the ball, the movement speed, and the way everything interacts makes Rocket League awesome to play in the first 60 seconds. But then it's also completely physics-based, and there is almost limitless depth in the way the cars and ball interact. Even through all of the competitiveness and toxity of the higher ranks, simply driving around the Rocket League pitch and hitting that ball feels great from minute one through hour 2000 of playtime.

Of course, the brilliant balance that Rocket League achieved with this is the reason it's perhaps one of the greatest games every (in my opinion), and so it by nature is very hard to achieve. But as a lofty goal it's probably what you should strive for within your own scope (depending on where you intend to take this game of course.) Perhaps the ball needs to be a bit more weighty, or you need some kind of straight edge on the baton? Because getting the ball to go where I wanted wasn't immediately intuitive. The baton and the ball just sort of rolled away from each other time and time again, and it was not obvious how to get the timing right to set up a smacking shot. Of course, a higher framerate would've made it easier as well.

Also, when I tried to change the graphics setting to improve the framerate, first the game froze, and when I reloaded the page and tried again, I could get into the menu but the options would always immediately flip back to their original setting (i.e. "shadows" was locked to on). This makes it harder for people to try the game, I imagine, if the problem is not only there for me.

Regardless, great work! Making this is already a very big task. Good luck with the rest of your process.

I really wished this game had hit right for me. I'm about 4 hours in, and the gameplay has been fairly okay (the stealth, gunplay, and hacking are all good, though not great). But I love the city. I love driving around in it, I love walking through the bars, and looking up at the sky in the middle of the street and seeing the high-rises above me is great. The story has not blown me away thus far, but it feels like a good vehicle to take me from one place in the world to another, and just walk those Night City streets. It feels a like a game I could've really sunk into for a couple of weeks. I don't mind some of the aspects like side-missions being fairly superficial, issues that have been raised by the guys on the Bombcast for instance.

However, technically it has been so clunky that it just takes me out of the game too often, and I ended up refunding it to GOG. I'll buy it later, when I have a more powerful PC. With a GTX1060 and an intel i7 8th gen, a very much middle-of-the-road PC, I got acceptable (but not great performance out of medium setting, with the framerate somewhere between 35 and 45 fps. I could've lived with that, but there are too many visual bugs that really take me out of the experience, and for this game I really need the ability to sink into it and kind of forget it is a video game.

The palm tree textures often overlay every other thing that is being rendered in the environment, so I'll be staring at a wall and see clusters of weird, small palm tree silhouettes everywhere. It ruins the look of the city. The same goes for the smoke effect, which doesn't show as smoke to me but rather just white rectangles. And during story scenes there is often a an object that is just frozen in place, like chopsticks floating in front of Jackie's face the whole time while I was talking to him at a Chinese food stand early on. That type of stuff, in combination with the less-than-ideal performance (even at the lowest settings I am not getting far above 45-55 fps), makes me think that I should just wait. It's a shame, because I feel myself getting sucked in early on. I will likely enjoy this game a fair bit somewhere in the next couple of years. But man, those trees and that smoke... really make the environment look like shit far too often for me to be able to forgive it. Hope they can fix those types of issues relatively soon. After all these years, it feels like a pretty serious anti-climax, and I feel bad for the long-suffering grunt developers at CDPR who have had to do so much crunch in the name of putting out a product that "lived up to fan expectations", and have it be in this state in the launch week.

Really cool that you're doing this. I was actually kind of afraid of trying this game out despite quite liking Doom 2016 because everyone keeps going on about how difficult it is, and I am really bad at using mouse & keyboard to a high level of dexterity. Your posts made me want to go back and give this game a try anyway.

That was great, thanks for the work!

Is this a North American thing by any chance? I'm European, and while I know of the concept of surge protectors, I've never heard of anyone using them regularly, except for particular appliances which are very vulnerable or something. Also, I thought most modern electronics came with something this like built in.

Anyone with decent experience with the franchise who can offer some thoughts on PES2019? Is the gameplay good? I didn't buy 2018, and was toying with the idea of getting it.

I really hope Croatia win it. With Belgium gone, the team that tried to play football the most is out of it, and both France and England play incredibly boring, negative football I think. Croatia deserves to win it based on their willingness to play for me, but England will be tough tonight, and France will be very hard to beat in the final as well. Agh, too bad about Belgium. A sterling performance against Brazil followed up by a very tempered one against France.

Ben's immediate reaction, as he looks at Vinny for reassurance thatDan meant that shit he had just said, is now one of my favourite GB moments ever.

Greece sounds like a great setting to me. Not sure how ready I'll be for another AC when it comes out though, I've only just barely started inching my way through Origins.

I love it so very much. I'm absolutely terrible at it by "serious chess players'" standards, meaning that I'm better than someone who would play just knowing the rules and trying to figure out their approach on instinct, but I lose to most people who have spent any time at all studying theory and have a decent grasp on an opening. This is why, when I start playing blitz or something on a new chess website like lichess.org, or chess.com, I just keep hovering around the default rating, sliding around between 1100 and 1400. Or at least, that what I think that means. I will usually spend my breaks at work playing one or two five-minute blitz games on lichess.org or something.

However, despite my lack of skill at actually playing chess, I adore watching streams of high-level play with commentary. The coverage feeds by the Saint Louis Chess and Scholastic Center (Youtube channel here), the Chessbrahs, chess24.com, and chess.com are all great in their own way. When I'm not watching Giantbomb videos as a stand-in for "podcasts", 4-hour streams by the Saint Louis guys or any of the others work just as well. Chessnetwork is good as well.

I can sort of understand people who say that "chess is too cramped" or that "chess is too reliant on knowing the theory", but I do not feel like that while playing myself. I just have a great amount of fun playing against people of my own skill level online, and I feel the dynamic of games between super grand masters (the type of GMs who participate in the top tournaments) is not like that either. Those matches are a combination of their incredible knowledge of the theory on the one hand, and their instincts and insight into the position as it appears on the board. There is so much room for mistakes and brilliancies, that it often is exciting to me (though I will admit that rapid and blitz are typically more fun to watch than classical.)