The Giant Beastcast: Episode 274

Hopefully Butt City has better platforming than Buttville.

put jeff's trackmania horn into flight simulator

Three clicks to mute any Windows program. I know you guys acknowledge this, but still. Having the updates come through the game is very annoying though.

@octaslash: right? They know you're playing it on W10 and W10 has a simple mixer that is quick to use if you want to mute anything. Why would they add an additional toggle and confuse the user?

@calibrono: H..how would the ability to mute the audio right there confuse the user? If that's the case there must be millions of very confused people when they accidentally mute a youtube video or spotify in the browser or app itself. Putting a mute button in there seems like the standard, common sense thing to do lol

@calibrono: The same reason volume controls would be on any Windows only application. Almost every program has sound controls. Who is going to be baffled by seeing a mute option in a program? I'd argue that it's more confusing not having one.

Maybe it sounds weird to more computer savvy people but my family is not the best with computers and the existence of a sound mixer on Windows would not even cross their minds. Whenever I told them about it, they had no idea what I was talking about and I had to show them. My family would also not be playing Microsoft Flight Simulator lol, but the point is that a lot of people probably don't know about it and most users would expect it to be in the program itself.

@tyler1285: You're totally right, the dude who took time out of his schedule amid both a raging wildfire and a pandemic to provide entertainment about video games should totally remain calm, cool, and collected when shithead neckbeards "well actually" his reasoned criticism over a stupid oversight.

You suck.

@tyler1285: 100% agreed, Jeff really needs to re-evaluate his attitude towards any type of advice or criticism from his fanbase, he comes across as such a reactive, overly defensive person at this point

Really great Beastcast, always enjoy when Jeff G gets to stop by. They talked about a ton of games!

Jeff was totally right that the launcher not having a mute button is crazy, I mean this is MICROSOFT. How does a company like that somehow miss that option?

At the same time, I was pretty surprised by the -intensity- of his reaction to chat, but I guess it's just indicative of the stress he's under. Disclaimer, I don't know his life so this is just assumptions, but I bet it's pretty hard to try and guide a site through a pandemic while trying to support his family and raise a young child, and to do all of this while the world is burning down quite literally around you. I'll never know what it's like to have a text wall of a thousand people going "Do this, duh" at me, so I'll never be an authority on how to react to that situation.

That all said, each of the people in that chat room that are typing 'Try windows sound mixer' don't know that 999 other people are typing the exact same thing. Maybe they should assume that, but 800 of those thousand people probably think they are being sincerely helpful and so to get told they fucking suck wasn't a great feeling.

I dunno, man. It was a small moment in an otherwise great podcast, but it lingers, you know? Maybe it was just a straw vs. camel's back situation. I can sit here and say that the criticism about a mute button could have been more level but until I'm in that seat my opinion has a ceiling on its validity.

Again, great podcast. Hope I don't sound condescending, I tried to make this comment in good faith. Best wishes.

I think people who say it's three clicks to mute a program are overestimating the general user.

Do you really think that someone who isn't super into PCs is gonna know to right click the sound icon, open the volume mixer (if they even know what the term means) and figure out how to mute a single program?

Speaking as someone who has experience in customer support when it comes to software, I guarantee you that not many people are as fluent using an OS as your average Giant Bomb member.

I've never noticed a mute button on any launcher program before, then again I've never seen a launcher program quite like what were dealing with here just with pure size.

There is one thing that does bug me with the whole Control situation and I see it kind of glanced over quite a bit on discussions, there was even some confusion here on the show. The 2nd DLC is even out yet, so yeah this whole thing has left a pretty sour taste.

I've been using computers every day for like 25 years. I never even noticed that you could mute certain programs that way.

It was actually my birthday when this went live, thanks for the shout out Vinny! :P

@tyler1285: I expected a much more significant reaction than he actually gave based on your comment.

That being said, he had already gone through the install process, the chat’s help at that point wasn’t actionable because he had already done it - it’s like telling someone who moved a couch up 14 flights of stairs that there was a secret elevator. It’s not helpful, it just makes you feel bad.

Additionally, putting music on a 10+ hour installer is a wild decision, and I think Jeff is right to criticize it. Why on earth would anyone want music blaring for that long, even if you could hypothetically mute it. No one would actually benefit from having it.

We’re all trying to do our best mid-pandemic, and I think going after someone who has to put themselves in front of an audience is not the decision I would make. I understand the frustration in feeling like someone lashed out against help being offered, but we all know the context of everything that is happening. Try to extend a little grace where possible!

@tyler1285: just about to watch, are you serious?? Timestamp?!

double jeff is best jeff.

but cant replace one abby 😥

@robalvey: Yeah, I'm with you on this. Saying that some people in chat "fucking suck" was not Jeff's best moment, but it sure wasn't the big blow up that I was expecting from these comments.

@tyler1285 He's under a lot of stress. You're probably under a lot of stress. We as a world are under a lot of stress. Let's try to cut people some slack for a bit longer.

When Alex said: “I was on that Flight Simulator Quick Look and ahh...”

I was sure that his next words would be: “boy are my arms tired!”

I think this goes to show what Jeff really thinks of the audience

really? He's human dude, try living in the midst of a pandemic, fires, a freakin newborn, a crazy heat wave, and sleep deprived all the while being "on" for hours on end every week while having live commentary about every word you're saying and not be on edge. I have great respect for these guys, chat can be annoyingly not helpful at times.

But anyhoo, i'd highly recommend the new flight simulator - it's pretty damn amazing. Im now falling into a dark hole of looking up hotas options :/

Funny, I'm part of the audience, and didn't think that at all. Just what he thinks of people giving obvious, patronising advice as if it justifies not providing the simple option in the game.

@tdous said:

Exactly. Y'all need to calm down.

@tyler1285: Ya, I kind of felt the same way. There's been a handful of times where the staff shit on chat and emailers and it's like "really??". If you don't like the comments and emails, just ignore them. No need to blast 'em on your show.

Given, I agree with them that it's dumb how FS handles it's install process, but man that was a bit of an over reaction to chat.

I'm with Jeff on this lol

@mattchops: *a subset of the audience.

They've dogged on chat before and I get it because negativity bias is a thing and chat will get called out at its worst.

I'm not one to blindly defend the duders but dude is trying to raise his first child in the midst of the worse pandemic since the spanish flu while ash is raining down on him and being cooked alive in his own home with no A/C so I think he's been doing pretty well at not losing his cool all things considered.

^ This

Jeff rules and is right. People rushing to the comment section to be faux offended by him dunking on chat is fucking comical. Clearly those people represent the entire audience of Giant Bomb, because that is how this works.

I like how Vinny's lowest download speed suggestion is more than double what i get, i left my PC on for two days straight downloading Flight Simulator, i cannot believe my luck that my connection didn't drop or something else didn't happen to stop the download.

I have no idea why anyone would use the chat feature (a.k.a. The shout at the hosts feature), or why any of the staff would ever look at it.

Jeff G is still a threat

The pearls being clutched here are something else.

Haha. Internet.

Man, I'm super excited for Rogue Legacy 2. I get the impression it's not right around the corner or anything.

I think both the people that are annoyed and the people annoyed at the annoyed people are wrong so clearly I’m above it all and the best.

I know Bakalar really likes being on the Bombcast but man he really should get some backpay for all these free hours of being a great co-host! It’s always great seeing both Jeff’s on the same screen as well.

I just finished and I'm left with that feeling I get from time to time where I'm so baffled thst people found something to be upset over it feels like I listened to a different podcast. Jeff seemed mildly irritated with the chat at absolute worst, and clearly reserved the majority of his disdain for the situation.

While I found it a bit odd that they got so hung up on the lack of a mute button on the Flight Simulator installer, they are right in saying that the install process is hot garbage. I had a very similar issue that Jeff G had. Note that I'm playing the Game Pass version.

I finish the quick 9GB download from the Xbox PC app, and left the installer running overnight knowing it would take a while (not sure why Vinny was so against this). I wake up to find the program not even running, which seemed a bit odd. So during lunch I start up the game to make sure it finished downloading, so I can play when I finished my work for the day. Game boots up fine, runs me through choosing control options and assist settings, and I get to the main menu. Everything seems to be in order. Great! Excited to play later.

I boot it up again a few hours later when I have some free time, and I can access the menu and every setting, but can't actually play. All of the tutorials are greyed out (despite the game saying they're downloaded), and when I try to free fly, the fly button is just greyed out. After some googling, it seems like the issue is that the installer didn't finish correctly. Which makes sense considering it wasn't running after I left it overnight, but why in the hell would it start the game normally after this like everything went smoothly? Why didn't it come up with an error when starting the game? I have to restart my PC, run the game again, and now I get hit with a screen saying I've got 50GB left to download. Luckily I've got good internet, so this only took an additional 1-2h (including troubleshooting the problem). But man, what a terrible experience to get the game running.

All that being said, the game seems great. Runs fine on medium settings on my mid-range PC (2600X, 970 OC, 16GB ram, SSD), I get 30fps consistently away from big cities. Playing with a controller feels good after you turn the sensitivity way down (I set it to -65% for both left stick axes), but the rudder control is broken on controller (it reads the triggers as digital inputs, not analogue). Makes taxiing a pain, but once you're in the air it's not an issue.

The game clearly needs some additional work (the install process is a nightmare), but it seems like a good foundation to build on. It's really crazy how accurate the representation is of my current city (Fort Worth, TX), all the buildings have correct geometry and satellite textures. It seems several years out of date, but I'm guessing that's an issue with Bing maps or whatever satellite imaging they're using.

I'm a Jeff G fan. I quite enjoy his grumpiness!

Im surprised at all the issues they're having. I have 1gb down, and it took me an hour to download Flight Sim. At first nothing happened when i got to the download acreen, but i reran as admin and it was fine. I also have a 1080 ti and a 4500 intel cpu, but Ultra is fine after the initial load of streamed assets. I guess im not a huge FPS snob, i domt have a 144 hz monitor, but it seemed good to me

Yep a lot of his opinions on games and other things are insane but he's my favorite member of the GB staff.

@tyler1285: lmaoo get a life

As a software engineer, seeing people so staunchly defend that installer not having a mute button is WILD. Jeff was absolutely justified in that reaction. If your application forces audio on the user, the user should have the ability to disable it from within your application.

@vinny If you just wanna flip switches, you should get into modular synthesizers. But Flight Sims are probably cheaper.

Re: Xcloud wired LAN (1:11 in the show)

You can sideload xcloud on a ShieldTV. I did this a couple weeks ago and it worked ok. Still looks kind of bad at times on a huge TV but that's just the nature of streaming from what is basically a XBox One S and also streaming at all. And sometimes it looks good enough that you can forget that it's streaming. Still kind of hard to hit corners right in Forza with the added lag.

Regarding lag, I stream games from my PC to the shield via cable and I still have to use the controller connected directly to the PC because to me games like Wolfenstein II or Control become way too hard otherwise.

[edit]

oh and regarding the whole thing in the comments about Jeff: lol.

Great podcast as always. Wish more people told the dorks in the chat to get a life.