None of them are free, but they all have a month free trial. After that they’re all $10-15 a month. Not sure about privacy, it wasn’t a priority when I went looking. I hadn’t heard of any of them before I went looking for alternative music services.
I actually react well to combative. Not right away, but it puts me into a “I’ll show you” mood that drives me down a rabbit hole of research. If you’re right, I come out the other side with the data and admit I was wrong. But I assume I’m not normal.
Another for Deezer. In the last couple months, I’ve tried Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer. Qobuz seems the best if you’re into music and building your own playlists. They pay the best royalties and do a bunch of human curating, including a weekly zine for current releases. They don’t have an automatic playlist that I could find. Deezer has the best recommendation engine of the three, at least for the genres I listen to.
Our marketing team isn’t good enough to change consumer behavior like that. I’d love to work with a team with that ability.
Some games do that, especially at a generation border. It’s not a ton of extra effort, but it’s low-return: a game doesn’t sell better or get a lot of press for being smaller.
The majority of disc space on a game like CoD is textures, audio and FMV. There’s no compressing 4k textures to get them to a reasonable footprint without losing quality. Same for 4k FMV. It’s not management that drives the desire for high-res textures and diverse asset libraries, it’s generally the art team. Once they’re allowed to care about what kinds of shrubbery exist in Borneo and which exist in Minneapolis, you end up with 30 kinds of plants. Multiply that out for rocks, cars, rugs, etc and add in the expectation for 4k or 8k screens and individual assets get huge and the library gets huge.
You’re right that it’s possible to do “pretty good” graphics for less, but it’s telling that your examples are from a decade ago and/or heavily stylized.
It’s also about what people want to buy. If games with that aesthetic reliably sold like gangbusters, AAA would follow.
Game Dev here.I WISH we could still ship with N64 quality textures and audio. We’d use so much less disc space and probably finish sooner and cleaner.
The one I’ve used on my Samsung isn’t as fast as a wired power bank, but I don’t need to wrangle the cables like I do with the wired ones. I wouldn’t use a magsafe power bank to charge my phone from 0 (too slow). But leaving it attached gives me an extra couple of hours with just a little extra weight. Useful for things like conventions or travel.
I use one in my car - it’s more convienet for short trips or trips with multiple stops. I do keep a cable for longer trips though, especially if I need to keep the screen on for GPS - the wireless charger makes the phone warm enough to stop charging over the course of an hour or so.
I have a Viture One and an Xreal Air 2. They’re both solid for gaming as a screen directly attached to your face. Neither do floating or body-anchored screens out of the box. The Xreal can do it with a breakout box, and the new generation of the Xreal that’s coming out in March is supposed to do it on its own.
Viture One came with a better carrying case and is easier to hook up in the dark. It’s slightly more comfortable to wear, and it has built-in focusing dials. Picture quality is good for gaming and watching videos, but not good enough for extended text reading - books and websites aren’t recommended.
The Xreal Air 2 has a much better screen, good enough for reading for an hour or so. The edges get some chromatic aberration, but most of the screen is good. It requires prescription inserts if you need glasses - a mixed blessing since it adds a hidden $80 to the price, but means you can wear them as real glasses. The nose bridge has size options, but none are quite as comfortable as the Viture. The Xreal uses standard USB-C cables, which is good for compatibility, but bad for attaching in the dark. As mentioned above, Xreal has a breakout box that gives different options for how the screen is displayed - attached to your head, attached with a delay (better for motion sickness), PiP so you can look at the real world with your media in the corner of your vision, and attached to your body giving the illusion of a TV screen sitting a distance from you.
It depends on what you’re looking to do with the screen, but I’d probably wait until the new generation of Xreals.
I picked up a construction-grade tablet PC back in 2010, and while I haven’t been todler-tough on it, it’s still running great and the peace of mind of it being so rugged has been great.
My current setup has 6, but that’s across 3 PCs and a devkit.
I find 2 per PC is my useful limit. Which means my current 5 isn’t quite enough. Monitor arms are always a challenge at that scale, though.
I don’t know if it’s gotten better these days, but back in the 90’s “being a man” was more a definition of absence. Being a man was “not being a woman/girl.” This caused a couple years of real difficulty for me as a high school boy, since women were (finally) allowed to do all the “male” things, which ended up defining the male identity out of existence.
Additional context: the squirrel bit one of the officers that was confiscating it. So they absolutely needed to test for rabies.
Don’t post your crimes to social media folks. Or do, I’m not a cop.
Raytracing is still very computationally intensive, and doesn’t have enough market penetration to make sense on most modern games. Devs need to implement two solutions: a raytraced path and a raster path. The game needs to be fully playable in both, across a wide range on hardware. The largest install base for most games is still console, where RT barely exists. So RT is generally relegated to eye candy for high-end PC. Which makes it a marketing feature, not a game feature.
It’ll be interesting to see if that changes with the PS5 Pro. I expect we’ll see more first-party titles support it, but not much else until the next real console generation.
I don’t know that I would say “much worse.” But it’s more than incrementally worse, which is what most of the updates to Win10 have been over its lifetime. So straw, meet camel’s back.