Essence_of_Meh

They're ready and waiting actually! I just want to finish other things (including Medabots) before starting another big title - I already have trouble keeping myself from constant game hopping as it is. Good suggestion though.

I'm playing Medabots: Kabuto for GBA. It's a pretty fun although simple JRPG. It has a neat unit customization system, enjoyable story and great art/music.
Combat is unique in a way that can be a bit annoying (you only have a partial control on who to target) but it's something one can get used to and work around to some extent.

I also installed The Sims 2 (Ultimate Collection, not the Legacy one) but I didn't really spend much time playing it on the Deck (I usually default to my desktop playthrough). Based on a short test I did manage to do it seems to be working and controlling pretty well so that's promising at least.

Part 2:

• Status update on some of the major issues and common questions:
  • Login issues and being stuck at position 1 - they're still investigating, authorization call during matchmaking (selecting server/shard) sometimes takes minutes to close.
  • Increased load times - they're still investigating, it seems to be related to the game waiting for an entity without authority waiting to get it (it can happen when server reboots after crash).
  • Restarting the game or trying to change shards is something CIG haven't included in their testing before. Doing so helped them find a lot of issues with the player spawning/authorization process.
  • Shard locks can happen when your character doesn't get stowed before your next login and the shard it's assigned to is no longer available. Most of the time this gets fixed automatically after a while.
  • Elevators and trams (the transit system) are a very old feature. As it is the streaming system destroys and recreates the carriages (elevators, trams) if there's no one in the vicinity. This system requires fundamental changes how these things work to prevent losing orders ("go to x") and allow "self-healing" (fixing the state while recreating the carriage).
    They're are also making fixes to the current system until the rewrite is complete.
  • Benoit is responsible for ships getting destroyed when stowing (it was caused by his back-end fix, they weren't actually destroyed just couldn't be called back).
  • One of the issues with ship calling into the hangar happens due to elevator being moved by code while the ship is moved through physics (causes "the flapping"). They're still deciding which way to go (move both through code or physics).
  • There's a possibility right now that when leaving the station before your ship is stowed it'll get stowed alongside the hangar instead of on its own. This can lead to a situation when ATC doesn't recognize the ship as being on the pad when trying to leave the hangar on another shard.
  • They made a fix to how the hangar queues are managed. It should help with long wait times or short availability times to leave/enter.
  • Hangars being assigned incorrectly - seems like there is a possibility of player having hangars of multiple size in the same location which should not happen. This can lead to the system being unable to select one to assign to the player. They're still investigating.
  • Vehicles exploding after being clipped by the hangar elevator happen due to a cleanup system trying to resolve a collision error. This should only happen for long abandoned vehicles in the future.
  • Inventory and item persistence issues - also caused by a cleanup system/item setup. Items flagged for cleanup and didn't lose the flag after pick up which lead to the system removing them on next trigger.
    There was also an issue where inventory caching (for UI) wouldn't update properly in some locations so they revamping the system to improve on that (items are actually stored, it's just a display issue).
  • They aren't really happy with the current Long Time Persistence system due to how it deals with item and ship storing which leads to items disappearing between patches. They're creating a new system to split permanent and runtime data of items/ships. They are also patching the current system in the mean time to resolve some of the issues.
  • Unique item recovery is prioritized this year. "The talk has stopped and the work has started."
    There will be a short, medium and long term solutions - this topic will be discussed next week on the show.
  • Aggressive ship de-spawning - cleanup system should keep the passenger count even if players aren't piloting to prevent this from happening. There are couple reasons why this happens, some should be solved other still need to be fixed.
  • They pretty much completely reworked the mission system for 4.0. Initially they focused on just making it work with Server Meshing, next they reworked how markers work (in general, i.e. party, mission etc.). The remaining work for missions and the main reason all the old issues still persist is reworking how the missions are built (mission team has to use tools that aren't updated for SM).
    They started engineering work to rethink how missions are made to improve and automate the tools.
  • Quantum Travel issues have multiple causes.
    One of them has to do with the fact that each ship component consists of smaller entities (responsible for health, power etc.) and sometimes some of these disappear/break from Quantum Drive when moving between shards, leaving people stranded or with inconsistent fuel levels.
  • Prison is actually a mission (and an old one at that). There was a bug which broke the missions logic leading to desync of the mission state and making the escape/legal exit impossible. They have a fix which should prevent the issue from happening again (as long as the elevator works).
  • They're still identifying the reason for the long delay of mineables rendering but they know where to look.
  • Shared missions paying full rewards to all people in the part was technically a bug. Rich Tyrer did confirm however that this is the direction of how they wants this system to work so they will implement something similar in the future.
  • They're still investigating the issues between Vulkan renderer and Nvidia drivers but they think it has to do with Nvidia's new vulkan drivers.
  • Issue Council is important even if players don't feel like it matters much. They want to rework the duplication system to limit similar issues.
    They don't think there is an issue with malicious dupe marking to farm rewards but they promise to look into it to confirm.
  • Error popups (the ones with error codes) have not bee touched in ages but will be updated. They want to display more information whenever an error happens in the future.
  • The black screen during preview happened because a fix to a bug consisted of fading to black and hiding the UI (which included the error popups).
• "I want players to know we know about the state of the game. (...) We're gonna work our ass of to get this game stable and solid, and to be the game we want to be. It's about time we do that change."

I'll be updating this as I watch but I'll stick to the main points. If you want a full picture just watch the archive.

Partial TL;DW:

• "Monthly" patches with fixes and new content (in quotation because they aim for 9-10 actual releases this year).
• Less frequent feature releases, longer testing on a separate channel.
• "Inside Star Citizen" and "Star Citizen Live" will be released together on Thursdays.
• New regular "Behind the Ship" series alternating with one of the above (depending on the topic of the week).
• The decision to release 4.0 when it did came to be because CIG couldn't get enough players on the PTU servers.
• This release allowed them to compare the loads between 3.24 and 4.0 servers.
• Before 4.0 release stuff:
  • They were finishing 4.0 features until October, upon merging this work and running Server Meshing in Pyro they were met with major issues with the systems.
  • "There was a new change in the engine were we tried do optimize some of the way we deal with streaming radius (...) the way we compound and aggregate objects would inflate the bounds of things and the new locations in Pyro would have radius of several thousand kilometers so every client in Pyro ended up loading a very large part of the environment. (...) Upwards of 15-20Mb per client per message."
  • During this testing they also established the player count for launch of 4.0 (500 players per shard soft cap, 600 hard cap).
  • Lots of network optimization.
  • They had to modify the teleport API for Server Meshing (used for teleporting players when they die for example).
  • They didn't managed to finish the culling of instanced interiors (the cause of seeing and hearing other people instanced hangars).
  • They mobilized all engineers to focus on the optimization before release. Came up with a special initiative to cut through red tape and push for improvements.
  • The initial target for this process was to stabilize server performance between 15-20FPS and prevent it from going below 10.
  • Some of the physics issues fixed during this process:
    • Resolving collision bugs persisting in the database.
    • Destroying AA turrets "collapsed" them instead of removing, then added new ones on top of those, compounding the issue.
  • Between 3.24 and 4.0.1 teams fixed 2900 bugs (3300 tasks).
• More resources (devs, including seniors) committed for fixes rather than new features.
• Increasing bug fixing quotas for teams.
• They want to improve observability of issues (some systems like ATC don't report issues as much as the newer ones).
• They're (re?)establishing resource budgets (CPU, GPU etc.) for all teams.
• They try to assign bug fixes and changes to a system to their original creators, that said it's not always possible and they want keep things balanced as to not keep someone purely on bug fixing for years.
• They'll try to stick to the promise of releasing only the stuff that's actually ready for release. Both Jared and Benoit acknowledged this didn't really pan out in the past.
• They were feature focused developer until now, changing to less flashiness and more bug fixing is a scary prospect for the whole company (especially marketing).
• Seniors will be assigned the most important, difficult and time consuming fixes more often (they used to keep them strictly on working on the major new features).
• Dev split between Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is flexible for the most part. Some fixes to one project obviously improve both as well.
• Squadron 42 development has a pretty aggressive pace as the want to finish the game this year and be truly ready for 2026 release.
• They try to minimize ping-ponging people between the projects, swaps should happen after finishing milestones.
• Neither 4.0.1 nor upcoming 4.0.2 will be a silver bullet patch. Improvements will happen as the year progresses.
• 4.0.1 improved a lot on the infrastructural level but there was a bunch of regression on the player facing side.
• They know a lot of this was said before and the real worth of these promises will depend on the results.
• They'll try to reduce the risk but there will be times this year when they try something new which may break things.
• They are talking about a scheduled maintenance window when they could deploy fixes more regularly and do maintenance.

Edit: added notes for hour 2.
Edit 2: Better split for the whole thing.

I couldn't really settle on what to play this week so I ended up with a bit of a mess.

First things first, Counter-Strike 2 is no more. As engaging as the game is something just doesn't feel right for me with this one. My main issue seems to have something to do with controls since I never had this many issues getting stuck on corners and doorways with any of the previous games. I don't know what it is, I just can't get the feeling for them.
There's also a pretty severe performance issue which feels like a memory leak that happens quite often in the middle of a match - again, don't know why since it doesn't happen every time or only on certain maps.
All in all, I can safely say I had way more fun with CS:GO but since the legacy branch won't work for me (game only flickers for a second and closes) I can safely put this experiment to rest.

Second, my The Sims playthrough might be finished because of the sequel. I installed TS2 to refresh my memory and compare it with the original - I ended up playing through the night with barely any breaks. As much as I love the first game TS2 is just on another level and I ended up launching it whenever I had some free time, in contrast to the original which requires me to be in a specific mood to enjoy it.
I didn't have this much fun with the series in a long time now so it was funny to go through this return arc only to see EA release the legacy packs. I hope lots of new folks get to enjoy those games as both hold up really well despite their age.

I also spent some time playing Euro Truck Simulator 2. It was my main choice whenever I couldn't focus on anything.

Daggerfall is on hold until I had my fill of The Sims. It might take a while but I'll be back, eventually.
Medabots also took a back seat to some extent but I'm still actively playing here and there.

See, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Based on the results I've seen, all the votes for independent candidates combined amounted to less than 2% of all counted votes. Do you really think those 2% had a bigger impact on the end result than the 90 or so million of people who didn't vote at all?

I'm not saying they had no impact, it just feels weird to focus so much on those who cared enough to take part in the democratic process while treating the rest as a secondary issue.

To clarify, this is just my observation based on internet comments and some news snippets I've seen. I understand things might look different IRL and from a perspective of someone in the middle of this madness.

Yeah, I'm not from or in the US which is why my question was mostly about what I've seen online and some media snippets. I have no idea about IRL sentiment, though I assume it varies like with everything.

Got it, I wasn't completely sure hence my question.

The current arc is all about the broader, political "behind the scenes" aspects of the world. There's some thriller vibes with a mostly unknown political group working from the shadows, some brutal action and a lot of investigating into who, how and why. There's also more world building (including dive into more religious aspects) in the recent chapters.
I'm not sure I'm ready to make judgement about this part of the story just yet - there are some things I like, some I'm not too hot about and a lot of my thoughts will depend on whether author can stick the landing with all of this.

All I'm willing to say for now is: it's interesting enough I'm still reading and want to know where it goes. I'll definitely post more if something cool or egregious happens in the future.

Understandable, it just seems like a wider sentiment based on my limited exposure to this topic.

That's my mom pretty much. She treats cooking like baking so whenever she does it a recipe is an absolute must. Well, that and using whoever is available as a taste tester for some reason (she has no problems with taste nor any skill issues in regards to cooking).

(╯°□°）╯︵ 🏀
Why is THIS always the direction these stories go in? I just hope it'll be a short arc at this point.

Perhaps I'm just unlucky enough to stumble mostly on comments focusing on them. I was however lucky enough I didn't have to read explanations like the one you've quoted here yet.

There is a lot of blame to be shared.

That's for sure.