Quick Questions XIV: A Question Reasked (Part 1)

Is there a trick to buying one of these new consoles online? There’s been a few times i’ve had one in my cart only to disappear. Is it just a matter of clicking fast or is it pure luck? Walmart has a new batch of consoles ready for sale at 3pm EDT today and I want to be ready. See you all on the battlefield.

Is there a story analysis video for Persona 3 or 4? Or other too-long RPGs? I’m really into story recaps for all of these long form media thingies (e.g. MCU movie recap) even if the media is questionable value (e.g. MCU). I’m not too interested in mechanics analysis unless it affects the story (in which case I am very interested).

there’s discord bots set up to go off when sites restock but all the discords with them you have to pay to get into, and the kids making the bots sell them for thousands of dollars. resellers market has been finely tuned by a bunch of people getting into sneaker sales during the plague who are using their new skills on getting and selling ps5s

like the OFFICIAL WALMART TWITTER told grandmas getting ps5s for their kids to ‘practice their f5 skills’ so if that’s the advice walmart is giving it seems grim

sorry this isnt more helpful im in a similar sitch

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It’s awesome how every consumer-goods company and retailer knows all our thoughts on a minute-by-minute level but we still have weekslong shortages for newly launched toys.

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you sit next to a computer all day and get the chrome app “distill” and tell it to target the add to cart button on the page of the thing you want to buy and set the sound to the buzzer. anytime you hear the buzzer, you get your phone out and use the phone app of whatever store you’re trying to buy from. have your account information all preset.

just wait six weeks and feel sort of vaguely smug and better about the whole sorry situation when the first reports arise of whatever fault the launch models ship with

previous times i’ve managed to get a console at launch it’s been a case of going to my local supermarket

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Yea, It’s impossible to buy online without a bot. I just tried purchasing from Walmart and I was able to get one in my cart but it kept crashing over and over until the stock was depleted.

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for me the appeal of a console launch lies solely in the act of hanging out with friends all night playing launch titles and getting high until the morning when you go to denny’s or something. but you can’t/shouldn’t really do that during These Trying Times, anyway, so all of the appeal is sucked from a launch. plus, i don’t have any friends and none of the games are on the level of house of the dead 2 or tokyo xtreme racer. :man_shrugging:

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It’s always been my dream as well to have friends who love/accept me and we can play games all night and have fun and eat food. When I go to cons and wander around by myself, I’m always amazed by the amount of people who have friends and things like that. I envy their enthusiasm and joy.

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i saw youre playing final fantasy xiv and if you ever want to hang out with me in a virtual space i will give your character lots of presents and you can hang out in my house and play triple triad zooted on vath weed

you seem like youd be cool to hang with at a convention!

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yummy!

I know this is like me and 60FPS but what is HDR? I know I’ve lived with it for like 15 years at this point but don’t know if I’ve ever noticed it or had the equipment to notice it. It’s like more colors and bloom? Why does more colors take more processing power?

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it doesn’t take more processing power (well, barely, if you’re looking at decoding 10-bit rather than 8-bit video on the CPU), it just takes more bandwidth at various levels (on the GPU, the display cable, the monitor). this is also why you usually have hardware that’s compatible or not, rather than it just taking slightly more performance to render. it is just deeper colour depth (so you can do impressive-looking stuff with the contrast), yeah.

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There’s no fixed meaning of HDR. It’s become a marketing term referring to any and all color feature

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The real HDR is the startlingly bright bullets on original Asteroids arcade cabinets

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High Definition Resolution

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High Dynamic Range. An HDR screen running a properly calibrated HDR output can display different color depths and brightness levels on different portions of the screen at the same time. I think? It’s something PC monitors have been able to do for a long time but when flat screen TVs and game consoles started supporting it it became a big buzzword.

So explosions and sunlight and stuff can look really bright, relatively speaking, while darkened or heavily shadowed areas can still show a wide range of detail.

It’s a subtle effect but once you’re used to seeing it you notice when it’s not there. I went back and played some Death Stranding several months ago and something was off about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Turns out I still had the HDMI output running through the PSVR which I had been using, and it was causing HDR to not display in the game.

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I am pretty skeptical about the visual return that investing in hardware good enough to perform at a 4K resolution, but I one time saw the Netflix logo in HDR and that was enough to make me a believer. Colors look gooooood.

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The term is confusing in games because games and cameras have been doing internal processes at a higher precision than the output formats for fifteen years. So when Half-Life 2 built the Lost Coast demo to showcase HDR, they were rendering the game internally at higher brightness range. They then compressed the image down to a monitor (‘tonemapped’) it by letting bright colors bloom onto surrounding pixels. This also necessitated simulating pupil dilation: instead of an artist setting brightness throughout a level, they can more realistically have very bright outdoors and dim interiors. When standing outside, interiors look very dark (the simulated pupil is closed), when inside, exteriors look bright (the pupil is dilated).

Relatedly, cameras with HDR modes are capturing a higher exposure range than they can output. Usually, this is done by taking several pictures at different exposure and stitching them together. In this sense, expose is very similar to the pupil concept games use.

New HDR displays extend the brightness range and color space. So you can more gradations in between dark and bright areas. Generally the displays have much brighter peak luminance, so bright highlights become very noticeable, but it’s just as important that dark areas are realistically visible without becoming pitch-black.

When comparing HDR and SDR rendering or content on the same display, especially a game, the SDR will look more posterized: colors are pushed to extremes and clipped. The HDR mode carries more color range so subtler shades can be seen. The expanded luminance data allows dark and bright spaces to coexist.

Traditional film benefits, too - SDR is a smaller colorspace than film handles, but HDR is a larger colorspace. So HDR transfers of film can hold the subtler tones much better.

Subjectively, HDR content has richer colors. The expanded brightness on highlights gives depth to everything else on screen. If you ever wanted a first-gen Vita because of the OLED screen or sought out the GBA SP revision with the backlit (not edgelit) screen, it’s for you.

image

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Completely unrelated but

How do people feel about Metal Gear Solid 4? I hooked up my PS3 for Demons Souls and MGS4 is just staring at me…

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