Quoting: tfkI've never played it. Is it good?

Well I played it for some time some years ago...
It was not bad: the planets were interesting and... beautiful. You could get more tech and build yourself a base... You could even play online coop with a friend etc...

There were issues too: The online coop mode was buggy as hell, crashing/disconnecting quite often.

But what drove me away was the fact that majority of the game was a perfect example of a so called Potemkin village [External Link] game mechanics:
- when you landed on a newly discovered planet, there was nothing around you. But within minutes, the game (seamlessly) generated fauna around you, in order to make the place look alive
- when you landed on a nearby starbase (to do trade etc. with NPCs) the station was basically empty. After a couple of minutes, the game generated other starship and NPC traffic so that the base looked as if it was teeming with life :)

This meant one thing: (At least for the bigger part) the game world was not persistent! If you built a base on the planet, it was still there upon your return. Still, it happened to me once that while exploring a planet in my starship I 'accidentally' found another crashed ship, so I landed nearby, repaired the found/crashed ship and took off with the new one to test it. I was never able to find my original landed ship again :-(

(And that is also why I very much play & love e.g. X4 Foundations [External Link], which is THE exact opposite of NMS: The universe is fully persistent and fully simulated no matter where you, as a player, are and what you do. So if you see something interesting happening around you, you know it would happen regardless of you watching! :happy:)

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Are we Vulkan yet? :whistle:

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Shiiiii...(t) So after years of waiting, I finally bought one :woot:

(...and if it is not that good and useful, at least I can turn it into an overpriced Linux home server :grin:)

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Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: BoldosThus the question now is not IF the high-performance RISC-V CPUs will arrive to the market, but WHEN. And another question is whether it will be only Chinese chips, or if e.g. US or EU (or anyone else, like e.g. India?) will be able to keep up with China and whether they too will be able to design, produce and sell their own RISC-V CPUs...

2023 and yes:

Venturamicro launched a 4nm 3.6GHZ RISC-V processor in the USA back than. [External Link]
https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/17q0y0t/ventana_veyron_v2_riscv_cpu_launched_for_the_dsa/ [External Link]

Yes, I know about this one. AFAIK it seems it has not been openly released yet, so not available yet to be bought and tested (AFAIK the full release is planned sometime by H2 2024).

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Quoting: hardpenguin

Steam Deck LCD 64GB

This is the one I have, just dropped that SD card inside and it works like a charm. I played like tens if not over a hundred of different games on it already!

I understood that there is small hdd/ssd inside...
So, you can also put a uSD card next to that and combine both drives as Steam storage? Or how does this work, actually?

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Quoting: mZSq7Fq3qsI have no doubt that it is an awesome game... but it is quite jarring to get into :D I have no idea what I am doing. I hope that this will help with my itch to play eve online. I'd play eve online, but who has time for that?

Well developers of X4 said it loud and clear that they do not want to babysit new players and serve them everything right under their noses, but instead they want (and expect) players to explore and find out mechanics, things and places on their own.

So although it is understandable that this approach might not work for everyone, it works as designed :smile:

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Quoting: RavenWingsI´d love to get into X again, but I don´t think I´ll ever find the time other then maybe on the Deck. Anybody tried playing it there for a longer periode of time?

I´ve sank countless hours into the first two games and remember using pretty much my whole keyboard worth of hotkeys, button-combos and macro-keys to manage my trading-empire. I´m sure they´ve modernised and simplified a lot of it, but I still can´t imagine its possible to boil it down to anything handheld-friendly.

Yeah, you can/will sink countless hours into X4 too.
I have player so far one huge game, started another some months ago and not looking back.
Some game mechanics are a bit different from old X2/X3, but the graphics are better, the immersion is way more better and way more amazing and the universe is huge too, with countless opportunities to play it the way you like :grin:

Definitely recommended... 11/10

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Thanks for the news.
Instabuy :wub:

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Quoting: LoudTechieI see no hope in this.
RISC-V has an even less functional software ecosystem, so it's useless for most consumers.
Although the architecture of RISC-V is open source the firmware isn't yet and some ARM processors do offer open firmware making them more suited for tinkering, because making or manipulating your own chips requires a lot more resources than doing the same with firmware meaning its out of the range of most tinkerers.

Well, to paint a bigger picture here: majority of RISC-V CPUs, boards and complete solutions are coming from China as of now. (China designed, China manufactured)

You may ask: Why?
Well, one of the (IMHO brutally important) piece of the puzzle here is that RISC-V is an open standard, which is not and cannot be controlled by patents and/or export regulations (The RISC-V foundation moved itselt from US to Switzerland to ensure exactly that). And as a result China is investing huge amounts of money, time, know-how, and general resources, to leverage this tech to achieve at least some level of technological independence in CPU chip tech on "The West". So continuous investment into and development of RISC-V tech is of utmost strategic technological importance to China.

And so, the RISC-V tech train, with China at the wheel, has already departed, China ensures it is gaining speed, and it cannot be stopped, until China reaches it's technological CPU destination. And they don't care what The Rest of The World(tm) thinks of it, because, for once, with this 'patent&export regulation free' tech they don't have to take care of who (dis)agrees....

Thus the question now is not IF the high-performance RISC-V CPUs will arrive to the market, but WHEN. And another question is whether it will be only Chinese chips, or if e.g. US or EU (or anyone else, like e.g. India?) will be able to keep up with China and whether they too will be able to design, produce and sell their own RISC-V CPUs...

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For the Framework laptop: it uses StarFive JH7110 as CPU. That one is a bit slower - typically clocked on max 1.6GHz - and lacks support for vectoring instructions (RVV), which could/will limit it's performance. This will be used potentially only as a low-end device.

(Disclaimer: Think of RISC-V vectoring instructions specification (or RVV) to be similar to MMX/SSE/AVX instructions from Intel/AMD CPU world).

For the ROMA II laptop, the K1 has double the cores (8x), higher clocks (2GHz) and support for full vectoring instruction standard (RVV10), so it is expected to be much more performant. Still the K1 is a new CPU and I do not thing that - as of now - there are any relevant/consumer performance metrics available (remember, cache/bus/RAM latencies are currently unknown and will also affect overall performance).

Moreover, software/driver support for this brand new K1 platform is an unknown. Here they claim full Ubuntu support which sounds great. It remains to be seen, what exactly that means though...

So on one hand, there are currently lots of performance and sw/driver support unknowns, also the ROMA II laptop for that price seems to be quite overpriced. EDIT: Maybe it is not AS overpriced as I perceived it at the time of writing this. Still, they could probably do better I guess...

On the other hand, if they really manage to have full and good sw/driver support (including the GPU, HW accel of destop and full support of VPU on-chip codecs for e.g. high-performance HW decode of video streams) this really could be the first consumer-grade RISC-V machine for bigger masses.

Hopes are high :heart:

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