• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • I doubt that.

    For me it is more a question of who is in charge. Are they effectively russian soldiers and the interpreters are relaying orders from moscow? Are they still north korean soldiers and orders come from pyongyang (after discussions with moscow) and the interpreter is just so they can communicate with allied forces? Or are they basically doing whatever they need to do to achieve a general objective?


  • What do we know about north korean military doctrine?

    I know, at least at the start of the war in Ukraine, russia very much suffered from how little agency and autonomy they give NCOs and lower ranked officers. And while I can’t imagine north korea trusting anyone with anything, these are also their military troops who actually get fed and have hostages back home to keep too many of them from fleeing.


  • Basiaclly all DRM models have had variations of that problem. It, again, boils down to what the check is, when they do it, and how often they do it.

    For example:

    • Back in the day, Splinter Cell Conviction (and a few other ubi games) actually connected to a remote server for game logic. If you were running a cracked version and a blocker (I think peerguardian is what we used? Been a minute) then you would actually notice your game just completely hang when you went through certain doors and Sam wouldn’t start talking until you turned PG off.
    • Similarly, quite a few securom and even starforce games would add the DRM check as part of the fundamental gameplay loop so you were potentially checking dozens of times per SECOND. This was a rapid checksum or a value in memory but it was still very noticeable

    And Denuvo is kind of the worst of all worlds since it is an activation model which, potentially, involves phoning home to a server.

    To my knowledge, every single case of “Denuvo killed performance in mah gerhms!!” was either

    • Complete noise. Like, less than 5% difference which could just as easily be a case of having a different tab open in your browser
    • A case of a poor implementation where the checks were way too frequent

    I am not aware of anything that was fundamentally denuvo itself. I would love to know more if you can point to a documented example but everything I have seen that actually has numbers ends up being one of the above.


  • I am not going to say that I think Denuvo is good for gaming. I fully accept the importance of DRM for week one sales (which make a huge difference to publishers) and understand that activation models are incredibly useful for that but I also think activation model DRM is fundamentally shite because it renders games unplayable in order “Why is this random ass server plugged in in this closet?”.

    But I do think people overly attribute negative performance to denuvo. Implemented correctly, there are MAYBE a few checks per hour and that is system noise. The problem is that, for whatever reason, so many games end up adding the denuvo checks to critical path operations that either completely delay the loading of a new area or tank performance completely because it is checking a dozen times per minute. And that is 100% on Denuvo for not working properly with the studios they license their tools to.

    But for the ones who DO implement it sanely? It is barely noticeable to the end user… from a performance standpoint.

    Remember kids: Hate mother fuckers for what they actually do. Rather than going the “bitch eating crackers” route.