Could also be Blizz, in which case I feel sorry for them.

Mind you, I’m talking about a partial rebate on the vehicle tax. People who don’t own cars don’t pay vehicle tax, of course.

In my opinion that should by handled by vehicle taxes. If your car exceeds the dimensions cities are designed for right now, your tax increases. If it’s noticeably smaller/lighter (think kei car), you get a tax rebate.

People would be a lot more interested in compact vehicles if driving one made a real difference in their wallet.

My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.

Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)

Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can’t afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience

Also, there’s not as much value in high-powered GPUs right now because these days high-end graphics often mean Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is excellent for static and slow-moving graphics but has a tendency towards visible artifacts in situations where the picture and especially the camera position changes quickly (especially since it’s heavily reliant on TAA). These artifacts are largely independent of how good your GPU is.

Unlike in previous generations, going for high-end graphics doesn’t necessarily mean you get a great visual experience – your games might look like smeary messes no matter what kind of GPU you use because that’s how modern engines work. Smeary messes with beautiful lighting, sure, but smeary messes nonetheless.

My last GPU upgrade was from a Vega 56 to a 4080 (and then an XTX when the 4080 turned out to be a diva) and while the newer cards are nice I wouldn’t exactly call them 1000 bucks nice given that most modern games look pretty bad in motion and most older ones did 4K@60 on the Vega already. Given that I jumped three generations forward from a mid-tier product to a fairly high-end one, the actual benefit in terms of gaming was very modest.

The fact that Nvidia are now selling fancy upscaling and frame interpolation as killer features also doesn’t inspire confidence. Picture quality in motion is already compromised; I don’t want to pay big money to compromise it even further.

If someone asked me about what GPU to get I’d tell them to get whatever they can find for a couple hundred bucks because, quite frankly, the performance difference isn’t worth the price difference. RT is cool for a couple of days but I wouldn’t spend much on it either, not as long as the combination of TAA and upscaling will hide half of the details behind dithered motion trails and time-delayed shadows.

They did; the Z at the end denotes UTC.

Plugins and extensions could make sense if the site and plugin are designed to talk to each other. But that could be made safer by each extension being able to decide whether to announce itself (and the user being able to override that).

I got tired of it in 2013. While it does work in some places (Android does it reasonably well), I haven’t yet seen a good flat design on the desktop.

Windows 8 and 10 looked garish and hard to read, especially since everything is a rectangle with a one-pixel outline. Is it a button? Is it a text field? Maybe a thick progress bar? Who knows, they all look extremely similar.

While Apple did overdo it in the later big-cat OS X releases, I’ll take a felt-textured widget panel and a calendar bound in leather over an endless sea of hairline rectangles.