However, that was also my experience playing games like this back in the day

Exactly my experience as well. It’s very reminiscent of that time when I was given a GBA emulator with a bunch of US and JP roms without any explanation. I didn’t know what an emulator is, or that there were game consoles other than the GBC. I didn’t knew my way around English either and Japanese looked like some sort of bug to me.

There’s just something stumbling through a big library and slowly making inroads in your favorite titles.

Under the constraint that I’m only picking from developers who already have multiple games under their belt, it’d be hard to choose between Zachtronics and Supergiant for me. Both of them have a perfect track record in my book. The only difference being that there most likely won’t be any new releases from Zachtronics anymore, whereas Supergiant is only becoming stronger with each release.

Yeah, while there’s some truth to the joke that Win32 is the most stable Linux API that’s still a big downside to the current Linux landscape.

That said, I don’t think Microsoft is currently in a position to enforce drastic changes to their ecosystem, mostly because the desktop market has mostly been reduced to business and gaming, and they can’t do anything that affects backwards-compatibility for the business. The only thing that I currently see as an issue is if they boot anti-cheat kernel modules due to the whole Crowdstrike incident and replace it with their own, easy to use, alternative, which then gets used by more devs.

I really hope that when something like that happens, Linux has already has reached a critical mass, or, failing that, some legislators will care enough to prevent it.

As annoying as it is, it really shows how much developers already care about getting their games compatible with Steam Deck, and, in extension, Proton.

Keeping SteamOS relevant in the handheld market will be a big factor that decides how many games will run on Linux in the future.

Yup. I get why some people might not care, but I don’t understand the people trying to defend this.

Would these people defend drinking a Verification Can™ as well? After all, it only takes a few seconds.

Those three really are the holy trinity of factory games IMO and it’s quite insane that we’re getting all of them in what’s essentially a quarter of a year.

Also the perfect order with the most relaxing one releasing first and the biggest and challenging one last.

After that we totally need one of those cross-game tech-tree randomizers for these games. That’d be quite a challenge.

As much as I’d like to see this game preserved, I don’t think the dev can be held responsible when they’re refunding everyone who purchased the game.

Even further, there’s also a clean split between the game and the framework they’ve built for it. So people can actually build their own games or tools using the osu!framework, and some already did so.

Which is neat, because it seems to me like it’s really performant and of course, low-latency, based on what I’ve seen trying the new client.

Isn’t the issue you’re describing less about the OS and more about cheap keyboards with awful or nonexistent NKRO? On my keyboard with full NKRO I can press as many keys as I want and the OS will recognize all of them being pressed without fail.

Also, if I’m in a text editorand hold down one key, then start holding down another one, the new one is immediately picked up, which is pretty much identical to this situation.

While being able to do this from outside the game is definitely cheating, I’d personally say that being able to decide what happens with conflicting inputs should be an option in any game where that matters.

Whenever I start pressing A while I’m still holding D it should be obvious that I now intend to go left, so the game should interpret it that way.

At the very least, a save game editor wouldn’t be too hard to create when running your own server.

Though that got me thinking if there’s some kind of GDPR shenanigans one could already utilize to get all your account data. I kind of doubt it, but it would be hilarious.

Looking at this map there seems to be at least some correlation. There really needs to be popular advocates for each language and country, particularly for the smaller ones and those with a low english speaking population.

Agree. I don’t know this person, but at best he didn’t understand the campaign and also overdosed on defeatism. At worst he’s intentionally misrepresenting the campaign and lobbying against better consumer rights.

Horribly written AI slop that doesn’t even bother with linking sources or crediting an “author”.

For example:

AMD, another major player in the GPU market, has also embraced this trend by adding next-gen RDNA 4 GPU support in its Linux kernel driver.

That’s technically not wrong, but no sane human would ever describe it like that.

Technically you can do everything through email, because everything online can be represented as text. Doesn’t mean you should.

PRs also aren’t just a simple back and forth anymore: Tagging, Assignees, inline reviews, CI with checks, progress tracking, and yes, reactions. Sure, you can kinda hack all of that into a mailing list but at that point it’s becoming really clunky and abuses email even more for something it was never meant to handle. Having a purpose-built interface for that is just so much nicer.

I’m sorry to be blunt, but mailing lists just suck for group conversations and are a crutch that only gained popularity due to the lack of better alternatives at the time. While the current solutions also come with their own unique set of drawbacks, it’s undeniable that the majority clearly prefers them and wouldn’t want to go back. There’s a reason why almost everyone switched over.

I’d guess because the same argument could be made for the website you’re on right now. Why use that when we could just use mailing lists instead?

More specifically: Sure, Git is decentral at its core, but all the tooling that has been built around it, like issue tracking, is not. Suggesting to go back to email, even if some projects still use it, isn’t the way to go forward.

I see. That I can mostly agree with. I really don’t like the temporal artifacts that come with TAA either, though it’s not a deal-breaker for me if the game hides it well.

A few tidbits I’d like to note though:

they announce them way too early, so people are waiting like 2-3 years for it.

Agree. It’s kind of insane how early some games are being announced in advance. That said, 2-3 years back then was the time it took for a game to get a sequel. Nowadays you often have to wait an entire console-cycle for a sequel to come out instead of getting a trilogy of games on during one.

Games shouldn’t be relying on them and their trade-offs are not worth it

Which trade-offs are you alluding to? Assuming a halfway decent implementation, DLSS 2+ in particular often yields a better image quality than even native resolution with no visible artifacts, so I turn it on even if my GPU can handle a game just fine, even if just to save a few watts.

The quality of games has dropped a lot, they make them fast

Isn’t the public opinion that games take way too long to make nowadays? They certainly don’t make them fast anymore.

As for the rest, I also can’t really agree. IMO, graphics have taken a huge jump in recent years, even outside of RT. Lighting, texture quality shaders, as well as object density and variety have been getting a noticeable bump. Other than the occasional dud and awful shader compilation stutter that has plagued many PC games over the last few years (but is getting more awareness now) I’d argue that game performance is pretty good for most games right now.

That’s why I see techniques like DLSS/FSR/XeSS/TSR not as crutch, but as just as one of the dozen other rendering shortcuts game engines have accumulated over the years. That said, it’s not often we see a new technique deliver such a big performance boost while having almost no visual impact.

Also, who decided that ‘we’ would rather have games looking like Skyrim? While I do like high FPS very much, I also do like shiny graphics with all the bells and whistles. A Game like ‘The Talos Principle 2’ for example does hammer the GPU quite a bit on its highest settings, but it certainly delivers in the graphics department. So much so that I’ve probably spent as much time admiring the highly detailed environments as I did actually solving the puzzles.

It was the early days of homebrew when there wasn’t much information out there and the tools were much less advanced. I didn’t really care about the risk either, so it could’ve been anything. I wasn’t immediately banned either. Took about half a year or so.

But yeah, emulation can pretty run all the relevant titles, meaning the exclusives, much better than the Switch itself.