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Who is your favorite video game developer?
  • 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.

  • God of War Ragnarök released and Steam Deck Verified, needs a launch option for Desktop Linux
  • 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.

  • God of War Ragnarök released and Steam Deck Verified, needs a launch option for Desktop Linux
  • 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.

  • God of War Ragnarok Steam reviews are ‘mixed’ right now, as players criticize the PC version due to account linking, just like Helldivers 2.
  • 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.

  • FSR 4 has been in development for 9-12 months already, and one of the biggest focuses is improving battery life for handhelds
  • Kind of.

    The big thing that actually defines FSR2 is that it has access to a bunch more data, particularly the depth buffer, motion vectors, and also, as you said, uses data from previous frames.

    The camera jiggle is mostly just to avoid shimmering when the camera is stationary.

  • There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple.
  • That's always been their plan, but it's getting hit with Valve Time. My guess is that they won't do it until all issues the major with NVIDIA GPUs have been fixed, as a public build that doesn't run properly on a majority of machines wouldn't go well. The latest driver is pretty good, but the Big Picture mode is still pretty much unusable.

    At the very least they're currently trying to bring official support over to other handhelds, as they've already confirmed that they want to official support for the ROG Ally and pushed out a update to SteamOS for the controller support.

  • There's a reason we aren't as harsh on the Steam Deck. Actually, a couple.
  • That, and monitor/TV size increased a lot at the time when flat panels became a thing, so you need a higher resolution just to achieve the same pixel density you already had on a smaller screen.

  • As it should be
  • Ok, now I kind of want this. I only have my PC connected to the TV, so I only need the power button, volume controls, settings and the D-Pad. A specialized cover would make hitting the right buttons in the dark much easier and also remove the ads disguised as buttons.

  • When they ask to install Linux for them
  • And you can even go a step further and configure it so all the ISOs go into a subdirectory. Then you can still use the USB for other stuff without it becoming a mess. Right now I have the following structure:

    ├ apps // Lots of portable apps, using the PortableApps system
    ├ data // For copying files between devices
    ├ images // ISOs go here, separated into Linux, Windows and Utilities
    ├ installs // For apps that need to be installed
    ├ secure // Encrypted Veracrypt store
    └ ventoy // Ventoy config
    

    All that on a tiny USB on my keychain and super useful when you're the IT person for the family.

  • Germany hammers Trump over debate barbs about Berlin’s energy transition
  • Ok, I think I'm starting to see the issue now. One thing I've missed is that the "tiny" amount Germany is importing yearly is actually half of the consumption South Sweden. That sure puts a bit of stress on the system.

    I'll say that I'm still not fully convinced due to the lack of concrete numbers, but it's something I'll keep in mind in the future.

  • Germany hammers Trump over debate barbs about Berlin’s energy transition
  • I can't find a way to dodge the paywall to that article, but the short blurb I was able to translate, makes it sound like my guess is at least part of the problem:

    As long as the sun shines the most, Skåne benefits from cheap solar energy from our neighboring countries. As soon as solar energy declines, the price of electricity rises throughout Southern Sweden. The poor Swedish transmission capacity means that we cannot benefit from cheap northern hydropower.

    That said, I do agree that Germany should've long been split into two zones, at least until transmission capacity catches up. But alas, most people in Germany don't even recognize that the lack of transmission capacities as the source of the problem and rather blame it on us importing expensive electricity from France.

    It's actually those parallels why I'm so distrustful: I'm far from an expert on the topic, quite the opposite if anything, but given how many people, even politicians, put out even dumber claims much more confidently, I'm always wary about such statements.

  • Germany hammers Trump over debate barbs about Berlin’s energy transition
  • Based on the article, it seems more like that's more of a problem of south Sweden just having a big energy deficit in general, not as a result of imports/exports or the actions of Germany particular.

    The way I understand it, it's more that a new connection just wouldn't make sense because Germany already has a problem from moving energy from its own offshore wind parks in the north to the south.

    I couldn't find a good article explaining the current energy situation in south Sweden, but looking at ElectrityMaps, I'd guess that part of the problem is that there's a huge amount of nuclear energy being produced in South Central Sweden, saturating the grid and making the transfer of cheap hydro and wind energy from the northern Zones difficult.

  • Satisfactory: PCGamer's review [90/100]
  • 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.

  • Germany hammers Trump over debate barbs about Berlin’s energy transition
  • I'm not sure I follow? According to this chart the import from Sweden to Germany is almost negligible.

    Sweden, Finland, Lithuania and Poland all seem to be bigger net importers.

  • AI's take on XML
  • That's assuming people actually use a parser and don't build their own "parser" to read values manually.

    And before anyone asks: Yes, I've known people who did exactly that and to this day I'm still traumatized by that discovery.

    But yes, comments would've been nice.

  • AI's take on XML
  • On one hand I agree, on the other hand I just know that some people would immediately abuse it and put relevant data into comments.

  • Ladies and Gentlemen, the sate of AI.
  • At the very least it failed in a way that's obvious by giving you contradictory statements. If it left you with only the wrong statements, that's when "AI" becomes really insidiuos.

  • Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”
  • It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding

    On the other hand, the time spent uploading/downloading much smaller files probably more than makes up for that, although even that difference might get pretty small with modern internet connections.

  • Concord is going offline beginning September 6th
  • 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.

  • Google posts Pixel 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro XL, and 9 Pro Fold repair manuals
  • They've also had a partnership with iFixit for a while now, allowing them to sell genuine replacement parts.

    The process still isn't what I'd call repair-friendly, but I've been able to replace the screen of my Pixel 5 without much trouble. What bothers me most is the use of adhesive and too many parts being bundled together so they can only be replaced in bulk.

  • What's your favorite note-taking application?

    Currently I'm using Joplin with Syncthing-backed file system synchronization. I'm pretty pleased with it, as I do like tagging- and Markdown-based systems.

    I plan to upgrade to server-based synchronization, but before doing that, however, I wanted to see what other people are using.

    Edit: So far I see a slight favor towards Joplin and Logseq, but I totally didn't expect (and appreciate) getting so many different answers.

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    Dolphin Blog: What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
    dolphin-emu.org What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?

    Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to cont...

    What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
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