People generally remember storms this big for the rest of their lives.
I truly think this will be a status quo shattering storm. Ever since "covid ended" the US has been in this state of extreme suffocating denial dialed up to 11 about the future and consquences. We all returned to office (if we were lucky enough not to be deemed an essential worker and were able to quarantine at all) and just accepted society was too dysfunctional to treat our safety as valuable even at a basic and fundamental level. Liberals and centrists dont even try to convince me they arent full of shit anymore, they checked out (all my leftist and science friends on the otherhand are still fighting but they and people in general for that matter are real close to collapse).
Honestly I feel exactly like I am living in a nightmare and if there is any silver lining to this storm it might be from punching centrists in the face to get them to wake up from their shitty dreams that are quickly foreclosing our future. Not that I want this to happen or that people sufferring is good...
. . but oh my I cant take much more of this, this is the most suffocating and disonant period of US culture I have lived through it makes the Iraq war era US look grounded and sane in comparison, which makes me want to throw up just saying that.
I think it is a case of using a purposefully absurd metaphor because more straight forward ones are too obviously in conflict with basic immutable, toxic aspects of people's belief systems (drilled and blasted through in their childhoods) that function to labotomize their empathy for the hardships of others.
You know how like other cultures use fairy tales and myths to talk about taboos or impossible truths so does "western" culture use the absurd framework of spoons to talk about the "impossible" state of being incapable of what the ruling class demands of us daily.
Dear Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole.
Unless you have specifically read up about the labor rights of Luddites you really dont know what you are talking about when you throw the word Luddite around (I know I didn't)
“[T]he Luddites did indeed understand the advantages which mechanization would bring,” Raymond Boudon, a sociologist at Paris-Sorbonne University, wrote in his Analysis of Ideology, citing the work of influential historian Lewis Coser. But “their machine-wrecking was an attempt to show the owners of the new textile mills that they were a force to be reckoned with, that they had a ‘nuisance value’. By acting in this way, their main objective was to gain concessions from the employers.”
The Luddites weren’t technophobes, then. They were labor strategists.
“This strategic interpretation of the Luddite movement is confirmed by the fact that the workers often destroyed only those machines which were turning out faulty goods,” Boudon wrote. “It was still true, of course, that a worker who went on strike could easily be replaced by somebody from the army of unemployed people willing to be strike-breakers, at a time when nascent trade-unionism was harshly suppressed. Since machine-breaking brought the factory to a halt, it was not only a functional substitute for striking, it was also much more effective.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-labor-technophobe/
Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves. Their struggle has been tragically warped into a caricature when it is more relevant than ever.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right
yeah definitely give it a go again and make sure to take the time to pick a decent reviewed one.
A bad bluetooth fm transmitter is a headache and a fiddly waste of time, a good one on the other hand works essentially just as good as an aux cord.
careful just like how violent video games will make you a stone cold killer addicted to violence eventually the addiction to speed will consume you until you become a lawless street racer straight out of midnight club. I have seen it happen over and over again to friends, eventually consequences always catch up with them... and they always end up losing their car in pink slip races to some new guy to the street racing scene who is shooting up the ranks improbably quickly and even has the eye of the coolest-most-badass street racer's hot ex (who also street races)... it is a damn shame .
Great description, the thing most people get wrong about defending science and history is that they dont convey how fucking weird it really is.
Even if Mozilla/Firefox was at some point a healthy organization, the shear incredible disparity of power between Google and Mozilla/Firefox means that the probability that Mozilla/Firefox would remain a healthy, functional organization approaches zero over a long enough period of time.
This is a problem that needs legislative action to destroy Google's incredible power and pseudo-monopoly control of search.
I am not saying Mozilla/Firefox isn't toxic, but there a million ways that Mozilla/Firefox could end up a toxic entity and billions of dollars that are directly interested in that being the case so shrugs.
....but yeah I agree with you, Mozilla/Firefox definitely didnt turn into a shithole overnight, but until recently criticizing them has been very difficuly to do in a lot of circles.
Ultimately the theft of the ruling class from the average artist and person in general is so staggeringly big that who gives honestly gives a shit anymore? Support game devs you like when you can by buying their games from stores that pay well to the developers and artists.... but f&$@ big game companies, they dont need your money, they aren't going to give a meaningful amount of it to the artists and or programmers doing the actual labor anyways so shrugs.
When Nintendo comes after people for emulating (especially old) games they aren't protecting anything other than the ownership class who wants to continue to charge rent for absolutely every aspect of our lives whether they rightfully or ethically own the things they are charging rent for or not.
If at first you crash and burn.... well I mean it is Beam Ng so doesnt that mean you are actually playing the game right?
That might be a reason to maybe consider some competitors of the Steam Deck that are a bit more powerful (but have their own tradeoffs, primarily that the wholistic experience just isnt going to be as good as the steam deck is right now), I don't know the Steam Deck might run 4k fine but I'd be hesitant to recommend it, that is so many fucking pixels lol
Agreed, did you know the NYC subway system moves about the same order of magnitude per day as the entire continental US air travel networks does. All those planes flying back and forth between countless different airports... the subway beneath NYC moves more people.
I think this statistic both puts into context the incredible order of magnitude power of subways for mass transit, and also helps put in perspective how dangerous they really are based on scary content uploading that is happening within a single subway car.... you gotta zoom your brain out to see the sea of perfectly boring subway cars transporting people to work and back every single day.
Ahh… I see you have met my dad, who decided only after I called him after having failed my suicide attempt to offer to take me back in after having kicked me out promptly at 18 and then only housed me for 2 months before driving me out to a random street corner and dropping me off saying he had lifted me back up enough for me to handle my own live because I was ruining his “vibe” while having a 3 bedroom house and a job that makes more than half a million a year.
A man who wouldn’t let me get a drivers license because I wasn’t allowed to touch one of his cars and needed to buy one on my own and figure out how to do it by 16 despite his first 3 cars being bought for him by his parents after he wrecked each previous one.
Seriously, when people say it is a distraction to blame generations and focus hatred on boomers I think it is a good reminder to keep the eye on the ball of extreme wealth inequality, but I think there is a really weird nut of truth in that generational hate in that wealthy, successful US boomers of a certain type really did completely abandon the "social contract" so to speak of passing the world on to their kids. Which wouldn't be that weird if society was always like it, and I am sure the "upper middle class kids" of every generation has felt this way to a certain extent, but it really feels like wealthy boomers just foreclosed the future of... literally everybody and when you meet boomers like your dad or one of my parents or countless other wealthy boomers I have met it really becomes far more "comic book" evil than it is reasonable to assume with some of these sad losers. There is no reason for the cruelty, and for the severance of resources and support other than a bunch of cynical political ideologies that amounted to barely anything more than lobotimizing a father's capacity to actually empathize with their child about basic life needs. It is like the condescending judgement of some wealthy boomer parents cancerously grew into a deep seated belief that their kids don't belong to be in the same economic class as they do, whether those wealthy boomers will consciously acknowledge it or not. I mean... not the worst problem to have, I am just pointing out how pathetic and sad US culture really is among superficially "successful" families.
Americans are the worst culture. Truly fucking despicable what they think is sane. You only get to buy how you want to be treated and the threshold for the floor of basic human dignity is more than most of us can afford.
As someone from the US I wholeheartedly agree but I also want to qualify this a bit.
US culture is the worst culture given how rich it is. You might go to another culture with a HELL of a lot less money in the society/less GDP (..because it has been extracted by countries like the US but different conversation) and be able to find aspects of that culture that are way worse... but more than any other country on earth the US has been able to choose the world it wants to exist in instead of being existentially forced to accept the terms set out by more powerful countries, and holy shit what the US has done with that is not only dumb it is catastrophic.
The US is the richest country on earth, we could be treating each other like royalty, we could be saying "it is unamerican to let homeless americans starve!!" and just start giving people housing and food for free, we could do whatever the fuck we want with all of our incredible amount of power and just ignore the consequences for the rest of the world... but instead not only do we ignore the consequences of our life style on the rest of the world (again, utterly catastrophic in terms of carbon footprint, ecological impact and just plain wastefulness) we ignore the consequences of our life style on our own damn selves, our family, our kids, our parents, our neighbors and our friends.
Like yeah I know I am not saying anything original but damn I just feel like it needs to be said over and over again, the US is a very shameful place in the sense that the amount of unnecessary suffering here is quite extreme (again, not making claims about absolute suffering.. not that it is ever helpful too beyond pointing out big disparities of privilege).
Most americans believe the entire point of transit is to sort people who can afford it from people who cant.
If mass transit is affordable for all it is literally considered a threat to these pathetic people who would means test their own kids before they gave them food and shelter if it was socially acceptable.
I was in NYC recently and the amount of wealthier people who just ubered everywhere (or actually just demanded to own a car and drive themselves in the least car friendly place IN THE US) with no consideration for ever using the subway underneath their feet was pretty disgusting and appalling especially coming from somewhere without magic train tunnels underneath my feet that run 24/7....
Notice all of these narratives run essentially in parallel with a nebulous fear of the subway being stoked by Eric Adams and centrists, they provide a convenient impulse to rationalize taking the easy way out and clogging the streets with another useless car. Kind of like convincing yourself as a kid not to do a chore in the basement because the basement is scaryyyy, I mean look at this video from somebody in another basement experiencing a freak scary incident that would likely never ever happen to me!!!!
I live somewhere with free bus transit in the US, and it is shocking how different it feels and yet also how many successful people around me with working cars just categorically ignore the use or possibility of using busses. The US is really really deeply fucked on this point and it makes me feel awful for the rest of the planet having to deal with our horrendous carbon footprints.
New York City has so much potential, but it is utterly ruined by rich conservative money suffocating the city in a chokehold.
I hate the US so much sigh
LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it
My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.
I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me "this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!"... admittedly they didn't know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point... they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn't know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.
Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah... Syncthing isn't a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device... and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism... COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.
Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing's GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!
That is great to hear, definitely seemed like FreeCAD was REALLY basic in the past, but there is such a big gap for a really fully featured FOSS Cad software!
Well we can't live without a modern game that acknowledges how awesome Total Annihilation is as an idea so effectively that means we can't live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?
I mean Forged Alliance Forever is amazing and I am zero percent bashing it... and ok I guess we would still have Planetary Annihilation, and that game looks pretty awesome too...so I suppose technically we could live without Beyond All Reason but I doubt even the Planetary Annihilation devs would be happy about that world, I know the FAF community wouldnt be happy lol.
Can you actually use steamdeck as a desktop PC though?
Depends on how many pixels you "need". Running high resolution monitors, even for basic stuff can get costly performance wise pretty damn quick, but in my opinion that isn't really asking the same question as whether the Steam Deck can be a good desktop.
You can absolutely use the Steam Deck as a desktop, I frequently use my Steam Deck in desktop mode... using the onboard controls. The only real limitation of the Steam Deck so long as you don't expect it to be a top of the line gaming pc, is that most people who buy it are never truly going to be able to give anything else other than a mouse and keyboard an honest go, they are too impatient and won't believe it can work but the sky is the limit for joystick+gyro input (our touchpad + gyro) for computers/gaming.
I would like to suggest a perhaps oddball steam deck utility here.
logseq!
logseq is a note taking, thinking and task tracking tool, it is open source and free and works superb on the steam deck when launched in gaming mode.
logseq has functionality for
-arbitrarily deep trees of headings
-easy linking between pages (think wikipedia)
-calendar and in depth task tracking and scheduling
-whiteboard simple visualization utility that can link back to notes
-ability to reference specific parts of a pdf or image from notes and link directly to it
You can then use the equally superb and also free and open source file sync software Syncthing to sync your logseq notes between different devices (say your phone and steam deck).
Using these two utilities you can easily build a cloud based task tracking and note taking system that has ZERO percent lock-in to any corporate silo or any subscriptions, you have complete agency over the whole thing and its pretty damn slick too!
Logseq notes are stored as plain text markdown which adds an extra layer of comfort in knowing if you take a bunch of notes on your games even if ALL development of logseq somehow went belly up those notes are stored in plain text markdown... so you arent going to lose them/have to rewrite them by hand.
(your notes being stored in plain text also means that even a comical amount of notes takes up only kbs of disk space)
Relaxing sailing experience. Discover Akalana Islands.
"pancake" refers to a colloaquial term for tiny nimble classic recreational racing sailboats like sunfishes and lasers, essentially the hull is shaped like a pancake (well a bowl more like but whatever) and all of the lateral resistance to getting blown sideways (that would be provided naturally by a long slim hull that sat deep in the water) is focused on the narrow point of the single daggerboard and to a lesser extent rudder. This is what makes sailboats like this an absolute joy to sail even in fairly light wind in real life, they take almost no wind to go and can take advantage of passing bursts of energy from even the most capricious wind gusts, so it makes sailing them a very direct and deeply calming conversation with the immediate elements of the wind and water around you.
Sailing in light wind is fun in a chill way but for long sailboats that have a consequently big turning radius, often it is difficult to keep any speed when turning the front of the boat directly past the onblowing wind because you can't pick up any speed in that moment, you have to rely on inertia. A pancake sailboat like this is made to spin like a top with a flick of the rudder so that even in light wind the hull can carry momentum through multiple quick tacks (changing direction by rotating the bow past the direction of the onblowing wind) or jives (changing direction by rotating the bow the other way, so that it never directly passes by the direction of the onblowing wind, can be very difficult to control in a small sailboat like this).
With this kind of sailboat you basically have two controls, you aim the rudder with an articulated handle in one hand and you control the angle of the sail/boom through a rope held in your other hand that runs through a pulley. In real life you also are able to control the center of mass of your personal meatcube for minute corrections as well, but with essentially just those two control inputs an incredible variety and complexity of movement is possible.
Even if you have never thought about learning sailing, it is worth learning for its own sake because of how primal and direct learning how to sail a pancake boat like this is that only has one rope to hold and one rudder and that is the whole dashboard of controls. If you have ever met sailors, they probably are really intense and get all hyped about racing around in conditions that look absolutely awful to a non-sailor lol, but it is just as valid to sail around in light wind normal on a blustery afternoon summer day as wiser and lazier alternative to paddling a kayak :). Honestly it takes an astonishingly little amount of energy to move a tiny sailboat like this at a pace faster than you can paddle a kayak.
Pancake Sailor and the developers non-free games are marketed definitely pretty heavily towards VR, but Pancake Sailor actually works bloody fantastic as a Steam Deck game. It is an immediate cozy and chill experience, the moment you open the game and start playing. I can easily see myself talking with someone on the phone while I focus on the conversation and mindlessly sail around in pancake sailor.
Check it out! It is free!
Also the main game is on sale for $5 in the steam summer sale, the game doesn't seem to go cheaper, it isn't necessarily a super rare sale either though so shrugs honestly I recommend just downloading Pancake Sailor and having some fun!
This game will genuinely teach you how to sail, and the really wonderful thing is that if you learn how to sail a really really simple sailboat like this you will understand the basics of how to sail any sailboat, no matter how complex. Yes there are a billion more things to learn with larger sailboats with multiple crew and sails and ways to manipulate those sails... but at the end of the day you are trying to accomplish the same set of maneuevers that will become deeply intuitive to you if you practice sailiing a simple sailboat like this. Honestly, master a boat like this and if someone threw you onto a typical 40 foot monohull sailboat and you had to sail it back to a harbor to save your life, you would be fine. You would do a really shitty job, but again the fundamentalis are the same. This is a human skill I think everyone should explore through video games!
Warning though, once you learn how to sail every time you play a video game where sailboats are just normal boats but with an animated sail that magically changes the wind direction around.. or even if there are true sailing mechanics but they are shallow af, you will become very sad.... :( but then valheim will give you a hug and remind you that there are people out there that really do care.
There are some decent deals going on right now, not so much for AAA titles really, they don't seem to be going on sale much in my opinion in the past year or so.
Indie games on the other hand have been having some really great discounts.
Here is the /r/gamedeals steam summer sale thread
https://old.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/comments/1dpxrdr/steam_summer_sale_2023_day_1/
The thread you are really interested in is the Hidden Gems thread tho...
https://old.reddit.com/r/GameDealsMeta/comments/1dpxyff/steam_summer_2024_hidden_gems/
Even more so than steam... I think some of the recent Fanatical bundles have been really great for indie games, I bought almost everything from these bundles
https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle
https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle
I also picked up a bunch from this one too
https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-handheld-heroes-bundle
I really like the digital board games from direwolf like Instanbul, Everdell, Wings Of Glory. Concordia is also a brilliant digital board game and perhaps one of the best board games ever invented by humanity... (not kidding).
How about y'all? Have you picked up any good indie games for your steam deck lately?
Kinda spent a lot, but with a lot of these indie games, like the big metroidivania games and such I just don't think they are ever going to come down below $3, they aren't worth that little lol anyways.. but just look at the isthereanydeal stats for some of the indie games in the fanatical bundles they straight up destroy steam's "summer sale" in my opinion at least at a cursory glance.
For example, look at "Trinity Fusion" in the "handheld heroes bundle", Steam advertises it on "sale" for $12, but if you buy 5 games or so on fanatical's bundle it is $3....
...just saying, might be a good time to flesh out your steam deck's indie, local co-op, party and retro style catalog!
In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think using the fediverse vs commercial social media is thattt crucial of a difference for most (add a million qualifiers here except if you are black, queer, trans etc… I am talking in relative terms here) livimg inside the borders of colonial powers like the US, France, Germany etc..
Speaking as a hetero white dude who grew up with a decent amount of privilege the fediverse isn’t for the countless versions of me living within the borders of colonial powers…
It might have been programmers living within the borders of colonial powers that did most of the labor to create the fediverse, and most of the early users might have come from within colonial powers but I think it is important to recognize that the gift that the fediverse represents to the world is the capacity to empower people living outside the borders of colonial powers to own and run their own social networks instead of having some random Facebook employee who doesn’t have the time or basic knowledge of a country to make major decisions about what news accounts to moderate as dangerous spam and what to allow.
From a 30,000 foot view, speaking in broad terms and specific values and priorities, what do you think are the best strategies for flipping the script on the fediverse being mostly a tool used by people within the borders of colonial powers to one used by without and within?
I wonder about the capacities of fediverse software being useful as a compliment to HOT open street mapping type initiatives in the wake of disasters and just in general?
(Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing? I don’t really know)
I have unfortunately not been able to figure out how to load controller configurations that I have shared to steam into games that weren’t the original game I made that controller config in. I click on the controller layout and it fails to load and reverts back to the layout I already had selected.
My recommendation (cobbled together from recommendations from others) for getting around this is adding the file manager "Dolphin" (steam deck already has it) as a non-steam game to steam as well as “Corehunt” (which you have to download from Discover, it is made by the same people that made CoreKeyboard). Or you can just use Dolphin and Corehunt in desktop mode.
https://flathub.org/apps/org.cubocore.CoreHunt
https://gitlab.com/cubocore/coreapps/corehunt
Before I start, if y'all have a better way feel free to chime in and show me the light :P.
——
Go to the game you want to copy a controller layout into. Edit one of the default controller layouts, make a random change to it, rename the controller layout to a unique name like TARGET_game then export the file as a personal save (or a personal shareable save I can’t remember which).
———
In Corehunt, search for the file, Corehunt should find the file fairly quickly (it is muchhhh faster, fuzzier and more thorough than the other file search programs I have used on the Steam Deck so far). Note the file path.
———-
If needed, also search the name of the controller layout you want to copy into the game (name that layout something you can search for easily too).
————-
Navigate to the file path for your controller layout you want to copy, click split view in dolphin and then open up the controller layout for the game you want to copy the controller layout into (that contains your “Target_game” file) and… drag and drop copy!
————
Done! Now when you go to browse layouts for your new game, the layout from your old game will show up and be loadable.
Note… you can also look up your steam deck’s file path to controller layouts in a guide or documentation but the filepath is really annoying and one of the folder steps is your steam user-id… so I actually think this explanation is much more concise and easy to do. Just let Corehunt find the folder location for you and then pin it to Dolphin’s sidebar so you can quickly jump to it again.
Steam games should name themselves according to the name you have in Steam, but sometimes the folder name is a number (the steam game’s id number or something).
-------
Unironically.
Next time you hear a ridiculous description of the steps required for a ghost summoning or exorcism, just think about all the emails you have gotten from HR that detail the pointlessly overcomplicated process for clocking in and out of work.
Or when you hear Sony just lost all their emails and you are like… what does that even mean?
It’s all just spirit forces blasting back and forth on a cosmic scale of bullshit and silicon.
With graphics turned to low (which just looks retro to me and fits the vibe of the game like I am playing midtown madness-ultra) Motor Town is a blast on the Steam Deck!
What really makes it fit well with the deck is the autopilot feature where you can hit a button and your car will automatically navigate to the next step of whatever job you are doing. That makes it perfect for picking up and putting down while you do other stuff.
Cataclysm DDA, Vim & WASD - Implications For Generalist Translations Of Qwerty Layouts To The Steam Deck ---------------
link to video demonstration on Peertube instance
Steam Deck controller config available by renaming Cataclysm DDA in your steam library (added as a non-steam game) to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and then searching under community layouts for "Cataclysm DDA full keyboard mapping".
edit: I recommend increasing the transparency of the popup steam menus by a large amount in practice, I kept them fairly opaque to make the video demonstration easier to follow
Here is my setup!
Vim Ring - my preference -> left joystick (no reason these can't be shuffled around tho) -------------
The Vim hjkl keys (along with the diagonals y u n b because this is CDDA and we need those diagonals) provide us with a clear idea we can ground the Steam Deck mapping in, and unlike a Vimmer with a qwerty keyboard, we can unfold the keys into the navigational ring (up down left right) Vimmer's imagine in their head to understand Vim qwerty controls.
Not only does this provide an easy way to remember our first choice in dividing the qwerty keyboard into Steam Deck mappings, it also means that the control scheme has plug and play compatibility with a dizzying array of software and games that all are part of Vim's ~40 year tradition and evolution of keyboard controls. Once you memorize the Vim Ring on your Steam Deck you will be able to use it for the rest of your life on joysticks and touchpads, and you can rest assured that other people will be developing vim hjkl based controls for software and games for the rest of your life.
WASD Ring - my preference -> left trackpad --------
WASD is probably one of the most well known "conceptual projections" onto the qwerty keyboard right?
It might seem a bittt confusing at first that z and x are the diagonals, but if you remember that this navigational ring is based on WASD, than s has to be down, and thus it becomes intuitive that z and x would be the downward diagonals. The letters q and e are almost without fail where left-lean, right-lean controls are for tactical shooters (for leaning out of cover to shoot) but even to someone unfamiliar with these control schemes, q and e are pretty intuitive.
Center Column ---------
Notice here, that between the Vim and WASD rings is 2x3 column of unbound letters on the keyboard, those being c v, f g, and r t. The natural place for these letters which are frequently used by games and software is the four Steam Deck back buttons L5, R5, L4, R4 and the bumpers R1 and L1. True, vim prioritizes the horizontal home row, but given the accessibility of the other homerow keys in the VIM and WASD rings I don't think this is a serious flaw especially because it is easy to visualize how this column maps to your Steam Deck.
Number Ring - my preference -> right trackpad -------------
Now for our last navigational ring. This ring was inspired by reading about players admitting to making the extremely chaotic-neutral choice of using the number row rather than the numberpad for navigation lol. We could just recreate the numberpad in a menu, but we already have two rings, and if anything nudging the numberpad into a ring shape makes activation from a touchpad or a joystick much more intuitive, it also expresses directly the meaning of the numberpad in terms of navigation while allowing quick access to each number for rapid input. Importantly, the number row keys not the numberpad keys are used here so that in conjunction with shift this ring can be used to activate the alt number row commands !@#$%^&*().
Caboose Board - my preference -> right joystick -------------
The Caboose Board is where the rest of the letters and punctuation keys go. I call this a "board" not a "ring" because more keys can be fit onto steam's menu system by making two rows then making a ring, which provides a natural place for extensibility for additional critical keys needed only for a specific game or program that won't mess up carefully arranged rings.
Controller Face Buttons, and Left & Right Triggers. ------------
At this point all the letters from the qwerty keyboard are mapped onto the onboard Steam Deck controls. We just need to tidy up and map a few remaining keys outside of the main 3 rows of the keyboard and make some quality of life mappings for important controls in Cataclysm DDA.
Up until this step, other than starting from the assumption that mouse control is unneeded for this mapping, I haven't made any keyboard mappings that are only memorable or salient in the context of Cataclysm DDA. Only after this point am I actually assigning keys to the facebuttons of the Steam Deck based on the specific requirements of Cataclysm DDA. Think about how much easier this makes it to create and memorize the muscle memory of mappings for the next complicated game you want to tackle creating Steam Deck bindings for, if it is a roguelike or other game/software that can be played without a mouse than at least 85% of these mappings don't need to be changed. If mouse control is needed, it is easy to imagine slotting the number ring into a toggleable alternate menu that shares the same control binding. Or the caboose.
These final mappings are intended to be intuitive to someone who has used a gamepad a lot (especially xbox controller). Escape is mapped to the menu face button, tab to the view face button, backspace maps to the x facebutton, spacebar to the b facebutton, enter to the right trigger and shift to the left trigger allowing the shift key to easily be held like it is intended to be on a qwerty keyboard.
Some final quality of life tweaks for CDDA, a single press of the y facebutton activates the / key to bring up the advanced inventory management screen (absolutely amazingly powerful utility in CDDA) and a double press of the y facebutton activates they ? key to bring up list of commands with plain english search. A single press of the a facebutton is mapped to " which brings up the movement toggle (run, walk, crouch, prone). A double press brings up the mutations menu with [ (a somewhat tenous mapping to remember I concede, this is a draft tho). For now I have the thumbstick buttons mapped to + and -.
A Final Note On Menus --------
It is important to adjust the in menu sensitivity especially for navigational rings like the Vim Ring, WASD Ring and Number Ring. Typically for a ring assigned to a joystick one might want to set menu button activation to continous (with these repeat turbo settings) and tweak sensitivity so it is easy to reach the menu buttons on the far edges of the menu without it being uncomfortable or resulting in accidental activations of other keys.
I was looking for a good generalist set of keybindings for my Steam Deck's onboard controls that bound all the letter keys and also the necessary commands to navigate web pages and manipulate files. There isn't any obvious layout to bind all the gamepad buttons, joysticks and touchpads to letter keys and keyboard commands/command chords, and further it feels like whatever solution you came up with would be impossible to memorize anyways.
Kind of a silly endeavor perhaps, but... touchscreen keyboards take up wayyyyy too much screen real estate on the Steam Deck, and further the pop up software keyboard sometimes doesn't behave right with software that isn't expecting a pop up touchscreen keyboard (i.e., not like a mobile app designed to handle one).
Then I randomly thought about Qutebrowser and vim keybindings... and I had an evil idea.....
I want to try using this with neovim as well, and I thought y'all might get a kick out of it lol!
edit errr, oooff I don't know how to get lemmy not to dump the text from my linked post completely unformated into this post
I am still in the process of ironing out how I want my control scheme, but when looking for a web browser to run in Gaming Mode on my Steam Deck that worked well (Firefox was being funky when run in Gaming Mode/Big Picture) I experimented a little bit with Qutebrowser.
https://qutebrowser.org/doc/quickstart.html Edit figured out how to share steam controller profiles, it is under the gear icon -> layout details, here is my draft vim/qutebrowser profile, try it out and let me know what you think!
steam://controllerconfig/2919876185/3227309282
Qutebrowser is downloadable from the Discover package manager in Desktop Mode on the Steam Deck (then find Qutebrowser in start menu ->right click add to steam). Qutebrowser is designed for a linux window manager like I3 where you don't really use a mouse much, everything in Qutebrowser is meant to be navigated with keyboard commands, no mouse required in the style of Vim keyboard commands. lt also prioritizes using screen real estate efficiently which is a boon for the Steam Deck. Like Vim, Qutebrowser has modes, an input mode (entered by pressing the i key) where you can enter text normally and a navigation mode (entered by pressing escape) that you use the keyboard letters to navigate and input web browser commands. In my control scheme you simply press the menu button to toggle between input and navigation modes.
While this might initially seem like the last software on the planet you would want to try to adapt to using with the Steam Deck's onboard controls, the wisdom of Vim-style keybindings mean that almost every important function in the software is kept to the letters on the main keyboard, i.e. a-z. We can build a nice control scheme with the idea of mapping all the web browser controls to the steam deck while simultaneously mapping letters a-z to the steam deck....
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The hjkl keys as up/down left/right navigation in vim naturally map to the left joystick, holding shift (long press R1 bumper) and hitting these keys navigates to previous page/next page/tab to the left/tab to the right
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the entire top row of letters on the keyboard can be assigned to a touch menu on the left trackpad and the entire third row of letters can be assigned to a touch menu on the right trackpad.
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The shift key can be mapped to long pressing the R1 bumper.
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That leaves 5 letters remaining, put f aside and map a s d g to the back buttons of the steam deck. Backspace maps naturally to the x facebutton on the steam deck, the a facebutton to Enter and the b facebutton to Spacebar.
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Finally, the last letter f can be mapped to the y facebutton on the Steam Deck. In qutebrowser f is an important key as it prompts what are called hints. When you press f you see something like this....
If you input a sequence of keys shown, Qutebrowser will navigate the cursor to that spot and left click. The really nice accident of this Steam Deck control scheme is that Qutebrowser by default only uses letters that are mapped to physical buttons on the Steam Deck (hjkl asdf and g) in this Steam Controller configuration.
With f bound to the y facebutton on the Steam Deck, it is natural to bind a similar command / that allows to search on the page (bound to long pressing the y facebutton).
Clicking the leftstick inputs o which opens up the prompt to navigate to a url, clicking the right stick inputs : which is used to access Qutebrowsers advanced commands and settings.
The thing about running Qutebrowser in Gaming Mode is that you can use a separate control scheme in Steam designed exclusively for using Qutebrowser. Obviously, inputting bulk text with the touchscreen keyboard is going to be faster, but I think this control configuration is worth exploring since the modal nature of Vim style keyboard commands reduces the amount of necessary keybindings to fully utilize and navigate a web browser by a huge amount. The left joystick being a good fit for hjkl is the icing on the cake!
Any program can be added to steam by putting the Steam Deck into Desktop Mode (hold power button and select Desktop Mode) and finding the app in the start menu. Right click and select \
Any program can be added to steam by putting the Steam Deck into Desktop Mode (hold power button and select Desktop Mode), finding the app in the start menu Right clicking and selecting "add to steam" from the menu. Remember the "game" added to steam will have its own separate controller profile, choose keyboard and mouse template for desktop programs and adjust as needed.
Kdenlive is a video editor that can be downloaded by opening the Discover package manager in desktop mode and selecting to install the program.
Why do this? Well, with Decky Loader plugin Decky Recorder you can record clips of gameplay in Gaming Mode with the Steam Deck. The default file location is /home/deck/Videos/. There isn't necessarily an easy way to view videos in Gaming Mode on the Steam Deck however, which means the next step of reviewing the footage you took while playing the game requires you to exit into Desktop Mode and open a video player like VNC.
Fine, but.. I actually think I like this workflow better, add Kdenlive to steam so you can launch it in Gaming Mode and then create a layout inside Kdenlive (I called it "browse" in demo video) that just has the "media browser", "clip monitor" and "transport" selected. This is your video player to review the clips you record, now you can switch to the "editing" layout (layouts are in top right of screen in Kdenlive) and directly transition to video editing without ever leaving Gaming Mode.
This video is a (clumsy) demonstration of using Kdenlive in Gaming Mode to make a video.
Operation Harsh Doorstop has been in development for a bit by now, it is a free large map first person shooter with vehicles that is being developed on the Unreal Engine with a modding SDK built in...
This is some gameplay from Operation Harsh Doorstop which is a free multiplayer tactical shooter with large open maps and vehicles, and more importantly from the beginning integrating a modding SDK was central to the objectives of the devs which is a really REALLY nice breath of fresh air (looking at you battlefield series... and call of duty series).
Operation Harsh Doorstop was pretty barebones until fairly recently, but the game now has most of the elements it needs to provide a fun large scale multiplayer shooter game complete with vehicles and I think in it's current state it is quite fun to play! It didn't used to run well on the Steam Deck at all, but with recent updates performance has improved to the point that I can play multiplayer fine (I actually had the graphics set lower than I really needed to in the video). It bodes well for how well future multiplayer games based on the Unreal engine will run on the Steam Deck.
Since OHD is free, it is a no brainer to check out, just pick servers where you can get guns with scopes on them as iron sights are only fun when you have a huge monitor and a high resolution. Development is ongoing so keep your eye on it!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/
(no pay to win!)
Mine are:
- Omega Strikers
- Xonotic
- Halo Infinite
- Minion Masters
- Splitgate
- Super Animal Royale
- Farlight 84 (love it on mobile haven’t gotten to it on steam deck yet)
This is a short clip of me playing Xonotic on a Steam Deck using joysticks + gyroscope to control my character. Xonotic is a FOSS game (it runs on an engine that is actually a direct descendant of the quake engine interestingly) in the genre of arena shooters which are typically considered impossibl...
Edit Sorry about the ugly word vomit from lemmy ripping out the video description on peertube, I didn't know it was going to do that
I decided to try Xonotic on my steam deck using joysticks + gyro to see if I could play somewhat competitively. Turns out, it is a blast!
Not claiming I am amazing at Xonotic (the bots are HARD btw) but wow there is a huge potential here for strafe jumping mechanics with games designed to be controlled by joysticks + gyro. It is a blast!