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Valve have really opened the floor for others to make good games though, right? I remember hanging out in indie game dev spaces about… 15-20 years ago, and many people’s best hope was to get accepted by a publisher and get 40% of sale revenue (publisher kept 60%). Getting onto Steam back then was very difficult (before greenlight).
Now anyone can publish on Steam, for better or for worse, and there are heaps of really cool indie games that rise to the top. Indie games were instrumental in the early days of VR as well.
Valve seem to have switched to a supporting role. They are developing hardware because it’s a gap they see in broadening their audience, and they let developers fill in the software because today being a game developer is really accessible.
To be fair, HL: Alyx was a pretty great game, that arguably gave you experience jumps like the original Half Life. I don’t remember much about it but I remember enjoying playing it. The little moments when you discover things like how you can write on a whiteboard by picking up a pen, or that you can only carry two grenades on your belt, but you can pick up a bucket and carry it around full of grenades, things that weren’t really possible in the same way until that new medium that they developed top of line hardware for.
I loved the touchpad as joystick in the valve games (portal, halflife). But as soon as you got to other games, for some reason it didn’t work as well.
I still have my steam controller (and it still works), but normally use an xbone controller.
I am keen to try one of these out though, they said 2026 so there’s a good chance it will be delivered this decade.
I am not aware on any on device ones that aren’t tied to a service (e.g. Ente does it on device because of E2E encryption meaning they can’t do it on the server) but I think you need an account or to self-host the service.
There are options (other than ente) if you can self host, but (other than ente) the server will be doing the processing.
I think Dicio is probably what you are looking for.
If you are a Home Assistant user you can set up an assistant and set the Home Assistant app as your Android assistant, though this is substantially less useful if you don’t use Home Assistant.
The company behind Mycroft got bankrupted by patent trolls (and perhaps poor management), I don’t know if there is any development there any more.
Yeah I can imagine trying to do it manually could get pretty tricky. I’ll look forward to the smart watch support (though I don’t own one, I might get one if others report it working well with GrapheneOS).
Edit: also one thing to try out if possible is to remove battery optimization from Google Play Services. Your device might be killing that, which stops counting the steps.
It seems it’s already set to not be optimized. It doesn’t seem to have access to the physical activity permission, but granting that permission didn’t seem to help. It still doesn’t count steps with the screen off.
No matter, thanks for all the ideas, I’ll just keep watching and see if others find a solution. I’ve subscribed to the Walkscape community so hopefully you’ll be posting updates there 🙂
It doesn’t seem to be helping. If I ever work out a more reliable way to get steps counted I’ll let you know. I know some pedometer apps don’t need Google Play Services and use a persistant notification to keep it active, but it seems like quite a significant change from what you currently have which wouldn’t be worth spending time on to appease such a small group of users.
If Google Play Services aren’t on there, the Recording API will not count steps in the background.
That makes a lot of sense.
Probably easiest solution is to let WalkScape to run in the background, when it’s freezed the battery consumption should be basically nothing.
It’s allowed to run in the background, but I have now disabled battery optimisation and will see if that helps.
From my understanding, any app installed directly from Google Play should be in the sandbox and have access to Google Play Services. I haven’t quite worked out where the steps are missing, but it seems when the game is open it’s fine, and when the game hasn’t been killed by the OS it’s also fine. If I go back to the game and it has to launch again from scratch, it doesn’t seem to count steps that happened while the game wasn’t running (foreground or background).
I also see this post where others are seeing the same thing, and are not using GrapheneOS. Maybe my use of GrapheneOS is a red herring and there’s actually something else happening.
It was always odd to me that apps need to be constantly active to get the steps. I don’t get why the phone doesn’t just count in the background then allow you to request “how many steps today” or “how many steps since X date/time” via the API.
I’m not across the Lemmy.cafe issues but they aren’t the only one seeing thumbnails fail intermittently. Here’s the issue on github where a fix has been made in Lemmy to help (but is not yet released): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5196
My point though is that an instance having an issue at a point in time isn’t a reason to discount it. All instances have issues occasionally. It was only last month that Lemmy.ee was having inbound federation issues.
Three months ago Intel stock dropped 30% overnight… so if Apple are even thinking about it then now is a good time.
I normally play games on quite a lag. I don’t have much free time, and there are lots of good games. I basically never buy games that aren’t 75% off or more.
But when I saw Baldur’s Gate 3 was on GOG, I bought it straight away, as it had great reviews, it’s full price seemed very reasonable, and if AAA publishers are putting recent games on GOG I want to support that.
Yeah, wisdom of crowds is a thing. Maybe I misunderstood what they meant. You ask everyone to predict, use the average for whatever Supervillain plan you have, then reward people who guessed better than the fed as an incentive to keep playing?
I would worry the reward and prior knowledge of the fed forecast would interfere with the wisdom of the crowd.
But sports games don’t pay even odds. You can’t just bet $10 on the favourite in every game, win 60% of the time, and come out ahead. You might only get paid $1.10 per dollar for a win. I’m not sure I understand how it’s helpful. Maybe only apply to games that pay enough?
Wisdom of crowds is a thing, but that isn’t how this ex-Valve dude’s example was structured. You can’t reward someone in particular for getting it right if you are averaging the crowd.
Is that honestly the most comfortable sitting arrangement he could buy with $500M?