$0.26/hour is pretty good!

After seeing the various forms of black magic Nintendo devs have pulled off with what is essentially decade-old tablet hardware… yeah, fine by me.

In before one of them starts stripping or firewalling the phone-home code. What’s Unity gonna do? Valve hasn’t signed any contracts with them!

But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.

Actually asinine.

Bevy is definitely nice, but it’s probably a bridge too far for (say) an indie team moving off Unity. (Rust learning curve + ECS learning curve + no editor yet + still pre 1.0)

Love it for personal projects though.

I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn’t stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but… like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren’t listening to the engineers.

Every other engine is smelling blood in the water it seems

For the sake of your sanity, I hope there’s a resolution to this that doesn’t involve a rewrite.

I can’t decide if they’ll get away with this or if they’re committing corporate suicide.

Depending on how they generate a hardware fingerprint, fabricating random ones every check is a single LD_PRELOAD (or equivalent) away.

There’s a reason Hello Games wrote their own engine for NMS. We all know that it was pretty bad gameplay-wise at launch, but under the hood NMS was (and still is) something of a technical marvel. No loading screens except for a disguised one when jumping between systems is quite impressive.

I’m sure that any flagged snippets will be submitted to a human for final review. They definitely won’t just auto-ban-hammer innocent people because the AI misinterpreted something they said!

Sigh.

Almost any game will work under Proton. If you want to be sure, check ProtonDB before you buy.

The main exceptions are competitive multiplayer games (like Valorant) that use rootkit anticheat software, but that’s probably for the best.

The jank is part of the charm. Who doesn’t remember Skyrim Horsing their way up a mountain?

I went out and bought an external disk (tiny and used, so it was dirt cheap) purely for Windows and rootkit shit like Valorant or Lockdown Browser.

No way in hell I’m letting any of that touch my primary disk.

It’s very niche, but I used to really like Hades’ Star. It’s a mobile game (with a PC port available.) It uses timers and pay-to-rush (not pay-to-win) but it’s designed as a long-haul game, so (IMO) the delays don’t nag like they do in a game like Clash of Clans.

A big overhaul update is supposed to come out later this year, so you might consider checking it out in a few months.

Fucking hell. We really need to shatter all these cancerous megacorps.

If Canada uses the same bands as the rest of NA (and I assume it does) you should be able to get one remailed to you, no?

I upgraded because my previous PC was a dead end. It was a retrofitted XPS workstation I got from my father - I had slotted a SATA SSD and a somewhat improved GPU, but I couldn’t push it much further due to the proprietary PSU form factor. There weren’t even extra PCIe slots, which became a huge issue when I switched off Windows and wanted to get an Intel Wifi/BT card.

• On my desktop: GNOME Evolution - but only because my university uses Outlook w/ Exchange (cringe) and the UI is slightly more tolerable than Thunderbird.
• On my phone: I just use the baked-in Samsung Mail app.

In terms of provider, I used to use Gmail for my personal, but got tired of Big G scraping my correspondence. I tried Proton, but its integration story is a complete joke (you can upload your calendar and contacts but there’s no DAV support, their IMAP bridge is a non-standard-compliant dumpster fire that doesn’t work with half the clients I tried…) so I ended up on Fastmail.

Yeah, but FACEIT doesn’t work either. None of these anti-cheat products do - they usually stop casual attempts at cheating, but in the face of any dedicated attacker (including subscription cheats and hardware mods) they’re pure security theater.

The only exception I can think of would be Vanguard, which only works because it’s an aggressively maintained bespoke solution (and a complete security nightmare) - but even then, it’s still defeated by hardware mods.

It was fun until I was forced to refund it due to the devs announcing they were going to move from EAC to FACEIT, locking Deck/Linux users like me out. Asshole bait-and-switch move if you ask me - I’m glad I had just under two hours of playtime.

My single tablet use case is ebooks. I despise the ugly “e-ink” readers and love the simplicity of a cheap tablet.

Dang, you’ve got eyes of steel. I could never read books on an LED screen - the eyestrain is just too much. E-ink doesn’t have that issue.

I’ve never really liked tablets - I much prefer a real computer. That probably explains our disconnect.

I’m surprised people still want foldable phones. IMO they’re a gimmick - worse, a gimmick based on technology that clearly isn’t “all the way there” yet.

Power button fingerprint sensors. I had one on my S10e, and I loved it - with the way I held the phone, my thumb naturally rested on the power button, so it was pretty much auto-unlocked.

Now they seem to have fallen by the wayside in favor of in-screen sensors - which are cool, but ever-so-slightly more cumbersome. Ah well, still better than facial recognition.

Good news on the battery front: the EU is mandating that smartphones have user-replaceable batteries by 2027. It’s not clear if “readily removable” will mean “hot-swappable,” but… hope springs eternal, I guess?

Holy crap, I forgot about that feature from my dark-ages G4. That thing was a piece of crap, but I do miss that (and the twist to open camera.)

I had a side/power button fingerprint sensor on my S10e. The S22’s in-screen one is cool and all, but I really miss how my phone would be unlocked before it even came out of my pocket.