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I have an F710 which I used and enjoyed for years, but it uses a proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol, and at some point, something wireless near me started interfering with it – occasionally, it’d stop responding to me for a second, which was frustrating in action games. I didn’t see the problem with Bluetooth controllers.
Pretty much any USB controller will work. Don’t normally need any special software support, and USB specifies the protocol, unless you’ve got some kind of oddball features on the thing. You can’t go too far wrong.
Of the ones that I’ve used, I’ve currently settled on the 8Bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth (there’s also a non-Bluetooth Ultimate controller that they make, but it doesn’t have Hall effect thumbsticks, which I want). Only downside is that it’s only available with a Nintendo face button layout, whereas I’d prefer the Xbox face button layout. They do sell replacement buttons, and Steam lets you flip the layout for games using Steam Input. Works with both USB and Bluetooth, and it comes with a charging cradle if you use it wirelessly.
If you seriously want to set something like this up, you’re going to need a device that can emit the smells that you want.
This instance of a device looks like it uses atomizers hooked up to different tanks:
https://www.amazon.com/Automatically-Releases-Immersive-Compatible-Platforms/dp/B0CNMXSN2K
I’d imagine that one run as many tanks as one wanted.
One limiting factor is that scent isn’t going to immediately change when you change your virtual environment. I’d guess that emitting the vapor close to your face, maybe running a hose up towards it, would help. Probably want some kind of exhaust to purge the previous smell from the room. My guess is that the reason that the reason that a “booth” is used in the submitted article is to minimize the airspace surrounding the user and thus clearing time.
Second, some form of computer control. Maybe some device that has relays controlled via USB. A relay is an electromechanical switch that can can cut power to an atomizer on and off, could run it to the atomizer.
Those guys sell USB devices with up to 64 relays. I haven’t looked, but it probably looks to the computer like a virtual serial port, takes text commands.
Then you need some kind of daemon running on the computer to send these commands at appropriate times.
And lastly, you need some way to trigger the daemon when the game is seeing some sort of event. Could monitor the game’s logfile if it has one and contains the necessary information – I recall some Skyrim-hooking software that does this – take a screenshot periodically and analyze it, or identify and then monitor the game’s memory, probably either a technique called library injection (on Linux, library interposers are a way to so this) or using the same API that debuggers use.
If the hentai game that your friend is after is Ren’Py-based – a popular option for visual novels, which many such games are – and the game includes the Python source .rpy files, which some do, then the game’s source itself could simply be modified. If it contains only compiled .rpyc files, that won’t be an option.
You’re going to need to obtain whatever scents you want to emit as well. You can get collections of essential oils – the aromatherapy crowd is into those – and mix them up to create blends that you want, stick 'em in the atomizer tanks.
One issue is that hacking it into an existing game is going to mean that the game isn’t intentionally designed around the use of scent.
That said, game studios are getting out of Russia as well.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that, but I do wonder how much of that is “we legally moved headquarters, but subcontract back into Russia”.
Like, you listed DCS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Dynamics
Following Tishin’s death in 2018,[14] Eagle Dynamics moved its headquarters to Switzerland, with multinational employees and contractors in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and elsewhere.
I remember reading some articles a bit back about Rolls-Royce subcontracting British nuclear submarine software back into Belarus and Russia.
Britain’s nuclear submarine engineers use software that was designed in Russia and Belarus, in contravention of Ministry of Defence rules, The Telegraph can reveal.
The software should have been created by UK-based staff with security clearance, but its design was partially outsourced to developers in Siberia and Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
I’d kind of think that scrutiny is probably less on video games than on defense contractors doing classified work on nuclear submarines, and if it can happen in the latter case…
Gorelkin said that Russian consoles aren’t being designed only to play ports of hundreds of old, less-demanding games. He added that they should primarily serve the purpose of promoting and popularizing domestic video game products.
The fundamental problem here is that software is an example of a product that has high fixed costs, low variable costs.
For products like that, scale matters a lot, because you can spread the fixed costs over many units.
Russia just isn’t that big.
Maybe it’d work if they can find something unique that Russian video game players really badly want that other people don’t care about much, so that desire is being unmet by production elsewhere.
Honestly, foreign sanctions might be the most-helpful route to make domestic production for the domestic market viable, since I don’t know how many official Russian localizations of foreign-made games will happen as things stand, and I assume that there are a substantial number of people in Russia who are going to need a game in Russian language to play it. I mean, people might be able to do some fan translations, but…
Foreign sanctions are also, I’d think, going to make it harder to get a successful export product working for Russian developers. I don’t know to what extent it impacts them, but it can’t be helpful.
If you look at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_developed_in_Russia
It’s not massive, and a lot of what’s there isn’t really top-notch stuff. There are some Russia-originating games that I like. Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946 is a world-class combat flight sim. But it’s part of a family of military simulation games that, from my past reading, benefited from a sorta unique situation. When the Soviet Union broke up, a lot of military spending got sharply cut, and a lot of military experts were suddenly looking for a job. There were a number of video game companies that picked some of them up as consultants to make military sims. That’s probably not going to show up again.
And I cannot imagine that the fallout from this conflict will improve Russian consumer spending capability over time, so it’s probably even harder to do a game oriented at the domestic market than would otherwise be the case.
Interestingly, Gorelkin emphasized that the console should not merely serve as a platform for porting old games but also for popularizing domestic video games.
Apparently state-subsidized efforts have not yet popularized appropriate domestic games on their own.
The blank line between the two actually – well, I suppose some clients might act differently than others, but certainly in the Web UI on lemmy and IIRC Reddit – produces a different effect, has a larger horizontal space, and is intended to be a paragraph break rather than just a line break.
foo
bar
(with two spaces trailing “foo”) Gives:
foo
bar
And
foo
bar
Gives:
foo
bar
It’s not normally a massive difference, but suppose you’re writing poetry, say, you’d probably rather have paragraph breaks between verses and line breaks after each line in a verse:
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
In Markdown, you want to put two spaces at the end of a line if you don’t want it to be treated as a single rewrapped line.
So:
foo
bar
Gives
foo bar
And with two spaces after “foo”:
foo
bar
I generally use bulleted lists instead to make it clear that it’s a list.
* *00: Space Marine*
* *Call of Duty: Black Ops*
Gives:
- 000: Space Marine
- Call of Duty: Black Ops
I have no idea why people do this.
I mean, I like a number of old Nintendo games too. But I just cannot imagine putting this kind of work into something like this, where it’s almost certainly going to get taken down.
The worst is when people do things like create unauthorized sequels to games and that gets taken down. Like, you could have gone and created your own game with your own setting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Metroid/comments/winq8r/what_are_some_of_the_metroid_fan_games_you_know_i/
Like, I like the Metroid series too. But if all the people who like the series enough to have created unauthorized sequels in the series had just used a different setting and characters to make their Metroidvania, we could have had a fantastic unencumbered series.
There are a lot of ways to measure that.
I guess one reasonable metric is how long I probably played it. Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far and an old computer pinball game, Loony Labyrinth probably rank pretty highly.
Another might be how long after its development it’s still considered reasonably playable. I’d guess that maybe something like Tetris or Pac-Man might rate well there.
Another might be how influential the game is. I think that “genre-defining” games like Wolfenstein 3D would probably win there.
Another might be how impressed I was with a game at the time of release. Games that made major technical or gameplay leaps would rank well there. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D or Myst.
Another might be what the games I play today are – at least once having played them sufficiently to become familiar with them – since presumably I could play pretty much any game out there, and so my choice, if made rationally, should identify the best options for me that I’m aware of. That won’t work for every sort of genre, as it requires replayability – an adventure game where experiencing the story one time through is kind of the point would fall down here – but I think that it’s a decent test of the library of games out there. Recently I’ve played Steel Division II singleplayer, Carrier Command 2 singleplayer, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included tend to be in the recurring cycle.
Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.
He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.
The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.
It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.
When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.
If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.
I think that there’s more to it than that.
My own guesses are:
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I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.
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Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.
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This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.
In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]
They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.
So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.
kagis
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
Smartphone dependency over time
Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.
Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.
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I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.
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Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.
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Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.
my thought was, '“oh am i going to have to do all this myself?” Idk why I would want to spend my time and effort doing what someone in Rimworld does without needing micromanagement.
Not really my cup of tea either.
I don’t think that Stardew Valley is really all that similar to Rimworld. Maybe Oxygen Not Included, Satisfactory/Factorio, Kenshi, or Dwarf Fortress if you’re looking for something similar.
I would call Hades and pretty much anything people call an “action roguelike” a roguelite, but I have a hard time calling something not a roguelike for using graphics, even being pretty strict about the definition. Like, there are a number of originally-ASCII roguelikes that have tilesets. Those don’t functionally change the game in any way than other than directly dropping the tiles in. Does that mean that Nethack-family games or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup aren’t roguelikes?
My red lines are:
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Gotta be turn-based. Maybe I’d accept a purely forced-turn version of a turn-based roguelike, like Mangband.
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At least some element of procedurally-generated maps and loot that alters how one needs to play the game from run to run. I’d definitely call many games that still have many handcrafted maps – Tales of Mag’eyal 2 or Caves of Qud, say – roguelikes.
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At least the option for permadeath, and that that be the primary mode of play. Some Caves of Qud was originally permadeath-only, but added a mode that avoids it.
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Grid-based. Hex grid is fine, like Hoplite.
Those are Berlin Interpretation elements. In addition:
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Top-down view (or functionally-equivalent, like equivalent, like isometric). I wouldn’t call a first-person grid-based game – and there were a lot of 1980s and 1990s RPGs that used that structure – a roguelike.
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Only direct control of one character at a time. I wouldn’t rule out Nethack for indirectly-controlled pets or Caves of Qud for letting one switch which character the player’s “mind” is controlling.
I don’t think that I’d make it a hard requirement, but all good roguelikes that I’ve played involve a lot of analysis and trying to find synergies among character abilities or item or monster or map characteristics, often in nonobvious ways. That’s a big part of the game.
I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.
Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.
My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.
I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.
My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.
Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.
The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.
Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.
Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.
Plus, there’s no point. Like, if you want to make a good KSP successor, lots of people were unhappy with what happened with KSP2 and would be happy to buy it. Why unnecessarily start a fight that risks the game?
EDIT: Hell, if someone made a good KSP successor, it’d be very near the top of my own purchase list. I really liked KSP.
I don’t know about Halloween as such, but ghost-themed, I guess Ghost Master. Twenty years old now, but try to make use of various ghosts with different abilities to drive people out of various buildings and houses.
I don’t think that the problem is 2FA itself so much as poor UX on existing systems.
Let’s say that I have a little USB keychain dongle in my pocket with an “approve” button and a tiny screen. When I sign in, at the time that I plug my password in, I plug the dongle in. It shows the information for whom I am approving authentication. I push the “approve” button.
It’s got a trusted display (unlike a smartcard, so that a point-of-sale system can’t claim that I’m approving something other than what I am).
It can store multiple keys, and I basically use it for any credentials that I don’t mind carrying with myself.
I then keep another, “higher security” dongle at home with more-sensitive keys.
Does that add some overhead relative to just entering my password? Yeah. But is it a big deal? No. And it makes it a lot harder for someone to swipe credentials.
I agree that using phone-linked SMS 2FA authentication is problematic (for a number of reasons, not just because it locks you to a phone, but because there are also privacy implications there).
for some reason
It’s called price discrimination.
If there are multiple groups of potential purchasers who have different levels of willingness to pay, if you can identify some characteristic of people willing to pay more, then you can create a version of the product that targets that characteristic and thus the group.
Price discrimination (“differential pricing”,[1][2] “equity pricing”, “preferential pricing”,[3] “dual pricing”,[4] “tiered pricing”,[5] and “surveillance pricing”[6]) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[7][8][2] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[2] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay[8][2][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[9]
- “Product versioning”[8][16] or simply “versioning” (or “second-degree” price differentiation) — offering a product line[13] by creating slightly differentiated products for the purpose of price differentiation,[8][16] i.e. a vertical product line.[17] Another name given to versioning is “menu pricing”.[14][18]
In this case, you’re going to have something like a group of “value customers” who care a lot about how much they need to spend on the game. And then you’re going to have “premium customers” who aren’t too fussed about what they pay, but want the very fanciest experience.
If you had just one version, sold the game at the “value customer” price, then you’d lose out on what the “premium customer” would pay. If you sold it at the “premium customer” price, then you’d have a bunch of “value customers” for whom the game would no longer be a worthwhile purchase, who wouldn’t buy the game, and you’d lose the sales to them. But by selling it at multiple prices, you can optimize for both groups.
EDIT: l’d also add, on the technical rather than economic side, that I’ve messed around with having a custom HRTF model myself, as Linux (and maybe elsewhere, dunno) games that use OpenAL let you specify a custom HRTF model in the config file. My own impression was that any impact on audio experience was pretty minimal. Might be different if someone had really weirdly-shaped ears or something, dunno.
Apparently the EULA blocked them from lawsuits, as people have tried suing them before.
This guy tried suing them six years back over his $4500.
Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He’s got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. Between April 2013 and April 2018, Ken pledged $4,495 to the project. The game still isn’t out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn’t refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.
On June 13, 2018, a judge ruled in favor of Star Citizen. According to Lord—and the LA county court records—the judge dismissed the case without prejudice, saying an arbitration clause buried in the Star Citizen end-user license agreement prevented Lord, or anyone, from taking RSI to court for a refund on a game that some backers think may never come out.
I suppose a class action lawyer might be able to find some jurisdiction in which they were taking money and running afoul of consumer protection laws.
Thing is, I think that a class action lawyer is going to want to go after someone with money, and when CIG runs out of funds, I don’t expect that they’re going to be a very interesting target.
https://gamerant.com/star-citizen-development-history-kickstarter-budget-delays-fans-disappointed/
In October 2012, Star Citizen was officially revealed, alongside a Kickstarter campaign that would be opened a week later. The Kickstarter page discussed the game in pretty extensive detail, boasting a long list of features that the game would allegedly have by launch.
Star Citizen was going to have a “persistent universe,” a vast multiplayer environment that allowed players to trade, fight, and talk amongst each other, acting as a simulation of a real sci-fi galaxy. Alongside this, a singleplayer campaign named “Squadron 42” would also be released, featuring co-op. Upon release, Star Citizen was going to have no pay-to-win mechanics, and no ongoing subscription model. Simply put, if people pledged money once, then they were done, and would receive the full game at launch, slated for November 2014.
Twelve years ago, the game had a release date set to be two years in the future.
Today, it also seems to have a release date of two years in the future.
https://www.33rdsquare.com/demystifying-aaa-games-the-past-present-and-future-of-blockbuster-gaming/
Lengthy development cycles – Given their complexity, AAA games take 2-5 years to develop. This allows time for extensive testing and polish.
Two years is at the lower end of what it’d take a studio to do an AAA game from scratch.
I think that “best” is open to various interpretations.
The most-emotionally-impactful in the context of the game?
The most-graphically-impressive?
The best-integrated with the game?
I often don’t try and play the latest-and-greatest games, and while I’m sure that I’ve played games with thunderstorms in them, I can’t immediately recall any recent first-person 3D games…and I’ve kind of shifted way from FPSes in recent years. Probably the newest 3D game that I can immediately recall playing that I distinctly recall having thunderstorms – though I think that they were rain is modded Fallout 4; I was using one of the weather mods.
I think it was one of:
There are radstorms that impact gameplay by dosing the player with radiation, and I suppose could be considered to a different form of thunderstorm. These are separate from normal storms. Fallout 76 also has radstorms, but they are less-frequent and far-less-damaging than in (modded, don’t recall base game) Fallout 4.
I guess that that’d probably be the most-graphically-impressive that I personally can recall off-the-cuff. I’m sure that there must be some newer, fancier thunderstorms out there.
For impact…I can’t recall for certain whether-or-not there was actual thunder and lighting other than in cutscenes, though there’s certainly rain… But The Saboteur is an Assassin’s Creed-style game (I understand; I’ve never played more than a very small amount of those games) set in World War II Paris. The areas that are occupied by Nazi forces are mostly black and white, with a small amount of color, mostly red, and at least some of the time, it’s raining. The areas where forces have been pushed back look kind of like spring. I think that it added to the game’s atmosphere a lot.
There are probably some games that this would work well for, but I’m not sure that it’d be a great replacement the way a physical thumb keyboard is for texting or the like.
Most present-day games that I can think of that I play use the keyboard as a grid of buttons. They expect to have your hand over the thing – often the left hand, with the right on the mouse – to let you be able to push multiple buttons quickly.
I’m not usually doing much text entry, which is what I’d expect a thumb keyboard to work well with.
Turn-based RPGs I can understand, but “RTS” is “real-time strategy” – it’s intrinsically not turn-based.
You can get turn-based strategy games, but they aren’t RTSes.
It depends on what you’re looking for. There are more hard-warsim oriented games at Matrix Games, though a number of those are also available on Steam these days.
Steam has a “Turn-based Strategy” tag:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1741&supportedlang=english&ndl=1
Isn’t it easier to just play a different game? I mean, there’s a ludicrously large library of games out there. If Sony is determined to only offer some game on terms that people don’t like, I mean, fine. Send money to a different publisher.
It doesn’t really seem worth the time and effort to make that game palatable. Give it a negative review indicating why you’re unhappy with it and move on.
locking down the Windows kernel in order to prevent similar issues from arising in the future. Now, according to a Microsoft blog post about the recent Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit, the company is committing to providing “more security capabilities to solution providers outside of kernel mode.”
So first off, from a purely-technical standpoint, I think that that makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. Jamming all sorts of anti-cheat stuff into the Windows kernel is a great way to create security and stability problems for Windows users.
However.
I don’t know if my immediate take would be that it would permit improving Linux compatibility.
So, from a purely-technical standpoint, sure. Having out-of-kernel anti-cheat systems could make it easier to permit for Linux compatibility.
But it also doesn’t have to do so.
First, Microsoft may very well patent aspects of this system, and in fact, probably has some good reasons to do so. A patent-encumbered anti-cheat system solves their problem. But that doesn’t mean that it’s possible for other platforms to go out and implement it, not for another 20 years, at least.
Second, it may very well rely on trusted hardware, which may create issues for Linux. The fundamental premise of a traditional open-source Linux system is that anyone can run whatever they want and modify the software. That does not work well with anti-cheat systems, which require not letting users modify their local software in ways that are problematic for other users. My Linux systems don’t have ties up and down the software stack to trusted hardware. Microsoft is probably fine with doing that, on both XBox and newer trusted-hardware-enabled Windows systems.
gives Nintendo the liberty to not only take legal action but also ban a user from any future use of their IPs in content making.
Features graphic, explicit, harmful, or otherwise offensive content, including statements or actions that may be considered offensive, insulting, obscene or otherwise disturbing to others;
considers
https://www.google.com/search?q=samus+aran+nude&sclient=img&udm=2&safe=off
About 9,880,000 results (0.20 seconds)
Sounds like they’ve got their work cut out for themselves.
Civilization
Honestly, if you don’t care about all the nice graphics and music and such, Unciv – a reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android – does demonstrate that the game doesn’t really need all those assets to be perfectly playable.
That being said, I do enjoy the music and the graphics (though the responsiveness of Unciv is nice).
While I generally agree, I think that there are some other ways that one could make games:
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One is to just do games incrementally. Like, you buy a game, it doesn’t have a whole lot of content then buy DLC. That’s not necessarily a terrible way for things to work – it maybe means that games having trouble get cut off earlier, don’t do a Star Citizen. But it means that it’s harder to do a lot of engine development for the first release. Paradox’s games tend to look like this – they just keep putting out hundreds of dollars in expansion content for games, as long as players keep buying it. It also de-risks the game for the publisher – they don’t have so much riding on any one release. I think that that works better for some genres than others.
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Another is live service games. I think that there are certain niches that that works for, but that that has drawbacks and on the whole, too many studios are already fighting for too few live service game players.
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Another is just to scale down the ambition of games. I mean, maybe people don’t want really-high-production-cost games. There are good games out there that some guy made on his lonesome. Maybe people don’t want video cutscenes and such. Balatro’s a pretty good game, IMHO, and it didn’t have a huge budget.
I do think, though, that there are always going to be at least some high-budget games out there. There’s just some stuff that you can’t do as well otherwise. If you want to create a big, open-world game with a lot of human labor involved in production, it’s just going to have a lot of content, going to be expensive to make that content. Even if we figure out how to automate some of that work, do it more-cheaply, there’ll be something new that requires human labor.
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Normally on a controller, that’s up to you. Linux will report button presses. Games might or might not have configurable gamepad bindings – they almost always used to do so before controller layouts were standardized, but in 2024, it’s often common to just have a fixed layout or maybe an option for it. You can also set up software yourself that could use it.