Katana314
@Katana314@lemmy.world
- Comment on Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away 9 hours ago:
I’ve been using CachyOS and impressed by the array of available software, and it was only in the back of my mind, the thought; “Wow, so much of this is so refined and polished. I wonder who has motive to maintain it?”
Joke’s on me, the motive is hardly there - and it’s a shitty time for it with Windows announcing that 10 is the last version and that there are no plans for a new one.
I’m glad Valve has a profit motive towards open source right now, but especially in a world where fewer people can donate at random, I really hoped that the model wasn’t specifically built to rely just on tip jars.
- Comment on Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away 9 hours ago:
I have so many causes on my mind that all need money; some for helping starving children, others for supporting sane politics, GoFundMes for people affected by a warped healthcare system; the request you’re making very much makes sense, but it’s so hard to put it above so many of the other critical needs for donations, when the image of an open source worker is someone who can, and often does, get paid working for a large company.
- Comment on Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away 9 hours ago:
I’m sure many people could point to hundreds of dangers around open-source programs relying on government funding. Yet, I can’t argue that it seems to be a necessity.
- Comment on Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk 1 day ago:
I’m kinda just transitioning out now. I have some projects to wrap up on Windows 10 LTS that use programs that wouldn’t run well through WINE. When those are done, I’ll make use of Linux alternatives to that project software, and pretty much just have my Windows boot available for dire emergencies.
As it stands, most of my gaming is transitioned over, and my Windows partition just has enough space for a few games after project work.
- Comment on Gaming Laptop with Linux Preinstalled and 32GB+ RAM? 1 day ago:
Hm. I’ve got an Nvidia card on Cachyos, and it’s all been fine so far.
I had an issue where an upgrade broke my drivers, but that turned out to be my fault from poor understanding.
- Comment on In reversal, Trump supports House vote to release Epstein files 2 days ago:
I’m now a bit worried of the controversy with those who have witnessed them doing a he-said/she-said.
I doubt the witnesses were allowed to make copies; so they could potentially blame people’s memory.
The other possibility is it implicates a LOT of people, and with his scandal out Trump needs ammo on opponents.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 4 days ago:
Writing as a new CachyOS user, this is like finishing a move from Florida to New York, and then learning there’s another two hurricanes headed for your old hometown.
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 5 days ago:
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 5 days ago:
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
- Comment on Today's featured article on Wikipedia: Bejeweled 5 days ago:
A few adult games made me realize I like the base concept of the game if it finds a way to feel rewarding and doesn’t ratchet up in difficulty (eg, mechanics that cover half the screen in stones)
Still haven’t really located a game that applies the match 3 formula in a way that makes me want to keep playing. EA’s touch is definitely one of those souring aspects.
- Comment on Steam Machine is huge for indie development 5 days ago:
I’ll first admit I predicted Valve wasn’t bothering with a Steam Machine again. I was proven wrong.
But I still absolutely don’t see it being more popular than the Steam Deck. They don’t have the production scale to make them at the Xbox / PlayStation hardware-per-dollar values, so they’ll still be an enthusiast item for people aware they’re buying a prebuilt PC.
So yes, you do already see this; indies target the Steam Deck as a supreme metric for Linux compatibility (and if someone complains HDR doesn’t work on his desktop Mint install, well, whatever). Valve even promotes some store presence to indies that do a bit of work to certify this. We’ve seen lots of games get patches mentioning Steam Deck related fixes - even when the game is a windows build using Proton.
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 5 days ago:
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 5 days ago:
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
- Comment on xkcd #3167: Car Size 6 days ago:
I think there have been occasions where I have passed a truck stopped at a red light on my bike, while carrying more groceries or other materials than they have in their entire backseat and bed.
- Comment on Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve’s ambitious new game console 6 days ago:
It’s possible placing the thumb sticks in some slightly different way helps to avoid patent issues.
- Comment on Winter burrow SBI controversy 1 week ago:
I understand Valve being libertarian about not moderating people excessively, what I’d like to see are better tools like shared blocklists or general moderation for any developer that doesn’t wish to control their own Community page.
- Comment on Valve announces three new products: the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller 1 week ago:
I suppose it’s not the first time Valve has counted to 3; in terms of releasing 3 projects. They released the Orange Box which had 3 games in it. But they never put out a 3rd iteration of things.
So expect this to be the last Steam Controller and Steam Machine, if we count the old 3p hardware Linux boxes and Index headset they helped with.
- Comment on Elden Ring Nightreign The Forsaken Hollows - Gameplay Reveal Trailer 1 week ago:
Elden Ring: Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows: The New Frontier: Last Rites: A New Beginning: The Pursuit of More Money
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
I’m still a little curious how that will work for games. Are they going to somehow emulate Win32 amd64 games? Do devs have to recompile them in some new way? Will engines support it beyond Unity and Unreal?
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 1 week ago:
I once tried writing a guide for Paper Mario, and it was then I realized how much effort, consultation, and typing all of these are. It’s in some ways not a surprise that walkthroughs are now just video playthroughs of the game (often involving someone backtracking 3 times as they figure out a puzzle) - that takes a lot less effort than conscious text recorded outside of a game.
- Comment on #RatFuckTheTimes 1 week ago:
Just copying this from a top level comment in case you haven’t seen it.
commondreams.org/…/zohran-mamdani-new-york-times
Now I feel bad that I unsubscribed from them for something as simple as popup annoyance. I could have slammed them for this.
- Comment on What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype? 1 week ago:
Another Crab’s Treasure, Stellar Blade, Jedi: FO and Survivor, Hollow Knight, Tunic, and lately Steelrising.
Some of those games are a bit easier but also have harder moments. To me, it’s about having a better-structured difficult curve.
- Comment on What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype? 1 week ago:
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.
- Comment on Some hidden gem demos and games I've found on Steam (2025) 1 week ago:
The game seems awesome, but it is by no means indie or at all a hidden gem. It has a ton of presence.
- Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now 1 week ago:
Ownership of infrastructure THEY BUILT.
Why is it fair that only the Factorio developer gets to sell Factorio? I have a copy of the game myself, and even built my own mod where the engineer says “lol” and you can go around to other engineers and say “lol” to them. It’s just that the Factorio dev has ownership and control of the base game, and restricts how people sell modded versions. It’s basically feudalism where he has complete control over Factorio versions.
Okay, that was a full paragraph of sarcasm. There ARE some industries where ownership of one thing, like a river or limited capacity for internet wiring, causes monopolistic control. But when we’re not reliant on a limited resource, except for the main one of “user attention”, you can’t justify it as “monopoly control”. It’s just “Bob makes the best pies, so everyone goes to his store instead of Alex’s.” If Alex wants the same attention, they need to build their own incredible pie recipe from scratch - they have access to the same street, the same apples, and the same flour.
- Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now 1 week ago:
If you’ve ever watched those credits, you’d know that’s not true. Credits don’t just go to people who assembled lighting rigs or held the boom mic - they also go to the offices that negotiated with local governments to arrange on-sight shooting, or production studios that fronted funding, or people who provided QA and support for the animation software the CGI studio is using. Much of it becomes distantly disconnected, and that’s exactly what the relation to Steam becomes.
You’re also perhaps being disingenuous about the “one big player” thing. It is possible, and achievable for individuals to write their own launcher. I teased it as being more work than an indie dev often wants, but it’s still doable. Factorio and Minecraft famously did this a long time ago AND got initially popular as a result. Many Asian games run their own Windows launcher. As a result, they collect 100% of revenue, but forfeit some Steam exposure. Notably, some large publishers can cut better deals with Steam based on that popularity; “We don’t need you, but we both gain a bit more from working together”.
Some indies have even learned about this the reverse way, in seeing that merely because Steam is popular, publishing there doesn’t necessarily cover advertising for them; and even a good game can fade into obscurity. There’s some pretty heavy misconceptions relating Steam alone to a game’s level of success.
On the other hand, people have tried to argue Epic, Origin, and others failed because they “weren’t as popular as Steam”, but they’re also generally not as good a product as Steam - not just due to poorer programming, but choosing to not even offer certain core features like reviews.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 1 week ago:
I’m cautious but a little curious about this one, because QA could actually be a very good target for AIs to work with.
- It might not kill jobs. Right now, engineers finish a task and the limited number of QA engineers can’t possibly test it enough before release. That game-breaking bug you found in a game? I’m sure some QA had it in their plan to test every level for those bugs, and yet they just didn’t have enough time - and the studio couldn’t justify hiring 20 more QA squads. Even if they do upscale AI testing, they’ll need knowledgable QA workers to guide them.
- This is often extremely rote, repetitive work. It’s exactly the type of work The Oatmeal said is great for AIs. One person is tuning the balance on the Ether Drive attack, and gives it an extra 40% blarf damage. He tries it, sees it works fine, and eagerly skips past the part of the test plan to verify that all cutscenes are working and unaffected to push it in. An AI will try it out, and find: Actually, since an NPC uses an Ether Drive in a late-game cutscene, this breaks the whole game!
- Even going past existing plans, QA can likely find MORE work for AIs to do that they normally wouldn’t bother with. Think about the current complexity of game dev that leads to the current trope of releasing games half-finished to eventually get patched. It won’t help patch games, but it’ll at least help give devs an up-to-date list of issues.
That said, those talking about human creativity and player expectations are still correct. An AI can report a problem with feedback that a human can say “No, that looks fine. Override that report.” It will also be good to do occasional manual tests, and lament “How did the AI think this was okay??”
- Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now 1 week ago:
I don’t think you came from Reddit. I think you came from TruthSocial.
- Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now 1 week ago:
Okay.
So, host a game on your own website, with its own patching process, payment systems, and forum. See how long it takes you, and how many sales you get out of it.
Once you do that, you may start to realize where that 30% is going. Sure, once you have the game and are playing it, you can say, “gee, it’s weird that Valve took a 30% cut of this work”. But it’s like seeing a long list of credits at the end of a movie when you were only aware of the signature voice of the lead actor.
- Comment on Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, filesystem is a slow battle of forfeiture. Everyone wants to say “I’ll just use FAT, or NTFS, because both Windows and Linux support them!” And then it inevitably gives them performance issues among other problems.
I still use either for the drives where both of my dual boot OS’s need to access them, but I recognize it’s not a good place for games (I have some old, light ones that I’m not worried about accessing on NTFS, but big ones like Helldivers are out). It may even be a good excuse to learn more detailed partitioning so you can slowly shrink/eliminate what’s still using the two compatibility formats.
Distro choice is a tricky problem. I say that as someone that kinda settled on one; my own experience has not always matched others. But I will admit, it’s nice to stay on an interface not too far from Windows’ taskbar.