> Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded...
This hasn't been my experience. I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month. It also brings up a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, but that's the nature of game development... what you make isn't going to be particularly interesting to most folks.
There's also the "Show me a random game" link, which is fun to hit and see what crap it presents you. [0]
I enjoyed the hell out of BF I and BF V. I also enjoy shooters that have "modern" weaponry. Given how fun BF I was at launch, and V was when I picked it up, I purchased a copy of BF 2042 at launch because -given that that's the time before the "I'm going to do nothing but snipe from spawn to maxxximise my KDR and get Sick Youtube Clips" crew comes to be the majority of the playerbase- that's the best time to play these games.
I regret that purchasing decision so much. BF 2042 was very, very pretty. It looked so good. But -as a game- it was so bland and boring.
FWIW, many online shooter games work just fine. Those with extremely invasive kernel-level anticheat do not. Some of those with less-invasive anticheat also do not.
So, yeah, shit like the latest CoD, Valorant, Apex Legends [0], and that godawful Marathon game won't run... but that's because of active work by the devs to make it so that it won't.
> ...where a statement closer to truth would be "generally run, with some notable exceptions".
Yep. Devs usually have to actively make their game not work on Proton for it to not work on the version of Proton that Steam ships. Most devs aren't so petty as to put in that extra work, so they don't.
I got to the end of the story. I can see how some folks would really, really dislike that ending, but I enjoyed it.
In regards to vehicles: there was exactly one location that I couldn't drive the truck to... but I pretty quickly got the upgrade to the truck that let me drive it there. :/
In DS1, I regretted building the roads because of how they mostly eliminated the need to walk around. Going into DS2, I'd assumed that refusing to build the roads would have made me spend way more time on foot, but, nope! Should they ever make a third, I do hope that they put the walking back into the game.
Plus, consider the software distribution situation in the pre-Internet world. There was getting someone to arrange for very-limited-time distribution in physical stores (and paying out the ass for the privilege), or paying to advertise your mail-order distribution, or encouraging BBS operators to distribute your shareware that includes a "Mail $AMOUNT to this address and we'll mail you a full copy." message inside.
Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day.
There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute.
If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud.
> I too would rather not have a stiff blade like plastic meterial nearly cut my head off everytime the car breaks.
I have to wonder how much of this is due to ~fifty years of aging of the belt material. It's not as if the very first time we'd ever designed and installed an operator-safety belt was in the 1970s... so it'd be very surprising if the designers chose to make them stiff blades. Your description is also at odds with how I've seen people handle and use seatbelts in motion pictures from the era... from what I've seen, those belts look to me to be reasonably flexible.
I both completed and enjoyed Skin Deep, but liked Blendo's previous game "Quadrilateral Cowboy" a fair bit more. They're not the same sort of game, but both are quite stylish and both use id Tech 4.
> UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
> I'm not so sure. Most people I know, including developers, only have one SSD...
Right. My intent was to say that a single disk, probably with everything under "/" in a single partition is what the overwhelming majority of personal computers out there are using.
> Multi-disk detection would be nice, but I can already imagine the absolute mess that would happen if you were to try to boot on a multi-distro PC...
This would be trivial if the thing supported LVM. [0] Given that the bootloader needs to use a protocol to tell the automagic fstab creator what is the root device, [1] update that protocol to have the bootloader pass the VG name to search for, and then search for LVs named "$VG_NAME-$MOUNTPOINT" and do the obvious thing. [2] No need to either fuck around with or remember magic GUIDs or worry about what happens when you have multiple partitions with the same magic GUID, and you support all sorts of power-user features for free.
[0] While it's true that I haven't used a ton of Linux installers, every Linux installer I've used for the past ten, fifteen years that offered to let you partition your disk also had an option to set up LVM. I know that many people think that LVM's an "advanced" feature, but it has been around for ages and is well-supported.
> ...on top of that it has very satisfying combat mechanics...
Man, the sequel made the combat totally trivial. I'm at the sequel's "Episode 10", and I've the opinion that DS2 took nearly everything that anyone ever complained about in Death Stranding and made it effectively optional. I don't like the decision, but I'm still enjoying the game.
> Unfortunately, they forgot what medium they were working with.
I strongly disagree.
You didn't like what RDR2 was doing, and that's fine. I had a blast with it, but I'm the kind of psycho that loves games whose big thing is traversing gorgeous terrain. Similarly, there are games that people absolutely adore that I absolutely cannot see the point of.
> As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is.
I expect Azure is in second place because Windows-only shops use it because of the Official Microsoft Active Directory integration (which might be called Entra now?).
For basic "Create a VM, attach disks and networking, and use it as a computer." tasks, it is my professional experience that Azure is the worst of the Big Three US "cloud" providers by far. Their "control plane" is flaky and unreliable, so it's something that you'll probably only notice if you create, destroy, or modify VMs a lot. [0]
If you have a support contract, Azure makes it much easier to talk to a human than GCP does, but I never encountered an issue that they were able to solve. "File a ticket, but don't expect support to be able to help because they won't understand the problem, and it will eventually go away." was the lesson I eventually learned.
[0] And the word on the street is that a huge chunk of Github's reliability problems are caused because of the move from AWS to Azure. Having used all three pretty extensively, I believe the rumors.
> The solution is that a router should have a standard unattended upgrade system built into it that is on by default...
Mmm, no. Unexpected downtime for infrastructure is godawful... just ask Windows Home users.
OpenWRT has a "Click a button to upgrade" thing, just like just about every consumer/prosumer-grade equipment does. [0] It also has a command-line tool that one can use to automate upgrades, for environments where the phrase "production grade" is actually an important thing to think about. [1]
[2] Those documents mention that you need to install some things to get operator-initiated upgrades. As of March, the button to click is installed by default, and the CLI tool is installed on systems that have enough disk space for it. [3]
> Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
...I smell a "backdoor" that's in the shape of the "Locate my device" and similar such systems. Unless there's no Android subsystem that will dredge up and present info about where a phone has been, then this demand seems totally plausible:
"We know that you can cause a device to report its historical location information. Cause all of the devices that were within area X between times T and G to report their positions during that time to us, the police. Here's our warrant."
If that camera system is closed-circuit and its data is restricted to the premises they should be permitted to do that.
If the data from that camera system [0] can be removed from the premises by anything less than a search warrant or court order, then no, they should not be permitted to do that.
I know this isn't how the relevant laws work now, but they haven't been adequately updated to account for radical changes in the ability for companies to perform mass surveillance.
[0] ...whether raw or "processed" by -say- a "customer analytics" software... [1]
[1] Want a count of the day's customers? Check register receipts. Want to know what displays are most popular? Ask your employees, or employ someone to take notes. etc, etc, etc.
> ...and it is what's known as "judge made," e.g. it wasn't made by legislature, it was invented by the courts.
In fairness, this describes so much of US law, and is why you can't really understand much of the rules that apply to you without also understanding all of the cases in which those rules were applied in novel ways.
Is it good that things work like that here? I don't think so, but I haven't thought through all of the particulars of another system.
> The analogy is a nightclub bouncer checks your ID.
...the obvious thing to deploy is a cannabis club bouncer that checks your ID with only his eyes and hands and either bounces you or lets you in, depending on the outcome of that check.
That's far simpler than involving some unrelated third party and far more secure than storing any information about the event in any computer.
> No, you'll need to add a line to your fstab manually if you want something autodiscovery cannot do...
It's just shocking that autodiscovery is so extremely limited. I'm aware that if you want to do something that autodiscovery can't do, then you cant use autodiscovery for that thing... I'm pretty sure that was covered in a recent Tautology Club meeting.
> I don't recall ever installing a system with / and /home on separate partitions, though.
I'd wager that that's the configuration of vast majority of the consumer systems out there... which makes it even more confusing how anemic partition autodetection is.
Its target user is one who bothers to partition out space for subdirectories, but doesn't use either multiple disks or LVM? That's a very particular sort of user.
This hasn't been my experience. I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month. It also brings up a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, but that's the nature of game development... what you make isn't going to be particularly interesting to most folks.
There's also the "Show me a random game" link, which is fun to hit and see what crap it presents you. [0]
[0] <https://store.steampowered.com/explore/random/>