andrew_bidlaw

@andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve must address swastikas and other hate on Steam, writes US senator in a letter to Gabe Newell⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Steam being privately owned and somehow independent is probably a big factor in that I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Classic shooters Unreal and Unreal Tournament are now free and preserved on the Internet Archive⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Even before reading the article I started to hear the sounds of UT99 gameplay and have chills.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Classic Unreal Tournament and Unreal now easier to download free thanks to OldUnreal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Can I download my teen reflexes too?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG's new stretchable display can grow by 50%, bendy panels can be deformed into new form factors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Randomly stretched screen would be even more displeasing to eyes I guess.

  I wonder if it can make regular screens more abuse-proof.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows to Linux compatibility layer Wine 10.0 planned for mid-January 2025⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are just four programs\games I like that I can’t set up on Linux or find replacements for various reasons and that’s impressive. I thought I’d be akin to a struggling refugee here but no, everything but niche stuff works fine and sometimes when it doesn’t it’s due to devs being dicks. Wine and now Proton communities aren’t the makers of the Linux kernel\OS\DEs themselves, but they are ones of the fundamental bricks to my personal certainity I won’t (need to) switch back to Windows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terraria hits over 60 million sales with Terraria 1.4.5 shaping up to be another big update⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought it was waaay bigger, like 10x times more. Dirty cheap, kids-friendly, lan-friendly with coop, you can sit idle and manage your pace etc. It’s not my fav, but it have very huge advantages over like most games and it shared a part of this minecraft fever. It’s weird it got to that point just now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Latest Windows 11 preview update is causing widespread system crashes and failures⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Like, most of them? It’s an experimental channel and the amount of overall updates dwarfs those that do the funny, yadda-yadda. The funnier thing though is they have a total grip on everything, all resources and brains, dedicated testers, and therefore have no reason to fail at all. Yet, the stability of Windows is worse than on popular Linux distros even when it doesn’t BSOD.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOOM + DOOM II enhanced versions get Steam Deck Verified⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder what new maps are. MachineHeads\NightDive did a solid job with Q1 levels. Also, Sigil is there too? That’s cool. Hope it’d make many new people experience these revolutionary games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Molyneux thinks generative AI is the future of games, all but guaranteeing that it won't be⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I read that sentiment about quests a lot and have something for it myself, but I find it questionable.

  Formulaic is what makes the quest work with the system. It should, just as a raw code, have a list of triggers for events, responses, all nailed to the system and the world that already exist. It needs to place an NPC with a question mark that has a fetch quest that updates your map\journal when you get it and correctly respond with an award when conditions are met. That’s on a basic level.

  The LLM to create such complex and strict manipulations should be narrowly guided to generate a working fetch quest without a mistake. We’d basically kill off most of what it is good at. And we’d need to build pipelines for it to lay more complex quests, all ourselves. At this point it’s not easier than creating a sophisticated procedural generation engine for quests, to the same result.

  Furthermore, it’s a pain in the ass to create enough learning material to teach it about the world’s lore alone, so it won’t occasionally say what it doesn’t know, and would actually speak - because to achieve the level of ChatGPT’s responses they fed them petabytes of data. A model learning on LotR, some kilobytes, won’t be able to greet you back, and making an existing model to speak in-character about the world it’s yet to know is, well, conplicated. In your free time, you can try to make Bard speak like a dunmer fisherman from Huul that knows what’s going on around him on all levels of worldbuilding young Bethesda put in. To make it correct, you’d end up printing a whole book into it’s prompt window and it would still spit nonsense.

  Instead, I see LLMs being injected in places they are good at, and the voicing of NPC’s lines you’ve mentioned is one of the things they can excel at. Quick drafts of texts and quests that you’d then put into development? Okay. But making them communicating with existing systems is putting a triangle peg in a square hole imho.

  On procedural generation, you can read about the saga of the Boatmurder in Dwarf Fortress: lparchive.org/…/Introduction/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Molyneux thinks generative AI is the future of games, all but guaranteeing that it won't be⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean… We had Daggerfall and Minecraft with procedural generation under the hood, and many others, for a very long time. Why we’d need a model that ‘learns’?

  I ask about in-game applications, not the use of LLMs in production.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nexus mods want feedback from Linux / Steam Deck users on their new cross-platform app⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Porn and nudity mods are ones of the most numerous\popular categories for decades. Steam can’t allow that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Captain Blood, a hack-and-slash pirate game revealed in 2004, will finally release in 2024⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember reading about it looong ago and has a wrong recollection that I’ve played it lol.

  I’d enjoy an action game from the PS2\3 era right now if they kept the basics without drastic changes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US man used AI to generate 13,000 child sexual abuse pictures, FBI alleges⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure.

  I mostly referred to the second paragraph. Probably, this person meant that it’s better no child has been harmed in this 13k images’ production, but the wording irked me, especially the ‘win’. It got me a bit salty and I didn’t elaborate, so I don’t know what exactly people thought I’ve meant.

  So I don’t consider this a ‘win’ because it doesn’t help their urges or make them less dangerous unlike therapy, like vaping was sometimes marketed as a healthier alternative to cigs or a way to give up smoking. I don’t want to dive into ethics of these two kinds of CSAM, but I find that leaving out the aspect of production (victimless?), it’s still harmful to the society as a whole to (generate,) collect and share it. Why brackets? Usually in court there are different levels or different articles that may be involved, and if production itself may be treated as harmless, merely having a collection and participating in trade\share of such materials are criminal offences themselves. And there we are to pick if we treat them as real or not. Returning to vapes: due to not being regular cigs, when it was a novelty many initially thought it’s okay to smoke them at work or in a classroom, but later they were banned as well. That’s not the only case where the nature of what AI produces and responsibility for that causes arguments, and our codified laws aren’t all bleeding edge to cover this, so I guess we are in the time we decide the framework to evaluate, work with them. And as silly as it is, vape pandemic was the first thing I’ve been reminded of, and it’s not great because both this and AI CSAM I’ve heard of because of it’s usage in schools - the second one is an article from months ago about deepfake nudes boys made of peers. Seemingly gated garden keeps being the most vulnerable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mighty Marbles is an upcoming physics game that looks like a fusion of kids toys⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s look very sweet and diverse in tiles\details. Hope the dev would be rewarded with sales and keep on adding stuff in his own tempo. Just watching it unlocked memories of playing physical puzzle games in my childhood. Pure and simple joy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US man used AI to generate 13,000 child sexual abuse pictures, FBI alleges⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, if pedos would only create their own shit to fap to i would consider this a win.

  Vape logic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big cool weirdo Yoko Taro may or may not be working on something that may or may not be Nier⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Something in the making… Non-informative but intriguing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With a Nintendo Switch 2 on the way, I hope Valve make a Steam Deck 2⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Underspecced, but having Mario&Co. I wonder if they’d happen to go the Sega’s way, intentionally or not, becoming games and not hardware producer, letting their main franchizes flourish or fall on other’s platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Their R&D in designing a console and these nice controllers is probably more expensive for Valve than what they’ve got from selling actual products, but cheap smartphone is $40 in the more sanctioned Russia, so I guess something like $100 isn’t an unreasonable price goal, and these folks are historically more into IT than we are, that makes me believe they can do or already did cheap controlling devices. I’m open to be wrong.

  And yeah, military things are always extra durable and extra overpriced, but they are in a process to cut corruption to join NATO\EU, so probably the end price won’t be that exhausting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe a little excessive for just drone operation and communications, but the formfactor of a handheld console is where the sweet spot is. I feel like if they’d make them for $100 with something akin to a 10-years old hardware in a rugged everything-proof body, it can become a standard in the future. Cheap drones have shown they can drop bombs alright, so there’s probably a market for a cheap controller made just for that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DJI might get banned next in the US⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Such a blunder, imho. Since drones are the future at least for warfare, encouraging their use with certified and safe models may be a no-brainer to support the growth of that technology and educating civil operators en masse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DJI might get banned next in the US⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For starters you cannot fly a drone over a person except the operator (yourself).

  Is that because most drones are passively recording a videosteeam for it’s operator to navigate it? Would it affect cameraless drones?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam will stop issuing refunds if you play two hours of a game before launch day⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would like to see this time limit extended back to maybe 30m/1hr (it may be different in ways you don’t like), but I don’t see a problem with reducing it if you’ve already experienced parts of the game.

  The problem is some games don’t even start at 30m point. Interactive introes and tutorials are here to misrepresent the future gameplay. Especially with a trick like making you have all power ups before having them all taken from you to grind them back. Take Skyrim where real game starts somewhen at Helgen after a starting dungeon.

  Add there games that have it’s own launchers them being a problem to log into while the timer is already ticking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hasbro exec says Baldur's Gate 3 "proved for us that people really wanted great D&D games," supports Larian's plan to "take the time we need"⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I really disliked it for many reasons even though I had no bugs but can’t pretend it wasn’t ambitious, Guys did jump over their head with it and tried to do something entirely new for them. And they had a hard crunch to complete it. Can’t hate the product, these devs, but honestly fuck their management.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage updated on Steam. It's now Steam Deck verified, removed DRM, added achievements, added localizations, and more⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For some reason it didn’t support my new controller so I added the game via Steam. This should do it. Sometimes even for installers since it’s wine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux on the desktop breaks 4% for the first time on Statcounter⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe, but I’d suspect it’s the growing market of OS-less solutions assuming you can pirate your Windows for personal use anyway makes some consider trying Linux, Also Steam Deck being a big hit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder how Warframe is on it. Not really an oldschool shooter, but still got me to use M+KB over a controller.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Got a spell costing 300 points when your mana pool is still 280.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some goat is driving⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  E B A G O

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's Racist!⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  and show them your belt of explosives to assist your persuasion skills.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A combination of languages to briefly cover the most of other languages.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do many people know it? I briefly googled this subject long ago snd it seems there are a lot of sign languages with their differences.