I just mash mod key + backspace on hyprland to kill it haha. Bye mfer!
But also sometimes lately hyprland hasn’t been playing as nice with steam games and my mouse doesn’t interact with the game. The fix I found is to fling the steam client over to the other monitor. Works I guess. Linux problems lol.
Relatedly, I’ve noticed ports of console games, particularly by Japanese devs, and especially Sqeenix, not actually having an option to quit to desktop. Sometimes hitting Esc will pop a plain system theme window with an option to close the program, but I’ve seen ones that didn’t even have that and had to be killed externally. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but even exiting DragonQuest 11 is a pain.
This is also hella common in a lot of online or multiplayer live service games recently. Forces you to alt-F4 if on PC. Especially bad with Sony’s playstation ports; they treat it like you’re on the PS5 and can just switch games to automatically close the running one.
I just want to let you know that when I was director of production at a multimedia studio, one of the rules in my ux design “bible” was that an interface must never present an “are you sure” prompt to a Quit action. Yes there were fights over it.
Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.
Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.
There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃
Which is interesting, because at least for me, the main reason I try to save often like that is because of games like bethesda games or other games that don’t autosave and will crash, losing you HUGE amounts of progress.
Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃
Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.
Not quite a setting, but every game should be required to tell you how long ago the last save was when you quit the game. I absolutely don’t understand why it’s only a tiny minority of games that does this, it is such an obvious thing to do
Well yes and no. Stellar Blade for example. When you click exit to desktop it pops up the usual unsaved data will be lost stuff but also has a timer below it showing when the last save was made
I’m thinking specifically when you exit the game, and it says “Are you sure? All progress since you last saved will be lost”, it should just have an additional “(last saved 2 minutes ago)” line in there. I think the recent Spiderman games did that, iirc
This is interesting, I’ve never heard of cachyOS. I’ve been running bazzite for a while now, I’ll have to check it out.
In related news, I’ll be trying to set up 8-player double dash on my HTPC with bazzite installed for a party coming up. Hopefully I can convince two instances of dolphin emu to LAN to each other
A bit of Anno: 117, but mostly Surviving Mars: Relaunched.
Surviving Mars still feels buggy and unfinished, but at least there’s a promise of getting the published game mechanics functioning as intended in the future. One patch after another the devs keep fixing and breaking and fixing the game’s various mechanics. At the moment it would be cool if they could get trains to work as intended, but so far the trains are more like unreliable passages between domes. True to form, the base game’s original limitations are still causing issues. Originally, the game was not designed to work with connected domes, and this limitation has never been fully resolved. It’s possible to have a lot of fun with the game, if one is willing to work around the limitations and unwritten rules inherent to the game. So, for example, I build domes into triangles, so that every dome is always only one passage away from another. I also micro manage workers, mess around with shifts, and block off undesired work slots in otherwise functioning buildings. All to make sure workers, more or less, stay put and keep doing what they are supposed to be doing. Similarly, I don’t even attempt to make any kind of utopian domes, where everyone is satisfied and sane, but instead use officers to keep radicals from becoming a major issue. Still, as far as Mars colony sims go, there’s nothing quite like Surviving Mars, so even though this is a flawed game, it is a good game.
Anno 117, on the other hand, seems to work as intended as far as I can tell. It is more of a bare bones game at the moment, but then again doesn’t have a gallery of hit-or-miss DLC like Anno 1800. The core game play loop feels satisfying. You build houses, build infrastructure to fulfill the desires of different layers of citizens, build increasingly complex supply chains (while keeping an eye on optimizing throughput), take advantage of production building radius effects (with some nice combos between different kinds of buildings), optimize islands for different kinds of productions like you would cities or towns in any number of other strategy games, research (mostly incremental stuff that adds up nicely), and build boats & soldiers for some light RTS flavored fun. The RTS side of the game is robust enough to be entertaining, while not being the main focus (probably will be fleshed out in future DLCs). Currently it’s not hard to keep citizens happy and productive, and it is very easy to play tetris with both homes and production buildings to optimize resource output. With not a ton of content in current game, I’ll probably get a couple of hundred hours out of Anno 117 before waiting for future DLCs.
Take it a step further, and require optional direction indicators. Not only do you get click on screen. You also have an option to get a little arrow pointing to which direction it came from. I have several friends with a bad ear. They can hear fine out of one ear, but not the other. That direction indicator allows them to track sound cues that would otherwise be useless to them.
The newer God of War games were pretty good about this, for instance. There were collectable ravens, which were usually found via sound cues; they would loudly caw for you to be able to track them down before you saw them. But if you only have one good ear, you can’t tell which direction the sound is coming from. The direction indicator bridges that gap, by adding a little arrow next to the raven cawing sound alert. For a more straightforward example, if an NPC says something, you get an arrow pointing to the NPC. Handy for when random NPCs have off-screen chatter.
On Linux Valve’s Proton makes it so easy. Literally makes it basically the same as playing on Windows (save for a few rare games that don’t work). As for how long I’ve done it, I just have a lot of free time on my hand
An option to choose what controller glyphs I want to use (Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, directional) and a option to always use those glyphs even when mouse input is detected, so I can use Gyro without the glyphs constantly flickering ☺️
I prefer the 4 circles glyphs that shows the appropriate face button highlighted. It’s device agnostic and helpful when I’m switching between playing on my Switch and playing on my PC with an Xbox controller.
The ability to pause should be a requirement for single player games. Not being able to pause long cut scenes, combats, etc. is so frustrating when nobody else is impacted.
Any game completely opposed to pausing for whatever design reason should instead be required to have a minimum of 30 seconds between pauses to allow for interruptions while playing without it allowing for rapid pauses to impact game play. 30 seconds minimum is because of how many interruptions are immediately followed by another interruption by kids/spouses/parents/pets.
I’m sure I have seen it before, but I can’t think of a single game that lets you pause during a cutscene. It really sucks for turn-based games where you need to watch whats happening when it’s not your turn in order to respond correctly.
I remember a game I used to play years ago that had no ability to pause, so what i would do is alt+tab to the task manager and suspend the process, and then resume it later. Obviously that’s way more clunky than just hitting a pause button.
I have played a lot of games where pausing the game to get to game menus pauses cutscenes, generally ones where they use in game assets to do the cut scene. I would have to check to confirm, but I think BG3 let you pause by going to the menu and there was also a separate option to skip the cuts scene.
Definitely played a lot with unskippable cut scenes too. Mostly avoid those games now.
It’s been a very common feature for the last few years and has been very rare before that so it really depends on when you started playing new releases. I’m in my mid-30s and pausing mid-cutscene definitely happended after I stopped being excited about my birthday.
Cutscenes especially. The pause button should pause cutscenes, with an option to skip the cutscene on the pause menu. The pause button should never just outright skip the cutscene. It should always pause the cutscene.
So many times as a kid that my mom would walk in and start talking right as a cutscene started. And when I’d go to pause it, it would just skip the entire fucking cutscene instead.
Yeah, pause and skip should be separate things. I have some games pm PC where the ESC key pauses and brings up the menu but to skip the scene you have to be watching it and then hold some specific button like mouse 1 for a couple of seconds to skip. Those are my favorites because I have time to reconsider skipping!
Oh yeah that was the worst. Game devs really shooting themselves in the foot with that design.
Once paused, should it just be a single button? Maybe a menu with an “are you sure? Y/n”, or maybe a hold down one or two buttons together for a couple seconds like on consoles?
Yeah no-pause feature was cool for one or two games as a gimmick, but Jesus h christ I’m an adult now and sometimes you need to freeze everything RIGHT NOW and single player games that you can’t pause are stupid as hell. Like I get maybe not pausing for accessing gear menu. But then at least give us a separate pause in case I have to run to the post office or take a business call or something
Watch Dogs 2 had an “invasion” system like Dark Souls, but it also allowed pausing in the world anytime you weren’t being invaded. It’s been a nice thing to point to anytime Souls fans make that excuse.
I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I’d forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.
I’d downvote this comment because it’s not a guilty pleasure at all, but I’ll upvote it instead because Link’s Awakening is a beautiful game, and I had it as a kid too :)
Final Fantasy VIII impressed me in my childhood and since then I’ve finished it 4–5 times. The story is a bit of a mess and doesn’t make sense sometimes, the fighting mechanics are peculiar, but the game is very dear to my heart. Thinking about giving it another go now, ha!
As a kid I picked up VIII before VII (thanks to demo discs) and it has always been my favourite FF game despite its predecessor’s huge shadow. Learning all of the quirks of the games systems felt really rewarding, though I can understand why it didn’t appeal to many.
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Problem is that the fancy graphics stuff isn’t just additive.
For example, raytracing is actually relatively simple to implement, since you just make light behave like it does in real-world physics, according to a couple relatively straightforward rules and material properties.
Lighting without raytracing involves tons of smokes and mirrors hacks and workarounds. For example, mirrors were often faked by building the same room behind the wall, with everything inverted, including the player character’s animations.
So, making a game with potato graphics typically requires building a second version of the game.
Of course, there can be a mode that does just turn off the additive stuff, so only that which does not require changing the game implementation. But that can just be one of the graphics presets…
Grappling hook with freedom on wear to place it, swinging physics, idc if it makes sense, ill take it in all games. And wingsuit gliding, I may have been one of the only few ppl online who liked that in battlefield. Such a funnway to traverse the map.
Description of the effects and hardware demands of graphics options.
An actual benchmark for ’optimized settings’ (even if it’s just crunching numbers) instead of hardcoded GPU names.
Clear indication of which difficulty the game was balanced for.
Msaa. Hate running old games at 200 fps with jagged edges and blur thanks to fxaa.
Instant controls switching between controller and keyboard. Tired of games that pick input type at startup, pick input glyphs at startup, ignore first button press from a different input before switching, disable controller if keyboard input is detected etc etc.
Not games but steam: just let me force steam input on all games like Proton.
Also how ‘full potato’ do you want it to be? I assume the settings don’t scale below low, so it’d be just turning off shadows, reflections etc. Would even the lowest resolution textures fit in the vram of an older card? And besides, the engine is probably designed for modern multi core cpus so even if the graphics could be scaled down it might not run well
I always dread picking up a new game that is kinda demanding on the hardware because I hate to keep testing all graphical settings to have the best graphics with good fps. The least they could do is show a split scene with each setting on or off so you can judge with your eyes, but a button that you set the fps and the game crunches some numbers and benchmark to find the best quality graphics settings it can do at the target fps.
If it can adjust the graphics on demand would also be awesome because some games can have variable demands during gameplay.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne