For anyone interested in game development: Balatro is made with Love2D. Which means the exe you download from steam can be unzipped using just about any zip program (might need to change the file extension from exe to zip) and the whole source code and 2D asset files are available for perusing. Not even obfuscated, full variable names and comments available to inspect as a real world example of a working game that has sold like hotcakes because the end result is good. Let it inspire you, let it teach you :)
Wow. Super impressive. Guess with today’s technology you could do it pretty much 100%. I saw that model that lets you separate music into separate tracks for guitar, vocals, drums, … Guess something like that could even separate the laughs from the next actor resuming to speak.
Kind of also reminds me of those videos where they stabilize / de-shake Star Trek. There are some scenes where the ship gets shot at for example. And the actors act that out and the camera is shaking too and a bit at an angle. Looks funny once that camera shake is removed.
Nintendo’s always been litigious and controlling of their brand. What they haven’t been (until recently) is price-gouging peddlers of derivative schlock resting on their laurels. They used to be afraid of low-quality games and rehashes diluting their brand (they witnessed the carnage of 1983). Now they just don’t care.
Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post…
Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.
When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn’t smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.
When the numbers didn’t look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn’t deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.
When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.
Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don’t play Korean games. Kpop and cosmetics and whatever are chill. Don’t play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.
Don’t buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.
Friendly reminder that Korea invented and perfected micro-transactions. MapleStory has done more damage to both worldwide gaming and Korean game devs than anything else could ever hope to.
Which is very sad because MapleStory was such a great game, at one time. I still play it (private servers) often, 20 years later. The game had such creative passion in it before Nexon took over and monetized the shit out of it.
The devs themselves are fine. It’s the leadership that’s cancer. Abusive leadership in Korean companies is actually a pretty well known issue. It’s just more self-destructive in game companies, which I have direct experience with. So they did a lot to me and my friends. And said friends shared their stories of other Korean game companies.
You’re absolutely right to question, especially with my level of anger, but I’m confident this one is justified.
Minesweeper is notorious for having some luck to it. The key is trying to do the 100% luck parts as early as possible so you don’t waste time doing the rest of the board only to fail later.
Minesweeper is notorious for having some luck to it.
There’s guess-free versions that guarantee solvable games. There’s also ones that automatically place a mine on the clicked tile if you take an unnecessary guess. Personally I really like davidnhill.github.io/JSMinesweeper with only “Fast mode” (and optionally “No guess”) enabled and everything else off.
For the average technology user yes. Software needs to come packaged in a way people recognise and can use without much setting up needed. I know there are many distros out there that do this. The average person using a computer however does not.
not going to be a steam OS user, but its less what you can’t, and more that any changes that valve patches in via their efforts on AMD drivers, users would get it first and without any fuss.
One example is HDR support. various distros and DEs kinda sat on HDR for the longest time, with mixed results on implementation. Valve just walks in and implements it.
Approachability. Valve is a recognizable name and the Steam Deck is notoriously usable in the sea of Linux uncertainty.
Before you say “Linux is totally usable, just look at <examples>” the first question people are prompted with is “What distribution do you want to install?” and there is no singular place that says “this is what you want for this specific use case.”
Valve is not the first name in Linux gaming, but they are a known and trusted name. It’s not just about brand recognition but about trusting a name to guide you through something brand new and extremely daunting. For the vast majority of PC gamers, SteamOS offers a guided introduction to something that previously was stereotyped as complex and difficult to learn.
Is it the best distro? Probably not, but then again it’s extremely easy to migrate from SteamOS to something else when someone discovers they want something else. Until they understand enough about Linux to find that they want something else, SteamOS is currently one of the best ways to get them there
Approachability. Valve is a recognizable name and the Steam Deck is notoriously usable in the sea of Linux uncertainty.
It’s very usable for a handheld gaming platform. It really isn’t any better for a desktop platform. The thing that makes it so usable is that you boot it and it boots into Steam Big Picture, and you don’t see the desktop. Most users never will. Is that how people are going to want their desktop to work though? Probably not. They probably don’t want to only use Steam. They probably want to use other applications too.
I don’t think it’s about having extra functionality to no one else has.
SteamOS is more restrictive than other distros out of the box. A user with no experience whatsoever would have a harder time messing things up because rootfs is RO and gets wiped on every update. Kinda forces the average user into using flatpak/Discover to mimic Windows and Apple app stores. In other words, it’s all about the psychology, not the distro itself.
Not to mention there is an actual company with an incentive to maintain the distro, with a massive focus on gaming. They have a ton of testing resources that a lot of distro maintainers do not have in that regard.
Having said all that, installing a distro other SteamOS on my Steam Deck was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve been using Linux for 32 years, I do not like SteamOS because they are trying to make it dumb for general consumption. Similar reasons why I despise Windows, besides the whole being owned by Microsoft thing.
I never understand why people are so obsessed with not getting updates. They usually just break everything and bloat the OS.
“But my security!” OS updates are going to protect you from 99% of the bad actors out there. They do nothing against social engineering. They don’t make you use strong passwords. Most of the security flaws OS updates are addressing are the kinda of attacks that only state actors or organized crime rings have the resources and abilities to exploit.
Governments? Heck yeah they need to be concerned. Large enterprises? Definitely. Small businesses? Eh it’s probably for the best to protect your livelihood even if you aren’t the juiciest target. But for an individual using their PC for gaming, social media, streaming content, online shopping, etc… The cost-benefit analysis is different.
It’s not different from physical security. Theres a reason you don’t need to go through TSA to get on a bus.
The problem is that as soon as a security issue is found on windows 10 it won’t be fixed, it is perpetual. In Windows 11 it will probably be fixed before you even know it exists.
You seem awfully optimistic about Microsoft’s response time lol.
How many people are out there today with broken locks on their doors or windows? How many stores do you think close every night with the minimum wage worker forgetting to lock up properly? How many people out their use incredibly weak passwords, share their credentials with others, or leave everything on post-it notes?
Security is a cost-benefit analysis. Depending on what exactly this hypothetical exploit requires I might very well be comfortable running Windows 10 anyways. The vast majority of security exploits require physical access to the machine- we only hear about the remote ones more often because they are scarier.
It might be a remote exploit or it might not. An OS is not just a program that runs in the background, if it is critically important.
These kind of exploiters don’t tend to attack you in particular, they have botnets scanning the web for any compromised machine.
Running windows 10 is fine today, might not be fine after EOL. It is irresponsible to shrug it off and not even consider the alternatives out there, including windows 11.
That’s where the “analysis” part of “cost-benefit analysis” comes in and it doesn’t make sense to generalize like you seem to want to.
Is it really that much more responsible to run Windows 11? You seem to have a LOT of faith in Microsoft to keep you safe. There’s plenty of reasons to not switch to Windows 11.
I also use Linux on some machines. But I can also see why there are reasons why one distro or another, or even Linux in general, may not be the right call for some people.
For the avg person why not trust them I’m not too worried about what they can collect on an average person I use Linux personally so I’m not shilling for Ms but 11 will keep out more hackers then 10 cause I wouldn’t be worried about them stealing my card info but a hacker yes i would be
Even if you trust their intent to not misuse your data, there are now a lot of live rpc hooks into your operating system, controllable by anyone who can compromise their azure implementation, which has happened at least twice in recent memory. If the data never leaves your device, and they didn’t have a way in, they wouldn’t have those things to lose in the first place.
The interdependency itself, regardless of intent, is inherently more dangerous than the previous separate paradigm that used to exist.
If the EU is allowed to employ guards in MS’s buildings and to roll their own secured version of Windows, I wouldn’t mind sticking to Windows 11 EU. On the other paw, if DOGE is given access to Microsoft, I shall flee to Linux. Hopefully, SteamOS Desktop will be a thing if the latter happens.
I’m pretty sure all personal data leaks to me and my friends and family have nothing to do with personal EOL OS on personal PCs/laptops.
My Dad, ran Windows 7 (yes, 7) until he passed last year, almost 80. We had his credit locked down, we had antivirus running, we kept the browsers up to date, and he was very good about not clicking weird links or calling fake support numbers.
His biggest data breach (and ours too)? Was from myChart a couple years ago, he got a letter that his data was part of the big hack, yada yada yada free credit reporting - so sorry. If you don’t know, myChart is like The Main medical everything portal in the US at least for most doctors and hospital systems. So all your test results, making appointments, sending messages, requesting Rx refills, all through myChart’s website. The hospitals and doctors using MyChart can see pretty much everything in your myChart health record (some exceptions)
So using super secure OS on your personal computer means nothing when you are part of a hundreds of millions data dump from someone hacking into that. Not having an account just means you don’t have access to your own records, they are still part of the system.
But Yes, I was in the process of getting Dad an upgrade to a flavor of Linux that would be the closest to what he was used to. And the only reason was because browser support was coming to EOL for Windows 7. He really didn’t want to change or lose his solitaire games and he deserved a stress-free life to play his damn games like he wanted.
THAT SAID - if businesses are using EOL OS and getting hacked - they definitely need to do whatever they need to do and protect their customer data. But EOL OS for an average person checking email, making doctor’s appointments, checking headlines, and playing solitaire while streaming music certainly doesn’t call for a need to panic.
IF you are a power user doing sometimes sketch things (according to Apple/MS anyway) probably switch to Linux sooner than later.
We have computers running Linux, Windows 10 (one of which was on 8.1 until a year ago), and Windows 11 in our house. The one on 11 is being tested basically, and will probably be reinstalled with Linux. But we are trying to give it a shot.
Your dad probably got lucky, and your router’s firewall probably did a lot of the heavy lifting. If you were to connect a win 2000/XP computer to the internet today without a firewall between, it would be compromised in minutes (there are loads of videos of people demoing this).
While I don’t have proof that 7 would be the same, I strongly suspect it would be the same. 10 will get there soon too. Firewalls will stop most of the low hanging fruit, but an application that bridges connections through the firewall are that much more vulnerable to exploitations that won’t be integrated by your running kernel.
I think it should also be noted that the games industry is not audited for security to the same degree as a lot of other industries. So vulnerabilities may not be found until years after launch and then go unpatched indefinitely because the company has already moved on to the next thing.
Hell, one of the older CoD games had an RCE vulnerability that as far as I’m aware is still not patched.
Plus, major publishers like EA are now pushing to create their own kernel-level anticheat in-house. Why should anyone trust them to create a secure piece of software that runs with the highest permissions possible when they can’t even be trusted to create stable, functional games?
Someone discovered Dark Souls games had a RCE but they never responded to the person that kept emailing them about it for months. The security guy then started invading streamers and crashing the game while doing fun stuff like showing text on the screen. Only then did Fromsoft take down the servers and patch things up - which took a few months.
Yes, game companies really don’t take security seriously.
“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
Cave Johnson, founder and CEO of Aperature Science
I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.
God deadlock is so good though I have to say. I have hundreds of hours already. This is coming from someone who HATED mobas and would still probably never touch dota or League
Agreed. As someone who doesn’t really like shooters and never got into League or DOTA, I had mixed feelings about playing a ‘hero shooter/moba’. I’m actually blown away at how good it is. They did phenomenal job. 10/10.
It’s a invite only alpha and as I write this it’s #7 on the steam rankings of current players, 6 if you wanna exclude Banana which is it’s own hilarious thing
I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That’s why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn’t been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I’m not interested in, I understand other people’s pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.
I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.
But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.
I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.
The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.
Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.
There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.
Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don’t pay as well but you get life time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king
I mean, yeah, if you aren't into the core elements of a game you probably won't be interested in the game. It's like say, "I'm not impressed with the new Mario game. I don't want to do platforming, and I don't care about powerups or collecting things."
A surprising percentage of gamers seem to think that any new AAA title game is catered to them and rather than understand it was made for other people, they complain about how bad it is.
I feel I would rather just opt out of playing these games. It ain’t worth it.
I feel like they should just host the entire game and stream it to players if they want to eliminate cheating, but that’s probably the most anti-SKG way to publish a game possible. Oh well.
Actually makes it easier to write aimbots and triggerbots, since you’ll have the video feed and can respond with the right inputs. Skips the step where you’ve got to film the monitor on the machine that’s ‘playing’ the game, which is protected by the HDCP between the PC and the screen.
To be honest I haven’t thought about this much because playing online games with strangers is not something I enjoy in the first place. I’m sure others have good ideas, though.
Seeking a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Rather than having one set of company-hosted servers that they then struggle to police, just let everyone host their own, and they can be responsible for banning anyone that doesn’t follow the community rules.
Yeah I wish we could go back to a model like that, the way PC gaming used to be. The sticking point would be battle pass progression, as mush as I hate it and an FPS is pretty much doa without it, although Hell Let Loose allows for rank progression while playing on clan-rented servers so it should work in theory.
The types of cheats that anti cheat in kernel space are trying to detect don’t view the video feed as such. They hook the process directly to read the memory, and the chest developer has reverse engineered the game binary to find out what variables correspond to things like opposing players, then using that information they draw stuff like wall hacks on the screen.
But yeah I guess an fps developer could move to a GeForce now type of model to eliminate cheats like that, but then no one would play that fps because of the input lag issues.
I have ~10k hours in counterstrike across multi game versions and accounts. I noticed a similar thing over my years. The players doing well in a match were often neutral towards gamer girls, but the guy having a shit match would be the fastest sack of shit every time. Especially if one of the top fraggers pointed out they were being beaten by a girl.
Obviously there are always exceptions to any rules but in my anecdotal experience the guys who were confident in their abilities didn’t care about women but losers would attack them just for speaking.
Counter Strike was way better when this was the vibe. I am so tired of competitive this and gun case that. I’ve never been interested in 5v5 scrimming in any serious way, but that’s all CS2 wants me to do.
I want gun game, I want wc3, I want ZM. I want quirky custom maps (glass!) and quake sounds and !bet ct all. I want to fuck around with new friends on a server for an evening, not to sweat my balls off throwing practiced smokes on dust2.
Same thing kinda happened to TF2. I mean, Competitive is dead but the server browser and community servers are not what they used to be. I miss when it was front and center. Today most people just play casual on Valve servers.
After a quick search it seems like the CS2 in-game server browser has gone to complete shit. I hope Valve fixes it. It’s part of the Source Legacy.
If it makes you feel any better those hours were spread out over the last 10 years or longer. I can’t even remember when I started. Just one of those ol’ reliable games for me.
And the worst part of it is that probably half of those hours happened within a few years in the middle there. I played like 6 hours a night every night with my friends. Good times but yeah…
My heavy CS days were early in csgo days. Back when the skin gambling scene and the pro scene were popping early on. My buddies and I would watch the pro games and then get all hyped to improve and we would jump into ranked only to get fucking pub stomped. Good times. Eventually we did start getting good. I only ever got to whatever rank was below global and only two of my buddies ever got to global.
However my top fps bragging moment was actually in valorant when it was a closed beta still I absolutely shat all over pro csgo player at the time named JDM in a lobby. Top fragged and completely dominated him the entire match.
That was when I peaked in my fps gaming lol. It’s all been downhill since. I’m still better than most people at fps games in general, but I am not as sharp and snappy as I was when I was a younger man with way more free time to practice and improve every night.
You’re absolutely correct, I had a similar experience
I played CS for roughly the same amount of time; my clan ranges from DMG to Global, but we had a rule that if you were in the clan, we’d 5-man with you regardless of your rank, so if you were Silver, you’d have a chance to rub elbows and learn strategies from the higher skilled players.
Then we got a Global, a girl named Moon.
Holy hell, it’s like people’s brains did a 180°, they were incredibly mean to her, for no reason, and eventually it came out that she was trans, and they bullied her even worse, out of the server.
I kicked everyone who bullied/demonized Moon for being trans; because at the end of the day, it was about being a honest human being, and not just a CS player/gamer.
Especially if one of the top fraggers pointed out they were being beaten by a girl.
Not really a gold star by the top player’s name for this, either. The comment alone leaves plenty of room to be interpreted as “girls should be easy to beat/poor gamers because they’re girls.”
They wouldn’t say “you’re getting beaten by a girl” as much as they would respond to the guys losing their minds who happened to be below them on the scoreboard by saying things like “Why are you yelling at her she’s playing better than you are shut up”. Kinda way.
I’m not a misogynist but anybody who consistently scores top on a public server pretty much is a pubstomper asshole by definition. And I have certainly been that. You don’t do it for the challenge, or you’d be doing league and more competitive modes.
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