Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

Ephera, (edited )

I mean, they do have the infinite money glitch, a.k.a. being owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft’s investors think Fallout 5 will make its money back, it’s more lucrative to get started on it sooner rather than later.

And it does also need to be said that they can’t keep remastering Fallout titles forever. They need to develop a new title at some point.

Bethesda Game Studios has so far always only had one game in development at a time, which should be TES6 right now. If they are working on Fallout 5, we’re likely talking pre-production stages. So, it might very well be the case that the two remasters come out in roughly equal spacing before Fallout 5 comes out in a few years.

Ephera,

From what I know of large corporations, I’d honestly be surprised, if the Microsofties they met, knew that this was happening…

Ephera,
Ephera,

Hmm, is there a way to improve that, like a different word that’s normally used? I could probably contribute a fix for the translation to the project…

Ephera,

Oh wow, so it’s kind of suffering from success, in that you might have understood it better, if it didn’t have a translation for your native language… 😅

Ephera,

I agree that the default isn’t great, but from the link that @tal had posted, there is actually a way to move the inventory button to where you want:
…docs.luanti.org/…/touchscreen-editor.mp4

So, they go into the menu, then press the “Exit” button.
Unfortunately, that video is already out of date again, as there’s now a general “Settings” button where the “Touchscreen Layout” button was. But in those settings, you can select the “Touchscreen” category and then that button is near the top.
Then it works like in the video again, by pressing “Add button” and so on.

Ephera,

Yeah, sometimes I wonder if they do these bad names for the free publicity of people complaining about them. But then there’s plenty examples where the name isn’t just clunky, but rather actively confusing for potential users…

Ephera,

His job is to spread lies and fear, so no reason for him to say something different, if he would know reality…

Ephera,

I could imagine that they didn’t want to do something called “Destiny 3”, because people would expect that to be better than Destiny 2, which is virtually impossible, if you’re gonna start over from scratch, with how many years of development have gone into Destiny 2 by now…

Ephera,

I thought, this was what the post is about. Then I saw the fist…

Ephera,

☠️ Tutorials that force you to purchase and use items, which can only be bought with premium currency.

Ephera,

I do this thing, where I’ll play a game for 2-5 minutes and then I’ll stop again.

You can bet your ass that I only play games that load and close almost instantly. Well, and basically only games that I’m already familiar with.

Ephera,

I think, the problem is rather that they have no budget for marketing. If they become visible on Steam, that’s significantly more visibility than they can hope for from a few social media posts…

Ephera,

Jason Schreier is not a no-name. I would expect the guy to figure it out, if he thought about it for a moment. But yeah, the whole article seems a bit rushed…

Ephera,

You always attack into the direction that the camera is facing, so if the character was facing away, that would look quite weird.

Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025? (arstechnica.com) angielski

For many gamers, this week’s release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it’s provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven’t gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its...

Ephera,

Yeah, Bethesda loves to ruin their game worlds with weirdly repetitive additions. Morrowind constantly spawns assassins on you, Oblivion does the Oblivion gates, Skyrim has the dragons. In the latter two, I think, it’s best to just not start the main quest, which prevents the Oblivion gates and dragons from appearing, at least if you replay the game.

I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game angielski

So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...

Ephera,

Mindustry is basically Factorio with more focus on tower defense.

Every. Single. Game. Ever. angielski

Recently I’ve played dead space and some other survival horror games like Alien Isolation, and just about every single time you see someone in there, they’re somehow invincible. Like, the fuck, that fat idiot inside that VIP Area there has somehow managed to lock himself in that room for what, weeks? Months? And somehow...

Ephera,

Also kind of breaks immersion when there’s tons of different enemies, but they never fight between themselves. Only when the player character shows up, they’re like, imma ruin this woman’s life.

Ephera,

Needlessly absolute take. Yes, there’s going to be parents, who’d rather pay extra than look into what other games they could give their kid, as well as loyal Mario fans, who will pay pretty much any price. But there’s obviously also players who do weigh up their options based on price, and who will make different decisions when they have to decide between two titles, when one of them is cheaper. Especially with the additional invest for a new console and the more dire economic situation, I could see many players not buying into the Switch 2 at all.

Ephera,

suddenly found myself in the Realm of Zot.

Yeah, when I got there the first and only time, I was also surprised how little separates you from Zot once you’ve made it through the Dungeon and the rune branches. Far too many of my characters have died on the final stretch…

Ephera,

Well, traditionally, console prices were subsidized by the more expensive game prices. They’d sell the console at a loss to then make that back per game. Them raising both the console price as well as game prices is what makes it awful.

Ephera,

I mean, if it’s still shit and it’s getting even worse, I don’t know why we wouldn’t continue to mourn that, or at least call it out.

Ephera,

What distro did you use before?

Ephera,

Well, Mint is still one of the top recommendations for new users. It gets support for the newest hardware at a bit of a delay, so if you wanted to follow suit with your new gaming PC, it might not be as great of a choice for that for now, but for your laptop, that’s what I’d recommend, if you’re not looking to experiment.

Ephera,

Well, that was kind of a general statement. Mint is boring. That’s what it’s good at. That’s why it’s loved and why it’s recommended for new users. Specifically, it’s similar to Windows in many ways. It’s somewhat more customizable, but that’s about it.

With you having used Linux twice before, you could consider something less Windows-like, less boring. I’ll be talking about the desktop environment (DE) rather than distro, because it has much more influence on this. You can use these DEs on various distros.

  • My personal favorite DE is KDE Plasma. The default-layout is also Windows-like, but it’s got all of the bells and whistles and options you could imagine. It’s kind of power-user heaven and almost like a toolbox to build whatever workflow you want.
  • The other big, popular DE is GNOME. It’s more macOS- and Android-like and focuses on a specific workflow. People who can get used to that workflow, then often really like it. The workflow itself is sometimes frustratingly uncustomizable, but it’s also fairly customizable when it comes to the details, typically by virtue of also having lots of features, which can then be customized.
  • Well, and I guess, I’ll throw in Xfce, too, since that’s likely what you used, back when you used Ubuntu Studio. (Ubuntu Studio uses KDE since the October 2020 release, but used Xfce before then.)
    Xfce isn’t necessarily what modern beauty standards would get flustered by, but many folks like it for its simplicity and because it is perhaps even more boring than Mint (without being Windows-like). There’s a good chance that it still works a lot like back when you used it.

Perhaps also worth mentioning that Mint’s DE is called “Cinnamon”, although it’s developed by the Mint devs, so if you like that a lot, it’s typically worth sticking to Mint.

Ephera,

Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
There’s tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn’t match what they wanted.

If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:

  • Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other “Spins” are available.
  • Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It’s really up-to-date, so much that it’s referred to as “bleeding edge” (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It’s also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
  • Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I’m on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
    It’s the most “maximalist” mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I’m biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You’ll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it’s less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you’re less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.

As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you’ll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you’d notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint use apt, openSUSE uses zypper, Fedora uses dnf and Arch uses pacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it’s still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both…

Ephera,

Yeah, I don’t have first-hand experience with Arch for that reason either. Well, and also because I do want a distro to set things up for me. You could set up the snapshotting (with BTRFS and Snapper) on theoretically any distro, but not having to figure out how and what settings are good, that’s why I go with openSUSE.
I might look into NixOS at some point. It obsoletes the need for OS snapshots, because the entire OS configuration is made in configuration files. But from what I hear, it helps to be a programmer (which I am) to really appreciate NixOS.

And yeah, don’t know much about Bazzite either, but from what I’ve heard, it really has some design decisions that make it feel more like a games console. The atomic/transactional updates, for example. As I understand, updates and such are applied to a copy of your OS, which gets swapped in when you do the next reboot. This helps keep the system stable after applying updates, but implies that you can’t really just poke around manually in your root partition.
It can be helpful for users not looking to experiment, but yeah, can be a pain, if you do want to.

As for a real-time kernel, the JACK FAQ says you don’t need it, but the distro might limit real-time scheduling anyways: jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
I’ve had JACK running on my system about a year ago, although I didn’t really have a need for low latency, so I can’t say, if it actually worked correctly.
Perhaps also worth pointing out that “Pipewire” is becoming a thing, which tries to make interfacing with JACK and PulseAudio much easier. I believe, I also used Pipewire back then. But yeah, folks who’ve dealt with JACK a lot more than I have, seem to be really excited about it, so it’s presumably doing a great job.

Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how? angielski

I know I remember seeing some people talk about how nice some of the environments in Hitman were, and that they’d just walk around as a tourist from time to time, treating it like a walking simulator/virtual tourism thing instead of the stealth assassination game it is. Curious about other things like that, where you play a...

Ephera,

This is a very mild violation, but I like to play these puzzles: www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
…except that I create a custom difficulty level which is quite a step below the easiest difficulty and then I almost rather speedrun the puzzles.

The Rectangles puzzle at 5x5 size has been my crack for the past months and I’m at about 13 seconds now (using my phone as input).

I mean, it’s very casual speedrunning. No one cares about my time, so I actually never timed myself before just now. But yeah, I just like the different challenge of thinking fast rather than complex.

Ephera,

Well, yeah, ray-tracing is actually a lot simpler to implement, because you just implement things the way physics works and then that works in most situations as you’d expect (i.e. how physics works).

All the lighting techniques we used in the past were just faking lighting in ever more intricate ways. Computationally much less intensive ways, which is why we bothered with them in the first place, but it’s genuinely quite a bit of work.
There’s some ways to optimize ray-tracing itself (e.g. pre-bake the lighting into scenes), but many times it’s also a matter of mixing ray-tracing and more traditional lighting techniques, which brings in that additional work again.

Which is then why it’ll be done less and less, the better hardware becomes. Because if publishers can sell to a wide audience without putting in that work, they absolutely will not put in that work.

Ephera,

I always thought that was just a me-thing. People will be like “Oh it looks so realistic”, which a) I consider a bad thing, like I’m seeing reality plenty times already, why would I want more of that? But also b) no, it does not? Even the games with the biggest budgets continue to have NPCs that look as stiff as if they’re three days dead. I’d say “with a puppeteer’s hand up their rear” since they do move their mouths, but frankly, even puppets move around more than NPCs do.

Ephera,

Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs…? It’s a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.

Ephera,

Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There’s been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already…

Ephera,

I mean, what even is the point of winning a game? Ah yes, now I get to click through half an hour of dialogue and cutscenes, so that I can then not play the game anymore, because I’ve ‘completed’ it. Really, completing a game sounds like a scam invented by Big Game to sell more games. Like, oh yeah, we’ve made our game so fucking boring that players want it to be over with, so they can buy another of our boring ass games and play that to completion instead.

Ephera,

Well, I was hoping my comment would be ridiculous enough to make it clear that it’s in jest, but apparently not. 🫠

I mean, I do strongly prefer a gameplay loop you can (want to) play forever over story-driven games, but I am very much aware that this is a personal preference.

Ephera,

Yeah, that post tried maybe a little too hard to portray high score games as always losing. You win, if you get a better score than before or whatever score you’re happy with. Of course, this requires setting challenges for yourself on which to grow, so it could only ever have come from turbo-capitalist 'Merica …or something.

Ephera,

I think, it’s a combination of things.

To some degree, it may make the player choice seem broader, as you can go full hero or full villain. In some sense, you can also go into the middle by kicking a puppy at one point and then helping an elderly lady at another.

But then, it’s also just hard to portray nuance. If the options are “pet kitty” and “punch kitty”, you know what’s what. But if it says “pet kitty” and “ignore kitty”, it becomes a lot less clear. Maybe the kitty does not want to get pet by a random stranger. You probably won’t be able to gauge its reaction from the character model to know what’s the right choice.
But you also won’t know what “pet kitty” really means. Will your character be gentle and back off, if the kitty does not appreciate the gesture? Or will they stroke that kitty until it bites them?

Ephera,

Yeah, I was gonna say: Oh, like most laptops then? If the hard drive is not encrypted, you can just boot a different OS to access what’s on the hard drive…

Ephera,

I’m actually aware of the difference, but would also argue that this difference isn’t that big. If you have to bypass security mechanisms to be able to use hardware as you please, that doesn’t sound to me like you actually own it.

Ephera,

If it is in Unreal, that’s going to be interesting. Presumably, mod support is out the window then.

Ephera,

The thing is, the age of the engine doesn’t say anything. The Unreal Engine started its development before 1998. But you do have to put in work to upgrade an engine over time and Bethesda doesn’t have Fortnite money for that.

Ephera,

Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.

I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.

Ephera,

Damn, the buildings in that screenshot do look like the terrible assets you got in simulator games ten years ago…

Ephera,

I have no idea, if it’s any good, but apparently this exists: content.luanti.org/…/aw_personaje_anthro/

I believe, you could in principle use any Blender model, although I’m guessing, they’d need to match in terms of animations. I’m not deep into either Luanti modding or Blender, so not sure how it works together, but here’s some documentation describing it: docs.luanti.org/models/using-blender/

Ephera,

One of them is art, the other is just reality…

Ephera,

They’re not saying to create Linux-exclusive games. Just games that run on Linux without WINE/Proton.

Is Civilization 7 not fun? angielski

Never played the Civ series before, but I’m totally into strategy games. Recently got 200 hours into Pennon and Battle and kinda burned out now. The Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era which I’m hyped for isn’t out yet, and there’s nothing else in the strategy genre grabbing me. Was about to jump into Civ 7 but saw the...

Ephera, (edited )

Yeah, its game mechanics are very similar to Civ5, which is still considered one of the high points in the Civ series. And it does reproduce them quite well, so I do think that can give you a good impression, if Civ is for you.

Then again, I do own Civ5, but still end up playing Unciv instead, because I’d rather have my laptop not screaming at me while it runs in the background and I do a couple turns every so often…

Ephera,

we would like to officially announce that this will be the [last] version labeled Alpha. We have already updated the versioning scheme (this version being 0.27.0) and we will progressively stop using the Alpha label altogether up to the next release, which will be Release 28.

Excellent. Whenever I told people about 0 A.D., I felt like I should add that it’s not actually an Alpha, especially with their webpage saying in various places basically “no, don’t look at us yet, we’re not ready yet”.

If they continue adding content, I do think that’s awesome, but what’s there is already plenty solid.

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