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Excrubulent, do games w How Do You Deal With Thumb Stick Drift?
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

A lot of people have mentioned cleaning it out. If you can open it up and clean the potentiometers that are underneath the joysticks, that works best. I use isopropyl alcohol for this, just spray some over the pots and wiggle the stick around for a little while to move the internal wipers and clear away any gunk.

After that I add dielectric grease - I use lithium grease but there are other types - to the potentiometers after the cleaner has dried. This protects against particles and corrosion and extends the lifetime of the potentiometers significantly, and reduces how often you need to do this. It has to be dielectric grease because it is non conductive. Conductive grease will short out the pots and stop them working correctly.

I find the joysticks will last quite a few years after doing this.

I don’t know what people are talking about with how others use the controllers; the speed or violence of movement of the sticks should make no difference to how fast the potentiometers degrade. It’s possible if their kids are using the controllers, they just have dirtier hands and that’s making the difference.

Eventually however the controllers will degrade no matter what. If manufacturers used hall effect sensors or just added grease to the pots to start with, the controllers would last so much longer, which is maybe why they don’t do it.

Excrubulent, do astronomy w Big, doomed satellite seen from space as it tumbles towards a fiery reentry on Feb. 21 (photos)
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I don’t know all of the details of this mission, but it seems like they’ve just lowered the lowest point in its orbit - called periapsis - until it sits low enough in the atmosphere to get enough drag that the orbit slowly decays over a decade.

The lowest part of the orbit would only drop a little bit, but the highest part of the orbit woukd reduce more with each orbit. If you do it slowly enough, the orbit would circularise and then it would begin to decay more evenly. As it falls deeper into the atmosphere the orbit would decay faster and faster until it can no longer sustain orbit, and then it falls deeper into the atmosphere and burns up in just a few minutes.

The reason for this I can only guess at - it wouldn’t take a whole lot more fuel to just deorbit all at once. My best guess is that it has something to do with reentering at the lowest possible speed. If you fall from a high orbit and reenter, you have a lot more speed and have to dissipate more energy all at once. It’s possible this increases the risk that the satellite will fail to deobrit, and break up and send pieces off in less predictable orbits. If it breaks up from a low circular orbit, there’s no chance of any parts escaping back into orbit.

Excrubulent, (edited ) do games w Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition comes to PC on March 21
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

There is the exclusives thing, but I think it goes the other way. The consoles are loss-leaders, meaning they’re manufactured at a loss, then they make their money on game sales. So they need game sales to make up the numbers.

Yes, people buy playstations for the exclusives, because they know there will be many. Also I guess once you buy it you may need to justify the expense with more game purchases.

Now Sony is the publisher, so they get money either way. It may be that the cut is apportioned differently for PS sales, maybe the PS division needs to protect their numbers, but I know games companies in the past have talked about their reluctance to release on PC because of piracy, and the attitude seems to me to be that PC users need to be taught a lesson.

Personally I think the whole walled garden ecosystem is bullshit and in an ideal world we’d all be running open source software on open source hardware, and the only new hardware you’d get would be for performance upgrades, or because you wanted a handheld or a second machine. There wouldn’t be this situation where people buy three separate machines just because some people decided their proprietary games would only work on their proprietary machines. It’s absurdly wasteful.

Excrubulent, do games w Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition comes to PC on March 21
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

The delay is purely about piracy, if I had to guess. It only makes sense if you believe piracy affects sales negatively, but these corporate publishers are incapable of thinking anything else. Their entire business model revolves around artificial gatekeeping, so they simply cannot admit that that whole segment of their work is pointless.

Piracy is a service problem, and releasing a buggy port with enormous delays is bad service. It doesn’t make me want to spend my money with them.

Excrubulent, do games w Microsoft Wants Game Pass On PlayStation, Nintendo, And "Every Screen" Possible
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Piracy is important to protect the legacies of material for exactly this reason. It used to be just that items physically degraded, now they’re being deliberately removed.

Since I’ve started routinely pirating shows I no longer have to ask the question, “is this show available?” Because if I’ve heard of it then someone has uploaded it.

Excrubulent, do games w Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Wow, that’s some good research! I’ll edit my comment about this, I don’t think my glowing description of their policy should stand without this info.

Excrubulent, do games w Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

They bargain their rights because they’re eager for a shot at money. It is very hard breakout without one, if that’s your goal.

It’s incredible that you can say this and not understand that this is exactly why the relationship is coercive and gets abused.

Plenty of horrible things are legal; that is not the measure of what is good. Our entire economic system exists to benefit those with money. It’s always been that way. Can you guess who it was that decided we should have a political system that gives power to people based on how much money they have? It wasn’t poor people. Capitalism inherently drives towards monopolies.

Excrubulent, do games w Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Copyright is a tool that gives creators the ability to commercialize their work. That its spirit, nothing more.

That’s what we are told is the purpose because otherwise we wouldn’t accept its existence. In practice it doesn’t work that way. The persistent story is that artists get very little compensation whilst whichever large entity is acting as the middleman for their copyright - often owning it outright despite doing nothing to make it - takes the vast majority of the profit.

It is a tool of corporate control, nothing more. Without copyright there would be no way a middleman could insert themselves and ripoff artists, take their money, and compromise their work with financially-driven studio meddling.

And the idea that the “spirit” of copyright is for artists, that completely falls apart when you understand that modern copyright terms exist almost entirely to profit one company’s IP - Disney is just delaying the transfer of Mickey Mouse into the public domain. That’s why copyright is now lifetime +75 years, or something ridiculous like that. That is not for artists to be compensated. Mickey Mouse isn’t going to be unmade when that happens. If Disney can’t operate as a business with all the time and market share they’ve built then they should just go under. There’s no justification for it beyond corporate greed.

Also without copyright there couldn’t be monopolies like Disney buying Fox, Marvel and Star Wars. That is an absurd situation and should be an indication that antitrust is effectively gone.

And as for artists getting paid, we’re transitioning more and more to a patron model, where people are paid just to create, and release most of their work for free with some token level of patron interaction. You don’t need copyright for that.

Excrubulent, (edited ) do games w Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

EDIT: If it’s true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there’s definitely a case here. I didn’t understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.


I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…

claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.”

…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.

This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.

Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.

To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.

Excrubulent, do games w Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Ah, I understand now. [MODIFYING JOKE MATRIX TO ACCOMMODATE NEW INFORMATION]

“Your honor, I need to fire my lawyer.”

“Mr Newell, no competent lawyer in this country would defend you on this point. If you do not answer the question I will hold you in contempt.”

Excrubulent, do games w Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I mean the simple response from the lawyer is, “Objection, relevance,” and the question gets tossed out.

I demand accuracy in my jokes, even if it kills them.

Excrubulent, do games w "The Next Subnautica" aims to deliver underwater survival spooks in early 2025
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

But you’re not pointing in the games. You’re moving the view/camera.

You are doing both. They are inherently coupled in this format. But in reality you are not leaning with your hand, you are pointing with your hand, and so the closest 1:1 mapping between movements is uninverted mouse controls.

Also I don’t know what “roll to the left” means here at all. You’d need to draw a diagram or something if you wanted me to understand that part. Your words alone are not enough to convey it.

Excrubulent, do games w "The Next Subnautica" aims to deliver underwater survival spooks in early 2025
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

It’s weird, I thought of it like leaning back & forward to make it intuitive, and our brains can learn to make just about any adjustment with enough practice.

But IRL if you’re physically pointing at one spot and want to move your point of aim up and to to the right for instance, you move your hand up and to the right, just like the uninverted mouse movement. So you’re spending time IRL learning one movement and time in games learning the opposite movement. I think that’s why inverted was so much worse even though I did it that way from the start.

Excrubulent, do games w "The Next Subnautica" aims to deliver underwater survival spooks in early 2025
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I did the inverted vertical mouse for ages for the same reason, and then one day it just stopped working for me. I think I’d tried other systems and come back to my PC and it suddenly felt wrong. Then I went to normal mouse controls and discovered aiming was more natural and smoother, and I’d probably been sabotaging my aiming by forcing an extra layer of abstraction into it.

Excrubulent, do games w Cities Skylines 2 dev stuck to launch date despite “potential kicking”
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

If you want to blame someone, blame the producers, not the devs. They don’t want to be pushed to strict deadlines with artificially limited budgets and whatever enshittification method the execs bought into this week. They want to make good games, but often they work under stifling conditions.

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