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A few tips I haven't seen anyone bring up yet:
– If you see a game on sale, it will be on sale again. Don't get baited into buying something you won't actually play for years.
– Please oh please learn to use the Deck's quick menu performance options. When people complain about the Deck's battery life, what they forget is that unlike a Nintendo Switch, it'll just treat everything like it's "docked" unless you tell it otherwise. It'll munch through that battery as quick as you let it, so extending it is your responsibility. The easiest way to do that is to just set a power limit (even the max of 15 watts will help) if a game is running fine. A lot of basic 2d games get by just fine on 3 or 5. Half-rate shading is the other major option. Basically it'll render some things at half of their normal resolution, sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it isn't noticable on the Deck's screen. With 3D stuff, get the performance overlay up and start dropping the the wattage if the framerate is high enough, or the game's video settings if it's not. Ideally just drop both, that's how you'll really save the battery. I just drop a lot of games right to "low" settings unless it looks really awful and go from there.
– In a similar vein, framerate limits!! Console games are nearly always locked to 30 or 60 frames per second for all sorts of reasons. In the Deck's case you're again thinking about battery life. While you can sometimes argue for framerates higher than a screen's refresh rate, on the Deck it's not really justifiable, there's no good reason to pass 60. Some games play just fine at 30 so lock it to 30 if you can tolerate it. Or, the Deck's secret weapon... 40fps. Normally you'd never do that, because it doesn't line up with the screen and things get weird, but the Deck's screen can actually just drop to 40hz to compensate. Due to some odd math 40fps is actually much closer to 60 than 30 in practice while still saving a lot of battery life.
BUT... BUT BUT BUT, the Deck's system-wide framerate limiter has problems. Input lag problems. Hopefully you don't notice and don't give a shit but if you do, oh god, so much input lag. Thankfully the vast majority of games have their own 60fps locks that don't have this problem (to the same extent) but for the 40hz thing you need to just deal with it.
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I mean... Phillips heads are hood for what they're actually designed for, which is, uh, to strip really easily so they don't get over-tightened. Which is irrelevant if your manufacturing is precise enough.
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I do wonder what an indie equivalent to these games would look like. I worry that I'd feel like they were just imitating Remedy.
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I wanted to counter this but I can't. Most of the mascot platformer-esque games now are imitating some other, older mascot platformer. A Hat In Time just doesn't have any real gimmicks. IDK if Pumpkin Jack does (I really need to try it at some point). Maybe Froggun but I imagine it has even less of a story and it's more of a puzzle game?
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Hmm... While it's nothing like Outer Wilds and infamous for probably being the most obtuse video game ever created, I wonder if you'd like La Mulana? Metroidvania about being an archeologist where you sort of need to actually peice together the culture and history of the civilization you're studying to move forward sometimes. It's style of storytelling is closer to FromSoft (hence the obtuseness) but still.
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While it's probably not quite what you're looking for, have you seen Carrier Command 2? Because it's pretty damn cool (and overpriced unfortunately)
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I really wish Blur actually did well back when it was around. By far the coolest take on a Mario Kart-like game I've ever played.
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You... you do realize MW5 is single-player and definitely not a "gatcha game" right? And has a pretty robust modding scene? And has a clan-based sequel coming up in a new engine?
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...Also Goddamn how is ot that no one has managed to make something like Theif again outside of Gloomwood (which is admittedly rad as hell?) I only managed to play Theif recently and it's still one of the best stealth games ever. Modern games need to learn how to leave the player alone for a while and let them cook.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about Immersive Sims because, like, in theory they're a lot of people's dream games, right? Yet their actual audiences are small. Part of that has to be down to setting, for the same reason Blade Runner was never big, but... that can't be it, right?
And why did people start calling Tears of the Kingdom an Immersive Sim? Is... Are classic Roguelikes immersive sims? Is Dwarf Fortress an Immersive Sim? Obviously not, but the definition we've given ourselves is too broad and what we actually consider a "reall immersive sim" seems too limited.
Mummelpuffin
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Well, there's another Quake 3 clone attempt every few years and every time no one cares. Diabotical made me especially sad because it shook the forumula up in some very smart ways and the Wipeout game mode needs to be stolen by pretty much everyone (and won't be).
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Is it weird that I think of Halo 3: ODST as one of the real detective games? Not because it's particularly dedicated to being that, but because the default ending of the game is that you don't solve the mystery and leave unsatisfied. You're just some grunt and what's actually going on is above your paygrade. Learning the truth is a bit of a pain in this ass but it's also basically half of the game's story. I think it was a really ballsy move for what it's worth.
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"It feels like there's thousands of us competing for a handful of jobs,"
Isn't that pretty much it? Everyone wants to make video games. All of the sudden everyone wants to invest in video game development because they realized there's money in it. But video games are a big commitment for consumers (compared to most consumables), we literally only have so much time to dedicate them and there's SO MANY GODDAMN GAMES. Like, an Eldritch horror inducing amount of video games if you have FOMO. And that's still a drop in the ocean compared to all the people who want to make video games. Hundreds if not thousands of cool games go completely unnoticed by basically everyone every month, seemingly.
There's a bizarre sort of supply / demand triangle going on.
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Oh that's absolutely why. If they dumped everything at once people would play what they wanted to play and drop the subscription. By doing this people come back.
If Nintendo doesn't keep NSO as-is for their "Switch 2" people will be EXTREMELY pissed, but it's Nintendo, they're fine with that.
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Sounds to me like you just don't want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don't either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads
BG3 specifically: It's D&D 5e, so... yeah It's gonna be complex.
Complex systems more generally:
The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You'll never learn everything at once, so don't try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you've carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don't even need to care about whether you'll understand everything eventually.
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Thanks for keeping the Thanksgiving tradition alive.
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TBF I can appreciate what he's going for. The lack of quotes makes it less like you're an omniscient being hearing dialogue, more like the narrator's just repeating what someone said. I'm in the middle of Alan Wake 2 and I can't help but read the book in Alan's VA's voice because the way "Alan" writes is superficially similar.
It also cranks up the impression that you're stuck on a nonstop violence train that doesn't really have any rhyme or reason to it. Just a series of events that occur.
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See, I've always wondered how flexible LaTeX is beyond research papers, because no one ever talks about what the hell LaTeX is outside of using some browser tool to get your citations right. It seems like a very "hackerthon" kinda tool but no one talks about it like it is because it's mostly burnt-out academics using it. How did you learn how to do this?
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I know he's said a lot of idiotic shit lately but... seriously? He actually said this? Jesus Christ. He truly has reverted into a lonely 4Chan teen.
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And guess what? It won't break like your over-complex Arch desktop because it doesn't need to be.
...Because I only just read the first chapter, and I know it's gonna throw me for a loop, but come on. This whole sequence of events feels like a parody of Westerns– Specifically the "everyone in a bar gets into a fight" trope. I feel like it's playing out like a Three Stooges sketch. Dude with a penchant for random acts of violence fights sailors because IDK he's a cowboy I guess. A freaky-looking judge lies about a priest and you get that moment where the music stops and everyone goes "git 'em!" before they all laugh about how they semi-accidentally murdered an innocent man, because violence funny, Mr. Judge just gave them a pretense and they're greatful. A guy named Toadvine insists the kid's in his way. When the kid refuses to move his _immediate reaction_ is an earnest attempt at murder. They flop around in the mud. When the kid wakes up Toadvine is concerned about the possibility that he broke the kid's neck because, well, that's not what he was tryin' to do. Just kill him. No bad blood between them, they trudge through the mud to hand each other their weapons and the kid wordlessly follows Toadvine (I guess they're friends now), who immediately goes to attack someone else because... who knows why. Pries their eye out. It really is as if Blood Meridian is depicting the west as one giant stupid bar fight. I wonder if the punchline that it becomes escalatingly awful over time and how dare you glorify stupid random violence like this? or something? I don't know, I'm just ranting. This is strange.
OK, so, this is only tangential to the purpose of this community, but still. The concept of a PKMS has tossed me into a wider interest in storing the content of a document *entirely in plaintext* with nothing but a markup language, and then formatting that content from there (often with PanDoc). Nothing frustrates me more lately than the idea of stuff that could be in text files yet isn't, because text files are *rad as hell* and computers actually understand them. Confession: It's a TTRPG rulebook because _of course_ it's a TTRPG rulebook. Of course the traditional method of making something that that is, y'know, Adobe Acrobat, but starting with something like that means that converting to any other format is just harder than it needs to be. Obviously a PKMS like Obsidian isn't really suited for longform, heavily hierarchical content like this. You used to be able to use nested YAML to hack a chapter / subchapter system together but no longer, and it was never a very good idea- if anything Obsidian intentionally resists attempts at hierarchy. LaTeX is awesome but none of the people who use LaTeX know how to document / tutorialize it in a sane way and it's community consists entirely of mathematicians and technical writers. Seems like an astoundingly useful tool that goes woefully under-utilized. My idea right now is to try using the [DocUtils](https://docutils.sourceforge.io/). It's markup language ReStructure is explicitly hierarchical and, bonus points, ReStructure is used by Project Gutenberg for it's epub tools. Any other ideas? Am I being a bit of an idiot? # Edit: I got what I was looking for. It's [AsciiDoc](https://asciidoc.org/). Kind of a holy grail tech thing for me.
I just got a pretty good deal on an old ThinkPad (think 10 years old now) to use as a beater for screwing with ArchLinux and hopefully to find a real use for. It's in great shape like it was never really used, but big shock, the battery is at 50% effective capacity and what's there disappears in less than an hour. Would you bother buying a battery replacement for it? On one hand I want it to actually be usable on the go because that was sort of the point. On the other, while replacement batteries exist, I'm worried that they're already very old themselves and already "expired". Would you take the chance? I don't want to let this thing go to waste when it's still perfectly usable, in fact it's pretty fast.
orgmode.org
I've been using Obsidian for a while, but recently, I've started considering that either of these grant me Obsidian's main advantage- your knowledge base being portable- while *also* being FOSS software. (In particular org-mode also gives me access to some things VimWiki would lack like support for things like images.) ...Oh, and apparently org-mode can be exported to loads of other things through the glorious program that is Pandoc. Loads of Android apps that work with org-mode as well, so you can, in fact, sync everything between pretty much everything!
On one hand (heh) there's apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren't typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful. On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as... intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it's all just fetishizing living a more analogue life. It actually makes the techbro in me think there's something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you _do_ choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable. I suppose that's actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there *will* just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again. ...Meanwhile I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That's sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I'm finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don't get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I'd get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things. **TL;DR** someone who's bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal
I love being outside. I hate the sun. I also hate sunscreen. I feel like there's a weird split between the reality of having this gross white goop on you all the time (most people don't wear sunscreen all the time, right? Right??) and the reality of the sun basically wanting us all dead. [This sunburn calculator](https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/sunscreen) made by a dermatologist will show you how quickly you can actually get burned. Personally, today, I literally can't stay outside for longer than 14-ish minutes (probably even shorter in my case) without any sunscreen before I've had too much sun. Even on a somewhat cloudy day, I can't stay out there for more than half an hour. I *notice* that I'm getting too much sun, too. I feel like my *eyes* are sunburned practically. I struggle to comprehend how skin like this even evolved. People practically shame me for "not going out enough" when they straight-up just have darker skin than me. ...And yet the idea of always putting sunscreen on is like, some kind of social faux pas on top of me really not wanting to. It smells, people notice that it smells, it feels gross, people notice that I'm even pastier than usual. It's like wow, you care about *skin care* enough to deal with that and **spend gobs of money** sticking a shot glass of sunscreen on yourself every two hours? God forbid if I actually had *lip balm* of all things as a man, and wearing clothing that would actually keep the sun at bay a little bit, ahhhahahaha. No. /rant **TL;DR** what do y'all do about the sun *existing*? Edit: I got over myself and started buying decent sunscreen. And decent SPF lip balm because Jesus Christ my lips are somethin' else. If people think it's weird to not get skin cancer that's their problem.
bundleofholding.com
I hope this isn't seen as an advertisement, because I think it's just legitimately of interest to anyone who likes RPGs a lot (and I certainly don't work for Bundle of Holding). It's like Humble Bundle if it focused entirely on RPG content and there's a lot of genuinely good deals tossed around that would never show up on Humble.
You read it right. Infodump time. Whatever hyper-specific thing you've been itching to really rant about. Rant about it.
Of course, it's up to everyone making Lemmy instances to decide how this'll work, and no one is able to make those decisions for them, which is how it should be. But if you were to make your own Lemmy instance, how would you handle it? Personally, while I think Beehaw is a great "staging ground" of sorts, I think it's important to remember that Lemmy instances all communicate. Just hit the "all" tab and you'll see posts from all sorts of instances- although mostly Beehaw, since 99% of us are here. So if *I* were to make a Lemmy instance- which I want to, at some point- I would make it much more focused. Almost like a subreddit with sub-sub-reddits. It'd probably be TTRPG-focused and I'd make communities for specific games and families of games that get a lot of discussion (and a catchall for everything else.) Because, once again, people from basically every Lemmy instance could subscribe to those communities so long as the instance I ran wasn't blacklisted for one reason or another. There's another reason I think I'd prefer things that way- It'd make the federated nature of Lemmy stronger. With very general instances like Beehive everyone naturally congregates in one place and it's kinda a microcosm of how Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are *the internet places* and I think that misses the advantages that a federated platform brings to the table. What do you think? More focused instances or a whole bunch of general-purpose instances that just happen to be ran by different people / have different moderation policies? Edit: ...Well it turns out someone *has* set up a TTRPG community (Put this in the search bar to get to it while logged in: !rpg@lemmy.ml) Edit #2: ...Admittedly I'm getting a better grasp of how this all works now, and it's more than a little frustrating that actually interacting with other servers is limited to subscribing to feeds. I guess I get it, technology-wise, sort of, is *saving* data across servers just not something ActivityPub can do, really? I feel like it defeats the point a bit if the majority of Lemmy instances are on a server ran by the Lemmy devs because being anywhere else is limiting.
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