I don’t much like scary games myself, but here’s someone asking /r/HorrorGaming what their scariest games are:
EDIT: And yet somehow, despite not liking scary games, I’ve wound up owning some of these, like Darkwood, the Amnesia games, Clive Barker’s Undying – which I wouldn’t call that scary – Doom 3, Lone Survivor, Outlast, and Subnautica.
I’ve also played Clock Tower, which was on there.
One thing that I found out was that as “most-Minecraft-like” games for Minetest, there’s apparently Voxelibre (renamed Mine Clone 2) and Mineclonia (fork of Mine Clone 2). Just out of curiosity, if you looked at both, what made Voxelibre particularly appealing relative to Mineclonia?
I’ve played Minetest, even contributed some code IIRC, but that was some time back, haven’t ever played the derived games. Kind of thinking about maybe giving it a go now that there’s apparently more there.
voxelibre
I was going to ask “how does that compare to Minetest?” But after a bit of investigation, apparently it is a renamed Mine Clone 2, which is a game for Minetest.
Do you have any examples of shumups that you like and any you dislike? That might help give a better idea of what you like.
I mean, if you just want “good shmups”, it’s easy to go to Steam, search for games with the “Shoot 'em Up” tag, and sort by user reviews.
But if you’re looking for something in particular, a list like that might help.
I recall someone who build some automated system to measure input latency on gamepads, who gathered data for a bunch over different interfaces, which is a subset of that. They had some sort of automated testing system, moved the controls automatically with a microcontroller-driven system.
looks
Neither of them are what I’m remembering, but it looks like multiple people have built input latency databases.
https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency
The second looks close to what you might want. Each controller has a page with a fair amount of information.
EDIT: I don’t think that this is what I was thinking of either, but looks like another microcontroller-based system to measure input latency:
https://github.com/maziac/lagmeter
EDIT2: Also not what I was thinking of, but yet another input latency measurement project:
https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/36811/1/ExtendedAbstractLatencyCHI2018.pdf
EDIT3: Also not what I was thinking of, but another:
If it makes economic sense to break them down for parts and locking doesn’t stop it, I suppose that it might make sense to introduce security holes in phone cases, with a chain that links to a belt or similar.
Bonus – if you’re going to have a chain anyway, can maybe run a cable along it and have attached battery or other phone peripherals elsewhere on you that don’t add to phone weight.
Everyone left out there that ever thought they might give gaming a shot did so during the lockdown, and they either stuck with it, or they realized it wasn’t a forever hobby for them
looks dubious
That seems like an overly-strong statement.
There’s a point where the whole world has access to video games. And we’re getting closer to that time. There are certainly limits on growth approaching. But I don’t think that we’re to those limits yet.
For mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa:
https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/connectivity-for-good/mobile-economy/sub-saharan-africa/
unique mobile subscribers in 2023, indicating a 43% penetration rate
That’s not even smartphones. And even smartphones can only run certain types of video games. There’s a lot of the world that still is constrained by limited development.
Internet Archive creates digital copies of print books and posts those copies on its website where users may access them in full, for free, in a service it calls the “Free Digital Library.” Other than a period in 2020, Internet Archive has maintained a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio for its digital books: Initially, it allowed only as many concurrent “checkouts” of a digital book as it has physical copies in its possession. Subsequently, Internet Archive expanded its Free Digital Library to include other libraries, thereby counting the number of physical copies of a book possessed by those libraries toward the total number of digital copies it makes available at any given time.
This appeal presents the following question: Is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no. We therefore AFFIRM.
Basically, there isn’t an intrinsic right under US fair use doctrine to take a print book, scan it, and then lend digital copies of the print book.
My impression, from what little I’ve read in the past on this, is that this was probably going to be the expected outcome.
And while I haven’t closely-monitored the case, and there are probably precedent issues that are interesting for various parties, my gut reaction is that I kind of wish that archive.org weren’t doing these fights. The problem I have is that they’re basically an indispensible, one-of-a-kind resource for recording the state of webpages at some point in time via their Wayback Machine service. They are pretty widely used as the way to cite a page on the Web.
What I worry about is that they’re going to get into some huge fight over copyright on some not-directly-related issue, like print books or something, and then someone is going to sue them and get a ton of damages and it’s going to wipe out that other, critical aspect of their operations…like, some random publisher will get ownership of archive.org and all of their data and logs and services and whatnot.
considers
You could probably do these automatically, given an automated loom – one of our first forms of programmable industrial hardware – and a chip layout description.
kagis
Here’s an inexpensive computer-controlled loom for $10k-$15k:
https://www.camillavalleyfarm.com/weave/weavebird.htm
I assume that the same design could be scaled up with larger motors and parts, worst case, so that probably puts a ceiling on about what it’d cost to do this automatically.
arent these controllers supported by fwupd?
Mine’s currently plugged in, and running fwupdmgr get-devices doesn’t have it show up as an updateable device, so I assume not.
Oh also I was surprised by the battery life; I think it was advertised as having 12 hours, but after 2 years of using it I happened to notice that I had 25-30 hours of playing time in a game
If it has a rumble motor, that probably dominates power usage. I don’t know how they come up with an “hours” number, probably work out some percentage of time that the rumble motor is active, but I could easily see that varying game-to-game.
Because my desktop doesn’t have Bluetooth, I usually use a wired Xbox One controller, though because of the micro-usb I can’t say I’m a fan.
It’s not hard to get a USB Bluetooth controller for a PC.
All that being said, I don’t really think that wireless is generally worthwhile for a PC, unless you have some kind of home theater setup in your living room. If you have a wire, you have plenty of power, no concern about battery life, no interference potential (though I haven’t had problems with Bluetooth, I have with proprietary 2.4GHz protocols), less moving parts.
With video game consoles, running a wire across someone’s living room was really obnoxious; the tradeoff makes a lot of sense there. But if I’m sitting right in front of the computer, none of that really applies. It avoids me maybe managing to wrap one cord around another, but that’s about it, and I don’t think that that’s enough of a benefit.
And I’d rather not be broadcasting unique Bluetooth IDs. Okay, probably not that big a deal from a privacy standpoint with desktop hardware that doesn’t move around, doesn’t have the kind of “tracking someone’s movements” concerns that Bluetooth devices that are carried around do, but I don’t really need every nearby cell phone telling Google or Apple when I’m playing a video game, having them build up a database spanning my whole life.
I use an 8bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth with Hall effect thumbsticks – which may be what you’re using – but in wired mode.
It, unfortunately, has a Nintendo-style button layout rather than an XBox-style layout, but at least when I bought it, and maybe still, you couldn’t get both an XBox-style layout and Hall-effect thumbsticks. They did sell replacement button caps and you could replace them, but Steam Input allows remapping.
I do think that it’s a little obnoxious that Linux doesn’t have One Unified System for creating up virtual gamepads or other controllers out of other controllers. Like, the technical plumbing to create virtual devices is there – you can create virtual libevent devices. But there isn’t a great backend for doing that systemwide and in a persistent fashion, no controllerd that takes some sorta description file setting up controllers both systemwide and on a per-application basis. Like, I should be able to have a virtual controller where if a program wants to fiddle the LED color, I just have, I don’t know, colored keyboard LEDs change or something like that. Or remap buttons, or set up macro functionality – which is what you want – or set up buttons to switch between multiple settings in-game or whatever.
It’s great that Valve’s doing some of that with Steam Input – and they do offer some neat things, like people sharing Steam Input configs on Steam – but I feel that we shouldn’t really need to rely on Valve for something like that.
Various controllers that I’ve used on Linux in the past:
Playstation 2 controller. Worked great, used until it wore out. Had some kind of USB adapter, IIRC.
A Logitech F710. The D-pad rolled to diagonals too easily for my taste, but other than that, perfectly fine, worked well for quite some years. Took removable AAs, which I liked (though that does come with some weight). Unfortunately, it uses a proprietary wireless protocol on 2.4GHz, and at some point, something in my environment started occasionally disrupting it. Bluetooth and wired controllers aren’t affected. I had to switch, couldn’t stand every now and then the controller not functioning for a brief period.
Various XBox controllers. I don’t really like the XBox layout as much as the Playstation layout, but, eh, not a huge deal; they’re reasonably interoperable. And most vendors had adopted the XBox layout. However, I have something like three different controllers using potentiometers that have drift issues. Yeah, probably possible to hide that in software, increase size of the dead zone, but goddamn it, I want to have a controller that just works correctly. Prompted me to get a controller with Hall effect sticks, which have been fine.
A PS4 controller. IIRC that worked, but in 2024, too many games on the PC recognize and set themselves up properly for XBox controllers, but not Playstation controllers. There’s another issue that could have been fixed with a controllerd exposing a virtual XBox controller…
I also have various non-gamepad controllers floating around, like a HOTAS setup and pedals. I would not buy a HOTAS setup these days unless you are really in love with a flight sim that uses it – gamepads with thumbsticks are “good enough” for analog input axes on the PC, and widespread enough that a lot of games will only support those.
Once again, humans were taking robot jobs. Robots won’t stand for this sort of thing!
released for public testing
I mean, it’s not publicly-available either; it’s just available to a select group of testers.
I haven’t been following the game’s development. But my guess is that the devs are going to prioritize targeting the machines that they’re using to do development of the thing. They won’t be using a Deck to develop the thing. This probably won’t be the only tradeoff made, either – I’d guess that performance optimizations aimed at the Deck or other lower-end machines might be something that would be further down on the list. I’d guess that any kind of tutorial or whatever probably won’t go in until late in the development – not that that’s not important to bring new users up to speed, but it’s just not something that the devs need to work on it. Probably not an issue for this game, which looks like it’s multiplayer, but I’d guess that breaking save or progress compatibility is something that they’d be fine with. That’s frustrating for a player, but it can make development a lot easier.
Doesn’t mean that those don’t matter, just that they won’t be top of the priority list to get working. What they’re gonna prioritize is stuff that unblocks other things that they need.
I worked on a product in the past that had a more “customer-friendly” interface and a command line interface. When a feature gets implemented, the first thing that a dev puts in is the CLI support – it’s low-effort, and it’s all that the dev needs to get the internal feature into a testable state for the internal people. The more-customer-friendly stuff, documentation, etc all happens later in the development cycle. Doesn’t mean that we didn’t care about getting that out, just that we didn’t need it to unblock other parts of the the development process. Sometimes we’d give access to development builds to customers who specifically urgently needed a feature early-on and were willing to accept the drawbacks of using stuff that just isn’t done, but they’re inevitably gonna be getting something that’s only half-baked.
I mean, if it bugs you, I’d just wait. Like, they aren’t gonna be trying to provide an ideal customer experience at this point in the development cycle. They’re just gonna want to be using it as a testbed to see what works. It’s gonna inevitably be a subpar experience in various ways for users. The folks who are using the thing at this point are volunteering to do unpaid testing work in exchange for getting to play the thing very early and maybe doing so at a point where they can still alter the gameplay substantially. There are some people who really enjoy that, but depends on the person. It’s not really my cup of tea. I dunno about you, but I’ve got a Steam games backlog that goes on forever; it’s not like I’ve got a lack of finished games to get through.
released
I mean, it’s not released.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422450/Deadlock/
About This Game
EARLY DEVELOPMENT BUILD
Deadlock is still in early development stages with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay.
LIMITED ACCESS
Access to Deadlock is currently limited to friend invites via our playtesters.
It’s not even Early Access.
Like, if you want to play it at this point, you’re gonna get something that isn’t done. It’s hopefully playable, but…shrugs
I haven’t played it, but it sounds like the situation may be in flux:
https://www.oneesports.gg/gaming/does-deadlock-have-controller-support/
At the time of writing, the action game is in closed beta, and it doesn’t offer native controller support. However, it does have an option that players can use to play the game with a controller.
With that in mind, the game is likely to feature controller support when it releases on PC, as it is expected to be Steam Deck compatible.
However, you must keep in mind that since the game is still in early development, it doesn’t offer any key binding or customization feature.
Additionally, even with a controller on default settings, some key actions in the game may not be mapped, so you might encounter limitations during gameplay.
In the near term, if a keyboard can do what you want, if you can dig up macro software for your platform that can look for specific gamepad combinations and send keystrokes as a result, I imagine that you could make it work that way.
But I can’t update firmwares
Use Windows VM with pass-through USB?
kagis
This guy did it on an 8bitdo controller via an Android updater:
https://old.reddit.com/r/8bitdo/comments/ttqwzm/is_there_a_way_to_update_8bitdo_pro_2_firmware_on/
There’s still the Fediverse.
I mean, that doesn’t solve the LLM pollution problem, but…