So Ubisoft, that failed hard on their own launcher. Made several mistakes when it comes to the games they’ve released, made the wrong kind of news with “The Crew 2”, cancelled a bunch of games (but don’t worry, Beyond Good and Evil 2 is definitely coming out…), goes and fired a lead designer.

Let me break out my magnifying glass to check on their stocks. Oh, they made a slight “comeback” from earlier this week, they’re up to 92 cents a share.

Mgmt at that place is making bold decisions for a company; when if their stock gains a penny, it’s worth celebrating.

🤞

No, it’s a long-known fact that the Windows code has been shit for decades. That’s been known since at least XP days I think. Pretty sure I first heard about it on TechTV

Im on the WIndows 10 Extended support. I’m either going to risk staying on 10, or move to linux. The big problems for me are 1 ) Visual studio doesn’t run on linux so I’d either have to learn a new editor or do a VM… I suppose 2) Gaming. A lot can happen in 8 months for improvements. But this might be the thing that holds me on Windows for a while. Saw a video of native Dota2 on linux runs like shit. 3) A solid remote desktop replacement. One that’s as good or better than what I’m using.

To add to this list

5. Remove WebView apps. Eat our own dogfood and use MAUI.
6. Go back to the classic Start Menu. Use API to make the whole UI available for customizations
7. Get rid of the whole shitty “Settings” menu and go back to the Control Panel.
8. Drop backwards compatibility for a bunch of crap. Stop pulling the 1980s forward, let that shit die.
9. Address real modern issues with compatibility and performance with current CPUs
10. Undo all the vibe coding.
11. Focus on stability and performance, not trying to be “An experience”. Windows runs apps, make it do that the best it can.
12. For the love of everything holy, take a risk and modernize the OS. This goes back to 8. But as someone who makes Windows Server golden images for multiple platforms, FUCKING CHRIST. Having to use the Autounattend to even get anything started, and that’s often (Even in Azure) just a minimal thing to get some client to do the real work, should tell you there’s a problem. The Autounattend is poorly documented. I learned more from just building a basic VM on different providers and seeing what they figured out. I could write a god damn novel on the shortcomings of the initial installation and customization of Windows, but it’s especially embarrassing for their Server platform
13. Stop dropping support for the crap that works. Just so you can sell an inferior subscription version. WSUS being sunset is stupid. Having on-prem WSUS is always going to be faster and easier. You should focus on making that better instead of letting it limp along and then “Oh, we have an overpriced and slower option!” Get bent.
14. Azure Local is a really fucking cool idea. That was an god awful pricing as far as I can tell. But neat.

Actually, what you said unlocked a memory. Though I don’t know if it falls in line with the Gameranx video (I’ll have to go watch that) or your sentiment. But the ‘Players need that catharsis and pay off for all their efforts or else it inevitably starts to feel pointless rather than fun.’ immediately made me think of the first Shadow of Mordor game. It was a great game, undone by a QTE final boss.

But yeah, so many of these games just don’t go anywhere. To your point, the live service games. It’s not 100% with what I intended, but I feel it ends up in the same area… I’m spending all these hours… what am I accomplishing? What’s the point of all of this? It’s just endless padding with endless travel time, side quests, and anything that requires you to wait real time for the quest to progress. Dailies in WoW, were my WoW killer. Some people saw it as “easy gold”; I saw it as non-content meant to drive daily engagement but not actually accomplish anything in the game. It’s all just padding for extra “engagement” or to make a game seem bigger than it is (or should be).

I’ll break down some of the issues I had with the games I listed for better context. And I’ll front this with, I know you don’t have to do side missions. It’s more like, you realise instead of giving you a tight, compact story that’s well crafted, they spent too much time padding it out so it appears to be a bigger game. CP2077, the main story is absolutely dwarfed by all the side content. The main quest line is like… ~35 missions? There are like 70+ “gigs” and the same for “side missions”. The main story is the thing you do the least. With missing mechanics, I can’t help but think it would have been more interesting if it were done in a more linear fashion like Deus Ex Human Revolution. Instead of a giant city that’s mostly empty boxes (the buildings aren’t buildings) and padded out with side quests. Skyrim, the thing that killed it for me, was just how pathetically easy it was to become the leader of the various groups/factions. It felt so unearned. I can only take being handed “wins” left and right because I’m the fucking chosen one… before it’s just dull. It was Medieval Idiocracy. I could have just started learning spells and they’re ready to give me the college because I’m the smartest person they’ve ever seen. Brawndo, it’s what Dragonborns crave. And Hogwarts, walking around the castle, was the best part. It felt magical and alive. Some of the puzzles were fun. But the classes were boring tutorial sections, and the main thing you do in the game is LEAVE Hogwarts to go do unspeakable things in non-descript burrows and dungeons scattered all over the place. That game has 15 main quests, 21 side quests. 95 Merlin Trials…

The tl;dr: An easy way to look at it, CP2077, Hogwarts, and Expedition 33 have similar playtime for just the main quest (per howlongtobeat.com, ~26-28 hours). But how it feels to play the game is drastically different. One had a story to tell and a point to get to, and it does that. The others made a world with a whole bunch of other stuff to do.

Alright, I’ll limit it to just pet peeves.

Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said. One game that I really liked how they did it was BG3. There’s a tutorial, but you can also turn it off on future runs. Worst tutorial I think I’ve ever seen was Xenoblade 2.

Games (and really any consumable media) that just don’t know when to end. There are very few games I’ve completed, mostly because I get bored. The game overstayed it’s welcome and I’m done. The grind isn’t worth the final boss fight or whatever is at the end. Generally, it’s because games (especially RPGs) think grinding is a “fun” mechanic when it’s more of an imbalanced game. Take, for example, Expedition 33, not once in that game do you need to run around grinding levels. You can successfully go through the entire game, only going to each stage once. Fucking fantastic. But then you have games that just went too far with things. Some games, like Skyrim, CP2077, (especially) Hogwarts Legacy, I only know the ending to those games because other people beat them. Ex33 I got 52/55 achievements (just need to win the gestral games and find whatever record I missed). I beat that game entirely in 74 hours. My first run of BG3 (53/54 achievements, only missing the bard one, because I think it’s boring), first playthrough was maybe 120 hours (currently over 700 due to multiple playthroughs). Skyrim… 146 hours… 27/75 achievements. CP2077, 133 hours, 18/57 achievements. Hogwarts sits at 50 hours with 19/45 achievements (that game should be a 20-hour game at most).

Games that don’t really respect your time. This one, Nintendo does a lot. Actually perfect example is Breath of the Wild. It’s a giant fuck off world that’s mostly empty, peppered largely with the same enemies throughout the whole thing. You have a weapon mechanic that encourages you NOT to fight (just get some good weapons and head off to exactly where you need to go). The cooking is bullshit, no recipe book, no making a bunch of something, a stupid cutscene every time. And the entire poop joke… like getting 20 for a poop joke would already be too much, but collecting 900 with (IIRC) no fucking way to track them… Or the fact that the way Nintendo expects you to get arrows is to grind out rupees to buy them. And the exploits used to get arrows or rupees quickly, in a single player game, they actively tried to patch out. That’s just one game, Nintendo does this on SO MANY GAMES, which actually pushed me to “fuck Nintendo” and I didn’t buy and won’t buy a Switch 2.

Some games are combos of these. One game I really like, but I always hit a wall is Satisfactory. Once I get to trains/aluminum, it’s just not fun anymore for me. I work 40-80 hours a week (sometimes I work 5x12s and 8ish hours Sat/Sun)(only sometimes, usually closer to 50 hours a week)… so all the extra planning and time to making a factory… like I just don’t have the fucking time. Same thing with Dune Awakening. The first zone was the best. Getting your first Orni wasn’t too bad, but it was already starting to push it. Having to fucking pay taxes in a game… Oddly, it was about the time I was farming up aluminum, I quit that game too. Maybe I have a pet peeve with aluminum in video games…

Wait, Super Mario Galaxy came out almost two decades ago!? Fuck me. I need to just stop using the internet, this shit just makes me feel old.

And with the help of Valve, it’ll continue to get better. Hoping companies like EPIC also take note and really start adding things to Unreal to really push Vulcan and Linux. Like, I don’t want a monopoly or anything, but if big companies make big moves towards supporting Linux, others will follow. ( I know Unreal supports Linux, I’m talking like actively pushing tech, support, pushing for games to be compiled for linux, pushing for native code and not needing compatibility layers, etc.)

I have the absolute most respect for any whistleblower. I dread to imagine what kind of world we’d be in w/o them. Example, Snowden.

I thought the same. Everything else worked, but for whatever reason, only GOG didn’t. I actually still have the photo saved from it. I find errors about it dating back at least 2009. At the time I was looking into it, I found it was a common thing from some example code. And it wasn’t even new to GOG; the old installer had the same problem. Example, https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_2/cannot_install_internal_error_failed_to_expand_shell_folder_constant_userdocs

I believe this is their third VR headset.

God damn prediction text keyboard. Mapped! (which this time was almost married… fucken Gboard)

Fuck GOG.

Might be different, but when they launched what I think is their current launcher, it was still using example code from pre-Windows Vista days. This was 2020 I reach out to them, because my user files were mapped to a NAS, and the legacy example code they used didn’t support this. Steam has no issues. Epic had no issues.

All the people wondering why they don’t support Linux… Well that’s because they use outdated Windows code for their launcher.

Did Lemmy just compare using a computer to domestic abuse… really…

That’s some out of touch bullshit. These are not comparable on any level. I get this is a meme section for Linux, but it’s some out of touch bullshit.

Some comics are going to translate better if you can go R. Like if you want to portray something truly cruel, dark, painful, tragic, I feel like you’re not really going to get that on anything less than an R. Like DC’s Identity Crisi. Or you could just look at movies that did come out like Logan, or Deadpool. If there’s a Peacemaker film you probably would want that rated R.

You forgot to mention, that was was fired from PayPal(?) for being incompetent.

And the engineers he hires are either not that great, or (more likely) are having to play fast and loose due to unrealistic expectations. Like the original hyperloop demo that was setup years ago for a competition, instantly rusted and was secured poorly. It’s since been destroyed.

What’s a way to create a local repo mirror?

When I was a kid, I knew a kid who was (presumed) special needs but also EXTREMELY VIOLENT. I remember being in the 3rd grade and seeing him literally being carried away into a side room at school (probably to get him away from someone). And I mean like some teachers had his arms, and others had his legs, literally suspending him in the air because he wasn’t going willingly to any degree.

He was known for biting and clawing. One time, he flat-out just choked me. He was a known entity in the school.

I have no idea where he ended up. I think his mom ended up putting him in a group home or something because she basically couldn’t overpower him anymore, and he made it known he was pissed at her.

Who you are now, isn’t likely who you’ll be in 6 years. You’ll change a lot over the next few years as you become an adult. Legally, becoming an adult is the difference of a day. But actually maturing into an adult takes time and effort. Yes effort, you’ll meet plenty of adults who cling to their highschool self.

I don’t know if alcohol is still placed on a pedestal like it was in my teens, but alcohol isn’t that great. It’s an expensive poison humans can sorta metabolize. It can taste good, but moderation is key. The point isn’t to get drunk. As an adult who can drink anytime I please, is generally would rather just have water.

Now is a great time to get into a fitness routine.