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@scaine:

I enjoyed The Cycle: Frontier for a while, back in 2022, but the constant drag of having to insure your kit for a decent run meant that the grind was a bit crazy.

But it was Dark and Darker that made me realise that extraction shooters weren't my bag. At least ARC is trying to match solos together... Dark and Darker was an absolute shit-fest. I remember, as a newb, I was walking around the waiting lobby, examining players randomly, and I came across a team of three, fully kitted out, and each member had at least (!) 15 healing potions. As a newb, I could afford, perhaps three. Sure enough, they were waiting at extraction. I hope they enjoyed the rusty sword I'd looted, and a couple of arrows. I never did find a bow...

Maybe ARC's community will prove me wrong, but these games almost always skew towards a small group of try-hards with too much time on their hands basically griefing newcomers. Too early to tell right now though.

Shooters are not my cup of tea, but I wanted to share that I am this try-hard griefing newcomers you describe 🙈. War Thunder's matchmaking is based on your load-out/kit tier, not your skill level/rank. So when I feel especially powerless and incapable in my real life, I can go to lower tiers than usual and restore the impression of being competent at something - by dominating some lobbies. There is still an aspect of luck (also in terms of opponents) but I have a deep set of skills/strategy to get the win (or achieve the arbitrary daily/weekly quests).

In abstract, I am personally adjusting my level of challenge to my abilities and needs at that particular time. When I'm feeling especially capable (curious and safe; and still play WT for some reason 😅), I go to a game mode or tier where I struggle.

I'm not excusing the harm me and others like me are causing. I'm not even demanding empathy for them/us. (Although it is a well documented fact that since we always see ourselves with context and others without - we tend to attribute our own failings to circumstance and that of others to character). I simply thought this might be an interesting diatribe or discussion.

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I have fond memories of Liège waffles with their sugar starting to caramelize inside and outside, sweet, warm, soft, and a bit chewy & crunchy from the caramel.

I never ate one, but now I want to!

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I was not impressed by the waffle truck. Tasted like the batter mix you buy at a discount shop

Maybe you picked the wrong truck, maybe it was a different kind of waffle, or maybe we have different tastes. Who knows? I have fond memories of Liège waffles with their sugar starting to caramelize inside and outside, sweet, warm, soft, and a bit chewy & crunchy from the caramel. Or maybe I was freezing and starving at that moment and it was just what I needed. It's true that food trucks are not known to offer the best food ever.

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Liège Waffles from the food trucks probably need a dedicated budget line.

When I was there, I was not impressed by the waffle truck. Tasted like the batter mix you buy at a discount shop. Maybe I just picked the wrong truck?

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FOSDEM itself is for free, so it's just plane tickets and accommodation. Yeah, I would chip in.

Don't forget our favorite reporter's fees

Besides the compensation, Liège Waffles from the food trucks probably need a dedicated budget line. Club Maté drinks also deserve a special mention, they are everywhere at FOSDEM.

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I won't be able to join this year, but I would be interested in joining a fundraiser to help GoL cover the event ;)

FOSDEM itself is for free, so it's just plane tickets and accommodation. Yeah, I would chip in.

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huh this looks really cool for the Deck ... adding to my massive pile of "to play" games on there. Thanks for the recommendation!

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It's currently rated Steam Deck Verified by Valve

It's the native build that's Verified on the Deck, so dropping that is a pain for everyone.

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Two years ago, there were a few extremely interesting BoF events on VR, I got to learn about some interesting projects, involving OpenXR, inside-out tracking, the Microsoft mixed reality platform, and some vrchat-like games. Unfortunately, I cannot be more specific than that as I cannot find it on the archived schedule.

Anyway, this event is always so interesting, it was about time a devroom was dedicated to this kind of content. In my experience, devrooms and BoF are much more interesting than the big talks at FOSDEM (which you can watch online later, though you don't get the QA+hallway discussions, but most speakers are available at their stand).

I won't be able to join this year, but I would be interested in joining a fundraiser to help GoL cover the event ;)

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I wonder why AAA companies stopped having demos like most indies.

Well, you could always buy a copy, play it for a bit, and get a refund. That being said, I expect the reason is something like 'demos don't provide enough of a boost in sales to be worth the cost'.

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Fixed an issue where PlayStation controller light bar settings did not stick when exiting the controller calibration page.

You can change lightbar settings for PS controllers in Steam?!? I had no idea. I've been using dualsensectl for that all this time.

I recently discovered that when you click into bluetooth settings in the notification tray, and disconnect your DualSense controller there, it automatically turns off the controller! That's pretty cool. I wish my bluetooth headphones would do that.

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Don't those visual give you nausea and/or a headache?

I quite often suffer from motion sickness when playing 3D games. I cannot play Minecraft on PC for instance. However, I have no problems playing Hyper Demon. Might also be because I suck at the game and my usual session length is shorter than 5 minutes.

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In my opinion, the game has a technical debt and design problems that were there since the first Warhammer Total War. The third game is very ambitious, but the engine it runs on was never meant to tackle this. Immortal Empires campaign is the result. They began to operate on a true grand strategy scale in IE but their engine doesn't deal well with hundreds and hundreds of factions and while the map is beautiful, they had to squish it very weirdly in many places in the name of performance. It's the biggest Total War map that's at the same time, gameplay wise, too small.

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It's not compression, it's delta-patching. The updates are the diffs between the old files and the new. After you've downloaded the diffs your computer uses that data to create the new files from the parts.

Well... I wouldn't believe if you told they're not transferring compressed (which you didn't explicitly do).
And delta transfer shouldn't do much CPU noise on the receiving side.

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I have a question, how good is this game in terms of... NFS, Dirt or even Forza Horizon series? I have seen very little footage of it and I wonder why AAA companies stopped having demos like most indies.

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Amazing game participated in betas.

graphic amazingly well
performance optimised and good looking its ok

sounds i think game has 3d sound system so i can clearly determine where is the sound source instead of what i cannnot in tarkov. also distance important working well when I talk
atmospher i love sci-fi theme its ok.

why i dont buy it rn price and game genre changes from first tests to demo
it was planned as PVE extraction shooter but it is now PvEvPvP extraction shooter in hardcore way. im curious about its player base changes.

my shooter is still Division 2. Abandoned Anthem long ago.

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Any ideas why SteamOS is at 27% while Custom GPU 0405 is at 14%?

The GPU 0405 (14.17%) is only the LCD.
The OLED is AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV VANGOGH) with 12.64%

So steam deck gpu is 26.81% and this is very close to SteamOS (27.18%)

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The container acts like a regular distro so you can sudo apt install or sudo pacman -S and changes will survive unlike docker.

Docker does the same. Just don't purge the container. They are all different ways of working with containers. Containers work the same.

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Hey yo, one of those flags is a Liberia flag. XD

I think they're doing the "accidentally Liberia" meme. A lot of "patriotic" Americans incorrectly use the flag when they get on a soapbox about the US, and then double down on their ignorance when they get called out for not knowing it's the Liberian flag. There's a whole Subreddit for this. :p

Steam must make use of extensive compression because downloading and installing Steam games drives my CPU fan to be audible.

Are your games on your OS drive? Steam stopped hammering my CPU once I moved them to their own NVMe.

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Warhammer 3 really fucked up the siege battles. Turned them into mobile tower defense bs. And it's a damn shame that they abandoned Warhammer 2 which would have been the definitive fantasy warhammer experience with some of the QoL improvements from the last game.

And, yeah, the base game is essenyially just a demo without the ridiculously expensive dlcs. Stick with the second game since the third looks more and more like a failed experiment.

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Thanks. Not my type of game, but I enjoyed reading your article.

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I enjoyed The Cycle: Frontier for a while, back in 2022, but the constant drag of having to insure your kit for a decent run meant that the grind was a bit crazy.

But it was Dark and Darker that made me realise that extraction shooters weren't my bag. At least ARC is trying to match solos together... Dark and Darker was an absolute shit-fest. I remember, as a newb, I was walking around the waiting lobby, examining players randomly, and I came across a team of three, fully kitted out, and each member had at least (!) 15 healing potions. As a newb, I could afford, perhaps three. Sure enough, they were waiting at extraction. I hope they enjoyed the rusty sword I'd looted, and a couple of arrows. I never did find a bow...

Maybe ARC's community will prove me wrong, but these games almost always skew towards a small group of try-hards with too much time on their hands basically griefing newcomers. Too early to tell right now though.

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The (steam) reviews on TW:WH3 are shocking. I thought this was a well-loved series, and maybe the first two games are in a better place, but jeez - you rarely see "mostly negative" except on absolute stinkers! It's denuvo-encumbered too. Great.

Etrian Odessey is a weird one too - decent reviews, but ultimately a fairly weak remaster of a well-loved series, so it's a nostalgia cash-in... and it's denuvo-encumbered?! Pass.

The rest seem average to decent, but nothing stands out. I remember feeling genuine excitement when I was subbed to Humble Choice a few years ago. It feels like it's really nose-dived since.

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Steam must make use of extensive compression because downloading and installing Steam games drives my CPU fan to be audible.

It's not compression, it's delta-patching. The updates are the diffs between the old files and the new. After you've downloaded the diffs your computer uses that data to create the new files from the parts.

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Steam must make use of extensive compression because downloading and installing Steam games drives my CPU fan to be audible. That can't be cheap for battery operated devices to contend with.

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The Crew, hm? Now why does that name sound so familiar...?

Valve's compatibility notice mentions how it always need an internet connection.

Oh, [https://www.stopkillinggames.com/](right).

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this in Bazzite when?

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This could be pretty sick. I do like that it is it's own game rather than DLC - hopefully that means it will include some deeper changes.

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Really been enjoying the TW:WH quite a lot over the years, though I really wish they had some smaller-scale campaigns. The Immortal Empires mode can be great fun, but it's also a massive map with many hundreds of factions with large demands both on mental focus and accepting longer turn times. The smaller story-focused campaigns in both Warhammer 2 and 3 are nice enough, but they are also a lot more directly story-focused and even they are quite huge in scope.

I would really love the ability to just pick a smaller sub-region of the world to play a IE-style freeform campaign in. Since a smaller world means better performance, shorter turn times, and a more focused style of play, it'd be a really nice complement to the larger Immortal Empires - but I wouldn't keep my hopes up...

Still, the desire for a smaller, more compact campaign notwithstanding, it's a great game and has lots of really fun parts to it!

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First I've heard of this game. Looks good! Wishlisted.

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