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Latest 30 Comments

News - shapez 2 is a thoroughly chilled time building up a shape-cutting factory
By Cley_Faye, 5 May 2026 at 1:50 pm UTC

I was waiting for that one. It's eerily chill to just stack stuff in efficient ways.

I see the comment about performance issue, and granted I'm not at the "500k huge machine" level of things, but on the opposite side of things I've been surprised by how stable it is right now; I can have the screen full of stuff and it move smoothly… at the current zoom level (LoD kicks in in very visible ways). But I also lock the game at 60fps, it might help.

If having ton of stuff offscreen causes sharp dip in performances to the point of breaking the logic, that's bad… but time will tell. And it might get fixed later on.

For now, it's been nice. The whole UI is well thought of, and the game makes it very easy to experiment/add/change/etc. Not much to complain there.
If you're kind of an extrem player, you can even use a relatively simple text-based format to generate whole machinery and import them in the game… but nobody's going to do that, right? Hehehe

News - The new Steam Controller from Valve is out now - some early thoughts
By Yasri, 5 May 2026 at 1:39 pm UTC

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: YasriHey Liam question, how loud are all the buttons. I use the DualSense now and the PS4 controller in the past. All other modern dualstick controllers that I have tried have been louder. Help a can only play games when people are sleeping gamer out.
Hmm. It's mostly quiet. The thumbsticks have an audible click, as do the triggers when you pull them right down to the casing but neither are particularly loud. The back buttons have a slight click to them, but it's reasonably muted.
Cool thanks, will have to give the steam controller 2 a shot then.

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By pb, 5 May 2026 at 1:36 pm UTC

I only planned on getting Steam Frame, but this feature of the controller got me intrigued: "Infrared LEDs make Steam Controller trackable by Steam Frame’s cameras when you’re immersed in VR. Perfect for playing all of your non-VR games on a giant virtual screen." - I hope to see a hands-on test of that and maybe I'll grab it as well (when it's back in stock).

News - Discord is finally less of a nuisance to update on Linux
By Mountain Man, 5 May 2026 at 1:24 pm UTC

No more selecting "I'll figure it out" and then waiting for my distro to post a new package. Yay!

News - Discord is finally less of a nuisance to update on Linux
By gaboversta, 5 May 2026 at 1:23 pm UTC

Quoting: XpanderDoes that mean i can finally remove "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true
This one line turned discord updates into a non-issue.

News - Discord is finally less of a nuisance to update on Linux
By Xpander, 5 May 2026 at 1:15 pm UTC

Does that mean i can finally remove "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true

and it will be able to update itself?

this method worked well though. I just did my regular package updates when i felt like and discord was outdated until then.

News - Discord is finally less of a nuisance to update on Linux
By Myne, 5 May 2026 at 1:08 pm UTC

At this point I prefer to stay using vesktop.

News - Discord is finally less of a nuisance to update on Linux
By rustynail, 5 May 2026 at 1:03 pm UTC

Quoting: The_Real_BittermanThere are people not using the official flatpak? Geez ...
It's actually news to me, I think last time I checked it still wasn't official, and it had a bunch of issues like shipping an old version of discord for months because the current one used a version of electron that broke something. And of course they had to use some weird hack to make an old version work with current servers.

News - Unity AI out in Open Beta to give developers the fabled "make game" button
By Jarmer, 5 May 2026 at 12:57 pm UTC

Ahhhhhh yes this is what I have always wanted. For the longest time, I have told my wife "you know, with my limited game time, what I REALLY REALLY REALLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYY want is a flood of extremely low quality garbage that I have to sift through to get to anything worth playing. That's what I dream of"

And now it's coming true! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE 🤬

News - shapez 2 is a thoroughly chilled time building up a shape-cutting factory
By Jarmer, 5 May 2026 at 12:54 pm UTC

This is pretty much the only factory game I have ever been able to get into past a tutorial. I love it. It's the fact that there's no enemies, no timers, no resources, just building and figuring stuff out while I jam to some good music.

News - Discord is finally less of a nuisance to update on Linux
By linuxor001, 5 May 2026 at 12:46 pm UTC

still waiting for them to fix the gif/clip issue

News - Discord is finally less of a nuisance to update on Linux
By The_Real_Bitterman, 5 May 2026 at 12:30 pm UTC

There are people not using the official flatpak? Geez ...

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By scaine, 5 May 2026 at 12:15 pm UTC

Quoting: HendrinMckay
Quoting: scaineWild that scalping is a thing, when Valve could have restricted (initial) purchases to only accounts over, say, level 10. Or restricted buying more than one unit to only accounts over level 10. This should be a reasonably easy problem to solve.

And maybe they did, and these aren't scalper accounts re-selling, just opportunistic steam players.

I'm lucky that I don't get FOMO over this stuff. Yes, I want a controller. No, I'm not buying through anyone but Valve. The scalping industry is so predatory.
Sadly, this would not have helped. There are tons of old steam accounts listed for sale that botters and scalpers can buy and do use for stuff like this already.
Pretty sure it would have helped, and along with a cap limit of two units per account and the scalpers jobs just became much harder and profit margins much lower.

News - Unity AI out in Open Beta to give developers the fabled "make game" button
By PlayingOnLinuxphone, 5 May 2026 at 11:05 am UTC

I dislike Unity since they have build in the call home spy functionality: singleplayer games that send telemetry to Unity etc. Now they force beginners to create slop games with stolen data instead of learning how to make games. I am sure, that low level entry point will lead in more slop games pretty soon, where people think they can make money flooding the stores with generated slop games.

Could it be that too many serious game devs switched to Godot or Unreal Engine after their previous enshittifications, so they decided to pull newcomers with "here everyone can create games" or companies to tell "your game studio can do the same work with 5x less artists in half the time", not saying that many people don't want to play slop?

8 years ago I thought that neuronal network algorithm will be a great deal for game development, not because it can generate assets, but because it can change or calculate data on runtime. My hopes were that usernames can be voice generated by TTS while all static texts are spoken by actual voice artists. Other hopes were that animating clothes physically correct without clipping to a much lower performance impact than doing actual math will become a standard technique build in engines. Everything trained ethical correctly of course (because it does not require large models). The reality is, biggest companies are allowed to steal all data to sell them combined via a so called "model"-file ... or worse, just selling the access to it ... to generate the whole game instead. And instead of cool technical improvements to simulate visual physics we get double FPS fake images that increases the latency.

If technologies can be used in a good way and a bad way, why we always decide to use them in the worst way possible?

Edit:
I am not afraid AI will replace serious game development any time soon. But game stores will look more and more like YouTube: 80% slop and 20% actual games on the search results and for little Indies it will get even harder to get found. So less people can live from that work, even if these games are good.

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By Mountain Man, 5 May 2026 at 11:01 am UTC

Saw lots of horror stories from people who were unable to buy a Steam Controller. Thankfully, I was able to buy one within just a few minutes of it being put up for sale. It seems Valve may have underestimated the demand.

News - Engineering puzzle game U.V.S. Nirmana arrives from the Zachtronics team at Coincidence
By Tevur, 5 May 2026 at 10:56 am UTC

Great, looks promising. You can even buy it as a bundle/discount with Kaizen.

I'm stll waiting though until they release on GOG

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By HendrinMckay, 5 May 2026 at 10:53 am UTC

Quoting: scaineWild that scalping is a thing, when Valve could have restricted (initial) purchases to only accounts over, say, level 10. Or restricted buying more than one unit to only accounts over level 10. This should be a reasonably easy problem to solve.

And maybe they did, and these aren't scalper accounts re-selling, just opportunistic steam players.

I'm lucky that I don't get FOMO over this stuff. Yes, I want a controller. No, I'm not buying through anyone but Valve. The scalping industry is so predatory.
Sadly, this would not have helped. There are tons of old steam accounts listed for sale that botters and scalpers can buy and do use for stuff like this already.

News - The new Steam Controller from Valve is out now - some early thoughts
By HendrinMckay, 5 May 2026 at 10:52 am UTC

Yeah, in North America here, tried from two minutes before release to an hour afterwards. No luck, just kept getting error messages. Going by various discords and what not, looks like scalpers were having a field day and grabbing up a large and relisting almost immediately on ebay. One of them even purchased 30 over 15 accounts from a screenshot I seen posted.

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By Craggles086, 5 May 2026 at 10:30 am UTC

Yep, Steam Controller all sold out in Australia at $149 (australian).

No idea how many they were shipping to Australia as opposed to the US, but might have a try next round.

News - Unique deck-builder Moonsigil Atlas arrives May 28 - No energy, no mana, just space
By scaine, 5 May 2026 at 10:24 am UTC

2026 is turning into the year of the deck builders, let alone Linux desktop. I'm really, really looking forward to this one. And after that earlier Rogue Voltage article, I ended up spending another 10 hours playing that too! And then there's Slay the Spire 2. Love it.

But this one is an insta-buy. At least I don't have long to wait now.

News - shapez 2 is a thoroughly chilled time building up a shape-cutting factory
By Ehvis, 5 May 2026 at 10:24 am UTC

Have been putting quite a bit of time into this since the 1.0 release. Quite good, with a few bad aspects.

The good part is the ease with which you can build your things. Almost everything works flawlessly and apart from the more "puzzle aspects", you won't have many issues building whatever you want. The main appeal of Shapez is still the same as it was from the original first game. Creating a fully automated MAM (Make Anything Machine) to deal with the random requests that open up after the last milestone. A challenge of controlling everything through wire networks while keeping everything tightly packed and without "stalls" it a fun time. The new "manufacture" game mode is a nice addition. Clearly designed to please those that don't like tearing down bits of the factory that are done with their task and it allows for very quick scaling.

That last part brings me to the "bad" part. Performance. Now, it's not bad that the game starts dropping framerate when you build to much as this is inevitable. But the game is made so scaling goes very quickly and with 20 hours in manufacture mode I exceeded 500k buildings. That's when the cracks start showing. There are a lot of details to the problem, but fundamentally what happens is that when fps starts dropping (usually only when being near certain setups), the consistency of production breaks. Whole production lines that had been working at 100% efficiency for 10 hours start stuttering because you have frame drops when you're working in a specific area. This is really bad for a factory game as this basically marks the end of what you can do.

So good game. I highly recommend it if you like to have a chill factory building experience. But be aware that your system will determine how far you can go before things break.

Unfortunately, the release has come with some instability. For example, simply doing ALT+TAB on the Linux version instantly closes the game, same happens across different fullscreen modes. Thoroughly annoying. This seems to be a problem in newer Unity versions, as I've seen several games now with the same behaviour. Proton 11 Beta does not have this issue and the game works much better there.
It also seems to be an AMD only problem. I don't have this problem (native version) on Nvidia/X11 and from the reports that mentioned GPU it was always AMD.

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By scaine, 5 May 2026 at 10:22 am UTC

Wild that scalping is a thing, when Valve could have restricted (initial) purchases to only accounts over, say, level 10. Or restricted buying more than one unit to only accounts over level 10. This should be a reasonably easy problem to solve.

And maybe they did, and these aren't scalper accounts re-selling, just opportunistic steam players.

I'm lucky that I don't get FOMO over this stuff. Yes, I want a controller. No, I'm not buying through anyone but Valve. The scalping industry is so predatory.

News - Engineering puzzle game U.V.S. Nirmana arrives from the Zachtronics team at Coincidence
By Cley_Faye, 5 May 2026 at 9:27 am UTC

More Zachtronics is good. It's always a good time (even if a bit tough at times :D)

News - Unity AI out in Open Beta to give developers the fabled "make game" button
By poke86, 5 May 2026 at 9:22 am UTC

Because faster is famously always better when it comes to game development.

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By RavenWings, 5 May 2026 at 9:07 am UTC

It felt like playing Cookie Clicker, but I managed to get two of them.

While the whole thing is still very frustrating for everyone, I´ve gotten the impression, they have imrpoved the process a whole lot. When preorders for the Steam Deck began, you could get stuck at ANY point of the process, having to start at the beginning over and over again, sometimes after reaching (and failing) the final click. I actually never saw a "order complete" page. I was still desperately trying to get a deck when suddenly a confirmation email arrived xD
This time, the process was smooth until that one point where everybody got stuck and once you got beyond that point, everything was just working as well.

Sorry for everyone who didn´t get one. But I don´t think we have to wait long for them to restock.

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By Ehvis, 5 May 2026 at 8:57 am UTC

Managed to get my order in. The really a much of a controller player, but my xbox360 controller is starting to its age and there are some types of games that I do play on controller.

The perpetual Steam store payment processing mess makes me wonder what "could services" are good for when they can't even dynamically handle a large spike in requests. And this time it was not the store itself, but just getting a slot in the payment provider.

News - The new Steam Controller from Valve is out now - some early thoughts
By CyborgZeta, 5 May 2026 at 8:48 am UTC

Somehow, I was able to get a purchase in within the first 30 minutes. Took a lot of tapping in the Steam app on my tablet. No clue when it will get here, but at least I'm getting one.

News - The new Steam Controller from Valve is out now - some early thoughts
By Craggles086, 5 May 2026 at 8:44 am UTC

Anyone else find headphone jack on the PlayStation controller annoying. My sound is always connected to external speakers on my computer. As soon as the PlayStation controller is connected I loose all sound.

On Windows it is a pain finding the setting to disable controller audio every time. Hope Steam gives us a setting that stays on if their controller gets audio out

News - Steam Controller goes out of stock as Valve get a ton of "Game Console" shipments
By keyboard, 5 May 2026 at 8:19 am UTC

Quoting: ZlopezI was trying to order the Steam Controller for 3 hours with checkout failing for me and then it was gone. :/ Hopefully I will be able to buy it in next wave.
Same here. Now I hope there will be a bundle together with the steam machine when it finally comes out.