Latest 30 Comments

How do you verify a user's age in a way that doesn't run head-first into a user's human right to privacy? ...okay, I admit, that's a stupid question, infringing on the right to privacy is kind of the point of the bill.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Not specifically related to this article, but this may be a concern for you: Luanti is [now being coded with AI](https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/commit/e6f0377ea2cb60c0c267b9ea570c1b4cc059d5b7) and its ContentDB [allows AI-generated content](https://content.luanti.org/policy_and_guidance/#43-ai-generated-content) as well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Considering the way Paramount has destroyed the Star Trek brand, it's not surprising to see people losing interest in the franchise. They have actively alienated their core audience in pursuit of a "modern audience" that doesn't exist.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: tfkThis is not the job of a government. This is the job of the parents.

And the article mentions a "parents decide act", which I could theoretically get behind. I don't think it is outside of the governments job to make sure that information and tools are provided by companies to help parents actually parent their children.

Of course this one is .... problematic. It doesn't really take a realistic stance of what operating systems are, what user software is and how things work together. Also giving parents the tools and information is not the same trying to enforce it into everything where it will undoubtedly run into problems of what can technically be achieved.

So again this feels like it was designed by people who's idea of "operating systems" doesn't go beyond phones and tablets.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

When the game released it required an external account (store page actually still says that), which was an immediate "hell no". Especially combining that with early access (which is apparently also still the case). So yeah, for me the game basically sabotaged itself. Probably not what caused the more general lack of interest since I don't think many people are as strict as I am.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

It could go either way with it simply asking for people to enter their date of birth ...

The pro and anti big government politicians in the us seem to have settled on bad government as a compromise.

Silly buggers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This is not the job of a government. This is the job of the parents.

This has a very good chance of sliding into a 1984 scenario.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Updated to add more info.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I backed the game several years ago, and I love the aesthetics, but I never got to play it, and it will probably stay in my backlog forever.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I didn't know it even existed :-(

But having the licensing expire after a mere 2 years is ridiculous. Its continued sale will result in continued royalties, I really don't get why :-(

Edit: I read that apparently Paramount/Skydance decided to up Star Trek licensing costs by 2000%
Feels like the "new owners" want to price out the small guy :-(

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Not sure what the 'TrendAI' part of the Zero Day Initiative is, but nice to see that the ZDI seems to be helping.

On the AI side though I am curious. I despise AI, and a new reason to hate it is that some of the latest models (namely Anthropic's Mythos) is *reportedly* incredibly good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. I take that with a huge pinch of salt because clearly it's somewhat marketing, but it does worry me. If it ever gets into the wrong hands (and to be clear, I don't really consider Anthropic to be the RIGHT hands...) and it is even half as powerful as they are claiming, it really could be dangerous - I feel even more so for Open Source projects.

Hopefully not though.

I'm a SWE, and while I still avoid AI in my workplace for the most part, my colleagues are not the same - but even the most enthusiastic are starting to feel quite sour about it. Even on the most personal and maybe selfish level, it makes the job... really damn boring. I don't want to be a 'manager', I want to code! (which again, is partly why I refuse to use AI wherever I can)

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This is insane, impractical, and unenforceable under any normal circumstances. What, we want to prevent minors from using technology now? For what purpose? It doesn't make any sense at all.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: chr

Quoting: Termy

Quoting: Purple Library GuyNever get rid of an obsolete thing until you have the thing you wanted to replace it with.

Yeah, generally not a bad idea - though i saw (or rather see) the prices for the Index dropping once the Frame is released. And as VR isn't exactly essential, i thought i can do without it for a few months rather than not getting much anymore when selling the Index. And i'm trying to lessen my clutter anyway 😆

I want to do the same with my Index but: I have no experience selling online, don't know how to price it (since it has a few defects), and struggle with work capability in general.

Oh and in my case, I might not get the Frame asap, since I'm doing worse economically than when I got my Index - so I might do many months or a few years without VR.

Sounds like just keeping the Index for a longer while?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

They just can't keep themselves from remastering these games

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: bisbyx...but achievements are a way of documenting progress in a game and some people like collecting souvenirs from their virtual journeys.

Really liked the description of achievements as "collecting souvenirs from virtual journeys". I think that's what it is for me, mostly.

:).

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: Liam DaweThe article is correct, the GitHub page explanation just isn't particularly great right now. It works with non-Steam games, that's part of the point of it.

Thank you very much for clarifying (I'm honored).

Well, in that case I have no idea how this could possibly work (and I am a game developer). Unless you have some kind of hack per game (?)

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: KrejsyLainenHow legacy are we talking? Nouveau is getting quite nice these days :)

The open source stuff is now focused on GTX 1600 and later (newer firmware). So not legacy.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: LoudTechieIt could be, but I'm not seeing significant fluctuations, which is what surprises me.
I would expect Indian Steam access to fluctuate comparable, but with a different rhythm, to Chinese Steam access.
Simplified chinese spikes are easy too see, yet there're no visible english and/or Hindi spikes.

The number of Chinese users on Steam doesn't fluctuate.

The number of samples recorded varies, on account of sometimes being wildly wrong.

The issue is that it's difficult to count each machine in a PC bang once and only once per year.

Mind you, in a way it may be OK to count them multiple times, because those machines are used for gaming a lot, by multiple people. On the other hand, from Valve's point of view, they may not buy all that many games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: LoudTechieIt could be, but I'm not seeing significant fluctuations, which is what surprises me.
I would expect Indian Steam access to fluctuate comparable, but with a different rhythm, to Chinese Steam access.
Simplified chinese spikes are easy too see, yet there're no visible english and/or Hindi spikes.

The number of Chinese users on Steam doesn't fluctuate.

The number of samples recorded varies, on account of sometimes being wildly wrong.

The issue is that it's difficult to count each machine in a PC bang once and only once per year. You can't count them server-side because they're all behind one IP address. You can't count them client-side because the clients get periodically wiped, which erases your means of seeing that you already counted it. Valve put their hands up on the issue - for a while after that they corrected the issues in the data when they came up, but they stopped doing that a couple of years ago so we get the spikes again.

Japan and South Korea could well have the same issues with data collection, but they aren't ~ a third of Steam, so no one notices.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

So the mechanic in PvE is that even if you only want to play solo you HAVE to play again every X time you your progress is wiped out.

So basically what I already said.

X time is long, but I have savegames in Steam that are a a couple years old and I went back to play them, so "a week" is not the same as "never" looses progress while not playing, which is what would happen if degradation only happened while actually playing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: Nickname

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: PoliticsOfStarvingIs it even an accurate way to measure Linux gaming? For the last two years or so, I don't even bother installing steam, I just go straight to heroic.

There is no accurate measure.
The Steam survey is one of the most accurate.
Steam dominates pc gaming enough to be considered a monopolist by the courts and for it to hold coercive power over Apple.
The survey provides enough extra information to see interesting trends including misleading ones(say variations in simplified Chinese. It's clear that if one considers Steam's global market Linux would probably not cross the 3% line, but that the Great Firewall of China distorts the picture).
Interesting here is that there isn't a clear variation visible for any of India's official languages.
[With a 16% adoption rate](https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-adoption-rate-by-country/), >1.4billion residents and a government with a track record of fast and hard decisions one would expect an easily spotted trend.
Nothing of the kind.

How well are these Indian languages supported on Linux? There might be other explanations for it as mentioned before, but with Linux(English only) being at 11% one could argue that that is significant.

It could be, but I'm not seeing significant fluctuations, which is what surprises me.
I would expect Indian Steam access to fluctuate comparable, but with a different rhythm, to Chinese Steam access.
Simplified chinese spikes are easy too see, yet there're no visible english and/or Hindi spikes.

Yes, I agree. We don't see fluctuations with anything other than China. I think with India the 16% Linux adoption rate is mostly among non-gamers; maybe there are some local Indian companies that manufacture cheap Linux laptops for daily use, but they are cheap low power machines that won't run Steam in order to fluctuate its statistics. We also don't see fluctuations with other large communities, like the US itself with its population of over 400 millions, or the over 1 billion Muslims who also don't fluctuate the statistics when Ramadan happens for example. So, I think overall the ratio of Linux gamers are similar throughout the world with China being the only exception. For some odd reason, Chinese gamers are very pro-Windows; contrary to what you might expect from a country like China.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I follow Warhammer on Steam and I got a bunch of e-mails from Steam. Cool to see them get updated, but I might have some of them on GOG. lol

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: spacemonkeyOr this article is incorrect, or I don't understand the technology behind it.

How I understand it: It is for getting Steam achievement offline and without using the Steam API. This is why it requires a "Steam Emulator".

Thus, this will not work with games you buy on Epic or GOG. It still requires a game from Steam.

In my understanding

The article is correct, the GitHub page explanation just isn't particularly great right now. It works with non-Steam games, that's part of the point of it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Or this article is incorrect, or I don't understand the technology behind it.

How I understand it: It is for getting Steam achievement offline and without using the Steam API. This is why it requires a "Steam Emulator".

Thus, this will not work with games you buy on Epic or GOG. It still requires a game from Steam.

In my understanding

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: Phlebiac

the game is technically over 20 years old

Steam says release date was Nov 22, 2011; maybe it was available outside of Steam earlier?

The original freeware game was released in 2004.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: Nickname

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: PoliticsOfStarvingIs it even an accurate way to measure Linux gaming? For the last two years or so, I don't even bother installing steam, I just go straight to heroic.

There is no accurate measure.
The Steam survey is one of the most accurate.
Steam dominates pc gaming enough to be considered a monopolist by the courts and for it to hold coercive power over Apple.
The survey provides enough extra information to see interesting trends including misleading ones(say variations in simplified Chinese. It's clear that if one considers Steam's global market Linux would probably not cross the 3% line, but that the Great Firewall of China distorts the picture).
Interesting here is that there isn't a clear variation visible for any of India's official languages.
[With a 16% adoption rate](https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-adoption-rate-by-country/), >1.4billion residents and a government with a track record of fast and hard decisions one would expect an easily spotted trend.
Nothing of the kind.

How well are these Indian languages supported on Linux? There might be other explanations for it as mentioned before, but with Linux(English only) being at 11% one could argue that that is significant.

It could be, but I'm not seeing significant fluctuations, which is what surprises me.
I would expect Indian Steam access to fluctuate comparable, but with a different rhythm, to Chinese Steam access.
Simplified chinese spikes are easy too see, yet there're no visible english and/or Hindi spikes.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: EWGIt needs to be owned by a not-for-profit or non-profit collective or co-operative.
...
Stop relying on closed source software.
Stop relying on centralized platforms.
Stop relying on big corporations for anything.

I hate to break it to you, but this isn't happening with a major streaming service such as Twitch anytime soon. Twitch already has one of the largest companies in the world subsidizing it. Amazon allows it to use AWS at a massively discounted rate and provides additional direct funding, and Twitch still can't turn a consistent profit. Even if they did take 60% of subscription revenue (which is an incorrect figure, the base split is 50/50), I doubt that needle would move much.

I understand we are on a Linux gaming forum and most everyone here is already somewhat an advocate for open solutions. An additional subset of this community, including your take, is those who take that a step further and claim everything needs to be an open solution.

Say Twitch implodes tomorrow and we have some sort of not-for-profit organization/platform that is palatable enough for the largest streamers in the game to switch to. First, you need to convince them not to go to YouTube, Kick, Facebook Gaming, or another platform where their fans are already present. You then need to make the transition seamless: they should have as painless of an experience as possible moving everything they've already set up on Twitch in order to dissuade them from seeking other solutions.

And finally, you actually need to support the streaming itself: large streamers consistently hit 10k+ concurrent viewers... assume a 6000kbps 1080p stream to each person, you'd need 60gbps egress minimum to support just that one stream, assuming we don't create some magical P2P minimum latency protocol in the meantime that every single user and their ISP is OK with. Then sum that all the way down to even the smallest streamers, sending data to/from the server and just a few people. Where are you going to find this kind of performance, readily available, and at a reasonable rate? Unless you have a massive datacenter budget, the cloud is the first solution that comes to mind. That solution violates all three of your final closing points.

I'm not going to even mention payment processing, legal representation, contracts, sponsorships, advertising... it's all too much. Yes, we do have massive, open projects working at scale. Wikipedia, Internet Archive to name a couple. Streaming infrastructure is categorically different from hosting static content.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: Nickname

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: PoliticsOfStarvingIs it even an accurate way to measure Linux gaming? For the last two years or so, I don't even bother installing steam, I just go straight to heroic.

There is no accurate measure.
The Steam survey is one of the most accurate.
Steam dominates pc gaming enough to be considered a monopolist by the courts and for it to hold coercive power over Apple.
The survey provides enough extra information to see interesting trends including misleading ones(say variations in simplified Chinese. It's clear that if one considers Steam's global market Linux would probably not cross the 3% line, but that the Great Firewall of China distorts the picture).
Interesting here is that there isn't a clear variation visible for any of India's official languages.
[With a 16% adoption rate](https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-adoption-rate-by-country/), >1.4billion residents and a government with a track record of fast and hard decisions one would expect an easily spotted trend.
Nothing of the kind.

How well are these Indian languages supported on Linux? There might be other explanations for it as mentioned before, but with Linux(English only) being at 11% one could argue that that is significant.

India has a wide diversity in languages with no real dominant language. Hindi, which is the official language, is the mother tongue of only around 180 millions, which is less than 15% of the total population of India. Hindi is also spoken by another 300 millions as a second language, so that's a total of around 480 millions, which is still less than half of the population. I'm not Indian myself, so can't tell, but I would imagine with 16% adoption rate at least Hindi should be very well supported on Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Interesting. I haven't played No Man's Sky, but wasn't it the case that it was procedurally generating creatures throughout the galaxy? I wonder if these battleable ones are procedurally generated as well, or how that works.

I'm old enough that I was pretty much Pokémon Red and Blue's target demographic when they released, and I loved the idea of being a sort of fantasy biologist, going through the world and discovering various species (not that the battling wasn't fun too, of course!). I've always wanted a sort of Pokémon-like game where each time you start a new run it randomly generates new creatures for you to find, so every experience can recover that sort of first-time wonder when everything is new and you're just learning how things work.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Oh, that guy aggro'd a thrumbo 4 seconds into the trailer (while inside what's clearly an Ancient Danger from RimWorld). That's not gonna end well. 😆

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment