Alba: A Wildlife Adventure

This one is very sweet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh, apparently the outside ring housing for the sticks spins round as a jog control. That's pretty neat, actually.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This has been on my wishlist for aaages. Gonna check out the demo later.

Edit: Boo. Demo doesn't launch on the Deck. On the desktop it's looking for Windows driver version numbers, which is obviously a bad plan.

Also, it seems to want to do Steam Cloud for the save, but can't.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

“We have made considerable efforts to raise the bar with our debut handheld, tailor-made with competitive features for all gamers.”

They have managed trackpads by the look of it, which is a significant upgrade over a lot of their competitors.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It has Native Linux support and is Steam Deck Playable.

Given that the reason it's "Playable" rather than "Verified" is because they've picked the text box function that doesn't pop up the keyboard rather than the one that does, they really ought to get that fixed before release.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yes, that's really is its name. It has AI in the title, because clearly that's how you sell things now, everything needs to somehow mention AI.

To be fair, the previous one's full name was "MSI Claw A1M," but no one said that because it was stupid. So it's not adding the "AI" bit, just making an existing bit into "AI." Likely for that sweet, sweet Intel marketing money, almost certainly to go with the Microsoft marketing money for making a Windows handheld.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MalIt's all nice and good but far from the tipping point.

Does anyone have some kind of research/analisys that tries to identify the % at which point the "network effect" will trigger?

So it's not a scientific analysis, but we were chatting about it on the Discord this morning.

and we got to

Thinking about the dynamics of that bump in the Steam Machines era, Mac was ~3.5% and Liam says Linux was briefly ~2% because of the Tux giveaway, so let's say ~5% combined. Avoiding single-platform traps and having an OpenGL render path got you both, essentially (with it actually being harder then than now), and Steam Machines meant that multiplatform was The Future.
Mac no longer uses the same rendering API as Linux, and its gaming market share has collapsed, so we'd need to be able to do it solo for Linux/Vulkan. So ~5% with publicly-known scope for big future growth seems like it might capture that similar ~40% motivation.
If Sony and/or Nintendo also embraced the use of Vulkan, that would increase the size of the target relative to the work done.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

after previously releasing the positively received Full Void.

Ooh, I really liked that one! Played through it on the Deck recently.

Guess I ought to check out their new one, then.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYes and no. The difference, sure, at any particular snapshot in time. But that's not what I was wondering about. Linux's 4% on the web was 2% not so long ago--the Linux desktop web share has apparently doubled, while its Steam share has inched upwards, I dunno, maybe 10%. This during a time when using the Linux desktop to game has rapidly gotten more workable, so if anything I would have expected the ratio to shrink, not grow. Still seems odd to me.

Since September 2018 (the start of the GOL data) Linux in the web browser has grown from 1.68% to 3.77%, while Linux on Steam has grown from 0.78% to 2.32%. There just hasn't been the meteoric rise that you're imagining. Linux usage on the desktop has just had slow, steady, boring growth whichever way you measure. With slightly faster growth for gaming specifically once a high-profile company releases a high-profile gaming device with Linux pre-installed.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGood news! I'm still wondering what's up with the increasingly strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.

Do you wonder about the difference between Mac's 14.9% on browser stats and 1.5% on Steam stats? It's the same thing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments