What have you been playing recently?

Horizon Zero Dawn [External Link]. I also played a bit of Full Void [External Link] and got Gabriel Knight [External Link] and Gabriel Knight 2 [External Link] working (but didn't play them through yet - I've played them before).

The little one played the demo of Preserve [External Link] and some Potions: A Curious Tale [External Link].

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you can now easily swap your primary ship in a space station

Oh, that was such a pain before.

You'd go to the station to sell a ship, and then it would spawn the ship in the lowest-numbered slot. Which wasn't necessarily the ship that you wanted to fly away, nor the next ship that you wanted to sell. So then you'd have to schlep out to your freighter just to swap ships, and then potentially fly right back.

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Quoting: Marlockcan any of the xbox players around here exolain the appeal of the left analogue being so far up, arguably less comfortable to use than the d-pad?

Not an Xbox player (and I don't like the controller either) but it's because it started as a Dreamcast controller (Microsoft and Sega had worked together to put WinCE on the Dreamcast).



Similarly the PlayStation controller was a SNES controller (PlayStation was initially a joint Sony/Nintendo project) with handles.



They've each then evolved from those starting points.

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Quoting: LoftyI imagine one of the reasons the steam deck is so wide because they had to find a way to make the track pads as usable as the analogue sticks.

Not exactly. It's wide to make it comfortable to hold. The modified handles to make the Switch (which has no trackpads) not awful to hold give that pretty much the same width as the Deck.

What having the trackpads means - and it's something that the other handhelds have failed to consider - is that the stick & buttons on the right, and stick & dpad on the left, are next to each other. You've got about 90° of thumb movement without moving your hand; the Deck puts all of the thumb controls within that arc. Which is why playing games with the trackpad on the Deck (many hours of point & clicks and RPGs here) is great, and would suck on the devices that lack them (most of them) or put them in the wrong place (this one, and was it the Kun?).

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Quoting: Liam DaweTrue in a way, but it is just the standard Xbox styled layout, so not really an issue and may change before release.

I hope it does. Their promo image is showing the user having to press a button that the machine doesn't actually have. It just seems sloppy.

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Quoting: Liam DaweThat's exactly it. It's Steam Big Picture mode, the glyphs are based on the controller or spoofed controller.

They could have worked with upstream Valve/SDL, though, so that the controller was an actual Orange Pi Neo rather than a spoofed anything.

Of course they've got time to do that still; it's just a mock-up with no release date at the moment. But if they were going to do that, they'd probably have tidied up their mock-up.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualPierre-Loup Griffais for his deep knowledge of OpenGL drivers.

That skilllset isn't especially surprising: Valve poached him from the Linux driver team at Nvidia.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyIs it just me, or have there been a lot of games lately about failing and reconstructing memory, mental trauma, stuff taking place inside the mind trying to put it back together and such like? And if so, is it just a kind of minitrend or does it say something about us as a society?

Kinda related. [External Link]

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OT, but I get real Blade Runner vibes from their choice of typeface for the announcement.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI suspect disabling family sharing will quickly become the default for most studios.

I don't.

Family Sharing has been a Steam feature for over a decade, and of the 67,264 paid games on Steam 189 opted out. The new Family Sharing doesn't do any more to depress sales than the old one did - probably the opposite - it just doesn't really suck for the end user like the old one did.

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