Quoting: ShabbyXI love how they consider this a feature:

> Proprietary engine.

It's different word usage from people who aren't familiar with open source. For us, "proprietary" is specifically contrasted with "open source," and rings all sorts of alarm bells. For people outside our ecosystem, "proprietary" just means "comes from the manufacturer themselves," like a screen wash or a paint primer or similar.

It is, obviously, a really bad choice of word when the thing you're intending to describe as "not a repackage of someone else's thing" does touch on the open source community... for example if you wish users of an open source operating system to test your game.

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Improved support for input devices with 8+ axes.
...
Fixed Lethal Company, Phasmophobia and other Unity games crashing when a controller with a hat switch is plugged in.

I wonder if this means they've got someone working on more robust HOTAS support for Linux?

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Quoting: gbudnyWindows is better for these games, and above 90% of Windows users can confirm it - this operating system sells so well.

There are so many absolutely awful takes from you in this thread, but this is definitely the worst.

How many people do you imagine ever install an OS (any OS)? Which OS do essentially all desktop computers come with pre-installed?

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So taking an Epic deal (which doesn't support Linux) for many developers means that they don't bother having a Linux build at release. So 12 months later or whatever, when they're preparing their build for a store which does support Linux, Linux support is way harder - as we've discussed here before; they might need to rip out and redo a bunch of single-platform stuff, and they're quite likely to not bother then, either.

They've managed to avoid that by having a Linux build available from the outset, which is commendable. And World Of Goo was one of the games that kicked off mainstream Linux gaming pre-Steam with the Humble Bundles, which is commendable, too.

But I'll still probably only pick it up when it's on Steam. For full price though, since it'll have a native build.

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Quoting: PyreticI'm not sure what this does.

It allows you to attach a robust part of the chassis of your device by a robust cable or chain to a robust part of your display area to stop people walking off with your device.

Increase security during convention booths? Seems like a niche use case.

With it, the Deck is the game demonstration device: everyone will make sure their game runs the absolute best on the Deck because that's how they're going to show it off to people. Without it, the Deck is just something you play with at home.

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This time around, they didn't give all that many details on Steam's overall growth. We didn't get notes on monthly or daily active users like we've seen in the past.

That is a shame - what with me having nudged them specifically about that - especially with Sony and Epic having recently provided MAU numbers. Where Steam currently fits in the ecosystem would be useful information.

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Quoting: PyreticWhat's a Kensington slot?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Security_Slot [External Link]

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis file renaming thing is kind of uniting two of my pet peeves. I find it annoying and pointless when people rename their companies or projects or whatever to an acronym based on what previously was a perfectly good actual name with a meaning, often claiming that the acronym doesn't even stand for the name it was based on but is just meaningless now. Why?! So for instance, what was once the Royal Bank of Canada, a perfectly good, dignified name, is now RBC, which according to them means nothing whatsoever and does not stand for Royal Bank of Canada but is just three arbitrary letters. What the fuck, really. But I mean, banks are evil so what do I expect, right? So this project, which used to have a descriptive name so if it got mentioned I'd be able to tell what it was, now has an acronym which if I see it referred to I'll be going "So what the hell is 'ES-DE'?" (Acronyms are also generally less searchable than actual names, because there are so often other things with the same one, so it's a pain and a bad idea in the internet age to change a descriptive name into an acronym)

But since it's a project with computer files involved, it gets to also add in my pet peeve about filenames and data formats and stuff, which is that in this day and age with lots of memory and sophisticated string handling there is no excuse for making such things less human-readable rather than more. So before, if I was browsing around and saw this configuration file, I'd be able to tell, ah, that's a configuration file for that Emulation Station thing. Now, again, I'll be going "Huh. What the hell is this file? Should it be there? Will something break if I delete it? No clue."

You missed a third: with all the tarting around the developers are doing, the user has to manually rename files. JFC, you know what you used to call the file, you know what you've arbitrarily changed the name to, the absolute least you can do is see if there's a file called the old thing and rename it to the new thing when you introduce a version that demands the new thing rather than the old thing.

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Quoting: grigiI can totally see the Steam Deck being a fantastic tool for games developers.
It's affordable, powerful, and easy to deploy software to.
It has many input schemes you can try, is a nice portable size, etc...

The trick they missed, that I hope they correct with the Deck 2, is having a Kensington slot. Load up your game/demo on some Decks and let people play.

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I've found this site [External Link] which has a handy scrollable list of all the Next Fest game descriptions.

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