Regarding the patent kerfuffle:

I've given the whole copyright/patent topic more than a little thought over the last 40 or so years, and a whole lot of thought since the days of Napster. It annoys me no end when copyrights/patents are wielded to censure innovation rather than simply protect it. It just feels obviously, morally, wrong to me.

Personally, I've come to believe:

Copyrights and patents both acknowledge that the creator or creators of a specific design --- be it process, product, or piece of art --- have the right to profit from thir design and to protect that right. I call this creatorights or designrights.

To my thinking designrights belong solely, inalienably and inextricably to a creator because they do not exist without a creator. For this reason I believe designrights cannot be sold by --- or taken from --- their creator, though they can be licensed.

Lastly, any designright said to be "owned" by other than than the original creator can be seen as completely invalid and can be understood to be illegitimate. The laws defending such claims may be seen as wrong-headed (to my mind, anyway) as the ones upholding upholding separate-but-equal doctrines or the legal personhood of corporations.

Mine is clearly not a perfect system (and there's more to it, which has Corsair losing in some scenarios) but I think its better than the ones in place now.

With this in mind --- and assuming the design originated within Corsair --- I guess it comes down to how closely Steam's controller paddle design matches Corsair's. If it's the same in mechanics and function, I imagine Corsair deserved to win. Otherwise, I imagine they should have lost.

Frankly, just off the top of my head, its hard to imagine how Xbox Elite controller and Steam Controller's paddles have enough in common for Corsair to claim both of them could infringe. It is, however, easy to imagine, if a little cliché, some skullduggery where MS backs Corsair to go after Steam ...

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Quoting: wytrabbit

Quoting: BeamboomThere's just something about a physical stick that can't be replaced with a touchpad.

My thoughts as well. The touchpad can be nice for a casual game, but trying to move or turn with it quickly and accurately in an intense boss fight (say for example Dark Souls 3, or Hellpoint) is impossible.

I can't imagine what joystick-only controller could be better. Granted I haven't used too many, just the Xbox versions and PS 3 ones, but I expect most others are similar. No matter how "fast" I might set "joystick sensitivity," I'm still constrained by a pre-set speed (firmware? software? I truly don't know).

But I'm not here to dis non-Steam controllers. What I've just written may only prove how ignorant of I am of contemporary controller technology. I'm here to say that the Steam Controller can indeed move as fast and accurately as anyone could ever want, but not with just any controller configuration.

On my SC (which I almost always set-up using mouse and keyboard settings) I am constrained only by the speed I can swipe my thumb across the pad. I always set my right pad as a trackball mouse without any friction, and I always set its sensitivity so that when I swipe my thumb from one side of the pad to the other, I turn 180 degrees in game and, if I don't lift my finger, I stop on a dime. Swipe. Stop. Very fast. Very accurate.

With time I've grown so accustomed to this mechanic that I can do a quick swipe in any direction, lift my thumb a micro-second, free spin a ways, and then touch the pad and stop anywhere between 0 and 359 degrees.

Again, I'm only saying all this to say that it is possible to be incredibly fast and accurate with the Steam Controller. All it takes is the right settings and time.

And as for using the pads as joysticks ... ick.

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So Zink, a Mesa Gallium driver, allows accelerated OpenGL via Mesa when only Vulkan drivers exist, and now --- or soon will --- drive Nvidia hardware? Do I have that right? Does that mean Mesa Gallium cum Zink is essentially being used to drive Nvidia cards? If so, that is soooo cool. If not, well, I don't fully get it, but even in my ignorance I can still tell it's cool news. My understanding of drivers is that a driver makes a thing do what it does. Vroom, vroom, vroom!

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I own three of Might and Delight's titles: Sheltered 1 & 2 and Meadow. I've played a little bit of Meadow and have yet to start the Sheltered titles ... but I'm looking forward to them. I bought them all because of their elegant, singular artistic vision; just beautiful, evoking a primal sense of wonder in me. Nothing since maybe the myth sequences of the 1978 classic, Watership Down [External Link], has given me that sensation. I'll get Sheltered 3 somewhere down the line. I knew it as soon as I saw that twilight blue elephant covered in stars.

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I'm a cheapskate and buy everything on sale, but not Valheim. I've bought two copies just now. (The last game I remember buying day one at full price was Fallout 4.)

WOO HOO!!! I am so stoked!

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I first looked at Minetest ages ago, looked at the many mods, their myriad dependencies and I slowly, carefully backed away. Back then, I was still new to Linux. Anything that couldn't be installed by simply ticking a box in Synaptic promised far more risk than reward, like playing croquet in a minefield.

To me, what the Minetest crew have accomplished here goes beyond just making Minetest more accessible to more people, they've made Linux more accessible to more people too. Every project that becomes more user friendly like this opens Linux up to a wider audience.

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In the past I've always ended up disabling shader pre-caching. Every time I fired up Steam, here came the march of shaders for every game I have installed, and at 6 Mb/sec, well --- life's too short. I've never even checked the "Allow background processing of Vulcan Shaders" because I always imagine it would make this shader thing even more nightmarish.

I just switched over to Mint XFCE and Steam is downloading all the shaders even as I write this. Maybe this new update'll fix it? One always hopes.:neutral:

Regarding the "Festival," I know all I need to know about what's next. It's Valheim into Early Access. Two copies please, thank you very much. :woot:

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Oh wow.
I would die soooo fast.
Still, it is pretty unique ... and that puts it on my wishlist. :)

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If it comes out in VR, then a non-VR version too. Other than that, nothing really, just that it comes out DAY ONE on Linux.

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Wicked wicked Valve ... she is a bad person and she must pay the penalty. And here in the European Union, we have but one punishment ... you must tie her down on a bed ... and spank her!
:grin:

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