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Latest Comments by Philadelphus
Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
2 Apr 2026 at 6:54 pm UTC Likes: 2

It does look like a good change from what I've seen (I saw some before-and-after screenshots elsewhere), but I'll wait for it to roll out to the main branch.

Quoting: XpanderWhy on earth is there so much empty space. Everything is squished into the middle. I have my monitor in landscape not portrait ffs.
well thats not steam only issue ofc. Every freaking site does that these days :(
There's lots of UX research that shows that above a certain length lines of text become hard for people to read. Reading skill impacts this somewhat (e.g., better readers can handle slightly longer line lengths), but there's an upper limit above which a line is so long it becomes taxing for readers to easily follow it back to find the start of the next line. This applies to any written text; it's why newspapers, books, papers, etc. run multiple columns rather than lines of text straight across the page.

This collides with the fact that as humans our horizontal field of view is larger than our vertical field of view, so monitors wider than they are tall make sense for computers due to the way our eyes work. But just extending text all the way across would be horrible to read, so it often ends up slightly awkwardly confined to a central region of the screen.

I agree that a good solution would be to have more stuff in sidebars (navigation links, etc.). Or perhaps go with multi-column layouts, though how well that works would depend heavily on the site. (Having read a lot of scientific papers in two-column format, it's really annoying to have to constantly scroll back up and then down again to read each page.)

(Interestingly, the research I found suggested ~80 characters as an upper limit for line length for "expert" readers. I counted the first line of my comment in the preview as being 119 characters long and didn't feel like I was having difficulty reading my text – I guess voraciously consuming written material ever since I first learned to read has its perks – but having read the occasional page with line lengths in what must have been the hundreds of characters I definitely concur that there is an upper limit on what's not taxing to read.)

NVIDIA announce a preview of "DRM Per-Plane Color Pipeline API" support on Linux (good for HDR)
2 Apr 2026 at 3:40 am UTC

What does DRM stand for in this case? Because I read it as Digital Rights Management, and I couldn't figure out from the headline if NVIDIA announcing something about "DRM Per-Plane Color" on April 1 was the height of April Fools, or a new depressing reality.

Fans of Portal and first-person puzzlers will definitely want to check out He Who Watches
31 Mar 2026 at 7:02 pm UTC Likes: 3

Interesting, another one for the first-person puzzle genre. Reminds me a bit of Superliminal and Viewfinder (learning to solve problems by looking at things from new perspectives), and also Gravitas [External Link] a short, hilarious (and entirely FREE) game which I can't recommend enough.

Plague Inc: Evolved is getting a big new Aliens & Anti-Vaxxers DLC and free update
31 Mar 2026 at 12:48 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Greenland falls to the zombie hordes overnight! There is no virus, no cure, only the relentless march of the undead. Can they consume the world?
Not if they're starting from freakin' Greenland they can't.
Perhaps (given the overall theme of the DLC) they mean “consume” literally, and Greenland is simply their initial snack. 🤔

GNOME Fellowship program announced to support "critical and under-resourced areas"
26 Mar 2026 at 5:38 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: GustyGhostMissed opportunity for Fellowship of the GNOME
GNOME Alone…wait, no, the opposite of that! 😄

Chaos Cubed announced as another big update for Minecraft with a unique new mob
24 Mar 2026 at 5:17 am UTC

new block sets of cinnabar and sulfur
They should add a few more while they're at it: lead, cadmium, beryllium, thallium, uranium… 😁

Jokes aside, it does look like some interesting stuff.

SteamOS 3.8.0 Preview brings initial Steam Machine support, and improvements for many handhelds
20 Mar 2026 at 7:28 pm UTC Likes: 7

Re-re-enable Bluetooth Wake for Steam Deck LCD
So…they enabled it, disabled it, re-enabled it, disabled it again, and are now re-enabling it for the second time? 🥴

Transport Tycoon Deluxe returns from Atari - now a requirement for OpenTTD via Steam and GOG
20 Mar 2026 at 1:20 am UTC Likes: 2

Well, I can admit when I'm wrong – this update post [External Link] from the OpenTTD team clarifies that they weren't "pressured" to make these changes by Atari, that they had discussions with Atari ahead of the rerelease, and that Atari is providing some funding support for their server infrastructure as part of the deal. I guess since I already have it on Steam it doesn't technically affect me going forward, though the release of this clarifying post suggests I wasn't the only one to get that misunderstanding from the original.

Combine spells to solve puzzles in the wonderful Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times - out now
18 Mar 2026 at 10:55 pm UTC Likes: 1

If there's one thing 495 hours of playing Noita has taught me, it's that combining spells to solve puzzles always brings horrible death utter hilarity! 😆

Transport Tycoon Deluxe returns from Atari - now a requirement for OpenTTD via Steam and GOG
16 Mar 2026 at 7:40 pm UTC

Quoting: CaldathrasIt's certainly plausible but not the only explanation. The OpenTTD team may have chosen to do so preemptively to avoid any potential complaint from Atari.
To me that just sounds like the OpenTTD team expected Atari to say "make people buy our game to play yours, or we'll DMCA you off of Steam and GOG" and got out in front of it. Not materially different, in my eyes.

Quoting: CaldathrasThe norm with these open-source executible projects (and total overhaul mod bundles) has been to offer them only to those that own the original game on the same store. This change puts OpenTTD in line with that approach.
Typically that's because they require assets from the original game (and I agree in that case, that makes sense). That's not the case here since OpenTTD has its own independently-created assets, so I don't see why it should happen.

I dunno. Maybe it's all totally innocent, but it's just not a very good look when a corporation comes along trying to revive a classic game and oh would you look at that, totally coincidentally you also now need to buy their game going forward to get access to the already-popular free and open source reimplementation of it (on popular store fronts, I know it's still freely available elsewhere). The patch notes definitely have an "I'm not happy about this and am typing it under duress" quality to them:
OpenTTD has been available on the Steam Store for the past five years.
During that time, we've built up an incredible player base, attracting lots of new players to the game.
Starting today however, OpenTTD will no longer be directly available as a standalone game on Steam.
It can instead be obtained as part of a bundle alongside the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe, which has been re-released by Atari and is now available to purchase via Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux.