What have you been playing?

Mostly still Slay the Spire and Pokémon: Infinite Fusion. With the latest monthly sprite pack, some of the sprites I made are now in the game. :grin:

…but I just started a new Minecraft world with a friend in the FTB Plexiglass Mountain modpack, so that's been the majority of my gaming time lately (and on my desktop, I wouldn't feel comfortable playing Minecraft with a controller).

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Quoting: t3gI haven’t gotten a Steam survey in over 2 years. Maybe Valve should use the actual login and playtime data vs some random survey.

I say this because every month these stats come out and gaming sites use them as gospel in the state of Linux gaming.

I got it last month or so, which made me realize I hadn't seen it like two years either. I used to get it fairly often several years ago.

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I feel like five people might be for the PvP team-style game: one person managing planets, one person handling diplomacy with other teams, one or two people coordinating fleet movements, one to oversee it all/choose responses to events…

Not quite my sort of thing, but I'd love to watch a big organized event like that. I might be able to get my friend who hasn't played since before the FTL rework to ease back into it with the PvE version.

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It also wasn't mentioned directly but the old Steam file picker when adding a Non-Steam game is gone, instead it now seems to use the desktop file picker.

FINALLY. If you've never uploaded a mod to the Steam Workshop, having to do it using the old file picker was pure, undiluted, unadulterated, torture.

Given the comments here I'll probably wait for this come out of beta, but I'm looking forward to it when it arrives!

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So soon after the last Story Pack? Paradox, you spoil us! :grin:

This sounds pretty cool, I love the idea of picking leader traits. I've always felt like scientists, in particular, are in a weird place because they perform two completely separate functions (exploration and research), can get traits for both, yet those traits have zero overlap. So my best explorer scientist levels up and gets…Expertise: Fields, well whoop-de-doo, I'm not going to put her on research, but it's completely useless for exploration. Hopefully being able to pick traits and "Veteran class" will help stop that happening. And make leaders feel a bit more alive; the council mechanic reminds me a bit of Crusader Kings, though we'll see if we have to keep council members happy or not.

Hundreds of new leader traits and two entire new tradition trees also sound amazing. I'm glad to see traditions are finally getting to where they always should've been, more like EU IV's idea trees as additional ways to further reactively customize your empire during play. (I tried the Politics tree that was recently added for owners of the Federations DLC, and it is… *chef's kiss* for those who want to throw their weight around as soft power in the Galactic Council. Made my leader Galactic Empress for the first time. :smile:)

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt is good to see High Dirigible Reusability coming to Linux. Too many people just treat their dirigibles as disposable, another tragedy of unnecessary waste. Littered dirigibles can float away and become entangled in wind turbines, or smother bird nesting sites.

In other words, what's HDR?

High Dynamic Range, though Wikipedia [External Link] can probably explain it better than I can. For visual/imaging stuff, I gather it's basically ways to better represent a wider range of illumination levels in an image. (So instead of an image with black shadows and blown-out highlights, one with details in the brightest and darkest bits.) I don't know how it works specifically, though.

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Quoting: KomorebiI'd like to mention "Fights in Tight Spaces" as another game in this genre.

How is that? It's on my wishlist but I haven't looked at it in a while.

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I actually just beat the Heart with the Ironclad for the first time a few weeks ago; the same time, not coincidentally, that I did a 999-damage Body Slam. (That was only my third time doing so, after managing it twice with my favorite character the Silent.)

I definitely feel like I haven't masted the Ironclad's sacrifice playstyle yet, but for what I did you really only need a few cards: Barricade to retain your block between turns, and Entrench to double it (I had two copies, which helped). Then having a few cards like Impervious to give you a one-time boost of lots of block to be retained and doubled helps, and a Body Slam to be able to turn your hundreds of block into damage is the cherry on the cake. Obviously it's random whether you get any/all of these cards (and there's still a lot of luck involved even then), but it's not that many so might be a bit easier to get lucky with. I think I might've had a card or two that let me Exhaust other cards to pare out the useless Strikes etc. that were left to allow me to get through my block cards quicker, but those may not be necessary if you don't take too many cards and remove as many as possible in other ways.

Quoting: junibegoodStS does exactly the opposite. You don't know what cards or relics you will get, so you are not trying to build an optimized deck. For most of the game, you are trying to build a deck that is just good enough to avoid dying against the next elite / boss you might face. And if you manage to do that for the whole game, congratulations, you won ! :smile:

These two approaches lead to very different game experiences and clearly don't target the same players. We could probably consider them two separate sub-genres...

It's a lot like FTL in that respect; it isn't a deck builder, but it's similar in that you pick a starting "character" (ship) which is the same every time and the fun for me lies in seeing what random weapons/crewmembers/rooms I get and trying to craft a winning strategy for the Flagship with what I've got. It's frustrating if you go in with the mindset of "I want a boarding team of Rockmen and Fire Beam"* or some similar specific level of detail because your chances of getting that exact loadout on a particular run aren't great, but if you go in with a flexible mindset and see what you can get out of it as fate takes you, it can be a lot of fun.

Of course that's not the One True Way to Play or anything, and as I said I like the sound of a game that lets your customize your starting deck/engine. That's an interesting thought about it being almost two sub-genres depending on whether you get to customize your starting layout or not.

*My favorite playstyle. 🤫

Quoting: g000hWhen I started with it, I often played it at lunchtime at work: Munching a sandwich with one hand and controlling the game completely with mouse.

Ha, same, though doing it on my Deck. :grin:

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I only got into Slay the Spire around the middle of last year so I'm still enjoying it quite a bit* – I only just did a 999-damage Body Slam for the first time a week or two ago. :grin: But I definitely appreciate the recommendations and a few of them sound interesting enough to check out. (I especially like the sound of customizing your opening deck.)

*It's one of the most-played games on my Steam Deck due to the combination of great Deck controls layout and being 2D so less power-hungry. And a few months ago I discovered the multiplayer mod for StS and have now got one of my friends into it, and we're having great fun duo-romping our way through the Spire.

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Quoting: scaineTrue. But it's only been good for about 3-4 years. Also, mobile phones were around for decades before they caught on too.

So, I've been thinking about this, and I don't think that comparison works in VR's favor. Cell phones are, fundamentally, about convenience: first the convenience of calling people without needing to be at a physical landline location, then later the conveniences that come with modern smartphones (texting, Internet access, apps, etc., although they were catching on years before the smartphone came around). But I think (the majority of) people could always recognize the potential for convenience they represent, even if they hadn't tried one yet. People weren't buying early smartphones because the value proposition wasn't there yet, not because they didn't realize the potential (I looked up the development of the mobile phone and discovered some pre-90s phones took like 14 hours to charge for 30 minutes of talking time; you're not really gaining much convenience with a device like that).

VR, in contrast, is fundamentally a less convenient way to interact with a screen. Sure, it enables new kinds of experiences, but it doesn't make anyone's life more streamlined or allow them to do things easier. (And while it works fine for games or watching video, I politely scoff at the notion that anyone would ever want to use it for, say, working with spreadsheets or programming.) There's nothing wrong with that, but the kinds of things that inconvenience people tend to remain hobbyist or enthusiast devices rather than being universally adopted. (Yes, you can argue that some widely-adopted things inconvenience people too, but people only put up with those inconveniences because the thing in question provides a net positive amount of convenience elsewhere: I put with the inconvenience of having to keep my car maintained because having it is a heck of a lot more convenient than walking or biking everywhere.)

I could be wrong, of course; I'm not prescient, and don't particularly care either way. But that's how the situation reads to me. I don't think the obstacle to widespread adoption is "more people need to have a good VR experience", I think it's "VR needs to become (comparably) as convenient as sitting down at my computer and using the keyboard and mouse".

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