Quoting: JarmerI had a Yoga foldable laptop once upon a time, long ago. Seemed like a wonderful idea on paper and in concept. In real life it was HORRIBLE. I HATED every minute of it. Actually wound up selling it used after less than a year and going back to a "normal" laptop. These kinds of laptops might be nice for the extreme graphic artist or whatever, but I guarantee for 99% of the market, there's no reason for this.

Not to invalidate your experience at all - but my experience was rather pleasant.

About 7 years ago I joked to a colleague that I would get a foldable laptop and use Linux on it (poor touch-screen UX). As that idea settled in my mind, I realized it was less crazy than I thought. I tried it out with a 12-inch used Dell 5289 ultrabook. It was my first touch-screen pc and even though I'm a heavy keyboard user, I found touching the screen very rapid and intuitive (even though KDE and X11 didn't work great with it - often needed to tap ("click") twice). I enjoyed the graphics tablet pen a lot for drawing. Although I never got around to setting up proper workflows for taking notes or sketches - only full-on drawing. Even though I liked this a lot, I used the pen very rarely. So I can definitely understand it not being worth the money for most people. I also didn't set up a right-click for the touch-screen. Foldability was nice for cramped spaces like train or plane trips. Somehow it still feels effective and just cool to me ca. 8 years later. Recently I've started using that laptop way less due to having gotten used to a bigger screen and way superior performance on bigger pc-s. Crazy to think this was my main gaming pc once - for Minecraft, War Thunder, and Paradox grand strategy games (with potato graphics mods). But I do still see a place for something like that in my life. Although a tablet would have superior UI/UX for the touch screen - I prefer a familiar software setup and capabilities.

I'm secretly hoping that Framework will give us touch-screen with a pressure-sensitive pen support. I would forgive a bigger weight, smaller batter, and more performance. 😁

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI really like the look of this but I'm not sure I could play it. Seeing all the stuff bouncing around, maybe falling off, maybe getting damaged, just makes me wince. Especially the piano! I kept going AAAGGHH that poor piano noooo!

Well, then YOU can do a better job driving. No seriously, you can presumably go extremely slowly to give this piano the safe run it deserves. 😁

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Quoting: Mountain ManI remember the cars in the demo had neat physics modeling but were way too bouncy and squirrelly, and slid across the dirt like they were on ice, making them almost impossible to control. Has that improved?

Since I played the original only a few weeks before this new release, I can confidently say, that the handling difficulty you mention has eased considerably. At least with the starter settings - beginner car and opt-out player-assist features in Settings>Gameplay.

That said, my sentiment aligns more with tuubi here - I personally enjoyed the challenge and learned to use a mixture of slowing down and handbraking in turns. Even though I have played only a few racing games extremely casually in my life and have only 4 h in this game, the start of the championship is not that challenging for me. But I believe enabling more players is good. The game presents me with several options to make it more challenging again if I want to curb-stomp the AI less.

The time challenges seemed still challenging. However, I can't use the previously honed skills anymore. I wonder if there is some new skill depth to reach for here.

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: JarmerZoria Age of Shattering [External Link].

This link should come with a warning. It ate up over 100MB of cellphone data when I clicked it -- and that was with video playback blocked!

Maybe Augmented Steam browser addon has something to make pageloads safer? Not sure how/if addons work on mobile browsers though.

Quoting: nullzero

• Forza Horizon 4 - bit the bullet and got it during the steam sale. Nice racing but mandatory intro sucks.

There is a fix on PCGamingWiki [External Link]! If there weren't, I would recommend googling any inconveniences in games - sometimes they have a simple fix (and then I would recommend adding the found information to PCGamingWiki as well).

Also, I like your avatar. For me, it's a blast from the past - haven't used HabitRPG for years. 😁

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What have you been playing recently?

Not on Deck, but:
- one of my comfort picks - War Thunder,
- various local multiplayer games with apartment mates or guests
- tried Drag for the first time just before it was re-released as Exocross 😄
- finished Wandersong finally

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: chrIs the desirable alternative thumbstick (that you wish your ideal controller included) here based on irregular potentiometer or capacitive or ldr?

As I understand it, hall-effect magnets, which, as anyone with experience of the Sega Saturn analogue controller knows, can fail too, with some very wacky effects when they do. :tongue:

Plus it's really inconvenient to have controllers that only work when you're in a hall. :tongue:

Hey, that's illegal! One dad joke per person per thread - as was agreed in the secret community meeting.

/jk

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Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: chr

Quoting: JustinWoodand as mentioned above, if they're going to use regular potentiometer sticks, it's just not worth it in my opinion. No matter the build quality, no matter the feature set, no matter the price, there's more than enough e-waste in the world, I don't want to support the use of sticks that are designed to fail at some point.

Sorry, I didn't understand - could you please explain further? I understand a potentiometer is some kind of electronic component. What are regular potentiometer sticks and what is the alternative? What do Steam Controllers use?

I will try to explain them, but I learned these things at school, so they can get somewhat complex and since I don't know how much you know about electronics I'll try to be as simple as I can.
I'm aware this'll affect the quality of the explanation feel free to offer tips.

Lay explanation:
Potentiometer stick is a fancy word for "thumb stick category 4b".
Regular means "Our programmers had to do less work and you still get a functioning product."

Alternatives could've been "irregular poly switch stick"(thumb stick category "our programmers had to do everything themselves"), "capicative stick"(thumb stick with too much fancy tech) and "ldr stick"(We needed a really good excuse for leds around a thumbstick).
Valve also used a potentiometer stick(and soldered it to the main board). Whether or not it's regular I don't know, but for mass production reasons I think so.

Technical explanation:

Basics:
Electronic resistance is measure of how hard it's for electricity to get through it.
Analog measurement methods in electronics often work this way:
Put a predictable amount of power at one side, put a resistor between the power source and your processing unit whose resistance is reliant on the thing you want to measure.

What's happening here specifically
A potentiometer is essentially an electronic resistor of which you can set the amount of resistance with a slider.
If you put two of them in a triangle and connect the sliders to the same stick you can track its stance with math.

What's regular:
regular means in this case that the amount of resistance provided by the potentiometers can be accurately described with R(esistance) = ax+b
where a is the distance removed from one of the sides, x is a constant and b is a constant.

Thank you! And so I understand that it was said initially that regular potentiometer thumbsticks are kinda crap because they inevitably fail eventually and need to be replaced. Is the desirable alternative thumbstick here based on an irregular potentiometer or capacitive or ldr?

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Quoting: JustinWoodand as mentioned above, if they're going to use regular potentiometer sticks, it's just not worth it in my opinion. No matter the build quality, no matter the feature set, no matter the price, there's more than enough e-waste in the world, I don't want to support the use of sticks that are designed to fail at some point.

Sorry, I didn't understand - could you please explain further? I understand a potentiometer is some kind of electronic component. What are regular potentiometer sticks and what is the alternative? What do Steam Controllers use?

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Yoo, I remember the CS 1.6 version of Pool Day. Haven't played CS since then. A bit nostalgic sight nonetheless.

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I recently visited Japan and was positively surprised to see some bigger electronics stores have a dedicated section for Steam Deck. Granted, it was 1/3 or 1/2 of the Xbox section and 1/10 of the Sony sections, but still more representation than what Steam Machines probably ever got.

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