In typical console style, when I first went to try this today I was greeted by this being unable to do anything.

Oof. Remember when the selling-point of consoles over PCs was that they were simple and quick? You just switch them on and you're ready to play! Yeah, not any more.

I blame the PS3. I was an XBox 360 guy, and it wasn't too bad on this; sure, there were updates, but game patches tended to be small - I seem to recall MS actually enforcing a size limit on them - and system updates fairly rare. (It goes against the grain to praise Microsoft but, those early overheating issues aside, they absolutely nailed it with that console.) Then, at the end of the last generation, a friend of mine gave me his PS3 so I could see what I'd been missing. I think in my first week of having it, the ratio of “switched on time” to actual “play time” was about 10-1. If not worse.

I've heard the PS4/XBOne generation isn't quite as bad, but I suspect people are just getting used to it.

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Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääDistrohopping ended here on this distro. Nvidia-driver installation (as far as i remember) was a world of pain everywhere else.

Heh. I dual-booted it for a while back when Steam first came out because it was a quick and easy way to set up a familar Arch-like OS with AMD's Catalyst without messing up my main Arch system. (I wasn't sure which graphics card vendor I'd go with if this gaming-on-Linux business caught on, and Catalyst is - or at least, used to be - a complete PITA to un-install.)

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That's a really strange experience for anyone who remembers the heyday of text adventures (or “interactive fiction”). On the one hand, you're very aware that you can say and do whatever you like because you aren't going to bang into the hard edges of the parser (and, having played quite a lot of IF, that's oddly difficult to get used to), but on the other hand it's very prone to responding in unexpected and frustrating ways, because there isn't really any story at all; it's just making it up as you go along.

Fascinating. (He said, in his best Spock voice.)

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There's a germ of a good game in this. (See what I did there? :D )

Limiting the number of quarantines and travel bans seems a little unrealistic, although the opposite is obviously the case for treatments and vaccinations. Maybe they could be unlimited, but with a stat for citizen dissatisfaction or economic damage that forces you to limit the length of confinement, or something.

Unfortunately, it goes fullscreen here on my 5:4 monitor, so I can't see the score. Although given the number of little red circles flying around the screen, that's probably a blessing in disguise. :S:

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Quoting: MayeulCSo you have a horizontal resolution at the very least

Not really. Those aren't pixels. Each subpixel in a digital display can only represent one particular brightness, but the phosphor dots in a CRT can display fine detail within themselves. Think of them as an array of tiny monochrome monitors, and it should make sense. In fact, although it wasn't common, some CRTs only had phosphor lines which ran the entire height of the screen.

To be fair, in extreme cases, the phosphors will limit colour resolution. But, importantly, not that of the overall image. Imagine an array of three monochrome CRTs, one red, one green, and one blue, side by side. There's no reason they couldn't display a perfectly good picture between them. The colour information would be all but completely lost - from a distance, you might be able to get an idea of the overall, average, colour across the entire image - but none of the the detail would. However, if you scaled up a single LED or OLED pixel in the same way, you'd just end up with three coloured lamps. All the detail would be lost.

Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with the idea that low persistence is one of the things that gives a CRT its distinctive “look”, but I'm not sure it's what makes them look better.

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Quoting: MayeulCAs for CRTs... I definitely agree on there being something to their quality. It could be multiple things, like the non-square grid pattern (some recent phones have this), but what I really think makes a lot of difference is the ultra low persistence of the display.

I think it's more to do with the fact that they're analogue. There's no native resolution, so scaling and (to an extent) AA are, effectively, done in hardware for free. I've never used a 4K monitor for any length of time, but from the experience of my (now rather antiquated) phone - 720p in about 4" - I think the extremely high DPI levels we're beginning to see in LCDs will help. Although obviously you run into the sort of problems that we see in the OP. (Yay, back on topic! :D )

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Quoting: Linas

Quoting: DuncI'm seriously considering going back to a CRT.

No, thank you. I'm quite happy those are getting extinct. I remember having a 19" CRT monitor back in the day, which was huge. And I don't mean the screen estate, which was quite amazing back in the day, but it was the size of a goddamn minifridge. :dizzy:

Oh, that's certainly true. I have a 19" one lying around, which is the one I've been thinking of using, and it's a workout just to move it. But where my current monitor is, I think I have the space. I dunno. When I say “seriously considering”, I mean every weekend it pops into my head, “Hey, I should try that to see how I get along with it...”.

They really do look good though, especially on lower resolutions. I have the one I've set up here running at 800x600 (it can go a bit higher), so the streams I'm watching are only in 480p (keeps the bandwidth down :) ), and it's only when there's small text on the screen that it's properly noticeable. Even then, it's not as... messy-looking as upscaling on an LCD.

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Ah, you rich folks with your fancy big monitors. The other alternative is to stick with 1280x1024, like God intended. :P

(I'm seriously considering going back to a CRT. In fact, I'm actually using a small 14" one as a secondary monitor at the moment so I can have livestreams on in the background to take my mind off... er, Current Events. I'd forgotten, but the image quality on those things is amazing.)

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Quoting: MohandevirGrid Autosport... Still the sim racing game I played the most. Since it looks similar, I'll be looking forward to this one.

Yeah, it doesn't have a good name among serious sim racers, but I enjoyed it a lot. My proudest gaming achievement was hitting the top of the time trial leaderboard for the classic Mini around the San Francisco short track. I'm still 15th (but can't even get within a second of my own record any more :( ). And so many weekly challenges used the Algarve circuit in reverse that whenever I see the real one on TV I think they're going the wrong way. :D

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as Steam grows there's clearly more games than ever also not reaching even $5K in the first two weeks.

It would be interesting to see the proportion of games that reach certain thresholds, and whether that's grown or shrunk over the years (rather than just between 2018 and '19, which they do talk about to some extent). Although, to be fair to Valve, it's kind of beside the point, which is a perfectly valid one: these are games (and therefore developers and publishers) which wouldn't have made any money at all on Steam prior to them opening it up.

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