my 2 cents:

if it doesn't offer a basic reference website, only an API, users might be distanced from it by a myriad of half-assed privacy-eggregious frontends

if it cares for only european content or it's only for europeans to use it, it's also dead in the water, because even europeans need non-european content to be searchable, etc

fortunately i suspect it's actually all the world's content for all the world but under european legislation, which is probably the best new option we (the world, not just europe) can have right now... yes, there'll be some content filtering, but less so than the reality bubbles Google, Meta & friends have been building around everyone while horning "free speech" against country laws

and given the EU still leaves room for national differences in content restriction rules, i suspect the API will actually allow EVERYTHING to be indexed and searcheable, with each frontend defining its national/corporate/political filter as an option, not at its core (eg: API providing filtering flags for ...&show_allowed_in=UK, ...&pegi=13, show_fakes=false, etc)

there are actually a zillion valid usecases for eg: a researcher or a company to be able to list and explore otherwise banned content, and if they're smart they might avoid "censorship" allegations this way

the obvious caveat is crazies building a campaing for everyone to actually use search.breitbart.eu daily "to avoid censorship" while unwittingly falling into a secondary web UI reality bubble atop a perfectly ok base

but the API license could enforce filtering trasparency as a condition for its usage

anyway, here is to at least a hint of hope for less ad-driven top results 🍻

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about the audio, you can probably set one of the game instances to suppress the soundtrack so only actual in-game sounds are coming in from both players

i'm pretty sure there will be some issues with UX in this trickery due to using 2 fully independent game instances but it is indeed genious level stuff

i also loved that it uses Goldberg Emulator to allow using an online multiplayer stack behind the scenes to make this possible... it's probably going to limit which games this can work with, but what an elegant hackery ❤️

ps: goldberg emulator should allow this to work even after valve and steam themselves no longer exist

@stormtux any suggestions of a GUI app we can use to set each game instance to a separate audio output via pipewire?

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the link above says the attackers use io.uring to bypass detection by monitoring tools, so it seems io.uring isn't an exploitable vulnerability per se, only a way already invaded systems will keep invaded in heavily monitored environments

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cons:
- no game ownership, like any streaming
- no game preservation, like any game that depends on servers to run (streaming or not)
- input lag, like most streaming and several server-centric execution games... is this still realistically an issue or has the tech improved enough to make it negligible?
- bandwidth, like any streaming and some server-centric execution games
- high subscription cost, i bet worse than multi-game streaming offers if you want to subscribe to more than 1 or 2 games this way each on a separate subscription
- what was that again? modding?!! is this something i can eat?

pros:
- no anti-cheat running locally on my machine
- ANY operating system will do
- almost any hardware will do

so i hope it succeeds in replacing the current distribuition model for competitive online multiplayer games that use aggressive anticheat, and flunks at everything else

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Ubisoft is "Triple iii" indie now?

what? where?!

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asymmetric coop puzzlers

can't think of many more

would Guacamelee! qualify?

the 2nd player character has symmetric powers to the 1st, but there are several areas where level design ensures each player will need to fulfill a quite different role in a coop challenge... there's a lot of platformer fighting, but it's a strong cute+funny+goofy vibe through it all, and you can't go wrong with mexican lucha libre and dia de los muertos as a backgroud story

same goes for Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time, plus a game can't get more whimsical than that

and overcooked!

stardew valley coop is not "necessary" but is substantial

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back on topic:
in a world with infinite competent human resources, it's likely that Zync would never make sense

in the real world it seems like it's living up to some of its big ticket goals and peoples expectations, eg:

ensure (wherever vulkan exists) a catch-all complete and compliant OpenGL implementation where specific implementations are quirky, broken, slow or missing

make a single effort count tenfold

surpass some suboptimal implementations despite its overhead

heck, even make some magic happen, like providing and using shared context so hibrid approaches like Vukan+OpenGL (done and used in X-Plane + plugins) and OpenGL+OpenCL (in the works iirc) become possible

kudos for the vision and for the deliveries!

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so, this is a bit off-topic, but the above comment on DLSS got me thinking...

to choose the perfect pixel to render when translating polygons to pixels a gpu can use supersampling (which sort of extracts more neighbouring pixels from the polygon then melds them into one)

then there's anti-aliasing which helps get rid of jagged edges by sort of displaying several pixels into one or making each pixel semi-affected by its neighbours

and probably a bunch of old-ish techniques that let the GPU think in higher-res then compress the resulting visual to lower-res in a smoother fashion

now there's upscaling techniques like DLSS and FSR that let the GPU think in smooth lower-res and expand the output to a not-quite-as-smooth higher-res

are we, in real world scenarios, partially downscaling then partially scaling things back up instead of doing it all in one scale?

is all this extra logic worth it or are there cases where eg: 4k without the contradictory bells and wistles is faster and looks better than 1080p with everything maxed?

is anyone keeping track of all the ups and downs and how well they go along? game engines, probably, right? driver logic?

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It'd be kind of hilarious if all those big corp CEO moguls who love clamoring for less regulations and minimal government tasted their own poison by all patent laws and trademark protections being revoked...

just saying...

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a fair while Mac OSX deprecated OpenGL when Apple launched Metal, and they also never officially supported Vulkan

this f...ed gaming on Macs hard, because games are irreplaceable, and because they're software you usually release and forget, unlike utility/office/production/development software, which needs constant improvement so can be adjusted over years to new platform requirements and/or replaced by an equivalent software, as long as the software goals are still relevant

opensource devs have hacked away at this problem with MoltenVK (Vulkan > Metal) and that opened the doors to other solutions like Zink (OpenGL > Vulkan) to be used on Apple hardware

x86 emulation over ARM was also already an important task before Apple chose ARM for their new machines

so very essential pieces of the puzzle to reach Asahi Linux's current success now were slowly falling into place even before the M1 was born... and Apple was also already murdering gaming devs on their platform since before the change to Arm

which is not to say Asahi didn't deliver much... they did! Hardware enablement is *tough* work!!! Writing an entire GPU driver from scratch is crazy!!! Hitting fully conformant drivers this fast on a brand new driver is awesome!!! And stiching together all those pieces in a user-transparent manner is non-trivial to say the least!

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