this looks great!!!

as a biologist, i've been flirting for a while with the idea of making a curator channel just for nature, biology and conservation-related games... this plus the 1.6 update to Stardew Valley may be the last push i needed ❤️

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those "good uses" were called "Expansions" and the wider catch-all name "DLC" was coined to put "bad uses" under the same umbrella and slap extra DRM-control on them

the oldest expansion i'm aware of... probably "Hellfire", for "Diablo 1"

It's an expecially interesting case because Diablo was done by Blizzard and Hellfire was done by Sierra Games, so it was pretty bold!

More so if you realize it wasn't an independent adventure but added in-game extra content (a new story arch, a new cave, new high-level spells, etc) to the original game

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what's the most profitable way to hunt whales?

is it to hunt just under the amount of newly bred whales each year so their population (and your business) doesn't get gradually over-hunted into oblivion?

nope... it's to hunt all of them at once, get the money and invest in something completely different

it's the fallacy of self-regulating markets, based on the wrong assumption that money must stay on the same business, while capital investment rules make it all too easy to scorch the earth and move on to a new business

this and the fact that even when a market does self-regulate it does so *after* bad things have already happened in a big way to most people involved (clients, workers and often even some of the investors)

i think this neatly summarizes what's happening with open capital gaming studios/publishers nowadays

hm... how's that triple "i" story unfolding? time to check on them again

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FWIW: if the official game engines refuse to work, then OpenRA (alternative game engine for early C&C series games) seems like it might be a really nice way to play them too

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looks like at least cheats A and C could be solved by server-side verification instead of deploying more aggressive local anticheat

if you move faster than possible, then you moved faster than possible, pretty damn straightforward (though deploying such calculations in a game that wasn't designed for it may be a PITA)

life points and damage can be entirely handled server-side or just doublechecked, no biggie either...

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: MarlockYep, it was all tongue-in-cheek

I must confess, I wasn't 100% sure because the bit about the yes-men was actually pretty true-to-life! As an ex-fan, I've seen first-hand the crazy lengths they'll go to in order to try to justify poor decisions from the company, and you got their mannerisms spot-on. :tongue:

There is nothing more tongue-in-cheek than Yes Men. I'm a real fan!

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis points to a more general problem with the virtual town square as opposed to the real one, when it comes to popular power: In the virtual one, it's like the authorities have doctor Manhattan. "Listen closely: You will all return to your homes." "Yeah? And what if we don't want to, ya blue-faced freak?" "You misunderstand. It was not a request." (Poof! Crowd all gone)

In-game virtual squares are not actually public squares at all, though gamers that are deeply involved in a game may use it as such for a while, even for more than in-game interaction.

On the other hand, whenever a company goes Doctor Manhattan and makes a big enough crowd go puff, it does become news...

...and Nintendo can only make those people go puff in the game, not on the real world and Discord and Reddit and Youtube and Insta and FB and etc, all at once.

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: Marlockimho relentless virtual protests in nintendo's virtual world squares (now that all games are MMOs) would be cheaper

Guessing this might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, since none of Nintendo's games have live virtual squares and they don't run any MMOs? :tongue:

From what I remember, even the hub-cities in the Splatoon games just pulled names and outfits from a pool of users who are online when you log on and then just put them in random poses in your personal temporary local instance of the area. The maximum interaction you have with them is to view a message or such (if that), so long as displaying them hasn't been disabled by the user or parental controls.

Quoting: Marlock(zero cost for nintendo users, which are the primary interested parties)

Nintendo charges for its online service, though... :huh:

Yep, it was all tongue-in-cheek

Nintendo is too controlling and too murderous for any in-game protest to actually work..
They'd probably ban and sue users over it, same as they do with emulators, spin-offs...

... 3rd-party mods... ... ow wait, there are none either because their platform is ludicrously closed off

AFAIK (but i'm not a nintendo cult follower) the only pokemon square in a nintendo game that's an MMO was real world squares in Pokemon GO

hum... now where did they place those rare pokemons?! :p

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imho relentless virtual protests in nintendo's virtual world squares (now that all games are MMOs) would be cheaper (zero cost for nintendo users, which are the primary interested parties) and would hit nintendo's fanbase (closer to their pocket) more directly

gaming news outlets would probably pick up on that event and if it was big enough, traditional and business news outlets might even mention it, all for no cost

...although my favorite protesters are The Yes Men, and what they would say is not anti, but pro-absurd (the same thing the suits from their protest target are saying, but in a less veiled way so the suits can believe they genuinely agree while everyone else can see it's absurd) + a dash of ludicrous

"we hate nintendo for suing their fans"
>>
"we love nintendo so much we totally agree they should keep suing us fans for any work we do that uses parts of their IP to show our love of nintendo games... in fact they should sue us all, more often, and ruin our lives harder, because we're all BDSM and it feels great to be enslaved by our mistress and her lawyers"

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Remote Play from linux to steam deck has been flaky at best for quite a while for several users, not just since the previous release

I hope whatever they did to fix the recent issue has also fixed the older issues... i might spread the news in the old threads about it and watch out for the reactions...

In any case, the Steam Link app has notoriously worked fine on the Steam Deck, and is available from FlatHub... it's also implemented differently from the Remote Play client feature in steam itself, so i often suggested it to people who couldn't see remote games in the deck's library or had issues actually playing them that way

ps:
I think Valve devs don't test for regressions in feature A while working in feature B... i suspect they don't have any automated testing suite for proper CI/CD pipelines where the Steam app itself is concerned, so testing everything for every update is probably prohibitively laborious (steam has a *ton* of features!)

hopefully they do get that sorted out for other components (especially FOSS ones they contribute upstream) and end up developing a taste for it and eventually doing the same for in-house proprietary software development

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