We live in a world where everything you do or say on the internet is potentially part of someone else’s training data. Lemmy is already a shitshow for that but you can bet that “ooh, piracy board” is fair game for everyone because nobody would be dumb enough to sue about that.

If someone wants to delete a comment for ANY reason, they are more than welcome to.

Is saving the game from an early leak worth getting rid of physical games? I hope not.

As a PC gamer who has been basically digital only since the late 00s/early 10s? Probably?

But the thing to remember is that, like with DRM, the studios have this data. There are orgs dedicated to analyzing (and selling…) sales data that can detect the impact that Mass Effect PC being “unplayable” for pirates because of securom for the first week or so had on sales (anecdotal but… probably real positive). Because this kind of stuff costs money (well, less so for removing a disc drive…) and they aren’t going to do that if they think it will hurt revenue.

Releasing physical months after the digital release basically guarantees you are only selling to enthusiasts and it no longer is economically viable. That is why companies like LRG exist.

Like almost everything, it isn’t about stopping piracy entirely.

Physical copies get sold early by stores/cashiers that don’t care. Or they get outright pocketed/copied at the factories and warehouses. Which lead to the constant “This nintendo game leaked a week or a month or whatever early”. Which… less so after the lawsuits but it means emulators can be updated to support the games before they even hit shelves.

Digital only doesn’t entirely stop that. But it tends to lead more toward “an unknown fake influencer posted all the cutscenes of this game online a week early”.

And if you are wondering why Sony is killing physical games…

Part of it is the same reason any live game would disable Linux. There is a LOT of money in premium currencies and RMTs but the game also needs to let players “earn everything” so that folk defend the design. And the studio (shareholders) just don’t think they have enough resources to properly test the “proton version” of the game. So if an exploit is found? You can bet the market share of linux users would go up an order of magnitude or two over night as people want to get their exploit cash and break the economy.

And considering that Linux is still single digit percentages of the Steam userbase (and that that is insane considering where we were a decade ago) we just don’t matter.

The other side of things is more tinfoil but I wouldn’t be shocked if it comes out that one of the other platform holders paid for some form of pseudo-exclusivity. Because the Steam Deck is incredibly powerful in that people are quite likely to want to play the PC version “just in case” they want to play it on their steam deck during all the public transit they do in their every day life. Like, personally speaking, it killed Gamepass for me. Because while I love the idea of being able to just try a bunch of different games to see if I like them, I found myself buying too many games because I wanted to play them on my Deck on my deck (hee hee or to be able to continue my progress when I go on travel.

See this going around and… that is a LOT of reaching from a random CSR trying to placate an angry user.

“We are currently working with Rockstar games to find a fix” followed by “You can buy the game you already have for cheap” just means that Valve sent an email saying “Bro, what the fuck?”. And Rockstar will likely send a response of “Do you want GTA 6 or not?” and this will never come up again.

I would like to be proven wrong (GTA:O is trash but some people like it) but … not optimistic. And we get these kind of “A random CSR said something to make me stop asking to speak to their manager!” level of “leaks” a few times a year. The vast majority go nowhere.

Knowing almost nothing about “Nix”: I am inclined to say this is just one person who is REALLY REALLY REALLY angry that they were not properly respected and were ever told no and blah blah blah. Hence the clear vendetta and… calling the HA devs luddite terrorists…

Would genuinely love a perspective on this from someone with basic people skills who understands what the nix devs actually wanted/needed to know if that was reasonable. But all signs point to “no” and “spray them with deodorant while you are at it”

Sure Jan.

Look. I don’t know much about your project or what it’s goals or ideology are. What I do know is that your behavior is tainting it and making me think your entire community are assists who call people terrorists for not supporting you.

Think about that

But it is a flood of people using a project in a way that it never was intended to be used in the first place.

Yes, HA is “weird” because it is an open source project that actually has significant amounts of funding (to which I contribute). But this isn’t a case of the authors and org deciding to support a new distribution platform. This is a case of a subset of community members deciding it should support that distribution platform and insisting that the project spin up knowledge and support for it.

Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.

It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).

As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.

On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…

I guess I am not getting it.

If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.

Honestly? I think you are getting hung up on approaching this from the T9 perspective.

Take a look at the mechanical keyboard community. Most people are sane and looking at TKL or even 60% layouts where most buttons people actually use on a keyboard are represented by dedicated keys. But there are some real sickos who go for fully minimalist layouts where they have closer to 20 or even 10 keys. And those are the leyouts where you heavily rely on different layers so that “A” might actually be “Button 1 with modifier X and Y” whereas B is “button 1 with modifier X”. Basically people took the logic of dvorak and went to an insane degree. It is terrifying and it is beautiful.

And that has the same issues that mapping to a gamepad would. Some people are going to be able to internalize that in a timely fashion. Others are going to spend months using typing tools online to train themselves. And the rest of us are going to say “nope” and move on.

In terms of how to have a better steam deck keyboard? I think there is a lot of room for someone to go full keeb-pill and take advantage of the physical buttons. I would 100% watch that youtube video, maybe throw a tip in a tip jar, and then have a new appreciation for the touchscreen keyboard the next time I have to enter my Warframe password. But I still think that if your game is heavily reliant on having a keyboard… it isn’t a Steam Deck game. And that is fine. I am not going to play DCS on my Steam Deck. One of these days I probably will futz around with streaming X4 though.

T9 I think is an example of how to map a large input space (keyboard) to a small device (gamepad). But it mostly thrived in a way to convey meaning to a numeric string (1-800-COLLECT, for example). But the people who actually used it for SMS/beepers were few and far between and we were so reliant on auto-complete/predictive language during the flipphone era. This is why it was the era of “oh, so and so texted me. Let me call them back”

largely for the same reason that even a lot of “keeb” enthusiasts increasingly acknowledge that going below a 60/65% for a programmer or a 40% for a writer is… of very questionable utility. Some people have the brain pathways to learn completely different keyboard layouts and can keep 4 or 5 layers worth of keys in their heads and write straight up fortran with a 13 key keyboard, Just like how some people can learn a new spoken/written language in a few weeks. Most people can’t and they basically just “ruin” normal keyboards for themselves.

As for hacking the gibson: Actually the vast majority of media depictions involve basically a keyboard/touch screen strapped to a wrist (that IS what a deck is). So if you really want your daily driver to be something with serious security issues due to how the lock screen is implemented… that is how you get your Count Zero on.

But that really is the issue here. You and I are discussing how you would map an actual keyboard to the steam deck. That isn’t what is being discussed here (careful, you too will get blocked (OH NOES!!!) because you didn’t give proper respect to a blog post). This is mapping an RPG/roguelite from old school curses input to a gamepad/touch screen combo. Which, as I said, is a fundamentally “wrong” idea. In large part because the vikeys/vimkeys solution of a lot of classic roguelikes/lites was a way to provide gamepad like controls with just a keyboard.

As an aside: My brain is blanking on it (it might actually have been the Steam Controller), but I remember an on screen keyboard that actually used analog sticks and felt like a weird hybrid of t9 and the god awful ps3/4 on screen keyboards. Something like you hit a button to bring up the keyboard and then move your analog stick toward a cluster (forget if they were nested or not) and buttons to pick the options. Was very much in that “This is cool as hell but my brain is not gonna learn it” category.

As for the touch screen: I also really dislike it (hence hedging my comment above). But I do wish more games, particularly the complex ones, would take advantage of it. Let me tap the inventory bag to open up my inventory rather than switching to interface mode and sticking over to it or having a dedicated button that could be a different skill. Stardew Valley’s Steam Controller layout (I forget if it was official or community) was awesome in a similar way because you would get context touchpad menus to quickly navigate the interface. But the problem is that it becomes a device specific layout and gets almost no usage.

Mate. If all you want is an echo chamber then don’t post on a message board. That is a blog post with the comments turned off.

And I did read your blog post. I didn’t watch your podcast so, deep apologies if that offended you somehow. And I still think you are doing what a lot of developers did during the 00s when “console ports” and “optional gamepads” were the big thing in PC dev space. You are trying to adapt an existing control scheme with radically different inputs rather than acknowledging what controls you actually need.

That is WHY Caves of Qud is such an amazing steam deck experience. That is WHY stuff like Stardew Valley on the Steam Controller are still looked at so fondly. And that is why so many other games never “feel right”. Because devs are trying to map a gamepad to a keyboard (hello Dark Souls) or an analog stick to a mouse cursor (fuck you Bungie and Ubi) or a keyboard to a gamepad.

Hell, we still see it with a lot of the CRPG, Strategy Games, and RTSes that devs try to make work for a gamepad. Very few get it “right” because it is a really hard challenge. And why Dragon’s Age increasingly became basically a Divinity 2/Oblivion style game rather than a “real” CRPG like DA:O was.

I guess my argument would be: If you are trying to adapt a keyboard to a gamepad without taking advantage of a touch screen (arguably even then), you are “doing it wrong”. That is why Caves of Qud is, somehow, one of the best Steam Deck experiences out there.

If there hadn’t already been a court ruling-ish (it is complicated) giving Nintendo the “right” to do this? Sure

As it stands? It very well could be an intern filling out a word document

You don’t need a lawyer to file a DMCA request. You just need to be ready to get one if someone disputes it.

And Nintendo almost definitely have lawyers on retainer, if not in house. The added cost of this is the effort it takes to search github for “uzu” and send an email.

It is almost a zero cost. They already have the legal-ish ruling. It is just filling out a form letter and sending it out.