Russ

This looks like a fantastic update! Huge thanks to everyone involved!

Yeah, that’s more than fair! There’s zero chance I’d have considered it if it weren’t for it being on sale (for $20 USD which I don’t see Activision dropping the price any further than that).

Thankfully it seems after playing around with the settings and ensuring that the video settings wasn’t set to ultra, which I somehow missed on my first pass of the settings, it seems to be playing much better and I can easily see getting my $20 out of it.

Call me crazy, but I just picked up Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare today.

I haven’t been interested in playing the Call of Duty multiplayer modes for a very long time ago (I don’t even think the servers are still available), but in the past I did enjoy some of the campaigns. Infinite Warfare’s campaign seems very sci-fi “ish” which actually kinda scratches an itch I’ve had for a while. Another game that looked similarish to this was the Crysis games which I’d never actually gotten a chance to play, but when they were last on sale I found out they didn’t have cloud saves and I like to bounce between my Deck and PC a lot so that was a deal breaker for me.

I’m thinking about picking up Advanced Warfare too, since I had it when it came out on Xbox One and liked the campaign for very similar reasons. In general I’d love to find more games that have the same style to them, which reminds me I’m overdue for a replay of the Titanfall 2 campaign…

They happen to be on sale right now till the 8th, I’d absolutely never pick them up at full price.

Edit: The game definitely seems to have some rough points when playing on the Steam Deck. It plays fine on my desktop via Proton with no problem, but some of the in-game scenes just absolutely tank the frame rate till I’m pretty much forced to hard reset the deck because it goes completely unresponsive. Hmm. In addition, all of the config settings seem to get synced via cloud saves, however when you launch the game on a different device before it actually starts it asks if you want to reset the settings to be tailored to the device you’re on.

Gotcha, no worries I’ll see what I can track down - thank you!

but I did set up OBS already and managed to get HW encoding to work on an AMD GPU.

Did you by chance use any resources for this, such as any guides or any of the OBS docs? I’m looking to do the same thing and it seems I’m only running into outdated information, as well as debates on whether its even worth doing GPU encoding vs CPU encoding.

They have their own hosting plans, but you can also self host it.

I just picked up “Turbo Golf Racing” last night, and am so far having a good time with it. Seems to be a really interesting take on Rocket League thus far. From what I can tell, all of the rewards in the “shop” are based off of in-game rewards and no premium currency, though there are some cosmetics that you can get in the form of supporter pack purchases (which are quite cheap). There is also a “season pass”, but there’s no premium tier of it. Performs at a nice 90FPS on my OLED Deck.

There are two modes, a “Race” mode which is similar-ish to Rocket League, but everyone has their own ball that they’re trying to race into the goal as quickly as possible, while navigating around the tracks. The “Golf” mode is pretty much traditional golf where everyone has a turn hitting their ball to advance it closer and closer to the goal each turn.

Fair warning, like Rocket League it is primarily an online multiplayer game, the only single player offline mode is the time trials mode.

I was a bit skeptical since the reviews mentioned that the online is dead / long queue times, but I’ve only had to wait a little over a minute at max for a match, in either game mode. Can’t say anything about the “Ranked” mode however.

For what is normally $10 USD (on sale for $7.49 right now) I’m having a very good time!

I’ve also picked up Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, and No Man’s Sky, but I haven’t had the time to give them a proper shot yet.

Also using my Stadia controller here, they work great but I wish they had the ability to remotely wake the OLED Deck…

I still have no clue which controllers do and don’t (aside from the Stadia controller) support the feature.

I was able to start a stream session and it did come up, although it kept reporting connectivity quality issues and it seemed like it was streaming at really low-bandwidth.

However, I normally stream via Sunshine/Moonlight and haven’t tried the native Steam version in a while since it normally doesn’t work well for me, so I think that’s something on my end rather than it being a bug (and the fact that it displayed the game to me indicates its no longer this bug, since it initialized and was at regular brightness).

Your fears were right, looks like this just got pushed to stable unfortunately.

Edit: They’ve pushed an update to fix this

Rocket League, which before I had my Deck I didn’t even really get into all that much so it kinda took me by surprise. Seems to even have no problem playing at the high quality graphics levels at a steady 90 FPS too.

Additionally, since EA is having a massive sale right now I picked up Burnout Paradise and the mass effect legendary edition, along with all of the NFS games.

It’s all good, I appreciated the advice and tips! Funnily enough, I have that exact reputation at work, to be honest I’d rather be too descriptive than not descriptive enough 😅

There’s certainly a balancing act to be played of course, but if that balance ends up being impossible for me, then more information (in my opinion) is better!

That’s good to know, thanks! I might actually have to look into giving it a go one day, maybe for an old phone at first just for some practice so to speak.

Plenty fair enough, thanks! That does remind me that I do need to look into Nix{OS} again, SteamOS does have built in support for Nix (or at least, I see there’s a /nix folder by default now). Had some issues with daily driving NixOS on my desktop a while back ago, but I suppose that doesn’t mean I can’t use it as a package manager!

That looks awesome! I can’t imagine myself being able to apply a skin, I can’t even get a screen protector to go on correctly 😅

If I may ask, what was your motivation to run Bazzite on your deck? I’m familiar with why you’d use it on your PC (ended up having to turn back from it on my PC, as I couldn’t figure out how to disable the upscaling the desktop had), or maybe a HTPC, but I haven’t seen anyone mention why they install it on their deck so I am a bit interested now after seeing multiple people mention it.

ActivityPub does use cryptographic keys for Actors (“users” in this case) - so even in theory if you were to destroy your instance and then set it up on the same domain and recreate the user, things would be quite broken still… But unfortunately it still does rely on the domain name itself, so I agree.

I think the problem is, without the domain name, there is no way for you to lookup who @russjr08 would be, or where to send data to them. The domain effectively acts as a mailing address (a well suited analogy considering that ActivityPub also uses inboxes/outboxes) so that Instance A always knows that User B can be found on Instance B.

I doubt its an impossible challenge to solve, but probably quite a difficult one I’m sure.

Yeah, AFAIK ActivityPub itself heavily relies on the domain being part of your identity - so its not really possible to change the domain on any of them, along with other federation implementations such as Matrix.

This is why while Mastodon allows for profile transfers, it doesn’t transfer your post content - it simply just sends a signal to your followers to unfollow your old account and follow your new one. The actual content itself is intrinsically tied to your identity on the old domain.