Zelda 3? You get fast travel quite early and the world is packed with stuff, it’s not absurdly huge. Doesn’t have that bloody owl in it either, telling you the obvious at great length.

Certainly not Wind Waker, anyway. Now there is a slow game.

No unexpected crashes, no game breaking bugs. Performance was… dubious. It looks amazing, but UE5 has scalability issues. None of the graphics options seemed to do anything for frame count.

The studio is mostly ex-Ubisoft employees. So yeah, it’s their first game as that studio, but they’re by no means novice developers. Fair play to them for following their passion though, it’s paid off.

“Mostly perfectly unless they’ve got anti-cheat, and you’ll be limited to 30 fps for most of the fancy-graphics titles.”

Actually pretty damn good. Considering the difficulty I had getting frames out of E33 on desktop, having it play reasonably on the go is impressive. 60 fps @ 4K made my PC sound like a vacuum cleaner and was warming up the whole house; really needs some of the upscaling trickery to be comfortable to play.

Best story, for sure. Most emotionally affecting is Majora’s, for me, but TP is close.

Don’t think the gameplay holds up. The Wii version is pure waggle, but even on the Gamecube, there’s a lot of filler - empty space and backtracking. Doesn’t respect your gaming time.

systemd-networkd gets installed by default by Arch, integrates a bit better with the rest of SystemD, doesn’t have so many VPN surprises, and the configuration is a bit more obvious to me - a few config files rather than NetworkManager’s “loads of scripts” approach. Small niggles rather than big issues.

Really, I just don’t want duplication of services - more stuff to keep up-to-date. And if I’ve got SystemD anyway, might as well use it…

NetworkManager dependencies can now be disabled at build time…

Nice. It was a damned nuisance that Cinnamon brought its own network stack with it. All my headless servers and my Plasma gaming desktop use systemd-networkd, which meant that my Cinnamon laptop needed different configuration. Now they can all be the same.

Hopefully the new release will bash a few of the remaining Wayland bugs; Plasma is great but I prefer Cinnamon for work, and it’s just too buggy for gaming on a multi-monitor setup at the moment.

Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…

Criminal waste of elotes, though. I’ll have them if they don’t want them.

HDMI -> DP might be viable, since DP is ‘simpler’.

Supporting HDMI means supporting a whole pile of bullshit, however - lots of handshakes. The ‘HDMI splitters’ that you can get on eg. Alibaba (which also defeat HDCP) are active, powered things, and tend to get a bit expensive for high resolution / refresh.

Steam Machine is already been closely inspected for price. Adding a fifty dollar dongle into the package is probably out of the question, especially a ‘spec non-compliant’ one.

I’m going to guess it would require kernel support, but certainly graphics card driver support. AMD and Intel not so difficult, just patch and recompile; NVIDIA’s binary blob ha ha fat chance. Stick it in a repo somewhere outside of the zone of copyright control, add it to your package manager, boom, done.

I bet it’s not even much code. A struct or two that map the contents of the 2.1 handshake, and an extension to a switch statement that says what to do if it comes down the wire.

Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.

Java’s biggest strength is that “the worst it can be” is not all that bad, and refactoring tools are quite powerful. Yes, it’s wordy and long-winded. Fine, I’d rather work with that than other people’s Bash scripts, say. And just because a lot of Java developers have no concept of what memory allocation means, and are happy to pull in hundreds of megabytes of dependencies to do something trivial, then allocate fucking shitloads of RAM for no reason doesn’t mean that you have to.

There is a difference in microservices between those set up by a sane architect:

• clear data flow and pragmatic service requirements
• documented responses and clear failure behaviour
• pact server set up for validation in isolation
• entire system can be set up with eg. a docker compose file for testing
• simple deployment of updates into production and easy rollback

… and the CV-driven development kind by people who want to be able to ‘tick the boxes’ for their next career move:

• let’s use Kubernetes, those guys earn a fortune
• different pet language for every service
• only failure mode is for the whole thing to freeze
• deployment needs the whole team on standby and we’ll be firefighting for days after an update
• graduate developers vibe coding every fucking thing and it getting merged on Claude’s approval only

We mostly do the second kind at my work; a nice Java monolith is bliss to work on in comparison. I can see why others would have bad things to say about them too.

Apart from being slow, having discoverability issues, not being able combine filters and actions so that you frequently need to fall back to shell scripts for basic functionality, it being a complete PITA to compare things between accounts / regions, advanced functionality requiring you to directly edit JSON files, things randomly failing and the error message being carefully hidden away, the poor audit trail functionality to see who-changed-what, and the fact that putting anything complex together means spinning so many plates that Terraform’ing all your infrastructure looks like the easy way; I’ll have you know there’s nothing wrong with the AWS Console UI.

On account of Dan Ek’s bullshit, have cancelled Spotify this year in favour of Qobuz, and am much happier all round.

Last year’s ‘wrapped’ was just AI generated slop. After a year of listening to metal and electronica, got a top five of stuff that I’m not sure I’d listened to at all. Who would have thought the great plagiarism machine, trained to produce the most average output from any given input, would not do well on input that diverges from the mean?

I’d probably have preferred a completely random K-Pop selection; might have been an interesting listen, try out something new.

Yeah. You know the first time you install Arch (btw), and you realise you’ve not installed a working network stack, so you need to reboot from the install media, remount your drives, and pacstrap the stuff you forgot on again? Takes, like, three minutes every time? Imagine that, but you’ve got a kernel compile as well, so it takes about half an hour.

Getting Gentoo so that it’ll boot to a useful command line took me a few hours. Worthwhile learning experience, understand how boot / the initramfs / init and the core utilities all work together. Compiling the kernel is actually quite easy; understanding all the options is probably a lifetime’s work, but the defaults are okay. Setting some build flags and building ‘Linux core’ is just a matter of watching it rattle by, doesn’t take long.

Compiling a desktop environment, especially a web browser, takes hours, and at the end, you end up with a system with no noticeable performance improvements over just installing prebuilt binaries from elsewhere.

Unless you’re preparing Linux for eg. embedded, and you need to account for basically every byte, or perhaps you’re just super-paranoid and don’t want any pre-built binaries at all, then the benefits of Gentoo aren’t all that compelling.

He did shake things up with a lot of new ideas. I’d like to think that proving him wrong has gotten us to a better place; it’s the fin de siecle version of being wrong on the internet, everyone writes to correct you. Kind of sucks for everyone that got the bad advice in the meantime, tho.

True. Was thinking of indie games, of the kind I might develop myself., which would be limited to the languages I speak myself.

If you’re developing something where you’d expect enough international sales to hire a translation team, then Chinese would be a sensible first choice, followed by Spanish.

Closing in on 8% if you filter it by “English language only”. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) use Windows and make up about 30% of all Steam users, which skews the rest-of-world results. And I wouldn’t consider 8% of all prospective sales to be a joke, especially since that number only keeps on rising and by the time you’ve spent a few years writing a game it’s likely to be quite a bit more.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Yeah, indeed. Steam language breakdown is about 40% English, 30% Chinese, 10% Russian, 5% Spanish, 15% other. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly use Windows rather than Linux, so choosing ‘English only’ basically doubles the Linux percentage.

I’d be interested to know why Linux has such bad update in Chinese-speaking regions. (It’s the lingua franca for much of Asia, so not just China, just largely China.) Obviously, inertia plays a part - easier to move to Linux if you know someone else that can help you, which if there’s no-one then you might be a bit stuck. Are the fonts crappy? Are the input methods greatly superior in Windows?