People playing Rust code while they sleep so they can learn it through osmosis.

Was before my time, but iirc C and other (then) high level languages were supposedly able to put programmers out of jobs.

I don’t wanna wait that long. ;_;

I played Braid ages ago, and it was okay. I can see it being influential when it first came out when there wasn’t many indie games.

Don’t think I really want to play it again though - it told it’s story and that was that. Unless it adds tons more levels or something, I’m not sure what value the remaster adds.

It’s sadly one of many “platformers with interesting mechanics but slow and clunky controls” that the industry has moved away from.

Okay, this nerd sniped me super hard. Sure you can spend it on a big massive project like a mansion or whatever, but you aren’t going to be able to have it finished (and thus paid for) in a month.

Not too mention if you do want to drop that much money at one, there’ll be many checks in place. Your bank will block your account for “suspicious activity”. The person who you are paying will probably want to run a background check or just refuse to take payment up front.

You’d have to justify where you got that money from as well, most likely, and saying a “genie” probably would get you some strange looks and perhaps arrested.

I legit don’t know how you’d actually get rid of that much money in a month.

I guess I don’t have much faith in the ability for magnets to stick well enough to the console.

Could have just gone through some planning hell and was originally intended to be released a few years ago.

As an aside: Magnets to attach the joycons seem miserable.

I used to think this way, then it was pointed out to me that, without timezones, we’d be in a situation where Saturday starts mid-workday in some places.

If you’re serious about getting help from the community, open source the game and/or provide concrete questions on what code you want to improve.

I have never wanted to play a game so hard in my life. It seems to have the atmosphere of Inscryption, the gameplay of Papers Please and a lot of buttons and knobs to mess around with.

One small thing but I’m surprised nobody points it out - the charging port location. I like using my switch/steam deck in bed or otherwise laying down, and the fact that the charging lead is at the bottom of the console rather than the top sucks. It just gets in the way and stops you resting the console on you. Whereas the Steam Deck just has it on top where you can just plug it in while playing.

I know the technical reasons behind it because of the dock and all that, but it’s annoying.

In general, I think the steam deck is better than the switch in almost every way - The switch is just an expensive ticket for the right to play Nintendo games nowadays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R0hbe8HZj0 If you’re a video watchy person, I found this to be a really good overview on fighting game fundamentals.

American football fields.

Played it a while ago and had fun with it - would recommend if you like city/base building games.

Did fall off late game with the “factorio problem” of having huge bases that you need to micromanage and build manually (so called because Factorio is the only game which I think fixes this problem; a lot of games I keep wanting to blueprint things).

Also, it took me the longest time to realise that you were allowed to run paths underwater…

Don’t get yourself an alpha male, get yourself a 1.0.4-ubuntu3 male.

I’ve played Ace Attorney and the writers put a lot of love and personality into the characters. I’d be sceptical if an AI could get close enough to any kind of writing style to “kill” writing in games like that.

Honestly getting fed up of AI doing a mediocre job of creating art and then people claiming it kills whole industries because it’s the “in” technology.

We anticipate that this change will reduce average wait times for free users over time.

Sure will.

(Also, TIL that GeForce NOW has a free tier. I assumed it was one of those “pay $10 a month” kinda things even at the lowest level)

I mean, not everyone has 10 fingers, so the average is slightly less than 10. Coerce to an integer and you get 9.

I actually bought it, tried it for a bit, and then refunded it.

It just felt kinda bland? Not sure if this is just because I wasn’t in in the right headspace, but the game got to the point where I started collecting resources in a base and I just put the game down.

It’s like they got a generic survival game and added not-pokemon and guns to it for shock factors, without really considering gameplay cohesion.

The real reason I refunded it though is because, according to someone on Bluesky, the devs have a history of being NFT and genAI shills. I’d rather not get emotionally invested in mons that could just become NFTs or AI puppets.

Very interested in a future game where someone else takes the idea and actually has the passion to create a good 3D mon catching game. Clearly it’s something the market wants.

🦀

I’m reminded of old video games where they had the developers help out with the voice acting. Like, couldn’t you do this here? Just have someone who happens to have a high quality microphone do the lines? Maybe even pay a starving artist on one of those “voice acting for hire” sites?

I get that deadlines are usually way too tight on games, but this is just poor quality control. I guess that is the AAA games industry noways though.

Those disclosures will be shared on the Steam store pages for these games, which should help players who want to avoid certain types of AI content.

I mean, this is better than most places.

The best part is that his “or” function changes the semantics of the code in a subtle and hard to find way. :D

Reminder to everyone that being an ethical consumer usually means you need to pay a bit more for the greater good.

I’m not sure to the extent in which they are private, but in my testing they DON’T appear in the following places:

• The “Steam Replay” thing.
• Whatever ProtonDB uses to query your owned games.
• Your recent activity (it also doesn’t also doesn’t count your playtime when displaying the “total time play time” in the last 2 weeks).

Not sure if they are hidden in your owned games list on your profile, but I assume they would be.

Note that the count of games you own (which is public) does seem to include hidden games, if that’s a concern.

Probably Celeste to anyone that has anxiety. I know it’s probably not the most profound representation of anxiety, but it’s a nice little game, it’s nice to feel seen and there’s a chance that some of the stuff in it will help.

Direct Kickstarter link, for those interested: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spiltmilkstudios/trash-goblin

I don’t. Anything on the client can be tampered with. It’s the server’s job to make sure anything they receive is both valid and consistent with how a human would act.

I’m a Linux gamer, every few weeks there’s a story in the news about how some random update to anti-cheat ending up banning Linux/Steam Deck users, it’s not a problem unique to AI. AI finding false positives will happen, but that’s where the “human in the loop” appeals process happens.

Some games do employ new tactics. For example, when the game suspects you’re cheating, it’ll spawn fake opponents only you can see and check if you try to interact with them. This will defeat most wallhacks and maybe even a few aimbots.

This is the kind of cool things that they should be doing! Try new and interesting things instead of trying to brute force anti-cheat by putting restrictions on what people can do with their computers and forcing a narrative where cheaters only exist because you weren’t strict enough.

You mean like… Both arms?

What sorcery is this?

Inexhaustive of things that kernel mode code can do that unprivileged (without “root”) user mode cannot:

• Update and install drivers.
• Run programs (like cryptominers) without them appearing in the task list.
• Make network requests ignoring all firewalls and monitoring tools, even when seemingly in airplane mode.
• Monitor your webcam and microphone, possibly without turning on that little light next to it.
• Escape any sandbox you put it in.
• Replace the OS with one containing malicious code.
• Replace the efi firmware with one that replaces any future OS install with the aforementioned malicious OS.
• Permanently brick your graphics card.
• Take advantage of buggy hardware to burn your house down.

And so on. The question you should be asking isn’t “are they going to do this?” but instead “why are they even asking for this permission in the first place?”.

A game where you run around pretending to be a space marine doesn’t need low level access to your hardware.

Unless the aimbot is using its own AI learning system, it’ll not behave as a human would. For example, it might fire at a random point in a circle, where a human might have better aim along the horizontal axis or something.

People with wallhacks will deliberately move their crosshairs over people that they see through walls. Or, if they know the server is watching for that, they’ll make a subconscious effort to never have their crosshairs over someone through walls.

It’s software I don’t want running on my system and the kernel mode stuff has full hardware access.

All you really need is where the character is looking, their location and the terrain map, all of which are things the server has authority over or can check easily.

Distinguishing between a good player and a bot probably won’t be that hard. A simple aimbot would probably fire exactly at a target’s (0, 0) coordinate, while a good player may be a frame or two early or late. Someone with wallhacks will behave differently if they know someone is around a corner. There’s almost certainly going to be small “tricks” like that that an AI can pick up on.

I described a plan here: https://pawb.social/comment/4536772

Not perfect, but neither are rootkits.

Server side anti cheat can’t distinguish good players from aimbots.

I’ve been thinking about this, and I wonder how accurate this is. I think overuse of all this modern AI nonsense is a problem, but wonder if this might be a good use case for it.

A big game will probably have huge amounts of training data for both cheaters and non cheaters. An AI could probably pick up on small things like favouring the exact centre of the head or tracking through walls.

If a user has a few reports of aimbotting, just have this AI follow them for a bit and make a judgement.

It’ll get it wrong sometimes, but that’s why you also implement a whole appeals process with actual humans. Besides, client side anticheat systems also have a nasty habit of mistakenly banning people for having specific hardware/software configs.

However, I would like games to come with servers again so you can play games on your own terms

Please! Not just for anticheat reasons, but also for mods and keeping the game playable when the publishers decide it isn’t profitable.

Screw client side anti-cheat, fix your goddamn server code.

I’m reminded of a case in Apex Legends where cheaters started dual wielding pistols, despite dual wielding not actually being a game mechanic. That should be something you can easily detect on your server and block.

Client side anticheat is just smoke and mirrors and lets developers think they can get away with not doing their job of writing secure code.

I’m honestly surprised that with all this concern about privacy against Google, Microsoft, Epic, and so on, gamers are willing to just let these games have unrestricted and unchecked access to all your internet, microphone and camera data.

Likewise, despite how much gamers call games “broken glitchy messes”, they are perfectly willing to give them enough hardware access to literally destroy your computer.

I’m not sure how to feel about this, to be honest.

I don’t have any serious plans or anything, but I do want to dabble in a bit of gamedev. Nothing major, just like an RPG or something that I put on Steam for like $5. I imagine there’s a lot of people who take bets on their future by releasing games that cost $10 or $20.

Why would anyone pay full price for games if you could get them from a trading platform for like 75%? I bet there’s a lot of people that would buy my game, play through it once and then sell it for maybe $4. And others who thinks anytime that pays full price for a game is an idiot.

Indie Devs would have to rise prices, perhaps drastically, to cover the lost revenue here. This would also put an end to Steam sales, because the instant you put your game on sale it sets the price for it in third party markets.

What about bigger games like BG3? What’s stopping me from buying it full price, copying the files somewhere and then instantly reselling it? It would probably force them to implement strict DRM restrictions, and probably the nasty rootkit kind.

I’m personally against DRM and don’t want to release a game with it, but the fact that this lowers the bar to piracy so much may force my hand.

I honestly believe this could spell the end of the indie gaming scene.

I’m reminded of AlphaDream, which died as a company shortly after releasing a remake of a game where the original was still playable on the same console.