MudMan

I guess? My local ISP did offer to set up a mesh, which I did briefly try. Interestingly, they did hijack your router settings and after that you had to call them to make config changes, which I never understood but may have been a “save you from yourself” thing for normal users.

The hardware was so bad that it didn’t solve the issue, though, and the inability to change anything on the setup was crippling. I don’t get the feeling that too many people bought that service in the first place.

But if you don’t get good enough wifi you don’t get good enough wifi. Normies will notice that. My frustration ended up being that all the cheapo, built-in solutions without fancy features were noticeably flaky or slow. Security wasn’t even in that picture.

See above. Gonna need names and sources for that one.

No, it is not. Just isn’t. Not a thing in Bioware, to my knowledge. Not a thing in the industry at large, either. This is an extreme leap you’re making.

Displeased with management decisions? Absolutely. Frustrated by working conditions? Rarer than you’d think but it can happen. Abused and harassed by a manager or a coworker, particularly for a woman, and receiving insufficient protection from HR? Unfortunately possible, but definitely not my first or second guess when somebody announces they’re leaving a studio.

“My coworkers are jealous of my talent and are mean to me” is science fiction.

Yeah, no, I got the intent, it just seems like… a random thought? Why would that be the case? You just think the other writers are jealous of someone who was there for fifteen years and just… mean girl’d them out of the company?

That’s not a plausible scenario. Or at least not the first think you’d leap to.

Woof, yeah, now you’re talking.

I mean, once you factor in a phone, a computer, probably some gaming device running updates in the background, you’re thinking at least three devices per person, plus whatever tablets, smart TVs, printers and IoT garbage you have lying around the house. And if you live on an apartment you’re trying to service all of that alongside a bunch of other people trying to do the same.

Honestly, I struggled a lot to get a solid, cost effective mesh to solve the issue. I ended up going back to brute forcing it with a chonker of a router. No idea if that impacts my neighbours and, frankly, at this point it’s every bubble of electromagnetic real estate for themselves.

It’s honestly crazy how much networking you have to do at home these days, particularly if you work from home or throw in a NAS into the mix. I have no idea how the normies manage. Maybe they pay somebody to set it up?

There’s been a Dragon Age sequel in some form of development for a decade. It’s not that surprising, people are gonna churn. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t stuck around in a single job for 15 years ever.

I’m not her and I’m not there, but I’m not sure what “being pushed out by other employees” would even mean. That sounds like something that happens in a nature documentary about lions, not games studio.

Six plus always-on devices is rookie numbers. I’m in the twenties, in a house with a handful of people.

And yes, the router I’m currently using is faster than all my wired devices over wifi, save for the two that pair some form of 2.5/10Gb ports. Also yes, my 1Gbps WAN hits about 900-ish on the downstream, with the ISP guaranteeing at least 800 as a legal requirement. I don’t know if other regions allow ISPs to sell connections that run at 50% of the advertised speed, but… yeah, no, that’s illegal here.

Honestly, full home coverage is the biggest issue I have. If this was a new house I would have wired it as a solution, but as it is, I only got the whole home fully connected with reliable speeds by spending a bunch of money in wireless networking gear.

I’ll be honest with you, I can see these most of the time now that I updated the links but I’ve also seen them broken in other tabs and refreshes, so don’t blame me (or CG tech), blame federation and bad design for image support.

But let me know if they’re still broken on your end, because I have no reliable way to know.

I mean, this is what your 2024 videogames look like, rendering in real time. I’d say we’ve come some distance.

And this is what offline CG looks like now. I’m all for repurposing this thread as an appreciation of how far scientists, engineers and artists have pushed CG in the past 30 years.

EDIT: Ugh, this stupid site’s terrible image support. Changing links.

20, maybe. It may have been the paranoia about blending everything together driving so much of the focus for on-set lighting, but a bunch of that is cut and lit the right way to hold up.

Terminator 2, on the other hand, absolutely looks of its age.

Or, you know, they could keep using Google Keep.

There’s a corner of the FOSS community that is all like “you should jump ship on literally any software that is not clean and pure of corporate interests” but also “can’t blame FOSS software for not being good unless you’re in the process of making your own”. It’s… kinda confusing.

No, I’m not saying I’m cut off from running thousands of games. I’m cut off from thousands of games that I own already in other libraries and I can’t play on a Steam Deck out of the box.

Most of them would gladly run just fine if I bought them off of Valve. But since I already bought them I’m not buying them again. So I’m cut off. So I’ll default to Windows until that changes.

Yeah, man, I have a bunch of Windows handhelds and both Deck models. I… may have a problem, but I know how it works.

And yeah, I do realize that the Deck and SteamOS game mode doubles as an attempt to complete Valve’s dominance over the PC market. I just think that sucks. If GOG can allow you to integrate Epic and Steam then so can Steam. And until they do that, the Deck is less useful to me than a Windows handheld because I keep as much of my gaming library as possible within GOG.

For the record, your posts kinda misrepresent how Big Picture works in practice. Like I said, yeah, you can’t change power and screen settings (and bluetooth) directly on Steam, but most Windows handhelds have a shortcut button with those options in it that is, let’s be honest, just copying the Steam version. Depending on your brand it is more or less useful, but it’s not like you have to whip out a mouse to do those things. I still think most of those implementations are worse than SteamOS’s fully integrated version, and Big Picture over Windows is overall a bit laggier and less responsive… but I mean, it’s close enough and it absolutely beats being cut off from several thousand games.

I am aware of the set of steps, but a) I’ve had issues getting it to work in the past, particularly getting new games to install under Steam as opposed to adding them in Desktop mode every time and b) what I want is an official way to install and launch third party games, or at least third party launchers from within Steam, the way GOG Galaxy or even Heroic itself supports.

Right now, I play those on Windows handhelds instead, where the steps are:

• Boot the device
• Click on the launcher you want

Which is similar to doing this on Linux desktop, where the steps are:

• Boot the device
• Click on the launcher you want

Oh, and for the record, as I said above, Windows absolutely does have a Big Picture mode. You can set up Steam to launch on boot straight into Big Picture. If all you want is to play Steam games you never have to use the Desktop on Windows either. Because I do play a ton of GOG games and emulation over Retroarch I prefer to boot into Desktop where my launchers are pinned to the taskbar, so it’s literally one tap to open whichever launcher I want. But Steam absolutely goes into Big Picture after that. Like I said earlier the only functional difference is that the settings button brings up the proprietary screen and power manager instead of the SteamOS Game Mode alternative, but otherwise the Steam interface is much the same.

Why do people not realize this is the case? Big Picture was available on Windows (at boot, even) long before the Deck happened. I’ve been a longtime Steam-on-TV user, this isn’t new.

Cool? I mean, it changes nothing. Whether you run the ARM handhelds on Android or barebones Linux and the X64 handhelds on Windows or Linux the results are the same. Bazzite, JelOS, Windows, Android, whatever. Go nuts.

Heat is still heat and batteries are still batteries, though.

Well, yeah, I get that, but honestly, if you can’t get what you want on that front from a GPD Win 4, an Ayaneo Air S1 or Flip… well, then what you want is better Windows on ARM support. These are still laptop chips we’re cramming into handhelds, it’s not a matter of size vs performance at that point. There’s a reason the Steam Deck is that size.

Honestly, at that point I’d try streaming, which those smaller ARM devices will do just fine. But even that I don’t think is worth it. That’s mobile hardware territory.

To be clear, I’m not advocating to enforcing a minimum spec. I’m saying that there isn’t a need to add a performance rating to a SteamOS certification or to the SteamOS compatibility badges because if they’re all based on Steam Deck performance they will be valid for all the other certified devices by default. At least until a Deck 2 is released.

I love small handhelds. The Retroid Pocket Mini is great (shame about the bad scaling on the screen). But those are typically Android handhelds for a reason. I don’t think a PC handheld in that form factor is worth it. You can just run Linux on ARM and get the form factor without the whole thing running like a hot potato for 15 minutes before it dies. There’s a lot of native ports of small PC indie games in that space and ongoing work for per-game port support, too.

Now, all that could change if the upcoming mobile chips we get are great at running at very low wattages and somehow get amazing power management options on the software side out of nowhere. But… I just don’t think that’s a priority for anybody specifically because ARM chips already have a well established ecosystem to give you basically what you want without having to tie the X64 platform in knots for the sake of running this over Steam instead of Android.

Oh, no, I’m talking about Windows native handhelds, which may be getting SteamOS support in the future, as per the original post.

I think a lot of people (reviewers included, weirdly) assume that you need to navigate those with a mouse replacement every time, so you get a lot of complaints about how bad using Windows without a mouse is compared to Steam OS on Game Mode. But you can absolutely set up Steam to a) autolaunch on boot, and b) launch straight into Big Picture mode. At that point once you unlock your Windows handheld you’re straight in the Steam fullscreen mode interface and can do everything (within Steam) with a controller.

Not that I think tapping the Steam icon to manually open it up is that much of a hassle, anyway.

I do have a Deck, but they never made good on their early promises to make it easy to use with Windows. Which they did make, I remember. But nope, if you have a Deck you should probably stick to Steam OS. Valve should just find a better way to integrate third party launchers.

I guess it depends on what you’re using? I’m on Fedia and this is very readable. Good indenting and color coding and stuff. Some real 90s forum energy to it.

The thing is, I play a ton of retro games, but I mostly mediate that through RetroAchievements. Since they keep adding new games and have leaderboards and so on it’s a great way to have something to follow to help you prioritize your time, instead of standing in front of a wall of boxes paralyzed between replaying Sonic 2 or trying some obscure thing you got seven times in bundles.

But I still love having original hardware in working order plugged into a CRT. It’s just almost an archeological pursuit. A shrine to what all these repurposed games I play on modern hardware used to actually look like. And it’s fun to fiddle with them for maintenance.