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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • I actually felt like the Elder Scrolls games handled this elegantly. The interactable doors could be wonky but also strategic, but for cell changing doors, on today’s hardware you barely even notice the loading screen.

    It felt like it kept each area of the game nice and concise, but also it still felt so connected! Especially with how characters could follow you between cell changes after Morrowind. (SURPRISE, pants-ruining Oblivion guard jumpscare!)



  • A browser based Doom or Quake engine world sim to run around playing with others sounds like such an awesome concept. I’d love that!! And in the 90"s no less. That would’ve been crazy impressive.

    Microsoft and MMOs, man. I remember they were gonna make a really neat online fantasy one for the Xbox and canned it, too.

    That’s such a wild story. Thanks for sharing that with us! I wish they wouldn’t have cold shouldered you like that…

    Here’s how I was imagining that went down the whole time I was reading it lmao. Just for you.



  • Haha that does sound slightly familiar! Like Mario Kart’s Lakatu on steroids. 😂

    Lol okay solved! Colliding with an opening door just yeets an NPC (safely) out of the way.

    Haha there needs to be a “monkey’s paw” community but around what new bugs pop up when someone proposes a fix for a mechanic.


    New bug report: Essential NPC unable to be interacted with because they walk toward the door to greet the player and get clipped through the opposite wall at high speed.

    Sometimes they fall through the map and the game crashes when they reach -9999 meters, other times they die intersecting the wall and it soft locks the main quest.


    Fun story rq: Deus Ex: Human Revolution had the most bizarre bug where, if you talked to a gang before getting the quest to go clear them out, on the second visit one of them would just spawn… like…on the moon, apparently? (A ridiculous distance upwards, not even visible except by objective marker) Made the quest unbeatable until they patched it hahaha.


  • Now we need to decide in the case of collisions if:

    • Doors violently push anyone out of the way, possibly “crushing” them into walls or
    • Force themselves back closed, turning any random NPC / obstacle on the other side into an unbeatable lock or
    • Just trap an unfortunate NPC in a corner on the other side, or
    • If they use the physics system to swing open, in which case they’ll look smooth but possibly bonk the player/actor going through them a few times and could potentially (and comically) insta-kill them if physics is feeling grumpy.

    The frustratingly comedic unintended results of any choice makes for great organic marketing though.

    Gamedev is magical.

    Aside: Know what did this really well though? Resident Evil games after RE:4.

    The ability to “slowly quietly open”, and then at any time decide to violently action-hero kick it open to send a zombie on the other side flying, was genius.


  • extremely good “search engines” or interactive versions of “stack overflow”

    Which is such a decent use of them! I’ve used it on my own hardware a few times just to say “Hey give me a comparison of these things”, or “How would I write a function that does this?” Or “Please explain this more simply…more simply…more simply…”

    I see it as a search engine that connects nodes of concepts together, basically.

    And it’s great for that. And it’s impressive!

    But all the hype monkeys out there are trying to pedestal it like some kind of techno-super-intelligence, completely ignoring what it is good for in favor of “It’ll replace all human coders” fever dreams.



  • Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.

    Totally can be! Absolutely!

    Although Blender’s amazingly usable now and has had lots of love in that regard! But it took a LOT of support to get this far.

    Good UX is crazy important.

    I think I’m more irritated at the people who seem to show up in so many FOSS discussions, expect FOSS alternatives to compete 1:1 with their billion-dollar corpo-ware of choice, demand the world of it, offer zero support, and then declare “it sucks and isn’t ready for the real world” because it’s not so perfect that Autodesk and Adobe are like “Well we’ve had a good run, guys.” and give up lol.

    I sympathize because I know where the frustration comes from. They’re sick of their tools being held hostage by interests that constantly seek to screw them! But change requires flexibility, cooperation, and support.

    I think a lot of people just don’t want to say “I want Maya/Photoshop/Excel/Solidworks/Windows/etc…but free and without dark-patterns!” (Don’t we all lol) Because they know that sounds unreasonable (yarr aside lol) , but people tend to get settled and comfortable with whatever got to them first.

    But taking that out on the community isn’t helping anybody.

    Constructive criticism of UI/UX is absolutely essential though, and requires a lot more understanding of how humans interact with things than simply “Well, billion-dollar-ware has always done it this way.” Haha



  • I am sympathetic but also so damn tired of seeing what essentially translates to:

    “Look, [megacorpo] bought out my school’s ecosystem so that’s all I learned. It’s “industry standard”, I can’t believe this FOSS can’t even do this one niche corporate-job feature, therefore it’s objectively terrible / not ready / inferior / useless for job work.”

    Which can usually be further boiled down to:

    “I tried it but it wasn’t a carbon copy of my preferred corpo-ware without any strings attached so it basically sucks.”


  • Sure thing! So glad I could be helpful! :D

    I don’t blame you. It’s the only thing I’m keeping a Win10 dual-boot for right now, and to their credit, it does work quite well in Windows. We’ve had a ton of fun with our set.

    In the meantime, I’m keeping up with the project but not actively tinkering with it myself, because it’s exciting but also not quite there yet. It’s at least given me hope that it can be done though! I’m confident we’ll see significant gains sooner rather than later. Hats off to them. (Once my income stabilizes I’ll gotta pitch them some funds…)

    Envision has made it VERY convenient to get set up, but the whole process still saps more time than “Fire it up and play.” So maybe play with it at some point, but either way definitely keep your ear to the ground. :)

    I’m hoping in the future we’ll get to use it for things like Godot XR or Blender integration. :D



  • Heya! Sorry for taking a minute to get back to you. :)

    1000000% with you on not giving a cent to meta or throwing out perfectly good hardware with plenty of life left!!! For real!

    So, last time I tried, VR is a little bumpy right now. I have a Samsung Odyssey+ set that’s simply fantastic…if Microsoft weren’t deliberately turning it into a paperweight.

    Wonderful strides are being made by the FOSS community however!

    It’s bumpy because a lot of VR kits’ only hope right now is a project called “Monado”

    https://monado.freedesktop.org/

    (Right now it looks like your Reverb G2 is supported!)

    I main OpenSUSE Tumbleweed these days, and I used this awesome bit of software called “Envision” that attempts to automate the “retrieve all the correct dependencies and build the thing” stuff.

    For being so early, I was very impressed, especially since I’m no pro at compiling software and navigating Git branches and stuff. This is relatively turnkey. (In a tinkery Linux way, anyway lol)

    https://lvra.gitlab.io/docs/fossvr/envision/

    (The wiki here is pretty nice!)

    I was able to get the headset to function this way, as in, fire up a game and see through it and look around, and you can enable hand tracking, which is really neat! But I struggled to actually select or interact with anything using it.

    The real tough nut to crack is the controllers, but they have made some strides there too! There’s a branch that enables controller support, but it’s VERY janky right now, like, unusuable, but it’s cool that it’s going somewhere!

    The other challenge is smoothness. Expect a little jitter here and there, it’s not so buttery smooth like it was running WMR because they did a LOT of fancy proprietary compensation and prediction code sorta stuff to make that experience work. (And to the surprise of absolutely no one, they refuse to let us folks have it.)

    For Elite or DCS, since you’d just be using mouse and keyboard or a standard controller or something anyway, the headset part MIGHT be enough for you! I’d definitely encourage you to give it a shot and have a little patience with it to see if it can be acceptable for you where it’s at right now.

    You can also get a lot of information and help in the “Linux VR Adventures” Discord. (Ugh, I know.) Link here if you’re interested. :)

    Unless you’re savvy building a bunch of stuff yourself, I’d say check out Envision first, and use that to build Monado for your Reverb and see how that works out for you.

    I hope this was helpful! :D


  • Honestly I have a ridiculous pile o’ games like a lot of us do, and I’ve yet to find something (that’s not VR) that I cannot play .

    For reference I’m running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with a 30 series Nvidia card. Wayland, two monitors, main is 144hz ultrawide 3440 x 1440, another is 1080p 60hz.

    First off there’s a few programs out there to get you “Glorious Eggroll” versions of Proton which add even more stuff Valve can’t distribute in their versions.

    This beautiful software right here looks about right: https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/

    Steam works fantastically. Heck, Proton works better than native Linux builds sometimes! Deck playability is an even bigger mark of quality.

    Even EA’s silly launcher works. I got Titanfall 2 and that Sims 2 Ultimate they gave away ages ago working like butter.

    I also love actually owning my games, so I use Heroic Launcher for GoG titles.

    Oh! I even have CD games or old .EXEs windows would refuse to even install anymore! Don’t worry, Linux has got this. I use Bottles to have separate environments for those games to install to and run. Majority of the time it works great but this is where things can get iffy. But hey, Windows wouldn’t run them at all!

    Wanna know what made me switch? Vermintide 2 kept giving me BSODs in Windows 10 with some super vague error code that made me think “Oh crap, please don’t tell me my GPU is dying.”

    Nope! Linux ran it with zero probs once I fixed some small quirk to make their dumb little launcher work.

    Cherry on top? All my RGB stuff works with Open RGB or my recently retired Corsair keyboard works with “CKB Next”.

    The community has made incredible strides. My Win10 partition only exists because it has Windows Mixed Reality, which they’re abandoning. But not to fear, the Monado project is making HUGE improvements.

    Give it a shot. I think you’ll be surprised. :)



  • I will definitely say I wish encryption setup was a lot easier in Linux. Windows is like “wanna Bitlocker?” Done.

    With most Linux installers, if you’re not installing in a very default way, and clicking that box to encrypt the drive, it’s time to go seriously digging. For a while.

    I managed to encrypt a secondary drive with the same password on my EndeavourOS laptop, but I still need to enter the same password 2 times before getting into the OS.

    I consider that a feat, and I’m not touching it for fear of losing everything lol.