Yeah, Denuvo registers every version of Proton as a different computer. So when you cycle through a bunch of different versions, Denuvo sees you booting it on a bunch of different computers back-to-back. IIRC Denuvo’s ToS allows for 5 different computers to boot a game within 24 hours. So it locks you out for 24h, as an anti-account-sharing measure. It has hit the spotlight a few times recently, because of the Steam Deck users needing to cycle through Proton versions.
I mean, even that doesn’t stop aimbots. They’ll just snap directly to the enemy’s head as soon as they’re visible. If anything, this would make programming aimbots easier in several ways, because a big part of programming a good aimbot is figuring out how to prevent snapping to enemies through walls. If the server is already handling that, the aimbot won’t need to bother with it.
If anything, a stupid simple method of server-side aimbot detection would simply be to create phantom player locations. Like randomly generate fake player locations without any character models. Invisible to regular players, but anyone who snaps to that fake location just got busted for aimbotting.
Server side anti-cheat won’t detect things like aimbots or wall hacks. An ideal anti-cheat would run both client and server side, without requiring kernel level access on the client.
Yeah, I’m genuinely excited about the new controller. My biggest complaint about the Steam Deck has been the lack of touch-enabled controllers for mouse control. Because even in Big Picture mode, there are still some games that occasionally need to use the mouse. Launchers, random in-game menus, emulator menus, etc… I have the original Steam Controller, and use it occasionally, but it has a few big flaws… Notably, the lack of arrow keys, which makes playing certain console games (or emulators) on it difficult.
The PS5 controller at least has a touch pad, but there’s no easy way to scale the mouse sensitivity for the controller’s touchpad, and the default sensitivity is way too high. Barely touching the pad has the mouse cursor zipping across the screen. Hitting tiny options on a “1080p launcher on a 4k TV” drop-down menu is nearly impossible. There’s also the issue where you need to hold the PlayStation button to enable mouse mode, but holding the button for ~15 seconds turns off the controller. It’s a laughably dumb oversight, where you have to do all of your (completely unscaled, way too sensitive) mouse movement in ~10 second increments, or else you’ll accidentally turn your controller off.
I’d actually love it as a detachable accessory for the Frame, just for fun. Have it snap onto the back of the VR headset strap or something. The strap has something on the back (probably a battery pack) so it could just mount directly to that. Sell it as an optional accessory for like $10-15, and they’d be printing money.
No, it’s actually broken entirely and makes the game look worse. That’s why so many people are confused about why they shipped it. Like why not hide the option until it is ready to patch in?
Adding a pip to the center of the screen helps reduce motion sickness. I hadn’t experienced it until I installed a Skyrim mod that removed the reticle for most things. Suddenly I found myself getting mildly motion sick unless I was constantly un-hiding the reticle.
Worth noting that some monitors have an option to manually add a pip. It’s meant for shooters when you’re meant to zoom in instead of hip firing, but it also works to reduce motion sickness.
Yeah, Nexus launching collections was actually an amazing boon to the modding community. I have ~1200 mods running on my Skyrim, and it was a one-click (okay, maybe two or three?) install that only cost the one month of Nexus Premium subscription. The hardest part was simply waiting the ~60 minutes for all of the mods to automatically download and install. But that’s also on the Windows side of my machine, because I didn’t want to deal with trying to mod it on Linux. I know MO2 and Jackify can replicate the same concept, but I haven’t personally tried it.
If you’re going the iGPU route, you may want to look into out-of-date (from a year or two ago) enterprise/corporate fleet laptops. There are always a ton on the market because the C-level execs always demand the newest and best laptops, even if they’re just going to use them for emails; the CEO would be embarrassed if they found out they had a worse laptop than the programmers or 3D modelers, after all. So the company IT is always milling through enterprise laptops.
And when they go to list 20 identical laptops on eBay at the same time, (because they just upgraded an entire department,) they’re not concerned with how much money they’re actually getting for each resale. The person making the listing is just some lowly IT schmuck who will never see a dime from the sale, but is forced to list them because the bean counters in accounting want to recoup expenditures. If you try to buy used from a personal sale, that person is going to be focused on getting the most money possible; No gamer is selling their year-old GPU unless they really need the money. By sticking to laptops that are popular in corporate settings, you’re able to ensure that:
You can often find two year old like-new $2000 laptops for like $250. Hell, just a quick google search of “Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2024 i7 1TB used” turned up multiple eBay listings for like $200. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon (current model is Gen 13) is a $2600 laptop, but the Gen 12 is only going for a few hundred.
Hell, if philosophy is the driving factor for a good villain, then GladOS wouldn’t even be on your list. A villain doesn’t need to be morally grey to be a good villain. Plenty of good villains are evil just for the sake of being evil. Even GladOS would fall into that box.
The point was simply that players need an end goal to keep them focused, and having a consistently present villain acts as a moving end goal. The player is driven to chase that goal until the conclusion, because the villain is always just out of reach. If you see a goal waiting on the horizon, the march there feels like a slog. But if the goal is consistently at your fingertips as you chase it, you’ll chase it all the way to the horizon without even realizing.
Certain parts of the game haven’t aged well, but there’s no denying that Vaas was a wonderfully done villain. He’s a great test case for the “a good villain can’t be absent and mysterious” argument. Most of the memorable villains in gaming have been nearly omnipresent; Vaas, GladOS, Andrew Ryan, Handsome Jack, etc…
All of them are good villains because they are consistently present. They have enough screen time to actually develop into full fledged characters. They’re not just some dark and mysterious overlord, patiently waiting in the bottom of a dungeon for you to come fight them. They’re persistently in your face, interacting with you. Even if they’re not actively hindering your progress, the fact that they have a continued presence means their eventual downfall is that much more satisfying.
Factorio not mentioned in the trailer, specifically because of their “never do discounts” philosophy. But it blows basically all of these games out of the water. At my worst, I was playing 8-10 hours of Factorio every day. I realized I had a problem when I started seeing conveyor belt/assembly machine blueprints in my sleep.
In fact, it’s the #2 bestseller in the fest, even without a discount.
At least switch to a Linux build. Hell, install a portable one on a USB stick to see if you like it first. The lack of security updates for W10 means you could very easily end up with a zombie computer on your home network.
SteamOS definitely isn’t made for a traditional desktop computer. It has a desktop environment for when you need it, but that’s basically bolted onto the side of Steam’s Big Picture mode. It would likely work well if you have a dedicated PC for your living room TV. But for a traditional desktop setup, you’d likely want something else.
Maybe Bazzite? It’s basically built for gaming, but doesn’t default to Steam’s Big Picture mode like SteamOS does. It comes with Nvidia drivers pre-installed, which is a big sticking point for lots of people; many have found and/or lost religion while trying to install Nvidia drivers on Linux, so having them ready out-of-the-box is a big selling point. And you can choose which desktop environment you’d prefer when installing it; I’d suggest KDE if you’re familiar with Windows, or Gnome if you prefer MacOS. It’s immutable, which is, to put it simply, controversial. Some people love it, because it means you won’t accidentally destroy your OS. But others find it limiting, because they enjoy being able to go elbow-deep in their OS config.
Which is why I said those procedures are worth reexamining, not just outright discarding. I tend to be against the DOGE chainsaw “just start hacking things off until it stops working” method. But asking “why” is a good litmus test for whether or not a procedure is worth spending time on.
It’s entirely possible that the “always done it this way” method is in use because that method works. The method was built using institutional knowledge that has since been lost. And those are worth examining for the exact inverse reason; To be able to reverse-engineer the institutional knowledge, and fucking write it down for the next person.
It’s like that new manger you get that thinks they should remove all these processes as they don’t see the use with them. Then slowly as they learn the hard way add all of them back.
And this is the reason “why?” is such a powerful question. If you’re coming into a role and want to reduce overhead, the first question you should ask is why things are done the way they are. In many cases, you’ll discover real tangible benefits to the processes that you would have otherwise missed.
In some cases, the answer will be “I don’t know, that’s just how we’ve always done it.” And those are the ones that are worth scrutinizing further, because that’s one of the most braindead sentences in the English language. If nobody can explain why a process is in place, it’s probably worth reexamining.
Steam has actually allowed exactly that in the past. IIRC, they allowed refunds for Helldivers when Sony pulled their PSN account bullshit. You simply can’t use the automated refund process; You need to actually talk to support about it instead.
Silverhawks are the only reason I ever got above 40 or 50 agility. The courses are so grindy, for virtually zero benefit.
I actually doubt it’s an easy fix. The issue is that each version of proton looks like a different machine. So when Denuvo only allows you to boot on [x] machines in [y] days, it’s easy to get locked out of a game simply because it looks like you booted it on a bunch of different machines.
Some of the game streaming services have this same issue. Nvidia has that thing where you can boot it on Nvidia’s servers, then stream it. But the issue is that when you boot it, you don’t get the same server each time. So if you’re playing a game that is prone to crashing, you can easily eat through your [x] machines count quickly. Not because you were playing it on different machines, but because it was booted on a different server each time you launched it.
You’re just looking for genres. Your comment is a little like saying “when I want to listen to music, I don’t want acoustic guitar. That instrument shouldn’t be called music.”