ascagnel_

UT3 was a dismal failure both critically and commercially, while Gears of War was a huge success. Epic rode that for a while as they worked on Fortnite, and then they put out the battle royale mode in 2017 and the thing took off.

UT2004 (and its Xbox counterpart Unreal Championship 2) were great experiences. UT3 tried to set itself apart by tuning its pace significantly higher, and it lost its audience, and UT2016 was never going to be a significant title given its development history.

Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.

It'll never happen for a whole bunch of reasons, but a phone with Apple's hardware, Valve's OS, and Nintendo's game library would be amazing.

This is really the endgame, I think. A modern smartphone with a controller attached is effectively the same as a Steam Deck or Switch 2, just with a different OS. Apple has been pushing higher-end games on phones lately (this year has seen iOS versions of Hitman 3, Sniper Elite 4, and Subnautica), and reports are that the new pro phones run them well (the limiting factor being thermal load).

A phone that can run my Steam library is super-compelling -- I travel a decent amount, so being able to chuck something smaller like a Backbone One in my bag vs. a Steam Deck would be a meaningful change.

Agreed. Mad Men premiered in 2007, well into the HD era, and was already composed for 16:9. The issue here is that the 4K "remaster" seemingly wasn't mastered at all, just a re-scan of the original negatives at a higher resolution.

That said, I think letterboxing is a better choice than trying to recompose a shot for a different aspect ratio if it wasn't accounted for initially (eg: The X-Files). And even then, the shot selection and composition would have been different had the aspect ratio been initially different (like TXF's 16:9 versions leaving the edges of the frame largely unused).

And so is CableCARD, for that matter.

> I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.

I've heard it said in jest, but the most stable API in Linux is Win32. Running something via Wine means Wine is doing the plumbing to take a Windows app and pass it through to the right libraries.

I also wonder if it's long-term sustainable. Microsoft can do hostile things or develop their API in ways Valve/Proton neither need nor want, forcing them to spend dev time keeping up.

> I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event.

Go visit a pulmonologist and get a diagnosis. Getting one and starting on a CPAP was life-changing for me.

Also, it's not clear who actually owns the thing -- the original game was developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive (PC) and Sierra (PS2). Following the tree of deals, there's a bunch of different big corporations that could have a claim on the IP:

- Fox Interactive was eventually sold to Vivendi, but most of their library was listed as owned by 20th Century Fox, which has since been acquired by Disney

- the second and third games in the series were published by Sierra, who over the years have been owned by Comp-U-Card, Vivendi, Activision, and eventually Microsoft

- Monolith Productions were eventually purchased by Warner Bros., who shut the studio down earlier this year

Just from that list, there's a huge list of media conglomerates that could have an ownership claim: News Corp, Disney, Vivendi, Warner Bros., Microsoft

Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allowed them to be posted on the Internet Archive for free access.

> every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value)

I view this as a positive -- it's not feasible to maintain a build for every game and storefront's DRM/auth (unless you go DRM-free, which is the ideal but not something publishers and developers do on release). A launcher is the layer that sits between -- the games are written to auth against a launcher, and the launcher has builds for each storefront.

Otherwise you're just further entrenching Steam as the de facto monopoly on sales.

My thought has been a 20- or 30-year term, with one or two renewals at a nominal fee, would work wonders. Orphaned works basically disappear overnight, and the vast majority of works will have exhausted their useful commercial life within those 20-30 years.

I'd also argue that works eligible for copyright must submit a modifiable edition (eg: source code or a DRM-free copy) that is made available to archivists immediately and the general public once the copyright term expires.

At least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing access to their 20+ year old email address if they stopped paying. I don't know if it was founded on anything, but it got them to keep paying through a decade-plus of non-AOL broadband.

I always look at the AOLTimeWarner merger as the thing that broke them, distracting them at the moment they should've been prepping to roll out broadband. I also look at that merger through the lens of "don't fight a land war in Asia" in terms of breaking empires -- "don't let your company acquire Warner Bros.".

Ah this is what I get for trying to write code on my phone. I'm specifically thinking of cases within useEffects, where the state setter is constant between renders but the state itself is not, so you can wind up with an infinite re-render once the state has changed once, unless you check the state inside the useEffect before calling setState.

You can actually further simplify the functional component by using setState's callback form. You don't always need to do this, but it makes setting state from within a useEffect much safer in that it won't need the current state value in its dependency array.

  const handleAgeChange = setAge((prevAge) => prevAge + 1);

This week the GZDoom project forked into UZDoom after a maintainer force-pushed AI-generated code into the repo. Thankfully, it failed to compile and other maintainers caught it before it made it out, but the decision to fork came down pretty quickly.

The YouTube app has never been good and never felt like a native app -- it's a wrapper around web tech.

More importantly for games, though, is the awful storage architecture around the TV boxes. Games have to slice themselves up into 2GB storage chunks, which can be purged from the system whenever the game isn't actively running. The game has to be aware of missing chunks and download them on-demand.

It makes open-world games nearly impossible, and it makes anything with significant storage requirements effectively impossible. As much as Apple likes to push the iOS port of Death Stranding, that game cannot run on tvOS as currently architected for that reason.

Apple's mistake was allowing 32-bit stuff on Intel in the first place -- if they had delayed the migration ~6 months and passed on the Core Duo for Core 2 Duo, it would've negated the need to ever allow 32-bit code on x86.

Apex Legends is an interesting case because EA/Respawn initially shipped with first-class support for the Steam Deck (going as far as to make changes to the game client so it would get a "Verified" badge from Valve) -- including "check[ing] the box that allows it to work". However, the observation was that the anti-cheat code on Linux wasn't as effective, so they eventually dropped support for it.

https://forums.ea.com/blog/apex-legends-game-info-hub-en/dev...

For comparison, the lifetime sales of the first Nintendo Switch would be considered a good year for iPhone sales -- six generations of phones sold >150MM units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...

I'm hoping the rumored revision of the Apple TV can slot in as a game console. Apple has been pushing AAA games on iOS/iPadOS over the past few years, but there's no good user story if I want to have that traditional experience beyond playing Apple Arcade games on the existing (and outdated) Apple TV pucks.

There's some irony in that the one thing they haven't figured out (the living room) is the one thing their competitors in the space (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) _have_ figured out.

One of my biggest complaints with Steam is that it's basically an unlicensed casino with extra steps -- and one of the things you could do at one point was buy a "challenge pass" for a major tournament that was effectively a "pick 'em"-style bet on the outcome. There is no age gating on this, outside of a click-through prompt since the game is rated ESRB M/17+ and its equivalents.

1. You buy an event pass

2. The event pass contains a "coin" that can be upgraded, and grants access to a "pick 'em" interface

3. Based on the outcomes of the matches and your picks, the coin is upgraded

4. The upgraded coin allows access to "souvenir packages"

5. The "souvenir packages" and their contents (rare and/or unique weapon skins) can be traded on Steam's marketplace for store credit or currency

The MLB package is very up-front about not being all-inclusive: it advertises "out-of-market" games -- games you can't otherwise access. Games on streaming services like Apple and Peacock count the same as broadcasts on ESPN, FS1, or TBS: national broadcasts available behind a paywall.

Gridiron football would probably work well for something like this: each play has a line of scrimmage, yards gained or lost, and a summary of the play (eg: from their own 47 yard- line, QB#3 threw a lateral to RB#8 with 3:08 remaining in the third quarter and gained 2 yards and was brought down by DT#10). Most importantly, there are defined "plays" that run from snap to down, which means you can summarize it.

NBA play would be very different and very difficult, because there are no defined plays, only possessions. It'd include relative locations on the floor (lane, 2pt area, 3pt area), list of players who touched the ball, and what the outcome was (2pt, 3pt, turnover, out-of-bounds, etc).

Baseball's biggest issue is that their biggest teams are also co-owners of their cable channels (and were trailblazers in this, with the Yankees and the YES Network). They don't care if you go to the game, they want you to get a cable subscription that has your local RSN, ESPN, TBS, your local FOX affiliate, and FS1 so that you can watch your team play. And that's not including games that may wind up on streaming platforms.

The post you replied to included this:

> I read that part of baseball's decline from the premiere American sport was due to its outdated revenue model (strict reliance on ticket sales). The NFL in 80s really embraced TV and reached more fans and here we are. MLB has been recently way ahead of the curve on streaming (MLB.tv, AWS StatCast etc).

I'm _hoping_ (although numbers don't seem to be showing it as a huge success as of yet) is that the Apple-MLS deal works well enough that other leagues are at least open to the idea of a no-blackout, all-inclusive package.

The one-time payment app and NetNewsWire (both excellent RSS readers themselves!) take a different approach than the subscription-only version of Reeder: they treat RSS more like email (with an emphasis on reading everything, or at least marking it as read).

I mean it more as a counterpoint to what Valve is doing: games are automatically opted-in to working with Proton and pass through a Valve-operated certification program. Because developers aren't part of that loop, you see occasional cases where games issue updates that break compatibility, with users blaming developers based on an outdated, Valve-provided certification.

This is one of the big reasons I've gravitated towards a reverse-chronological feed that takes you from the past to the present -- at some point you hit a natural end, which is a natural prompt to go do something else. I've picked up Reeder[0] as a feed reader, since it can aggregate a bunch of sources (chiefly RSS, but also Mastodon, BlueSky, reddit, etc) and presents it in such a timeline without pressure to read everything.

[0] https://reederapp.com