Witcher 1 is the only game in the franchise I’ve actually played. And I definitely agree, it’s very worth playing. I was really enjoying it. The only reason I never ended up finishing was that at the time I was playing through a Wineskin, and…the damn game was crashing on me every hour at most. Which was pretty appalling considering I was playing on a platform that Steam said was officially supported…

But I have no doubt that if I had been running on Windows at the time I’d have finished it back around 2014 when I was first playing it, because I was really enjoying the story.

Gimp is still useful for quick and simple edits

See, the problem with that is that that’s precisely not how I use Photoshop. I don’t use it often (certainly not often enough to actually pay for it), but when I do, I tend to go fairly deep.

I should try out Darktable though. I used to use Aperture until it was discontinued, and these days I frequently use Lightroom, though I don’t really love it.

There definitely exist paid players out there (or at least used to…dunno if they still exist), but there are also “free” (as in beer) non-free (as in speech) options, like the ones included out of the box in a Windows or macOS installation.

Sometimes slightly worse. Like LibreOffice.

Sometimes actually better, like VLC.

Sometimes about the same, like the latest version of MuseScore (older versions were, in fact, quite a bit worse).

But sometimes, like with older versions of GIMP (I’ll admit, I’ve not tried its latest major version release candidate) it’s significantly worse.

Oh neat. Are their maps actually being used by Microsoft’s Bing Maps or other user-facing products yet?

I recall a couple of years ago some talk about a new open mapping initiative that Apple or some other big commerical players were going to be involved in. Separate from OSM. What ever happened to that?

I’m surprised that Apple Maps has a community that is pretty much Tue same size as organic maps

Ftfy

Because like, what is there to talk about?

The vast majority of my time on Reddit was on smaller communities where that wasn’t true. The experience on Reddit of the defaults compared to more niche communities was like night and day.

I don’t even think that’s remotely true.

I’ve seen two cases that actually directly impacted my ability to use Firefox. I can only presume there are many more. Those being supporting the column-span CSS property (available since 2010 in other browsers with vendor prefix, and early 2016 without, while being late 2019 for FF) and supporting iPad OS’s multi-window functionality (introduced mid 2019, Firefox has had it for just a handful of months now). I have first hand experience telling me very directly that this is true.

There’s also been a lot of talk about Firefox’s lack of support for PWAs. I’ve not experienced that myself to be able to comment more than to say I’ve noted others have complaints.

The point is that with open source you can effectively leech off of Google for now, while still retaining the flexibility to nope out and do your own thing at any point you decide.

Considering just how severely behind they are already (as I mentioned in my other comment, they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards or operating system features), I see anything they can do to reduce how much they need to maintain independently as a good thing. In an ideal world where they had all the funding and development power they could want I might say sticking with the completely independent Firefox would be great. But that just isn’t where they’re at today.

They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works. If it changes in a way that breaks things for you, don’t pull that change. At that point, if the change is drastic enough to require it, you can turn that soft fork into a hard fork and hope that Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. join you; something that would significantly hamper Google’s ability to maintain their dominance of the browser engine market. That’s a choice that they simply don’t have today when being based on Firefox and Gecko means using an inferior browser platform.

Honestly I’ve been saying for some time that Mozilla’s resources would be much better spent making Firefox a soft fork of Chromium. Primarily: use the Blink browser engine and V8 JS engine, with only the changes to those that they deem absolutely necessary, and maintain a privacy-forward Chromium-based browser. Maybe try and enlist the help of Brave, Vivaldi, and other browsers that are currently Chromium but which prefer more privacy than Google offers.

It’s not zero effort, and especially as Google continues to develop Chromium with assumptions like the removal of Manifest V2 it might take some effort to maintain, but it cannot possibly be as much effort as maintaining an entire browser.

This is being reported as a rumour that’s been debunked, but I’m doubtful how true that is. Seems quite likely to me they’ve bowed to pressure.

But I don’t think you need to go from the time when arcades were entirely irrelevant, but merely where they were no longer the main driving force. That’s at most the late '90s with gen 5 consoles and many big popular or influential game franchises like Quake, Pokemon, Age of Empires, Fallout, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto (that’s '96 and '97 alone).

And you need to go up until at least the time when few of the largest games were available without cancerous monetisation strategies, not merely when a few games had started doing it. So you definitely need to go up to at least the launch of the 7th generation consoles in 2007.

To bring it back to the original point of the conversation, that’s not to say that it isn’t worth preserving games that did have those strategies of course. It just doesn’t detract from the sense of a period when the majority of gamers’ experience was much better.

We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997

And EA greedy in 2007. Doesn’t mean that what they were doing then was as bad as what is being done today.

But an arcade game is a physical object. The preservation needs of arcade games are very different to games distributed on cartridge or disk, which is why I suggested that a digital library would be focusing on home game consoles, especially those released at a time when home gaming was the main way gaming got experienced (i.e., after arcades were the most popular way).

[24 years is] too short of a blip to consider a golden age

Assuming that “too short” and reference to a “golden age” was meant in refutation to my claim of the 3rd–6th console generations, which lasted from 1983 until 2007. If that’s the claim, I find it absolutely absurd. When we discuss the golden age of TV we’re talking barely one decade, from the mid-to-late oughts to the late 10s.

If you meant something else by that bit, I’m sorry, please disregard the above paragraph. But I don’t know quite what you do mean.

I don’t think we’re talking about arcade games at this point though. We’re talking to a large extent about 3rd–6th generation home gaming consoles. For Nintendo, that’s the NES to GameCube. Sony entered with the PlayStation in the 5th gen, and Xbox came out in 6th.

I think a lot of people would see this (and to a slightly lesser extent the 7th gen) as the high point where games came out in a completed state and you paid once and the just enjoyed the game.

Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.

But personally, the phrase “the devs should” never bothers me. It’s pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the “developer”: the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.

At this point, “crypto” is its own word short for “cryptocurrency”, and not for “cryptography” in the broader sense. It’s unfortunate, but that’s how people use it.

I honestly find their “historical accuracy” claims kinda comical. Yeah it’s better than most games for sure, but it still only pays lip service to accuracy in a lot of aspects for the sake of the game’s story. Henry has a completely fantastical rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to de facto military commander.

No, I did really enjoy it. I just don’t spend an enormous amount of time gaming, and the time I do spend is most often in completely different genres that I can play with friends while chatting on Discord, like RTS (Age of Empires mostly) and survival crafters (like Raft and DST).

No it’s not. It’s pretty explicitly not, by the guy who is most famous for talking about piracy as a service problem:

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.