“Chasing live-service and open-world elements diluted BioWare’s focus”

Lol gotta love the narrative framing here that carefully tries to avoid coming out and saying why Bioware might have been so focused on monetization and blindly following trends and buzzwords. You would think if the experienced artists and developers had any actual agency, power or true belonging with respect to the corpse of the game studio Bioware, the studio would never have pivoted this way in a million years.

Life does not return to a body that has had its spine extracted and heart ripped out. Of course there is always a little bit of cash to be made on selling people on the possibility that it might happen, especially if you push that story in interviews with gaming press, but the point of buying Bioware was to enshittify it. Extracting the spine and ripping the heart out was always the plan.

Ok, I know it sounds crazy but I actually quite like this set up I made for playing cataclysm dda using onboard steam deck controls. There are four pop up menus of keys that map to left joystick, left touchpad, right joystick and right touchpad. The remaining center two columns of the qwerty keyboard map to the rear four buttons and two shoulder buttons like they are on the qwerty keyboard.

(No mouse because it is cdda you don’t need a mouse.)

https://sopuli.xyz/post/12374907

There are three rings, the wasd ring which is a natural spatial mapping at this point for pc gamers (push the s down, z and x get pushed to the sides and become diagonals), the vim ring which unfolds the classic hjkl vim navigation controls (with diagonals) into the natural spatial mapping (might actually help you learn basic vim controls lol idk) and the numberpad gets its own ring/3x3 square but retains number row shift functionalities. The fourth menu has keys on the righthand side of the qwerty keyboard basically represented as they are on the keyboard and houses mainly menu/ui navigation stuff.

Maximally little unnecessary memorization and it works, as nonsense as it sounds.

What kind of workflow does this involve on your deck?

Same I have been learning blender and using it on my deck! Super cool to hear about others doing so!

Also kdenlive is a nice linux non linear video editor available on flathub/the discover app browser.

https://kdenlive.org/en/

I have been using kdenlive to browse, edit and compose gameplay videos right on the deck, it is a really nice easy experience.

Good question, I think there is a bug maybe? Development on Main Assembly stopped in 2021 (which is why I recommend MA at this pricepoint) and the bug might have never been fixed. What a shame :( the game definitely wasn’t intended to do that.

edit so I did some testing, Main Assembly exits to the menu with an error if I go from being connected to the internet to being disconnected. The game plays fine in totally offline mode or when connected to the internet, the bug (at least on my deck) arises when switching between being connected to the internet to not connected while playing.

Definitely potentially pretty frustrating, worth tolerating for how cool the game is (and for $4) but frustrating nonetheless. It is a shame development on Main Assembly stopped it has some amazing ideas and vehicle mechanics!

Trailmakers is definitely very solid too, the building philosophies between the games are quite different but they are both great games.

I think it is a testament to trailmakers that it doesn’t feel hamfisted in comparison to main assembly, rather it feels like an intentionally limited construction set carefully tuned to environmental challenges in order to make tweaking fun, feel approachable and give permission to make subpar monstrosities and just wing it, tweaking as you go.

It fits the theme of trailmakers better than I realized at first. You crash land on a planet while crewing a dime-a-dozen corporate freighter. The technology you have access to from the wreckage is extraordinarily powerful but functions in very rigid systemized ways partially to allow crafting a wide variety of interoperable and compatible components but also partially because a soulless space megacorp made them lol. That being said, it feels like a fun freeing limitation in a way that emulates the play of legos well.

Main Assembly’s (in game accessible) workshop has some seriously good stuff, like someone modeled a realistic, working Nissan gtr skyline!

The build is set up with race track rock hard suspension, but it feels really fun to drive and you can absolutely powerslide and oversteer like you would expect.

https://youtu.be/UP6RI42DgQw

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2363306440&searchtext=

Here is a sports car fully set up just waiting for a model to be built around it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2196401528

This Rock Crawler is a surprisingly faithful recreation of a real life rock crawler and honestly I would believe I was playing an offroading sand crawler game if you just had me drive it with no context what game I was playing.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2381297215

Check out these other buggies, every single one of these must represent so many hours of tinkering and tweaking work because each one of them feels alive and dynamic in handling in a way most dedicated racing games fail to really capture.

How about an x-wing with a cockpit view?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2397845618&searchtext=

This monster truck handles REALLY good

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2170574251&searchtext=

This car is tuned to drive like a trackmania car, and it drives awesome, it is a blast to drive at high speed.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2759012431

Here is another arcadey, high performance f1-offroader hybrid, really nuanced handling with some cool suspension

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2434054909

This rally racing/small trophytruck-like vehicle doesn’t have a skin/aesthetic panels but the handling and suspension is butterrry and the workshop description indicates it has autopilot and different modes. Amazing stuff! Ridiculously fast too.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2355543998

hot wheels hot rod, handles good

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2258992409&searchtext=

Finally here is a nice, simple forklift because you always need a forklift.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2181182790&searchtext=

Or maybe a fullsize, functional truck crane!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1947787434&searchtext=

Well I am planning to build a rocket and go to the moon but alas the hardware is still a couple years out :( no fear, it will be soon though!

You can run your own relay, in that sense the “body” of bluesky is when considered in the abstract potentially decentralized… but when you consider the “brain” of bluesky nodes and the layer of moderation and post/commenting is still locked into a centralized system it is a bit like arguing borg drones have free will because they are physically individual beings.

Or it is like arguing an ant isn’t existentially dependent upon the structure of the ant colony to survive since each ant posesses an individual body with its own six legs.

At a fundamental level the intended meaning of “federate” is that disparate communities and softwares can “connect” seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.

A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.

A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.

Some recommendations for lefty mastodon instances, all are vaguely tech themed, but that comes with the territory. That being said none of these instances feel like weird places to not be a techy person, the conversations and interactions on these instances occupy as diverse a range as anywhere else.

https://mas.to/about

https://elekk.xyz/about

https://tech.lgbt/about

https://eldritch.cafe/about

https://digipres.club/about

https://toad.social/about

https://hellsite.site/about

Your lemmy instance lemmy.world is under the umbrella of https://fedihosting.foundation/ which oversees both lemmy.world and the mastodon instance mastodon.world

Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?

Please do whatever helps you express your identity/identities of your self best! You can always link between accounts in the public account bios.

I will offer you a suggestion though, if you already made the account Pretzilla@lemmy.world why not make Pretzilla@mastodon.world, link between them and perhaps indicate if you use one or the other account more. You might as well, people will still recognize you immediately on your mastodon account but you might find it nice to be able to interact with the fediverse through the perspective of mastodon/microblogging.

Then make another account on a different mastodon instance that looks cool too, go wild, do whatever fits your fancy, the consequences to making an account and never using it are small enough that except in edge cases (you took up a slot on a server with a limited number of registrations or something) nobody is going to care!

p.s. Notice all of these mastodon instances have thoughtful moderation policies that place an emphasis on protecting and centering vulnerable voices over valuing the “right” of socio-economically advantaged groups to spread hate speech in public. All these instances have links to the mastodon accounts of the humans who moderate those instances so you can get an idea of the human element of the moderation. How cool is that? Each place has its own slight spin on being a healthy community and you can find the place that is perfect for you!

Or Misskey!

It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.

Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.

I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.

Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.

yes, see this thread

https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474

“#BlueSky isn’t decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that’s all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find “networking through Relays instead of server-to-server” as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.”

There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A…

Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren’t any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.

What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.

One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.

Sure but also ugggh

They will break the internet as much as they need to in order to accomplish this.

wtf kind of lame criticism of mastodon is this…there are constantly cute pictures of pets being posted on mastodon… and like anywhere else with humans these posts are very popular on mastodon.

I would say these posts are MORE popular on mastodon because without an algorithm cute animal photos are going to stick out as popular even more.

This is all nonsense anyways, Bluesky is considered “cooler” by techy types with a childlike awareness of history, politics and power because the tech is cooler when considered in the abstract.

Coincidently none of these technical details have the capacity to make bluesky a truly open and free place otherwise those investors would sue bluesky for purposefully and willfully not pursuing profit for shareholders. This won’t stop certain types from pointing at pictures in the sand and reciting idle words thrown to the wind by the people in charge for now.

Bluesky exists as a legal instrument of profit, all else about bluesky is malleable and changeable and will eventually be bulldozed or undermined in the pursuit of profit for shareholders.

edit 2 this is a real human, and I was grumpy and while it was satisfying to point fingers it just makes me into the asshole so I removed that, but my broader point still stands