Self-hosted servers with active moderation and a consistent, vetted player list? What are you, a communist?

Hey, don’t blame us for Murdoch. He’s Australian, he only bought US citizenship in his fifties in order to spread his hate better.

… Saying that becoming American helped with that doesn’t really strengthen my case here, does it?

“Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz: I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”

• Al Franken

The problem with using salt water isn’t salt buildup, it’s that it’s corrosive and will drastically shorten the lifespan of any equipment exposed to it.

ReVanced (a patched version of the official app) is straight up better than Premium because it can get rid of all the crap corporate insists on shoving into customers’ faces. My YouTube app has a subscriptions tab (that only shows videos, not shorts or random “informative” carousels) and my profile tab with all my playlists, and nothing else.

It’s glorious in its simplicity. Why would I ever pay Google for a worse product?

Yep.

Yeah, it ran on AOL’s platform and was a multiplayer dungeon crawler similar to SSI’s other stuff.

I’m still on dual 1080p monitors and a machine that’s more than a decade old and was mid-tier at best when brand new. I’ve only upgraded the GPU and doubled the RAM, yet it still runs basically everything at an acceptable framerate. Hearing that would boggle the mind of my younger self, who struggled for days to get Neverwinter Nights (the Bioware one, not AOL - you know you’re old when you feel the need to specify) to run at more than four seconds per frame in outdoor areas on a fairly new machine.

They announced a 2025 release date back in 2023, and as of the last video update a few months ago it seems they’re still hoping to hit it.

I haven’t seen how they handled the Shivering Isles yet, but if they managed to make the Plane of Madness boring then I’ll be more than a little annoyed.

Ha. Years counted for more back then. Remember, this was back in the day when graphics technology made a qualitative leap every few years. Nowadays things have stabilized and the focus is on boosting framerate and pixel count, but back then each generation was a monumental leap forward in fundamental rendering tech.

It’s a marketing tactic called “shadow-dropping”. It’s a risky tactic that relies on word-of-mouth for marketing instead of an expensive ad campaign. It tends to be used either when the company isn’t confident in their product, or if the drop is so desirable that it’ll sell well regardless of marketing.

We can assume this is the latter, though it’s possible Bethesda were also hedging their bets due to the remake’s lack of mod compatibility since long-tail revenue from modding basically carries them for the several years between game releases.

This is my main complaint with the remake so far. Original Oblivion was bright and vibrant, which stood out due to the obsession with brown-filtered “realism” in games at that time. Trees almost looked like they were painted with pastels.

The colors in the remake are noticeably toned down. It still looks great, but it lost that dreamlike quality that sold Oblivion as a fantasy world.

Oblivion uses Gamebryo. Creation is Skyrim and later games. That might seem pedantic since it’s a newer version of the same engine, but one of the major reasons for the rename was Bethesda ripping out the Gamebryo rendering code and replacing it with their own, more modern renderer.

The modders have still done amazing things with Oblivion, but they’re limited by the ancient Gamebryo tech. Postprocessing shaders, high-poly meshes and texture upscaling can only do so much, especially on a 32-bit engine that can use at most 4 gigs of RAM (2.5 gigs if Bethesda didn’t set the LAA flag and the end user hasn’t installed a 4GB patch).

The original is also required to enjoy Skyblivion, the fan-made remake with much more love and care put into it, when it comes out later this year.

The frustrating thing is all the information and materials to support Samsung devices is out there, but the custom ROM development community is so ridiculously toxic and unhelpful to newcomers that few people are willing and able to mainline new devices (and supporting a new device is complicated enough that you pretty much can’t get started without someone more experienced to point out the decades of cruft, pitfalls, and vendor-specific workarounds that the build processes have accumulated). More of the old guard leaves every year without enough new blood to replace them.

If Valve’s Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don’t use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve’s current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we’ve gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It’s amazing what happens when all innovation isn’t black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

Right, I should have specified isolated VM. WSL and Windows are interconnected (even if some things, like accessing Windows files within WSL2, are horribly slow). Google’s solution probably won’t have anything like that, given their reluctance to allow users access to Android’s underlying systems.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

18/f/California.

Jokes aside, this appears to be a full virtual machine rather than something like WSL that can interact with and manipulate the host OS. You probably won’t be able to do anything interesting with your Android files using it, just mess around in a sandboxed distro. So it’s still good for developers who want a portable Linux environment to run things in, but not nearly as useful as a properly integrated terminal would be.