What I want Supergiant to do is… whatever the fuck they want.

I don’t see the game getting either of those things.

Duos, you can already do, you just have to take on a rando as a third. They could scale the difficulty down for 2 players, sure, but Elden Ring’s mutiplayer scaling is notoriously terrible, in part because no amount of scaling can account for the lost potential for splitting aggro, in a game where splitting aggro is king.

Voice chat is something that FromSoft has INTENTIONALLY never included in any prior game, despite there being co-op in all of them. Making players coordinate with each other with very limited communication tools is one of FromSoft’s signature design choices. The fast pace of this game compared to prior games makes the lack of communication tools hurt a lot more, for sure, but it’s still very much playable. Anyone who dislikes this design choice is absolutely free to, but it’s not gonna change.

Normally, I’d be on board with you, but it does strike me as notable that Coffee Stain has apparently ALREADY been under the umbrella of shareholders this whole time, and is still fucking THRIVING. I’ll also note that Coffee Stain is based in Sweden, where all the things that make them great (I.E. the way devs are treated, which lets them thrive and make great shit) isn’t about to change.

So, I think it’s worth tempering the pessimism a bit, for now. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

What makes you say that? Do you say “everything else” to mean all the studios that aren’t splitting off along with Coffee Stain? From what’s here, I don’t see why Coffee Stain is in any different boat than everyone else underneath “Coffee Stain Group”.

I’ll take another look, but I didn’t see any such setting when I was trying to diagnose. And I haven’t changed any Plex settings since the last time we had an internet outage and it worked properly, just a month or two ago.

I recently discovered that Plex no longer works over local network, if you lose internet service. A) you can’t login without internet access. B) even if you’re already logged in, apps do not find and recognize your local server without internet access. So, yeah, Plex is already there.

Is the BlueSky OP here not a native English speaker? Cause, BOY that was tough to follow.

Entire final hour of Tears of the Kingdom.

No, the patent involved is specifically covering Pokemon. Legends: Arceus, in particular, IIRC.

Sooooo, what Ocarina of Time did in 1996?

You’re right to think that “since it’s open source, people can see what it’s doing and would right away notice something malicious” is bullshit, cause it pretty much is. I sure as hell don’t spend weeks analyzing the source code of every third party open source package or program that I use. But just like with close-source software, there’s a much bigger story of trust and infrastructure in play.

For one, while the average Joe Code isn’t analyzing the source of every new project that pops up, there are people whose job is literally that. Think academic institutions, and security companies like Kaspersky. You can probably argue that stuff like that is underfunded, but it definitely exists. And new projects that gain enough popularity to matter, and don’t come from existing trusted developers are gonna be subject to extra scrutiny.

For two, in order for a malicous (new) project to be a real problem, it has to gain enough popularity to reach its targets, and the open source ecosystem is pretty freakin’ huge. There’s two main ways that happens: A) it was developed, at least partially, by an established, trusted entity in the ecosystem, and B) it has to catch the eye of enough trusted or influential entities to gain momentum. On point B, in my experience, the kind of person who takes chances on small, unknown, no-name projects is just naturally the “exceptionally curious” type. “Hmm, I need to do X, I wonder what’s out there already that could do it. Hey, here’s something. Is it worth using? I wonder how they solved X. Lemme take a look…”

For three, the open source ecosystem relies heavily on distribution systems, stuff like GitHub, NuGet, NPM, Docker, and they take on a big chunk of responsibility for the security and trustability of the stuff they distribute. They do things like code scanning, binary validation, identity verification, and of course punitive measures taken against identified bad actors (I.E. banning).

All that being said, none of the above is perfect, and malicious actor absolutely do still manage to implant malware in open source software that we all rely on. The hope is that with all of the above points, as well as all the ones I’ve missed, that the odds of it happening are rare, and that when it DOES happen, it’s way easier to identify and correct the problems than when we have to trust a private party to do it behind closed doors.

Great recent example, from last year: https://www.akamai.com/blog/security-research/critical-linux-backdoor-xz-utils-discovered-what-to-know

Me, I see this story as rather uplifting. I think it shows that the ecosystem we have in place does a pretty good job of controlling even the worst malicious actors, cause this story involves just about the worst kind of malicous actor you could imagine. They spent a full 2 years doing REAL open source work to develop that community trust I talked about, as well as maintaining a small army of fake accounts submitting support requests, to put pressure on the project to add more maintainers, resulting in a VERY sophisticated, VERY severe backdoor being added. And they still got found out relatively quickly.

Sick. I’ve tried a few times in the past to find a frontend for postgres that I liked, and was never able to. Will have to give this a try.

The most straightforward thing to do, on a private LAN, is to make all your own certs, from a custom root cert, and then manually install that cert as “trusted” on each machine. If none of the machines on this network need to accessed from outside the LAN, then you’re golden.

Yeah, just like it was announced for 2023 in that one XBox showcase.

I’ll believe it when I’m playing it.

Not really, not on its own. It can GET demanding depending on how big you go with building stuff.

Musk, an avid gamer himself, claimed

Hey, glad to know this source has no credibility.

Better him than Musk.

The presentation is different, but the core problem that the FTC is targeting is the same: spending real money to gamble on artificial digital goods.

True, but if it’s good for users, it should be the rule for ALL apps

I’m not sure which ones he was into at 4yo specifically, but my son’s Switch favorites include…

Super Mario Odyssey Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle Celeste Minecraft Yoshi’s Crafted World Letterquest Big Brain Academy NES Arcade SNES Arcade

Of those, the ones I would say mught meet your super-chill criteria are…

Super Mario Odyssey (yeah, you can die, but you just respawn and can spend tons of time just running around aimlessly) Celeste (normally not, but there’s a lovely Assist Mode) Yoshi’s Crafted World (there’s a no-fail mode) Big Brain Academy (if they can handle being scored on things, without taking it too seriously).