sigh You’re right.

Having said that, if they happen to fix Warcraft 3 Reforged, they might get on my good books. I’m not that hopeful for it, but I want a version of the game from 20 years ago that isn’t busted and can be played online again lol.

You could almost say… Parodied 😯

Right, legally speaking that would be covered in the US.

But Japanese law is completely different and IIRC parodies are not covered which is why anime always censors their parody references to other anime. It’s stupid, but it’s the society that both developers are from.

Only time will tell what they’re actually accusing Pocket Pair of doing though.

edit: censors, not sensors. 🤣

I’m pretty sure I saw the same tweet from Stephen Totilllo (sp?) just to give you some credence, but I think many people called him out for it as it was below his usual reporting standards.

We’ll have to wait and see when the case developers further.

But if it’s just about the concept of “collecting monsters” and using them in battles somehow, then they can go fuck themselves.

I don’t think it would be that because it would be unenforceable. There are plenty of games where you collect monsters, some of which existed before Pokemon’s creation and plenty that have existed after. It would be the King Kong case all over again, but inverted.

Without a doubt, Patents and Software are a bad mix.

But there’s definitely a truth to the idea that Palworld in particular were aiming for a legal battle against Nintendo from the beginning with provocative action. There’s a reason why Nintendo has rarely gone after Pokemon-likes but have decided that this particular company is worth pursuing.

This is kind of a lose-lose situation. Palworld was clearly kit-bashing existing Pokemon models and were engaging in creative bankruptcy, but software/game patents serve only to hurt creatives and developers around the world and Japan in particular is poor around SLAP suits.

So, I agree, grab the popcorn. But I hope that whatever patents they’re choosing to enforce here don’t have a major ripple in game development as a whole. There’s a world with the brazen IP theft of palworld actually does us all a disservice by making it an easier case for Nintendo to enforce Patents that would otherwise be unenforceable or difficult purely out of optics.

Regarding VPNs, I wish this was an easier way of doing it. Unfortunately it requires all friends to be tech savvy enough to understand why a vpn is necessary.

Yeah, thanks for sharing this. I’m going to have to give this a try sometime.

I had previously been building it manually, but I think I’m starting to realize that gitlab/github CI is basically essential to running a proper repository anyway.

2024 is the year of a lot of gaming and gaming-tangential products being made with a ridiculous price tag but not a clear audience of people who ever asked for it. 🤔

I mean, yes. But also no, it sort of depends.

If you have very low bar of needs (needing a web browser and some utility apps, without specific apps in mind) then it’s actually never been easier. If you use a Silverblue based system, all updates are done in a transactional way and old versions can be booted into at any time in case something breaks (which basically never happens with silverblue, with some exceptions.) Read only systems means you can’t muck around with the root files and can’t accidentally “break” your system in the way you used to be able to on older OS designs. I would say that “Linux with Guardrails” is effectively invincible, and I would like to recommend that new users try OSTree based systems. For example, Fedora Silverblue, Ublue’s Aurora / Bluefin, Bazzite (Steam OS clone), etc etc.

If you have more specific needs, it can be a crapshoot depending on whether or not the hobby in question has a strong linux presence. Particularly, bespoke non-game windows apps are still a bit tricky to get working and require some Wine (Windows process wrapper for compatibility) knowledge. There are edge cases where running certain applications in flatpak (Steam, Bitwig) can mean that, while it’s impossible for these applications to break your system, you’ll be very limited in options for these programs. For Steam, this can mean more difficulty with out-of-steam application management. For Bitwig, this can mean no choice in VST. These are all programs that have work arounds, but on a read-only system like Silverblue (which I would like to recommend for new users due to the indestructibility) those are all a little more difficult to implement and require you to know a thing or two about virtual desktops. (Thus, not new user friendly.)

I would still say that it’s never been easier, but as you get more famililar with any system, you generally demand more and more from it. Thankfully, with linux, its always been a case of “if there’s a will there’s a way” and the UX utility applications being made by other people have been getting better and better.

My recommendation to you would be to try UBlue Aurora. It’s familiar to Windows, it’s being managed in a way that makes gaming relatively simple, and it has an active discord community to help new users. It also has that indestructability that I was talking about before, but has a lot of the “work arounds” pre-setup for new users.

Linux

🥳

Crypto and other bullshit

🤢

Well, you know, I guess I’ll take the good with the bad.

I would use BTRFS and Snapper over using Timeshift due to the lack of granularity it has. You should be able to back up any volume you want, not just the home directories like Timeshift does.

This is 100% justified.

These types of features have been regulated in fighting games for a long time. The ideal situation here would be for Razer to open source their firmware and establish a community-driven approved firmware design and let valve greenlight a specific configuration which can be parsed by the game’s executable (or, for tournaments, can be flashed for valid gameplay).

That’s my 2 cents at least.

Some applications, such as those with tablet demands, are not met by current wayland des with proper tablet support and xwayland is currently the better option. This may have changed in the last year or so, but this is roughly my recollection of certain big art programs.

I’m currently using debian with Docker.

If I were to do it again, though, I’d probably just use either fedora or the server equivalent to silverblue (I can’t remember the name). I am so heavy on docker use at this point that I wouldn’t mind going full immutable.

I use BTRFS for the snapshot and subvolume tools.

It is pretty good but usability is a mixed bag. Always getting better by the month though, it feels like.

Right,

It seems like they realized with Cities Skylines 2 that their QA and overall output quality had to be higher and Life By You’s state must have been in such a position that they weren’t confident they could turn it around.

Ultimately, they need to do some good-will gesture around CS2 in order to gain the trust of the sim audience again and I don’t think it should be that difficult for them to course correct that game (though how they market it and get it in people’s hands is another question…)