If you’re interested in home automation, I think that there’s a reasonable argument for running it on separate hardware. Not much by way of hardware requirements, but you don’t want to take it down, especially if it’s doing things like lighting control.

Same sort of idea for some data-logging systems, like weather stations or ADS-B receivers.

Other than that, though, I’d probably avoid running an extra system just because I have hardware. More power usage, heat, and maintenance.

EDIT: Maybe hook it up to a power management device, if you don’t have that set up, so that you can power-cycle your other hardware remotely.

I assume that early access games are in the running when they exit EA. Presumably, that’s when they’re at their strongest. Doesn’t seem to me like it’d be fair to treat them as being entered when they enter EA, as they aren’t fully developed yet.

I have a very, very tiny folding knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that, and I suppose that that could cut a seatbelt, though I doubt that it’d be likely for the seatbelt to jam. No glass punch, though.

investigates

Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

reads further

It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.

Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.

If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.

I think that there’s more to it than that.

My own guesses are:

• I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.

• Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.

• This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.

  In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]

  They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.

  So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.

  kagis

  https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

  Smartphone dependency over time

  Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.

  Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.

• I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.

• Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.

• Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.

xev also works in Wayland via the X11 support, so either will be fine.

I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.

Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.

My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.

I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.

My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.

Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.

The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.

Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.

Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.

Plus, there’s no point. Like, if you want to make a good KSP successor, lots of people were unhappy with what happened with KSP2 and would be happy to buy it. Why unnecessarily start a fight that risks the game?

EDIT: Hell, if someone made a good KSP successor, it’d be very near the top of my own purchase list. I really liked KSP.

And thus a piece of Eastern European folklore that was popularized in a novel by a Irish writer and then spread via mostly American movies became a Japanese video game series now at least partially developed in Spain and begets a play acted by Japanese female actors.

!buildapc@lemmy.ca for a link that will work for anyone, regardless of their home instance.

I think that “best” is open to various interpretations.

The most-emotionally-impactful in the context of the game?

The most-graphically-impressive?

The best-integrated with the game?

I often don’t try and play the latest-and-greatest games, and while I’m sure that I’ve played games with thunderstorms in them, I can’t immediately recall any recent first-person 3D games…and I’ve kind of shifted way from FPSes in recent years. Probably the newest 3D game that I can immediately recall playing that I distinctly recall having thunderstorms – though I think that they were rain is modded Fallout 4; I was using one of the weather mods.

I think it was one of:

• Natural and Atmospheric Commonwealth

• True Storms

There are radstorms that impact gameplay by dosing the player with radiation, and I suppose could be considered to a different form of thunderstorm. These are separate from normal storms. Fallout 76 also has radstorms, but they are less-frequent and far-less-damaging than in (modded, don’t recall base game) Fallout 4.

I guess that that’d probably be the most-graphically-impressive that I personally can recall off-the-cuff. I’m sure that there must be some newer, fancier thunderstorms out there.

For impact…I can’t recall for certain whether-or-not there was actual thunder and lighting other than in cutscenes, though there’s certainly rain… But The Saboteur is an Assassin’s Creed-style game (I understand; I’ve never played more than a very small amount of those games) set in World War II Paris. The areas that are occupied by Nazi forces are mostly black and white, with a small amount of color, mostly red, and at least some of the time, it’s raining. The areas where forces have been pushed back look kind of like spring. I think that it added to the game’s atmosphere a lot.

There are probably some games that this would work well for, but I’m not sure that it’d be a great replacement the way a physical thumb keyboard is for texting or the like.

Most present-day games that I can think of that I play use the keyboard as a grid of buttons. They expect to have your hand over the thing – often the left hand, with the right on the mouse – to let you be able to push multiple buttons quickly.

I’m not usually doing much text entry, which is what I’d expect a thumb keyboard to work well with.

I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You

I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.

But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.

Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.

I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.

But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.

If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.

I did like Sim City a fair bit.

Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet

NUT has a hardware compatibility list.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

Turn-based RPGs I can understand, but “RTS” is “real-time strategy” – it’s intrinsically not turn-based.

You can get turn-based strategy games, but they aren’t RTSes.

It depends on what you’re looking for. There are more hard-warsim oriented games at Matrix Games, though a number of those are also available on Steam these days.

Steam has a “Turn-based Strategy” tag:

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1741&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

Yeah, same. If I were going to get a handheld console, it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want, but…I really don’t need another portable computing device.