wavey

Just saw this on Mastodon:

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So one of the sources Tim Langdell cites on his website for “setting the record straight” is IGN. No, not that IGN: Indy Gamer News. A website that looks like, I dunno, an ageing bloke with few design skills (and who, say, might not know how to create a magazine cover either) might have made it. And that looks like passing off. And that had precisely one live article, suspiciously on the subject of Edge. https://indygamernews.com/17042023EdgeOrEdgy.html

 

HMMMMM.

http://edgegames.com/mobigame.html

On 13/05/2023 at 18:28, Vorgot said:

I've forgotten a lot and was tempted to reread them (the joy of Kindles and all your content being available) but will hold off as I'm enjoying the series

It's worth having a look at least... I read it on Kindle around the time it was released, but the show has prompted my wife to read it now, and it has since turned into a very flashy book - animated illustrations throughout, it looks gorgeous if that's your thing.

I'm really enjoying the adaptation, it looks pretty much identical to what I imagined from the book. And Apple seems like a perfect home for the show - I mean it is about people forced to live in a closed ecosystem after all.

18 minutes ago, ckny said:

Can someone explain why they'd remove stuff? How will that save them or make them money?

Basically they have to pay out residuals for any content on the platform. The formula that has been negotiated between the unions and the studios isn't related to how popular a show / movie is, but is just based on the number of subscribers to the platform. So each show has a fixed cost, regardless of how many people are watching it, and removing the show will let Disney avoid that cost.

Not great from a user's perspective, but you can see how it would make purely financial sense from a Disney executive's point of view.

1 hour ago, thesnwmn said:

But if they mean how pressing the "Steam" button on a deck will suspend the game then that's different. Although actually that's not entirely consistent on Deck either. Some games pause and others keep running.

Ah right - is that the equivalent of alt-tabbing away from a game, or is it meant to save the state as well? The review also compared it to the Switch's suspend/resume, which I think must mean whole-device suspend - iirc anything other than using the home screen will close your game and lose unsaved progress. On the other hand, I scanned through a few more reviews, and I haven't seen anyone else mention it yet, so maybe it's mistaken or referring to something else.

We talked about this earlier, but if this IGN review of the Steam Deck competitor the Asus ROG Ally is accurate, this is a dealbreaker:

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The biggest negative is that the Ally lacks the Steam Deck’s (and the Switch’s) ability to suspend and resume a game at the touch of a button. This means that any time you want to stop playing for longer than a simple pause, you’ll need to save and quit out of your game entirely, and load up again fresh the next time you want to play. This is, of course, the standard way things go on desktop PCs

It's bizarre - it's not a Windows limitation, suspend/resume from within games works fine on my Steam Deck with Win 11. But lack of suspend on a mobile device - probably the single most important feature for how people will use this in real life - makes it a non-starter.

2 hours ago, thesnwmn said:

If people have a trouble free experience of sleeping the Deck mid game and it resuming without issue then that's great news.

Yeah it seems to work fine - I suspect mainly due to MS getting Windows working for tablets, where a smooth sleep/resume would be essential.

Actually one caveat to that: being Windows, it will sometimes randomly wake up out of standby on its own. I remember the same kind of thing happening on desktop machines and laptops as well, but maybe I've just not configured something correctly..? Anyway, not ideal for a battery-powered device.

19 hours ago, thesnwmn said:

Plus no quick resume. So you have to hibernate/sleep/turn off every time. 

I agree about Windows - I have it on my Steam Deck, and it's unpleasant to use. I wouldn't recommend it as a route for the general consumer. But what do you mean here? The power button seems to behave the same as in SteamOS - you can press it mid-game, it goes into standby instantly; press it again and it wakes up.

This is a bit off-topic, but I wondered if anyone had heard of anything similar..?

My wife and I have joint credit cards from Sainsbury's bank, we took them out 15-20 years ago and never use them any more. (For the wife's use mainly, I don't think I ever used mine, and don't have the details saved anywhere.) A month ago there was a mysterious £1 charge to it from Microsoft, and then a month later £10.99 from Microsoft. That seemed familiar...!

Phoned the bank, and the charge was made on my card number, but with the wrong expiry date. Phoned up Microsoft, and they couldn't tell us anything because neither of our names matched their record of the card number used.

It seems weirdly small potatoes for credit card fraud, and easily stopped. But they obviously let through a charge with the wrong expiry date and name. Maybe someone typed their card number wrong and got mine..? But that seems pretty improbable. I don't know, weird stuff.

7 hours ago, JohnC said:

Archer Maclean.

60's no age. His snooker and pool games were properly revolutionary. I always fondly think about IK+ whenever I see @ScouserInExile post.

1 hour ago, T Pot said:

Anybody rocking Windows only on their Deck? I'm tempted to bin off steam OS and Uuse Win11 with steam auto launching in big picture mode at boot. That way I have acess to my Gamepass games and a few others that just won't play well with Steam OS no matter what I do. 

Yep Windows-only here, because I wanted to maximise compatibility with my library, and minimize crashes and glitches in-game. And it's fine! I haven't done anything with the UI outside of games, so I'm using plain Windows to launch them - not ideal, but it's only for me and I don't have the time to set up anything fancier.

To setup you can just install Windows from USB, then the Steam-supplied hardware drivers, and it will basically be working. I did find a much more comprehensive guide, which I plan to go through at some point (so I can't vouch for its quality yet): https://github.com/baldsealion/Steamdeck-Ultimate-Windows11-Guide/wiki

The one fiddly part is the driver for the controller input - Steam has its own, so any game through that is fine. For games outside of Steam, I need to quit Steam completely and start another driver, SWICD. But after that, Gamepass games etc work fine.

Having said all that though, I'm probably going to dual-boot Windows and SteamOS when it's supported properly. There's *one* game I've had an issue with, Toree 2, a cute/cheap little platformer, but whenever I launch the game it's getting rogue inputs from somewhere which makes it unplayable - like there's an extra controller plugged in, with the left stick jammed in one direction. It's Deck verified, so presumably it is fine under SteamOS. But that's the only game I've seen that happen in so far, and SteamOS is much nicer to use overall.

2 hours ago, Gotters said:

is it just price arbitrage though beyond that ?

GOG sells games without DRM, so you can download and keep them even if GOG go belly-up. They also put some work into making older games still playable on newer systems, and provide extra stuff for some games - soundtracks, manual scans, guides etc. But for modern games, yeah it's usually just down to price.

33 minutes ago, shirubagan said:

Any chance you could PM me how to roll back the OS? I am utterly clueless.

It was a full re-install for me, I'm afraid, I'm not sure if there's a less drastic way to do it. I followed this guide to get hold of an older installer.

17 minutes ago, shirubagan said:

I have no clue what I'm doing with Windows at all and was mucking about with it on an SSD for Game Pass, but yesterday's updates seem to have borked it. I'll stick to SteamOS until Win11 is officially supported/I can get someone who knows what they're doing to set it up for me.

If it's the latest Win 11 update (22H2) then I know that can cause a crash with the audio driver for the deck - I had to install an earlier version (21H2).

3 minutes ago, T Pot said:

Could you just have Steam open at startup and have it start in Big Picture mode? I've read that their plans soon is to replace big picture mode with the interface from Steam OS which would be great. 

Yes I'm sure that's an option, and the Deck UI will be nice when they release it, but it's not a priority for me at the moment, it's only an extra tap or two.

Gamepass was the main attraction for me, but yeah, it's definitely not something I would recommend to everyone. If you're not having any problems, stick with SteamOS, it looks like updates are regular and it will only get better over time.

1 minute ago, yakumo said:

If you wiped the deck to be Windows only, does this mean you lose a lot of functionality baked into Steam OS?. Also is performance worst as well playing in Windows?. plus I guess configuration is more of a hassle since you have to manually tweak everything?. Also what app are you talking about regarding the controller?, is there a video demonstrating this as well?. 

Loss of SteamOS functionality - yes, you lose e.g. the automatic graphics memory management SteamOS does, so I put it up to 4G in the BIOS. By default you lose the menus that pop up for the Steam and ... buttons, but I've not looked into those at all yet. For Steam, the experience is exactly the same as a desktop running big picture mode, with the same kind of Steam overlays and configuration options. Valve do provide Windows drivers for the GPU, Bluetooth, audio, wifi etc.

Performance - I remember seeing benchmarks where people have measured a performance loss under Windows, but it's not something I've noticed while playing.

Configuration being a hassle - not that I've noticed, any more than on a standard Windows desktop. But I haven't looked at e.g. optimizing the battery performance, so if that's a concern I'd do more research first.

Controller - there are a few ways to support the controller in Windows I believe (outside of Steam - inside, it works perfectly). I use this app, but haven't tried out any of the alternatives yet.

At the moment, I must say I have something that doesn't feel like a console at all outside of the games themselves, and it's a question of taste whether you're alright with that or not. I'm sure I could get it booting into some kind of frontend to make it nicer, but for me it's not worth the hassle. I have it booting to a Windows desktop - it's ugly and a lot less nice to use than the SteamOS deck mode, but like I say, I was aiming for the stability and compatibility of games more than anything else.

5 hours ago, thesnwmn said:

If I had a main guess with most of these it's that its window/display management is very dodgy. It simply gets itself into situations where its picked the wrong thing (or nothing) to render to the physical screen and so the user cannot see what they're meant to.

I know this won't be for everyone, but I've put Windows on mine, and I have no regrets so far. Having games run in their natural environment rather than through an emulation layer solves a lot of these kind of problems, and for me that kind of stability is worth sacrificing a bit of faff around launching games and maybe some performance. Plus being able to install Gamepass games locally is a big advantage. Suspend / resume works perfectly, Steam big-picture mode is an OK alternative to the (better) SteamOS deck UI, the only real issue is getting non-Steam games to recognise the controller - in my setup this means quitting Steam fully and loading up another app for the controller before launching a game.

Maybe I've been unlucky, but I've seen a few game crashes, and I've occasionally had the controller become unresponsive. XCloud is great when it works, but sometimes just boots to a white screen, and it's not much use out of the house. It feels alien to be thinking of Windows as more reliable than Linux, but for games I wondered if it might be.

Has anyone tried a Windows-only setup for the SteamDeck?

Don't get me wrong, SteamOS is incredibly impressive in what they've managed to do, and I love Linux and use it all day every day at work. But as a way to avoid all the small incompatibilities, the workarounds for certain games, checking the Verified / Playable status, and being able to install Gamepass games, I'm wondering if it might be a more straightforward route for the sake of a dodgy £15 Windows key from Amazon.

So before I take the plunge, has anyone here tried it? I know Valve have now released Windows drivers for the hardware, but are there any pitfalls, or will it screw performance, or anything like that? Or should I wait for SteamOS 3 and go down the dual boot path?

It looks like the game has been optimized to cull all the polygons outside of a 4:3 ratio screen - is there any way to change the resolution to something 4:3?

I will say GTA V runs really well - I have it on Steam, and there’s a little bit of faff first time round dealing with the Rockstar launcher, but when it’s running it looks good and is a pretty solid 60fps. I think it starts with the graphics options quite low, but I made it native resolution, and bumped up most of the options a notch or two, and it’s coping well. It’s installed on SD card as well, and it seems plenty fast enough to stream the map in.

I was really impressed as I still think of it as a recent game, but I guess it’s like 7 years old now.

Mine arrived today, lovely bit of kit!

(Warning, shipping talk follows)

I don't know if my shipping experience was unusual, but in case it helps anyone expecting to order one:

- Ordered on Saturday

- In Steam, order said 'Shipping soon' until Weds morning

- From Weds, the GLS tracker info they sent said that they were waiting for the package to be given to them

- It was still saying this on Thursday night!

- Friday morning, Parcelforce said they had it nearby, and it arrived Friday lunchtime

So it looks like it wasn't tracked at all through the Netherlands, but it was a nice surprise to get it today.

21 minutes ago, SuperCapes said:

Oh Yeah!!!!!

Nice one, same here! Apologies if this has been discussed to death, but for the UK what kind of time frame is it from getting a tracking number to delivery? (I'm not even sure which country they're being sent from!)

I wonder who this was?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/xba_profile-xbo_topother/game-pass-subscription-cancellations/361b0608-c07b-41e8-9536-f6cb79318b88

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Xbox has identified a fraudulent group of resellers who were stacking multiple instances of the PC introductory offer and converting it to Game Pass Ultimate. To resolve this issue, we have notified the impacted users individually prior to having their fraudulently acquired subscriptions cancelled.

My main problem with the finale was the big discussion about the Ship of Theseus.

What with the sitcom theme, they should have gone with Trigger's Broom instead.