tal @ tal @kbin.social

Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbi

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2 yr. ago

Honestly, there are very few games I have seen that don't work on Proton today. You might need to update to the latest experimental or use the GloriousEggroll build of Proton, but I don't even bother checking ProtonDB any more.

I will say that one of the games I really would like to run on Linux, Command: Modern Operations (and its predecessor, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations) does not run on Proton. But aside from that...

Well, there's that The Outer Worlds game that was billed as being kind of like Fallout. I was kind of disappointed with it, because some of what I'd call its weak points were really part of what make Bethesda's games for me. Bethesda has interesting perks that really alter gameplay, and The Outer Worlds has pretty bland perks that slightly bump stats. The Outer Worlds is, strictly-speaking, open-world, but there's no reason to really retrace steps, so it functionally feels a lot more linear. Bethesda focuses on you wandering around the world and just stumbling across interesting things, and The Outer Worlds has little to stumble across other than in cities. Bethesda has interesting weapons that operate significantly-differently, and The Outer Worlds has a few weapon classes that all operate in about the same way, including uniques, aside from several "science weapons".

However, it did get a good Metacritic score, so I expect that there were people who liked it. It was also pretty bug-free. And it is kind of in the same vein, but just didn't have what made me really enjoy Fallout titles.

More-broadly-speaking, I guess that you could call any open-world games a little like Bethesda's stuff. The Grand Theft Auto series, Saboteur, probably the Assassin's Creed series (though I've barely ever played those), the Mafia series.

EDIT: Hmm. Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds were both done by Obsidian, and Microsoft apparently acquired them as well five years back and rolled them into Xbox Game Studios, so from a standpoint of people on other platforms (well, I'm on Linux, but can run the Windows releases via compatibility software), I can imagine that The Outer Worlds doesn't make things less frustrating, even if one does really like it.

Maybe Valve should take another crack at the console market.

I mean, you can just plug a PC into your television. Flip on Steam's Big Picture Mode. It's pretty similar, just that you don't have to buy your hardware from Valve.

It’s a major historically cross platform franchise, for one thing.

Also, there aren't a whole lot of game developers that do Bethesda-style games.

I haven't played any Mario games in a long time, and I don't know what they look like after consoles went 3d. But go back some decades, and they were side-scrolling platform games. There were lots of other side-scrolling platformers. The Mario series was a particularly good series, but it had lots of competition.

Hmm. Yeah, I see. WP says that everyone inland blocks airport construction or expansion near them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThamesEstuaryAirport

A potential Thames Estuary Airport has been proposed at various times since the 1940s. London's existing principal airports, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and Luton are each sub-optimally located in various ways, such as being too close to built-up areas or requiring aircraft to fly low over London. In the case of Heathrow, the growth of air traffic has meant that the airport is operating at 98% capacity.

Economic considerations have so far ruled out a new coastal airport, while political considerations have ruled out a new inland airport,[1] leaving planners with an as-yet-unresolved dilemma.

By 1960, it was becoming apparent that further air capacity was needed. Stansted, a former military airfield in Essex, was proposed as a third airport in 1963. A Government White Paper endorsed Stansted in 1967 and in 1968, after an inconclusive public inquiry, the Government appointed Hon. Mr Justice Roskill to head the Commission on the Third London Airport (the "Roskill Commission") to review sites for a third airport. Cublington in the Vale of Aylesbury was its chosen site.[4] It was seen offering the best access, as it was situated on the key London-Birmingham axis, it would be away from built-up areas and it would cost less than most of the alternatives.[5] The proposal met with strong opposition from local people and more broadly from politicians and middle-class voters which made it politically untenable.[6]

The Thames Hub Airport (like Shivering Sands, nicknamed "Boris Island" after Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London[32]) is a proposal for a 4-runway hub airport to be located on the Isle of Grain in Kent.

The Thames Hub Airport proposal was submitted to the UK's Airports Commission by Foster+Partners in July 2013 as a proposed solution to the question of how the UK can maintain its global hub status. The future remained unclear as the option was not on the Commission's original short list, but was still considered. It was finally rejected on grounds of cost (possibly as high as £100 billion) and environmental damage by the Airports Commission in an announcement made on 2 September 2014, leaving Gatwick and Heathrow as the remaining options.

Heathrow

googles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeathrowAirport

In 2022, it was the second-busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic and the second busiest airport in Europe.

As the required length for runways has grown, Heathrow now has only two parallel runways running east-west.

https://nats.aero/blog/2021/11/3-2-1-now-the-story-behind-heathrows-parallel-runway-take-off/

Heathrow’s runways are ‘only’ 1,414 metres apart, which is too close to be able to do parallel departures outside of very specific weather and visual conditions.

I'm kind of surprised that Heathrow hasn't been expanded already.

My assumption is that that's gonna get thrown out because they don't have standing. Probably some kind of case law along those lines already, since I figure someone's probably tried that before.

googles

Looks like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julianav.UnitedStates

Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is a climate-related lawsuit filed in 2015 by 21 youth plaintiffs against the United States and several executive branch officials. Filing their case in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, the plaintiffs, represented by the non-profit organization Our Children's Trust, include Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the members of Martinez's organization Earth Guardians, and climatologist James Hansen as a "guardian for future generations".

They call for the government to offer “both declaratory and injunctive relief for their claim—specifically, a declaration of the federal government's fiduciary role in preserving the atmosphere and an injunction of its actions which contravene that role.”

In January 2020, a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue for an injunction.

Legal actions to affect climate change by federal and state-level governments have been attempted since the 1990s; one of the first known cases was led by Antonio Oposa, a Philippine lawyer that represented a class-action suit of 43 students against the Philippine government to protect a forest surrounding their village.

Since 2011, Our Children's Trust has been filing various state and federal lawsuits on behalf of youth, though most of these have been dismissed by courts, as courts generally have not ruled that access to a clean environment is a right that can be litigated against.[8][5][6] Such cases are also generally dismissed as lawsuits cannot be initiated by "generalized grievances", and require plaintiffs with standing to sue and can demonstrate concrete harm that the government has done, and that the courts can at least partially redress the harm by order of the court.[9] Further, cases cannot be brought to court if they deal with a "political question" which cannot be resolved by actions of Congress and the President.[9]

The "political question" bit should be inapplicable, since this is a company, but the lack of standing to sue for climate change probably does apply.

I assume that this is a crowd-pleaser by the California executive, that they expect it to get tossed out but want the political points.

The above text says that the aim is to do RDMA, to let the NIC access memory directly, but I'd think that existing Linux zero-copy interfaces would be sufficient for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-copy

The Linux kernel supports zero-copy through various system calls, such as:

• sendfile, sendfile64;[9]
• splice;[10]
• tee;[11]
• vmsplice;[12]
• processvmreadv;[13]
• processvmwritev;[14]
• copyfilerange;[15]
• raw sockets with packet mmap[16] or AFXDP.

So I'd think that the target workload has to be one where you can't just fetch a big chunk of pre-existing data, where you have to interject server-generated data in response to small requests, and even the overhead of switching to userspace to generate some kind of server-generated response is too high.

Which seems like a heck of a niche case.

But it obviously got approval from the kernel team.

googles

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/filesystems/smb/ksmbd.html

The subset of performance related operations belong in kernelspace and the other subset which belong to operations which are not really related with performance in userspace. So, DCE/RPC management that has historically resulted into number of buffer overflow issues and dangerous security bugs and user account management are implemented in user space as ksmbd.mountd. File operations that are related with performance (open/read/write/close etc.) in kernel space (ksmbd). This also allows for easier integration with VFS interface for all file operations.

I guess you could accelerate open and close too.

In all seriousness, I feel like if you're in such a niche situation that you can't afford the overhead of going to userspace for that, (a) there's likely room to optimize your application to request different things and (b) CIFS might not be the best option to be sharing data over the network either.

The first page I get when googling for "Boiler Upgrade Scheme" is this:

https://www.gov.uk/apply-boiler-upgrade-scheme

It seems to walk you through the process.

There have been vulnerabilities on the TCP/IP stack on a number of platforms (maybe all?), and that's a rather smaller attack surface.

EDIT: It also looks like ksmbd has already built itself a bit of a security history:

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6991749

EDIT2: A bad security history:

https://lwn.net/Articles/871866/

The commit history for ksmbd shows a steady stream of fixes, as expected. Worryingly, though, many of the problems being fixed are clearly security issues — not a good thing in a network filesystem implementation. Examples include:

• The code to change ownership and permissions did not check existing file permissions first.
• Failure to validate data lengths could lead to access to invalid data.
• The server would blindly follow symbolic links during pathname lookup.
• Numerous failures to validate buffer lengths, such as this one or this one.

All of those fixes were applied after ksmbd landed in the mainline; there are others that came before. Currently, twelve fixes to ksmbd credit Coverity scans in their changelogs.

Those would worry me if they showed up in a production userspace network filesystem.

[continued from parent]

• Temperature. I know that Disney's done some things like have water jets that spray at people for their rides. I imagine that someone could rig something up with a computer-controlled heater/air conditioner, make a cave in-game feel cool and clammy. Kind of hard to both set up in arbitrary places and get a common experience across people. There have been people playing with using thermocouples for VR.
• Scent. Again, I recall reading that Disney worked on incorporating this into Fantasia presentations many decades back. I suppose that one could have some kind of device that kept a bank of essential oils and then could mist a given set, though I think that how long it lingered would depend a lot on the surrounding environment. Maybe if you had some kind of vent by the nose or something that passed air directly by the face. There are apparently companies trying to sell devices to do this sort of thing.
• Motion simulators exist, can be used for stuff like flight sims, but I think that the price point is probably going to remain too high for them to really take off for the mass market.

I mean, in theory, I could imagine someone writing some kind of software layer that cleverly abstracts all these sorts of systems, has games drive events. But in practice, I've been watching external devices that aim to provide a new source of sensory input come out for a long time, and they have pretty depressingly and consistently failed to take over the market.

I think that realistically, in terms of having many games providing sensory input to people, it's gonna be the display and audio, and maybe VR headsets for the foreseeable future.

Maybe as stuff like OpenRGB becomes more standard we could also see that tied into game/music events more as well

That's possible, though I should note that control of external lighting has been around for a while, and we haven't really seen it become a standard thing in games. I think that the problem is less lack of a protocol and more that similar configurations aren't commonly available or that people don't feel that there's a great way to incorporate it into games. And it's not even specific to lighting, but to devices other than the monitor and speakers that provide some kind of sensory input to people. After all these years, the norm is still:

1. You can see what's on the display.
2. You can hear what the speakers play.

For the lifetime of the personal computer, maybe fifty or sixty years at this point, the only real change in the norm has been for fidelity improvements to what's on the display and fidelity improvements to what's playing though speakers (well, headphones more-frequently these days). And people have tried a lot of things.

• I'd guess that keyboard backlighting is one of the more-common things, and it doesn't get used much.
• Monitor bias lighting has been around for a while.
• RGB LEDs on the PS5 controller are standard, but I don't own a PS5, so I dunno how commonly they're made use of.
• DMX512 is a standard for hooking up stage lighting devices like strobes and spotlights and colored lighting and smoke machines and stuff -- you'd use it to drive stuff like live performances, lightshows at clubs, stuff that runs in time with music like this. USB-to-DMX512 transceivers are pretty affordable, and Linux can handle them.
• Multiple monitors. That's seen some uptake in flight sims (though I think that VR headsets will displace that), but outside of that, doesn't seem to have really caught on. And it's a (moderately) expensive way of doing things.
• You can get external small displays, of the sort that Matrix Orbital sells. Logitech tried incorporating them into "gaming keyboards" with integrated miniature displays for a while; it looks like they dropped that in 2013, with the G19s. There have been a few games that have had uptake. It did not take off.
• Various forms of 3D displays coupled with glasses did not do very well.
• VR headsets. We'll see where this goes. I remember an earlier VR headset craze back towards 2000 that didn't seem to take off, and I'm not sold that the current one is going to become the norm either. Though at least in terms of sensory input to your eyes, that can (given sufficient brightness, contrast, resolution, etc) replace all the other visual stuff here. If I had to bet on one external sensory device becoming the norm in the next decade, I'd bet on VR headsets, and I'm honestly not that bullish on even them. Maybe if they become cheaper and higher-resolution. I will say that I think that they pair well with laptops, since they address the limited screen size well.
• Technically, there have been some changes in speakers that have met with some level of uptake, but none have become the norm. You have things like chairs with backrest-mounted subwoofers or surround sound.
• Tactile feedback touchpads.
• Force feedback -- not simply rumble motors that use offset-weight motors, which is what I think a lot of people think of when they think of force feedback -- doesn't seem to me to be very healthy. Used to be that there were joysticks that simulated the resistance in pre-fly-by-wire aircraft, like the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro, but those seem to have fallen out of fashion. There are still some steering wheels that provide resistance in response to driving. The PS5 controller has, as I understand it, voice-coil actuators and mechanical resistance on the triggers. But in general, I feel like force feedback has been something where people have talked about potential for a long time, but which hasn't really become the norm.
• Rez famously came with a vibrator; these days, buttplug.io is a FOSS layer that can drive a bunch of sexual stimulation hardware (not, despite the name, just buttplugs). That's had some game uptake, but it's pretty limited. People have been working on computer-controlled sex devices since the mid-1970s, and it still hasn't become the norm.

[continued in child]

It looks like people have run WINE under Cygwin, so barring Cygwin-introduced compatibility issues, Windows can use the same compatibility layer.

I like the idea of both the game influencing the music and the music influencing the game.

Like, you have a directed graph of music, with audio on the edges, and the current game state determining which edge one takes out of a node. The game influences the music there.

But then you also have an "event track" on the edges that can be used to do cosmetic things like flash lights in the game or whatnot in time with the music, or, as with rhythm games, require the player to do things in time with the music. There, the music influences the game.

Can we just… not get remasters and remakes anymore?

I'd like to have HD versions of a number of older 2D games that I enjoy re-released.

Honestly, I'd like to have HD versions of some newer games that were originally done with low-resolution graphics, like Binding of Isaac and Caves of Qud. Nothing wrong with low-resolution graphics -- I think that it enables shifting resources to developing gameplay, and that that's often a good tradeoff -- but those games did well, and I'd be willing to pay for flashier graphics.

If you look at Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, it's gone from ASCII to graphics to significantly-prettier tilesets. Dwarf Fortress did something similar. I think that that shows that there's demand for it.

I appreciate that not everyone wants that, but I would.

The new world has to be pretty similar to the old, given that the article says that one can flip between the modern and original graphics.

Talking of nostalgia, all three games are being released with an option to switch between the original blocky polygon graphics, and lovely patched-over modern designs. If it’s anything like the Monkey Island remakes, this means I will spend the entire time obsessively switching back and forth, unable to cope without knowing how every scene looks in each incarnation.

That ratio doesn't matter.

What matters is the value derived from some prohibited activity relative to the fine/lawsuits resulting from that activity.

Let's say that Company A sells oranges, and uses some pesticide that isn't approved, and gets a fine for it.

Let's say that Company B sells apples, and improperly claimed that the apples were fresher than they were to grocery stores and is sued for that.

Let's say that Company A and Company B merge and form Company C. The value of Company C would be larger, but it would make no sense for either of the above two disincentives to be larger. Being part of Company C doesn't make engaging in bad behavior more-desirable than it does for when A and B were separate, and so the disincentives one establishes for bad behavior shouldn't grow either.

Honestly, looking at the numbers, if the aim was to increase commuting range to London, even Birmingham was beyond what I'd be willing to tolerate, even with HS2.

https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/19/hs2-travel-times-route-speed-and-time-you-could-save-on-your-commute-15631586/

London to Birmingham: It’s expected this journey will take 52 minutes instead of 81 minutes (one hour, 21 minutes).

London to Manchester: It’ll take just over an hour (63 minutes to be exact) to get from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly if all goes to plan with HS2. Right now, it takes 144 minutes (two hours, 24 minutes).

So it's about an hour to either, and that's just one-way and only the train portion of the commute; there's going to be more travel at each end.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistics-great-britain-2021/transport-statistics-great-britain-2021

the average time taken to travel to work was 28 minutes across all modes, 3 minutes faster than 2019’s average

So just the train portion of the commute would be something like double the average British total commute length.

That's a considerable chunk of one's day spent commuting.

I hadn't heard the term either until recently, and had to look it up. An American bully is a cross between pit bulls and bulldogs. A bully XL is the largest variant.

The breed is not an officially-recognized one, so definitions are a bit fuzzy.