> can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today
I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with.
I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.
That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.
Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport with the other players and can start to play against specific peoples play-styles.
However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.
Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.
But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.
WRT player stats and rankings: I'm inclined to disagree. Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy. Matchmaking often ends up constrained by the number of online players searching for a game at the same time, so the teams may not be well balanced, and the outcome of the match can be decided by the presence of a single highly skilled player who happened to be searching for a match at the right moment. The resulting rankings aren't necessarily a good measure of player skill.
Larger games have the luxury of being able to place players into teams consisting entirely of other players of similar skill levels, against teams of similar composition. The results of those games are a better reflection of those players' skill.
> Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy.
PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game, exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of strangers because I can never git particularly gud?".
You might argue that the solution to that is to have separate rankings for folks in your friends' (or whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with leaderboards that are restricted to the population of players on the private servers on which I play. Plus, private servers give you the option to benefit from active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels forever. [0]
[0] Or encourage them to cheat and be godawful, if that's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what they're getting into by joining.
Well there's more than just one hacker circle. That was never really the case and it's less and less the case as the earth's technologically-inclined population increases.
Culture is emergent. The more you try to define it, the less it becomes culture and the more it becomes a cult. Instead of focusing on culture I prefer to focus on values. I value craftsmanship, so I'm inclined to appreciate normal coding more than AI-assisted coding, for sure. But there's also a craftsmanship to gluing a bunch of AI technologies together and observing some fantastic output. To willfully ignore that is silly.
The OP's rant comes across as a wistful pining for the days of yore, pinning its demise on capitalists and fascists, as if they had this AI thing planned all along. Focusing on boogeymen isn't going to solve anything. You also can't reverse time by demanding compliance with your values or forming a union. AI is here to stay and we're going to have to figure out how to live with it, like it or not.
> The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating.
I've been over-indulging in context switching long before short-form videos ever showed up. The internet itself is all about context switching. But the UX around short-form videos definitely encourages doomscrolling, similar to how microtransaction games encourage neverending grinds.
We definitely need better habits as a collective, but I think a list of "do's" is just as important as a whack-a-mole list of "don'ts".
Yep, the internet as a whole and is the real culprit. We love instant gratification and short feedback loops and the internet provides.
I feel like things will likely get worse before it gets better, but I have long-term hopes that eventually we'll see some cultural change that promotes doing vs consuming.
They do. Also, the ones with matrix LEDs (most newer Models other than the Cybertruck) automatically create a circle of darkness around anything they detect to be another vehicle.
> One of the biggest productivity improvements I've had as a developer was to make a habit of planning all my work upfront. Specifically, when I pick up a ticket, I break it down into a big bullet point list of TODOs.
How an individual developer chooses to process a single ticket is completely unrelated to agile or waterfall. Agile is about structuring your work over a project so that you get a happy customer who ends up with what they actually needed and not what they thought they wanted when they signed the contract and that turned out to be completely not what they needed after two months.
"AI" is the only term that makes sense for end users because "AI" is the only term that is universally understood. Hackernews types tend to overlook the layman.
And I hope no one gets started about how "AI" is an inaccurate term because it's not. That's exactly what we are doing: simulating intelligence. "ML" is closer to describing the implementation, and, honestly, what difference does it make for most people using it.
It is appropriate to discuss these things at a very high level in most contexts.
> the lack of popular multiplayer titles that require a kernel-level anti-cheat is a heavy downside
It's a downside if all you want to do is play those games. But it's an upside if you're hoping they someday ditch all that nonsense. This puts more pressure on those publishers.
More likely is that some linux distro like SteamOS gets a large enough install base that it actually makes sense as a target and these big platforms make their anti-cheat work on at least that distro. As unfortunate as it is not having a very strong anti-cheat or a system like Valve's VAC ban to detect and lock cheaters out leads to really shitty online experiences in public lobbies for PVP games.
Some anti cheat works with proton if the game dev allows it. But anti cheats are generally not effective on Linux because you can just load your cheat as a kernel driver.
Secure boot, signed drivers, attestation, is all possible. But you can just sign your own driver anyway so kinda useless.
Might be possible with a more secure mode that is booted into when you launch a game that only allow specific drivers and programs like the game and maybe discord.
They generally run Linux without issue already... that said, pre-installed options would be nice, not sure if SteamOS is the most appropriate. Probably Pop, Cachy or Bazzite, and given that Pop comes from a competitor, unlikely.
We're talking about making it popular though, so shipping with it is the important part. You can also install Windows on the Steam Deck but that doesn't make the Steam Deck a win for Windows.
> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use.
The real limiting factor is more likely to be having a large headset on your face for an extended period of time, combined with a battery that isn't meant for all-day use. The resolution is fine. We went decades with low resolution monitors. Just zoom in or bring it closer.
The battery isn't an issue if you're stationary, you can plug it in.
The resolution is a major problem. Old-school monitors used old-school OSes that did rendering suitable for the displays of the time. For example, anti-aliased text was not typically used for a long time. This meant that text on screen was blocky, but sharp. Very readable. You can't do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don't precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset's displays. It's inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.
There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that's a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.
> There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. [...] But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer.
What's available now might vary from person to person. I'm using a normal-sized 1080p monitor, and this desk doesn't have space for a second monitor. That's what a VR headset would have to compete against for me; just having several virtual monitors might be enough of an advantage, even if their resolution is slightly lower.
(Also, I have used old-school VGA CRT monitors; as could be easily seen when switching to a LCD monitor with digital DVI input, text on a VGA CRT was not exactly sharp.)
The weight on your face is half that of Quest 3, they put the rest of the weight on the back which perfectly balances it on your head. It's going to be super comfortable.
Yeah, already many people use something like the Bobovr alternative headstrap for the Quest3 that has an additional battery pack in the back, which helps balancing the device in the front.
Which doubles the weight on your head, which increases the inertia you feel when moving around playing active games. The Frame is half the weight on your face, so active games are going to be a lot more comfortable.
Whether or not we used to walk to school uphill both ways, that won't make the resolution fine.
To your point, I'd use my Vision Pro plugged in all day if it was half the weight. As it stands, its just too much nonsense when I have an ultrawide. If I were 20 year old me I'd never get a monitor (20 year old me also told his gf iPad 1 would be a good laptop for school, so,)
One problem is that in most settings a real monitor is just a better experience for multiple reasons. And in a tight setting like an airplane where VR monitors might be nice, the touch controls become more problematic. "Pardon me! I was trying to drag my screen around!"
Lol, I laughed then 20 seconds later started taking this literally: I think that was July, it had been two years, and it was over by November (presumably due to my other excellent qualities!) (all joking aside, for younger members in our audience, it was sweet and she was around in my life for at least another decade)
Your 2K monitor occupies something like a 20-degree field of view from a normal sitting position/distance. The 2K resolution in a VR headset covers the entire field of view.
So effectively your 1080p monitor has ~6x the pixel density of the VR headset.
The problem is that 2k square is spread across the whole FOV of the headset so when it's replicating a monitor unless it's ridiculously close to your face a lot of those pixels are 'wasted' in comparison to a monitor with similar stats.
Totally true, but unlike a real monitor you can drag a virtual monitor close to your face without changing the focal distance, meaning it's no harder on your eyes. (Although it is harder on your neck.)
To get the same pixel per degree as my work laptop I'd have to put it's virtual replacement screen 11 (virtual) inches from my face and that's probably the lowest PPD screen in my normal life unless I get a bad desk at work that day. Just pasting them inches from your nose is not a great solution, you can already do that with a good set of monitor arms and there's a reason almost no one does it.
I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with.
I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.
That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.
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