Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
That’d be quite high compared to historical inflation-adjusted launch prices.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/game-console-launch-prices-adjusted-for-inflation-1975-2024/
Game Console Launch Prices Adjusted for Inflation (1975-2024)
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/995e4917-5bb0-4dee-8b7d-f43e8ef21d62.webp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_generation_of_video_game_consoles
The ninth generation of video game consoles began in November 2020 with the releases of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S console family and Sony’s PlayStation 5.[1][2][3]
The duration from the eighth generation until the start of the ninth was one of the longest in history, having started in 2012 with the release of Nintendo’s Wii U. Past generations typically had five-year windows as a result of Moore’s law,[10] but Microsoft and Sony instead launched mid-console redesigns, the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro.[11] Microsoft also launched a monthly console lease program, with the option to buy or upgrade.[12] Some analysts believed these factors signaled the first major shift away from the idea of console generations because the potential technical gains of new hardware had become nominal.[13]
The eighth generation video game console period ran for about eight years, so there’d be precedent for the ninth generation consoles to do the same, which would take us to a 2028 release date for the tenth generation.
searches
Nintendo Switch 2 Production Cut 33% Following Weak Holiday Sales, Report Claims
Nintendo has reportedly cut back on manufacturing Switch 2 consoles following weaker than expected holiday sales for the console.
That’s according to Bloomberg, whose sources say Nintendo now expects to make 4 million Switch 2 units this quarter, down 33% on the 6 million it previously planned to manufacture.
Nintendo recently confirmed it had sold fewer Switch 2 consoles internationally over the holiday period than it had once hoped, particularly in the U.S. — though the impact of this had also been dulled somewhat by stronger sales in its homeland of Japan.
I seriously wonder if they’d be better off just deferring the next console generation until 2028.
I never thought Borderlands games were all that good, personally.
I didn’t like the respawning enemies aspect. Felt like an unchanging world.
And the story was kinda forgettable, in my book.
Most of the humor didn’t really do anything for me.
But I did enjoy the constantly-changing collection of procedurally-generated weapons that constantly changed up how one played, which is kinda the signature of the series.
Ah, gotcha, thanks.
At least some of the past ones do; they’re on Steam.
Yup, and with the evdev devices present.
I’m looking at a Trixie system right now, and /dev/input/js0 appears just as expected. Is it possible that you modified your Debian installation way back then, to disable your js devices? Maybe you (or some package you installed) applied a udev rule to block them?
Nope. Vanilla /etc/udev (well, okay, there are some unrelated changes for snapd and one to keep an JBOD enclosure form spinnign down drives). The joydev module isn’t even loaded.
I would be very cautious about that.
US font IP law has some unusual quirks.
Historically, the US took the position that typefaces could not be copyrighted.
Later on, case law established that digital font files — maybe only vector ones, not sure, but it did apply to vector font files — could be copyrighted.
What this resulted in was a common practice in the US that I recall in the 1990s or so having people print out vector fonts (which put them in a non-copyrighted form), then scan them back in, vectorize them, and make a usable font. The font wasn’t great, only approximated the letterforms of the original, and I doubt that they recreated kerning correctly, but it worked more-or-less. Then they’d sell sell bulk collections of these recreated fonts.
The fonts were knockoffs, but that doesn’t mean that they were infringing under US copyright law.
That may be what was going on with that font.
The comp.fonts FAQ has an extended discussion on the topic (and based on that, raster font files also are indeed not copyrightable, just vector).
A great many games rely on a library for joystick input.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that they’re using the js API at the kernel level.
SDL, for example, which will use js devices depending on the circumstance.
Your own link points out that even SDL 1 — very old now — doesn’t use the js interface unless forced to do so.
I’m running Debian trixie. IIRC in the past, for a while when the evdev interface showed up, a problem was that games that could talk to both interfaces would sometimes get double input, because a number would aggregate all input from all joysticks, and so if one had both the js and evdev interfaces visible, they’d see it as two joysticks both; a fix was to not expose them via the js API, rather than leaving them exposed via both. I don’t know how that’s evolved over time, but it may have been a factor encouraging not exposing them by default. I’ve certainly seen the “double input” behavior myself, maybe ten, fifteen years back.
I think that the “female names end in a vowel, male names in a consonant” thing might not be the norm in non-English languages.
searches
https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/download/2485/2408
The relationship between names, phonology, and gender has been reliably demonstrated in studies focused on English names (Mutsukawa 2014; Cassidy et al. 1999). For example, in an analysis of male (n = 267) and female (n = 222) students, Slater and Feinman (1985) identified several phonological gender differences including: (i) more phonemes, more syllables, and a higher ratio of open syllables in female names in comparison to male names; (ii) a strong stress on the first syllable of both female and male names; (iii) a greater likelihood of female names ending in a vowel in comparison to male names; (iv) male names having a larger percentage of voiced beginnings when names begin with consonants; and (v) male names having a higher percentage of endings with high central unrounded vowels when names end in vowels, in comparison to female names.
A few studies have examined phonology, gender, and names in languages other than English. In a series of studies, Mutsukawa (2014) observed that first syllables in Japanese names illustrate gender difference. For example, the letter “a” in the first position is found in female names whereas the letters, “k” and “s” are more common in the name-initial position among males.
The historical analysis indicated that female names ended more frequently with the letters “a”,“e”, “i”" in comparison to male names both in Korea and the U.S.A. As illustrated in Figure 2(a), through each decade under review, female names were more likely to end in the letters “a”,“e”, or “i”. This finding is consistent with observations documented by Barry and Harper (2000).
Hmm. So maybe it does affect some languages outside of English if Korean sees a similar phenomenon, but it doesn’t sound like it’s a universal, if Japanese uses different conventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country-name_etymologies
checks first few entries
Antigua and Barbuda
Antigua: “Ancient”, corrected from earlier Antego,[22] a truncation of the Spanish Santa Maria la Antigua,[23] bestowed in 1493 by Christopher Columbus in honor of the Virgen de la Antigua (“Virgin of the Old Cathedral”[24]), a revered mid-14th-century icon in the Chapel of La Antigua in Seville Cathedral.[25]
How do you calibrate controller deadzones?
Personally, I went with the hardware fix route for dealing with stick drift rather than the software approach of aiming to filter it out, and got a controller with Hall effect thumbsticks.
There are few Steam games I’ve seen that do use gamepads but don’t support Steam Input. Not saying that they don’t exist, but I’d be kind of inclined to suggest playing around with the global Steam Input settings if your gamepad isn’t working with any titles via Steam Input.
I would start with section 2.2.3: Joystick API deadzones and calibration, because the joystick API is the lowest common denominator for this stuff.
Most games don’t use the Joystick API any more (/dev/input/js*), but rather the evdev API (dev/input/event*) which is dealt with further down on that page.
I don’t even have the js devices on my system these days anymore.
I’ve got a substantial existing backlog of owned games and am trying not to just jump on more things until I’ve worked through some of that.
Some things that I’d buy anyway:
If Kenshi 2 comes out anytime soon. My expectation is that that’s years out.
If something like Caves of Qud comes out. I already have some roguelikes to play.
Additional good DLC for some games that I have been playing, like Starfield. The Rimworld DLC has been worthwhile.
If something like Steel Division 2 with Wargame: Red Dragon’s modern setting came out. Steel Division 2 has reasonable game AI and good quality-of-life features, but I personally enjoy the newer setting of Wargame: Red Dragon. WARNO isn’t that — it’s much too fast-paced for me and has less unit variety, feels to me like mostly just directing a constant flood of units. Less of the intricate deck-building that characterized the earlier two titles.
If Fallout 5 came out anytime soon, which I am very confident will not happen.
EDIT: If someone successfully comes out with some game that can be plugged into a local LLM backend — it’ll probably be a game in a new genre, simple ruleset run by the game with its own logic that an LLM is smart enough to reasonably play and generate text description for — I’d be interested in giving that a shot. There are some developers experimenting with that sort of thing, but I don’t think that we’re really there technically. Might not be possible to do this effectively with current LLMs.
EDIT2: I’d also go for a Noita 2 or Noita DLC. There is some developer working on an unnamed game for what looks like a Noita-alike that I discovered a bit back, but it’s in early development, and I don’t know whether the actual gameplay will wind up getting the kind of appeal that Noita has. I imagine that one could get similar mechanics but have a game that isn’t as appealing.
If NTSYNC is the headline feature, the completion of Wine’s WoW64 architecture is the change that will quietly improve everyone’s life going forward. On Windows, WoW64 (Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit) is the subsystem that lets 32-bit applications run on 64-bit systems. Wine has been working toward its own implementation of this for years, and Wine 11 marks the point where it’s officially done.
What this means in practice is that you no longer need 32-bit system libraries installed on your 64-bit Linux system to run 32-bit Windows applications. Wine handles the translation internally, using a single unified binary that automatically detects whether it’s dealing with a 32-bit or 64-bit executable. The old days of installing multilib packages, configuring ia32-libs, or fighting with 32-bit dependencies on your 64-bit distro thankfully over.
This might sound like a small quality-of-life improvement, but it’s a massive piece of engineering work. The WoW64 mode now handles OpenGL memory mappings, SCSI pass-through, and even 16-bit application support. Yes, 16-bit! If you’ve got ancient Windows software from the '90s that you need to run for whatever reason, Wine 11 has you covered.
For gaming specifically, this matters because a surprising number of games, especially older ones, are 32-bit executables. Previously, getting these to work often meant wrestling with your distro’s multilib setup, which varied in quality and ease depending on whether you were on Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, or something else entirely. Now, Wine just handles it for you.
Oh, thank heavens. I remember advising some users here to look for specifically missing 32-bit host Linux library support; I’d run into that problem before.
The NEMA 1-15 power cable becomes the most important item in the room when people discover their specialized devices cannot recharge without it. It is frankly hilarious how much we obsess over liquid cooling and fiber optics while our daily sanity relies on a design that has barely changed since the dawn of the lightbulb.
Only peripherally-related, but on that note:
The most-common lightbulb socket in the US (the “Edison screw”) dates back to 1909.
The 1/8-inch headphones jack isn’t identical to the original standard, but it’s a direct decendant (and electrically-compatible with) the 1/4 inch mono phone jack from (checks) 1877. Since that time, we’ve had variants with more rings (stereo, microphone, balanced audio) added and the size reduction to 1/8-inch for smaller devices. But the basic standard has been around for quite a while.
To cue anyone’s memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_based_on_films