• 2 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Coming at this from a very basic level, but I’m wondering if this could help me.

    I have such an unnecessarily hard time with Bluetooth. I have all kinds of devices (usually speakers, headphones and such) which I don’t use, because switching them between input devices can be like pulling teeth.

    For example:

    • at my desk with my wired headphones watching something in tbe background I’m enjoying
    • need to do something at my workbench, which has a chromecast on a monitor
    • I can cast the video there, but I don’t want to use the big speakers because it’s late
    • my small wireless speaker is paired to my phone, I can’t remember how to re-pair, don’t want to go through Chromecast settings
    • same with my earbuds
    • end up ‘watching’ on my phone because it’s too much effort to use the actual TV!

    I’ve been thinking about making a physical central BT ‘broadcaster’ which I pair everything to. It would be able to take multiple aux or bluetooth inputs, and would have a switch or mixer to control the inputs.

    Would something like this help with any of those issues without having to build something like that (which also wouldn’t be optimal)?

    Im on mobile, and some of those features have gone way over my head!




  • I love Linux, but I do generally consider it a special-purpose OS. Servers, embedded stuff, etc, I will always go with some flavour of Linux.

    But for a daily driver I do struggle imagining using anything other than Windows. Like sure, I could probably get all my games and CAD software working in a Linux OS. But I can easily grab Win10 LTSB and have everything just work. I have to make a living from my machine, and ultimately I just need it to work.

    If I was doing just web and office work, then it would be no harder really, but I’ve finally accepted that not everything should be a project!




  • Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don’t really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.

    But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don’t miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.

    Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to ‘outraged’ unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don’t know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.

    I think what’s more important is a real shift towards your ‘type 3’ games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it’s had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was ‘dead’. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money’s worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be ‘dead’?

    Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I’d love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that’s what will actually make a difference, it’s what’s actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.

    I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We’ve basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.








  • But it’s pretty realistic and happens all the time. I don’t see what’s ‘bootlicky’ about not trusting ‘promises’ by corporations years before release that are not protected under laws like the Trades Description Act.

    I don’t know what was supposedly promised, because I didn’t follow interviews and stuff leading up to it, I just bought the game based on what was actually delivered in the end, which is how all purchases should really be made.

    Stuff mentioned during development should never be taken as a promise, no matter how trustworthy or honest the developer is. This is just the simple reality of long projects.

    It’s also why we don’t hear from devs as much these days, instead it’s mostly PR people, as too much weight is put on off-hand quotes.

    Studios like CDPR have nothing to gain, and lots to lose, by deliberately over-promising.