Community MetaSteam | August 2021 - Openness Is Its Superpower

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fspm

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Nov 1, 2018
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Off topic

But not worth an extra thread.
(iCloud scanning)

There is an observable difference in reporting about the new iCloud scanning plans from Apple over here.

Normal news media: Apple is fighting back against child porn.
Tech media: Total surveillance - Apple's fall from grace
Is apple run by catholic church?, thinking about the children much.
 
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Cacher

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Jun 3, 2020
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Continuing to tool around with the Car Mechanic Sim 21 demo and hot damn does it look sexy.

I guess a 4 year gap between releases really does bump the presentation values.
I got CMS2018 yesterday because it is pretty cheap. Yeah, 2021 is a nice update but 2018 can probably last me a while, so I can get 2021 later. So far it's pretty fun.
 
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Aaron D.

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Jul 10, 2019
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Tangent rant, I was listening to a recent Kingcast podcast that covers Stephen King books & movie/tv (duh) and they had Anthrax (heart) bassist Scott Ian on the pod who's a huge King fan.

They were talking about Anthrax band doing a guest appearance on Married With Children back in '92.

Ian said that Ed O'Neill (Al Bundy) was absolutely incredible to work with. I guess he was an accomplished serious stage actor before landing the role with Married.

Ian went on to say that the band was totally nervous about doing a TV show and O'Neill took extra time out to brief them on stage-cues, timing on lines, etc. Said he was a cool m/f'er who went the extra mile to make them feel comfortable and ready for the shoot.

Amazing that you'd never think that about bro giving his character on the show.
 

Madventure

The Angel of Deaf
Nov 17, 2018
1,668
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Tangent rant, I was listening to a recent Kingcast podcast that covers Stephen King books & movie/tv (duh) and they had Anthrax (heart) bassist Scott Ian on the pod who's a huge King fan.

They were talking about Anthrax band doing a guest appearance on Married With Children back in '92.

Ian said that Ed O'Neill (Al Bundy) was absolutely incredible to work with. I guess he was an accomplished serious stage actor before landing the role with Married.

Ian went on to say that the band was totally nervous about doing a TV show and O'Neill took extra time out to brief them on stage-cues, timing on lines, etc. Said he was a cool m/f'er who went the extra mile to make them feel comfortable and ready for the shoot.

Amazing that you'd never think that about bro giving his character on the show.
I also think it's funny how of all the 90s TV dads the one who played an "asshole" was the best off screen and arguably onscreen while the others on screen/off were assholes or massive perverts
 

Anteater

Hentai Specialist
Sep 20, 2018
1,430
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I'm in chapter 8 in Ys IX, I've been doing all the affinity/gifting and unlocking areas/doing all the sidequests each chapter, I assume those are chapter based, anything else that are missable? I haven't been keeping up with chests/items/equipments I assume I can collect those in the final chapter right?
 
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Alexandros

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Nov 4, 2018
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Tangent rant, I was listening to a recent Kingcast podcast that covers Stephen King books & movie/tv (duh) and they had Anthrax (heart) bassist Scott Ian on the pod who's a huge King fan.

They were talking about Anthrax band doing a guest appearance on Married With Children back in '92.

Ian said that Ed O'Neill (Al Bundy) was absolutely incredible to work with. I guess he was an accomplished serious stage actor before landing the role with Married.

Ian went on to say that the band was totally nervous about doing a TV show and O'Neill took extra time out to brief them on stage-cues, timing on lines, etc. Said he was a cool m/f'er who went the extra mile to make them feel comfortable and ready for the shoot.

Amazing that you'd never think that about bro giving his character on the show.
Man this is so nice to read. I loved Married with Children growing up and I am happy to see that Ed is a cool guy.
 

Routa

Non-Stop MMO Searcher
Dec 22, 2018
861
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Finished Lost Heroes, 10/10 - might write more thoughts later but that game was better than it had any right to be, especially the music - I want to know who the composer was on that.

There's still some post-game content I'll try to do and see how difficult it is. The final story boss was 3 bosses in a row - with no healing in between, I brought like 40 items for SP and rezzing and used all of them :fearful-face:. Ended up being very close.

There was a final boss for each franchise and each with their own song, unfortunately - I can't find them online anywhere :crying-face:
 

crimsonheadGCN

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Jan 20, 2019
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Clifton, New Jersey
www.resetera.com

In 2008, when I was working for the good folks at Janimation in Dallas Tx, we were hired by Gearbox to create a vertical slice (an animated version of what the game will look like) for the game "Duke Nukem Begins", a Duke origin story.

I headed up this project, as the director at Janimation, and did a lot of the character development, including the design and modeling of Duke. We poured everything we had into making the most awesome cinematic Janimation had ever created. But unfortunately, we got word the game was canceled due to the legal issues with Duke Nukem at the time.

"Duke Nukem Begins" was never made.

It crushed us, as this was what we thought could help us compete with bigger players in the game trailer market at the time.

Because it is still a piece I am damn proud of, I am releasing it 13 years after its creation.

The whole team that worked with me deserves to see this released into the wild. I hope this somehow resurrects this version of the game by showing the world how awesome it would have been...
 
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beep boop

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Dec 6, 2018
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Pretty decent impressions so far from Team Ladybug's second game on steam. The second area has an appropriate difficulty bump, without going too crazy with it.
Finished it just yesterday. It’s good. Maybe a little too slight for my tastes. Not an unqualified recommendation, but it had enough going for it that I enjoyed my time with it. It's got real good "game feel".
 

Gintaro

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Feb 20, 2021
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Regarding the EOS stuff, weird that there are decent amount of single player games are using it. Hopefully its not for some weird purposes
 

dex3108

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Dec 20, 2018
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Well i guess that's Cyberpunk 2077 done after like 65h. I liked it a lot but it is basically game with tons of unused potential.
 
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EdwardTivrusky

Good Morning, Weather Hackers!
Dec 8, 2018
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If you block outgoing connections for that specific game, not hard to do in Windows, then that should do it. Especially if it's a single player game anyway.
... or the EOS Service if it installs one. I don't have any EOS games so i can't check things myself but if i do end up playing an SP game with an EOS nag screen i'll probably look into blocking it somehow.
 

dex3108

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How many of those SP games are on Unreal? Could it be enabled without developer knowledge when they update UE?
 

EdwardTivrusky

Good Morning, Weather Hackers!
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I doubt it. As far as i know it's an API so the developer has to code in the EOS calls etc. Also, many games are "locked in" to the specific version of the engine they started with due to differences between even minor versions possibly causing issues so adding EOS to earlier engines or upgrading a game to a newer engine is unlikely. How many games have been through "development hell" because they updated the engine and caused issues? I'll say "lots".

It's possible that EOS is put out as a forced wrapper around older games but i'm doubtful it'll happen.
 
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beep boop

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When you report a comment in a (Steam) group's discussion page, does anyone know where that goes? Is it Steam's moderation or the group admins that it's forwarded to?
 
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Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
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When you report a comment in a (Steam) group's discussion page, does anyone know where that goes? Is it Steam's moderation or the group admins that it's forwarded to?
I would say the group moderators if they exist, and otherwise Steam's moderation.
 
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dex3108

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I doubt it. As far as i know it's an API so the developer has to code in the EOS calls etc. Also, many games are "locked in" to the specific version of the engine they started with due to differences between even minor versions possibly causing issues so adding EOS to earlier engines or upgrading a game to a newer engine is unlikely. How many games have been through "development hell" because they updated the engine and caused issues? I'll say "lots".

It's possible that EOS is put out as a forced wrapper around older games but i'm doubtful it'll happen.
One way or another if it is not EOs it is something else. Literally any game these days is sending some kind of telemetry to someone.
 

beep boop

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I would say the group moderators if they exist, and otherwise Steam's moderation.
Thanks. Trying to figure out how to not waste my own time. Decided to ask the question to Steam support for clarification.
 

Ge0force

Excluding exclusives
Jan 12, 2019
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Belgium
One way or another if it is not EOs it is something else. Literally any game these days is sending some kind of telemetry to someone.
The question is what kind of information EOS is sending to Epic. I don't mind when a game sends anonymous data about the way I play that particular game to the developer, but EOS seems to send shitloads of data to Epic's servers. It's not unlikely that EOS sends data about other games and Steam as well.
 

Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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One way or another if it is not EOs it is something else. Literally any game these days is sending some kind of telemetry to someone.
That's an extremely generous use of "literally". E.g. no port we ever released is sending anything to anyone. And the same goes for the vast majority of (indie) games I play.

It might be closer to true for AAA games.
 
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lashman

lashman

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Sep 5, 2018
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That's an extremely generous use of "literally". E.g. no port we ever released is sending anything to anyone. And the same goes for the vast majority of (indie) games I play.

It might be closer to true for AAA games.
well - unity sends stuff by default ... they have a package you can download to add a toggle in settings to turn it off iirc ... but it's not there by default

or at least that was the case a few months back
 

Dragon1893

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Apr 17, 2019
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Só I started playing Mankind Divided after dropping it on my first attempt because when I arrived at Prague it became obvious that my old PC couldn't handle it.
It wasn't smooth though. The game was insisting on showing me controller button prompts and mouse acceleration was insane with the sliders in the menu having absolutely no effect.
Turns out you have to unplug all your controllers to fix this issue...
But it didn't stop there. The game was crashing constantly. Turns out that I need to disable DX12.
With these things out of the way it didn't take me long to get hooked, I'm a sucker for games that always give the player multiple options to tackle a mission.

10 min into 13 Sentinels



I also really want it on Steam goddammit Atlus
The game is so damn gorgeous and the gameplay in the battles is better than I was expecting.
This and Catherine FB will probably be the last games I play on PS4.
 

Mivey

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Sep 20, 2018
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So I have been messing around with Proton a bit, installing Steam on my Linux laptop (which I don't generally use for gaming, as it only has an integrated Intel GPU), and installed some older titles to see how far things have come. Valve wants the entire Steam library to be playable this way, after all.
At least the support of old DirectX3D games, like Deus Ex or Gothic still isn't very good. Deus Ex has pretty horrific colour depth issues, making the first level of the game pretty much unplayable and Gothic doesn't play videos, which makes the beginning of the game, explaining the setting and why the hero is in the prison colony pretty much impossible to follow. I also couldn't talk to NPCs, though I think that's a fairly common bug with Gothic, nothing to do with Proton. Also tried Max Payne, which seems to run the best, but Proton can't render it at above 16 bit colour depth.

For these old Direct3D 9 titles, Proton relies on Wine, and none of the fancy translation to Vulkan, and that is still far from perfect. The most consistent issue seems to be that colour depth is fixed at 16 bit, and can't be raised. Even if you set it to 32 bit.
 
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Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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For these old Direct3D 9 titles, Proton relies on Wine, and none of the fancy translation to Vulkan, and that is still far from perfect.
Do you mean pre-D3D9 titles? because D3D9 is in DXVK now and should be pretty solid.

For games pre-DX9, a good approach is often to run them through dgvoodoo2 and then run that through dxvk. Which is a bit silly but apparently it works.
 

Mivey

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Do you mean pre-D3D9 titles? because D3D9 is in DXVK now and should be pretty solid.

For games pre-DX9, a good approach is often to run them through dgvoodoo2 and then run that through dxvk. Which is a bit silly but apparently it works.
Oh, sorry, yeah, pre D3D9 for sure. Those are all games from early 2000s.
Maybe for the version of Proton that ships with Deck Valve will do this daisy chaining of translation layers like you suggest. Just observed that the current thing done by Proton as it exists on Steam Linux right now is not quite perfect.
 
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ISee

Oh_no!
Mar 1, 2019
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well yes ... but then you have to fiddle with settings for 15h every single time you launch a game ... and also have to upgrade the hardware at least twice a week
You also have to sit infront of a tiny screen, wear an uncomfortable headset, update drivers twice an hour and play without friends.

And all you get for all that trouble is an endless catalogue of games for every taste out there. You can play big AAA, explore a space station in VR, lead the fate of an empire or micro manage a lawn, while dating catgirls.

PC gaming is meh!
 
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