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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email from a Valve employee submitted as evidence telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

    Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.


  • I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

    I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.




  • I had to dig through the website shoving paid services down my throat and found the script builder, is that what you mean? If yes, I can see it generate either a command using chocolatey, or a config file (to feed chocolatey?), which seems to require me to install chocolatey manually first.

    Looks like it doesn’t meet the basic requirement of being a standalone script, and requires you to do extra setup first. I’m also very much not a fan of the website so far, but I can give it a pass since ninite being opinionated in the package choice is a subjective thing.


  • The great thing about ninite is how you can go there ahead of time and generate a single file, and when you’re done installing you just run that file. I suppose one could generate a batch script that installs stuff with some other package manager (you’d need to include install/update for it first, I remember reading about how Winget can come outdated with a broken version), but the issue with that is simply that ninite definitively exists and works reliably, while I don’t know any such service to generate install scripts.





  • some of my games didn’t launch, complaining about missing stuff.

    I don’t know Slackware, but I know on arch there’s the standard steam runtime version, and then there’s the unofficial steam-native-runtime, which uses system packages instead of steam’s own bundled runtime. And if we’re talking native Linux games, which is where the problem is, they tend to not work with steam’s runtime, presumably because they weren’t properly built to target it, and need to be launched with the native runtime (or switch to running the windows version with proton…)



  • If it makes more sense to focus on your specialization while paying somebody who specializes in local food delivery to do the delivery… No, yeah, that kinda sounds right. The actual issues I see here are not valuing the labor of delivery and getting too lazy, and maybe an issue where people are generally too time-pressured to take a break to get the food.


  • One counterpoint - even with a weak speed to capacity ratio it could be very useful to have a lot of storage for incremental backup solutions, where you have a small index to check what needs to be backed up, only need to write new/modified data, and when restoring you only need to read the indexes and the amount you’re actually restoring. This saves time writing the data and lets you keep access to historical versions.

    There’s two caveats here, of course, assuming those are not rewritable. One, you need to be able to quickly seek to the latest index, which can’t reliably be at the start, and two, you need a format that works without rewriting any data, possibly with a footer (like tar or zip, forgot which one), which introduces extra complexity (though I foresee a potential trick where the previous index can leave an unallocated block of data to write the address of the next index, to be written later)




  • I don’t think OOP’s nature makes them necessary, so much so as it enables them and popular programming principles encourage them. I think they’re a good thing, especially if there’s a way around them in case you can’t get the public interface changed and it doesn’t work for you, especially for performance reasons, but that should be done with care.

    Funny story, when modding Unity games using external modloaders you’re writing C# code that references the game’s assemblies. And with modding you often need to access something that the developers made private/protected/internal. Now, you can use reflection for that, but a different trick you can use is to publicize the game’s assemblies for referencing in your code, and add an attribute to your assembly that tells the runtime to just… Let you ignore the access checks. And then you can just access everything as public.


  • If it was a single question, that does sound lame, my other thought was that those “online polling tools” might not be viable because you can’t put internal company communications into them… But if it’s stuff like food choices or something, then that might also not be a problem.

    That said, my point still stands - what you describe does sound like what I’m saying. If you make a sheet with a dedicated field to put the answer into, it should be possible to reliably automate pulling out answers from all the files with excel-level knowledge, and without any additional sites or servers, just spreadsheet editing software and email.