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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I’m pretty sure it is a wrapper in the way it looks up game-specific information to apply specific tweaks to how the game is ran and how the prefix is set up… But it is also true that it does also include a modified version of wine, so the terminology is difficult to pin down.

    That said, I don’t mean it in a disingenuous way, at least I don’t think it is such. I do believe valve is often attributed excessive credit for proton’s creation, but I don’t think they did anything wrong, much less “just nab it”. Open-source is open-source, and I’d imagine people who put work towards making wine viable are happy that Valve brought it to the mainstream.


  • also literally wrote proton

    It’s getting weird how often I find myself saying this… But Valve mostly took already existing software and built a wrapper around it, integrated into their platform. I love what they did, but the credit for literally writing it goes to all the people who spent years building wine and related software.





  • Ah, seems you’re partially correct - steam has a command for downloading a specific depot version. You need to know the specific ID to download, and notably games can use multiple depots to form the game files, but I thought you needed to use something like SteamCMD or DepotDownloader for that.

    I’m still upholding the fact that it’s not a “proper” feature, while I appreciate having those kind of utilities put in the user’s control, this isn’t something most people could figure out themselves.


  • It’s not like they have to create the compatibility layers from scratch; Valve did it for them.

    I do just want to point out, Valve didn’t do that - Proton is mostly just pre-existing software that they packaged together into an officially supported feature. I love that they did it, and having it in the biggest PC game platform presumably did wonders for Linux gaming, but it was most certainly not made from scratch.



  • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.detoGaming@lemmy.worldTetris
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    26 days ago

    That’s cool, I didn’t realize that - according to Wikipedia, it was “adapted to the IBM PC” and spread throughout Moscow and then to eastern Europe, so I wonder how many people actually played that. I guess the NES version was the first commercial one


  • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.detoGaming@lemmy.worldTetris
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    26 days ago

    Virtually endlessly. What they’re talking about is, AFAIK, the actual original (not actually original, but NES) Tetris. It was meant to be infinite, but at some point the numbers get too big to store, and the programming starts breaking down. Some games might be able to keep going indefinitely, just resetting/looping some numbers, and in modern games it might take years, centuries, or even universal lifetimes to reach that point, but almost all “infinite” games will break down at some point.



  • Magic in general is just a plot device that can do whatever the author needs it to do.

    Sounds like that’s just where we disagree. I would instead say that magic is part of the world being shown in the story, and it should have an explanation, just like laws of physics. The hints come not from the narrator knowing things and dropping clues, but from the underlying logic of how magic works and the behaviors of people shaped by the magic of the world. And of course the reader can’t anticipate everything - but I also want there to be a sense of what’s possible and what’s not, and for the cases where the reader’s understanding is broken to be impactful and bring new understanding.

    So yeah, in the end it’s just a matter of preference. I can look at HP and think “man, the magic just does whatever the fuck the author needs”, and other people can look at it and enjoy the whimsical adventure for what it is. Or, in a way, I guess it’s both - I can still appreciate the story, but it’s underlined with a sense of shallowness.


  • The issue is that the wands being made from the same core doesn’t have any explained effect before this event, when an explanation conveniently appears, now being a known event that has happened before. The issue is that, to my knowledge, things just happen that have no prior explanation, which sugests they’re just being made up on the fly to fit the narrative, which in turn means the reader/viewer has no way to anticipate them.

    In what I’d consider a “good” magic system, things fit together. They don’t have to be revealed immediately, but often there will be hints, and when the reveal is made it’s gonna at least fit into the void in prior knowledge. This is, of course, my subjective preference, but I think HP goes so far into the opposite that it’s just random stuff made up to justify whatever the author wanted to happen with no reasonable explanation.