dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 3 days ago:
You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 3 days ago:
Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.
This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.
Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.
- Comment on The story of a crazy Half-Life 2 bug, as told by former Valve dev Tom Forsyth (Mastodon thread) 3 days ago:
I like this one:
Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.
It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.
- Comment on Evolution at its finest! 6 days ago:
Be sure to stick an AR500 plate between your saddle and the mine as well, so you can enjoy a free added speed boost when you flak your enemy without scorching your buttcheeks.
It’ll totally work. I saw it in a cartoon once.
- Comment on Evolution at its finest! 6 days ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Posted directly, no. Not anymore, anyway; there was a bright and shiny albeit very short period early in .world’a days when you could upload a video instead of an image and it would take it and work. I imagine the admins disabled this for obvious reasons.
You can still post an animated .gif, though. I do it all the time.
- Comment on If Microsoft ended Windows 10 support, why is it still getting updates like every other day? 1 week ago:
Pro or Enterprise? Or even better, Enterprise IoT LSTC? The latter is going to get security updates until 2032.
And those enrolled ($61) in the Extended Security Updates program get one more year of security support (not feature updates), and the various Enterprise versions will continue to get updates for up to another seven years, depending on the version.
Microsoft didn’t stop updating Windows 10 and they won’t for quite some time. They’re simply no longer offering those updates to most users of the consumer versions of Windows.
Windows Update can also hand you updates to your drivers independent of the support status of your copy of Windows. For instance, if you install a copy of Windows 7 even today it will still pull driver files from Microsoft.
- Comment on Me when Valve releases a phone 1 week ago:
Steam Deck: Already runs Linux.
GabeCube: Confirmed it will run Linux.
Steam Frame: Confirmed it will run Linux.
Obviously Valve has made no overtures whatsoever towards making a phone. But if they did, what on Earth would lead you to believe that it wouldn’t run Linux?
- Comment on Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading 1 week ago:
Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.
- Comment on Happy Day to all who celebrate 1 week ago:
It’s from the Watchmen comic:
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.
- Comment on Valves first title with a 3 in it 1 week ago:
I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
Eyy, Reverb gang.
Apparently there is third party support in Linux under Mondao but it still seems pretty developmental and I haven’t had the time to mess with it yet. I’m still clinging to mine as well, because at least for now it still works and I’ve blocked Windows from rug-pulling my WMR app. I’m sure that’ll only last until the next time I need to reformat and reinstall in a couple of years.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
Valve’s strategy here seems to be to build physical inertial tracking into the controllers as well. They both have an IMU built in which presumably gives them a pretty decent ability to guess where they’ve been moved in physical space even if they’re outside of the cameras’ field of view. I don’t know if anyone has accurately assessed how well that works in this case.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
The only other major PC oriented inside-out system, Windows Mixed Reality, allowed controllers and headsets from all brands participating in the program to freely intermix. I’d doubt Valve would be dumb enough not to also follow this path, if there are ever successive iterations of this hardware.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
Linux Desktop!Linux… facetop?
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 week ago:
I just like that they have the complete compliment of normal controller buttons. It seems the world has agreed on twin sticks, a d-pad, ABXY (or triangle square cirlce et cetera, you know what I mean), and two shoulder buttons… Except for VR controllers. Every brand has their own dinky layout and they’re all sparse on buttons, I guess not to “intimidate” newbies, but it requires making weird compromises or binding actions to directions on one of the analog sticks or something, and that always feels lacking.
I hope they also stole the idea from the OG Oculus controllers where it can sense when your fingers are on the buttons but not pressing them, to so they can show your fingers in VR space and help people work the things by sight as well as feel.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 2 weeks ago:
But that part was so wholesome. Not to mention physically improbable.
- Comment on Splashed again 2 weeks ago:
He’s still the meanest son of a bitch of space.
- Comment on I swear half the posts on here are just slop now 2 weeks ago:
I write really long posts and I’ve said “delve” exactly four times in my Lemmy career. I know this because I just checked.
I’m like 99.8%, maybe 99.9% certain I’m not an AI.
- Comment on Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 2 weeks ago:
Some AI or central computer going haywire and destroying everything is, like, the third or fourth stock RPG trope just behind the Dark Lord burning down the protagonist’s village in the first act or the mysterious waif girl actually turning out to be a princess.
You really think they’d know better.
- Comment on You just had to ask that question 2 weeks ago:
[ { "respid": "00001", "content": "response", "value": "0" } ]
- Comment on What 3 weeks ago:
I worked at a Chinese restaurant for some years, and my boss natively spoke Mandarin but whenever he was muttering to himself about something or another he would always cuss in English. I have no idea why this should be but it was always hilarious.
- Comment on Why do each gaming fraction (pc, consoles, mobile) hating each other? 3 weeks ago:
That’s the real deal, right here.
The SNES vs. Genesis war from the 1990s never really ended. The banners being flown have changed over the years but the battles are pretty much the same. Me personally, what with having the luxury of being a perfectly responsible fully grown adult — that’s what it says on my driver’s license, anyway — I have at least one example of pretty much every console from the Atari VCS up to the PS3.
My beef with consoles now is that they’re all, with the exception of the Switch and its sequel, just watered down PC hardware anyway. And I already have a PC. And by and large my PC plays what I tell it to, not what Sony and Microsoft and for fuck’s sake not what Nintendo try to dictate at me. Thus, for modern games I play on PC.
As far as insufferable computer users go, that all started with Doom. Doom was the killer app of the 90s and every console maker at the time either wished theirs could run Doom but it couldn’t, or barely managed it and the experience was dogshit. Before that, it was the opposite: PC games and their developers fervently wished they could match the capabilities of the game consoles of their era, which all had specialized hardware specifically designed for the types of things games from that time did. It’s probably no coincidence that id software’s formative outing started with John Carmack and Tom Hall’s Dangerous Dave In Copyright Infringement,, which as dumb as it sounds was genuinely showing off at the time in that they managed to make a bog standard PC pull off a platformer with smooth(ish) scrolling, which is something the NES can do in its sleep.
- Comment on On new installations, Android rebinds the power button to open up Google Assistant 3 weeks ago:
Another in a long line of messing with user interface things on updates, without any prior warning to the user. And if you even get a changelog at all on the update prompt it’s always just vague bullshit like, “Bug fixes and usability improvements,” without explaining what those “improvements” are supposed to be.
In unrelated news, the last major update on my Moto G changed the incoming call screen from swipe up to answer, swipe down to reject to swipe left to answer, swipe right to reject. What is this, fucking Tinder now? And don’t come at me about the “gesture” setting in the dialer app options, either. Yes, I am aware of it. The only options listed there are now “horizontal swipe” and “single tap to answer.” Why any rational individual would want to inflict the hell that is the latter option on themselves is unknown to me.
This kind of horseshit is why boomers and old people are terrified of updates and drive us IT nerds up the wall by perpetually ignoring and dismissing them. Because when you change the user interface choices people are used to behind their backs and without warning, as far as they’re concerned you just broke their device.
Cut it out.
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 3 weeks ago:
Yes, but Minetest/Luanti is not a fork of Minecraft, it is its own separate thing.
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 3 weeks ago:
You can use the same license for both, and your purchase includes access to both versions regardless of how you buy it, unless that’s changed very recently when I wasn’t looking.
Officially, both versions also explicitly require you to create (or already have) a Microsoft account to sign-in and play. Unofficially, the Java version is dead easy to pirate.
- Comment on Are bots on lemmy? 3 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure I’m not a bot, but some days it’s difficult to be sure.
- Comment on NOW! 3 weeks ago:
The mattress industry is notorious for being rife with this. And for anyone wondering, the markup on mattresses is also insane. I briefly sold them, and most of our brands forced us to maintain a markup of around 800% via UMRP (i.e., the manufacturer sets the retail price and revokes your dealership license if you sell below that price).
