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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • That’s not really the case, though. Blocking that pipe off doesn’t fix any bug, it’s just a design choice to tell inventive players that they must solve the puzzle before continuing. Removing that and allowing players to progress without having solved the puzzle in its intended way is just a different design choice. Both are equally valid, in my opinion.

    There actually have been quite a lot of bugfixes in the 20th anniversary update, which have an impact on current speedrunning tactics, as can be seen here within the section 20th Anniversary update of Half-Life 2. In the end, it’s pretty meaningless anyway, as most speedrunning of Half-Life 2 is done with a pretty ancient version of the game.



  • I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

    I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.



  • I agree that both the map and the statistic I’ve posted don’t take those country-specific characteristics into account.

    I’m not sure how important that difference really is, though, as both the US and Germany seem to have pretty similar degrees of urbanization (US: 83.3%; Germany: 77.8%; source). So the rural population isn’t really that big in either country, relatively speaking.

    I’m not trying to say that the rural population isn’t a factor, I’m just not sure how big that factor really is.



  • Sorry that I can’t really take your argument seriously, but which recycling advert claims to recycle every bit of plastic ever produced on earth? That’s what those 9% are.

    I’m sure there are misleading ads in the recycling industry. Those are practically everywhere. But I’d really like to see that one.

    The percentages which are probably actually used in promotional material, because they actually have something to do with what your local recycling plant is responsible for, and not what has been polluting the environment since the early nineteen-hundreds, can be seen in the table for Regional Data, which I’ve previously linked to.

    If you still want to stick to the claim that because only 9% of every bit of plastic ever produced by all of humankind (1% more than once) makes plastic recycling in general a scam, I’ll be genuinely envious of your ability to reach mind-twisting conclusions from data which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual argument and your persistence in keeping that opinion. Maybe you can teach me sometime.





  • Firstly, I‘m not twisting words, there is no mention of „plastic“ in the post I was replying to, just plain „recycling“.

    Secondly, I’m sorry, but I really don‘t understand how a non-perfect rate makes plastic recycling a scam. Recycling is hard. There‘s no magic recycling machine, which just converts 100% of plastic waste to newly usable material. There are so many reasons for a less than perfect recycling rate (non-separated trash, contamination, badly designed packaging, technical limitations when sorting etc.pp.), that I find it just very strange and unhelpful to call it a scam without substantial support for that claim.

    Sure, not using plastic would be best, but that‘s just more idealistic than realistic. I think that plastic is such an integral part of our lives right now, that it‘s not going to go away anytime soon. And that makes recycling, for now, an important step to reduce the total amount of plastic we use.





  • I think we‘re in a very different situation right now. Proton has become so good that it‘s just not necessary for most developers to do anything to get their game running on Linux. When Macs peaked in the hardware survey, the compatibility tools were far less powerful and developers had to actually invest time and resources, if they wanted their game running on Mac.

    I also think that the Steam Deck is absolutely being recognized by many developers. Even big publishers proudly announce their games being playable on it. And having games optimized for Deck often improves them on Linux in general.

    So I really wouldn’t worry about developers not specifically targeting Linux. Even without that, gaming on Linux is in the best spot it has ever been and is steadily improving.


  • Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

    Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

    All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.


  • While that‘s true right now, a big patch called „Economy 2.0“ is expected to drop this week (more on that here and here).

    I really hope this will be a successful first step of making the game actually better than its predecessor. Unfortunately the economy simulation is only one of many issues which make me want to play something else after a few minutes of gameplay. I think it‘ll be at least another year until they‘re able to fix all these minor annoyances, which sum up to one very big annoyance. Like not being able to place stuff sometimes without any obvious reason. Or those ugly, steep pathways on lots, when the connecting street isn‘t completely flat. Or missing animations for firemen, which currently only have to drive up to a burning building in order to stop a fire.

    Cities Skylines was a better Sim City (2013) and was justifiably loved for that. For now, Cities Skylines 2 is unfortunately just a worse Cities Skylines.