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Astaroth

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Astaroth ,

Oh… I had a tiny bit of hope before reading this

Astaroth ,

To be honest I don’t remember the last time I finished a game.

Not counting Rogue-lite games where you replay them over and over like Slay the Spire I think the most “recent” game that I’ve finished might be Mass Effect 3, which is from 2012…

Oh actually I did finish The Banner Saga 1 a few years ago. It’s pretty good except for being somewhat lacking in Quality of Life features. The main selling point are the art style and gameplay-story integration. The tactical combat gameplay is okay but very repetitive, although it got a lot better in BS2 (which I haven’t finished) with more varied mission objectives than just “kill every enemy” over and over again.

Skyrim and Xcom 2 are probably in my top 3 or at least top 5 most played games but I have never completed them.

The games I’ve replayed and finished the most times are Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1&2 (only completed ME3 2 times).

I’ve replayed DA:O more than 10 times and I would highly recommend it, although I would recommend getting mods and especially get the increased memory patch so it doesn’t crash as often.

Astaroth ,

Calling BG3 a sequel is very disingenuous, it shares nothing in common with BG1 and BG2 besides the name.

Being based on d&d and having two previous big hits in a row (Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2) obviously mattered though.

Astaroth ,

Removing the awful camera zoom and graphics around the border when using Witcher Sense

Astaroth ,

the date-time in the top left corner looks weird. The numbers are all greyed out except for only a small section

Astaroth ,

This was after spending an hour trying to get into the BIOS, only to find that the keyboard doesn’t actually work before the Windows splash screen comes up… I mean who the fuck designs it like that?

Does your laptop have multiple usb ports? And did you try them all?

I had this issue even on my PC until I tried a bunch of different USB ports and found one that worked.

Uhh I just realized that since it’s a laptop the keyboard is part of the laptop… Well I’ll still leave this in case it helps anyone

Astaroth ,

Really?

I would’ve expected 3DS at most

Astaroth ,

There’s always Fish the Friendly Interactive Shell as well

Astaroth ,

If Mass Effect Legendary Edition actually included ME3’s multiplayer I might’ve considered installing Origin again.

Astaroth ,

7z x yourfile -odirectory

Astaroth ,

TWP is even better than just google translate because it lets you choose between Google, Bing, Yandex, and DeepL translations, if a translation looks sus you can take a look at what the other translation engines say.

At least on PC

Astaroth , (edited )

Warcraft 3 (RIP)

Skyrim

Xcom 2

Honorable mentions: Starcraft 2, Mass Effect trilogy & Dragon Age series

Astaroth ,

I used to have to wait 5~10 minutes on the loading screens before missions before when I didn’t have an SSD and only 8gb RAM

The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee... (www.pandasecurity.com)

The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.

Astaroth ,

Steam has proton which lets you play Windows games on Linux.

You can use Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bottles, or just plain WINE as well but for a lot of people the easiest way they know is to just add a non-steam game to steam.

Astaroth ,

So one thing I’ve started getting worried about is whether youtube/google will eventually block/delete youtube/google accounts who use adblockers.

I don’t really care about my youtube account but I have several gmail accounts and losing those would be awful.

I assume they won’t ever go that far, but just the possibility is scary.

So is there an easy way to migrate all your stuff to some other email service and what are some good ones?

Random thought: Windows is largely successful because of Piracy

Windows as a software package would have never been affordable to individuals or local-level orgs in countries like India and Bangladesh (especially in the 2000’s) that are now powerhouses of IT. Same for many SE Asian, Eastern European, African and LatinoAmerican countries as well....

Astaroth ,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

Ignoring unauthorized copying

… Bill Gates said “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In 2008, by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called “Windows Genuine Advantage” (WGA) was downloaded and installed. When WGA detects that the copy of Windows is not genuine, it periodically turns the user’s screen black. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that “Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software”.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

… the documents identified open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to Microsoft’s domination of the software industry, and suggested tactics Microsoft could use to disrupt the progress of open-source software.

Astaroth ,

Happens to me all the time 😅

And since I’m already holding down ctrl I’ve formed a habit of using ctrl + shift + v even though just regular ctrl + v works. Although for me it’s mostly positive as I usually just want the text without formatting anyway.

Astaroth ,

:q!

you mean ZQ

Astaroth ,

and ZZ for save & quit

Astaroth ,

same

Astaroth ,

Mass Effect Legendary Edition (ME1), just got Liara & did the DLC mission as well as a bit of uncharted worlds & rogue VI on Earth’s moon.

The game looks a lot better and most controls are nicer. Although somehow the Mako is even worse to control in LE than the original ME and I get some stutter/loading while running around in presidium.

Being able to skip while in the elevator is nice, but I would’ve liked to see the option to be moved directly into normandy added to the rapid transits like in ME2 & ME3. Having to go to C-Sec, take the elevator, and wait for the decontamination process every time is really tedious, and it’s why I rarely visited the Citadel in the original ME1 as well.

Honestly ME1 LE is looking pretty nice and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it yet, but it was always the story that was the highlight of ME1, the gameplay isn’t actually that great and I’ve already replayed the original several times so I think I’m just going to go ahead and play ME2.

Astaroth ,

no one needs to play any game

it’s just a matter of how willing someone is to compromise on their principles for entertainment

Astaroth , (edited )

I would recommend Arch and derivatives (supposedly EndeavourOS is Arch but better for beginners, I’ve never used it though) or NixOS, they’re highly configurable & have good package managers.

I would not recommend debian or it’s derivatives because apt package manager is way worse than pacman.

Also while Arch is a rolling release OS, it’s not really unstable, it’s not like it constantly breaks with updates.

I’ve used Linux Mint a bit at a relative’s house so they can have an easier & more “stable” GUI experience, but there weren’t all the packages I needed on the GUI software manager, and even some packages that existed didn’t want to install until I used the terminal anyway.

And as I mentioned earlier apt is just a worse package manager than pacman so it’s a pain to use.

Especially since I was using plain Bash without good tab completion unlike Fish or Zsh, which makes the much longer apt commands that much more annoying to type in compared to just -Syu -S -Ss -Qs -Rns.

And it’s not just that the commands and package names are better and shorter on pacman compared to apt, but there’s more packages (and I’m not even counting AUR).

For example, on Linux Mint I were going to install wine-mono and wine-gecko, which you’re going to want if you plan to play windows games outside steam proton, but they didn’t exist and I had to follow the wiki.winehq.org/Mono and wiki.winehq.org/Gecko installation guides instead of just downloading 2 binaries through pacman.

And tbh I eventually gave up on wine-mono and just got the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

If you’re really supper worried and paranoid then instead of Arch you can use NixOS, it’s whole shtick is that you can have multiple versions and always roll back to before anything broke.

[Question] Which shell prompt do you use and why?

Hi. I’ve been using powerlevel10k for a long time, but a few days ago, I decided I wanted to customize it a bit. I opened the .p10k.zsh file, and I was shocked. It’s really massive, with TONS of options. I’ve been digging through for a few hours already, and it’s absolutely amazing how much you can customize it without...

Astaroth ,

I love fish.

Sometimes I wonder why people think using the terminal is so hard, then every once in a while when I’m not on my home PC and have to use Bash I get reminded of why

I’ve been meaning to try zsh since it can supposedly do everything fish can while still being posix compliant, but I’ve never felt the need to not be using fish so I just never got around to it

Astaroth ,

NEXON…

Astaroth ,

I was thinking ME trilogy as well, but while ME1 is a great game it doesn’t really hold up in terms of graphics. ME2 and ME3 still look fine though.

Astaroth ,

I don’t like any DEs, tbh both KDE Plasma and Cinnamon felt worse than Win7 DE. And I’ll never ever even try Gnome

But I absolutely love WMs, I use i3wm

Astaroth ,

just mount the .iso (if there is one) and run the installer (e.g. setup.exe) with WINE

Astaroth ,

assuming that you’re running WINE through the terminal you’ll see if there’s any error and usually it’s pretty simple to find what you need to make the game run (if it doesn’t already)

for starters get all the gst/gstreamer packages including the plugin ones (libav, good/bad/ugly, etc.) and make sure to have both 64 and 32bit versions.

get wine-mono (or directly install .net runtimes in your wineprefix, easily done with winetricks) and wine-gecko.

after that you basically just get whatever .dll or vcrun stuff as needed (following error messages), most easily done through winetricks

I will admit though, while using Linux Mint (instead of Arch Linux which I use on my home PC) at a relative’s house I had some trouble at first because a) apt package manager sucks, b) the names of the packages were different, and c) wine-mono and wine-gecko packages didn’t exist so I had to follow these instructions wiki.winehq.org/Mono & wiki.winehq.org/Gecko

also just like how protondb is a really good resource to look up how well games will run on steam proton and tips on how to run them, there’s appdb.winehq.org

Astaroth ,

I wasn’t saying it can be done, thing is the time and effort to make it work is way too much…

If you think it’s too much time and effort for you, that’s fair enough.

I obviously don’t think it is or I wouldn’t do it. Also something to note is it gets easier and faster with time as you have more things already installed and thus more games run out of the box, as well as just having the experience and know-how of what to do.

and the end result tends to be poor.

I’m not having poor end results compared to when I were using Windows, so that’s just a you thing.

Only real notable fault for linux gaming is online multiplayer games with anti-cheat, and luckily for me I don’t play those anyway.

Well one thing that hasn’t been working that comes to mind is Frosty Tool Suite, a mod manager for Frostbite engine games, so I was unable to replay Dragon Age Inquisition with new mods on Linux.

That however isn’t a game itself but a 3rd party mod manager, and technically I could get it too work by either using a NTFS formatted hard drive or some other tricks, but it seemed too much of a pain to deal with so I’ve left that on the back-burner.

Astaroth ,

Neovim

Astaroth ,

yeah Fish tab completion works, but one thing I’ve noticed though is that tab completion for wrong case only works if there’s no option with the correct case

e.g. if I have Downloads and Downloads2 then d with tab completion will become Downloads, but if I have Downloads and downloads2 it will tab complete to downloads2 and D will complete to Downloads

I’ve been meaning to look through the Fish documentation to see if I can change that and fuzzy search for history but never got around to it

Astaroth ,

Never used or heard of it before but apparently zoxide is only for cd command, do you happen to know if there’s some fuzzy match for in general?

At the moment what I do is history foo | grep -i “bar”

Astaroth ,

Advance Wars By Web

Advance Wars is an old turn based strategy game, for the GBA (Game Boy Advance), and AWBW is a fan site to play AW online.

I’ve gotten pretty into it ever since Advance Wars Reboot was announced, and being able to play it in the web browser means I frequently find time to play…

Ironically I don’t play the actual AW Remake because in classic nintendo style the multiplayer is extremely lacking, only being able to play with players added to friends list, not being able to upload/download maps except to friends, and extremely limited map sizes for online maps

Astaroth ,

Neat, we need more games like AW and Wargroove

Astaroth ,

Have you seen the video? The shooter getting “pranked” had both hands occupied carrying a paper bag and was being followed and harassed for over 10 seconds while repeatedly telling the prankster to stop.

It does seem like an overreaction to shoot immediately instead of trying to threaten first but I’m not sure.

I would’ve fully sided with the shooter if they’re weren’t in a mall with other people around and probably security right around the corner, because then he would’ve been much more at risk if he doesn’t shoot and the prankster tries to rob him or w/e.

Astaroth ,

The vast majority of people are neither lawyers nor judges.

I think the people the laws apply to should be able to make sense of those laws or the laws are no good.

Astaroth ,

Skyrim but it’s an MMORPG (and I don’t mean some shitty WoW clone with an Elder Scrolls skin draped over it like ESO)

Astaroth ,

I never figured out how to disable DXVK so eventually I just made a 2nd wine prefix without DXVK for games I run in OpenGL.

However if your GPU doesn’t even support Vulkan then you shouldn’t be using DXVK at all so why would you not want to disable dxvk?

Astaroth ,

The problem is Winetricks doesn’t support updating DXVK.

Are you sure about that? Every time I run winetricks (once in a blue moon) it always says I have DXVK (Latest)

Astaroth ,

afaik you need dxvk in the actual wine prefix, just having it on your system doesn’t do anything.

I had installed dxvk from AUR and didn’t get why it wasn’t doing anything, turns out the point of having dxvk on your system is for symlinking it into your wine prefixes so you don’t have to get a dxvk installation for each prefix individually.

when I found that out I just removed dxvk package and got installed dxvk directly to the my prefix with winetricks, because I only use two wine prefixes anyway (one for vulkan and another for games that have to use opengl)

Astaroth , (edited )

From my understanding, at least one other necessary component is dxvk, and that wine is not enough.

dxvk is not necessary but it massively improves game performance on a lot of games, also keep in mind some games will actually not run if you use dxvk, so you sometimes (very rarely) have to use OpenGL instead and the only way I really found to do that was to have a wine prefix without dxvk. (I might’ve just been stupid though)

for the record only games that I had to use open GL for so far was Starcraft 2’s Galaxy Editor (although the actual game itself runs fine with dxvk) and I had some problems with alt tabbing in really old versions of Warcraft 3 (1.27 and older)

Anyway, for a time I used Lutris a bit but now I always run wine through terminal because Lutris was great when it worked but there were seemingly no solutions for when it didn’t (while running wine directly has never given me a problem).

And what’s great with running wine directly through the terminal is that either it will run and you’re good or you’ll get some error messages saying that some .dll or whatever is missing (usually .net, visual studio, msvcr100+.dll, mscvcp100+.dll, ms*.dll, etc.) and you just use winetricks and go through the list until you find what you need.

One more thing that took a while for me to learn was that some games (if you’re using mods) will need to be run along with WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User's_Guide#WINEDLLOVERRIDE…

for example when I play Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005 I start it with this command: WINEDLLOVERRIDES=“dinput8=n,b” wine speed.exe

another thing is sometimes you want to run games with some arguments, for instance before I got XCOM 2 on Steam and used AML I used to run it with this: wine XCom2.exe -noRedScreens -review

Now here’s a pretty big caveat, which is that I use FISH instead of Bash which adds some big QoL improvements (in this case it’s mainly about tab completion).

If I actually had to manually type in the commands or spend minutes going through history file every time I would never do it.

Although I suppose you could make an alias for each game.

Oh yeah and always run the games from the same directory as their .exe file is located in, more often than not it won’t work if you just do wine /path/to/directory/game.exe instead of cd /path/to/directory && wine game.exe

Edit: some typos, and I just want to note that the && aren’t supposed to include the amp; parts

Astaroth , (edited )

Years ago, Winetricks would write a new verb definition for every new DXVK release. Presumably when it was much less stable. You can see remnants of that with the 100+ verbs for installing particular DXVK versions. Now it just takes the latest stable release. Yay for the maintainers, because that’s a lot less work. As a side effect, Winetricks doesn’t have a way of updating it normally.

Oh does it not add new entries for every new DXVK release anymore? In that case I guess my DXVK version is probably a year old by now even though it says DXVK (Latest) and that it’s from year 2023: i.imgur.com/lNaqTPG.png

There is an easy way of updating DXVK anyway. Just run Winetricks with --force:

WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever winetricks --force dxvk

Now, admittedly, I misspoke about Winetricks “not supporting updating DXVK”. I learned this option exists just now. So you can force-update it with --force, which bypasses winetricks_is_installed and installs the latest version of DXVK. Guide has been updated accordingly; thank you for making me look into this again!

Oh I had no idea about this, and I normally just use winetrick’s GUI while using it so I would’ve had to look up how to update dxvk if not for you explaining it.

Although as a side note I’ve got the winetricks-git AUR package, not winetricks so maybe there’s some fix for it somewhere already, I’ll have to look into it. So far I haven’t had an issue with DXVK being too old, but I mostly play older games

When I was writing the Visual Novels on GNU/Linux guide, I did a lot of experimentation with Winetricks.

Unrelated but I’ll check that guide out, I’ve had trouble playing VNs that are in Japanese, as without LANG=“ja_JP.UTF-8” wine /path/to/game.exe they won’t even run but even with it the fonts don’t work and are shown as empty boxes.

Astaroth ,

Why a game (unmodded) doesn’t work will usually be pretty obvious just from the errors you get

I might’ve just been lucky, but so far the only time I had to look up a fix was for battle.net launcher, which ever since a while back has to be done after every update.

old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/…/ituht4u/

The problem is in a hidden flag that’s set on the qwindows.dll file in lastest B.net version which makes it hidden from the app.

The fix is relatively easy, simply run this inside the Program Files (x86)/Battle.net/Battle.net.13801/platforms directory:

setfattr -x user.DOSATTRIB qwindows.dll

After this Battle.net will work again.

But when it comes to mods it can be a lot trickier, and I don’t really have a general purpose solution. Hopefully the game is popular enough that someone else has a guide on what to do.

I’ve never played subnautica so I don’t know, but if the mods have their own modified DLLs then you’re probably supposed to use DLLOVERRIDES, so maybe WINEDLLOVERRIDES=“ribbon=n,b” since it’s called ribbon.dll

Some other issues I’ve had with modding is that the mod might expect the game to be in a certain directory or for directories to have certain names or there might be some problem because Windows isn’t case sensitive while Linux is.

Honestly the mods are generally not causing issues from my experience, it’s the mod loaders and what not.

Astaroth ,

Installing the fake japanese font did the trick 👍

Astaroth ,

While fandom sucks (although I think it used to be fine before the redesign many years ago) and game companies/publishers are cheap, I still think 3rd party wikis is going to better, even shitty ones like fandom, because guess what?

Just like every other ‘live service’ (or even just old games!?! if you’re Ubisoft) everything will be fine and dandy until one day some suit decides to shut down the wiki to cut down on costs and all that information and community work gets flushed down the toilet.

With that said, instead of them making some wiki website, it’s nice when games lets you look up information in the game itself, without having to open the web browser and going to some wiki.

Astaroth ,

Unrelated but the Activate GNOME watermark is just some kind of meme of Activate Windows, right?

Astaroth ,

Doesn’t it already? At least when it comes to games

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