[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 8 months ago

Admittedly, it's pretty niche software. But for those who grew up using equivalents on gaming consoles such as Xbox or PlayStation, it was (still is) a pivotal accessibility feature.

And it's not necessarily only for those with physical disabilities or reflexive motor skill issues. Sometimes you'd like to introduce a really good story based game to a novice player that you know just doesn't have (yet or never) the coordination or muscle memory to complete it.

My grandparents never grew up playing videogames, and some of my nieces and nephews in the family are too young to grasp complex game mechanics. However, all of them really enjoyed playing with a control assist, where they could take the initiative in gameplay, like choosing dialogue options, steering saddled horses, flying broomsticks, exploring the world at their discretion, and I could just coast along in the backseat, fixing their camera angles, steering them back on course when lost, rescuing them in high stake combat encounters, etc.

In some ways, you could think about it as co-oping for single player games, but because it's per controller, you can do the same thing for multiplayer games as well. Like to help level the age gap in PvP games with your older sister versus your younger brother.

Before we ever played with control assist, I tried the classic method of tossing around the one controller like a hot potato, but it's just not the same in a number of ways. For one, having to relinquish a single controller really breaks immersion, as your suddenly fumbling about between living room chairs only your game characters on death's door from an unexpected boss encounter. It also deprives them of that haptics, where they can learn more easily attack patterns or UX interaction that conventionally telegraph via force feedback.

There is perhaps some functionality for solo players as well, such as splitting hand control across multiple gamepads. Like if your hands/arms were of different sizes, or you wanted to play other than with the controller on your lap, you could just easily dual wield controllers mux together the left and right sides-in-reach, or mux a regular handheld gamepad with something more like a Xbox Adaptive Controller for when dexterity or convenience demands.

Although, I think the majority of folks will find the assist co-op scenario for single player games the most appealing aspect. As others have replied on prior release posts, like parents helping their kids through their first playthrough ever, it's really an underrated feature for game consoles, and bringing that to gaming on Linux was really appreciated.

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 8 months ago

Indeed, I've encountered a few games on Steam that gracefully switch multiple controllers, but only by giving exclusive input on a first come-first-serve bases (i.e. which ever controller moves first after some cool down of inactivity from both). Hollow Knight: Silksong being one such example, as I couldn't necessarily drive separate axis from different controllers simultaneously, thus one such motivation for passing the game only one virtual controller and optionally hiding the rest to avoid input conflicts.

I'd be happy if Steam were to adopt such an accessibility feature into Steam input directly, much like Xbox and PlayStation. Perhaps they'll take more of an interest in multi controller configurations with the upcoming refresh of the Steam Controller, given the wireless dongle is meant for multi device pairing.

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Nix CI Benchmarks (garnix-io.github.io)
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Background:

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[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

It doesn’t matter, because Nix isn’t built for it. That’s not it’s purpose or what it’s best at.

I was asking more about linux distros other than NixOS.

They all offer a better desktop experience because they are tuned with their packages and experience.

  • Would you say it's a front end aspect? If user driven system changes were as simple as using a Software Center UI?
  • A similar [desktop] experience sounds relative, what the comparison? Windows, MacOS, linux?
[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

Oh, neat! Is this the project you're referring to?

Looks like Bazzite is listed as an example derivative image. I've heard good things about that OS from newer Linux users' perspectives. But is ublue something an individual user could personally customize, or more like something a development team or community project would build up from?

The landing page referencing layers and the Open Container Initiative, so is this more like a bootable container using overlay file system drivers?

One attraction I appreciate with Nix is the ability to overlay or overload default software options from base packages, without having to repeat/redefine everything else upstream, e.g. enabling Nvidia support for btop to visualize GPU utilization via a simple cuda flag. Replicating lazy-level-evaluation with something buildkit ARGs would be hectic, so do they have their own Dockerfile/Containerfile DSL?

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago

It's a steep learning curve, but because much of the community publishes their personal configs, I find it a lot simpler to browse public code repos with complete declarative examples to achieve a desired setup than it is to follow meandering tutorials that subtly gloss over steps or omit prerequisite assumptions and initial conditions.

There are also plenty of outcroppings and plateaus buttressing the learning cliff that one can comfortably camp at. Once you've got a working MVP to boot and play from, you can experiment and explore at your own pace, and just reach for escape hatches like dev containers, flatpacks or appomages when you don't feel like the juice is worth the squeeze just yet.

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

Have you had any luck with projectors for coding? I've only ever used them for large mob-programming sessions, like during hackathons. I feel like the low/narrow contrast of projectors makes it hard to use for dark mode, not to mention the space real estate requirements. :P

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 8 points 3 years ago

Private Eye - essential for staying online 24/7

What was that device, an early cellular modem or 802.11 wireless bridge? The thing ontop of the briefcase looks like a head visor with an antenna. Google search keywords are just noise.

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 3 years ago
[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 3 years ago

This was a funny talk wasn't it! Any others of his you'd recommend?


Think I posted this with the short code, so Limmy didn't match the cross post, but here are a couple more old comments here too:

I should open a ticket about fuzzy domain matching for cross posts on Lemmy. Should be useful for other things like stack overflow or other social media links.

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 3 years ago

Yeah, I actually think lemmy could benefit from improved scraping and indexing. For example, it'd really help if more search engines could natively understand Lemmy's federated nature, e.g:

  • Deduplicate links by prioritising results for instances hosting the community that a post was originally submitted to.
  • Include and denote cross posts by recognizing order of submission timestamp and prioritizing popularity via vote ratios, comment counts, and lurker click-through traffic.
  • Do the same deduplication and prioritization across instances, but for comments as well.

Another use case besides search engines would be for internet archive projects, helping to preserve historic internet content even in the face of lemmy instances falling offline and disappearing. For example, much knowledge was lost to us due to the Twitter APIoplicips and Reddit Blackout: E.g:

Most of the above will only ever be possible due to improved scraping or even federation APIs.

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 7 points 3 years ago

Looks like they posted the video process timelapse of that artwork here:

I'll have to checkout their webcomic Pepper&Carrot. Thanks for the reference!

[-] ruffsl@programming.dev 8 points 3 years ago

After logging a daily cycle of the system base load, could you post some before and after metrics for resource usage for comparison? That'd be fun to see.

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