sudotstar

joined 2 years ago
[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I'm a big fan of the series and would consider it to be my favorite JRPG series, not just for the story but because I enjoy the gameplay it offers as well.

It's a fairly "cheap" series to try out and see if you're into it. The entire series is a singular, continuous story, so the recommended place to start is Trails in the Sky First Chapter, which can be picked up fairly cheaply on Steam, especially during Steam sales. It's not as long as future games in the series, and is fairly representative of the pacing and storytelling format that later games will follow (though it is considered one of the slowest-paced games in the series). Basically if you're not a fan of Sky FC, you're not likely to be a fan of the future games in the series either (especially given that the substantial improvements to gameplay over the series' 20 year history likely won't have much appeal to you).

There are also demos available for some of the newer games in the series (e.g. Trails of Cold Steel III), and while I would not recommend actually playing through those games out-of-order, they may serve as a quick/cheap way to see if the format of the games is right for you.

I will say that while the combat of the games is rarely very difficult, and the game provides difficulty modifiers to make it even easier if you'd like, that the combat system is still fairly fleshed out and quite good casually IMO, but if you're really not into doing it even at easy difficulties, one option (PC exclusive) may be to download completed game saves and play through the games on New Game+ and completely trivialize the combat.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

On my Thinkpad 2in1, the behavior your desire is what I get. I'm on Fedora KDE (Kinoite) which pre-installs Maliit by default though, I'm not sure if it comes with some additional configuration.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In this case it's referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it's a bit buzzwordy, but it's not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 22 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I'd probably pick something esoteric and then just stop programming, tbh. I enjoy being a polyglot programmer, and learning many languages and learning from many ecosystems is incredibly interesting to me, far more than hyper-specializing in a single language would be.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Even if the performance is only mediocre, the gameplay will hold up. The game uses a fresh new combat system that merges action combat with turn-based gameplay, the likes of which I haven't really seen in any other game including past Trails entries, and it's absolutely a great time.

For the original PS4 release, Falcom released a fairly comprehensive demo that allowed you to play through the entire first chapter of the game, and carry over your save to the full release. They've also done something similar with Ys X which released on Switch day 1, so hopefully the Switch version gets a similar demo for both the Japanese and Western releases so you can try-before-you-buy.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I'm interested to see how the game performs on Switch. I played the Japanese PS4 version which was rough at launch but improved with post-release patches. I expect there are going to be some necessary cutbacks (no 60FPS, lowered render resolution, reduced visual effects, the standard fare) but that shouldn't impact the quality of the game experience at all, it's a wonderful entry and a great starting point for newcomers in a long-running series that rarely ever has those great starting points.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I think logistics management issues are a classic example of "first world problems" in Factorio, but it did feel like a pain in the butt to manually manage personal trash slots, similar logistics requests across multiple similar objects, and whatnot.

I didn't know I needed a solution to that problem, and I didn't expect it to be specifically in this format, but I really like what I see. I especially think the named groups will go a long way in e.g. a multiplayer Factorio session where some people but not everyone is into setting up complex logistics systems, allowing everyone else to at least understand and use the system and its benefits even if setting things up is left to the experts.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's unfortunate, but it's understandable if effort needs to be focused on a single good UI widget ecosystem fully under Mozilla's control, rather than living by the whims of the three major desktop UI toolkits they have to support, as well as the hundreds of thousands of web pages that are exclusively designed and tested against Chrome which already has been using non-native widgets across desktop platforms for a very long time. I'm not in the web dev space anymore, but I'd constantly see sites built that were incredibly dependent on the exact pixel sizes of widgets as they would render in Chrome, and would visually fall apart on Firefox, or with other zoom/text size settings.

UI design across Windows, macOS, and Linux GNOME/KDE have converged enough that it's probably good-enough if Firefox continues down the path of just theming their own widgets with the OS/user's color scheme where applicable, and calling it a day.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

If I'm not literally touching the content I'm trying to scroll, I'll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Unfortunately, I think many of the Asypr/Feral ports from the early 2010s, like Civ V, Borderlands 2, etc. fall victim to this. Those ports were amazing for Linux gaming at the time, but due to the fact that they were held back by their macOS counterparts and Apple's limitations on that platform, as well as the fact that they were third-party ports with far less post-release engagement from the original dev than the Windows versions, have left those versions to languish. It's a huge shame because those companies did, and to a certain extent still do support Linux-native gaming quite well, but their earlier ports have not aged well and there's not much that can be done given the opportunity costs for the many involved parties on those older games.

Civ V is a game I still play regularly to this day, and I basically have to run the Windows version under Proton to avoid crashes on modern hardware, maintain compatibility with popular mods, and play multiplayer with Windows users without terrible game desyncs.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

It might be somewhat controversial of a take, but to me an awesome-performing Proton version of a game is far better than a Linux version that may be native, but has severe deficiencies and/or lags behind its Windows version.

To me, my favorite native Linux games would be ones that do things on Linux that are not possible on other platforms. Generally, this would be an "unfair" advantage, as games should strive for feature parity on all platforms within reason, but so often we end up being on the wrong side of that equation that seeing some of the perks of the platform is nice.

To my knowledge, the only major game I can think of that does this to a certain extent is Factorio, which enables non-blocking game saves on Linux and macOS and not Windows. It's not a Linux-exclusive feature, but it's nice that the developers went through the effort to implement the feature on Linux even though it's not possible on Windows.

[–] sudotstar@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

I wasn't a fan of the built-in weather widget so I immediately replaced it, so I have no experience with it being nonfunctional, sorry.

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