bisby

Its already a massive game. Sector 7 on PS1 was only a few low fidelity static screens. That wouldn't work on modern game engines. The world would feel empty. So they make the town bigger. But now it feels empty because it's a large area with little to do in it. So adding side quests are a way to give the areas personality. And also, because they made the areas larger, the game naturally became massive disk space wise. There are a lot of potential reasons to have the game broken up, and then when broken up, you have to backfill side quests to make sure the game still feels full.

And I'm sure there's a bit of corporate "add bloat to expand play time" but it's not JUST that.

Also, I just started rebirth, and now I need to go find out how to make it UWHQD

Not to spoil too much, but the remake isn't the whole game. That's why there is a part 2 (which I haven't played yet, no idea how far into the game that gets)

Random broken things and weird tinkering to get some things working. And even when they work, not quite as good as windows.

Most overlays don't work because they are tied to windows specific windows capture things. On KDE wayland, the default "view desktop" from SteamVR doesnt even work.

But if youre looking for some very chill things, it's generally passable. I've been playing beat saber, which is fast paced (at least for the hand tracking) and proton handles it perfectly. From what I can tell, proton can handle VR games just fine, there's just some work to clean up the SteamVR interface in general.

I'm still delusionally hoping that the Valve Deckard is shipping soon and that when that drops, there will be a big SteamVR 3 linux update (kinda like how SteamOS 3 came out with the steam deck), and the headset will run linux itself so naturally they will have to ship all their linux VR improvements, and we'll see linux VR suddenly become mega viable.

tl;dr - working, depending on your level of tolerance for slight jank, and what games you want to play.

I have a separate PC for VR (with an old Vega64 in it) on my valve index. Just a week or two ago I got fed up with something on Windows 10 (i think it was trying to get me to upgrade to windows 11 maybe?) and installed bazzite.

I started with HORRIBLE performance issues. Like could barely run beat saber smoothly issues. And then I changed something minor around (Disabling the VR Home was I think the biggest thing, it's like it was constantly running in the background or something), and ran some script i found online (https://gist.github.com/galister/a85135f4a3aca5208ba4091069ab2222 - i think it was this one, but disclaimer, i have not looked deeply at what this does, I was running this on a fresh gaming only distro so I had nothing to lose), and suddenly performance was just fine. I'm sure this isn't motion smoothing, but going from stuttery to smooth made me think of this. And a Vega64 is pretty old, and pre-dates any modern "rdna" AMD improvements. But it is GCN at least. I might

Audio switching on Bazzite does work. In fact it works more reliably than it did on windows for me. I feel like "using a gaming dedicated distro" can go a long way in making gaming things work, and this is a dedicated gaming PC. YMMV

Base station auto sleep mode does not work, but https://github.com/ShayBox/Lighthouse this CLI script can solve that. Just set something to run lighthouse --state on and lighthouse --state standby and you're good.

Performance is generally worse than windows, and some things won't work (OVR toolkit requires some windows specific things, so naturally doesnt work). But on windows, the first time i launch steamvr for any session (its not just per boot, its just more like "if the headset has been off for more than an hour"), the headset screen wouldnt turn on. Put the headset on, i can see the tracking is working via the mirroring on the display, but the headset doesnt light up. "Restart headset" and then it works. Every time. Doesn't happen on linux. And with bazzite, the power button does a quick sleep just like on a steam deck, and the index still works reliably after the computer wakes from sleep.

I don't do a lot of VR, i just regularly play beat saber for exercise. And it works well for that. I'm perfectly happy sticking with bazzite for VR workouts. I havent really tried any other games, but would be willing to test drive anything for compatibility if anyone cares about something specific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

even if you can figure out specifically WHAT a function does, it's not always clear WHY a function does, and honestly, if this function wasnt labeled in the code, no way in hell would I know what it does.

It has an entire wiki page dedicated to explaining it, and it involves enough math that most people wouldn't be able to follow along.

Nothing this atrocious lives in any current codebases I work on... but if you work at an old enough company, some of the load-bearing code will be tricky to figure out what is calling it, but also it was written in a time where little hacks were needed to eke out performance.

You only have to experience it once for it to be a memorable enough thing that you will cite it for the rest of your days.

Or more realistically, it IS comprehensible, but the level of effort necessary to comprehend it is not worth it. So you leave it as "undecipherable" and move on.

The 4 freedoms of open source per RMS apparently dont include calling your project whatever you want to call it. You have to run that past him.

The first few years of self hosting tend to have a lot of experimentation, so the overlap is natural.

I'm hitting my grumpy old man phase of self-hosting where I want my Minecraft server and Jellyfin to to be stable so I don't have to hear about it from my family. So ironically, my setup is starting to look more like an overkill setup because I want to self host with stability instead of tinkering around to see if I can run a different server distro, etc. My home lab years got me to find a real nice base, but now I just add things to that base and I don't mess with the formula I have.

IMO the distinction is that if you are doing it for fun (or education) and could afford to lose any service you run for an extended period, you're home labbing. If you are doing it for cost savings, privacy, anti-capitalist, or control reasons and the services are critical and need to stay up, you're self-hosting.

tl;dr - experimentation vs utility

I have 2 AMD k6 300mhz chips. I tried to do that to one of them and never was able to get it finished. They are both just sitting in a bag in the back of a drawer somewhere so it's not like it mattered either way

XMPP has been an option for decades, if your contacts aren't using it by now, they arent going to. And with communications tools, both parties have to agree on a tool. Even if one party doesn't care about privacy or security.

Raw brute force security isn't the point most of the time, and ease of use and simplicity of setup are going to be major factors in adoption. Signal is much easier to get started with for most people than XMPP.

That wasn't the only part I was referring to. The edges around the letters on the license plates are weirdly lumpy. Every license plate Ive seen in Europe and the US are generally cleanly printed/stamped. These look hand painted. But I was never behind the Iron Curtain. It just looks very "AI smoothed" to me.

But everything about this picture feels weirdly AI. The logo on all of the pumps is just slightly different in each iteration. The guy's face. The texture on the wall down the entire left side, which somehow bleeds over the front of the car. The license plate on the left car has some numbers but the letters don't even look Cyrillic, they're just kinda mush.

So "Cyrillic letters on the license plate" aside, this photo is just FULL of weird AI anomalies.

Based on the states I know, some of the surprising rural areas are where state universities are.