They have a 1 time $6 payment for GoG access, which isn’t too bad. I’m loathe to agree to a subscription payment for anything else these days, but a one-off payment isn’t too bad if it’s something I’ll use.

Innoextract sounds pretty good, I’ll definitely keep that in mind for non-steam games in the future.

Sounded like they ran fine from the moment the updated version was released. Glad valve is finally getting them updated, that meme about how doom will run on everything except steam deck was a little painful.

I’ve heard of it fixing various sleep related audio bugs. Overall it’s a great plugin and I recommend it to everyone.

That was a good investigation and explanation about a weird number of up votes. Thanks for explaining it.

I don’t have time right now to write a full proper response, but for quests I would imagine starting out we would still use traditional random generation the bones of the quest, but use an LLM to create the narrative and NPC dialogs for it. Games like Shadows of Doubt already do a good job with randomly generated objectives, but there’s no motive for the crimes. Just taking the already existing gameplay and using LLM to generate a reason why the crime happened would help with the atmosphere a lot. Also, you can question suspects and sometimes solve the case by them telling you they saw [person] at [location] at [time], but I think an LLM could provide actual witness interrogation where you have to ask the right question, or try to catch them in a lie.

As far as the mechanics for LLMs to actually provide dialog, I expect to see some 3rd party AI startups work on it. Some kind of system where they have some base language packages that provide general knowledge and dialog abilities, and then a collection of smaller models/loras to specialize. Finally you would have behind the scenes prompting that tells the NPC who their character is, any character/quest specific knowledge they have, their disposition towards the player, etc. I don’t expect every game company to come up with this on their own, I suspect we’ll get a few individual companies offering a built solution for it starting out, before it eventually becomes built into the larger game engines.

Obvious application is having NPCs that you can actually talk with. Not just about one or two topics that they have a pre-recorded voice line to tell you about, but about anything at all. And with AI speech generation as well, you could have them somewhat realistically talk back to you.

You could also have an LLM working as a kind of DM, coming up with new quests with stories and some content variety. A lot of games have repeatable randomized missions, but this are very formulaic and feel very repetitive after you’ve done a few. There’s usually no story, just a basic combat grind. A LLM could come up with actually interesting randomized quests, like a murder mystery where the murderer had a motive and you can legitimately question the suspects about anything they know.

Truly the end of an era

The steam recovery media let’s you reinstall just the OS while preserving user files.

As long as you haven’t done anything too dramatic like converting your file system to BTRFS

Edit: This will downgrade you to a much older version of SteamOS though, from which you would then have to update back to current. This can be a problem because some early issues (like the OLED deck not being able to connect to wifi 6E networks) can make it frustrating to update.

Presumably the hand grips on the deck keep enough of a gap under the deck to keep this from being an issue.

I have both the Spigen case and the JSAUX modcase, and both will fit inside the carrying case. The modcase one has to have the front cover and kickstand removed to fit however.

That said, I usually only use the modcase with front cover now instead of the original carrying case.

You should definitely use OpenMW instead of vanilla, it’s not a mod but is instead a full engine rewrite. It runs natively on linux, has better performance, and a whole lot of other benefits:

• Native support for macOS, Linux, and Windows
• Improved physics and AI
• Distant terrain
• Save/Load dialogs organized by character
• Quality of life UI improvements, such as being able to search for spells
• Multiple quicksaves
• World map adjusts automatically to fit new landmass from mods such as Tamriel Rebuilt
• Support for up to 2147483646 loaded mods (up from 255 in the original Morrowind engine)
• Since it was made from scratch, virtually no engine bugs from the original Morrowind
• And much more

You can install it from the Discover store in desktop mode and then add it to steam, or alternatively you can use a tool like Protonup-qt (also in the discover store) to install Luxtorpeda, which is a tool for automatically launching supported games with rewritten engines. Once Luxtorpeda is installed you can open Morrowind steam properties in game mode, and check the “force specific compatibility tool” box and select to run the game with Luxtorpeda. After that it will automatically run the game through the OpenMW engine instead.

You’ll need to set a password for Cryoutilites I think. In desktop mode you can open konsole and run the command passwd, then enter your password twice. After that you can just run the Cryoutilites installer.

I haven’t played world, so unfortunately I can’t make a comparison. There’s definitely grinding to do though, hopefully someone who has played both can comment about it.

I’ve been playing a whole lot of Monster Hunter Rise. It runs really good, great performance and battery life (which makes sense considering it was originally a switch game). It’s my first real Monster Hunter game and I’m having a great time with it.

Only issues I’ve encountered: switching between docked and handheld play causes a minor fps drop until I restart the game. The game also has a utterly bizarre bug where if you’re playing with a controller designated as the 2nd player controller, any monster roar will drop the fps to 0 for like a minute. Super bizarre, no idea what kind of spaghetti code could cause that.

Edit: for anyone interested, Fanatical has a build your own monster hunter bundle right now that’s an incredibly good deal. Can get MH Rise + it’s big Sunbreak expansion for $11, previous best deal I had seen was $18 for the two. They also have MH World and a lot of other past MH games.

That’s unfortunate, full system freezes like that are sometimes because you ran out of ram/VRAM. If that was what happened, the SteamOS Beta uses zram which should prevent this once the change makes it to stable. In the meantime you could use something like Cryoutilites to increase your swap file size, which should also prevent crashes like that.

Valve pushed a beta client update this morning that among other things fixed a login issue:

Fixed a rare bug that could cause the login page to continuously fail with “error 11” until the client was restarted.

So based on that maybe try restarting the client if you’re already having trouble. Could be completely unrelated issue though.

That actually came up in some of the early ROG Ally reviews. Some reviewers found that old steam games wouldn’t run on it, but they would run on the steam deck.

The top seller chart only covers around 2 weeks of time if I recall right, and the Steam Deck has been near the top of it for years now.

You’re good, no shame in asking questions.