I again very much appreciate the advice, and its nice to know /someone/ is rooting for me lol.

Now... this may be an unfair criticism at this point but:

When I first got into Arch (and this was /before/ the Steam Deck was a thing) I found it to be a chaotic mess that required reading literally hundreds of pages of /unofficial community wiki documentation that was often wrong/ to even get a stable bare metal build of Arch working that could actually you know like function as a working computer, without having to bugfix for 3 hours before I could use basically any program... and then some major dependency would update, conflict with another major dependency and blam back to ok now I have to rethink my ENTIRE arch build AGAIN.

Oh, right. The community was basically just awful. Terrible.

PopOS! on the other hand was uh... dl iso, flash, boot, run installer, reboot, then install apps and configure the OS, and I rarely ever had a dependency update bork the whole OS.

Now, granted, that was 1) When I was less well versed in linux and 2) Before the Steam Deck, so its possible that the Steam Deck OS has more or less corralled the expanded Arch Universe into actually having some sane standards merely by being the biggest and most important fish in the Arch pond.

Though I still am fond of PopOS!, I will give a more desktop oriented configuration of Arch a try as a dual boot, and I would be very appreciative if you could point me toward an Arch config that is know to work with reasonable stability on a Steam Deck, if such a thing exists.

Please let it have at least by default a DE, or configurable DEs either in the installer or in different flavored downloadable isos.

Yeah, I was trying out Arch back when it did not by default have a DE and you had to manually figure out all the dependencies to install one, via CLI.

Please dear god do not put me through that again lol.

I will try out Obsidian... is that available on F Droid, Aurora, NeoStore or just plain old Google App Store? Just got the shitty $200 phone from a grocery store right now.

I will look into ChatGPT maybe later, after I am actually living somewhere hopefully permanently. Did not know you can customize different use case for it now, very neat!

I also have seen some procedural methods of generating animations in demonstrations for research papers...

... but there was one tutorial I found of someone implementing... not quite as good, but probably a framework that could be built into something close to GTA's style of 'when the world or objects clip into your character, it modifies their animations so they do not clip through the world or objects'... already, in Godot, with available code to just grab.

You would probably have to do a bit more work to get it up to Euphoria engine quality, but this guy already figured out the fundamentals /and implemented them in Godot/, so thats why I was considering it.

You are absolutely correct though that ultimately that is not really a core feature and probably shohld not be first priority.

I am thinking though that procedural level design is going to be a fairly important core feature of what I am going for.

This may sound absurd for a single dev, but I would like to make something that can eventually be turned multiplayer, but is initially single player for early dev and testing purposes. Stability testing with NPCs, really want to make more in depth AI routines for both combat and non combat tha most games have, present in all NPCs.

Hub zones would be defined cities or encampments that feature a higher number of NPCs, but are smaller than the overworld map, and are where a lot of NPCs would just be going about their daily business, a bit more in depth simulation than just MMO style quest givers just standing there waiting for you.

I am guessing that having a small town that actually feels alive, with actual people doing actual normal people things, and have a decent amount of them, the hub zones will either need to just be totally disconnected from the rest of the game as its own contained level... or perhaps i can come up with some lore and gameplay friendly way to make it so the rest of the world is graphically opaque on the outside or less expensive to render, and all the other AIs of the world and other hub zones go into some kind of simplified simulation state, or just pause or something?

Probably would also be a kind of safe zone for players to more safely socialize in, enforced either by a world/game mechanic, or just lots of npc guards. Still brainstorming that part. Procedural generation could possibly be used to simply lay the foundation of multiple differing hubs simply as a dev tool so i dont have to level design tens or settlements/cities.

Then you would have the overworld, larger but more sparsely populated by npcs, and with a hopeful balance between graphical goodness and draw distance. For actually making the overworld I am going to attempt to grab a decent quality heightmap of the real world (game is set in real world, a bit in the future), then manipulate it in either Krita or perhaps a decent open source 3d heightmap editor, then possibly use some procedural generation to paint trees, bushes, rocks, handle cliffsides and valleys where the heightmap resolution is insufficient to handle the terrain convincingly, abandoned cars, garbage, etc... instead of manually plopping them all in, as seemingly every modder of every game that has ever been modded does.

In the overworld would be more or less dungeon entrances of various kinds. Like the hub zones, the dungeons would be basically seperate levels from the rest of the game, with every AI not in your particular dungeon going into a simplified simulation state to allow for more complex and numerous AI baddies or what not to exist in the dungeon, without murdering your oc or framerate.

Due to the setting of the game, theres a lot of tectonic activity going on, sometimes a volcano might go off or something, maybe an asteroid or satellite impacts the ground and changes the terrain, so different psuedo random world events could cause some 'dungeon entrances' to pop into being, others to disappear. The dungeons themselves I would like to be able to have basically procedurally generated, with a number of different styles of dungeons.

Add this all up and you get something approximating say Fallout New Vegas... or maybe Kenshi..., but the overworld itself changes, and the actual high risk high reward dungeon areas actually organically change simply as time goes on in the game, so that no two playthroughs are the same.

I could also make it so that, when various conditions are met, various NPCs dispositions toward you changes such that, among other things, they could start you off on various quest paths that may have large impacts on the world , a specific faction, or a hub zone.

Then if the single player works... make at least part of the game multiplayer. Yeah I know God help me with that rofl.