Thanks for explaining. I'm convinced that autocorrect and touch screen keyboards are behind a great deal of the bad grammar and weird sentences that we see online.

Ha... That is hilarious, and very much like Bethesda. (See also: the bee problem in Skyrim.)

Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.

That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:

Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)

Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.

I haven't reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I've seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven't yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.

In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn't have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It's not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.

(Thankfully, the Baldur's Gate 3 developers haven't dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)

This article is nothing but filler, and the headline is pure speculation.

Activision Blizzard is such an awful company that I stopped playing their games, for ethical reasons. I'm no fan of Microsoft or consolidation, but at least they don't have a habit of supporting human rights abuses. This acqisition has me considering playing (ex-)Blizzard games again.

Vertical mergers, like this one, can either be good

Do you have any examples?

Moxie always did keep rigid control of Signal's development and operations, often running contrary to users' concerns and needs. I don't think that has changed since he left.

He has argued at length against decentralized messaging. Requiring phone numbers is another example. Being bound to Google services is yet another: Signal dragged their feet on that issue for years, and when they finally did offer a non-google build, they hid it away on an unlinked page of their site and placed it below a "Danger" warning.

For all their talk of security and their contribution to the field of data privacy, some of their choices seem very strange, and the reasoning they offer is often dubious. I am not convinced that their motivations are aligned with my best interests. Their actions are certainly not.

I see steadily increasing interest in privacy, data security, repairability, and e-waste reduction. The markets for these things may be relatively small today, but they are growing, and open hardware can address all of them.

do you think any meaningful new entries are going to deviate from their playbook?

Curious choice of words. I suppose it depends on how we define "meaningful". There are measures of success other than becoming a trillion-dollar market capitalization tech giant. There are many businesses that succeed despite being different, in some cases because they are different.

More concretely, we have already been seeing new entries for several years. (Purism and Raptor Computing Systems, for example.) They have thus far been limited in what they can offer, partly due to the lack of truly open and affordable components, and partly because the demand for products like theirs is just getting started. But both of those hindrances are changing.

I think how much this area will develop and grow depends on how we either support it or impede it with obstacles. I hope attempts at short-term defence against a rival won't lead us to shoot ourselves in the foot.

I wonder how much more hirelings will be used now that their appearance can be changed.

I wouldn't mind a way to designate the face of the party, so the game would stop pulling my tank into dialogues and persuasion checks.

Of course, then you would be expecting people to give their personal info to Google.

These projects came up in a quick search for something self-hosted:

https://github.com/ohmyform/ohmyform

https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms

https://github.com/formio/formio.js

https://github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey

There are probably more.

Nobody suggested otherwise.

IRC and email work fine for me. Leagues better than having it locked away behind Discord's policies and whims.

An issue/patch tracker (and maybe a wiki) would be nice, but I don't feel they're necessary. The linux kernel manages without them, after all.