It’ll have that on Linux like last time. You just need to set the uinput driver for the device. They had a generic gamepad one in the kernel for the OG. But not loaded by default as it’ll look like a kb&m out of the box unless you set a user-level driver config for the HIDs.

Valve were very supportive of Linux if people didn’t want to use Steam/Steam Input but other OS didn’t get their efforts beyond the Steam client.

You should definitely use those alternatives and they sound superior.

At the end of the day, this is the Steam Machine’s controller and it’s designed for use in the Steam and Linux ecosystem. Its behaviour and lack of generic xinput is intentional.

I’m surprised people think this is odd since the original Steam Controller was the same - it’s a Steam Input device, not XInput.

If you consider what it was designed for, it makes sense. This isn’t another generic controller but a controller designed for a Linux/PC-based video games console (Steam Machine).

If you boot into a desktop UI without Steam running, desktop UIs don’t support xinput devices to navigate around them.

The Steam Controller thus defaults to presenting itself as a keyboard and mouse so that the UI can be navigated without Steam running.

If it was xinput, you’d be reaching for a keyboard and mouse to plug in just to click Steam and then immediately no longer need them.

That’s why it’s not an xinput device.

I don’t think you understand what “the engine supports saving at any time” entails.

Having the ability to serialise objects is not the same as handling the input and output of serialisation.

You might as well be annoyed by why aren’t all developers letting us rewind time in games? Load from our last save? No thanks. Developers are so disrespectful of our time. They just need to log all the changes that happen and play them backwards. Every engine supports that!

I recommend you try implementing a save feature in a game engine then you might have a little more respect for the difficulty of the problem you’re irritated by.

Developers aren’t being unthoughtful or lazy, you’re just trivialising a rather complex software engineering problem that isn’t easy to solve and one solution over another has trade offs / weaknesses.

I understand why people want the feature and I agree it’s amazing but the reason lots of games don’t is it requires the serialization of basically everything in the game and that can be a nightmare to maintain if you’re making lots of big changes to the game throughout development. You have you go back and rework your save code every time you change anything, and ensure older parts of the code still adhere if you need to change how save works (meaning i.e. touching so much of the same code over and over rather than getting a feature implemented and moving on).

And while it can be done with most major engines with plugins, it you’re creating your own structures/object types etc, you need to extend that plugin to support them (and maintain that code every time you make changes to the structures).

Emulators simply save the state of memory since many older consoles didn’t have much RAM to begin with dumping it entirely to disk isn’t that big of a deal (especially if only a subset of registers are marked for game state). Not so easy with modern games where there is a lot more going on in RAM.

Games that have a daily tick e.g. Stardew only need to store a set of initialisation values that are used to begin the day since no other changes would be made to state yet (since the player hasn’t made any that day). Or checkpoints where you serialise player state, quest state, etc, with enemy location etc ignored and respawned as default the next time you play.

Think of it this way. If an enemy spawns in a default location, that doesn’t need to be serialised if you load a game from a checkpoint. But if you can save anywhere? Well then you need to know the enemies, their positions, their vectors, their AI state (alerted etc), their velocity, their position in the animation timeline, and potentially so so much more. If you save mid explosion while boxes are flying all over the place, you need to serialise so much more data to resume the physics simulation. Etc.

And what about multiplayer? That’s additional players and their state and surroundings etc that need to be serialised and reserialised at load successfully.

Then there’s how you serialise. Do you go with a text markup like JSON which can get incredibly large if there’s a lot of things to serialise? Or do you make a custom binary format to compress the size but then you need to maintain that format and how you map to and from it in your engine?

It’s a lot easier if you don’t have to serialise the state of a huge number of things for saving and maintaining that saving code every time you make changes. It’s not impossible, and if you build with the feature in mind, it can be made manageable to maintain.

But if that feature isn’t essential to your game, and you’ve an acceptable alternative, it frees you up to work on other features instead.

It’s a balancing act. And for a solo developer like that of Stardew, I can completely forgive them for not wanting to implement it.

If anyone from Larian is lurking, please do a GDC talk on this. I’m super interested in their approach to shipping a (native) Linux build of the game.

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Dubloonies!

You are blessed with a country with a functioning education system. It seems some countries only educate to the level of “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order?”

CANZUK when?

“I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity, I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes,” the actor continued…

Nice little touch there by the journalist.

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard wrote the original draft of the Withdrawal from the European Union. What part are you struggling with?

As a Brit, this comment is nonsensical. We were at the table when the rules for leaving the EU were written; our pen’s ink drafted those rules.

We knew what the outcome of leaving would be and pretending we didn’t is embarrassing.

My ethnicity is English
My nationality is British
My heart is European

As a Brit (but European at heart and strong “Remain” voter), I am quick to remind fellow Brits that English is a language heavily derived from our European ancestors: French, Latin, Germanic (Proto-Germanic, “Old English”, Old Norse, Romance, etc), Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and more.

I know the United Kingdom has been a royal asshat throughout the centuries but the mark of Europe is intense and undeniable; without Europe, there is no such thing as the English language (except perhaps a number of proper nouns that are rooted in the Celtic people and their ancestors) [Edit: see crappywittyname’s comment below].

I hope our European siblings can find solace in the fact that “English” is a distinctly European language that is full of words from all of our tongues.

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