Posts

I’ve been keeping a list in my head for ages of things I’d love to see Steam bring about and make available for people to use. This post is basically a list of those things put to digital paper. Each thing will be described to the best of my ability, and will not strictly be taking practicality into consideration, but they should all be reasonably possible. Allow the User (or the community) to specify a directory from which to syncronize save files for games where the developer did not actually set the directory themselves, and enable save sync. This would be fantastic for older titles like Grand Theft Auto 3/VC/SA where RockStar has never bothered to configure it. Enable saving a Diff of a Games Files, specifically to enable easier 3rd party modding. Unlimited Local Diff’s, with a limited number of remote diffs, with a file size limit set per game. Maybe some way to specify your own repo for diffs so you can effectively have unlimited space? The goal of this is to allow you to mod a game, IE GTA SA, to support widescreen, restore the music, add back the missing lighting effects, all kinds of things of that nature, and then synchronize that across all of their clients, or have it survive reinstalling the operating system the user is using. Cloud Storage! I’d love it if Valve had some kind of Cloud Storage solution for general storage. It doesn’t need to offer downloads of those files for other people, but just having a place I can stick files and know they’ll be fine and syncronized between machines would be fantastic. This one in particular I can understand why valve might resist it, as it’s a very expensive proposition even giving every steam user 5GB of storage - That’s a LOT of space. Maybe put it behind a purchase? SteamDrive, $10 for 10GB, forever. Queued Purchases! Let me go to a game, indicate how much I want to pay for said game, give valve the money, and when that game eventually hits that price, it’s automatically purchased, and if any money is left over, returned to my Steam Wallet. Gnome on the SteamDeck. I own a SteamDeck, I run Bazzite on it because honestly the Gnome experience is better, though that might just be that I am more familiar with Gnome than KDE in my day-to-day. Gnome <3 Remember what tab I set to default across devices. You can set it per device to go to Library instead of Store, but you can’t set it to go to Library on first login. Theme API! Give us back a nice clean way to theme the client especially on the Deck, so we don’t have to install Decky! As much as I love Decky, having first party support for that would be fantastic. Overlay API! Let me write code in some form that Steam will dynamically load into their own overlay, so adding a button along the bottom, so I can do silly shit like integrate a YouTube player or Telegram or Discord or Mastodon. Steam Controller Firmware Updates… Please add a button to flash Steam Controllers to the last available firmware. The current solution is very lackluster. You have to track down and download a zip file from the Steam Forums that flashes the controller, and the thread has 2 links, one of them is wrong and doesn’t work, it’s a shit show. Fix this please. “Steam Audio” as it exists right now is an API that enables games to sound better, but I want “Steam Audio” like Steam Input - Let me configure Mic and Speakers and Headphones and what goes where for applications running under Steam. I’ll add and remove from this list as stuff happens over time. ...

So, Chrome just killed most of the good Extensions, and you’re looking for an alternative. You’ve looked at all of the competition, and come to a stark realization: The only competition is Firefox [1]. Every other browser (Brave, Chromium, Edge, Opera…) are all based on Chromium, and will with time all succumb to the removal of Manifest V2, if only because, at the end of the day, they rely at least in part on the Chrome Store. ...

Search is dead. Or at least, it will be soon. What do I mean? I mean that within 18-24 months, using google is going to be effectively pointless. I’m going to make a personal bet against myself that this isn’t true, and I hope I lose. But I can hear you asking, why do I think this? Well, lets look at how google right now today works: You go to google.com You type in a query The results are interpreted by an AI and you’re given a likely kinda right but mostly wrong answer You scroll past that and go nearly to the bottom of the page to find somthing relevant - Assuming anything relevant even appears on the front page. And the last two points are what is going to end up being the issue. ...

I can’t help but recommend doing what OpenRCT2 did if you can Keep the game playable for the entire process. How? Make your decomp into a DLL that’s injected into the main, original executable. As you add code to the decomp, make it so that calls to that code go to the decomp instead of the original. Over time, more and more of the game will be from the decomp, until one day you can simply replace the original executable, and in the mean time you can VERY easily check if your new code works, or at least doesn’t crash. ...

Okay so I have found myself in an interesting situation I want to have my Router/Server/Whatever you want to call it, uWebServer is how I refer to it, build and serve builds for the rest of my machines. It’s reliably on, water cooled, under my stairs, and most importantly, not a laptop. And to be clear, by builds, I mean my NixOS flake outputs - all of the binaries needed for any of my computers to run. ...

See? Some people still do it.

Aight, so first off: I love Majoras Mask. In my list of best games of all time, it sits solidly at #1. So of course, when I heard that there was not one, but two different PC ports, and that they were done by entirely different people, using very different methods, I had to try them both. Now, I’ve beaten Majoras Mask, to 100%, multiple times. On the Nintendo 64 with my reliable gold cartridge with the holographic front, on Project64, Mupen, and WiiVC. I have a deep, intimate knowledge of all things Majoras Mask, random bits of lore, how to do just about anything in the game. ...

I recently built a router using NixOS. Here’s how I did it. I’m going to skip a lot of the middle learning stuff I did while I figured all of this out. And there is still a lot of stuff I need to learn. Like how to handle IPv6! Hardware My router/server is a custom built gaming PC from many years ago. It has an i7-6700k, 32GB of RAM, and a pair of 256GB SSD’s in btrfs raid0. It’s overkill for a router, but it’s what I had laying around. ...

I built this on Nix. And it was very easy. First though, Credit where it’s due, I borrowed from This with some updates. At the moment, the configuration for this site looks like this: { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }: with pkgs; mkShell { buildInputs = [ hugo ]; } Which frankly, is excellent! (Also of note, I’ve set it up so that the text above will always be the current version that’s in use!) ...

First Post! Heck!