A very jovial greeting to all,

About 20 minutes ago, I started the build for Hubzilla 11.2; as usual, it will be available for all to enjoy, and update their own instances after about an hour or so, so please don't update until then.

If you're curious about the code, you are most welcome to check out the Hubzilla code at: https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core/-/releases

and, of course, the docker image code at: https://github.com/dhitchenor/hubzilla

Questions, issues and PRs are all welcome; I'm looking forward to speaking with you.

A very jovial greeting to all,

About 20 minutes ago, I started the build for Hubzilla 11.2; as usual, it will be available for all to enjoy, and update their own instances after about an hour or so, so please don't update until then.

If you're curious about the code, you are most welcome to check out the Hubzilla code at: https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core/-/releases

and, of course, the docker image code at: https://github.com/dhitchenor/hubzilla

Questions, issues and PRs are all welcome; I'm looking forward to speaking with you.

So when the news circulated recently that the Lutris developer was using Claude to help write the code (and the angry posts/articles appeared) I figured I'd reach out to Mathieu to hear the other side of things.

I chatted to him a little, asking for his side of the story. He goes into some depth on how he uses it as part of his work-flow, the transparency in open-source projects in general, licensing and ownership of code that A.I. writes, safety and so on. Plenty of answers from Lutris, if you're curious on the topic. As ever, you can find the link here:

https://gardinerbryant.com/mathieu-comandon-explains-his-use-of-ai-in-lutris-development/

I recently picked up a couple of Apple TV gen 3.1, and discovered you can't do a whole lot with them aside from cast from your phone these days. I can't solder for shit, so jailbreaks are out of the question for me, sadly. In the process of researching all this, however, I found a GitHub that will help you hijack the Redbull TV app that comes pre-installed to run IPTV through it. Anyone know of anything good I can look into further? I'm on disability and life is expensive 😭

Full post: Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) but the numbers I've heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry

To address some frequently asked questions:

• These are US and Canada productions. If you're wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere
• These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)

Today’s game is Halo Reach. I bought a friend a copy of the game while it’s on sale so he could join us for the campaign. So now we have a full 8 person roster for the campaign to pick from.

I’ve already talked about this game a lot, and I had a suggestion from someone to talk about things besides mechanics. And so far I don’t believe I’ve talked about the Art, both music and the design. So i chose to focus on that.

I’m a big fan of the art style with its soft and almost muted feel. It helps set it apart from Halo CE-3. The muted tone also really helps set the tone. It feels less bombastic than something like what Halo 3 is.

With Nightfall especially it makes everything kind of have this nice cool and dark tone while still being playable and not abhorrently dark. Plus i love the way things like the Jackal’s shield have a kind of soft glow to them.

Halo’s music is amazing too. It’s the first time a video game made me go “wow. This doesn’t feel like a side piece to a video game. It feels like its own thing”. It really makes it feel unique. Plus the way it’s not constantly playing helps keep it from getting old. Winter Contingency alone with the opening motif has definitely cemented it for me as one of my favorites.

Finally, I didn’t want to end off without talking a little about me messing around with my friends. This is Halo after all.

The entirety of the thing we kept killing eachother. It started when I got in a ghost and gut blown up by my friend who stole the wraith. In retaliation I air striked him and took the tank out. Our other friend joined in by running me down with a Ghost. This kept going until we quit and ended with a well placed sniper shot to a Forklift that killed all of us.

We (hopefully) will play some more tomorrow. I know I’ve played Reach a bunch but it’s one of my favorites and I love playing it. I do hope this playthrough doesn’t fall in the bin with the other games I’ve started and dropped.

Brief overview:

This particular hybrid genre is quite rare to find and very enjoyable for me. I think it can largely be credited to Ratchet & Clank for trendsetting and inspiring all the rest (even Jak 2 had used some of Ratchet's code after Jak and Daxter [1]: The Precursor Legacy didnt have any weapons). There are some older games that might have inspired Ratchet & Clank, such as Blasto, which will also be listed here. But mostly I'm focusing on games that replicate a similar style as the Ratchet and Jak series, sometimes on purpose. Please let me know if you have any additions to the list.

The List (main):

▪︎ Ratchet & Clank (series) ▪︎ Jak and Daxter (series) ▪︎ Protodroid DeLTA ▪︎ Akimbot and Pumpkin Jack (same dev as each other) ▪︎ Tamarin ▪︎ Automaton Lung (& sequel Automaton Heart demo) ▪︎ GearGrit (and the devs' other game Fadeout kind of) ▪︎ Cloudbuilt ▪︎ Onirism ▪︎ Metal Arms : Glitch in the System ▪︎ Ruff Trigger : The Vanocore Conspiracy ▪︎ Donald Duck PK (AKA PK : Out of the Shadows) ▪︎ SpongeBob SquarePants: Plankton's Robotic Revenge (yes, this is really a 3rd person shooter) ▪︎ Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath ▪︎ Shadow the Hedgehog ▪︎ Spy vs Spy ▪︎ Blasto

I've heard recommended but can't verify if they fit the bill or not:

▪︎ Jet Force Gemini ▪︎ Stitch: Experiment 626 ▪︎ Smarties: Meltdown ▪︎ Insecticide ▪︎ Dr. Muto ▪︎ Destroy All Humans! (series) ▪︎ Robots ▪︎ One ▪︎ MDK (series) ▪︎ Earthworm Jim 3D ▪︎ Buzz Lightyear of Star Command ▪︎ Blinx : The Time Sweeper ▪︎ Cryght ▪︎ Mega Man Legends ▪︎ Fur Fighters

Similar gameplay elements either continuously or occasionally:

▪︎ Sly Cooper (series) ▪︎ Ty the Tasmanian Tiger (series) ▪︎ Rayman (the 3D games) ▪︎ Skylar & Plux ▪︎ Spyro the Dragon (series) ▪︎ Super Mario (series) ▪︎ Crash Bandicoot (series) ▪︎ Astro Bot (series) ▪︎ *Psychonauts (series) ▪︎ Futurama ▪︎ Family Guy Video Game! ▪︎ Jumping Flash ▪︎ The Gunk ▪︎ Splatoon (series) ▪︎ Sunset Overdrive ▪︎ Returnal ▪︎ ReCore ▪︎ Lost Planet (series)

Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models.

Me again :P

Honey, I Shrunk The Vids is a streamlined video conversion tool built on FFMPEG, with smarts built in for standardising all files put through it to a standard target bitrate into either .mp4 or .mkv containers, in either h.264 or HEVC format. Comes in GUI for desktop and CLI for headless operation. The idea is that you can point it at a folder full of folders full of videos and hit "Start", and trust that when it's through you'll have videos compatible with devices back to ~2014, smaller (or at least no bigger) than they were before, and with accurate MKV tags where appropriate.

The application has gone through some more major revisions since my last post, and I thought people would like to know! The first thing you'll notice is the visual refresh:

There are no more menu tabs; all options are exposed in a single side panel. Also, I added exotic filetypes for inputs: mts, mpg, mpeg, vob, flv, 3gp, 3g2, ogv, rmvb, rm, asf, f4v, y4m, apng, webp. That's right, you can convert basically anything FFMPEG supports to convert to MKV or MP4!

I'm particularly proud of the webp support. FFMPEG can't decode animated WebP natively (or at least, the most popular binaries can't; maybe someone has a fork that's fixed it), so HISTV:

• Parses the RIFF container itself,
• Decodes each frame through ffmpeg's static WebP decoder,
• Composites them with correct alpha blending and disposal, and
• Pipes the result to the encoder.

Temp files are completely avoided for storage/IO reasons; variable frame timing is preserved, so smooth per-frame progress is retained from source.

The one filetype I left out was .yuv, because that's raw data, no container or headers, and the user would have to enter the correct dimensions for each video (which defeats the core purpose of Honey, I Shrunk The Vids, so it's out of scope for this project).

The theme engine has been simplified, with only 6 keys down from 16, and everything named more intuitively so it's easier to tell what changes what. As well, a Linux user reported their FFMPEG wasn't discovered properly, so ffmpeg discovery now uses login-shell PATH resolution (previously macOS only), fixing detection when ffmpeg is installed to locations like ~/.local/bin.

Bunch of bugs got squished (for example the encoder would switch when toggling the new "Precision Mode" checkbox), and several more efficiency passes were made with more hand-edits than ever. This is the cleanest, leanest build yet, and the most featureful.

Finally, I added "-full" versions for each platform. These come bundled with FFMPEG, if you want just a single download.

Also, I've flirted with the idea of signing the Windows executable so Windows Defender stops complaining about it, but I don't yet see a reason to give Microsoft money for that. You can just click "More Info", and then "Run Anyway".

I'm running out of ideas for future updates, but if anyone has requests just drop a comment or open up an issue! And, as always, I'm here for questions. I hope you find it useful!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44753763

Apple Support page

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/210996

From Common Dreams via this RSS feed

There are so many Wine Front ends so many guides

1. play on linux (https://www.playonlinux.com/)
2. wine tricks (https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks)
3. winecharm (https://github.com/fastrizwaan/WineCharm)
4. wineZGUI (https://github.com/fastrizwaan/WineZGUI)
5. bottles (https://usebottles.com/)
6. qt gui for wine (https://web.archive.org/web/http://q4wine.brezblock.org.ua/)

Games

1. lutris (https://lutris.net/)
2. protontricks (https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks)
3. protonplus (https://protonplus.vysp3r.com/)
4. portporton (https://linux-gaming.ru/)

What an utter dick.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62362329