I mean… 2023 is shaping up to be pretty dope so far. FF16, Pikmin 4, Diablo IV, Armored Core (assuming it’s good), Tears of the Kingdom…

Might’ve meant “material” progress, like “tangible” or progress that’s real and meaningful? “Materialistic” I think usually just means thinking about things you own rather than the quality of your life and relationships? Though saying it out now, I guess that works kind of… But I’ve only ever heard “materialistic” referring to people who only care about what someone owns rather than being a good person; never about video games or the kind of progress I think you’re wanting.

Anyway, lots of good suggestions here. I can’t add anything that meets all your qualifications; but if you are willing to dramatically break your install size requirement, I’ve been having a lot of fun lately with the Forza Horizon games (4 and 5) which are open-world racing/challenge games; but literally everything you do contributes to experience points and money you can use to upgrade and purchase new cars, and there are a lot of challenges which aren’t just races, there’s speed trials (how fast can you hit this one stretch of road), trick trials (how many jumps can you pull if in a minute) and so on.

But the install is like 65GB for FH4, and 150+GB for FH5… hundreds of high detail cars and massive open worlds, I guess… :(

Would maybe be funny if a law were passed saying that you could only charge people for access to your AI content if you can prove that their own content wasn’t used to help train the AI…

Is here on Beehaw get the features enabled on Beehaw, regardless if the poster’s instance has ones not enabled here. So you wouldn’t get downvotes over on here. But lemmy.ml has then it seems. You may even have downvotes over there that you wouldn’t know about here! Fedi is weird sometimes…

Hey, thanks! I’ve now found them!

I got it working! I’m fortunately, I know a kindly professional who took pity on me and showed me the secrets of Cloudflare free-tier, and we did work something out.

I have had to learn SO MUCH in just the last week, though, it’s crazy intense!

This is an idea I didn’t know about! I’ll have to look more into it. If you feel like it, I’d love to hear a bit more detail; but also I know how to use DuckDuckGo, so no pressure!

I’ve been working on getting Matrix Synapse running on my NAS, and the CLI hasn’t been my problem. I’m a programmer, and CLI doesn’t scare me; but the other issues you mention are all new to me, and getting a web service set up so people outside my local network can access it but without leaving me open to bad actors is wicked stressful.

The biggest problems end up being that I need to work with the soup of technologies, and there’s no one place to do all the things. I’ve got TWO routers (because my internet comes through one, and I run my LAN and wifi off one I trust better) which means I’m double-NATed, which is apparently the root of all evil; I can use Cloudflare to tunnel to my NAS, but I can’t accept simple (CNAME) redirects from a family member’s domain to one of my subdomains without paying Cloudflare $200/month, so that means I’m back to dealing with the double-NAT, and then I have to learn setting up TLS, which sounds like it’s simple, but still it’s jimmy way another thing to screw around with and another thing I could screw up on accident.

I could pay for a VPS, but that to me defeats a lot of the point of “host your own” federation when some company could be subpoenaed for copies of all their hosted accounts or something. (Yes, I could get subpoenaed for my data just as easily, but it takes more work to subpoena a thousand people than one company for a thousand people’s accounts.)

Anyway, I’d love to see things evolve to where it’s easy for newbies to host their own private instances of everything.

Personally, I’d love a drop-in tool that runs more like a temporary server while it’s running, syncing federated data you missed while your device was off; and only serving your data when it’s on. Likely with some kind of redirect service/NAT punchthrough so other clients can find you…

…but I think we’re a long way off from being able to do that.

I was really sad the day I completed the last Picross S game on Switch. I had run out. I was playing in bed to unwind my brain at the end of the day. Found a clown on Steam that’s decent, but my Steam Deck is too big to play lying down in bed comfortably. 😥

I do, but I’m not running anything super important through them; but I’ve been considering jumping ship to Cloudflare, as cloudflare seems to be doing a good job with providing encryption and traffic protection with their free management accounts.

The only good outcome of the merger IMO is hopefully getting rid of Bobby Kotick. The fine devs across the company deserve better leadership and a safer working environment than they’ve had over the years under his frat boy reign.

But do I think Microsoft will eternally play fair with the acquisition? Not by a long shot.

Does Matrix have an equivalent to “servers” on Discord? Like, I can join one and it comes with a bunch of chat rooms owned and moderated by the same community? Because that’s the biggest thing I used Discord for is following and interacting with communities I’m in; and I just fired up Element and I see nothing that hints that it would be possible…

Yes, please! The UX of IRC is the absolute worst for me! Give me some IRC that’s easy to hop in and use? With file transfer and in-line image sharing and voice chat? Okay, I’m in!

On the other hand, I have hated the experience every single time I ever needed to get on to IRC for any reason. And needing to either stay logged in or run my own private always-on bounce server in order to see what overseas friends have been up to while I was asleep? Man, that’s such a bad user experience. :(

If something came up that were as easy to use as Discord but didn’t store all the chat centrally unencrypted… I would be well in favor of that. Like if each developer could just fire up a private server instance and I could add that server to my list and chat in their channels and jump around servers? That would be super awesome.

But yeah, I’m in probably a dozen Discord servers that I mostly follow for gamedev news or YouTube channel post updates or whatever, that I never really interact with.

It’s very similar IIRC to IRC, just… with a GUI that makes it easy to use for non-techies and those of us who just don’t have the time to memorize commands.

I went through the same phase several years back when my child was born, and you’re right—games where you can pause any time are the only kind worth playing for several years after a new child.

This is exactly my opinion. They’re not great in a lot of their stances; but they ARE better than most companies in most of their stances… and the open-source options just DO NOT WORK as well by far.

I want my software and hardware to enable my hobbies, not to BE my hobbies getting them to work and keeping them working as new versions come out.

I was VERY confused about Counter-Strike 2 having any kind of urban planning at all… and then I saw the screenshot better and worked it out. 😅

The issue, I imagine, is that there’s a community online who pays attention and cares about it, and we’re almost completely separate on the Venn diagram from a huge swathe of gamers out there who do all the preordering. 😩

Among my personal friends, probably the same ratio of men and women are into Souls games. So like… yeah, women play games. And not just “lady-friendly” fare. As a non-woman, I freaking love Animal Crossing; meanwhile my wife has beaten most of the Souls games and I’ve given up on all of them. Anecdotal, but like… gamers like gaming, and I feel like these days trying to say anything about game preference and gender is just not really helpful.