I mean, for 10 bucks anything is a decent deal. Those specs are pretty decent for a simple home server. I’m not familiar with HP thin clients, but I assume you can install a Disdro of your choice on it? My big reason to avoid HP is their crap software and warranties, both of which are moot here.

I would say relatively light software like tailscale, pihole and such would be fine. Docker containers might be pushing it, but that depends largely on what containers you want to run, same goes for nginx; by itself the requirements are fairly low, it depends on what you want to run on it.

Jellyfin might be a stretch, and as you alluded to, real-time transcoding is probably out. It strongly depends on the decoding capabilities of that chip and wether it does hardware decoding or if it all happens in software. The latter might be too much for it. If it can handle it though, it might be interesting as a media player hooked up to a TV, rather than acting as a transcoding or DLNA-esque server.

The original Test Drive Unlimited was great, but it rightfully bombed in reviews due to some really bad technical issues. Some of the car characteristics were really bad and off the mark, and the game suffered from an engine issue that was a problem other racing games had solved long ago;

On long slopes, the geometry of the road didn’t curve properly; the angle would have a polygonal jagging issue. This was most likely to shave off performance cost on the 360. Other games had already solved this issue by effectively smoothing angle changes, but TDU did not do anything of the sort. The result was that on hilly terrain cars would constantly bump around and lose traction due to weird unexpected air-time. Some cars were affected far worse than others, particularly super cars had a bad time.

I loved TDU, I loved cruising around in my Shelby Cobra and doing the one-hour tour around the island for decent money.

But the list of flaws is pretty long, and the technical issues made it a nonstarter for anything competitive.

It honestly wasn’t so bad. I played about 80 hours of it, right after launch. In typical Bethesda fashion, I used a few ini tweaks and such to tailor it to my tastes. Mostly fixing the Stealth (which was horribly broken at launch) and balance changes like reducing the bullet spongyness of enemies.

Both are now patched and configurable through the built-in difficulty settings.

I enjoyed my time with it. I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got.

I switched to using Moonlight to stream rather than Steam’s built-in RemotelyPlay months ago. It was just absolutely unusable; not a bandwidth issue, had that in spades. The problem was that it would either not connect, connect to a blank/green screen or the audio/video would randomly cut out. It would work maybe a fifth of the time, and if I had to reconnect for whatever reason, it would absolutely always fail.

Moonlight? It worked out of the gate, and has never failed despite running on some beefy encoding settings since I have very good WiFi with next to no interference from neighbors.

I desperately want Steam’s own offering to be better though. Not having to install a second tool, and to just connect from Steam directly would be a much more polished experience.

It’s doubly absurd considering Microsoft owns one of the biggest build and deployment automation pipelines as part of their Azure offerings. Most of it is aimed at Azure, but so much of the Xbox backend is just Azure under the hood anyway. Azure Pipelines should have had integrations for this on day one.

Well, I suspect they will get their chance. The remake was incredible, and if they can pull it off a second time with DS2, I suspect 3 will follow too.

The third game had some decent ideas. The weapon crafting was conceptually interesting and thematically appropriate with Isaac being an engineer. The co-op could have been done better, but I had a blast with it.

Nuke the MTX shit from orbit and redo large swathes of the story though. What they did to Ellie was a disgrace.

If you’re on PC, there’s a few configuration file tweaks you can do to make enemies less spong-y. Enemies gain 20HP per level in this game, and thus get very tanky, very fast. This doesn’t change per difficulty. The damage scaling modifier does, but not enough to counter this.

I’ve set this to 5HP and increased how much damage I take as well. Feels much better that way, in my opinion. Legendary enemies still have more health, but not to an insane degree.

Do you want me to share the settings?

I took some time off because I needed a break, not specifically for Starfield, but it definitely works in my favor and it’ll probably what I’m going to be spending a large chunk of time on.