We gonna finally get a decent Zen 5 entry?

I was using the mobile app.

A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

• I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
• Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
• Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
• Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
• Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
• Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.

Legend of Legaia

The idea of putting fighting game inputs and combos into a turn-based RPG was just so cool, and I haven’t seen anything like it since.

I take it from your exasperation that you want a game to “just be good already”, from the very start. So I’ll exclude anything that takes too much thought or investment to start having a good time.

• Deep Rock Galactic
• Tunic
• Pacific Drive
• Gorogoa
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• Hand of Fate 2
• FTL
• Styx: Shards of Darkness
• House of the Dying Sun
• Hitman Go and Lara Craft Go
• VVVVVV

Yeah, that was my point.

Because so much of a (typical) mobile app’s behavior is delegated to first-party APIs, having a huge range of device models in the field doesn’t cause as much of a splintering problem as it would for software that defines more of its own behavior internally, like games tend to do.

Yearly refreshes make a lot more sense for phones, where the OS defines a lot more of the app lifecycle and common features, consumers might be interested in non-performance hardware upgrades like cameras, and things tend to be less spec-sensitive in the first place.

For a gaming device, giving devs an uneven foundation and users a confusing compatibility matrix would spell doom.

Edit: I should probably clarify that I wasn’t saying a yearly refresh for phones is good. Just that the context of Android+iOS is very different from the Steam Deck, and that context makes more frequent refreshes more attractive to consumers and less damaging to developers than it would be if applied to the Steam Deck also.

Edit 2: I also just realized this is not the same story as the one a day or two ago that drew a direct comparison to phones. So I guess I should’ve gone back and commented on that one instead. I just wanted to share cuz I’ve had a lot of meetings about device support and consumer upgrade habits, as a mobile dev and as a game dev, and I don’t think most people would guess quite how different those two worlds are.

The Switch is ARM and uses several components from FreeBSD and Android. It would not be surprising to learn that they have the ability to compile system components like Virtual Console for an ARM Linux with stubs for Switch-specific stuff.

The SNES Classic is also ARM, and has much less going on than the full Switch OS (Horizon). That could be the core of what they use for the museum displays, considering there’s an ARM version of Windows too.

Either way, devs gonna dev. If you can’t get feedback at your workstation and always have to deploy to your target platform to test anything, you’re gonna move too slow to catch and fix bugs or build flexible enough systems to prevent them.

So much of dev testing is about trade-offs between rapid iteration and thorough fidelity. You need access to both.

From my own experience, I’ve done stuff like:

• built mobile apps that can also be deployed as desktop apps or web apps for the sake of dev testing
• built testing tools for car systems that fake out sensor input
• built HTTP wrappers for cloud-deployed services to allow them to be run locally
• faked out camera feeds for AR apps

It can get janky, cuz not everything works the same way, but most of what you work on is not platform-specific anyway and a good architecture will minimize the portion of code that only works on the target platform.

The article notes that they are likely using a proprietary in-house emulator.

just sold you out

They been sellin us out since the start. And they never even paid for us!

I’ll believe it when GN says it.

They did.

They did issue a fix: “Buy a new CPU please!”

That’s why they don’t mind the reputation hit. If 1 person swears allegiance to Intel as a result but 2 people buy new AMD chips, they’re still ahead. And people will forget eventually. But AMD won’t forget the Q3 2024 sales figures.

I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.

It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.

But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.

It’s worth checking out Louis Rossmann’s take too: https://youtu.be/TF4zH8bJDI8

I rarely ever find myself disagreeing with either of them, so this is an interesting situation.

Edit: This is also a good take about live service, separate from the “Stop Killing Games” initiative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO38QvKraTQ

• Tetris
• Descenders
• Minecraft

That’s fine for him, but let’s not take this as a guideline for the entire industry.

There are plenty of talented, creative, and committed developers who are trying to turn their dream game into their life’s work.

For most of them, the only way they can survive spending another 5 years working on the same title post-launch is by charging for the new stuff they make.

Perfecting his argument.

Yeah but can it hit a 100% failure rate?

That’s probably the least of your worries, tbh. It’d be like missing the bottom screen of a 3DS.