Imo, plugins should have separate config files, with uniform, consistent formatting. Separating them ensures that plugins never modify primary configuration details, they can be updated independently, or deprecated without affecting future functionality. It also means you can take regular and reliable backups of each config.

Depending on the developer, and the scale of their game, these things can also be incredible cheap to produce too. If your gameplay/monetary loop is something designed to arbitrarily force a player to wait to accomplish something or otherwise spend money, then you can drastically reduce the amount of content that needs to be added as long as you have an adequate base.

Even if you spend money, loot box mechanics and randomized stats can push players to continue to spend because while they got an item, they didn’t get the perfect item. Base builders, team combat titles and character based games are very, very effective at this.

For developers like the one behind Evony, they can be a lot cheaper because that game, and a hundreds like it have existed all the way back as far as farmville and earlier. They just got better at the monetization loop over time.

Similarly, if you’re born at the tail end of Millenial/start of Gen Z, then you still grew up with a collage of 90s and 00s culture and inconography, offsetting the definitions the groups typically gain over time. Some Gen Z grew up into adolescence without really feeling the advent of the modern internet or social media. The end of that range never knew a world without it.

Generations are useful statistical groupings, but don’t represent individual experiences or influences, leading to disparity or outliers that feel excluded from their “peers” so to speak. I’d say I probably share more experiences with Gen Z, but a lot of the cultural aspects of my childhood are closely linked to later Millenial ones. There’s a gradient, not a cutoff.

With that in mind, a battery health tool is probably the fastest way to tell how old a phone is going to feel. Otherwise nothing else is going to suffer wear and tear. If the phone is in good shape, and the specs are agreeable, then it doesn’t matter how old it is.

Hey there, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “first activated”. In general, you activate a SIM card, not a phone. This would be associated with your current phone plan, not the device itself. Your carrier would be able to provide that info. If you’re referring to when your phone was first purchased/turned on, then most folks tend to add their Google account during setup, which might be why there’s a suggestion to check your Google account to see when the device was added.

The IMEI is potentially useful as it’s a device identifier, but generally doesn’t matter to anyone except your carrier.

Absolutely. Android devices are dirt cheap, and ubiquitous in most of the world. It’s an obvious choice for many based on that alone. There’s also lots of families that aren’t in Apple’s ecosystem.

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I firmly believe this Quest exclusivity junk is stifling VR in a way that sets it back quite a lot. There’s a lot of interesting ideas, but the closed ecosystem that Meta/Facebook has crafted is detrimental overall. It limits the peripherals, the fidelity, and it doesn’t even have the kind of competition something like the old console wars did. It’s just dumb.

Iirc support for Classic Teams was dropped in March (or earlier). New Teams is generally less buggy in my experience anyways, and I haven’t yet found functionality its lacking. Not sure why you’re still presented with the option to drop back, as I don’t believe I’ve seen that toggle in a while

While true, I think buying into a proprietary memory format that hasn’t been formally made an open standard is something you have to accept some risk on. CAMM is cool as hell, but it never made it this far.

Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn’t seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It’s just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn’t cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn’t been able to maintain this.

So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.

So far, I’ve not actually had this problem. It was a huge issue in Windows 10, but every setting (aside from audio devices being a little weird due to their own drivers) works pretty much as needed now.

It’s frustrating. There’s a lot of Windows 11 that I do actually like: Massively improved HDR support, far better DPI scaling features, tabbed file browsing, a unified control panel again (yes I know if you look hard enough you can find legacy panels), configurable snapping regions for Windows, gaming focused features with screen recording, intelligent capture, etc. On the power user side: the terminal, winget, built in ssh support and broader compatibility with Linux development toolchains, and if you’re the kind of person with a family or friends you do tech support for regularly the Quick Assist’s current iteration is a godsend.

But then the tradeoff is ads, increased telemetry, AI integrations, inability to move the taskbar, a piss-poor local file search, increasingly restrictive desktop customizations via third party tools, shorter support periods for Windows feature updates, and generally a lack of overall feature control due to low level integration with core Windows services.

I don’t think Windows 11 is a bad operating system in the sense that I believe it to be a marked improvement on a feature by feature comparison to Windows 10. But it feels like two development arms at Microsoft are consistently at war with eachother. Some want to implement really cool features and tools for end users, and the others are hellbent on locking the system down and forcing this Apple philosophy of “use it like we want you to”.

Dark Void…man what a cool game that just doesn’t turn into literally anything halfway through. There’s probably some kind of licensing issue that’s leading to the delisting. I’m not even sure this isn’t the first time its happened.

It’s quite good. It helps a lot with making minute adjustments to aim that the control sticks can’t quite manage without dropping sensitivity substantially.

The controller has gyro, and games like Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West do make use of it. There are others as well, but I’m not familiar enough with the library to recall specifics

If your only intention is to use the card for encoding, I recommend picking up an A380 instead. The A770 is a surprisingly performant gaming card for newer titles, but all of the available ARC cards have the same encoder.

Since the A380 is typically single slot, and fits within the 75W spec, you don’t even need an extra power cable for it if you wanted it as a secondary card too.

Intel seemed to fall behind kinda hard w/ regards to CPU/Motherboard features until much later on. Supposing you aren’t working with parts you already have, everything from 1st generation Ryzen onwards would have rebar support. They can be had very cheaply too, and work on any AM4 board.

You may also find a BIOS update allows some older chipsets to support rebar. It’s a tad flaky depending on the manufacturer though.