The Bobiverse series eventually features some aliens. I don't think that's a spoiler at all... But they aren't space-faring, so I dunno if that counts for what you're looking for.

As a developer, the experience is so much better on Android for me. And I oppose the walled garden on a ideological level.

But I have to admit some of the features are compelling. Some of them aren't even really Apple's doing, such as Genshin Impact supporting wireless controllers on IOS14+, but not Android at all. Others are built in, such as the lidar scanning.

They haven't yet tempted me over, though, because phones are incredibly expensive and even if I weren't opposed to the walled garden, I'm pretty invested in the Android ecosystem now.

At some point I plan to borrow someone's iPhone and try Genshin on it, and if that works well... Well, I might just switch anyhow. Or maybe I get sick of that game before that. ;)

I guess you could hope to find someone here that could help you with that, but it occurs to me that you're working with people who definitely understand it. Perhaps you could ask them for some guidance?

It does say it was cross-posted (to 3 places) at the top on the web.

After looking into z-wave and zigbee and having installed a lot of wifi devices, I also decided to wait for Matter. I've been pretty disappointed in the reviews I've seen, and the range of devices is really limited. I'm starting to wonder if I should just give up and go with Z-wave.

I think the tutorial for Pikmin 4 is boring and painful for people who already know the deal. And I think the constant, slow interruptions absolutely kill the pacing, at least at the beginning.

I'm there for the gameplay loop, not to read the same recycled trash dialogue that every Pikmin game has, and it's ridiculously similar to other basic games, too.

The devs seem to think I'd rather watch the UI do pretty things than play the game, and they couldn't be more wrong. Maybe that crap snappy, let me skim through dialogue at rocket speed, and let's get on with the fun.

I thought it was going to be an adventure game at first, and was excited. Then I realized it's a party game. Meh.

I used to upgrade every generation, and yeah, it was stupidly expensive. But it was my only hobby, and you could actually seen performance increases each time.

But for the last 10 years or so, there's much less point. Sometimes there are major advances (Cuda, RTX) that make it worthwhile for a single generation upgrade, but mostly it's just a few FPS at highest settings. So now I just upgrade every few years.

That article was posted in Sep 2021 and doesn't seem to have been updated.

I think maybe they aren't quite updated in some areas. In the US, I checked my console and the web, and it's still showing the old games, and these aren't claimable yet.

It was really unfortunate that they included that. I continued to the end, but those were definitely the worst parts.

I don't use a respirator at all, but I also don't hang out in that room while it's printing, and I have a small air purifier that runs in there full time.

Based on the title, I was expecting it to be an easy way to automate what you just said. But it's not.

Reading the page and docs, I don't understand the use case for this.

I can understand being underwhelmed if you went into it thinking it was going to be Fallout in space. But I went in knowing it was a space western RPG, and I quite enjoyed it. I've been thinking about replaying it, and it was just in the Humble Bundle this month, so that'll probably happen soon. (I played it on PC Game Pass the first time, I think.)

I'm not downvoting, but wow, that's a bad article. It came down to "I'm switching because I'm bored."? Ugh. I expect a lot better from tech journalists, not just a diary entry thrown up on the web.

Because of federation, I suspect they can't just disappear. But they should lose their content and be marked as deleted, rather than viewable.

I think a lot of stuff could fit their tech, if they were willing to go the extra mile and develop standard game features as well. Pokemon Go could be so much more if they implemented more RPG stuff. Ingress might have reached its limit, I dunno... But everything they've produced since those has been incredibly bare-bones and boring. And they all sounded like they had potential.

They want to do the absolute minimum amount of work to support their main mechanic, and nothing else... And it's killing them.

I feel like I have read quite a few books that I felt that way about, but it's always hard to bring them to mind when someone asks. That said, the first few that popped into my head:

• Cradle (series)
• Wool (series)
• The Martian (Audio book is especially well narrated!)
• Murderbot Diaries (series)
• The Bobiverse (series)

And you think the people behind Genshin Impact are going to make an offline game? :D

I agree that a building/farming game shouldn't be always-online, though.

It could be a conspiracy, or it could just be that developers implement those features when they get money/help from nVidia and AMD, and don't when they don't. Or maybe AMD's offering is easy to implement and nVidia's isn't. I vaguely recall that nVidia's is tied to the game more tightly than AMD's is, but don't quote me on that.

In the end, I expect we'll eventually converge on a system that both work with, and this'll all just be a blip in history, like every other standard worth supporting.