I’ve spent so many hours building empires in that game. I even played to it on the Deck (docked) with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. :D

Lemmy-UI, directly on the browser. Works on Voyager too.

But I believe that LW has a couple of patches over the official release, that may be why.

I think I will put like 10 5 everything, then link to a dedicated page on the git repo (I’ll try to make it a wiki so everyone can add its own)

Edit : Reduced to 5 to keep it concise as a start. I’ll put the others in a dedicated topic

Edit 2 : Fuck it, let’s put everything

On that our opinion differs.

Games, like movie, are a way to make art. It allows ways of expression that other medias cannot.

Of course not all games are made with the artistic value in mind, like not all movies are, but those are nontheless pieces of our collective culture, be it something like a racing game, or a little platformer.
All thoses are the result of hundred, if not thousands of hours of work, from programmers, to musician, with all others support tasks in between.

For a movie, imagine if you had to constantly be connected to a server, and that suddenly, for nobother reason than saving a buck for the company owning the movie, no one could watch it anymore. Countless masterpieces would be lost to time, not because the original band was lost in a fire like many did through time, but because of someone greed and refusal to make them readable without that punny server.

That petition ask just that same treatment for video games, nothing more. We are not asking for remaster, nor a continued support on new consoles, just a way to preserve the shared memories we hold dear.
Memories of friends who played with us, friends that may not be of this world anymore. Memories of stories told and lived.
To not forget what was, what could have been, and what can be.

1. Well, I don’t. It doesn’t void my freedom to express my opinion on the matter.
2. I also maintain server (my own, sometime other people server when asked to), and even worked with an open sourced MMO server (Ryzom). Those don’t need to be hard to maintain, except if the architect is a idiot that followed the tend of “microservices”, which does’t make much sense for an MMO.

If they aren’t good enough to make software that makes sense, we’ll find a way to make them work. Don’t underestimate a band of hyperfocussed nerd.
Some guy already programmed a whole unofficial MMO server from scratch, which ended up to be even better than the official one. Unfortunately is wasn’t ever released for obvious copyright infringement reasons, but still.

Considering how much time and effort you put on your posts, I’m sure you’d make a good moderator. I’d sure need help in the future, as both moderator are temporary (unless they chose otherwhise), and as such I’d use all the help I can to moderate.

I’ll DM you to discuss about the details.

Will do

Edit : Actually the second link worked and sent me on LW.

You know you just have to block one user to stop seeing them. 😅

Will add them after my nap. Allergies hit me like a truck today 😅

Edit : tomorrow, probably. Damn those allergies 😅

“Oh no, it isn’t a 20s TikTok video!1! How could anyone understand such gibberish neatly organized text with detailed explaination of why preserving games is important!11!1”

But seriously, you are on a community about games, define yourself as not being a gamer, and clearly show you have no idea of the topic at hand, why do you even bother engaging in this conversation?
Just leave us, silly gamers, try to protect the medium we share and love, and continue on your way.
I doubt anything here is of any worth to you.

I’d agree for an MMO, which can be quite complex server-wise. But most “online single player” would be quite easy to modify.

I’m a software developer who worked with asynchronous online systems.
A simple disk caching system could replace any uploaded data, and any online call can be written to work with cached data with a few line of code. Heck, on some frameworks you could write a simple middleware to make it work without changing a line of the original code.
I could do it on such game in less than a week on a language I don’t know, and probably a day or two on one I know about.

As you are not a gamer, I’ll try to make it simple.

If a game ask for an online connection, is usually for three reasons:

• multiplayer, or some kind of social interaction
• drm, to make it harder to cheat, or redistribute cracked versions of said game
• telemetry, either to know how players plays their game, or to sell you as an ad target

When the publisher decide to stop the online component, to save a buck, it often mean the game stops working altogether because of the DRM part, as it basically refuses to start without the proper authorization from the now defunct server.

The petition do not ask them to keep running the server indefinitely, but rather to

• make it possible to bypass the DRM always online part to be able to play the single player part, if there is one. In most case, it is a simple change to do, a function to modify in order to always return “true” (game can be played)
• allow the end user to self host the server. It doesn’t mean open-sourcing it, just to release the server software and allow to point to another server than the defunct ones

In both case, the code already exist, and the changes required are minimal, so why not do it? It costs barely anything to the devs/publisher, and gives the game a second life, even without official support.

But they don’t. Mostly out of greed, to push people to buy the newest, micro-transaction infused game they wish to sell, sometimes even the same game with half the content replaced by micro-transaction (Overwatch 2 being the perfect example).
They don’t want an older, maybe better game to overshadow their new shiny cash grab.

Exactly

Damn that website screams the 2000’s 😂.

Interesting project, I’ll keep an eye on it.

I totally agree.

As for E33… Well, I’ll probably be able to play to it on the future Deck 2, with better graphics. An enhanced edition without needing an update 😆

I’m a gameboy era dude, I don’t have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn’t want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer 😅. So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden “very low” setting specially made for the Deck.

Honestly, and I say that as a 98% Deck player (according to last year Steam Recap), it is starting to lack horsepower.
I really hope the Deck 2 will allow for external GPUs when docked, because E33 really did put it on his knees 😅. Even at “optimized” settings (which you cannot change on the Deck), I was at 20-30 FPS unless I enabled XeSS. And even then it looked like shit 😅.

Having worked with both, SAP if by far the worst of the two.

But Sage is another league. Want an API? Sure, here you go. Oh, you want it to do something usefull? I’m afraid we can’t do that.
It’s so bad their client ask actual third parties to create custom APIs to be able to actualy do something.
If you are lucky you’ll have a good third party, if your’re not you’ll be like me, trying to do something without any docs, and api datapoints that make no sense unless you have said missing docs.
Those fuckers can’t even chose what format to give to their id. Sometimes it is a string with a lenght of 7, sometime 13, sometimes an int.

As someone who escaped from that hell, I pity you.

Then I remember that I’ve now experienced far worst, and Dynamics seem not that vad in retrospect.