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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • Hey Op, since you appear to be somewhere in the EU based on your mention of Euro pricing, would you be willing to name and shame the wheelchair manufacturer and/or model?

    Without giving too much of my own personal information away, I might be in a position to cause a bit of ruckus for this particular company in terms of bad PR, possibly legislatively. I work for a company that profiles itself on doing this stuff “the right way” (secure practises, not screwing users this way, etc) and we are working on building a list of practises we are hoping to root out EU-Wide with some examples that are clearly exploitative.

    I need nothing personally identifiable, just the brand and model, and I can pass it along to the team that can investigate further.


  • Everyone else is just telling you to do things in a way that is different, and while they are correct (you should use a unit.d/systems script for this depending on your distro), I’m going to actually answer your question since I know sometimes you just need a quick and simple way.

    Depending on your version of cron, it may support special statements instead of the * * * * * notation for time.

    The one you want is @reboot. Replace all entries of the schedule syntax with that, including the @, and the command will be executed only once when the system boots up.

    Use that to start a script that checks for network connectivity on a loop with a sleep statement. Break the loop when you have connectivity, then execute your command, and exit the script.

    Don’t ignore the correct way though. You’re better off executing this as a systemd (or equivalent) script. It’s barely more effort, and has the benefit of some nice built in logging and integrations.