Tech Over Tea - His Video Game Just Went OPEN SOURCE!! | Ritchie

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Today we have Ritchie otherwise known as Acidiclight back on the show, last time it was to discuss the work he was doing at Trixel but now he's on his own working on his own game project Socially Distant. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AcidicLight Twitter: https://twitter.com/acidic_light Website: https://acidiclight.dev/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidiclight Socially Distant: https://sociallydistantgame.com/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as well as your host, Brodie Robertson. I have zero idea what episode this is. It's probably like 2.24, something like that? That sounds close enough to right. Today, we have Richie, Acidic Light, back on the show. Welcome back. How's it going? It is going quite alright, other than, well, the massive storm going on right now. Yeah, and the mic technical issues we were just having, but, you know. Yeah. I'm not sure what's going on there.

It, I don't know if it's USB, or Discord, or hell, it could even be Pipefire, or maybe my computer hates me. Yeah. Yeah, it's probably a mix of all of the above, actually. Like, to be honest, I did notice that moving the mic closer to you did make it work slightly better. I know even with the noise suppression set to none, Discord does still have some compression going on in the background. And I think they still do a bit of noise compression even with it disabled. So, yeah. I could just use Jitsi for stuff, and Jitsi doesn't seem to have these sorts of problems. Yeah, but then I have no idea how to use it, so. Yeah, that's fair, that's fair. So, for anyone

who didn't see the last episode that you were on, um, just give a brief introduction of who you are and what you do, because also that's changed since the last time you were here as well. So, my name's Michael, even though everyone calls me Brittany, um, and I am a, a C-Harp game developer. I'm also very blind, uh, that's kind of my thing, uh, and in the, in the last episode, I was lead programmer of ReStitch, so that's what a lot of people might know me as. But since then I've actually left Trixl and I'm doing my own stuff now. I've been bug hunting KDE, working on my own game. I actually have multiple games on the back burner nowadays. And since the whole ReStitch stuff stuff i am now a full-time linux user well you did i think after the last episode we had i don't know how long it was after that you

did switch back to windows temporarily i believe yeah um i had to go back to Windows 11 because shortly after the podcast I switched to Plasma Wayland because Plasma 6 was in RC and I had gotten my Zoom multi-monitor thing fixed and merged

into Master and I wanted to use that but one day I was working on Restitched, and I loaded into a level that someone was having issues with, and I went to debug it for them. But for whatever reason, the entire sky was flickering black and white, and models were glitching out.

Everything was completely chaotic. And after a bunch of testing, what I realized is And models were glitching out. Everything was completely chaotic. And. After a bunch of testing. What I realized is. The more objects were on screen. In Unity. The worse it got. And obviously.

We're talking in terms of like. An empty level being fine. And then you place three down apples. Or you place down three apples and the game goes haywire right that was on plasma wayland with uh my amd 7600 xt um and i switched to xorg because i thought maybe it was like x wayland or something like that because unity editor doesn't run under wayland natively at At least not 2020 LTS, which is what we use. What I still use.

But Xorg didn't fix it. No surprise there. And it turned out to be a driver issue. Or, yeah, a driver issue. And switching back to Windows just fixed it. And then obviously I

ended up quitting Trixel because reasons but once I did I went back to Linux and I haven't been able to test any larger scale Unity games yet but I used a different driver I'm on RadV instead of

AMD VLK or Vulkan Radiant I believe is what I'm using for my Vulkan driver and that seems to have made not just Unity but my entire system way more stable so I've been able to

basically not use Windows anymore Regarding the whole Wayland support in Unity it looks like as of the 2023 version, there is experimental support. Yeah. I haven't tried the 2023 version yet, because I don't think the LTS of it... Actually, yeah, the LTS wasn't out yet,

because it's still not out. They're actually not doing 2023 LTS. It's all changed. Now it is Unity 6000.0.4, which is actually Unity 6 Preview, and it's super confusing, and I tried it, and it was a buggy mess, and so I went back to 2021

LTS where I know things work. Right, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah, I guess if you're I guess if you are building a game over a long length of time it probably makes a lot more sense to stick back with like a known working version

rather than using something which, know might possibly be better but hasn't really hit that point of maturity yet yeah uh sometimes i do like to do the engine upgrades uh typically with like new lts builds of the same year because they do have bug fixes obviously sure um they don't fix many of the bugs that i actually care about but you know a bug fix is a bug fix right right um but sometimes i do like to upgrade to actual newer year versions of unity and unity 6 in particular because i don't know how well you know about the whole runtime fee thing that happened but part of what

happened with that is when they walked that back they actually um it's kind of a way to win back a lot of the trust of people like me who are on the personal edition um they actually took away the annoying made with unity splash screen that you're forced to have and they upgraded the they increased the maximum amount of revenue you're allowed to make per year before you have to go to unity pro and then it's completely dropped unity plus and the way unity licensing works is um at least historically um the license you agree to doesn't change unless you upgrade your engine version to a new year.

So I'm on the 2021 LTS license for Personals, so I'm stuck with the splash screen and all that stuff. But when I go to Unity 6, it's going to be a new license and I'm going to be able to turn it off and make my own, because I do like...

I don't mind showing off that my game's made made in unity but I'd rather show it off in my own art style right right I'd rather not just have it be a splash screen that's just horned in every single unity game that is using that version just has that exact same splash screen yeah so I think from my understanding like the way they changed it is fairly similar now to the way that Unreal works if I'm not mistaken yeah

I'm not too familiar with the new versioning scheme I'm also not a fan of it because right now it's kind of in this weird transitional period where if you go to download Unity from download archive it shows up as 6000 and then right now it's kind of in this weird transitional period where if you go to download unity from download archive it shows up as 6 000 and then none of the other numbers make sense like what does zero mean because one used to mean like the beta channel and then two was your regular

kind of testing preview channel and then three was lts it was logical uh but and then it was basically reverse car model so unity 2021 lts came out in 2022 really simple but now it's just a mess right now and it's confusing and oh yeah oh i see what you mean okay Okay, so 2023... Okay, yeah, 2023, you used the old numbering scheme. Now it's 6,000. So we have 6,000.02, 6,000.01, and then 6,000.00. Okay. Yeah. Huh.

And it's really confusing, because that happened, like, a couple weeks ago. And when I last checked that page it was still 2023 and it's like what the hell is going on over there right right I see the issue then so from I know it's like really old news now but what was that like when the whole Unity stuff came out? Because back then, you were at Trixel already, yeah? Yeah. Trixel, we didn't really... We were a little bothered by it, just because everyone was bothered by it.

Sure. But we were just like, yeah, we're going to weather the storm. This game's a Unity game. It's been a Unity game for years. There's no time, no point in porting it to another engine right right socially distant i was like um i could probably port this in a week let's find another game mention um because i was very against it i was very against the idea of being charged per install because you know what's going to happen there yeah someone's going to pirate your

game or someone's going to to troll you if they hate you, and they'll install it, then delete it, then install it, then delete it, or they have like 50 computers. Who cares about review bombing when you have install bombing? Yeah, and it's not something I wanted to deal with, and then I was like, I don't know how

that's going to work for me. Obviously, it's still an issue, and they have walked a lot of it back since then, but it's a lot better to grasp now than it was at first. They totally dropped the ball at first, but they got rid of the whole multi-install thing. They clarified that.

It's the first install on a device that you pay for, that you pay the fee on. And obviously they kind of changed the whole revenue structure of it's royalty-based, and also there's the install fee if you hit a certain threshold, and then they dropped Unity+, they increased the threshold for personal. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better now,

and I just decided to stick with Unity, because I know Unity well, and like Trixel, my game's been in Unity for years. I can do a port in a reasonable amount of time, but I would need to learn a new game engine. And with me and my blindness, it's easier for me to bite the bullet and stay with Unity. Right, right.

Yeah. I tried Godot, and I tried Unreal. I did try another game engine, and I actually managed to find some bugs in that one. It was called Flaps. It's kind of like Unity. It's a lesser-known one, but it's kind of like unity it has it's the lesser known one but it's an in-development game engine it has a very similar interface to unity and how you use it

but it's all open source and um i found a lot of bugs in it that have been fixed thankfully but and and i just ended up going back to Unity because, yeah. Right, right, right. So, of the engines you did try, did you find one that you actually would have been happy to port the game to, or was it just like, yeah, Unity sucks right now, but I guess let's

just see where this goes because nothing's any better. They're better without having the runtime fee obviously but not better in terms of what they offer and the tech they have yeah it's it's a bit of both um good oh was no i don't like shady script there is the dot net version of it i'm i'm a c-sharp developer i always will be it's not to change. But the.NET tooling is not quite there, or at least it wasn't when I tried. And, you know, its editor UI does this really weird thing.

It kind of DPI scales on its own. And that doesn't sound like a problem. But for me, the most important thing is that my font size is consistent across applications. If I zoom in 2,000%, and if you think that's overkill, well, you don't know me well. 2,000% in Discord, it should look the same as zooming in 2,000% to my game engine. It should be just as readable um and unfortunately godot the font was huge when i zoom in that much and it was like i'd have to zoom out

of godot to be able to fit things on screen and then when i switch back to my code editor i'd have to zoom back in to read my code and it's like i don't want to do that yep yeah then there was unreal unreal was nice um i love its ui toolkit i've been using unreal off and on since unreal 4.7 so it's been like at least a decade um and i love unreal's ui editor because it's very drag and drop there's like built-in support for animation and tweening, and it's got a lot of layout elements. It almost feels like using something like GTK or Qt in how you put UIs together, and it's fully visual, which sounds counterproductive when I'm blind, but I have my ways. Whereas Unity is very hacked together and very difficult to use effectively.

The problem with Unreal, though, is I could put a great UI together, sure, but I'd build the game and it would be like 300 to 600 megabytes in size for what's basically like I don't know wallpaper right right and a panel and a terminal like i didn't do a full port there wasn't a lot of stuff in the game

and then i started comparing engines and in all three of the engines that i tried unity unreal and flaps i put nothing in the game build just a black scene nothing else and i hit build and unreal was still like borderlining 150 mechs with just a black screen is that the unreal boilerplate there or is that something you would expect to expand as you build more onto the game um i was mostly just testing boilerplate yeah um so obviously you have all of your your libraries and dependencies to make the game engine be a game engine but then there's there's other kinds of data like scene data and stuff like that just the way things get packed in Unreal, it results in a larger build with a black screen than

in something like Unity. Which is weird, I don't know why, but I guess it is what it is. And then, obviously I was also switching between Windows and Linux back then. I think back then I was doing the QEMU setup

with Windows and a virtual machine on a virtual GPU. Unreal on Linux is a pain in the ass. Anyone who has had to use Unreal on Linux knows that. You have to compile it from source, and it is like, on

most computers, it is worse than compiling the kernel. It's gonna take six hours. And you need a lot of RAM to do it. And with Unreal 5, what you end up is a completely unreadable mess because the font scaling is

fucked. And then for whatever reason, I got some weird compile error because Visual Studio was missing on Linux. Huh. And Unreal is c++ so like you need you need your tool chain working otherwise your game is not going to build and you're not going to get an editor it's not like unity where you can go in and yeah there are compiler errors but you can still drag things around and like test things Unreal if you have compile errors in C++ you're fucked So when all this

was going down how much work had been done on socially distant? How far were you into the development? Because obviously you know if you're at like the prototype stage it'd be a lot easier to do a port than say where you are now where a lot more of the functionality is coming

together At that point i was very very early on in gameplay i don't think i had really any gameplay like maybe the social media system was in place in like a very early you have to use dev tools to use it kind of way at that point i was making a desktop environment for the game to live in. Because it is a hacking game and it does take place in a desktop. So you need to put that desktop together so you can actually have a game or have something for the game to live in. So back then it was really easy for me to drop everything and go to another engine and see what I could do with it. But nowadays I wouldn't do that because I have a lot more tooling. It is actually becoming a game and not just a desktop environment.

And it's very entrenched into Unity. There's like no way I'm going to port it. So why did that bring you back to Linux after the whole thing's breaking? Honestly, Microsoft and Xavier Hugo. Microsoft, because they're starting to do more ai crap and they're starting to lock down microsoft or local account creation now you have to like basically set it up as a worker school device and then not showing a domain that is the only way you can create a local account. I don't need a Microsoft account.

I don't need OneDrive. I don't need Office 365. I do have a perpetual license of Office 2021. But I rarely use it. And that's something I can throw in a virtual machine. If I need to. Or maybe even bottles. If that gets good enough.

With wine. I don't see that happening with Office 2021 though. But Windows even with that all aside it was it wasn't a great experience. It did fix my driver issue but there were a bunch of other driver issues.

For the first two weeks or so when I was back on Windows I did not have a graphics driver because, for whatever reason, the AMD Adrenaline software is 404'd. And when I tried to install it after it stopped 404ing, I'd get Windows Defender errors. And driver signature verification errors. It was really stupid. And then Windows Update would pull in a driver for it. And it would bluestream, like, constantly.

And Chrome would crash, Discord would crash in a driver for it. And it would blue screen, like, constantly. And Chrome would crash. Discord would crash. Everything was just crashing. I'm looking at a guide on Tom's Hardware right now about making a local account on setup. This is as of February, so it might have changed by now. But what they're suggesting in here is when you're going through the setup process, you get to the Choose a Country screen. You press Shift-F10 to bring up a command prompt and disable the internet connection. Once you're fucking fucking around with the command prompt in the install environment,

you've hit the deep end. Like, I don't want to do that. Yeah, then you use IP config release to disable the interface. Then you close... Wait, what? Wait, wait, why would you have to- couldn't you just unplug your ethernet cable at that point? What- does it-

I'm not sure- or does it behave differently when there's no connection and when it thinks there's no network device? It probably does, you know what? It probably does. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft. It is, it's really convoluted. I know my usual method is to say, or in the email prompt for the Microsoft account, I say something like fuckatyou.com, and then put ASDF as the password. And then that kind of like, it realizes this is not a valid account, and then it goes, oops, there's an error. And then they left in a little button that says try again you do it again and then it comes up with a local account

prompt and then you go from there but they've taken that away they've patched it in 24 or 24 8 2 i think i don't know if that's come out yet but that's at the very least it's an insider preview and and yeah so I don't want to be part of that. I paid for pro for local accounts. Do you know if they care about temporary email addresses? Because I know there's a lot of services that like, make these burner addresses that just go nowhere. I honestly don't know and to be honest I'm happy with Linux, so I don't care enough to hack it. That's fair.

Because Linux is easy! You want a local account. You create an account. Honestly, it's harder to not have a local account. Like there's so few distros that offer anything else. And even on art it's easy, it's like two commands. Yeah. You add the user, you add the wheel group alongside it, and then you do your pseudo

stuff or whatever you're gonna do. And then password, and then your username, and then you enter your password. And then boom, you're done. Two commands. Like, I get them wanting to integrate a lot of this functionality they're talking about, but like, why do I need an online account? Just let me have a local account. Like, yeah,

it's good if you want it that it's there, but why do I need it if I don't need it? Like, why do I need to use OneDrive if I have my own NextCloud instance, or Google Drive even? Like, why do I need AI if I can write code at a level where I don't need AI?

Or when I do need AI, I can just open my web browser and go to app.gpt. It's not that hard. I don't need a button in my taskbar for it. Speaking of... Go on. I do want to bring up something else in a second. Alright. Oh, no, this is going to be related to the AI stuff. If there's anything else you want to bring up something else in a second. Alright. Oh, no, this is going to be related to the AI stuff.

If there was anything else you wanted to say there. But yeah, like I was saying, I don't want to have these forced upon me features that I'm not going to use, because they're taking up RAM, they're taking up space on my screen. In some cases when they add things, settings get

reverted. there used to be this issue where um i would turn off the search bar in windows 10 oh and then i'd upgrade to windows 11 and it would get reverted because there most about windows is is all the ads and the eight and the forced stuff that it tries to push on you would be totally fine because it's a proprietary operating system and that's how they make their money if my paid license for windows 11 pro has disabled it like if if you're not going to pay for Windows, you're going to pay for Windows. Through advertisements and shit. But if you're going to pay for Windows

through actual money, you shouldn't be forced into that crap. I shouldn't have stuff forcibly installed on my system. I shouldn't be forced into a Microsoft account. I shouldn't be locked out of my system just because my Ethernet isn't plugged in. None of that needs to happen. The only reason it happens is because Microsoft wants it to.

And I just don't like having that level of control on my system being dictated by a company that's... that... is not mine. Speaking about that level of control, this is the thing I wanted to bring up. Did you hear about the Windows Recall stuff yet? This is their new fun AI thing they've got going on. Oh, is it the one that records the entire screen and everything? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Yeah, I saw that on Mastodon. I didn't remember the name of it, so I need to double-take for a sec.

But yeah, I did see that, and I'm like, I am glad I'm on KDE. So, this is gonna be old news by the time this comes out, but let me just explain to anyone who hasn't heard about Recall yet. So, this is a system that Microsoft is selling as, like, big big crazy new feature that you're going to love. What it basically does is as you're using your system, it'll be taking screenshots of everything you are doing. And then all of this data is going to be processed through a machine learning system. of this data is going to be processed through a machine learning system and you'll be able to use a search engine basically to search for elements through anywhere in your computing history. So one example I showed is the person who

was demoing opened up a PDF file and it didn't say this text anywhere in the PDF but she searched for brown leather bag and it took her to the picture of the brown leather bag. So it recognized the image there and you could use, you know, machine learning nonsense to find that content. Now, Microsoft says that all of the processing for this is going to be done locally. Sure it is. Sure it is how often has microsoft said that we don't collect this data we like remember that when they first started doing all the massive data collection back in windows 8 and windows 10 and they were like constantly saying like nope nope we're not

doing this nope nope not happening nope we're not collecting all of this data. I don't trust Microsoft to say they're doing something locally when they have the history of being Microsoft. This data is going to be scooped. It's either going to be like an opt-out toggle somewhere or it'll be opt-in by default and then some update later, they swap it from opt-in to opt-out and it's just

like whoop sending up his training data most people have no idea what training data means so like okay have the data awesome do you want to know the the the most fun part about it what i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna give me a second let me just find the specific text from their documentation um About what they do not hide from the collection Note that recall does not perform content moderation It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers that that data may be in snapshots or financial account numbers that data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device.

Especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking a password entry. So if you ever do that thing you know how a lot of websites have that little toggle where you can show your password? If you ever do that your password is going to be saved

basically in plain text just on your computer and Your password is gonna be saved, basically in plain text, just on your computer. Yeah, because Windows is totally the operating system we want that happening on. Like, don't even- Put all the whole, like, this is spyware, because it is spyware. It is spyware, yes. Put- put that aside for a second. It's Windows,

the most popular desktop operating system in the world right now, still. And you know, the same operating system that all the malware developers, I almost said artists, that would have been funny in the 90s. They're basically artists.

All the malware developers target. And, you know, we have all these info stealers. You know, that's going to be a goldmine, especially if the AI is running locally. Yeah, well, with it running locally, so let's say you have some sort of malware, right, that prompts the... Let's just assume that Microsoft isn't collecting any data.

You have a bit of malware that will send prompts to the model, and it's like, okay, give me password fields, and then just collects whatever data that is and sends it off to whoever. Like, what's to stop that? Yeah. Absolutely nothing. that yeah absolutely nothing i i i and i'm very very into cyber security like this that's that's what i'm into i'm actually planning on going into computer networking for college in a year or so

whenever i stop having to go to so many eye appointments because game dev is something i do as a form of art and creative outlet but i'm really into cyber security and when i read this stuff and and and hear about it the first thing i think about is well i'm a black hat malware developer how can i take advantage of it and if the ai is running locally and storing stuff locally, I'm going to be able to find where it's being stored. And eventually I'm going to break through whatever encryption, if any. If any. I doubt there's going to be any, realistically. And I'm going to look through it,

and maybe I might do some big data analysis on whatever's stored in it, however it's stored. But eventually I'm going to look through it, and maybe I might do some, like, big data analysis on whatever's stored in it, however it's stored. But eventually, I'm going to find passwords, and I'm going to immediately send them off to some C2 server. And boom, you're pwned. And all because Microsoft thought it was a good idea to put BiWare on your computer. Microsoft thought it was a good idea to put BiWare on your computer. Well, let's- sorry, um, let's not even talk about the password stuff. If you ever use an encrypted chat application on Windows now, all of those messages- Completely moving! PODE.

Every single one of them. Encryption is dead on Windows! Yeah, it doesn't fucking matter if they're end-to-end encrypted if there's a screen out of them right on the device and there's OCR in it going on. As soon as it's rendered on the screen, you're screwed.

And thinking about me for a second, if I were still on Trixel, I would not be able to use Windows because what else Would be on my screen that it would be tagging And reading The source code of Restitch which I signed a contract

That says I'm not allowed to share And my computer's not sharing it If you're Using like Windows In some sort of I don't know let's Make it super serious like some sort of... I don't know, let's make it super serious. Some sort of military context, for example. That might be top secret information.

Yeah. It might be information that if leaked, they'd make you disappear. It's Microsoft thinking. disappear like like it's microsoft thinking like i i i'm totally flabbergasted by it and i'm glad that i got linux working i really am how how long do you think it's gonna take for some three-letter agency to come to microsoft and say we want the information from someone's computer and see exactly what they're doing. I'd have to wait her about two femtoseconds.

Yeah, if you're doing anything, just don't use Windows, but if you're doing anything even remotely remotely sus, just, Windows is not suitable. Now, there's gonna be a toggle to turn it off, absolutely. I don't trust- But will it do anything?

Well, not even that. Let's assume it does. I don't trust Microsoft to not change the toggle after an update. That too. And that's if it even does anything. Yeah. This might, like, I think this might actually be the worst spying that microsoft has ever done like we can talk about the whole you know advertising collection tracking where your cursor is on the screen like yeah all that stuff is fine but having a system that effectively breaks all encryption, I think that's by far the worst. I don't want to say it can't get worse than this, but I can't think of how it can be worse than this.

Me neither, but I know absolutely it's going to get worse because we said it can't get any worse than this with Windows 10 and look where we are. Now, I'm not opposed to the idea of doing a system like this, right? If you know you have complete control of the data, I think this is a cool idea. I just don't trust Microsoft with that data. If you wanted to run something on a local server, for example, that you knew exactly what was running on it, that's fine. I think that's cool.

It might not be the thing I want to use, but I think that's, that is a cool bit of tech. I just want to make sure I know where that data's going. Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I, it, I don't know if there's a company I would trust with that data, but I can think of companies

I would trust more than Microsoft. Yeah, me too. I might trust KDE with it. I might trust NextCloud with it, but not Microsoft. No way. Oh, God. I don't know. Like, people, whenever things like this happen, right,

people talk about how there's going to be, like, this big rush of people to Linux, and there will be, but, oh, there'll be, like, a couple of people, but most people, like, this is the sad thing, right, most people don't know this is happening, or if they did see, if they did see it, like, this, this announcement, don't care, like, this, this was announcement don't care like this this was so annoying when I was watching this I was watching a streamer talk about this happening and he didn't understand at all what was going on with this was like well this isn't any worse than like browser cookies or like a browser

history it's like no it's so much worse this is every single thing on your computer being collected and easily searched through with an AI model it's so much more than that yeah and

as far as people switching to Linux I always kind of sigh when people say that there's going to be huge exodus from Windows to Linux, I always kind of sigh when people say that there's going to be a huge exodus from Windows to Linux. You can hope that, and one can hope that it'll happen, but realistically, it's not going to happen. Because most people don't care. Most people use Windows because they grew up on Windows, and it's the operating system they use. It's their computer. use it's their computer um most people who are even annoyed at windows won't even won't even like

they'll they'll think of linux as this really complicated thing and unfortunately they're right because linux as a whole is i'll be honest a massive mess and there's a lot of things that could be done better about it we have way too many distros which is in itself is confusing because because how do you recommend a distro to someone who doesn't know what linux is we can't just throw them on ubuntu because you don't know what they're going to be doing with that distro and if ubuntu is going to work for them or if that layout is going to work for them there There's so many desktop environments, which is great if you like messing with desktop environments and seeing what you can do with them, but most people just want to open their computer and have their computer work. And then most people rely on software that just does not exist on Linux yet. Most people have hardware that don't work on Linux. I myself have a

headset that, until very recently, because I actually programmed the driver for it, I could not use one of the main features on it that I use on Linux. It was a Windows-only feature. And people are going to stay with Windows

because Windows works for them no matter how bad it is getting in terms of being spyware. And it's unfortunate, but that's the reality of it. Nobody's going to jump ship. A few people might, like people like me, the power users might. But most people are just not going to switch. Well, I think when it comes to Windows as well, obviously you have those power users who,

you know, maybe they've built a computer, maybe they at least understand, like, you know, general techie things. But I think a lot of people forget that most computer users don't upgrade operating systems. They upgrade computers. The only reason people aren't still using Windows 8 is because Microsoft added a little button

that says upgrade to Windows 10. Before that, people didn't really upgrade operating systems. They would upgrade whenever their computer broke and they bought a new one. Yeah, and for the people who did upgrade their operating system without replacing the entire computer, back then, and I remember this distinctly with Windows 8, it was never, oh my god, Windows 8 is horrible, I'm going to go to Linux. It was always, oh my god, Windows 8 is horrible, I'm going to stay with Windows 7. Yep, yep.

And that even happens nowadays. People who hate Windows 11 are just going to stay on Windows 10. And that goes happens nowadays people who hate Windows 11 It's gonna stay on Windows 10 I goes out of support. I don't think they're gonna care It's so sad to me because I I guess when Windows 10 has been around for quite a while now But I will see posts that remind me of those Windows 7 posts and those Windows XP posts people say Windows 10 is the last good version of Windows. I remember when Windows 10 came out and everyone was like Look at all this spyware like look at all this stuff They're changing look at how much worse they're making it and now there are people who their first version of Windows was Windows 10 and like

Windows 10 is the last good version like you weren't born when 7 or XP came out. What are you talking about? And I was born when XP came out and even I I Don't really think Windows XP is XP is just nostalgia xp was not good it it was not downgrade than that by like service pack 3 it was you know they fixed everything but at the start xp was like that was that was the um the swap to full nt that was when they completely stopped doing the whole dos windows thing and they'd done nt windows, but it still was kind of rough at the beginning. By the time the Surface Packs came out, then it actually got good.

And that's what people remember as Windows XP. Yeah, people remember XP like SP2 and SP3. Was there an SP3? I can't remember. Maybe it is SP2. I think it was sp3 either way it doesn't matter people don't remember windows xp rtm um because if you do remember rtm um it came with no firewall on by default and back then the internet was still fairly new, and it was very common for people to connect their system directly to the internet without a router in between or a hardware firewall. And someone actually did a video recently about Windows XP being connected directly to the internet, and they kind of replicated that old kind of setup where you're

directly wired into the internet with nothing between you and you ever know that video was called i can't remember what it was called unfortunately it was one of the ones that auto played for me but he had it hooked up and within like minutes he had severe malware infections all over the system there was like, like, backdoors and rootkits and an FTP server that he did not put on there. There was even, like, a second user account that managed to get created called Admin A. And he didn't do anything.

All he did was just sit there and wait with the computer online. And I would not want to use that in this TNA. I'm assuming the video you're talking about is what happens if you connect Windows XP to the internet in 2024. I do believe that is the one. I think it is.

He also did another video three days ago for Windows 2000. And it looks like it might have blue screened fairly quickly. Yeah, I don't doubt that one. And then Windows 7, even if you go back to it nowadays,

not that you should, because most computers are not going to run it on bare metal and actually have any drivers. Good luck getting USB 3 to work. That's at the level we're at with Windows 7. It is long since dead, unfortunately, because it was my favorite version.

But if you were to put Windows 7 in a virtual machine and upgrade it to its latest, up to the 2020 end of support, you're going to have Microsoft Edge and all the spyware on it. It got backported. I don't know what it is. Like, I don't, I really don't get what it is with Windows users who want to use EOL stuff. Like, I get modern Windows really sucks, but I've always, I've always thought

about this in the context of being a Linux user, right? Like, imagine if you found a Linux user who was like, no, I refuse to update past 1904. Like... I used to be that user. Oh, man. But it wasn't with 1904, it was with 10.04. Okay, yeah, at least that's an LTS.

Did they do LTSs back then? Yes, 10.04, or 10.04.4, at least that's an LTS. Did they do LTSs back then? Yes, 10.04, or 10.04.4 LTS, at least. It was the last LTS to have GNOME 2, and that was why I stuck with it. But, with that said, I do kind of understand the people who do stay on

older Windows versions. For most people, it's because they don't like the new stuff, and their system works. And to them, no matter how many or how hard you try to urge them to upgrade for security reasons, they don't care. Because they just think, well, my computer's fine. I have an antivirus. It works fine. I don't get viruses. I don't do bad things on the internet. I don't click the big green download button. My computer's gonna be fine. Why do't get viruses. I don't do bad things on the internet. I don't click the big green download button. My computer's gonna be fine. Why do I need

to upgrade? But unfortunately, as time moves on, people stop supporting the older versions of Windows. And by people, I mean developers. And your antiviruses don't get updated. Your browser doesn't get updated. And then 20

years later, you end up with well what happens if you run Windows XP directly to the internet in 2024 you end up with a shit ton of malware and you don't even realize it because your antivirus just doesn't know or it doesn't exist yeah that's a good point

like right now there is still stuff working on Windows 7, but we are starting to see a lot of things drop support. Like, earlier this year, you had Steam that finally dropped support for Windows 7, and that's just the stuff you're hearing about. Like, there'll be these little things that don't change. Like, the point with your antivirus there, there, you might have one, but if it's not running modern antivirus rules, it basically isn't running. That's pretty much how

it goes. And if it is running, it's going to have an outdated database. For one. Maybe you get lucky and you have some antivirus that does update the database in an unsupported version, but you have to get lucky. And most people are not going to get lucky like that.

If you're treating Windows 7... Most people don't even use antivirus. If you're treating Windows 7 as this hobby that you... If you're treating it like a Linux from scratch system, where you're you're spending, like, eight hours a day trying to make sure everything is perfect about the system, like, you can get it into a state where it's, like, relatively not completely dangerous, uh, and there is, like, these giant forums where people, like, there's a bunch of stuff on Reddit as well, where people are, like, really dedicated to keeping Windows 7 alive and keeping it safe, but unless you're doing everything there, like, you're much better off just biting the bullet and moving to something newer, or if you're,

honestly, if you're, if you're on Windows 7, right, like, I get liking the interface, but if you're on Windows 7 because you want to play video games on Windows 7, at this point, basically everything you want to play is going to work perfectly under Wine anyway. There was a couple of odd exceptions, but those are the odd exceptions. Yeah. There were a lot more exceptions a few years ago, it's gotten a lot better. There are some games in my library that actually run functionally better, and I don't just mean for performance sake, I mean actually detecting my video card better on Linux than they do on Windows. Like, if you want to play Bejeweled 2 on Windows, you're software rendering that. Why are you playing Bejeweled 2? On Linux, I can hardware accelerate it. Bejeweled 2, the most important selling point of a computer.

Okay. I mean, I was using that as an example of a really old game that uses direct play in a lot of those older games. What the hell? I was using that as an example of like a really old game that uses 2006? What the hell? Yeah, it came out on PS3 some... almost 20 years ago. Holy crap. Jesus Christ. Okay. Okay, sure. I didn't realize it was that old.

I didn't either. I grew old. I didn't either. I grew up on V-Day World. Wow, I feel old now. Oh, God. So... That's short. We've gone, like, way off on some, like, random tangent for the past 50 minutes um one thing i did want to i did want to talk to you about is i have made a very big deal about

client side and service side decorations and i am getting reigard on the show as well to talk about his experience from the factorio side but i know that you did complain a bit about gnome doing the whole service either client-side stuff as well yeah um so i'm i i complain about it from both an accessibility and a game dev standpoint um actually before we get into this, sorry, I probably should explain what client-side and server-side decorations are for anyone who hasn't heard me rant before. So,

server-side decorations are basically where your desktop applies window decorations to the window. So, window decorations are things like the title bar, the close button, a little icon that says this is what the application is, and things like the title bar, the close button, a little icon that says this is what the application is and things like that. If it's server side, the desktop is applying

this. If it is client side, then that is up to the application to design itself. Now client side does have some benefits. You can integrate things like a menu bar into the header. You can integrate like other application components. And if you look at macOS applications, for example, they heavily use client-side decorations. And it works quite well on macOS because, you know, Apple has a much stronger hold on like UI design. If you want to be on the app store, you got to kind of like, you know, make it fit more with

what they're trying to do yeah apple way or the highway basically now the problem is that gnome only supports client-side decorations and doesn't have server-side as a fallback if we're looking at something like kde though they allow you to do client-side decorations if you want them. But if you don't add them, every application is just given server-side decorations and that's fine. So that's why if you open an application on KDE, it's going to have a consistent title bar. Whereas on GNOME, yes, some of them, if it's like a GNOME core application, it's going to look fine. But other applications, it's going gonna depend on how the developer does it if they use libdecore it'll look gnomey but if they use something custom

it'll look really weird and yeah that's pretty much the landscape yeah so my my issues with it um from a game dev perspective and um was Factorio or was it someone else that complained about it? Yeah, Factorio. Yeah, they were complaining heavy about it. Yeah, I'm kind of with them on it. It's hard enough to support Wayland on Linux. It's hard enough to support Linux in general because you have to think about X.org and Wayland

because there's going to be people who run the game on Xorg and under Wayland and that's gonna happen as long as Xorg is a thing and yes, X Wayland is a thing but sometimes it doesn't exactly work out well. Sometimes it is subtly different and it breaks the game um but that's fine whatever um the problem with csds in game development is with a game um you're not typically thinking about the game as a window when you're developing it because it's it's a game um you're giving you're giving up canvas to render stuff to and it can have a window border and a lot of people will play their game in windowed mode and that's great most people will play it in full screen mode

that's also great and in that case you won't have a window border which is fine because you're in full screen mode full screen or borderless windowed when I say full screen I do mean borderless windowed even Yeah. When I say full screen, I do mean borderless windowed. Okay, yeah, fair enough.

Even then, you won't have a window border. Yeah. But in windowed mode, you need some way to reposition the game window so that you can move it onto another monitor or something. Some games let you resize it. Most don't. Mine does. And you need a way to close the game.

Most games on PC do have an in-game exit button, but sometimes they don't. And, you know, sometimes you need to immediately close it and don't want to navigate to the main menu. You need a way to be able to minimize and maximize it. You need that stuff.

And when you're designing a game you're kind of assuming that the game engine or the operating system is going to do it for you and put that window border in place because on windows that's going to happen you tell win32 i want a window border it'll give you a window border um you tell it i don't want it to be resized it won't let you resize it stuff like that that's great um on kde you will get a window border because it has server-side decorations on mac os even uh because apple has so much of a tight control over that desktop environment they probably do the same thing as Windows where

you can use a CSD and you'll get the fancy features of a CSD like being able to put header bars and stuff like that in it but most of the time you don't need it and so they probably have server side decorations for that case or they have some sort of SDK that puts the client side

decorations in place for you, and it's nice and consistent with the operating system. Yeah, I can't comment completely on how Apple does it, but... Neither can I, honestly. I'm just assuming. Yeah, that sounds like the way Apple would do it. But with GNOME, your only option is CSDs. At least to my knowledge. I think that's been a complaint for a very long time.

It's their lack of support for server-side diggers. But I honestly don't pay enough attention. This is the state it's in. There's a protocol for it. This is the work that's really dumb. There's a protocol for it that I believe they might have act. They might have been like, yeah, we're good with this, and then never wanted to implement it. Or maybe I'm thinking of DRM leasing, but there is a

Wayland protocol that they just, at this stage, refuse to implement. Yeah. So, with CSDs in game development, when you're working in a game engine like Unity, you kind of have to rely on Unity to do that for you, because you don't have control, necessarily, over how the game window is created.

You have settings that you can set when you're doing the build, but you don't get to actually call into the Win32 or the X11 or any of those APIs that control the game window, because it's done by the game engine. So if I were to implement a CSD into Socially Distant, how would I do it? How would I tell the window manager that I'm dragging the window? How would I tell it to close? I could probably use an in-game game engine API to do it, but then how would I maximize? How would I minimize? How would I tell the window manager what icon to use?

We won't go there with the xd top level icon thing um we won't go there but all these things i have to consider as a developer that maybe my game engine just doesn't have an api for me to do and i'm not going to be able to reach out to the the operating system level level APIs because you just don't do that in a game engine. If you do do it, it's extremely complicated. And it's not something you want to worry about. So with Socially Distant, what I ended up doing, or what I plan on doing, if I can even figure it out, is I'm going to have a toggle in the settings menu. You go into settings, and you go

interface, and you turn on under compatibility, in-game window decorations. And it turns the in-game status bar into a CSD. It's not implemented yet. I'm just planning it. But that's what I'm planning on doing, because

I don't know how else to do it in a reliable way but then someone's going to open the game not realize that's a setting and then they don't have a border and then they're going to file a bug report and then they're going to be like what the hell right and i don't want to deal with that um and that's something i have to worry about is game dev but then there's the accessibility aspect of it for me um and i i do use applications even on kde that have csds um there's stream controller one which is what does my stream deck now um and there's a couple flat packs that i use that that have csds um they give you a lot of power and that's great but one of the things i will always assert is that a

menu bar your typical file edit view stuff like that is a lot better on pc than um a hamburger menu or a sidebar in a lot of cases um because and and this was a kde thing and it's not even related to cses but when i was configuring console the terminal uh the menu bar in the corner or the main menu thingy the hamburger menu in the corner navigating that with a screen magnifier is hell right it's a drop down but the very the top level menu of that drop down is completely fine to navigate the sub menus the moment your mouse leaves the bounding box of the menu it closes there's no way to keep it open okay it is hell um and that's that's annoying for console but at least i can still close the window and stuff like that in a very common way and generally navigate the application.

And I did actually set it up to use the menu bar. So it's great now. But with an application in the Gnome ecosystem, I'm basically forced to work in a way that is what the developer set up. And if they're using CSDs, then if they're using. CSDs. Then if they're using web decor. Then it's probably going to be very Gnomey. And it's going to be fine and consistent.

That's fine. But if they're using something custom. I'm at their whim. And they could really do. Some really hanky things. Like Spotify for example. It has a CSD. On Windows. But it doesn't work on kde and there is just no way for me to get into my spotify preferences right now it's buggy it's annoying

and it's not accessible i want my windows to be laid out in a consistent way controlled by my desktop i have not opened up spotify in a while let me just check it because i usually use spotify on my phone um i use it on pc and it does get a server side decoration on kde yeah yeah i'm seeing the server side decoration yeah yeah and then there's a big thick black bar at the top oh and that's where the csd is supposed to go and that's where you get your preferences and account settings and stuff like that and it just doesn't render oh yeah the hell um and unfortunately this is what happens when one desktop environment in the entire ecosystem decides we don't want to support csds and you're on your own to implement CSDs, because that's what

we're doing, and deal with it. You end up with applications that don't quite do it right. Huh. I don't know if that's... Well, Spotify's an Electron application, I believe. I don't know if that's a problem with how Electron does it, or if it's a problem with what

Spotify is doing. I think it's a problem with what Spotify is doing. I think it's a problem with what Spotify is doing because they do a custom header bar for Spotify because I'm very familiar with the layout on Windows. But it's not there on Linux. And it probably is there on GNOME, but I'm not on GNOME. So the whole CS um, the whole CSD SSD thing isn't just a problem in games,

it's also a problem in applications using, like, certain libraries and certain toolkits. Here's a fun one I found, um, a little bit ago. I'll send you, I'll send you the link to it. Um, a little bit ago i'll send you i'll send you the link to it um this is from back in 2021 where people realized that vs code was broken on gnome because it just didn't have window decorations because at that point uh electron didn't support a like a fallback on gnome and that's 2021 with vs code um and they're probably gonna be on an updated or up-to-date electron build discord certainly isn't you know what else doesn't have a proper working csd that should be there on windows but isn't on linux discord and then a number of other leyland protocols that don't fucking work on discord i i was testing this with someone discord i don't know who at discord's doing this

somebody somebody discord is like having a bit of fun with linux because they half implemented the protocol if you go into the like screen sharing it'll show the like all of the things you can catch with pipewire and it will actually show it accurately but when you try to select it it will error out and then you like select it again and again and again it just starts looping but they've half yeah yeah yeah they've half implemented i don't know what's happened i don't know who started this but somebody's trying to fix it. Yeah, that was a really frustrating one for me. I had that the other day

trying to do a screen share in a voice chat. I would just keep selecting my left monitor. I'd hit apply. I'd have the little thing in KDE to say, save this setting. It would be checked. And it would just keep reopening and keep reopening and keep reopening. I ended up having to literally kill Discord.

And switch to Xorg. Yeah, that's always fun to have to do. Especially for me, because switching between Weyland and Xorg is not a matter of logging out, selecting a different session, logging back in. I have to

actually tell STDM to auto-login. Like, I don't have a password prompt. I automatically log in to whatever session I have to actually tell STDM to auto-login I don't have a password prompt I automatically log in to whatever session I have set because with STDM there's no compositing in STDM so I can't zoom in

so if I have to switch to Xorg it is literally I have to reconfigure my login manager to use Xorg and then reboot my system right it's an ordeal if the um if if the plasma devs got zoom working in stdm is that the only thing you would need for that to just work fine yeah um i would probably need to re-familiarize myself with the layout sure honestly i don't know enough about SDDM.

But yeah, if I had the Zoom ADM, the GNOME Display Manager, it does have Zoom. It does have full compositing, actually. I think it actually uses Mutter while you're in there. And I can go in and switch my session in that login screen. But with SDDM and LightDM and all the other ones, I can't, unfortunately. I believe you are right about Mutter. SDDM is...

Well, SDDM wasn't always the KDE display manager. They've changed through a couple over the years. So this one is just not core integrated into KDE. I distinctly remember KDEM being one that they had for a while. That sounds right. I would have been back in the KDE 4 days. And yes, I have used KDE 4.

I don't know how I used KDE 4, but my vision was a lot better when KDE 4 was out. Yeah, you are right. The KDE Display Manager. KDM. Yep. I don't know when they swapped. Someone will probably tell me. Yeah, 2014.

According to a Pharonix article, they swapped to SDDM. Or they recommended the swap. I don't know if they had started shipping the swap then. Yeah. That's fun. So hopefully at some point they can sort something out there. That does seem like a really important thing to get dealt with. Because even if it's not

as much zoom as you need, that still should probably be there. Yeah yeah you should at the very least be able to zoom in a little bit to be able to see where to enter your password because some display manager themes on stdm they don't automatically focus in on the password prompt whether it be a bug or maybe they're like set up differently to where you actually enter in the username as well and it's not a great experience i end up just having to use the default kde one and don't rice my display manager so can you just explain more about what you like you were doing

to do that logging because i don't think i understood what you were doing properly so in kde if you go into your system settings, under the appearance, I think, I usually just search for these settings. But there's a category on the side called login screen STDM. And if you go in there, you get your usual customization of the login theme and the background and stuff like that. But if you go up to behavior, you can actually go in and tell it to log in automatically as a specific user with a specific f-section. And it's a little bugged on my system right now.

Every time it kind of resets the setting visually. But when you do apply it, what'll end up happening is you reboot your system, and instead of it giving you a password prompt to log into your user, it just automatically goes, okay, I want to log in as richie with plasma x11 and i'll boot plasma x11 and for me that's fine because i'm it's a single user system and i know that there are not ever

people using it but in a multi-user system obviously you don't want that because you need people to be able to pick their account and if i were on a multi-user system, obviously you don't want that because you need people to be able to pick their account. And if I were on a multi-user system and I needed to switch between Xorg and Wayland on my session, that just would not be a thing I can do. Right, right. Okay, that makes sense. Well, at least there's something you can do to work around it. There's at least that. Yep. There's always a workaround. Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully there's at least that yep so always a workaround yeah you hopefully hopefully there's

something so right now you're on x11 i guess yeah yeah i am on x11 okay is that because of the stuff you had happen before with the the graphic stuff you just haven't tried out Wayland again, or no, is X11 just fine for you right now? I started on Wayland. Um, when I did my install a couple of weeks ago, I think I can't remember how long I've been using Linux.

It's actually really good that I can't remember how long I've been using Linux this time, because it's getting to a point where my computer is just my computer and I forget that I'm on Linux. Right. That's awesome. But yeah, I started out on Wayland because Plasma 6 defaults to Wayland, Plasma 5 defaulted to XOR.

Right. And Wayland was great. XWayland not so much. Any XWayland application that I use, when I'm zooming in the screen, I don't know if it's a thing with K-Win Zoom, or just K-Win in general, and X-Wayland, but when I hover over a text field, sometimes the cursor doesn't change to a little I-beam to tell me that there's a text field there. to tell me that there's a text field there. If I hover over a link, it doesn't always turn into a pointing finger. And it's these different cursor styles that you have in your applications.

They don't work a lot of the time. A lot of the times when it does change, it gets stuck. And it doesn't sound like a big issue, but for me, the cursor is the most prominent thing i can see on my screen it is it tells me what i'm hovering over if i see it turn into that pointing finger i know that's a clickable link and that's very accessible to me because i can barely read but

i can still see um but it's even a bigger of a problem in an application that gets busy like unity where when it's recompiling scripts the main thread is just hung because another thread's doing stuff and there's a progress dialogue but for me when i'm zooming to the screen i'm not always seeing that progress dialogue so what ended up happening a lot is i'd play socially distant and i do my thing things, and I would exit the game. And when you exit the game, it has to reload script assemblies for some reason, and it takes a while. And whenever it loads script assemblies, my cursor turns into a beach ball.

Or a throbber. Or a throbber, yeah. One of those things. I fucking hate that term so much. I fucking hate that term so much I went to say beach ball this time because I think I'm on a cursor theme that actually does have a beach ball cursor

just for anyone who's unaware of the throbber thing a throbber is one of the terms used for the loading icon that your cursor will change into just in case you haven't seen the pirate software short yet. Yeah.

So it'll turn into that loading icon to tell me yeah, I'm loading script assemblies and stuff like that. But then it will finish. And it will stay a loading icon. Right. Because cursor got stuck. And I don't know about you or anyone listening but for me i'm very

conditioned from like years and years of computer class if you see the hourglass or the beach ball or the throbber you don't touch anything because you're going to overload the computer and back then that was actually true because we were on like crappy ass dell optiplex desktops with like 512 megs of ram running Windows 7 when they had no business doing so. Obviously, nowadays... Just to see if it's going to start working. But for me, I'm just conditioned

not to fuck with things when I see that icon. So I will end up waiting for five minutes for the loading icon to go, and then I snap out of it and go, oh wait, it's frozen at that cursor, it's responsive, everything's fine, but that's not great. Actually, I

do have a problem that's very similar to that. I've noticed that sometimes Kdenlive will stop responding, and then, so you know how, like, applications will usually grey out if they stop responding. I've noticed that sometimes when the application is now working again, it remains grey until I click that sometimes when the application is now working again it

remains gray until i click on something in the application i can't say i've had that happen but i i've had that happen with compass a few times i've only seen it with kden lives so i don't know if it's an issue just with that application or what the deal is yeah Yeah. But speaking of KWIN issues, the other issue that I have with Wayland is it's very specific to me zooming in with multiple monitors. To be clear, multi-monitor

zooming in KDE is a lot better and I know it's a lot better because I wrote the code that makes it a lot better. Which is great for me. uh there's one remaining bug and it's been confirmed they know about it it's reported all that stuff but it's a bug i call heli screens because when it happens it feels like my workspace all of my screens are helly basically if i have a window like discord on my left monitor and we're zoomed out so picture the screens is normal because

we're normal um you type in it and everything's responsive then we zoom into the screen and what's going to end up happening is you're going to have part of Discord on the left monitor and another part of it on the right monitor. But when zoomed out, it's all on the left monitor. So that's the key info here. Okay. And when I type, once the text I'm typing ends up on the right monitor,

zoomed in, window repaints don't happen immediately on key presses um and i've i've also i've also had it happen with right click menus where the highlight won't immediately upgrade or update across both displays um sometimes i'll open a right click menu and part of it will be on my left monitor but it'll be invisible on the right and it depends on what monitor when zoomed out the window is placed on so if it were on the right monitor zoomed out then the exact same lag would be happening on my left monitor um so that's why i call it heli screens because one screen always updates immediately whenever things happen on it but the other screens don't and you get this weird kind of like it's it feels a lot like

screen tearing but across multiple screens and it's been a bug um i don't know if it's k k win six or plasma six what are you going to call it um i don't know if it's KWIN6 or Plasma 6, whatever you want to call it. I don't know if it's been introduced in that because I've only ever used KWIN Wayland on Plasma 6. Right. But I do know it's a Wayland-specific thing and it just does not happen on AppStore. So that one that you've reported is Noddle Screens Update on Window Repaint

when using Zoom Effect on Wayland? Yep. Okay, awesome. That's the one. And I did actually upload screenshots of what it looks like. Oh, yes. Particularly with right-click menus.

A little hard to reproduce it with typing, but you can see how bad it can get. Okay. Ah, okay. So, hmm. That's a weird one. Yeah. I guess- I've talked- Go on. No, go on, it's all good.

Okay, I've talked to XaverHugel about it, and I've actually looked in the code to see what kind of causes it and what doesn't. What I did notice is that zooming in and out of the screen, it doesn't cause that effect. And looking at the code, I know exactly why. Every time you zoom in, it adds a full repaint to the compositor scene. That makes sense. So what I don't know is how they're doing partial repeats and how that's being calculated.

As far as I can tell, they don't account for Zoom. And that makes sense because Zoom was added way before Wayland was a thing at all. And Zoom is an effect. It's not part of core K-Win. before Wayland was like a thing at all and zoom is an effect it's not part of core K-Win it's

not part of the compositor scene rendering it's literally the way zoom works in KDE is it takes the screen as it's already been rendered and it blitz it to a render target and then it blitz that render target back onto the screen.

Zoomed in. And panned. That's all it does. And then it renders a cursor on top of it. In place of the regular KDE cursor. And that's probably why I have the cursor bug on X-Wayland. But I don't know. I'd have to look in the code.

But what I do know. Is because of the way that it renders. It is impossible for partial repaints in the current state of K-Win to be able to account for how zoomed in I am and where my zoom is focused

so it's most likely just not caring at all and just repainting the left monitor because as far as it's aware the only things happening are on my left monitor. It doesn't matter that things are happening on my right monitor to me. To Kaywin, it's only

on the left. I see. I guess that would make sense. What we've also noticed is typically when you're typing, it will actually catch up after like a second or so. But with the right-click menu example, the reason I was able to get the screenshot of it, it wasn't a screenshot, it was a photo. But the reason I was able to get those photos is because the only thing that would cause a full repaint of of that area of

the screen would be me moving my mouse or funnily enough time like the minute in the digital clock on my panel increasing by one would get the get it to rep Yeah, because that would need to repaint so it could see the new number. Yeah. So, yeah, it's weird. If I, if, what I also noticed, and I didn't put this in the bug report yet, but if I have a full screen YouTube video playing on my right monitor and I'm zoomed in doing stuff on my left,

none of the issues happen. Because the YouTube video is constantly causing a repaint on the right monitor. Well here's what you can do. Put a clock that has milliseconds on it on your screen at all times. Boom. Problem solved. I might, I might have to do that, but depending on how the clock's implemented it might only do a partial repaint on that screen. Right, okay, that's fair. just always have a youtube playing a youtube video on in the background just mute it yeah that could work it's a lot of bandwidth but it is well actually speaking of speaking of youtube videos i don't know if this is... It actually got shared in the Discord, didn't it? I don't know if you saw it.

There is someone who has uploaded... I just can't find it. Maybe it's in my history. Has uploaded Arch Linux. The Arch Linux ISO onto YouTube. As, like... As video data. Just raw...

Turned the ISO into raw video data I'm not surprised someone someone did I think try to turn what was it that they they did something with like image data or something, like, on the internet. Or, no, it wasn't image data. It was, like, they were using ICMP ping packets and stuff like that as a way to store data just on the internet. And they wrote a Linux block device driver for it. If you click on the link, make sure your audio is muted because the ISO is also, uh,

audio data. Oh my god. It will not sound pleasant. That- that's probably something my ears could handle, but I can already see by the thumbnail. Oh my god. Why am I not surprised that people do this stuff? It's awesome. Um, I might have to talk- I think the guy has like a video explaining how he did it, but I might have to talk about it myself because it is really really cool and really really stupid. Now I wonder if you were to do the same thing, but then Now I wonder if you were to do the same thing, but then, um, was it Matt KC or was it someone else who made a video to ASCII converter that would like turn the pixel data into, it wasn't ASCII, it was NZ escape sequences for your terminal. So like multicolor and stuff.

What if you did that with the arch iso you could or here's an idea right let the iso be an iso that too i mean yeah arch is a great operating system if you leave it as an operating system system so with this um with this this repaint issue uh it has been confirmed do you like know if there's anything being done with it so far like has anyone actually properly taken a look at like a fix for it i know zaver hugel has talked a little bit with me about how it could be fixed and an immediate workaround would be when you're zoomed in um just do full repaints because realistically if you're zoomed in it's not gonna matter anyway yeah um but as far as people actually working on it i don't know i've done a

cursory look into the code to see what's going on but i just don't have the skill set to be able to rewrite whatever needs to be rewritten to make that work um and it's even the fixing panning on hey when for multi monitor on plasma six that was like weeks of work for me because i needed help getting around kwin and for me uh kIN is not something I can navigate on my own because with my IDE, I use Rider, but if I do use CLion, which is the C slash C++ version of Rider, it just does not play nice with KDE projects. And I don't get code completions, I don't get navigation, I don't get any kindions I don't get navigation I don't get any kind of like

analysis whatsoever that I can use I can't even control click a function to go see where it's implemented so I have to navigate as if I'm writing code in notepad and it's not fun and compiling

KWin especially the first time around it eats so much of my ram and swap that the linker will seg fault almost all the time it is mental to get it working and then once you do get it working you have to submit a merge request and get it code reviewed and then because i'm not too familiar with kde's coding style there was weeks of back and forth of how can we do this a different way that isn't shanky as hell eventually we got there with multi-head fix but i don't think that's something that i can do on my own with uh you know partial repaints working because i don't know how that system works have you looked at the comments

under the other bug report the other caching one because nate graham said the funny thing that you are annoyed that people keep bringing up um i haven't seen the bugzilla on that one since i i saw your video on it yeah it didn't have any comments until my video came out by the looks of it yeah i haven't checked the bugzilla since then. I wonder what he said. This is probably an issue we should fix for the benefit of people with a single slow storage disk. But, I have to ask,

if you're a technical expert and have multiple options for storage hardware options, would it not make more sense to put the cache on your fastest one rather than a known slow one? Yeah, yes it um so i i get where he's coming from because my in my case i have my boot drive on my fastest drive because that's what makes sense to have like it's your fastest drive yeah that makes sense and to be clear i do boot and application drive i guess yeah i do think kwin shouldn't be writing to the home directory for that they should be writing

slash tmp because you know i i don't know how others have have fared with doing that but in my case when i was investigating it i could just just delete my.cache folder and K1 wouldn't crash. I wouldn't get any errors. I'd just be able to use the effects and the stutters would take less time. And then eventually they would take more time, the bigger the cache got, but it would just recreate the cache. So there's no reason it can't be on a temp file system. so there's no reason it can't be on a temp file system um and when people say well richie just put your stuff on a faster hard drive what or on a faster drive what they're what they fail to realize is like nate graham said yeah there are people who don't have ssds or nvme there's the

first gen steam deck which one of the variants had eMMC. That's going to be dog slow. Oh, I forgot about that! And then there's people who have their home directories on a network-attached storage device, like you said in the video. That's very much a possibility. And not only that, but in my case, I actually did have it on something faster than a hard drive i used lvm which is logical volume management it's kind of the colonel's kind of own version of raid in a way where you can take multiple disks and pull them together and treat them as one. So in my case, I have two 4TB hard drives,

and then a 1TB PCI-4 NVMe, and what I was doing was I had one of the 4TB drives in an LVM pool, and I was going to add the other one later on once I got my data on it, off of Windows. But in front of that, I had a 1TB NVMe cache in front of it so it should not have been that slow but my mistake was that my LVM cache pool was full because I was transferring data off of Windows

and I should have flushed it but there are people who do that lvm is there is a reason that the arch wiki literally uses your home directory as a as an example of how to set up lvm because that's a valid use case for lvm it is reasonable to have people pull spinning hard drives together and optionally put an ssd cache in front of it. That's a thing you are able to do. And I don't think that there's any reason why my compositor should hang for several seconds because I did that. Well that's the other big question. I don't know why it's hanging. It's one thing that it's pulling in the data. I don't know why it's hanging because of it.

That's the weird part and someone's obviously going to have to look into it but my theory is based on being a game dev and seeing similar things happening in Socially Distant obviously a game engine and a Wayland compositor are going to have a lot of parallels they're doing a lot of the same things

with rendering and stuff like that you're going to have a render loop, you're going to have a main thread and if you block that main thread you're going to have a render loop, you're going to have a main thread, and if you block that main thread, you're going to cause those hangs. That's how it is. And I suspect what's happening is maybe they are loading from the disk on another thread, but they're waiting for that data to come in on the main thread because they have to. And while waiting,'re just not doing anything productive sure they're not rendering frames they're not they're just waiting and whether it be because they are they're blocking waiting for the disk data to come in or they just are

are spinning the thread because the data hasn't come in yet and they expect it to come in relatively quickly who can say but the point is at the very least it should still be pumping out frames it should still let you move your mouse and and type on the keyboard and it should be reading keyboard input and stuff like that to be able to maybe the tiling editor does take five seconds to come up, but it actually comes up. Right, right. Well, yeah, the issue that bothered me the most is I would open up the tiling editor, and it wouldn't open. But I think what I...

I mentioned this in my video. I think what was actually happening is it opened, but it read a second key press, and pressing the key to open it was also the key to close it. So it seems like during that issue where it locked up, it must have rendered it and then removed it afterwards. It's hard to say because I don't have specific action-by-action logs,

but that's the most logical thing I can think of. And you're absolutely right. That's exactly what it is doing. I actually told you that's what it was doing, and Sa doing um i actually told you that's what it was doing and saver hugel told me that's what it was and we confirmed it okay did confirm i didn't know he actually confirmed that i thought it was just a theory yeah um it it does do if you hold down the tiling editor key right now, it will open and then it will close and it'll come back. Sometimes it's being temperamental on my system. But, you know, if you hold the key down for a second or so, it will close it.

And what's happening is it's not reading two key presses. What's actually happening is you press it then kwin hangs by the time it comes back up it just hasn't registered that you've let go of it and it thinks it's still held down so it goes and immediately closes it because to it you've held it down for that long and unfortunately that's a very common bug in in game development when you're doing streaming and disk io if you block the main thread all of your delta time calculations are they're gonna be thrown off by that because to the game engine it's gonna go oh the last frame took five seconds to render.

Right. And it causes weird issues like that with keyboard input, and unfortunately, it's what's happening. It's the reality of it. Unfortunately, I don't know what they'll need to do to fix it.

If it were a game, I would just say split the load operation across multiple frames and keep rendering frames, but I don't know enough about how it works to say definitively how they'll fix it. I just hope they do. I don't know if... Yeah, that seems like it's going to be a lot more of an issue to fix.

I think the best thing they can probably do is just get QML onto ram stick it in temp it shouldn't be getting dumped like the the folder in in cache that it's specifically using is called qml cache like they have a specific folder just for qml that folder should probably be in your temp yeah and and i i get why they're caching it because um when you're doing qml or really any markup language ultimately you're gonna you're gonna need to parse it and then you're gonna need to turn it into something that's renderable and it's a good idea to cache that result so you don't have to do that computation every time but it shouldn't be cached to the disk um it seems like they're still doing the

computation every time though that's that's what's weird to me like every time you do the effect it's being reloaded and so it it seems to me like they're doing that computation every time so i don't know i don't know what the logic is behind caching it to the disk anyway if you're not going to be reusing it i don't know either and i honestly don't know enough about the code to really understand why i need to look at it and then the fix understand what the code's doing the fix that you suggested with putting the whole KWIN folder on TempFest, the only reason I wouldn't directly recommend that is I don't know what else KWIN is putting in the whole KWIN folder, and I don't know if there's possibly

something in there you'd want to survive between boots, because I've noticed that by moving my entire cache folder um apparently zsh doesn't like its history file existing on a sim link so my zsh history broke um yeah i look i that's that's where i've i've had it for a long time um i i've moved it to my like directly to my home directory um but zsh has like like, a variable that lets you set location. That's the only thing I've seen break because of it. Everything else, to the best of my knowledge, is fine. I thought that maybe browsers did a bit of caching there,

but they seem to do their caching a bit differently. So that seems to have been fine like i i initially deleted my entire cache folder just to see what would happen and nothing broke like i did it when kwin was running so nothing broke which is good but i haven't extensively tested everything that uses like uses the kwin folder to say whether or not you'd want that to be going through boots you were saying that it's it's been fine but yeah I don't know if it's always going to be fine for every situation though yeah the the only weird thing that I've had with my system since then is, for whatever reason, and it's probably Unity Editor being Unity Editor. The other day, I had this weird issue where I would open Unity, and Unity lets you select what IDE to use to edit scripts in, and if you don't select it, it's just going to use your default text editor, and you don't want that. You don't want to do

Unity in Kate. It's not fun. So I select Rider because, well, Rider works a lot better with Unity and I like Rider. And what would end up happening is it would apply and I'd be able to open scripts

in Rider and have everything work, but then I'd restart Unity, which you have to do a lot. Sometimes it just decides it wants to break and you have to restart it. And it wouldn't save my settings. I don't know what fixed it, but

it's fixed now. I haven't done anything to fix it. The only thing I've done is reboot my system. I doubt that's what did it. It probably is, but who knows. But that is so far the only weird thing that

I've had happen since moving my cache off of the hard drive. Do you have it set up with a TempFest right now, or do you have the folder moved? Right now I have my i i actually completely redid my home directory so i have the main home directory on my one terabyte mvme uh so all my pictures my videos are on that and then i have a vault folder that's my four terabyte hard drive so maybe in my case the reason nothing

weird has happened is because i'm doing something a little more sane um on second thought that's probably what it is but when i was initially doing it i was just sim linking it onto a faster drive and then when i was testing to reproduce the bug i was doing the opposite and sim linking it onto a slower drive and that's how i ended up noticing that it was based on the drive's busyness as opposed to solely the fact that it was a hard drive um because when i did that when i was testing to reproduce it i would put the cache on the slower drive and the effects would still be fairly responsive. But then I'd start writing to that drive and it would

chug. Right, right. Really badly. So, I suspect that's why I was having a lot more problems with it with LVM because my LVM cache was

full and every time K1 went to write to that.cache folder it would have to write to the LVM cache and then it would also have to write to the main hard drive on it and if it went to write to the LVM cache it had to make space to write to it which means moving something else off of the LVM cache, it had to make space to write to it, which means moving something else off of the LVM cache onto the spinning drive, and that's going to slow things down. So I had a pretty complicated setup. Now

I'm a lot more sane, and I'm not thrilled with the way my system's set up. I don't want to have a specific vault folder for my 4K hard drive. I want my home directory to be all of those drives, but it is what it is. Um, yeah, when I eventually, um, change out my home drive, I'm just going to probably NVMe it. Like, that'll just be the easiest thing. I don't, like, I,

here's the thing, right? I haven't noticed any, The only issue I've noticed with having my home directory be a hard drive is specifically KDE. I've never experienced this problem using Gnome, using Hyperland, using anything on X11 like i3 or anything like that. I doubt the problem's there on Cosmic. This is specifically an issue with the way that QT QML works. This is just QML. Look, if I'm being honest, it's just QML, frankly, doing things wrong.

I would be inclined to believe you there. It really should not be caching to disk. Especially if it's going to be recomputed every time. What are you doing? Even if it's not a speed issue, the issue is there's no reason to constantly be smacking the disk. The hell if it's gonna be recomputed every time. That's... What are you doing? Even if it's not a speed issue, like, the issue is your... There's no reason to constantly be smacking the drive. Like, why... Yeah. Why are you constantly

hitting it with I.O. every time you need to do a desktop effect? Like, that... That's just unnecessary reads and writes. Yeah. And with SSDs, maybe nowadays it's not such a big problem, but SSDs have limited write cycles and even with wear leveling

you hit it too many times and eventually it's gonna say fuck you and die. It's gonna happen. It's inevitable it's only a matter of when and like if KD wants to do a simple fix like the easiest fix is

like they don't even have to like get anything changed with QT a simple fix, the easiest fix is... They don't even have to get anything changed with QT QML. I think the easiest fix is just anytime you're doing any QML stuff, just chuckle and temper fest. You might have to worry about... I guess you could have the issue where you might have to clear out some of what's been loaded, and maybe it will take a bit more effort,

but I don't think it's going to require like a complete re-architecture uh re-re-architecting of how this system works i could be wrong and if someone from kde is watching this and can like correct me there let me know but it doesn't seem like the most straightforward fix would be that difficult to do. Here's hoping. For me, this is the only problem that I have with KDE where it's genuinely made me want to swap to a different desktop. There are issues with, you know, I don't like the way that virtual monitors work and other little things,

but this has been the only problem where I genuinely... It's genuinely made me want to stop using KDE. And honestly, during that stream I did on KDE, it made me want to just stop using KDE right there. Yeah, and I remember that. I think it was actually there. Yeah, and I remember that. I think it was actually there. And I don't remember having the same issues as severe as you did, but I do remember having issues of my own, like the Shelly Screens bug and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And at the time, I actually was having the stuttering issue.

I just didn't realize that it was an issue with KDE. I thought, like a lot of people in my comments section, I thought that it was my fault. I didn't think it was related to my home directory. I thought that it was driver-related with my GPU. Yeah, that makes sense. When I talked to David Edmondson, he was like, this is probably some GPU frame timing issue timing issue like that yeah and david hugel thought the same thing and only only

when i moved the the dot cache folder off of the nvme and some other stuff that i tried did i realize this is disc related what the hell's going on yeah yeah and and like it i can play games like cyberpunk 2077 which are notorious hard on resources to play off a hard drive and it's fine i yeah i i like my games being on an ssd because i particularly don't like load times me it it depends uh load times don't really bother me realistically it's gonna take less time for the game to load than it is for my eyes to tell that it's loading anyway. Sure. Well, I got... The main reason I really don't like hard drives for loading games is I played Skyrim on a PS3, and there were situations where you would go into a building

and it would be, like, 30-second to a minute load time. Every single time. I actually had to replace the hard drive on my ps3 with an ssd a couple years ago because i was doing a lot of little big planet stuff and i was creating levels in it and i would little big planet has an undo redo thing um and you know sometimes you make mistakes you'll hit the little left d-pad button and it undoes your last action and yeah when it does that it has to reload the old state of the level from disk um and i was constantly getting 15 second rewind times doing undo redo and upgrading to an ssd has fixed it it was weird but then it also makes sense because

that this ps3 has been kicking since 2007 it's one of the original models it's like the very first that didn't have ps2 compatibility built in oh i was gonna ask that you said it was the original i thought you were gonna say it did actually have that. Wow. Yeah, it can do the... It used to be able to do other OS, so it is early enough to have that firmware. But it didn't have the PS2 compatibility. What it does have is it has the ability to emulate PS2. Not even through PS2 Classics Emulator. I can just give it an iso because i have it

custom firmware and it will read it as a disc and play it but it's not doing hardware emulation it's doing software and but the ssd made little big planet like literally 10 times faster for me and i suspect that 160 gig drive was this dying but then my dad put it in his computer and it works fine i don't know why he put it in his computer but he did oh hey if it works it works i guess i think he stores his music on it i don't know why but you do you, I guess. Oh, that's... Sure, why not?

So, I guess we probably should talk a little bit about what's going on with our socially distant, like, where the... What the state of the game is now. Like, what's happened since last time? Since last time... A few devlogs have come out uh the most recent one was me working on i can't remember no it wasn't chat it was oh what was it that i was doing the last time? I think I was still doing foundational stuff at that point, but I was, I multi-threaded the terminal.

So traditionally the in-game terminal emulator, it's based off ST. It's port from ST or SDC, like the C version of the suckuckless Terminal, to C Sharp and Unity. And I had to multithread it because if I printed, like, a lot of text to it, the game would have to process all of that text to get it rendered on screen. And that takes time. And it was taking enough time that it would drop the frame rate

and multithreading it allowed me to process keyboard input and stuff like that on the main thread and just send it send the resulting events over to the terminal thread and it processes text when it wants to

process text and so I can print thousands of characters to it now, and it does not chug the frame rate. It just renders and repaints the terminal when it's ready. So that's something that I did. I also added background blur to it for all the people out there who like their background blurred terminals. That's now a thing you can do. It's on by default default but there's an accessibility toggle to turn it off um i did work a lot on the networking simulation for hacking

and you know i won't go into that because it's very complicated and realistically as a player you're not going to notice most of what's going on behind the scenes so it's not worth it to go into it but um lately this month um i'm not going to reveal too much because i want to save a lot of it for the devlog but i am very far into a lot of the npc related dialogue stuff i don't know if we had this um this this conversation last time, but the font you're using is JetBrains Mono, isn't it? Terminal uses JetBrains Mono.

I don't know if that's going to be in the final game, because I don't know about the licensing yet. But the main user interface nowadays uses a different font that I unfortunately cannot pronounce due to a speech impediment. Can you write it in discord uh let's see if i can pronounce it because my speech doesn't type it but it is the cyberpunk 2077 font no i we're not doing that nope not happening yeah

i i can barely type it but but I like that font. Rajdani? Maybe? Maybe. It's a Google font, though, and it is open font licensed, so I should be in the clear for it. And I originally chose it because it is the UI font used in Cyberpunk 2077, and that's sort of the art style I'm going for with the UI.

And some people have recognized this as that font but other people just think it looks nice and that's really motivating for me. So it's used everywhere. Yep, yep. I know this font, okay. If, well,

I have a feeling the license isn't going to be fine for using JetBrains Mono, but have you thought of what you might want to use in the terminal instead? Um... Honestly, I don't know. There aren't a lot of great-looking Monospace fonts for a hacking

game. There are a lot of great Monospace fonts, to be clear, but a lot of them are use them for your code editor for your actual terminal they don't look flashy in a hacking game right right um a lot of them look pretty similar and a lot of them what i've noticed particularly on google fonts they miss italic variants which is important because maybe not in an actual terminal, you might not see italic fonts used a lot, but in a hacking game, you kind of have to give it that kind of Hollywood hacker aesthetic. And that means I want to have access to different font styles and

be able to do italics and underline and stuff like that. And that's why I ported ST because I can do all of those color codes and stuff like that and be able to do fancy effects. But I think if I do need to change the font, which I'm not totally clear about, I'm gonna have to check, but if I do I'm probably going to either go Ubuntu Mono, which is also OFL, I believe. Or I'm going to go with Hack, which is the one that's used in KDE. And the reason I'm going for either one of those is because I personally think they look nice. And the game now has Bloom, which definitely helps make the font look a lot more flashy. I'm not going to change it, because there's no reason to. It works fine as JetBrains Mono, and realistically, it's probably OFL. I don't think JetBrains would use any other license.

You can just download it for free. So realistically, I'm fine, but yeah. so realistically I'm fine but yeah as far as other gameplay stuff I'm doing in socially distant this isn't something that's going to come in the next devlog because I need to actually implement it and I'm running out of time

to do so but I have this idea for mechanic where you download an image from the in-game internet or something like that and you're going to open it in an image viewer and when you zoom into it you're going to be able to pick out certain pieces of information that are in the image like maybe you have a screenshot of someone's browser and it's like a point and click style thing kind of and you have a screenshot of someone's browser. It's like a point-and-click style thing. Kind of.

And you have a screenshot of someone's browser, and maybe you're looking for someone who has a private social profile that they're following. And you want to hack into that private profile. Well, first, you're not going to be able to password track it, because that's going to take a while and you might get locked out, but you might be able to hack into someone who has a public profile or reverse, or not reverse,

social engineer them or something like that. But to do that, you need to know someone who's following that private profile. So my idea is to have an NPC post some kind of screenshot of their computer and then you'd be able to pick out those elements that are on their screen,

and be able to find usernames and other information in the image, and be able to catalog it. Kind of like OCR, but in a gamified way. Orwell, I don't know if you've played that, or if other people have that are listening, but Orwell has a similar mechanic and it's what the game itself is basically built around is you're browsing the internet and you're trying to find information about like criminals and stuff like that and this whole conspiracy

that's going on in the game and you will come across these highlighted pieces of information on the internet of people saying things, certain statements and stuff like that. And you have to, you drag them out into this catalog and you end up building this network of information and people and relationships and stuff like that. And what you drag in ultimately gets reported to the government and it decides how the game plays out. It's really interesting of a mechanic so I figured I'd do something pretty similar of socially distant that I haven't really seen in a lot of hacking games. So that's a mechanic that I'm going to try. It's kind of quite ironic for the blind guy to be implementing an image-based mechanic but... We'll see how it goes. Well hey, at least we can be sure there's probably going to be a zoom feature in the game uh there won't be i'm gonna rely on the desktop to do it okay that's fair uh

i i the reason i i'm making that decision is because it's similar to using a virtual machine with a zoom feature um if i'm in microsoft windows in a virtual machine and i hit the windows key and plus it's going to open the windows magnifier but it's also going to zoom into kde which is a problem and right i don't want to conflict with that in the game okay that's fair's fair. It's not going to do that. That's fair. But at least if an issue comes up where the Zoom maybe conflicts with it and there's some sort of issue that happens because of it, that problem should get fixed. Hopefully you come across the problem yourself

before anyone else actually sees it. Yeah. Realistically, most of the accessibility features in the game come from okay this looks cool but i can barely read it so i'm going to implement a toggle that lets me dim the colors or change the font stuff like that and it it's been working pretty well do you have some sort of right oh sorry go ahead i was gonna say do you have some sort of like high contrast theme in there as well or is that just how it looks? I don't have a high-contrast theme yet.

I probably won't, because doing a theming system in Unity is hell. I've done it before. It's not fun. But something I do have is the game's dialogue system. You can go in, and normally the chat bubbles for NPCs are colored and the background is quite bright as it would be in real life but you can actually dim the colors quite a lot to the point where it almost becomes a muted almost black even for the player which would be blue and it makes it a lot more readable

and I think I've taken a few screenshots of it turned on um and it actually kind of looks neat despite it being an accessibility feature which is more than I can say about Windows high contrast yeah we talked about that one last time yeah

I remember that and it's so much worse than Windows 11 let me tell you I didn't know that at the time but it's so much worse than Windows 11, let me tell you. I didn't know that at the time, but it's so much worse over there. Mm-hmm. I don't remember if it was you or somebody else who was having a discussion with a Gnome person about high-contrast themes.

Ah, I definitely was having a conversation. Yeah, it was you, okay. The evil skeleton about it. Ah, yeah, yeah a okay conversation yeah was you okay the evil skeleton about it ah yeah okay yeah yeah he and i have become friends since us both doing the podcast he's a pretty close friend of mine i really like him and or them i accidentally they did come out or a few days ago so oops but. But they are really cool, and I actually helped them by giving them feedback, redesigned their website, and add a high contrast theme to it.

I don't know how to access that theme, unfortunately, but it is there, and it looks pretty damn nice. And it doesn't do any of the mortal sins that Windows High Contrast does, which is even better. I know there was that discussion, but maybe I'm thinking of someone else that actually had a conversation

about the actual GNOME desktop. Yeah, that was probably someone else, but I know that I have had discussions with Skelly about it and how it looks kind of bad. Yeah, do they even have a high contrast theme right now? I'm not certain. Because I know GNOME's not big- the problem is GNOME's not big on theming, so if they- I know they do have one, because I have turned it on in the past. It's not a great one But it is there

Compared to Windows What would you rate higher? I would rate GNOME Which is not a high bar to be fair Yeah The problem with Windows is it just takes

All of the colour out of it And it makes sense If you're blind and can't see colour The problem with Windows is it just takes all of the colour out of it, and... It makes sense if you're blind and can't see colour, but... If you're blind and cannot see colour, you're really gonna see the same thing. You're probably the easiest to understand. Oh, fuck. Um... Try to say something now.

Uh... You're just a robot could you leave the call and just rejoin try I will leave as well hello testing 1 2 3 considerably better you don't sound like a robot now lead as well. Hello. Testing, one, two, three.

Considerably better, you don't sound like a robot now. Okay. Where was I? Something about high contrast. Yeah, I remember now. Windows high contrast takes all of the color out of things. And going between

Windows applications, the window borders look completely different. Like, the terminal looks different from the file explorer, looks different from UWP apps, look different from Win32 apps, and it's a mess. And there's also the distinct lack of color. You get, like, there's a dominant accent color in all of the high-contrast themes,

and you can set it, but you're very limited in what you can set in those themes. And the big problem is, if you're blind enough to not see color, then I'd way too sure you're blind enough to need a screen reader. But if you're at my level of blindness, you do need text-to-speech for some things. But what's more important is a lot of visual context clues beyond just reading um that comes down to color and spacing and cursors doing what you expect them to do like if i hover over a link it should be a pointing finger um but with Windows one of the worst things that it does is

especially on my website and even Skelly's you go to a code snippet and it may be syntax highlighted but you're not going to see it it's going to be all white so what you would want is more like a a gradient

of like high contrast where it's like you know removes all color removes this removes that and you can like choose where along that line you want it to be or maybe enable certain things to be disabled certain things i guess yeah like for me i don't want a lot of thick white borders to differentiate between different panels that just isn't aesthetically pleasing and it isn't helpful what I want is for contrast ratios to be increased like instead of a

gray dark theme where the text is light gray and the background is dark gray I'd want white text and black text or a black background or maybe I want colors more saturated because a more saturated red is easier for me to distinguish than a yellow

and what Windows does nowadays is it takes a lot of those colors and heavily brightens them, it doesn't saturate them it brightens them. It doesn't saturate them, it brightens them. So you'll end up with... And on GitHub, there's the danger zone section in repository settings, and a lot of those buttons are bright red because they're danger zone items.

They're things like delete the repository or transfer ownership, stuff like that that you don't typically want to do by accident. And when I mean high high contrast they are red but they're bright yellow red and it's hard to distinguish against the other colors for me right right right and i'd i'd rather it just be yeah maybe mess with the background a bit and increase contrast ratios, but don't mess with the actual colors. And then the other big offense for me and Windows High Contrast is on my website. A lot of the links on it are animated so that when you hover over them, they fade to white or they fade to blue from white. And I did that because I want it to be indicating that the page is responsive

but in windows it strips all that out and they all go blue and they stay blue right so it's kind of like the way they've handled high contrast is they have one set definition of if you need high contrast this is what you need it's kind of like yeah if you're a lot of old video games that would have a colorblind mode but it wouldn't be different kinds of colorblind it would just be colorblind yeah it would be colorblind you can't see colors okay we'll put shapes well i remember in battle for three it had a colorblind option and i think it was i think it was red blue colorblind so it would make like the team icons you know different but if you had a different kind of

colorblind it didn't help you really it maybe it made it better maybe it made it worse i but it's certainly not your like what you need for like your system yeah yeah whereas what i do right now is i have i use breeze on kde most people but i have a custom color scheme on it it's not one that i made and i think someone on mastodon offered to make one for me that does what i needed to do but it's what it's downloaded from the kde store i forget what it's called. It's a weird name. But it makes a lot of the UI elements black background, white text, or a bright cyan, as I guess they were going for the hacker effect as well.

It's not perfect. But it definitely helps because I don't do well with grays as my background, and I do even worse with off-whites as my text. What I really want is something like the Discord AMOLED theme. That would be the perfect high-contrast theme for me. If I could have that, or even a traditional high contrast black but without the thick white

borders and taking all the colors out and all that context out it would be great but unfortunately traditional high contrast themes are just not that well we can probably keep going for like another hour I reckon, but we have passed the two hour mark, so I think it's probably a good time to end it off. Yeah, and it's getting late for me too. Well, I wanna pop down to the gym and get some videos done after that, so, um... Let the people know where they can find you and find your stuff. Well, last time I didn't mention it too much,

but there's obviously the YouTube channel. I've been getting back into making videos. I have my stream deck working now, which is great. So, youtube.com slash aestheticlight. I can't remember if there's an underscore or not. Not on YouTube, no. There is a space on your name, but there's no underscore in the actual app.

Alright. Well, I can always send those links to you and you can link them in the description. There's always that. And then, I'm on Mastodon. I'm very active on there. That's, like, my only social media. And, you know, if you want to support what I do, socially distant

mainly right now, but I have other projects on the table. There's the Patreon, where you get access to socially distant devlogs a week earlier than everyone else, which is the only perk you get right now, besides like a private chat where you can talk to me on Discord. But it does help out a lot to have that support, and it means a lot to me on discord but um it does help out a lot to have that support and it means a lot to me and obviously there's the website a little less active on there um but occasionally i do programming blogs and then yeah that's the only other thing i would say is socially distant is doing playtest applications now i haven't started bringing people on is doing playtest applications now i haven't started bringing people on to the playtest program because i'm not ready to but i am accepting applications so if anyone wants to actually try the game out and find bugs in it

or accessibility issues and stuff like that that would be awesome too and it would mean a lot and i'd be happy to meet you guys do you have um a link that i can send people to that I can just put in the description? There is sociallydistantgame.com slash playtest or on the main website it'll be in the top corner in the nav bar it'll say apply to playtest. Ah, I see the button. Yes, right here. Sweet. Just ignore the padding issue between the button and the social helmet. I don't know how to fix that. Yeah. I also noticed if I'm zoomed in too much on the browser,

it switches to a hamburger menu and the hamburger menu doesn't do anything. Yeah, it's implemented but it's broken because I'm not great with CSS. That's fair. Eventually I'll fix that when I'm not doing other things. Fair enough. Is that pretty much it?

Yeah. Awesome. So as for me, my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I have no idea what to be out because I have a giant backlog and I need to stop recording podcasts and take some time off, but I don't. So check it out, see what's there. If you want to check out my gaming stuff, that is Brody on Games. I stream on Twitch and YouTube twice a week. Right now I'm playing

through Sekiro and probably still doing my Pokemon stream with Ren. That's starting this week as of the recording. So we'll probably be like three or four episodes into that. We're playing a randomized black and white Nuzlocke, so check that out. If you want to listen to the audio version of this and you're watching the video, you can find the audio on pretty much any podcast platform. There is an RSS feed.

Put it in your favorite app, and if you want to find the video, it is on YouTube at TechOverTea. Give me the final word. What do you want to say? You don't out-richie the richie. That's what every bug sooner or later finds out. What was that comment that someone said on your Discord?

You don't... Neil Gompa? Where is it? You gotta stompa the Gompa. You gotta stompa the Gompa. Yeah. That was one of them. That was because when i was announcing to patreon that i did that we were doing this podcast it was i i i gave myself the goal of out passioning neil gompa because he was really passionate in it and i hope that i did that it was a good episode i i definitely had some

fun here and i'm sure there'll be a lot more to talk about for another one at some point in the future hopefully socially distant is a lot further along then and the play test goes well yeah well i will see you guys later bye