The only scripts I’ve seen still leave a giant empty box at the top… Are there any that fix this too?

Not that I’ve seen, but I know some people who somehow missed the video, and he doesn’t link to it on the website so:

https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE

My experience is dated, but figured I’d share it in case no one else has any input.

I owned a few Motorola Android phones before and after the Google involvement. I think my most recent purchase was 2015.

At that time, they were extremely “pure android” with very few additions beyond the stock experience. The things they added were way ahead of their time - I still think those devices had the best “always on” display implementation to this day, and they did it way before it became a norm.

Their software and update support was rivaling Google at the time, and most other manufacturers were still in the days of 2 years of updates if you’re lucky.

They just stopped making phones it seemed like. I ended up moving towards Pixels over the years, but Moto is the one company that would tempt me to switch back. That or maybe HTC but they’re dead.

Hope you get a more recent answer - I didn’t even realize they were still making phones to be honest.

There’s isn’t enough physical space for three sensors on a smaller phone especially if it’s the size of the iPhone mini

I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that “more cameras” is the complaints being made here. Sure, telephotos make sense as things that take up more space. But most people are using them for like 1 in 50 shots or something. I have an extremely hard time believing that someone would genuinely notice the difference unless they’re an extreme case or they’ve been told the other ones are better. Within reasonable effective focal lengths, these are pretty negligible in the sizes we’re talking about.

If Apple couldn’t make a smaller phone sell particularly well, I doubt anyone else could.

I hard disagree with this. Apple is literally the worst company to try to make this shit work. Apple’s core selling point is the status symbol of it all. People trying to show off having the flashiest phone are not going to buy a product being touted as a half baked smaller and cheaper version of something else. Their entire marketing was about it being mini. Apple customers are not the core audience for something like this, and Apple marketed it as exactly what people disliked about small phones.

around or less than 5% of total iPhone 12 and 13 sales

I find it more surprising that this was below expectations than I do that only 5% of people bought a smaller phone. I doubt much more than 1 in 20 people really is after a smaller phone. I’m sure they exist, but based on the people I know and the number of people I’ve heard interested in smaller phones, I’d estimate it more like 1 in 20 to 1 in 40. It’s not for most people by any means. But 1 in 20 is still a decent number of people.

They have to understand that the cameras on the biggest flagships occupy a lot of space and it isn’t feasible to bring it to a smaller form factor.

Not… Really… Sure it makes some difference, but the much more constraining factor is the money. Cameras arent that big, but they’re one of the priciest pieces of hardware in the device.

The problem is more that they keep trying to sell small phones at cheaper price points. So they end up with much worse screens, socs, and cameras so they perform like shit. People don’t want a small phone because they don’t care about their phone. People want small phones because the standard size is fucking huge. They need to make a high-ish tier small phone instead of low tier small phone that performs like the 50 Walmart shit.

I know it’s not everyones cup of tea but…

I ended up buying a Pixel Fold for the Fold aspect. There’s an added benefit that it’s really short when folded so I can reach the entire screen one handed. It’s heavier and thicker than a slate phone, but I actually enjoy the folded experience way better than other phones.

I can understand that Valve doesn’t want to give false impressions that a game runs perfectly when there are imperfections as mentioned

Idk, I disagree with this. It means that games are being labeled as “not verified” because of things that don’t really hamper what people would care about - the keyboard popping up for naming your character or seeing “A” in a green circle isn’t going to make people be like “oh no, this doesn’t work well on my steamdeck, I’m not playing it”. Does it look unprofessional? Sure. But that’s not what people care about when looking at the ratings for compatibility. They just want to know if it’s going to run well.

These systems are all about trust and evaluating the right metrics. Having the right button icons matters to Valve but not the player. Once players play games that aren’t verified and they run fine, and they play games that are verified but still have performance hitches in some places, etc, the rating system loses its credibility and then it’s meaningless.

On top of this, developers are already shunning the verification and just not bothering. Some of the things they ask for don’t directly affect the playability of their game. It’s an extra hoop for the developer to jump through, and if people don’t trust the badge, there’s no point in chasing it. Valve is literally undermining their own system from both sides by doing this.

There’s already people in this thread touting protonDB being a better evaluation. It’s exactly this that will happen and will continue to happen and continue undermining their rating system until Valve aligns their verification system with what users actually care about.

I’d actually bet it’s something different…

It’s less that you game on a steam deck because it’s portable, and more that because it’s portable you can game. There are people here and there that are like “yeah, I have a steam deck so I use that instead” but the sentiment I see more often is “I wouldn’t be able to game at all if it wasn’t portable - I can’t sit down for that long, I only have time on the train, I need to be near my kids” etc.

And this changes the dynamic. It’s less that these people have “desktop gaming” and “portable gaming” and are choosing to play the AAA games while portable. They only have portable gaming. And they choose to play the same good games everyone else is playing. The only gaming they do is on their deck. And they’re not going to be like “oh, why play a good game like BG3 if I can play a shitty portable game like xyz”.

These are just people’s primary gaming devices now. And if they can, they will choose to play the same good games everyone else is choosing to play. It doesn’t matter if it only runs OK, playing a good game with OK graphics is still better than playing a shitty game.

Yes, it requires it runs well with default settings, everything is accessible with the standard deck controls, that all the control displays use the steam deck icons, and it doesn’t reference controls the deck doesn’t have. It’s a very high bar.

I really do not understand how server anti cheat is not way easier.

In a clean slate, it is. It’s also way more effective (except for things like wall hacks, aim bots, recoil suppressors, etc, but most of those things are only really important and popular in competitive FPS). It’s also much simpler to understand and to leave no “holes” behind. It also lives in the developers domain so it can’t be “compromised” or circumvented.

The thing is that client side “anti cheat” can be commoditized. Every game with server authority/anti cheat needs specific server software to run their game logic. Client anti cheat is basically “look at everything else running on the system and see if any of it seems suspicious”. As such, there’s not really anything “game specific” to these - they basically are just a watch dog looking for bad actors - so as such, one company can come along, make one, and sell it to other devs.

This being “off the shelf” and not something the dev team has to think about besides a price tag means that management is just going to buy a third party solution and check off the “anti cheat” box on their task list.

I feel like devs are caught up on realtime anti cheat and not willing to do anything asynchronous.

First, this is a management problem and not the devs. Any dev worth their salt knows this isn’t really a good solution.

But I’d say the more relevant and prominent thing here is that game companies just don’t want to have to run servers anymore. It’s a cost, requires dev time, and requires maintenance, and they don’t want to do that. If these games had servers running the game world like games used to, they’d inherently have their own “anti cheat” built in for free that wouldn’t necessarily catch everything but would do a better job than some of these. And it could be enhanced to cover more bases.

But studios don’t want to do this anymore. It’s easier to make the game p2p and slap an off the shelf anti cheat and call it a day.

Some games still require matchmaking servers etc, but the overhead there is way lower.

Or they really like paying licensing fees for client-side anticheat.

Not that I agree with the decision, but it is definitely cheaper and faster than the alternative. But picking something like nprotect totally fucking baffles me. There are better options.

I just don’t understand how any competent software engineer or systems admin or architect trusts the client so fervently.

In some ways, same. Every project I’ve been on that has gotten anywhere near client side trust I’ve fought adamantly about avoiding it. I’ve won most arguments on it, but there are some places where they just utterly refuse.

But then there are things like New World… I don’t know how the fuck that shit released like it did. The number of things trusted to the client were absolutely baffling. I expected Amazon’s first foray into gaming to be a fucking joke, but I was totally appalled at how bad it turned out. They even touted hiring ex blizzard talent to get my hopes up first.

It does

https://steamdb.info/tech/AntiCheat/nProtect_GameGuard/

https://www.resetera.com/threads/helldivers-2-incorporates-nprotect-gameguard-on-pc-a-kernel-level-rootkit-anti-cheat-technical-director-responds-to-the-controversy-on-reddit.808530/

I don’t know if this makes me “a redditor” somehow or what, but…

As a dev, I am deeply troubled by the gaming industry so calmly walking into kernel anti cheats. It’s insane and being tossed around like it’s nothing.

Helldivers especially, since they picked one of the sketchiest ones and it’s a game that entirely doesn’t need it.

I have no idea if Reddit has suddenly picked up on this, but I’ve been pissed since at least Valorants release, but have seen more YT videos talking about it recently.

I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.”

Pretty sure I would quit on the spot. Clearly doesn’t understand “clean” code, nor how people are going to interface with code, or git for that matter. Even if you write a book for each commit, that would be so hard to track down relevant info.

To make sure millenials can’t read your password, 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓲𝓽 𝓲𝓷 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮.

How would this mess with millennials? I think you mean gen z.

“Why spend thousands of dollars on paying someone to fix it when we can pay them hundreds to spend an hour writing a dialog box?” - Some storefront owner

It’s probably all the new generation of programmers/management - you would think they would listen to the lessons passed down but… Nope.

There the solution was to go into the Apps settings, find Pixel Launcher, and choose force stop, then clear cache, then clear settings.

Fwiw, force stopping your actual launcher should fix the issue without restarting etc but it does come back.

I think I’ve tried doing this on the Pixel launcher with no dice, but going to give that a shot since it shouldn’t hurt. I doubt this would impact the issue if it’s actually based on what you claim though.

I’ve been crazy for months over this lmao. Glad I could help 😜

That’s great and I’m glad that works for you.

But most people buying portable gaming handhelds are not doing that. And the people looking for things like that are likely landing closer to a surface or standard laptop, which Windows already supports well.

I don’t know that Microsoft has any business trying to make Windows support these devices better…

Windows is entirely built around two pillars:

1. Enterprise support for corporations, and team machine management
2. Entirely open compatibility so they can run almost any hardware you put into it, plug into it, and backwards compatibility for all that for as long as possible.

Portable game machines are not an enterprise product. Nor do you care about broad hardware support or upgradability. Nor do you care about plugging in your parallel port printer from 1985. Nor do you care about running your ancient vb6 code to run your production machines over some random firewire card.

Windows’ goal is entirely oppositional to portable gaming devices. It makes almost no sense for them to try to support it, as it’d go against their entire model. For things like these, you want a thin, optimized-over-flexible, purpose built OS that does one thing: play games. Linux is already built to solve this problem way better than Windows.

But, Microsoft will probably be stupid enough to try anyway.