You can run Python reasonably well with pythonista or Pyto (I like pythonista, but Pyto supports some PyPI libraries). Apple’s Swift playgrounds is pretty decent for Swift. They’re all only up to a point, but you can do plenty of actually interesting stuff with them. I use them on my current iPad (and run the Python scripts on my phone).

But 4th gen is old, so it’s quite possible none of that works. Maybe web stuff with something like Textastic if you pay for shared hosting somewhere, or a low end VPS isn’t crazy expensive and lets you run code. If it’s consistent power that’s your concern, raspberry pis can be paired with one of those portable USB batteries if it can be charged and send charge at the same time.

If those options are still too expensive, really no clue. It’s hard with no money at all.

Yes. It is literally impossible for an organization asking for money not to be an ad.

And yes, showing me a single ad once means I never give them money again. I am not OK with ads.

Yes, it is an ad. Any call to action is an ad.

And its mere presence will ensure I don’t give them any more money. The core concept of inserting any ad in an OS is not behavior I am willing to reward.

It’s not complicated.

It’s an ad.

There’s no version of advertising I will ever be OK with.

It’s not possible for a game to be fun without development of skill over time.

That’s the core concept of what a game is: forcing you to make ambiguous decisions in an uncertain environment.

It’s not desirable. Building a game that enables people to continually make actual progress is desirable. Allowing people to modularly adjust difficulty if they feel a game is too difficult is desirable.

Removing feedback to make it significantly harder to get better at a game is not desirable. You cannot get better if a game is constantly lying to you about what is good and what is bad. Rubber banding isn’t just “fake progress to get by an encounter”. It actively prevents you from being able to learn because it gives you unreliable mixed signals. It’s fundamentally broken and being forced to rely on it means your actual game design is fundamentally broken.

I know it’s common. It completely fucking destroys games singlehandedly. There is no acceptable way to do it.

Rubber banding replaces actual progress with illusory progress.

Maybe the assassination attempt was a full fledged conspiracy by the other party from top to bottom and he just goes apeshit.

But yeah, weird premise.

Then people are entitled to be upset, because the entire store page is advertising a combat heavy action game.

Honestly I like it, for telltale like walking simulator, it sets up the story pretty well, it has some nice sci-fi beats. It’s good for what it is. It isn’t anything it promises not to be.

If it feels like a walking simulator, that’s not at all what the store page is selling it as. It’s claiming to be all about action.

I watched 3 minutes and he advocates multiple absolutely game breaking terrible ideas.

“We don’t want players to die” is cancer. “Silently changing difficulty” when people die is cancer.

Dying is a good thing. Players learning to get past difficult segments is a good thing. A game that doesn’t respect that is broken.

Meanwhile, in 2024, the video game industry will turn a staggering $282 billion in revenue. Video games worldwide make more than twice the money of all film and all music combined.

OK, but how much did actual game sales make? I’m willing to bet the proportion of that money this is citing that’s hyper-exploitive microtransactions is pretty damn high.

I have no real interest in a library over owning games (I did pay the ~$30 difference in Black Friday sales to add the library for a year on PS5, but I own my games for the most part), and I think everything being day one gamepass on Xbox weakened their already not great first party ecosystem and encourages microtransactions to an extent.

But the biggest existential threat isn’t “pay $x a year to rent a library”. It’s lootboxes and other microtransactions built to milk everyone they can for every penny they can. It fundamentally alters the design of games when “how can we extract more cash” is part of the process, and it’s not something that just happens after the fact. It also, unlike renting games, actually pushes invasive anticheat, always online requirements, and onerous mod restrictions on games that should be single player, because they can’t milk you for cosmetics if fans can make their own for free.

Donations.

Presumably because either the authors or intended visitors (those who value privacy) prefer a slightly more work to track transaction.

Couldn’t tell you. Just what it looks like to me.

I’ll cross it out as a dumb assumption, though.

Judge away. Five fingers are comfortable as shit.

Those look like women’s ones on a man’s foot though.

They could simply declare a standard and let the enthusiast community handle adding support for specific hardware. It might be a niche community, but that niche does self select for people willing to engage some. And presumably “this works on Steam” would be enough of a market mover for some manufacturers chasing that very small niche to support it.

You can’t change what inputs games will take. They will emulate a joystick from mouse input, but I don’t think it’s great. But at the end of the day a game expecting binary inputs isn’t ever going to work with analogue ones without very specific engine hacks.

This sounds like something that would be great for SteamInput to handle. I’m guessing it currently doesn’t, but it has most of the bones it would take to handle mapping inputs that way.

Is he planning to also use the laptop as a laptop?

If not, there are small form factor PCs (especially if you’re willing to buy used business stuff) that don’t take up a lot of space that can be good options. Laptops have some features that are kind of nice on a server as well (the battery becomes a backup against power outages and you don’t need to remote access or plug stuff in to use it because it has a built in display and keyboard), but I don’t think they’re so nice that it’s usually worth buying a laptop just for that purpose. It’s more a reason that repurposing an old one makes sense. If you’re willing to pay the premium a new laptop adds, you can get some pretty low profile units.

I feel like you should not be allowed to record any data until there’s a documented case with a police report at minimum. At that point, potentially restricting action becomes a legitimate security need.

Google basically gave up because even with their bankroll, dealing with the regulatory bullshit monopolies current providers had a lot of places was prohibitive.