This appears to be full on slop. At first I thought the art style looked terrible with the level of detail not lending itself well to a 2d game because the shadows of the sprites do not match the background and then I started noticing all the typical AI hallmarks:

• The teacher’s desk in the classroom does not have legs on the left side. The chair underneath it fades out of existence at the back.
• The wires on the dialogue interface fade out of existence. The screwheads don’t get the drive bit right.
• The image with the well is the worst of them. It has multiple fading out fences, the pipe entering the vertical well at a 45° angle makes no sense, the cactus on the left is completely distorted and probably more.

The Steam page says:

AI is used only as a supportive tool to upscale, create and refine specific background (maps) and environment art derived from our own 3D assets. Some of the voices used are also AI, we do have in plan changing them with real voices for the final version.

That’s not what I’m seeing here. The backgrounds look fully generated to me.

For my work PC I followed the advice of an article someone posted on here and turned off transparency and animations in the accessibility settings. It really makes a difference.

Maybe I overestimated how widespread support for alternatives is. The problem seems to be to be that while most apps will support an alternative, no single format is supported everywhere (xkcd). According to another comment US messaging apps don’t support any alternatives, which is enough to keep GIF alive on its own.

I wasn’t even aware of APNG or AVIF before this thread. Webm was just the first alternative for GIFs that came to mind.

Looking at this APNG also seems to result in pretty large files whereas AVIF appears to have by far the best compression.

AVIF looks like the best alternative for sending short meme clips to people, which I assume is most peoples use case for GIFs.

Discord, Signal and Whatsapp all let you send any video format I’ve ever tried. I presume the same is true for Messenger and whatever else people use to communicate nowadays. I genuinely can’t think of anything that would support GIF but not various video formats.

Yes? I don’t really understand the question.

Please stop making gifs at all. It’s a terrible format that creates massive files that look like shit.

Webm is supported almost everywhere now and manages better quality at higher framerates and smaller file sizes.

Or you could buy a Starlabs Starfighter with a slightly worse CPU in the base config, double the RAM and a far better display for $1000 less. Also comes with coreboot.

Go to Settings -> About Firefox/Fennec

Tap the logo until it says “Debug settings enabled”

Go back and enter the new “Secret Settings” menu. There you can turn off Nimbus and Labs permanently. Also toggle “Keep Debug Menu revealed” so you don’t have to enable it every time you want to change something.

That’s the way I see it as well. Some distros are going to want to or be forced to comply with the laws, so offering the option seems sensible on systemd’s part.
Systemd is not forcing distros that don’t want to comply to use the field.

I can see how the lack of build variety can get boring. People who are into TTRPGs probably spent way more time with DnD than I did. For me the entire system was something completely fresh with BG3, which probably made me enjoy it so much.

I’m guessing you’re referring to Starfinder: Afterlight. I’ll look into it once it’s released.

As for the action point system, DnD’s action system was one of my favorite parts about it. Most action point based systems I’ve seen so far have balancing issues that seem difficult to get rid of.

For example in Fallout going from 9 AP to 10 AP effectively doubles your damage output, because it lets you attack twice per turn, so anything less than 10 agility is just bad. In Divinity I always felt bad about having to waste AP on movement on melee characters, whereas ranged characters can spend almost all their AP on attacking.

DnD’s system on the other hand is less flexible, but more consistent in that I rarely get into a situation where I can’t do anything meaningful on my turn, because I had to spend all my AP on movement.

I appreciate the detailed response.

I agree that individual classes in BG3 could offer more options. A lot of levelups are just “you have this passive now, period”, but I found multiclassing to fix that, by offering more interesting choices. Finding the right breakpoints for how much to invest into each class to get the most benefit was fun for me. I generally enjoy the min-maxing aspect of RPGs more than the roleplaying.

Most of your criticism seems to come from comparing it to other TTRPGs and I get that not enjoying DnD in TT will affect your enjoyment of a game like BG3, but I’m looking at this from a CRPG players perspective.

My comparisons are classic Fallout, Divinity, Rogue Trader, VtM - Bloodlines, Cyberpunk, etc. Compared to those games I enjoyed DnD as a system the most, but I will probably give Owlcats Pathfinder games a chance.

I keep seeing this sentiment and I just don’t get it. From the perspective of someone who has never played a TTRPG and whose only experience with 5e is BG3, it is an incredible system compared to other CRPGs I’ve played.

It is simple enough to get into quickly and complex enough to remain interesting for hundreds of hours. Small numbers + simple math + transparent formulas make it very easy to understand what is happening why and how build decisions influence combat.

Meanwhile in Rogue Trader, I barely understand what any of the stats actually do or how damage is calculated. How much more damage am I going to do by putting point into offensive stats? How do defensive stats influence the damage received? On top of that every levelup presents you with dozens of options for traits for every single character in your party. How am i supposed to make an informed decision here? Just reading through them all would probably take an hour. I ended up just using build guides and getting bored because just picking the options someone else tells you to is not very exciting. The Pathfinder games are much the same in complexity from what I’ve seen.

If someone has some tips to get into those systems I’d appreciate it. I’d like to get into Pathfinder/Rogue Trader, but it just looks like way to much work until you get to the fun part.

I’m not sure whether i like the rounded corners on everything, but KDE implemented it properly. Clicking/scrolling while hovering the cursor over the panel gap will interact with the closest thing on the panel.

It is for their target audience. They’re not talking to you, they’re talking to their customers.

I can still see parts of the desktop. They should really go all in and add some more blank space to the sides of the menu.

I can’t even find a single positive comment on YouTube. Maybe there is still some hope for the games industry, when absolutely everyone is starting to reject the Gatcha/GaaS/MTX slopware.

They sadly advertise with an “AI” part, which, ew. But they seem good other than that.

That’s just what AMD calls their latest laptop CPU line. I don’t like the name either, but performance-wise they look really good from what I’ve seen.

are all of these laptops customisable in terms of OS?

I haven’t bought any of these laptops so far, I just looked into them because I was considering it. That said, all of them offer various Linux distros, Windows, or no OS at all. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to install whatever you want on them.

As for security I’m really not the person to ask. The way I see it, a computer is as secure as you make it. StarLabs shipping with coreboot out of the box does seem interesting though, if you want to go full tinfoil hat :)

Tuxedo (based in Germany) are Clevos. Slimbook (based in Spain) sells Clevo and maybe Tongfang, not sure.

StarLabs assembles their own laptops in the UK, but I think their parts are still Chinese/Taiwanese because where else are you going to buy laptop parts?

Personally I would not rule out buying Tuxedo/Slimbook just because the manufacturing is in Asia. Ultimately the components for any laptop will be sourced from there anyway and at least you get support from a European company.