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found an unnamed txt on my desktop where i apparently wrote this

crd (cathoderaydude@gmail.com) — 2024-11-19T19:48:15+00:00

i'm always thinking about the concept of a “clone” in videogame discussions, partly because i've been walking around for about a decade thinking about the claim that there was a “flood of doom clones” after 1993, a phenomenon that, as far as i can tell, simply did not occur.

break

the concept of a game “clone” used to be incredibly literal. after pong came out, a hundred companies simply made pong, but not called pong, and sold their counterfeits not under the table, but openly, with huge advertising campaigns and the whole bit. this repeated for decades, and unsurprisingly created vast amounts of IP law in its trail.

in some cases, a company like atari would succeed in a lawsuit which established towering new concepts about copyright, then later sue someone else and inadvertently establish more precedent which demolished the one they'd just set. ken williams of sierra once won a suit vs atari, and then on the courthouse steps told reporters that he wasn't sure he actually agreed with the judgment and what it meant about his career and industry. the judgment in his favor, rendering a verdict he requested, i must stress.

there was also the capcom / data east lawsuit, over a decade later, which established that data east was absolutely permitted to create a near-perfect clone of street fighter, because street fighter itself was largely just a series of riffs on cultural tropes. you can read up on that one, it even has a wiki page, and the judgment was juicy and flavorful.

but these were exceptions; clones were overwhelmingly accepted, legal and commonplace behavior through at least the late 80s, and every single successful game got cloned quickly and often crudely. everyone agrees that Power Blade is “a megaman.” so when doom came along, pundits simply assumed it would be massively duplicated, to the point that they didn't really bother checking if that was actually, you know, happening.

you can look into it yourself and draw your own conclusions, but i assert this very strongly: while doom was probably important to the development of the First Person Shooter, it did not actually define a pattern that much else used. if you check the fossil record you will find that very few nearly-identical games were released in doom's wake, and this differs substantially from many other genre-defining works. Jazz Jackrabbit would not exist if CliffyB hadn't been trying to make “sonic, but for the PC,” and the NES had a half-dozen games that were nearly pixel-perfect copies of Zelda, but it's really hard to find a game that looks or plays like Doom.

heretic/hexen/strife don't count - not only do they deviate enormously from the original work, they were based on the same engine. i don't think you can call something a clone when it's a legitimately licensed derivative of the exact same code made in partnership with the creators.

duke nukem 3d could be the most notable “doomlike,” except that it isn't really remotely doom-like. it's hard to identify anything it does that's directly lifted from doom; they figured out that weapons shouldn't be in the center before id did, they added a massive vertical component to the gameplay, non-abstract maps, huge moving mechanisms and complex puzzles - all kinds of extremely novel things that frankly don't get enough retrospective attention imo.

you can't call DN3D a clone unless you think that “first person game” or “game with guns” are ideas that wouldn't have been invented without id, which is patently absurd. both ideas existed and were being exploited from multiple angles, the self-suggesting combination of the two was going to have certain obvious and unavoidable properties, and the only reason doom seemed relevant to the conversation is because it was first. that in turn was incidental: 1993 was the point when computers became barely powerful enough to start making this kind of game, and doom did it first solely because id happened to have a programmer on staff who was talented enough to squeeze a 3D engine into the capabilities of the 486.

it's not like “texture mapped first person 3d” was a remarkable idea nobody had had before; everyone had had it in fact, since it was simply the natural progression of the nascent “VR” concept, which had been an object of obsession since the 70s. most devs simply didn't know how to execute on it, and since A) the PC meta in 1994 and 1995 was still overwhelmingly low-end 486s or worse, and B) doom was closed-source, its release changed nothing. i'm sure that lots of studios WANTED to clone doom, and there absolutely would have been a “flood of doom clones” if that had been possible, but even two years later it was still incredibly hard to make something doom-like that would run acceptably on the PCs most people had.

and thus, what mostly got released in doom's wake were not doom clones, but wolfenstein clones - massively technically inferior and not really featuring remotely similar gameplay, but far more achievable to devs who didn't know how to figure out what carmack had figured out. and even then, once again, the most successful ones (e.g. rise of the triad, blake stone) were literally licensed off the wolf3d engine itself, dulling the impact of the term “clone” and its implication of illegitimacy. so there was really virtually nothing that looked like doom - but by the time this was apparent, the industry had new business to move onto, and nobody bothered readdressing it.

the game that actually got cloned to hell and back was quake ii. by the time it came out computers were far faster and it was straightforward to make something on-par without needing to invent new science; you could simply plot polygons onto the screen in the most obvious way and it would work on most midrange-or-better computers. then 3D acceleration came along and shifted the challenge away from technical execution and onto design, e.g. making a game that was actually fun. this obviously left quake ii in the dust, and few people bothered commenting on it's genuine relevance to the development of the genre.

all this came to mind because i was watching jeff gerstmann play balloon fight, and he opened by asserting that it was a joust clone. i can't argue with this, it's definitely a joust clone… but who has ever said that before? how many “joust clones” exist? is it more than one? how many need to exist before we'd stop saying “clone” and just let it be a “genre”? and for that matter, do we apply this idea to any other artform?

in a sense, sure - movie reviews have always been willing to say something is “like a mix between [movie a] and [movie b],” and apparently Bush got accused of being “Nirvana clones,” but it's not really something that looms over a band or a film forever, unless they, you know, suck.

in the videogame field however, we're willing to point at a title and say, “this invented a new kind of gameplay, and now everything with similar mechanics will stand in its shadow, with an asterisk next to their names, unless they cross some unspecified and unknowable threshold. So Say We.”

nobody called Symphony of the Night a Mario Clone, but that is in large part just a matter of time, isn't it? it seems like there's no quantity of altered or superseded mechanics that quantifiably lifts the velvet rope and allows a game to pass into the hall of Original Works, and i feel like we just don't apply that level of conceptual exclusivity to much else. much to think about

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further linux on steamdeck notes

crd (cathoderaydude@gmail.com) — 2024-11-11T22:12:49+00:00

having spent another day linuxing on the steamdeck, i have come to a number of conclusions that might be useful to you.

thing 1: huh. this is pretty good

i am astonished at how quickly the deck becomes desirable as a general purpose computing implement as soon as you put it in a dock. like, there are some ergonomics issues with it to be sure, the lack of USB ports is irritating among other things, but there's a lot of plusses.

it takes up very little footprint on a desk. “ah,” you say, “then just get a NUC” - trust me, you don't need to tell me about Little Guys, okay. but NUCs (et al) don't have built in screens, so i'm forced to have an actual dedicated monitor to use one; that's too much space investment. and they don't have batteries, which is a showstopper for me because i am constantly reconfiguring everything on my desk to do various projects. i need to be able to unplug something (either on purpose or accidentally) and move it around without needing to shut it down. the battery in the deck acts like a little UPS; perfect.

“why not get a laptop?” takes up too much desk real estate, i do not have room for a second keyboard that can't be made to go away when i don't need to use the machine at the moment. “ah,” you say, “then get a tablet.” i have a couple problems with that. one is that tablets suck; not qualifying this. all tablets feel jank and awkward to me, details unimportant. another issue though is that none of them have conventional touchpads, and touchscreens are horrible. using a desktop OS through touch is bad, full stop, so the fact that the deck has an actual touchpad is basically the seller for me.

that feature alone makes it a lot easier to use in a “progressive degradation” fashion. if i want a full-fat, 100% PC experience i can hook up a keyboard, mouse and monitor. a NUC could deliver that, but since the deck has a built in screen, if i only need a 90% PC experience i can hook up just keyboard and mouse. if i only need to go 70% PC, i can use just a mouse, and use an onscreen keyboard if i need to enter a password or ctrl+c.

all that works with a tablet too, but if i only need a 40% PC experience, i can just reach over and use the touchpad to click a couple things, without adding any peripherals at all. doing this on a tablet sucks ass, because by the nature of the act - a quick, off the cuff action before returning to my main PC - i'm always going to be off-axis, and using touchscreens with an outstretched arm makes them even less accurate than they already are. i always end up hitting shit i don't want to, focusing the wrong window, starting an unintended program, and generally wasting so much time and effort that the whole endeavor becomes pointless.

the deck hits this perfect midpoint. tablets lack just enough laptop features that i find them useless, but just including the trackpad, in a vertical orientation, got it over the line for me. i just kind of blinked and found myself wanting this thing on my desk at all times.

i have been trying for years to find a way to have a tiny dedicated linux machine, so i have something handy if i ever need to do a quick dd operation or something i can't do as easily on windows, but everything i've tried didn't take. the 12“ thinkpad (they shouldn't even make them bigger than that) was supposed to solve this, but it's just too big because of the keyboard. i have to make a bunch of space to get it out, which is never practical, and then it's In The Way the whole time it's on the desk, desperately screaming to be put back in its bag so i have elbow room again. this doesn't do that. i think it might finally be The Thing that solves this problem.

also, i know it's pretty thoroughly understood that the deck is Surprisingly Performant For What It Is, and i also know that my instincts for computer performance are pretty badly miscalibrated due to my advanced years, but i keep being impressed by what this thing can do. case in point, i installed OBS earlier, and found that it can use the hardware x264 encoding. i was able to record 1080p60 video through a USB capture card with only 8% CPU utilization and no fan noise. i didn't have a chance to test battery life thoroughly, but it felt like it'd get at least 45 minutes that way, which is a lot better than i would have expected.

thing 2: usb reliability

the usb situation on the deck is not hot, it's really its biggest failing. it should have four USB-C ports and i think valve could have made this happen if they weren't cowards. “just use a hub” doesn't solve the problem that the one port is a single point of failure.

on that note: no, you probably shouldn't run the deck off an external drive habitually. like don't get me wrong, i've done this for 8 hours with no trouble under light duty, but once i start doing Full Contact Computing it has a tendency to fall over.

three or four times i've had the USB SSD just suddenly evaporate. dmesg fills with write errors, or suddenly won't even execute because the root fs just disappeared, obviously forcing a hard reboot, and at first i thought this might be some kind of kernel bug or the SSD throwing some kind of confusing status code back to the OS or other such mumblings, but i've since obtained a dock (Anker) and connected more peripherals. this time, when the SSD disappeared, my USB capture card also reset.

in the first case I was doing a high speed file transfer and saturating a decent chunk of the bus, and in the latter i was capturing 1080p60 video while recording it to the USB SSD, so i suspect that basically, putting enough load on the Deck's USB controller has a tendency to reset it. obviously this is unhealthy if the OS is on said controller. I really wish linux was better at recovering from this specific scenario but it's not exactly a priority ig.

so i will be discontinuing my reliance on the external drive, but i can't help but think that if there were two root hubs on here, this kind of scenario would be more survivable. if valve didn't advertise the thing as a viable primary desktop PC I wouldn't even bring it up, but they do, so.

thing 3: steamos considered optional?

i've largely concluded that running steamos is not necessary unless you are specifically interested in lengthy gaming sessions on battery. like obviously that's a huge part of the sell on the deck, but not for everyone, and if that's not you, it might not be necessary.

plain old linux steam works almost identically to the steamos version. if you want the fullscreen experience on boot, you can just add it to your startup apps with the ”-gamepadui“ argument, and bam, now you'll start in Big Picture Mode. all the shortcuts work, the gamepad remapping works, the steam button works, and even if you're doing desktop stuff you can hit the steam button at any time to open steam as long as it's running in the background (you can achieve that by running it on startup with the -silent arg.)

what seems to be missing, if i'm not just missing it myself, is the top tier special sauce, the performance-tuning options available in the ellipsis menu that let you do stuff like limit FPS and force lower resolutions. guessing this worked through a mix of X server customizations and/or gamescope trickery; in any case it doesn't seem to exist outside of steamos.

thing is, i didn't find myself using those things even when playing on battery. i would rather get 25 minutes at 35fps than an hour at 18fps, and honestly i am just not that into portable gaming at all. the most likely place i'm going to use this thing As Intended is when i'm laid up in a bed (hospital or otherwise,) where i can plug it in anyway.

if you are in this same position of not actually playing games on trains and in breakrooms, and you're a tinkerer (do not waste your time with this if you aren't already linuxbrained lol,) i think you should strongly consider just wiping the internal SSD and installing Normal Linux. it's not like it's hard to go back if need be, you can just reflash it to steamos. good luck gamers

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