Minecraft itself requires an online account, though, yes? Is linked to some sort of central authentication system, needs to be connected to play?

Well, GOG sells a lot of commercial games and doesn’t require online connectivity for anything marked as “DRM free”. Tend to be older. Once you download it, no link to the service required.

I think that all the – be they free or commercial – games on itch.io don’t require signing up for a service, unless the game itself has some sort of service. I don’t have specific recommendations there, though.

Games bundled in a Linux distro won’t require a service.

There are open-source games.

I personally like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is a very deep open-world roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world with zombies. Steep learning curve, as a warning, but you can do all sorts of stuff. NPCs, build bases and set up electrical power, build ground vehicles, boats, and rotary-wing craft. Vehicles can carry other vehicles, can have video cameras, turrets, armor, various sorts of lights, rams and other melee weaponry. Bionics, mutations, skills, farming, crafting, quests, music and sound packs, graphical tiles. Martial arts. Contains probably more real-world firearms than any other game I know of, does stuff like multiple optics, various stock and handle modifications, powder fouling. Moddable melee weapons. Artifacts. Mods to add spells, psionics, and various magic items. Traps and static defenses. Cooking, brewing, drugs, alcohol, various types of clothing. Explosives. Waifu body pillows. Regional weather simulation. Heating and cooling. Lovecraftian stuff. Radiation. Remote-controlled vehicles. Senses including smell, hearing with temporary and permanent impairment modeling, infrared, vision to see magnetic fields, light-amplification optics, eye dilation simulation when entering different light levels. Vehicle-mounted battery chargers, kitchenettes, water tanks, rainwater collection systems, water purification systems. Radios. Various factions of enemies, some of which fight each other. Bandits. Lockpicking, teleportation, various types of diseases, parasitic and fungal infections, various types of poisoning. Hacking. Furniture. Various types of psychological conditions. Gasses, gills, skates, broken limbs, stances, folding bicycles, body part level encumbrance, container size maximums (including modeling things like mesh bags that can’t contain small items and waterproof containers that protect things that are destroyed by immersion in liquid), pockets in clothing, various types of holsters and sheaths that can be worn on various places on the body. Pain, guilt, cannibalism, music. It’s got a lot of stuff. There’s a build on Steam now pre-set up with graphics and sound if you want to donate, but you can also just download the builds from the dev site for free. Has mobile builds, but I think that it really benefits from the computational power of a PC, as well as a keyboard.

Dwarf Fortress also has a steep learning curve, is a colony simulator. Not open source, but free, also deep, many hours you can spend there.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an open source roguelike, relatively shallow learning curve. Really aimed at touchscreen devices like smartphones, but has computer builds, has support for keys and stuff. See !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world.

Mindustry is an open-source factory automation game in the vein of Factorio. Works on mobile or PC platforms.

I’ve only played Unciv on smartphone, but apparently it also has PC builds. It’s an open-source reimplementation of Civilization V, sans all the pretty graphics and animation and music and such. One of the deeper games I think you can get on a phone.

Someone else mentioned Minecraft. I think that that requires an account with the service these days, though Luanti – until recently known as Minetest – is a similar, open-source project that does not.

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a tough roguelike known for being well-balanced, with the devs stripping out unnecessary stuff and streamlining it. I don’t play it much these days, but I’ve enjoyed it in the past.

Endless Sky is an open-source clone of Escape Velocity for the classic Mac, a 2D space exploration, fighting, and trading game. I don’t play it much, but I think that it’s worth a look if you’ve never played it.

Battle for Wesnoth is an open-source tactical hex-grid game. Characters can level up and gain abilities. Can be played on mobile OSes, though I think that it really benefits from a mouse.

I am not personally all that into OpenTTD, an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but I have played it and have seen many people who are super-into-it.

I’ve played and enjoyed the open-source 0 A.D., some time back, but last I played it, it had a bunch of work still to be done. An Age of Empires clone.

There are a handful of open-source RTS Total Annihilation-inspired games based on the open-source Spring engine, like Beyond All Reason.

You can broadcast to everyone connected to a WiFi network. That’s just an Ethernet network, and there’s a broadcast address on Ethernet.

Typically, WiFi routers aren’t set up to route broadcasts elsewhere, but with the right software, like OpenWRT, a very small Linux distribution, you can bridge them to other Ethernet networks if you want.

Internet Protocol also has its own broadcast address, and in theory you can try to send a packet to everyone on the Internet (255.255.255.255), but nobody will have their IP routers set up to forward that packet very far, because there’s no good reason for it and someone would go and try to abuse it to flood the network. But if everyone wanted to, they could.

I don’t know if it’s what you’re thinking of, but there are some projects to link together multiple WiFi access points over wireless, called a wireless mesh network. It’s generally not as preferable as linking the access points with cable, but as long as all the nodes can see each other, any device on the network can talk to others, no physical wires. I would assume that on those, Ethernet broadcasts and IP broadcast packets are probably set up to be forwarded to all devices. So in theory, sure.

The real issue with broadcast on the Internet isn’t that it’s impossible to do. It’s just that unlike with TV, there’s no reason to send a packet to everyone over a wide area. Nobody cares about that traffic, and it floods devices that don’t care about it. So normally, the most you’ll see is some kind of multicast, where devices ask that they receive packets from a given sender, subscribe to them, and then the network hardware handles the one-to-many transmission in a sort of star architecture.

You can also do multicast at the IP level today, just as long as the devices are set up for it.

If there were very great demand for that today, say, something like Twitch TV or another live-streaming system being 70% of Internet traffic the way BitTorrent was at one point, I expect that network operators would look into multicast options again. But as it is, I think that the real problem is that the gains just aren’t worth bothering with versus unicast.

kagis

Today, looks like video is something like that much of Internet traffic, but it’s stuff like Netflix and YouTube, which is pretty much all video on demand, not a live stream of video. People aren’t watching the network at the same time. So no call for broadcast or multicast there.

If you could find something that a very high proportion of devices wanted at about the same time, like an operating system update if a high proportion of devices used the same OS, you could maybe multicast that, maybe with some redundant information using forward error correction so that devices that miss a packet or two can still get the update, and ones that still need more data using unicast to get the remaining data. But as it stands, just not enough data being pushed in that form to be incredibly interesting bothering with.

I do.

I think that it’s one of the services that dramatically enhances both my online experience, but also the world’s. And I’d rather have it donation supported than ad-supported or similar.

There aren’t many services that I’ll donate to, but this is one.

One other factor that I think is an issue with motion blur: the modeling of shifting gaze in video games often isn’t fantastic, due to input and output device limitations.

So, say you’re just looking straight ahead in a game. Then motion blur might be fine – only moving objects are blurred.

But one very prominent place where motion blur shows up is when the direction of your view is changing.

In a video game, especially if you’re using a gamepad, it takes a while to turn around. And during that time, if the game is modeling motion blur, your view of the scene is blurred.

Try moving your eyeballs from side to side for a bit. You will get a motion-blurred scene. So that much is right.

But the problem is that if you look to the side in real life, it’s pretty quick. You can maybe snap your eyes there, or maybe do a head turn plus an eye movement. It doesn’t take a long time for your eyes to reach their destination.

So you aren’t getting motion blur of the whole surrounding environment for long.

That is, humans have eyes that can turn rapidly and independently of our heads to track things, and heads that can turn independently of our torsos. So we often can keep our eyes facing in one direction or snap to another direction, and so we have limited periods of motion blur.

Then on top of that, many first person shooters or other games have a crosshair centered on the view. So aiming involves moving the view too. That is, the twin-stick video game character is basically an owl, with eyes that look in a fixed position relative to their head, additionally with their head fixed relative to their torso (at least in terms of yaw), and additionally with a gun strapped to their face, and additionally, with a limited rate of turn. A real life person like that would probably find motion blur more prominent too, since a lot of time, they’d be having to be moving their view relative to what they want to be looking at.

Might be that it’d be better if you’re playing a game with a VR rig, since then you can have – given appropriate hardware – eyetracking and head tracking and aiming all separate, just like a human.

EDIT: Plus the fact that usually monitors are a smaller FOV than human FOV, so you have to move your direction of view more for situational awareness.

https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gcrlhn/what_fov_do_humans_have_like_in_video_games_can/

Human field of view is around 210 degrees horizontally. Each eye has about 150 degrees, with about 110 degrees common to the two and 40 degrees visible only to that eye.

A typical monitor takes up a considerably smaller chunk of one’s viewing arc. My recall from past days is that PC FPS FOV is traditionally rendered at 90 degrees. That’s actually usually a fisheye lens effect – actual visible arc of the screen is usually lower, like 50 degrees, if you were gonna get an undistorted view. IIRC, true TV FOV is usually even smaller, as TVs are larger but viewers sit a lot further away, so console games might be lower. So you’re working with this relatively-small window into the video game world, and you need to move your view around more to help maintain situational awareness; again, more movement of your direction of view. A VR rig also might help with that, I suppose, due to the wide FOV.

Motion blur is a win if it’s done correctly. Your visual system can make use of that blur to determine the movement of objects, expects it. Move your hand quickly in front of your eyes – your fingers are a blur.

If you’ve ever seen something filmed at a high frame rate and then played back at a low frame rate without any sort of interpolation, it looks pretty bad. Crystal-clear stills, but jerky.

A good approximation – if computationally-expensive – is to keep ramping FPS higher and higher.

But…that’s also expensive, and your head can’t actually process 1000 Hz or whatever. What it’s getting is just a blur of multiple frames.

It’s theoretically possible to have motion blur approaches that are more-efficient than fully rendering each frame, slapping it on a monitor, and letting your eye “blur” it. That being said, I haven’t been very impressed by what I’ve seen so far in games. But if done correctly, yeah, you’d want it.

EDIT: A good example of a specialized motion blur that’s been around forever in video games has been the arc behind a swinging sword. It gives the sense of motion without having to render a bazillion frames to get that nice, smooth arc.

In contrast, the Internet very much designed for one-to-one communication.

It’s not widely used today the way broadcast TV was, but there is multicast. Twenty years ago, I was watching NASA TV streamed over the Mbone.

There, the routers are set up to handle sending packets to multiple specific destinations, one-to-many, so it is pretty efficient.

Doesn’t get taken up into the body, goes from the mouth out the rear.

Other than moderation in calories and getting some bare minimums of nutrients that probably isn’t an issue for most people, I think that one can’t really go very far wrong.

I personally try to eat more protein/fat and fewer carbs than I once did, and for the same reason you mentioned – I feel like a lot of carbs make me hungrier later. But, hey, as long as you can keep moderation with carbs, probably fine too.

I don’t know the answer, but I’d guess that lubricants might be a factor.

Strictly speaking, I believe that it’s Creative Commons rather than public domain. Pretty similar, but IIRC it addresses some differences in European law.

If you’re drawing an analogy to Trump, setting aside the many other things that aren’t parallel, Trump is a terrible orator. I mean, most US Presidents are at least decent, but Trump is horrendous.

your foreign minister was Madonna

This is like that.

kagis

Not that much like it, apparently.

https://www.nme.com/news/music/madonna-shares-support-for-ukraine-with-release-of-sorry-remix-video-3170167

In the early hours of this morning (February 26), Madonna took to social media to share a fanmade video set to a remix of her 2005 song ‘Sorry’.

“Russia’s Pointless and Greed Driven Invasion Of the Ukraine MUST be stopped!!” the queen of pop captioned the post. “Please Send in Humanitarian Aid to help millions of citizens of the Ukraine who’s lives are being affected by this CRISIS at this very moment !!

“Putin has Violated Every Human Rights Accord in Existence. Putin has no right to try to erase the existence of the Ukraine. We support you President Zelensky!! We are praying for you and your country! 🙏🏼.”

She concluded: “God Bless You All! Lets not feel helpless when confronted by Geo-political Actions of this magnitude. There are things we can do.”

I mean, they’ve done this when places charge them money to index the news articles there.

It hardly seems reasonable to both mandate that they index a given piece of news media and that they pay a fee to do so.

Well, it depends on what you want it for.

I wanted specifically to find a search engine that has a subscription-based model and does not generate its income from data-mining and ads. It doesn’t retain search logs. For me, it’s what I had wanted for some time – a service where I was the customer rather than the product – so I am pretty happy with it.

It has some other features, but I generally don’t care much about them other than its “Fediverse Forums” search lens, which lets one search the Threadiverse (Lemmy/mbin/piefed).

looks

It looks like they also have a Usenet archives search engine that I haven’t looked at. I might look into that, as I used to use Usenet archives search engines.

I’m happy with it. Depends on what you’re looking for, though.

Both the sheriff and the mother involved were women.

I am hoping that this is in the figurative sense. I don’t think that a shootout would have improved her situation.

Seaching Kagi. I used to use googles when I used Google as my search engine; now I use Kagi.

I remember biking all over as a kid. I didn’t tell my parents where I was going. Might head off into the bluffs or to the shopping center or to a friend’s house or to a convenience store or along some bike trails. I sure went further than a mile.

And we didn’t have cell phones or whatever back then either.

I don’t feel that I was neglected.

“I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident,” she says.

The sheriff disagreed.

“She kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or ‘anything’ could have happened,” recalls Patterson.

Even if his mother was walking there too, it’s not likely going to do much to stop a car from running him over. She’d just be some extra mass to fling.

Kidnappings – and a number of other serious crimes – are usually done by people who are known, not random strangers.

kagis

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/zmldiz/til_there_are_only_between_150300_kidnappings_of/

There are only between 150-300 kidnappings of children by strangers each year in the US. The other 200,000 kidnappings each year are by relatives.

Even more lopsided than I’d expected.

And as for “anything” happening, I’d imagine that “anything” could have happened at home, too.