I’m not sure if the author’s point here is “A lot of games emulated Half Life’s scripted sequences but in a worse way and that is Half Life’s fault” or “Half Life’s style of immersion overshadowed immersive sims and sandbox games and that was bad”. I could maybe get on board with the second but you can’t then go praising Naughty Dog because they mixed cinematics with their scripted gameplay.

As the author says, scripted sequences are a tool alongside cinematics and anything else. In the case of COD (I haven’t played a new one in around 15 years, so I’m talking from the perspective of COD4 and its derivatives. I don’t know how anything recent is structured) the briefing screens during loading are literally cinematics delivering narrative in a stylistically appropriate way. They do take away agency via QTEs (which act as resets for the gameplay and limit dynamism) or extended ‘you can jiggle your camera’ cutscenes, but those aren’t inherently bad, and Half Life doesn’t do them anyway.

Outside of maybe two moments in Half Life you have all of your weapons and abilities available, so those scripted sequences are not a cutscene you are forced to jiggle your camera at, but environmental set dressing or one-off combat scenarios. A cutscene showing a tank smashing into the room through a wall would break the flow of the firefight, and having it there from the start would take away the player’s ability to set up an ambush with tripwire mines or one of their other tools. A good scripted event doesn’t reduce interactivity, it is a stimulus for the player to interact with.

https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/repo-mirror/

Forgejo has an option to mirror a repository and update on a regular interval. It won’t get wikis or issues though. I’ve got mine set up to mirror a bunch of decomps.

I’ve been using the Jellyfin WebOS app, it works well but sometimes will transcode instead of direct streaming the first time something is played. Restarting a few times fixes it though. I also have jellyfin on my steam deck, but I don’t think it does drm apps.

I switched away from truecharts once scale switched to native docker and my experience has been much smoother since. TC had some kind of breaking change every other month, now I only have to worry about breaking changes when the actual apps have a major update.

The transition was way easier than i expected. First I set up nginx pointing to the TC load balancer for every url, so I could swap apps one at a time. Then I used heavyscript to mount the volumes for an app and rsynced them to a normal dir. With that I could spin up the community apps version or a custom docker config and swap over nginx once I confirmed it was working.

No split screen, lan is a ton of fun. Online is entirely server browser, which is fine except that you need to port forward to run a private lobby. I’m hoping this one makes private matches a bit simpler.

There are pc light guns that play fantastically with emulators, but the first HOTD remake still needs a mod to get them barely working so I’m not optimistic here.

I don’t reencode anything, I keep the raw bdmv rip and remuxed mkv for jellyfin. Even if the difference is imperceptible, as long as I have the storage space there’s no reason to spend time fiddling with conversion when it can only make things look worse.

I like being to leave a pair of headphones in my bag without having to worry about charging or pairing when I switch devices.