MudMan

There are definitely ways to send backwards compatible data when required and separately support additional features in a new iteration of an API. This wouldn’t be in the top 10 backwards compatibility challenges MS has figured out.

But in any case, I don’t care if they call it XInput2 or Game Input. I just need it to support all controller features in all games. It’s a bit hard to tell whether Game Input will ever do that, but so far it seems more concerned with acting as a layer to explicitly support a bunch of different hardware, each with its own standards, than a XInput replacement for controllers. There doesn’t seem to be a concept for a “Game Input controller” there at all, actually, just supported controllers you can listen for regardless of what they’re sending through.

I guess over time if they stick with it and it does end up working as a Steam Input-style intermediary layer that just recognizes anything you’d just ship controllers that match whatever format with gyro support and Game Input-enabled games would just pick them up fine more or less universally, but that doesn’t seem to be what it does right now, or at least not something that either games or manufacturers are relying upon.

Anyway, this was interesting and informative, but I think I’m good now. I definitely don’t want to have a conversation formatted as an argument in which nobody is disagreeing with anybody else. Those are exhausting.

That’s interesting, but considering this note:

We recommend the GameInput API for all new code, regardless of the target platform, because it provides support across all Microsoft platforms (including earlier versions of Windows) and provides superior performance versus legacy APIs.

For games developed on the GDK for Xbox One, GameInput is the only input API

I’m really not sure this would do what we both want it to do. If everybody has had a GameInput version of their controller support since last-gen and we’re still getting limited to the XInput feature set I don’t think it sorts out gyro-on-Xinput at all. I am not familiar with the behind the scenes of how modern engine controller code is handled, but this sounds like maybe it’s how games with native PS controller support are doing that, but not necessarily a new standard that will allow the default XInput PC setting of new controllers to pass gyro input to games detecting them as an XInput device. I think it’s more like MS’s answer to Steam Input as an additional layer between the games and the hardware, regardless of what the hardware is using.

It does show that all the tools are in place. MS has control over all the involved APIs. They could expand the Xbox controller API feature set tomorrow, whether or not they add the hardware feature to their base controller model. They just… don’t. And Steam could deploy a Steam-independent Steam Input driver or software to just take over all controller support on a dedicated full-feature OS layer, but they also don’t (on either Windows or Linux, as far as I can tell).

Honestly, there are enough workarounds (add games as non-Steam games, use Switch modes and so on), I just bump against the edge cases of it often because I’m both a controller and handheld nerd, so I’m stuck with a GPD Win handheld that insists on injecting their internal gyro as mouse inputs, which confuses the hell out of half the games, along with a bunch of GameSir and Gullikit controllers that do weird things with gyro, like injecting it at the firmware level instead of passing it to the OS. And I mess around with enough emulators to also end up with “oh, this was on DI mode when I booted RetroArch, so now all my buttons are in the wrong places until I quit”. It’s only dumb for like ten of us… but man, is it dumb.

Yes, I’m aware, that’s why I’m calling out it’s weird that XInput doesn’t support gyro, because we’re a long way away of it being just based on Xbox controller support and a whole bunch of other controllers with a whole bunch of other features now go through it. If MS doesn’t want to add gyro that’s up to them, but Windows supporting it natively is way overdue. Of course at that point older controllers would probably need a firmware update, but hey, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

In practice the situation we’re having is games are defaulting to Xinput and relying on Steam Input as an intermediate layer for additional features, so the end result is that gyro is… not NOT supported, but often not acknowledged at all, so you end up with a bunch of situations where you have to config gyro manually per game as a bit of a Steam-level hack, and then your controller is all wonky anywhere other than Steam because the way Switch/DI/PS input modes get picked up in non-Steam stuff can be weird.

And it gets worse in handhelds where you’re absolutely at the mercy of how the manufacturer decided to set up their controller and gyro support, and sometimes need to do a lot of weird stuff to pass it on outside of Steam.

It’s the jankiest part of controller set up left on PC gaming, and it’s all down to this weird “mom and dad aren’t talking” dance where MS keeps pretending PC controllers are fundamentally Xbox controllers at the XInput layer and Steam is the de facto curator of the controller support but has no interest (and to be frank no expectation or need) to have their controller layer work outside their launcher.

It’s hard to fault Steam’s controller layer, but I really wish they finally found a way to parse gyro data from third party controllers without having to run them on Switch mode. That goes for Microsoft and their own drivers. At this point it’s weird to keep pretending the Windows controller APIs are supposed to work on their first party Xbox controllers only.

I’m almost entirely sure that PS4 and XOne controllers did get upgrades at some points. Definitely Switch 1 ones, which matters or not depending on how you split the gens. There were definitely revisions in older controllers, though. Some were labeled and had obvious new features, some were quieter. And PC-side drivers got updates all the time, obviously.

Also, your current gen controller will also keep working indefinitely without an update. In this case Valve is annoyed about a particular dependency where THEY need the upgrade to happen for a feature compatibility thing, but the controller proper will work if you plug it in.

I genuinely don’t know that I follow that explanation. For one thing, what reasons would there be to ban paid blind boxes, online or offline, while allowing outright games of chance with a monetary payout? In what world is a Magic the Gathering blister more of a problem (for a consenting adult, anyway) than an online casino?

But also, by the larger point you’re making it seems like you’d be fine with a government saying “porn is banned for everybody because reasons” but not with “porn is banned for kids”, at least in a scenario where that comes with age verification.

To be clear, I agree that both of those are… not good. I just don’t know that I can wrap my head around the logic of thinking the more extensive issue is more acceptable than the alternative. You could argue that the porn ban is an excuse to add mass surveillance, but at that point we’re not talking about the porn ban, we’re talking about the mass surveillance.

Oh, and for the record, there is plenty of will someone think of the children regarding loot boxes. Both on its own and bundled together with a blanket assessment that gambling is immoral and/or illegal. It’s actually a fairly close match to the porn issue, where concerns about children are being wrapped around a more targeted hostility around the concept from both sides of the political spectrum.

I… don’t know where you’re from, but actual gambling is legal here for adults. Are you suggesting that people should be able to place bets on actual sports but not buy a random loot box in a game? That seems incredibly extreme.

Which still leaves a bunch of other stuff people have used kids to attack on all sides of multiple political aisles, but hey, if that’s the one you want to caveat I’m happy to flag how weird the caveat is.

Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I’m not disputing that there are technical ways of… you know, making your country’s Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.

The point is it’s both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can’t just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you’re trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.

It’s kind of unfortunate how much this has been encouraged by petty online fights. People were very excited when “will somebody think of the children” was applied to, say, some social media content or gaming loot boxes because the Internet did not like those things, so they were very happy to ignore the pre-existing parental control devices and request blanket bans. Then people remembered that a bunch of old, prudish people on both sides of the political aisle don’t like porn and it was too late.

Man, people love the “they first came for” argument online and I should have guessed the first time it really pays off in the 21st century it’d include the absolute most depressing things possible instead.

Anyway, this is bad and I don’t like it, but UK politics are almost as bad as US politics, so I’m happy to let both stew in their own cautionary tale juices.

I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That’s not what VPNs are, though, and you still can’t ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.

I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.

See, there’s a lot of online chatter about how much sense Linux folder structures make, with everything grouped by type all over the filesystem. And then this happens.

DOS 5.1 folder structure or bust, I say. Home directories are evil, if your filename doesn’t fit in 8.3 characters you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t find it with dir . /w it shouldn’t exist.

How do you “ban VPNs”? That’s not how software works, and VPNs are… you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean “ban them to bypass restrictions”, but the entire point of a VPN is you can’t tell from the outside what it’s being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can’t enforce it.

Well, I guess we’re only going to invent the microchip once.

In any case now that I’m… you know, not a kid and can look at 90s tech with some historical data, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as we remember. But then it also didn’t have memory prices spiking by 300% overnight because everybody knows a fake AI bubble is going to pop so they want to sell them a bunch of crap before all the money evaporates but not ramp up production because that money is clearly going to evaporate.

That’s 21st century through and through. 20th century tech would just keep slapping the same Z80 and Motorola 68000 chips on things for a decade. Z80 too slow as your CPU? Maybe it can be your sound chip now. Listen, we have warehouses of these, we’ll keep selling you new ones well into the 2000s, it’s barely a clump of wires held together with chewing gum.

Did you know the 68000 was 10 years old by the time it made it to the Genesis/Megadrive as a CPU? That’d be like the PS5 launching with a single core 2GHz Athlon from 2005. I didn’t know that as a kid.

I guess there are two types of approach to this season, the “yay, nothing is getting done in the next three weeks” and the “oh, crap, nothing is getting done in the next three weeks”.

I am, unfortunately, in the latter camp.

He doesn’t say he doesn’t, so I assume he does.

The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:

The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell.

Seriously, it’s like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.

Hah. Shocked that you didn’t just take the easy way out and wrote “salt to taste”.

Agreed 100%. I think it’s understandable to feel schadenfreude on someone this deeply embedded being bit by the arbitrary business practices of big corpo in a worst case scenario type of situation.

But the problem is the business practices, not the person being affected. The guy’s job feeding Apples gargantuan content engine doesn’t make this alright.

…

Please do not use recipes from AI summaries without clicking through to the correct amounts.

I mean, hell, I won’t use a recipe I find on a recipe site without cross-referencing at least a couple other recipes from other sites, because some of those are janky as hell. But the best-guess of a summarization LLM on what all those numbers and ratios are meant to be? Yeah, no. Not by itself at all, unless you’re just trying to jog your memory on something you already know and can recognize the correct values if you see them.

Man, that’s a big lateral move. Honestly, my experience is spotty as well (using mostly Bazzite), and I’m sticking to dual booting for the foreseeable. I definitely would not change hardware for this reason. Especially because, having some installs on AMD-based hardware, my expectation that the issues would drop to zero is… very low.

If you can’t try before you buy I’d only swap to get a meaningful upgrade. Of course when a “meaningful upgrade” will be affordable or accessible in the future is anybody’s guess. Because isn’t tech in the 21st century fun?

Because it was a 500 dollar transaction and the card they purchased was an apple-branded product in a major retailer.

It was a 500 dollar transaction because this guy is a pro developer in Apple’s ecosystem and apparently uses a 6TB plan for both personal and professional storage.

The Trigger: The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. Shortly after, my account was locked.
    An Apple Support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue: indicating that something was likely untoward about this card.
    The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale), so if I cannot rely on the provenance of that, and have no recourse, what am I meant to do? We have even sent the receipt, indicating the card’s serial number and purchase location to Apple.

Much as I do think mixing pro and personal accounts is a mistake, as a person who has to pay several major corpos for subscription plans for professional software that include cloud storage, I admit I get it. Receiving spam about how full your free personal Google Drive is kinda sucks extra if you are already paying a bunch for an enterprise account with a bunch of storage on the side.