Pet peeves: The return (Part 5)

If you do want to poke Sabellian in Outland he’s only in the Blade’s Edge Mountains, running the Gruul raid quest. Not sure about if there’s a run-up questline you need to go through to get to that though.

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Think you need to find Samia Inkling, but I may be misremembering.
Who was also a dragon in a wig. Go figure.

I did pretty much all of BC in like… three of four big chunks for the loremaster achievement back in

2010
oh god
brb crumbling to dust

BC Loremaster: 18. 07. 2010
WotLK Loremaster: 27. 12. 2009

Past me was on a mission

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Here’s a more charitable take from me, who’s used Steam nearly since its inception.

(Warning: long technical post)

Originally, the Steam client used Valve’s in-house GUI toolkit, VGUI. You can still see it in Half-Life 2 and other Valve games of that era; it draws those old school green Windows 95 style dialogs. The Steam client originally looked like this, too, and it worked well in 2004 when Steam was primarily a platform for delivering Valve’s own games, especially then-cutting edge Half-Life 2 and its companion games like Counter-Strike Source. However, Steam quickly grew beyond its original scope, and that kind of UI no longer cut it.

Valve eventually phased out VGUI in its games; compare Portal 1, which uses a VGUI dialog for its settings, to Portal 2, which uses a more game-y looking settings menu. Steam, to my understanding, remained VGUI’s sole user, and a toolkit that was designed for Windows in 2004 for 2004 Windows apps eventually became a maintenance burden — especially when Steam turned cross-platform.

Over time, Valve integrated more and more web elements into Steam. The Store tab in particular was an embedded steampowered.com web page, just shown in the Steam client rather than an external browser. Originally, Steam used the Internet Explorer engine, but after it was ported to Mac and later Linux, Valve switched to Chromium, the open source browser framework that powers Google Chrome. Eventually, more and more pages of the Steam client became essentially web pages shown in a VGUI window, but the menu, settings dialog, etc. were still implemented with VGUI — which, I remind you, was a 2004 toolkit, developed in-house by Valve, which had to be continuously updated with newer technologies like HiDPI, modern font rendering, GPU-accelerated rendering, cross-platform support and so on.

My guess is that at some point, Valve said screw it, declared VGUI a maintenance burden, and rewrote the remaining VGUI parts of the Steam client with web tech instead.

It’s not an entirely unreasonable choice. Valve needed a desktop GUI toolkit with first-class support for every OS supported by Steam (Windows, macOS and Linux; Steam Deck uses a modified desktop Linux OS), HiDPI, 3D acceleration and everything else a modern GUI must support, and allows embedding browser windows that would have to be there anyway. It would also need to be highly customizable to allow Valve to revamp the Steam GUI whenever it wants. They could use a third-party cross-platform toolkit like Qt, but it’s not as flexible and customizable as just drawing everything with a browser engine.

Like it or not, web tech is one of the most powerful and flexible ways of building a desktop GUI these days: inherently cross-platform, easy to customize, having an insanely rich ecosystem of reusable software components, and allowing developers to adapt to rapidly changing requirements from customers and managers. A lot of desktop software these days draws its GUI with the Chromium engine, including Discord (whose desktop client is basically a browser window attached to a tray icon) and Visual Studio Code, one of the most popular programming IDEs.

Problem is, browser engines also bring a lot of bloat. Modern browsers are built with the assumption that they’ll be displaying untrusted content; they’re heavily sandboxed, with every browser tab or group of tabs executing in a separate process (which results in data duplication in memory) and having to use inter-process communication (which adds overhead) to render the single browser window you actually see. Apps that just want to draw a GUI don’t need all this extra complexity, but it’s there anyway, and as a result, Chromium-based desktop apps feel more sluggish and use more memory than those that use toolkits written specifically to build desktop GUIs.

Unfortunately, browser developers don’t invest extra development effort in un-sandboxing their browser engine for embedding scenarios, they just give you tools to put a full-featured browser in a window of your own and call it a day. It’s like using an airplane to drive to the nearby shopping mall; you can do it given a wide enough road, but it’s not what it was originally designed for, and hey, it’s a very flexible vehicle that can take off and fly on the off chance you actually need that feature.

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Anything but, it’s extremely reasonable. Maintaining something like this is a huge burden where you either need veteran developers to stick around for routine maintenance tasks or onboard new recruits to learn an incredibly niche and generally uninteresting technology. It’ll reach a point where you can’t really just throw more money at the problem to fix it.

I’ve been in a situation like this before, when I joined my current job about half of our application was rendered with Centura Team Developer, which was incomprehensible to most of us, and looked like windows 95.
Whenever anything had to be done with it, no matter how simple, one of the three developers who actually knew it would have to do the work.

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yeah i started over again on baldurs gate 3 what about it

What’s the new character, then?

i made my human illusion wizard that i just finished playing in our rime of the frostmaiden campaign

i missed him already

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3yGVZlWEAopkUC.jpg

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Get the mod to expand party.
Make several character.

no, TNT as in the second WAD in Final Doom for Doom 2!!

Where are the red hearts, I don’t see those? They’re just grey here for some reason. I don’t see much else changed other than the notifications being slightly changed.

They seem to have changed overnight :woozy_face:

Not privileged human male paladin?

Smh…

if i ever play a paladin please feel free to take that as confirmation that it’s time to let me go

[my eyes narrow]

what’s wrong with paladins, huh? huh???

Commically evil Paladin Durge is a good parody of the lawful stupid guys tho

tbf evil paladin would be pretty cool

i’d play an oath of vengeance one also

I love paladins, even the ones that aren’t comically powerful (BG3 made lockadins even more powerful than base 5E somehow)

The true evil paladins aren’t Oathbreakers but Oath of Conquest paladins (you meet one in act 3, sadly not playable yet) - Douse the Flame of Hope is one of their oath tenets

Commically evil Paladin Durge is a good parody of the lawful stupid guys tho

people often say paladin is a poor fit for Durge given their story [for those who don’t know, they are an origin character who had a big impact in the story before the game begins] but ‘paladin slowly learns with horror what their Oath of Devotion was actually sworn to’ is a great story and has plenty of options for where to go!

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It’s also worth noting that Minthara is a paladin. Even post brainwash, she is not exactly what you would call a “nice” person.*

I am not sure how do oaths even work in DnD: Do you make the oaths to yourself or to some god/force of nature or entity?

Because Oath of Vengeance is literally all about smiting and purging the evil and vile and never compromising- Which leaves you quite capable of committing horrible attrocities if you so wish.

*however she is a goth gf so i dont care for her faults, whatever they might be

I have this ability irl

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