Friendly reminder that kernel-level anti-cheat can and will be circumvented.

Any game fairness improvement that it provides will be temporary, but whatever malware it allows onto your system (either deliberately or through bugs exploited by third parties) will likely last until you reinstall the whole OS. Depending on the type of malware, it could even persist for the life of the hardware.

For the record, this is not the company that most people think of when they hear the name Motorola.

“It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility

The one I use was discontinued years ago, so instead of recommending it, I’ll offer a suggestion:

Don’t look for “gaming” headsets. Look instead for well-regarded headphones and mic, or for a telephony (VoIP) headset from a brand that specializes in them, on sale. You’ll be more likely to find something that sounds good in both directions and lasts a long time.

How are you handling it?

I handle it by not using a rolling distro. I get security updates, but I’m not interrupted every time a new version of something becomes available. I do the periodic release upgrades on my own terms: when I have time.

And how are your experiences?

Wonderful. My system is very low maintenance, which means I have more time to get work done or play games.

My gaming groups use Matrix, mainly for its stronger ecosystem and better long-term outlook. Despite developing slowly and not yet doing everything we want, Matrix is consistently improving and growing to serve more and more use cases. We’re willing to tolerate some inconveniences for now, in exchange for having the contact networks we build today continue to grow for decades to come. We use Mumble for voice chat, because it’s great, but might switch to MatrixRTC when Element Call leaves beta and becomes available in more Matrix clients.

I recently wrote up a few tips for Discord users considering Matrix.

If chat for a small gaming group was all I needed, I might choose XMPP. It’s arguably easier to administer than Matrix once you learn about all the XEPs required for comparable features (ease of admin is relevant to me because I self-host) and I would be able to guide a small group through client choices and setup. But I have found XMPP’s ecosystem to be a poor fit for large and diverse contact networks.

You yourself said that the issues I had were only fixed a few months ago.

No, I said I haven’t seen a single one of those errors in more than a few months. I haven’t been tracking the timeline, but I’m pretty sure the fixes were being put in place closer to a year ago.

I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect me to regularly re-try every other platform before relating my past experiences with it

When we choose to publish old experiences instead of gathering updated information first, it’s important to also state when those experiences were, so readers can take it into account. Things are constantly changing in this field. (Mostly for the better, I think.)

In any case, thanks for clarifying, and thanks in advance for adjusting your spiel now that you’ve been made aware that your information was out of date.

One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links

I think I’ve seen invite links being proposed for Matrix, but I don’t remember the status of that idea, and can’t find a relevant MSC at the moment.

This bot looks like it could be helpful for now:

https://github.com/dfuchss/matrix-joinlink

https://www2.matrix.org/blog/2024/05/24/this-week-in-matrix-2024-05-24/#matrixjoinlink

I found it to be slow at times, but more annoyingly,

Slow at what, exactly? If you mean slow at delivering messages, it suggests that you were using the world’s largest public server, which sometimes gets overloaded enough to be slow. In that case, your criticism is not of Matrix, but of a particular server. To compare apples to apples, you would have to either pick a different server or compare the largest one with a similarly loaded XMPP server.

it would very consistently not un-encrypt messages both for me and the people I was talking to,

When was that? Which clients were in use? This is relevant because unable-to-decrypt errors were fairly common until roughly mid-to-late last year. They put a lot of work into finding and addressing the causes, and I haven’t seen a single one in more than a few months. I suspect the experience you’re describing here is either out of date, or you’re using clients that haven’t applied the fixes yet.

I also notice from your recent Lemmy posts that you are evangelizing Movim pretty hard lately. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but praising XMPP without mentioning its drawbacks, while spreading outdated and vague criticism of other options, is a somewhat misleading way to do it… and a disservice to the community.

I prefer not to give those people any attention at all.

I have deployed LiveLit for my homeserver

Do you mean LiveKit?

In gaming circles, Matrix is to Discord as Lemmy is to Reddit: tiny. You’re unlikely to find well-established rooms for niche topics, so you would have to either join an existing barely-used room, or start a new one yourself.

The good news is that, with so many people leaving Discord right now, promoting a small room could easily multiply its population and boost its activity. You might even consider talking to moderators of niche Discord channels to see if they’re interested in migrating with you.

an always on chat channel.

I guess you must mean an always on voice channel. Thanks for clarifying.

(For what it’s worth, my groups are using Mumble for that purpose, alongside Matrix, at least until MatrixRTC brings its voice features up to speed.)

offer true jump in /jump out game chat.

What does this mean?

Follow me on Threads [aka Facebook]
Follow me on Twitter
Join us on Discord

No thanks.

I’m a little surprised to see someone soliciting for those platforms on Lemmy, given that they are antithetical to the values that brought most of us here.

Also, there’s a well-known reason for this that is plainly obvious to anyone who has been keeping up on US news over the past year.

This doesn’t belong here.

Thank you.

Does “Zoom platform” here refer to the China-based video conferencing service famous for lying about their encryption features, or is there some other zoom platform?

Not CLI. Terminal interface. (Sort of. It requires a terminal with sixel graphics support.)

Civ 4 is great.

Civ 5 is mostly great if you add the Brave New World (or maybe Gods and Kings) expansion, which revises the game mechanics. My main complaint is that I don’t like how religion affects the mid-late game, but the game is still great overall.

Both can be had for cheap when they go on sale.

There’s a free and open-source Civ-like game called Unciv. I haven’t played it, but I’ve seen it mentioned often enough that it might be worth a look.

I played the tutorial, and continued the game for several hours after the tutorial part ended.

I struggled to stay awake. It was by far the most boring slog I have ever experienced in any edition of Civ. (I haven’t played Civ 7, though.)