Gimp and Inkscape are my two trusty revolvers and I am a lone cowboy

Hell yeah! Go play some videooooo gamesss

I know in steam you can set the order of controllers (player 1, 2, 3, 4) but I can’t remember if you can set controllers to the same player.

At any rate you can map both controllers to output keyboard commands and then have the game receive input from mouse and keyboard and then the game will think it is receiving input from only one device.

Hmm I wonder if antimicrox would allow you to combine two inputs into one composite input, I don’t have experience with it so I can’t say for sure but it seems like the kind of utility that would.

https://github.com/AntiMicroX/antimicrox

What I would do in this situation is map the controls to keyboard, then use a Controller-to-Keyboard mapping program to map all the controller buttons to the keyboard buttons. So map both controllers D-Pads to W-A-S-D (or arrows, or whatever really) then set those keyboard controls to your movement controls in the emulator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnPC/comments/165tewk/mapping_multiple_controllers_to_the_same_input/

organice is front end that runs entirely in a mobile or desktop browser that allows you to access and edit org files easily with a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard. It obviously doesn’t have full org mode functionality, but it does a have a calendar view.

https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

All you have to do is navigate to https://organice.200ok.ch in your phone’s browser and then pin it to your start screen. The PWA is downloaded and you can now access a remote webdav server with the locally saved front end of organice. No data is sent to organice, the only function of the website is to give you an easy place to download the PWA to your device using a web browser.

I love love love love org mode, it is just simple yet so powerful and there really is nothing else like it, I can’t really recommend anything else in good conscience here, especially since most other options (except for logseq https://logseq.com/ which I am not sure does everything you want?) are commercial and who knows what the hell will happen when the company goes out of business or is bought out by someone else?

I recommend Spacemacs or Doom emacs as a nice starting point for emacs, or you can just start with basic emacs and build it yourself as org mode is included in the default distribution of emacs.

An additional thing to think about, there is an android release of emacs coming up, so org mode might get much more accessible on the go in the future!

No worries if you aren’t interested, I am just providing some additional context.

https://www.spacemacs.org/

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

This video is a great thorough but approachable explanation of why org mode is so special:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEeStDz_imQ

Wow hell yeah thank you so much! I love mods but I really don’t have much fun manually putting modpacks together as I am after a coherent experience that is roughly balanced and fun, so I REALLY appreciate seeing an example of a collected list of mods that someone who plays the game frequently in co-op might use! Thank you. Now I just have to buy the damn game lol

Do you specifically not recommend sharing colonists but instead having a two base kind of setup?

What mods do you think make the choices you make in moment to moment gameplay more fun and interesting?

Hell yeah

Do you have any recommendations for playing as a new player with a friend who is a new player using the co-op mod. I know that isn’t the ideal way to do it, but I don’t mind steep learning curves so much especially when it is for games that are meant to be played for years and years like Rimworld.

Going Medieval looks interesting!

I have still never played Rimworld, I keep meaning to buy it and get around to playing it. I feel like playing it co-op would be a blast.

It is a bit hard to find info on some of the units and mechanics but the underlying game is just so damn tight and the turn based combat is nail biting, so it is worth pushing through that annoyance.

If you end up liking it but find it confusing feel free to reach out with questions, I have played a good bit of it.

whispers in your ear

“Eador Genesis New Horizons”

http://eador.com/B2/viewtopic.php?t=4724

Its like HOM 3 but the campaign focuses on many short games played over a meta campaign where you gain the ability to build new buildings and units based on the “shards” you conquer (each “shard” is its own separate run through of a short HOM3 type game). There are “local lords” that will fight for control of the shard but the real problem is when other gods similar to yourself also try to stake a claim on a shard and you have to battle them.

Eador Genesis is HARD af, but the New Horizons mod has been in development for years and it has grown the game into an extremely tight, challenging experience that you really ought to check out if you like HOM 3. The graphics are also wonderfully old school pixelated and simple like HOM 3’s are.

I haven’t really messed around with city builders, though I did have a blast playing Zeus and Poseidon.

What are y’all’s favorite city builders?

^ Not in terms of how many mods there are or raw Numbers Of Things in the game but in the actual depth and fun to the decisions you are making in moment to moment gameplay.

I did like anno 1800 but the whole “let’s imagine the colonization of the Caribbean as fun and just pretend slavery wasn’t absolutely integral to the European relationship with the Caribbean” just feels… idk if problematic is the word but it just feels odd. It’s like watching a movie that has the aesthetics and music of a classic slasher horror movie film but it is a comedy film with no violence and the whole time you are watching the movie you keep wondering why the movie was made to precisely echo the aesthetics of a graphic horror movie (the main character wallks around dressed up like Jason Voorhees and always has a machete but he is just a pretty nice guy looking for romance). At the end you are confused and unsettled that the movie never addressed or rationalized being filmed exactly like a horror movie while never straying from being a comedy.

Harsh Doorstop looks like it will be a fun homage to those old modded Counter-Strike 1.6 servers

Yeah except Operation Harsh Doorstop and the underlying Unreal Engine can take mods wayyy farther than modded Counter Strike ever could as it has vehicles and support for large maps :) . Hopefully the impact will be like how Battlefield 2 mods were the engines of innovation in the multiplayer vehicle shooter genre for years and years.

I did enjoy those weird Counter Strike servers, I got so bored of playing de_dust over and over and over again that I would always seek out the weirdest servers I could find just because it was fun to see new shit lol. I don’t think Operation Harsh Doorstop is going to blow up like Counter Strike did obviously, the gunplay in Operation Harsh Doorstop is good but not genre defining… but I do think that small niche communities of players who like certain kinds of vehicle based multiplayer shooters will absolutely form around the foundation of Operation Harsh Doorstop, and it will be those smaller games that rocket the genre of multiplayer vehicle shooters forward into a new era.

Lets just hope it doesn’t result in Epic being the gatekeeper to it all though and that some other developer like the Road To Vostok devs creates alternative platforms to build vehicle shooters on top of. I look to the Spring Engine and the fabulous Beyond All Reason rts as examples of how open source engines (or at least engines with a good SDK) built to facilitate game development in a genre can really have a huge long term impact even if the overall playerbase never skyrockets for any particular game built on the engine.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

Thanks for linking the games you mentioned, otherwise I would never had bothered to check them out, and they both look amazing.

Hey, I love these types of games so it always makes me happy when I can raise awareness about them. Especially since Operation Harsh Doorstop is free, there is no reason not to give it a try even if it is just to check up on the progress of development.

Honestly, that sounds like a great lifestyle fit for you, but for many people there is a huge risk in that lifestyle in becoming extremely isolated from other people and not feeling like there is an easy way to escape that isolation.

A couple of mile walk into town is not the kind of thing someone who is feeling down but wants to maybe meet people is going to do unless the bicycling infrastructure is pleasant and easy to use. It also leaves you heavily dependent on having a healthy body to socialize which again I think is generally a bad idea as it is the times we are in poor health that we need friends the most.

Yeah I am on a steam deck so Squad is a no (also the community seems really toxic from what I have heard?), Arma 3 only really gives acceptable framerates in singleplayer (though not sure that is really because I have a steam deck…) though DayZ which is built on the Arma engine actually runs incredibly well for how demanding the game is and is totally playable on deathmatch servers with 20+ people.

Hell Let Loose looks ok, I really don’t like Escape From Tarkov like games though because they invariably become pay to win with players being able to pay real money to have material advantages they bring in to matches, and I could not be less interested in that to be honest even though the overall game type sounds cool.

Triple A studios can no longer sustain the game development model and remain profitable due to b-suite and a-suite management grifting all the profits and paying for CEO golden parachutes while the QA, game devs and art teams can barely afford rent.

The unfortunate thing is that the amount of development work it takes to make and maintain a multiplayer shooter with balanced gunplay and vehicles is immense. I am not convinced an indie studio can really do it and succeed long term, especially if they drag their feet and refuse to add mod support (like the Battlebit devs) so the community can augment the small development team’s work when necessary. Battlebit is certainly not a success story currently on that front, but I am eagerly watching development of Operation Harsh Doorstop as it is a realistic shooter with vehicles and large maps made by developers that understand the importance of opening up their game to modding. Even if Operation Harsh Doorstop doesn’t end up being to my tastes in terms of vanilla gameplay that fact we now have a moddable shooter with decent gunplay, movement and vehicle mechanics means that future projects in the vein of Forgotten Hope and Project Reality will have a natural place to turn that can jumpstart development past the barebones stuff that takes up a huge amount of work.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

I honestly think several commercial shooters built on a shared open source shooter engine makes more sense than a bunch of indie studios trying to build shooters from the ground up every single time. The important bits aren’t all the details in getting the engine working in shooter design, the important bits are the details of balance, the subtleties of gun feel and the flow of maps, these are the things indie developers should be worrying about in terms of shooter design, not making basic aspects of a multiplayer shooter function. I am not aware of any open source shooter engine that currently provides that capability that isn’t extremely outdated. I am keeping my eye on Road To Vostok however as it is a singeplayer open world game built on the open source Godot engine, it isn’t multiplayer at this point but modding support is being built in from the beginning and I could absolutely see this becoming the open source shooter engine platform I dream of someday. It is no easy feat to design a shooter as a small team, and the fact that the Road To Vostok team is building a shooter from the ground up could end up being a huge gift to the genre in helping future game developers actualize their shooter ideas.

https://www.roadtovostok.com/

Then I would definitely recommend moving somewhere where going out and meeting people is easy, whether it be hobbies, nightlife or other reasons to get together with new people and make friends. Definitely don’t buy a house somewhere where it takes a conscious input of energy from yourself to see others as when we become depressed that is the HARDEST time to get ourselves to push through inertia. If you are anything like me you are going to end up on your couch feeling sad and a lot of times you won’t push through that to drive the 30+ mins to whatever thing you were considering doing. You also can’t be anywhere near as spontaneous about interacting with people and participating in different community events when every time you do it requires specific planning. If you live in town all it might take for you to get involved in something happening you were unaware of or thought you weren’t interested in is to pass by it happening. When you live far away from things, you have to sit there on your couch and specifically make the decision while blobbing on your phone that you want to participate in whatever thing you are interested in, and that can be a lottttt harder when you are depressed, trust me lol.

If you want the feeling of being out in the sticks, pay attention to being close to mass transit or easy drives out into nature.

That must be nice

I strongly recommend getting a house where you can walk out your door and walk somewhere without feeling unsafe because the road immediately outside your house is dangerous if you aren’t in a car and have the destination you are walking be a pleasant environment to be a pedestrian (i.e. not endless stroads).

The impact on your health, especially if you can win the lottery and get a job within walking distance, cannot be measured easily and most people vastly underestimate the savings and quality of life impact from not having to drive everywhere for everything.

I just wish battlebit would add mod support already so I can completely just stop caring about what EA does with the battlefield franchise.

I like battlebit but the game balance is totally skewed towards high mobility players with SMGs and if you try to play any other style you immediately get sniped…. so I really want my battlefield itch scratched and battlebit is just failing terribly at it at the moment.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/671860/BattleBit_Remastered/

I am thinking about checking out Forgotten Hope 2 again, that is an old school one lol.

http://forgottenhope.warumdarum.de/

There is Renegade X which is a remake of a battlefield-like game set in the Command And Conquer universe. Fun but gameplay is still pretty rough around edges (it free tho).

https://totemarts.games/games/renegade-x/

Any battlefield-like games I am missing that can run on a steamdeck? Right now I am mainly just getting my vehicle/infantry combat fix form Halo Infinite, which is thankfully really good.