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Why I Deleted My Steam Account After 20 Years

Some may know me from over a decade worth of modding broken, under-performing or otherwise inconvenient aspects of PC ports. Dedicated users of Special K also know that I have spent as much time battling problems caused by Steam as I have defects in the games themselves.

My experience with PC gaming goes back a further two decades, to the days of shareware, dialing into a BBS to get game patches / user generated content and tedious DRM fetch-quests involving physical game manuals. I was irritated when Half-Life 2 shipped on PC and required a dedicated piece of software to satisfy DRM and patch the game, but at the time these were minor inconveniences. Valve tried to quell concerns of software preservation with the first of a long series of lies wherein they claimed to have a contingency plan for the DRM scheme reaching end-of-life.

Steam's DRM scheme has reached end-of-life multiple times without the promised parachute.

In 2002, the cl

Under Windows Settings > Accounts > Family & other users > Other users

Click the button for "Add someone else to this PC"
Click the link for "I don't have this person's sign-in information"
Click the link for "Add a user without a Microsoft account"
Enter a user name, password, and security questions
Change the account type to "Administrator - Local account"
Logout and login as this new user.

Open a Command Prompt using "Run as administrator" and run:

Product	IDE version	Solution version(s)	Platform toolset	_MSC_VER
Visual Studio 2022	17.0	?	v143	?
Visual Studio 2019	16.0	?	v142	?
Visual Studio 2017	15.0	12.0	v141	1910
Visual Studio 2015	14.0	12.0	v140	1900
Visual Studio 2013	12.0	12.0	v120	1800
Visual Studio 2012	11.0	12.0	v110	1700
Visual Studio 2010	10.0	11.0	v100	1600
Visual Studio 2008	9.0	10.0	v90	1500

CUSTOM GAME ENGINES: A Small Study

WARNING: Article moved to separate repo to allow users contributions: https://github.com/raysan5/custom_game_engines

A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game tech and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are some companies using custom engines but it's very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So this article.

Nowadays lots of companies choose engines like [Unreal](https:

	dd if=sboot.bin of=fwbl1.img bs=1 skip=$((0x0)) count=$((0x3000))
	dd if=sboot.bin of=epbl.img bs=1 skip=$((0x3000)) count=$((0x16000 - 0x3000))
	dd if=sboot.bin of=bl2.img bs=1 skip=$((0x16000)) count=$((0x82000 - 0x16000))
	dd if=sboot.bin of=lk.bin bs=1 skip=$((0xDB000)) count=$((0x35B000 - 0xDB000))
	dd if=sboot.bin of=el3_mon.img bs=1 skip=$((0x35B000)) count=$((0x39B000 - 0x35B000))

	# example of generate output using https://github.com/tianocore/edk2

	sources=(
	"berkeley-softfloat-3::git+file:///home/ngranger/Downloads/edk2/src/berkeley-softfloat-3"
	"brotli::git+file:///home/ngranger/Downloads/edk2/src/brotli"
	"cmocka::git+file:///home/ngranger/Downloads/edk2/src/cmocka"
	"cryptography::git+file:///home/ngranger/Downloads/edk2/src/cryptography"
	"edk2-cmocka::git+file:///home/ngranger/Downloads/edk2/src/edk2-cmocka"
	"engine::git+file:///home/ngranger/Downloads/edk2/src/engine"
	"googletest::git+file:///home/ngranger/Downloads/edk2/src/googletest"

	#define NOMINMAX
	#include <Windows.h>

	#include <iostream>

	#pragma comment(lib, "dxguid.lib")

	#define DIRECTINPUT_VERSION 0x700
	#include <dinput.h>

	#the following settings will alleviate or outright prevent shader stutter
	#with the downside of taking up more GPU memory, hence it may not benefit
	#GPUs with insufficient VRAM

	#for UE2 engine titles edit the main config ini file
	#(e.g. Unreal2.ini) to add/change the below lines:
	[D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
	UsePrecaching=True
	AvoidHitches=True

	// Copyright (c) 2021 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved.
	//
	// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
	// of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
	// in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
	// to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
	// copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
	// furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
	//
	// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in

	#include <iostream>
	#include <cmath>

	// Sample of an optimizer bug in Visual Studio 2003 - 2019 (or more)
	//
	// Compiling this program in Release (/O1, /O2 or /Ox and LTCG) in both x86 and x64
	// configurations produces a different output from unoptimized (Debug) configurations.
	//
	// Expected output: 709
	// Produced output: 31