Steam Deck

"pancake" refers to a colloaquial term for tiny nimble classic recreational racing sailboats like sunfishes and lasers, essentially the hull is shaped like a pancake (well a bowl more like but whatever) and all of the lateral resistance to getting blown sideways (that would be provided naturally by a long slim hull that sat deep in the water) is focused on the narrow point of the single daggerboard and to a lesser extent rudder. This is what makes sailboats like this an absolute joy to sail even in fairly light wind in real life, they take almost no wind to go and can take advantage of passing bursts of energy from even the most capricious wind gusts, so it makes sailing them a very direct and deeply calming conversation with the immediate elements of the wind and water around you.

Sailing in light wind is fun in a chill way but for long sailboats that have a consequently big turning radius, often it is difficult to keep any speed when turning the front of the boat directly past the onblowing wind because you can't pick up any speed in that moment, you have to rely on inertia. A pancake sailboat like this is made to spin like a top with a flick of the rudder so that even in light wind the hull can carry momentum through multiple quick tacks (changing direction by rotating the bow past the direction of the onblowing wind) or jives (changing direction by rotating the bow the other way, so that it never directly passes by the direction of the onblowing wind, can be very difficult to control in a small sailboat like this).

With this kind of sailboat you basically have two controls, you aim the rudder with an articulated handle in one hand and you control the angle of the sail/boom through a rope held in your other hand that runs through a pulley. In real life you also are able to control the center of mass of your personal meatcube for minute corrections as well, but with essentially just those two control inputs an incredible variety and complexity of movement is possible.

Even if you have never thought about learning sailing, it is worth learning for its own sake because of how primal and direct learning how to sail a pancake boat like this is that only has one rope to hold and one rudder and that is the whole dashboard of controls. If you have ever met sailors, they probably are really intense and get all hyped about racing around in conditions that look absolutely awful to a non-sailor lol, but it is just as valid to sail around in light wind normal on a blustery afternoon summer day as wiser and lazier alternative to paddling a kayak :). Honestly it takes an astonishingly little amount of energy to move a tiny sailboat like this at a pace faster than you can paddle a kayak.

Pancake Sailor and the developers non-free games are marketed definitely pretty heavily towards VR, but Pancake Sailor actually works bloody fantastic as a Steam Deck game. It is an immediate cozy and chill experience, the moment you open the game and start playing. I can easily see myself talking with someone on the phone while I focus on the conversation and mindlessly sail around in pancake sailor.

Check it out! It is free!

Also the main game is on sale for $5 in the steam summer sale, the game doesn't seem to go cheaper, it isn't necessarily a super rare sale either though so shrugs honestly I recommend just downloading Pancake Sailor and having some fun!

This game will genuinely teach you how to sail, and the really wonderful thing is that if you learn how to sail a really really simple sailboat like this you will understand the basics of how to sail any sailboat, no matter how complex. Yes there are a billion more things to learn with larger sailboats with multiple crew and sails and ways to manipulate those sails... but at the end of the day you are trying to accomplish the same set of maneuevers that will become deeply intuitive to you if you practice sailiing a simple sailboat like this. Honestly, master a boat like this and if someone threw you onto a typical 40 foot monohull sailboat and you had to sail it back to a harbor to save your life, you would be fine. You would do a really shitty job, but again the fundamentalis are the same. This is a human skill I think everyone should explore through video games!

Warning though, once you learn how to sail every time you play a video game where sailboats are just normal boats but with an animated sail that magically changes the wind direction around.. or even if there are true sailing mechanics but they are shallow af, you will become very sad.... :( but then valheim will give you a hug and remind you that there are people out there that really do care.

So I tested my mic inside Discord and it does show that the mic is being picked up. Has anyone had the issue where that does not translate over to online games?

https://lemmy.world/post/16966492

Hi, First, is it possible to set the steamdeck to "default" to always keep picking the steamdeck speaker as default audio out also when an HDMI is connected through the USB-C? I have an old monitor (VGA to HDMI to USB-C haha) and would be easiest to still just output audio in the steamdeck speaker by default. It is easy to switch audio outputs in desktopmode, not in gaming mode unfortunately can't switch to steamdeck speaker there, doesn't work.

Second, how do y'all combine music and games? I prefer to play games while listening to youtube full albums (freetube or similar) in background. Doesn't really seem to integrate well in gaming mode either? Tried adding Monophony and Freetube as non-steam games, but not very succesful. What's your suggestion for optimizing the setup?

Sorry for the noob-questions. Pic unrelated, sort of.

They've added FSR 3.1, XeSS 1.3, and FSR 3 Frame Generation to:

• Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR'S CUT
• God of War Ragnarok (Releasing Soon)
• Horizon Forbidden West (20% Off)
• Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered (40% Off)
• Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales (40% Off)
• Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart (40% Off)

Frame generation is usually only beneficial if you already have a reasonably high fps, but the author of this article mentioned that it actually worked really well for him in Spiderman on Deck and let him hit 60fps.

Chart

Decky broke with the Steam game recording update, but the 3.0 update fixes that and features a lot of behind the scene updates that should make Decky more reliable and plugins run better.

There are some decent deals going on right now, not so much for AAA titles really, they don't seem to be going on sale much in my opinion in the past year or so.

Indie games on the other hand have been having some really great discounts.

Here is the /r/gamedeals steam summer sale thread

https://old.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/comments/1dpxrdr/steam_summer_sale_2023_day_1/

The thread you are really interested in is the Hidden Gems thread tho...

https://old.reddit.com/r/GameDealsMeta/comments/1dpxyff/steam_summer_2024_hidden_gems/

Even more so than steam... I think some of the recent Fanatical bundles have been really great for indie games, I bought almost everything from these bundles

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle

I also picked up a bunch from this one too

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-handheld-heroes-bundle

I really like the digital board games from direwolf like Instanbul, Everdell, Wings Of Glory. Concordia is also a brilliant digital board game and perhaps one of the best board games ever invented by humanity... (not kidding).

How about y'all? Have you picked up any good indie games for your steam deck lately?

Kinda spent a lot, but with a lot of these indie games, like the big metroidivania games and such I just don't think they are ever going to come down below $3, they aren't worth that little lol anyways.. but just look at the isthereanydeal stats for some of the indie games in the fanatical bundles they straight up destroy steam's "summer sale" in my opinion at least at a cursory glance.

For example, look at "Trinity Fusion" in the "handheld heroes bundle", Steam advertises it on "sale" for $12, but if you buy 5 games or so on fanatical's bundle it is $3....

...just saying, might be a good time to flesh out your steam deck's indie, local co-op, party and retro style catalog!

Features:

• 4 Custom Buttons to assign Functions
• Full Gyro Support (only when "Steam Mode" is activated)
• A customization feature to only activate Gyro when a specific joystick is touched
• Continuous button pressing or "Rapid Fire" mode for face buttons
• Supports both Bluetooth and Wired connections
• A dedicated Steam button to start big picture mode or bring Steam up
• A Quick Access Menu button

However it doesn't have:

• vibration function
• trackpad
• Headphone jack

It will cost around $50

It's stupid cheap on Steam right now and I've never played it. I've been doing 100% of my gaming on the deck, which has me wondering how well this plays on it. Not graphically/performance because it'll clearly run on a toaster. But mechanically. Are there parts that are hard to use controllers vs kb/mouse for?

Now that I think about it, is there a resource that speaks specifically to this sort of question for games? I know of protondb but that seems to be focused on getting it to run easily and with good performance.

EDIT: thanks for the input! I've purchased it and I'm stoked to give it a playthrough. I WFH, so the thought of sitting at the same desk I was just at for 8+ hrs to game is not at all appealing. Been loving the deck for this exact reason!

To enable it on steam deck, you need to switch to the beta channel. After that, you'll have a new setting category for it, and should have a new tab in the overview page.

Default binds are steam button+A to start recording (if you don't have passive recording enable), and steam+y to flag a time in the recording.

I have recently been trying to play Halo Wars and Helldivers 2 online. Naturally I wanted to be able to talk with my teammates, but the microphone does not seem to work. I have gone into the settings and switched between the available options, but I cannot chat with others. What can I do to debug?

Also, a video demonstration: Steamworks Quick Tips - Steam Game Recording and Steam Timeline API

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck#SaleSection_34993

The 64GB and 512GB Steam Deck LCD models are being phased out, and will only be available while supplies last.

64GB LCD is $296.65.

512GB LCD is $381.65.

• Fixed a an issue with a rare session crash during early startup of ELDEN RING
• Fixed a general issue affecting all units on 3.6, and OLED units on 3.5, causing a slow memory leak during gameplay
• Fixed a DSP firmware crash with previous 3.6 versions that could result in internal sound disappearing until next reboot
• Improved responsiveness of session restart in case of session crashes caused by certain GPU errors
• Fixed an issue that could cause videos to stutter in titles such as BlazBlue Centralfiction

Some pretty good fixes. Unfortunately you'll need to be on the beta/preview channel to get them, but hopefully it won't be long before they come to stable.

Updates available for stable and beta channels. Both are pretty minor, mainly just bug fixes.

Steam Deck specific changes:

• Show battery information for connected Bluetooth devices under Settings->Bluetooth and in the Quick Access menu.
• Added a per-device toggle to Settings->Bluetooth that controls whether a device is allowed to wake SteamDeck from sleep.
• Fixed a bug that would cause the UI to show stale data for Bluetooth devices.
• Fixed clickable screenshots in the post-game summary and library screenshot section not opening the screenshot dialog to the correct item.
• The magnifier scale can now be configured in Settings->Display.

This update has replaced 3 different Decky plugins for me: Controller tools (for showing controller battery), BT wake control (for controlling what BLE devices wake the deck), and the Bluetooth plugin (used for quick connections to Bluetooth devices that don't automatically connect).

The update also has a lot of desktop changes, click through to the article to see them all.

Whether on the deck or not ; I personally haven't tried any on the deck yet, but I downloaded about 40 demos or so, Tails of Iron 2 and Airborne Empire were good fun, The Alters and Tactical Breach Wizards completely hooked me!

Not an official announcement, but it's probably safe to assume an Xbox handheld is in development.