The Bobiverse series eventually features some aliens. I don't think that's a spoiler at all... But they aren't space-faring, so I dunno if that counts for what you're looking for.

As a developer, the experience is so much better on Android for me. And I oppose the walled garden on a ideological level.

But I have to admit some of the features are compelling. Some of them aren't even really Apple's doing, such as Genshin Impact supporting wireless controllers on IOS14+, but not Android at all. Others are built in, such as the lidar scanning.

They haven't yet tempted me over, though, because phones are incredibly expensive and even if I weren't opposed to the walled garden, I'm pretty invested in the Android ecosystem now.

At some point I plan to borrow someone's iPhone and try Genshin on it, and if that works well... Well, I might just switch anyhow. Or maybe I get sick of that game before that. ;)

I guess you could hope to find someone here that could help you with that, but it occurs to me that you're working with people who definitely understand it. Perhaps you could ask them for some guidance?

It does say it was cross-posted (to 3 places) at the top on the web.

After looking into z-wave and zigbee and having installed a lot of wifi devices, I also decided to wait for Matter. I've been pretty disappointed in the reviews I've seen, and the range of devices is really limited. I'm starting to wonder if I should just give up and go with Z-wave.

I thought it was going to be an adventure game at first, and was excited. Then I realized it's a party game. Meh.

I used to upgrade every generation, and yeah, it was stupidly expensive. But it was my only hobby, and you could actually seen performance increases each time.

But for the last 10 years or so, there's much less point. Sometimes there are major advances (Cuda, RTX) that make it worthwhile for a single generation upgrade, but mostly it's just a few FPS at highest settings. So now I just upgrade every few years.

I think maybe they aren't quite updated in some areas. In the US, I checked my console and the web, and it's still showing the old games, and these aren't claimable yet.

People love a launcher. People hate multiple launchers. People despise launchers they use for a single game.

That said, it probably wasn't the launcher that killed sales, other than the fact that it wasn't on Steam for some random discovery sales. People who wanted to play the new COD bought it, and then found out what the launcher was, not the other way around.

I don't use a respirator at all, but I also don't hang out in that room while it's printing, and I have a small air purifier that runs in there full time.

I can understand being underwhelmed if you went into it thinking it was going to be Fallout in space. But I went in knowing it was a space western RPG, and I quite enjoyed it. I've been thinking about replaying it, and it was just in the Humble Bundle this month, so that'll probably happen soon. (I played it on PC Game Pass the first time, I think.)

The loading bar that I implemented in our app at work is real. It only advances when it has done something, and it advanced that % of the total when it has done it.

It gets away with that because unlikely other bars mentioned here, what's it's doing is a lot of little things that all take about the same time, and so it's actually a pretty decent approximation of how much is done.

So there's at least one that isn't fake. ;)