Malix

zstd is generally stupidly fast and quite efficient.

probably not exactly how steam does it, or even close, but as a quick & dirty comparison: compressed and decompressed a random CD.iso (~375 MB) I had laying about, using zstd and lzma, using 1MB dictitionary:

test system: Arch linux (btw, as is customary) laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U cpu.

used commands & results:

Zstd:

# compress (--maxdict 1048576 - sets the used compression dictionary to 1MB) :
% time zstd --maxdict 1048576 < DISC.ISO > DISC.zstd
zstd --maxdict 1048576 < DISC.ISO > DISC.zstd  1,83s user 0,42s system 120% cpu 1,873 total

# decompress:
% time zstd -d < DISC.zstd > /dev/null
zstd -d < DISC.zstd > /dev/null  0,36s user 0,08s system 121% cpu 0,362 total

• resulting archive was 229 MB, ~61% of original.
• ~1.9s to compress
• ~0.4s to decompress

So, pretty quick all around.

Lzma:

# compress (the -1e argument implies setting preset which uses 1MB dictionary size):
% time lzma -1e < DISC.ISO > DISC.lzma
lzma -1e < DISC.ISO > DISC.lzma  172,65s user 0,91s system 98% cpu 2:56,16 total

#decompress:
% time lzma -d < DISC.lzma > /dev/null
lzma -d < DISC.lzma > /dev/null  4,37s user 0,08s system 98% cpu 4,493 total

• ~179 MB archive, ~48% of original-
• ~3min to compress
• ~4.5s to decompress

This one felt like forever to compress.

So, my takeaway here is that the time cost to compress is enough to waste a bit of disk space for sake of speed.

and lastly, just because I was curious, ran zstd on max compression settings too:

% time zstd --maxdict 1048576 -9 < DISC.ISO > DISC.2.zstd
zstd --maxdict 1048576 -9 < DISC.ISO > DISC.2.zstd  10,98s user 0,40s system 102% cpu 11,129 total

% time zstd -d < DISC.2.zstd > /dev/null 
zstd -d < DISC.2.zstd > /dev/null  0,47s user 0,07s system 111% cpu 0,488 total

~11s compression time, ~0.5s decompression, archive size was ~211 MB.

deemed it wasn't nescessary to spend time to compress the archive with lzma's max settings.

Now I'll be taking notes when people start correcting me & explaining why these "benchmarks" are wrong :P

edit:

goofed a bit with the max compression settings, added the same dictionary size.

edit 2: one of the reasons for the change might be syncing files between their servers. IIRC zstd can be compressed to be "rsync compatible", allowing partial file syncs instead of syncing entire file, saving in bandwidth. Not sure if lzma does the same.

I'll preface this with the fact that I don't know the game, but looking at the system requirements on steam, both of those systems are below minimum spec.

Also, it would probably help if the macbook actually was on fedora 41, it reads 40 in the screenshot - so maybe try upgrading that one, since the game runs on the system with actual fedora 41?

names of games I didn't expect to hear to day. Only had Major Stryker shareware as a kid, played it a lot, along with Duke Nukum and some other old SW games.

But those games on massive tv? Pixels the size of cats.

Were you using any crt shaders or such?

doesn't seem like it was all that popular game to begin with, so all things considered the number of affected users is likely to be like, 10 at best? And some of those are likely affiliated with the dev/publisher anyway.

But it sucks that these things still can get through the sieve to begin with :/

eyyyy, World Class Leaderboard, one of the first games I ever had on PC. Got fond memories of that - but rose tinted glasses didn't survive revisit in dosbox x)

This game looks neat tho. Might pick it up!

Wobbly Life? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1211020/Wobbly_Life/

It's essentially a 3d platformer coop about doing random jobs because your granny doesn't like you laying about her house. There's all kinds of "jobs" to do, like racing, fishing, disposing nuclear waste...

I've played quite a bit of the browser version, but that steam version has stuff in screenshots I don't think I've seen in the browser one... huh.

Might need to check this one out, thanks!

I just couldn't stop buying the bg3 season passes, fomo-exclusive character skins and consumable magic item bundles to feed the one companion whose name escapes me atm.

/S

if/when you get stuck / progress feels horrendously slow/stalled, the wiki is pretty up to date and offers great info https://spaceidle.game-vault.net/wiki/Main_Page - but imo, only check it when progress stalls hard, otherwise there be spoilers, a lot of spoilers.

Welcome to space :)

Unnamed Space Idle? https://store.steampowered.com/app/2471100/Unnamed_Space_Idle/

It is pretty similar to Melvor, you have a space ship instead of a character. Ship automatically shoots baddies and goes forward. You upgrade the ship, it's parts, etc. Proceed to idle, harveste materials, craft stuff, collect bonuses, unlock new tiers of stuff... etc. It looks a bit amateurish, but it's pretty cool as far as idlers go.

It has offline progress, cloud saves & works on linux too. And apparently you can share your progress with android version too - but I dunno for sure, haven't tried.

There are mtx available, but even the game tells you they're not really needed, they're there for giving support to the dev - and I can confirm, the game isn't coin operated at all, you gain everything you'd realistically need through gameplay at reasonable pace.

Imagine paying hundreds for beta-invite, to scalpers, and then get banned because account trading is pretty much always against TOS.