Polynomial-C's IT blog

It's about time to write about a game that used to be my favorite one for the last seven years. Since at least 2014, Hinterland Studios from Canada developed a very impressive game called "The Long Dark" (I wrote blog posts about it twice already). Like I said, it is a very nice game but I have a huge issue with its development studio.

The Steam problem

Hinterland Studios is mainly selling TLD through Steam. They started with early access via Steam back in 2014 and quite soon became very successful. After a while, they started to sell the game via other distribution platforms as well.

Now, there's the situation that I do not really like Valve's Steam platform very much. In my opinion they enforce DRM on their users by simply forcing them to download and play the games that you have bought via Steam through their Steam client software respectively the so called "steam-library". Unfortunately, that "library" can also be seen as a huge trojan-spyware. Not only can Steam (Valve) manipulate and even delete the content (the downloaded games) that is controlled by the steam-library in any way they want, but they also track each and every thing you do with the Steam software. This includes but is not limited to

• permanently logging what game you're playing
• how long and how often you play games
• forces you to use "anti tamper" software
• They scan your hardware
• They scan your installed software
• They track your communication

Left alone the fact that a library that can be controlled remotely (by Valve) theoretically can do anything on the target operating system. At least as much as the user-account the library is running with is allowed to do.

Furthermore, despite Hinterland's assertion that TLD downloaded from Steam doesn't contain any kind of DRM,

the mere fact that you cannot play the game without the Steam-client running or without any installed steam-library at all, very much IS a DRM measure.

The GoG case

I don't remember exact dates but back in 2017 Hinterland offered TLD via Humble Indie Bundle and Good old Games store. I bought the game in the GoG store and had a very good experience. Back at that time, updates to the game arrived in a timely manner at GoG and the Linux version of the game could be easily installed and played. I barely had issues with the game itself and when there were severe issues, they usually got fixed with an upcoming bugfix and/or feature release.
Then things started to become difficult with GoG. For unknown reasons, Hinterland Studios stopped selling TLD in GoG. They did this with the promise (and this is important for later in this post) that GoG users which purchased the game would get updates of the entire game at least until the story part of the game has been finished. After Hinterland stopped selling the game via GoG, receiving updates became more and more difficult. Sometimes it took weeks or even months until GoG users got the same updates that Steam users got immediately. Of course, sometimes the updates arrived as fast as before Hinterland left GoG as selling platform but the general delay in recieving the updates via GoG increased more and more.
No matter how often I complained in Hinterland's forums, I never got details as to why these delays happened. So in the end I have to assume two possible reasons for this:

• Hinterland gives a fsck about his GoG users and simply uploads updates randomly.
• GoG is a sloppy game store or a bad loser (because Hinterlad stopped selling their game on GoG platform) and is responsible for these delays.

The turning point with DLC content

Fast forward to 2022, Hinterland had finished a survey among its users and decided to produce so called "downloadable content" or in short DLCs which have to be purchased separately. Together with the announcement of these DLCs, Hinterland also promised to continue maintaining the now called "basic game" and provide updates to its users that do not purchase DLCs.
I don't know if they kept this promise for their Steam users but GoG users presumably seem to be not within their scope here. Since August 23rd 2022 or more precisely after the v2.02 release of TLD, Hinderland stopped providing updates to GoG users. Meanwhile, at the time of this writing, they already released the fifth DLC and the game itself is at v2.31.
That is 29 new releases that have never been delivered to GoG users. For more than 1.5 years, Hinterland is showing its GoG users the middle finger and ignores every request about new updates for their GoG users. And in case they decide to come down from their high horse and show unexpected generosity by answering questions about the future of GoG support, it's empty phrases like:
Look at the date. This post had been made more than a year ago. And this is a common scheme. Everytime some GoG player is raising that kind of question, the best he might get is an empty phrase like the one above. So coincidence or intention? I personally start to doubt this is coinicence. To me it appears as this is planned strategy in order to get rid of their uncomfortable GoG users.

Here's some interesting evidence from Hinterland's own forum that shows Hinterland blatantly lying to its GoG users:




And finally some evidence taken from the GoG forums proving the same:

My conclusion

Hinterland is not a trustworthy development studio anymore. Perhaps they have never been trustworthy but I didn't find out about this until Hinterland decided to cease update deliveries to GoG users. I can only recomment to not buy anything from Hinterland! I was very eager to buy the DLCs (via GoG) because I liked the game so much. But this is over now. Hinterland will never see a single Cent from me again.

Having a HP Laptop for a while now, I was confronted with the challenge of updating its BIOS without having a Windows OS at hand. Searching through WWW didn't bring satisfying results at all. There was not a single howto that helped me to sucessfully updating my Laptop's BIOS.
What I found instead was a Website from HP that provides tools for Linux to flash the BIOS of your HP Laptop.
Unfortunately, HP only provides the BIOS file inside of a Windows .exe file - at least fo my Laptop model. So in order to get the real BIOS binary, you first need to extract that binary out of the .exe file. I found the 7z tool from p7zip to be of good help here.

If you happen to be using Gentoo, you are lucky because you can simply use the Gentoo packages I created to install the HP tools that are required for flashing the BIOS. Simply add my overlay and run the following:

emerge -anv app-arch/p7zip sys-apps/hp-flash

Non-Gentoo Linux users need to install the tools by themselves. This is explained quite thoroughly on the HP Website I linked to above so I won't go into details about this here.

Once you have downloaded the correct firmware .exe file from HP, you need to extract the .bin firmware image file:

mkdir hp_bios

cd hp_bios

7z e /path/to/the/downloaded/hp_firmware.exe

Now you should have the firmware image binary file. For my laptop its name is something like VXX_XXXXXXXX.bin where X needs to be replaced with digits.
Next step is to load the hpuefi module which is required to flash the BIOS to HP's UEFI system:

modprobe hpuefi

Create the device node that is needed to communicate with hpuefi module. When using my Gentoo packages, you can find the script that creates the node in /opt/hp/hp-flash:

bash /opt/hp/hp-flash/mkdevhpuefi

Now you can finally flash your BIOS. Keep in mind, when you have locked your BIOS with a password, you need to give that password to hp-flash as well. If you haven't set a password in your BIOS, simply omit the -p option:

/opt/hp/hp-flash/bin/hp-flash -p "yoursupersecretBIOSpassword" VXX_XXXXXXXX.bin

Do NOT turn off your laptop until the flashing procedure has finished. Once the flash process has sucessfully finished, reboot your device. And don't be surprised if your laptop turns off even though you wanted it to reboot. It seems like HP devices prefer to shut off once they got a new BIOS image flashed. Just switch the device back on and let it apply the freshly flashed BIOS image.

So I cannot emphasize this often enough but guys, spare yourself a lot of stress and troube by not becoming a Gentoo developer or try to mess with them (even with valid bug reports).

One recent example can be seen in Gentoo bug #891179 where a simple request of making a questionable information about dependency calculation time in portage optional revealed once again what kind of people can be found in Gentoo nowadays.

Arrogance at its best.

Well done fellas!

Keep in mind: These two guys are just among the worst examples.

There is a simple feedback like "Hey I don't like it, can we make it different". There's even a provided solution. HOW it could be improved. And all which comes back is: "How dare you to waste our time!!" - What a wonderful work environment you have here... I bet there are dozens of potential devs waiting in line to help out with Gentoo development... not.

For those which are still interested why people leaving, here you can get a short glimpse on the hostile work environment a few people create for everyone.

By the way: Don't be surprised when the bug "unexpectedly" disappears now that it's subject of this blog. Altering facts is common practise in Gentoo nowadays just like spying on emails (am I right, Sam? --> pts/27 ).



Let's see how many people are getting triggered this time.

It's one thing being accused for slandering. It's another thing being publically called an asshole. So here's another great stunt from Gentoo. First read this PR:

Reinstate poly-c overlay #532

And now have a look for what I was banned in their GitHub organization:



And IMHO there's nothing more to add here.

Like I've blogged recently, Gentoo has removed my overlay from their list based on completely false assertions. That's not so much of a problem for me as I know how to get my overlay into Gentoo systems but other users of that overlay might have more difficulties to keep the overlay. As a result I've uploaded a config file for those users so they can simply drop that file into /etc/portage/repos.conf/ directory and run in order to re-gain access to my overlay. I hope that helps those users that got "punished" by this extremely strange move Gentoo did there.