Quetzalcutlass
@Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
- Comment on Possible ARG found in an indie itchio game 1 week ago:
Alternate Reality Game, sort of a meta-game outside of the actual game. Usually they involve vague hints, cryptographically encoded hidden clues, URLs linking to random sites with more hints hidden in the page’s HTML or images, and a bunch of steps to solve the full riddle. They usually need a large number of people working together to solve and are popular as a form of viral marketing.
- Comment on Spooktober Hallow Style Jam #4 1 week ago:
Use any game engine you would like to use, some options if this is your first game jam
- Godot (3D, and 2D) (Use Godot 3.5 as a beginner, Godot 4 is in beta)
This probably needs updating, seeing as Godot 4 has been out for years at this point and is currently working on its eighth major update.
- Comment on ‘We were bored of traditional fantasy cliches’: inside Playground Games’ 10-year effort to revive Fable 2 weeks ago:
The original Fable did clichés well, though. Like the player is descended from the royal line of Albion, but it’s so buried in vague hints that you need to read a bunch of lore to find out. It never matters to the story or gameplay, it’s just a cool background fact.
- Comment on Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51% 2 weeks ago:
Looking it up, while the high-end gift fruits are insanely expensive (hundreds of dollars), regular fruit seems to be widely available and costs the equivalent of a dollar or two. They also tend to be unnaturally unblemished even on the low end.
I wonder how much produce gets thrown away due to a single bruise or spot. I’m hoping it gets turned into drinks or purée for desserts or something instead.
- Comment on Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51% 2 weeks ago:
One of the games that was briefly popular this year was Where Winds Meet, a Chinese free-to-play RPG. They made it a selling point that NPCs and sidequests were entirely LLM-driven. Look up a video if you want to see some of the most awkward and cringy dialog this side of Soulstorm.
- Comment on Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51% 2 weeks ago:
This seems weird to me. Isn’t Japanese culture obsessed with aesthetics? Like when you buy fast food there it actually looks neat and clean like in advertisements, and you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries but they’ll be the brightest, most flawless specimens you’ll see in your lifetime. Even cheap throwaway meals are packaged like a professional food stylist went over them.
That focus on perfection seems incongruent with the slop machine that churns out soulless, derivative, and often obviously flawed ‘art’.
- Comment on No Man's Sky's next Expedition adds a quasi documentary to the game 3 weeks ago:
I still hate FOMO content like this even if they (very rarely) do reruns to let new players grab the old rewards. This kind of thing should be permanent, not something that will vanish after an arbitrary amount of time.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
My quote only mentions Saints Row 2 because that was the latest game at the time that review was made. Like I said, it’s from an old review.
Though I do remember being incredibly disappointed at how character customization went backwards in depth for Saints Row 3. That and the campaign missions in 3 being mostly filler (several were straight up reused minigames with only narration to differentiate them from the ones you found on the map) and the plot sliding almost entirely towards humor and dropping most of the darkness of 1 and 2 in favor of bombastic heroics.
The later games did give us Kinzie though, so all is forgiven.
(The reboot is still an abomination.)
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
To quote an ancient review by Shamus Young (RIP):
GTA IV offers incredible production values, voice acting, music, and visuals. By contrast, all Saints Row 2 can offer is fun. You’ll have to work out for yourself which one sounds better.
The wrong series died.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Funnily enough, that was one of the major complaints fans made about Fallout 3. For some unfathomable reason Bethesda decided to set it generations after the first two games, yet the Wasteland hasn’t changed at all despite it now being centuries since the bombs fell.
Come to think of it, they did the exact same thing with Skyrim.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Speedrunners have thoroughly dissected the Hitman AI and found ways to completely cheese the game. There’s a brief explanation of the systems at the beginning of this video, but basically the devs wanted cinematic moments where guards rushed past 47 to check out a distraction, but bungled the implementation to the point where you can reliably waltz past armed guards while undisguised and your weapon out after half a second of preparation.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
They were referring to Mario and Luigi matching the Italian flag, not Wario and Waluigi.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
It’s 100% a mistake. “Wretched souls” is a phrase with a lot of history, going back to Shakespeare at the very least. I’m guessing they didn’t catch it because retched is also a word, even though that use grammatical incorrect (unless they were souls that’d been vomited up).
- Comment on Utopia 🌈 2 months ago:
They got in early. I remember researching the Holocaust for a school assignment in the late nineties/early aughts and the top result was a conspiracy theorist/Holocaust denial screed. An openly racist one with slurs and epithets throughout, no less. The early internet was wild.
There was also Stormfront, a white supremacist forum with hundreds of thousands of members where racists openly detailed their plans to infiltrate police precincts and federal agencies by having fellow members already employed there vouch for them, with the goal of creating a network of supporters throughout the entire law enforcement apparatus to protect them. Looking at the news, it’s not hard to imagine they succeeded.
- Comment on Republicans head home for the summer after a string of losses in Congress 2 months ago:
And it doesn’t have to be this way! This behavior of spending most of their time in office campaigning or acquiring funding for reelection instead of, you know, governing only became the norm in the nineties.
(Add yet another “fuck Newt Gingrich” to the tally board.)
- Comment on I hate Android! 2 months ago:
Even setting aside the wear and tear issues with flash storage, swap and zram sadly don’t play nice together. Zram will fill up with stale memory while swap gets the fresh stuff, which is the exact opposite of what you want and causes awful performance problems.
- Comment on I hate Android! 2 months ago:
I’ve got 4 GB of RAM
Sadly that’s an almost unusable amount these days. The OS will use half of that while sitting idle, and Google Play Services will use a fifth of the remainder (you can enable Developer Mode and view running services to see this yourself). 4 gigs is solidly in the “only one or two apps open at a time” range.
(It doesn’t help that every Android app includes its own separate copies of all its libraries and dependencies for compatibility reasons. There’s no such thing as a lightweight app without going out of your way to avoid the normal development ecosystem)
Android also doesn’t use swap (storing unused/rarely accessed memory contents on the disk for later), instead shifting stale memory pages to a compressed block in RAM (zram), so once it starts filling up with cached background apps it has to start killing apps or the system will hang. The less RAM you have, the sooner this will happen, and both Lemmy clients and web browsers use a ton of RAM.
- Comment on Repeating of course 2 months ago:
One of the linked papers makes the claim that the circuitry would be less complex than that needed for floats, but also includes this note:
Floats have one advantage over posits for the hardware designer: the fixed location of bits for the exponent and the fraction mean they can be decoded in parallel. With posits, there is a little serialization in having to determine the regime bits before the other bits can be decoded. There is a simple workaround for this in a processor design, similar to a trick used to speed the exception handling of floats: Some extra register bits can be attached to each value to save the need for extracting size information when decoding instructions.
The proposed system also lacks NaN and separate positive/negative infinities, so it wouldn’t be a drop-in replacement.
- Comment on Repeating of course 2 months ago:
I’ve managed to create a compression algorithm that reduces files down to a single bit. I call it “is this file ‘loss.png’?”.
It’s guaranteed 100% lossless with any input!
- Comment on Repeating of course 2 months ago:
Ah, Apache Commons: for those who felt Java’s standard library wasn’t bloated enough already.
(I kid, I kid, though it was always funny just how many basic features seemed to be missing from Java back in the day despite its massive bundled library, leading to seemingly every major project adding Commons as a dependency. Not as much as thing these days AFAIK)
- Comment on Repeating of course 2 months ago:
I feel obligated to post a link to this excellent (albeit incomplete) writeup of posits and unums, which can more accurately represent fractions in memory at the same (or lower) bit size as traditional floating point.
Said page also includes the single best slightly-above-entry-level explanation of how floating point works I’ve ever seen.
- Comment on 🐟💥 2 months ago:
Flashbacks to the Invincible train scene.
- Comment on At this rate, it will never end 2 months ago:
This explains waterfowl.
- Comment on This one's for the gardeners ;) 2 months ago:
- Comment on Be the lamp you wish to see... 2 months ago:
- Comment on Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog 2 months ago:
The flying is pretty great. I liked what I played of it, but I’ve been holding off on a full playthrough until they fix the terrible user interface (which is luckily one of their top priorities).
- Comment on Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog 2 months ago:
Admit it, you just like Soulmask because it lets you turn into Anubis (the Original Furry) on demand.
I’m onto you, Kolanaki!
- Comment on Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog 2 months ago:
Haven’t exploded their budget on a hiring spree
The big thing they did with the cash was start a publishing arm to help fund other indies. So far the biggest title to come from that is the pirate survival game Windrose.
Here’s hoping Pocketpair continue being as awesome as they’ve been up to this point.
- Comment on Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog 2 months ago:
I play co-op, and multiplayer has the unfortunate quirk that the game lets you pull base Pals you don’t own into your own Palbox and doesn’t show any indication of who the original owner is afterwards. Combine that with raid bosses, where you’re hurriedly swapping out Pals with fresh ones en masse as the boss defeats them, and I have no idea who owns half my Palbox. So I avoided condensing anything that wasn’t fresh out of the incubator.
- Comment on Palworld v1.0 - Official Release Changelog 2 months ago:
Reading the changelog, you may have gotten what you asked for.
