jaycifer

@jaycifer@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Firefox die for good if Google is forced to sell off Chrome?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if Google stopped paying Mozilla, the organization has enough in savings to operate for several years. That’s plenty of time to cut back on spending and find other revenue sources. My only concern would be that they cut back on Firefox development rather than what I would consider a side project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alien: Romulus is getting a VHS release⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s probably the format they watched when they were younger, which would be a major contributor to nostalgia. I still keep a VHS player and my parents’ old copies of the pre-special edition Star Wars movies along with Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Melts our frozen-solid hearts': Frostpunk 2 devs celebrate 350,000 copies sold—covering the production and marketing costs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe some mental mixup with Snowpiercer, which does take place on a train surrounded by snow?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Melts our frozen-solid hearts': Frostpunk 2 devs celebrate 350,000 copies sold—covering the production and marketing costs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.

  There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.

  And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”

  I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Melts our frozen-solid hearts': Frostpunk 2 devs celebrate 350,000 copies sold—covering the production and marketing costs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.

  I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.

  I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon goes to dinner with coworkers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you say so!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon goes to dinner with coworkers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “I guess I don’t know. Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.” With a look on his face that clearly shows confusion at why you spent two whole responses about something as insignificant (in his mind) as potatoes. Everyone else probably has similar looks.

  For small talk like that you get one response on the topic. If someone said I should order potatoes because I’m Irish I’d lean so far into it, adapt an obvious accent, and say “Oh I do loove me potatoes.” If I wanted to backhand him a little I’d tack on “Except during the famine when there were no potatoes. Those were daark days” to the first statement. There’s enough humor in the accent to cover the callout mass starvation he probably unwittingly referenced.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon rides a bike⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I started taking Kurzgesagt videos with a grain of salt a while ago, hence the “apparently.” Their explanation just fit NoName’s assertion pretty well. Never bad to make the possibility of being wrong explicit though!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon rides a bike⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a Kurzgesat video about this a couple weeks ago. Apparently if you don’t spend calories exercising/biking, your body will find other ways to burn it like increasing your immune system activity (which can have poor long-term effects). There’s an adjustment period when you do start exercising where energy is still spent on sedentary things and the actual exercise before the former is reduced to mostly match the latter.

  I have also read that regular exercise can lead to an increase of base metabolic rate by ~5% though, which is like an extra 100 calories per day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨if the total fertility rate drops and stays below global replacement rate, will humans disappear?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Let me spoil part of the Foundation series for you. In one book, the cast visits a planet where they encounter one person with psychic powers surrounded by robot servants. He reveals that the planet is evenly divided by I think 128 people like himself who want for nothing and live comfortably. They only reproduce asexually, and only in preparation for their own death or when another dies.

  What this illustrates that’s relevant for you is that yes, not hitting the replacement rate could lead to significant population decline, but only until people are comfortable enough and want to have kids or feel it is the best way to maintain their way of life (think farmers having kids to help on the farm).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Summer Sale - Top Deals⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a 3D first person game instead of a 2D isometric, and most of the differences stem from that. More manual building (they added blueprints but I don’t know how good they are), infinite resource sources which means setting up a mining outpost is permanent. Much less focus on fighting wildlife, though that is present.

  Overall, it’s a much more relaxing, slower paced game than Factorio. Both are good at different aspects of the same thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some excellent free games/total conversions that are worth playing the whole thing?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are several good total conversions for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. Star Trek Armada 3 is the most complete overhaul I’ve played for it. I’m a big fan of Halo spaceships and the Sins of the Prophets mod is the closest thing I’ve seen capture the asynchronous battle between UNSC and Covenant ships. There are others for Star Wars and Stargate that I hear are good, but I have not tried them.