Flatfire
@Flatfire@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada 1 day ago:
I think I’d almost consider it the same as starting with nothing when they began the next phase of construction in 2002. The map then vs now demonstrates that, and mostly follows China’s industrial/modern expansion in urban environments in recent memory. I think it’s still difficult to comprehend what a massive shift they’ve had in urban construction since the mid-90s as they’ve become the economic center for trade and manifacturing in the last couple decades. The transit still can’t keep up with demand, even with a subway system so extensive. It’s also still a very car-centric urban environment and I imagine now faces many similar civil construction challenges as in North America. It’s a good part of why I’m curious to see how things shape up in the coming decades for them and how they overcome those challenges at a scale Canada hopefully never needs to contend with.
- Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada 1 day ago:
We have two LRT lines opening in short order. Both the eglinton crosstown and finch west. They’re also actively working to make all the Line 2 stations accessible by way of adding elevators where the designers in the 1960s saw no need for them. Believe it or not, they’re aware, but the TTC fights more than just a budget when trying to implement these things.
Besides NIMBYs, there’s the rapid expansion of the GTA to consider, which has led to either a redevelopment of land or a requirement for mass transit in places that were developed 20 years ago without consideration for it. As densification occurs, it is both more required, but more logistically complicated. The current municipal gov does genuinely seem interested in fixing this, but doing so is kind of a nightmare without the funding to buy property and redevelop entire civic centers. Add to the fact that the provincial government seems to wage its own war against changes to anything that would affect a car’s right of way and the downtown suddenly becomes this unchangeable monolith.
Then there’s the bonus factors of Bombardier, the supplier of basically every train for every LRT or Subway line in Canada, the fact that Toronto is actually a collection of smaller municipal regions with their own concerns and challenges, and that they’re also still trying to add ATC to all of Line 2 in order to replace the aging trains there. It becomes pretty clear that building out an entirely new transit system under the directive of your federal government with next to unlimited funding is probably a lot easier than reworking a 60 year old subway network that had vastly different aspirations than now.
China runs the benefit of uniform prioritization of these networks, in places that had no previous infrastructure to contend with. They aren’t currently splitting a budget between maintaining/retrofitting 60 year old subway lines, stations and cars. I’d be more interested in see if they were able to continue this kind of buildout in 30 years, or if they end up facing a lot of the same logistical challenges.
- Comment on Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game 1 week ago:
I think Deadlock is pretty up there. That said, it’s closer to Smite than it is a hero shooter. The community-driven character builds mean meta is pretty fluid and it has what I would describe as a very accessible MOBA-centered design. I don’t care for MOBAs much, but to say Valve isn’t innovating here would be disingenuous. I think my only problem with it is that it’s lacking something that makes the gameplay loop feel satisfying, but that may just be my bias against MOBAs talking.
- Comment on I put these 2 pics of Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker together, can someone who's more clever than I am come up with with some captions? 3 weeks ago:
This feels like it could be used in the same vein as the Vince McMahon increasing excitement meme but maybe a bit more sinister
- Comment on Hey PC game developers, please follow Stellar Blade as an example for PC optimization in the future, because it absolutely rocks 4 weeks ago:
Hardly. I’ve played enough dumpsterfire UE4 ports to know it’s no better if the devs don’t put the effort in.
- Comment on Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support 4 weeks ago:
Powershell’s
Get-FileHashdoes exactly this though. - Comment on Thanks Duo, I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about a coquettish green owl-unicorn 5 months ago:
Bunchie, is that you?
- Comment on Box Office: 'Sonic 3' Starts Strong, 'Mufasa: The Lion King' Misfires 6 months ago:
I had no idea there was a new Lion King movie in that awful hyperrealistic cg format. Why? Disney could straight up just put the original film back in theatres and make more money.
- Comment on As the Canada "tax holiday" starts, Walmart increased the price of an item by the amount I would have saved 7 months ago:
No, but Best Buy does. As does Canada Computers, Shoppers Drug Mart, Gamestop, etc. none of which are as bizzarely aggressive about nonsensical pricing schemes.
- Comment on make it make sense 8 months ago:
Oh don’t worry. They believe it’s man made, just not in the way you want.
- Comment on Anon is unpopular in high school 8 months ago:
Makes sense. I’ve always heard about it being taken a while before finishing highschool so I figured it was engrained in that curriculum.
- Comment on Anon is unpopular in high school 8 months ago:
Wild. We just have pre-requisite courses that typically qualify you for University programs. You overall grades matter, but there’s nothing like an SAT
- Comment on Anon is unpopular in high school 8 months ago:
Schools in the US have tests on Saturdays? We don’t really have an equivalent to SATs here in Canada, but I figured it was just a summary exam or something you took like anything else.
- Comment on Heroic Games Launcher v2.15 has expanded GOG support, EA games from Epic Store support 11 months ago:
GOG, basically. Which feels a bit ironic given Heroic covers GOG
- Comment on The Insidious World of Fake Mobile Game Ads 1 year ago:
Depending on the developer, and the scale of their game, these things can also be incredible cheap to produce too. If your gameplay/monetary loop is something designed to arbitrarily force a player to wait to accomplish something or otherwise spend money, then you can drastically reduce the amount of content that needs to be added as long as you have an adequate base.
Even if you spend money, loot box mechanics and randomized stats can push players to continue to spend because while they got an item, they didn’t get the perfect item. Base builders, team combat titles and character based games are very, very effective at this.
For developers like the one behind Evony, they can be a lot cheaper because that game, and a hundreds like it have existed all the way back as far as farmville and earlier. They just got better at the monetization loop over time.
- Comment on The worst pick-up line I've ever gotten 1 year ago:
Similarly, if you’re born at the tail end of Millenial/start of Gen Z, then you still grew up with a collage of 90s and 00s culture and inconography, offsetting the definitions the groups typically gain over time. Some Gen Z grew up into adolescence without really feeling the advent of the modern internet or social media. The end of that range never knew a world without it.
Generations are useful statistical groupings, but don’t represent individual experiences or influences, leading to disparity or outliers that feel excluded from their “peers” so to speak. I’d say I probably share more experiences with Gen Z, but a lot of the cultural aspects of my childhood are closely linked to later Millenial ones. There’s a gradient, not a cutoff.
- Comment on LPCAMM2 upgradeable RAM for laptops sounds awesome 1 year ago:
While true, I think buying into a proprietary memory format that hasn’t been formally made an open standard is something you have to accept some risk on. CAMM is cool as hell, but it never made it this far.