drosophila

@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can now search for Steam games by adjustable difficulty, mouse-only options and other accessibility tags⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  An FoV slider tag might be a good addition to the camera comfort section; I’ve heard many people say that narrow FoVs can make them motion sick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what is north?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It should probably say, “off the Antarctic coast”, or even “X kilometers off the Antarctic coast”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  How hard is it to just say “I don’t like that scent”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazing.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The definition of jank is that it at least sorta works.

  If it doesn’t its not jank its just broken.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To join Facebook these days, one must record a video selfie⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing to understand about large organizations is that appearances matter a lot and the people working in them have to look busy. This is well known phenomenon among low level employees but it applies to managers and even executives too (who have to put on a show that they’re increasing shareholder value and that their company is special somehow).

  So, why do advertisers care if someone says “fuck” but not about someone whose spewing pseudointellectual misogynistic drivel? Because there’s someone whose job description is “brand value” and if they’re not upset about something then they don’t look busy. The amount of “fucks” per minute is a really simple metric that (now that speech recognition is as good as it is) is really east to measure. In other words its a straightforward way to look busy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Gooner⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Play Fallen Aces if you want to experience a gooner shooter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Skyrim-style open world RPG Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon releases out of early access today⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Its interesting to me that there are so many high budget open world games that fall within the assassin’s creed / far cry / GTA triangle and yet it seems like nobody tried to copy the Bethesda open world formula given the enormous popularity of Skyrim.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨they come⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, thermal mass only serves to even out fluctuations in temperature. If the outside environment swings between hot and cold then a building with high thermal mass will tend to have a temperature in the middle of those two extremes. Like how a heavier ship is tossed about on the waves much less than a small boat.

  But if a place is consistently hot or cold for a long time thermal mass doesn’t really do anything. At most you can use it as a battery, so you can, for example, run a heat pump while electricity is the cheapest and use the thermal mass to maintain the temperature you established over the costly period.

  So many people think that its a substitute for insulation though, which slows down the rate of heat transfer in or out, and does actually let you use less energy to maintain a given temperature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Comfy cozy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  TBH, I think there’s something wrong with Americans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In Fallout 3 you can kill the entire BoS faction (minus the essential NPCs, that go unconscious), wait a day, and they’ll be your best pal again.

  In Starfield there is the exact same morality system, with lawmen who will attack you if you are evil and some random faction that will attack you because “we hate goody two shoes”, but you are shoehorned into being Jesus at the end of the game with the same issue of the ‘good’ faction having to mandatorily become non hostile to make the final quest work.

  The way people feel about Starfield is the way I feel about every Bethesda game since Morrowind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AMERICAN POPE LETS GO⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the cannibalism tips.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is your favorite indie game?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The monsters in REPO are worse somehow.

  Not sure if its because its relatively easier to stun/kill them or of its because their mechanics are lacking in some way compared to lethal company’s, but I feel as if they don’t have the same sauce.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does a larger MRI produce more data than a smaller one (same data density over a larger volume), or is it the same resolution spread out over a larger space?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm jealous⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There is a religion called Jainism that actually tries to avoid harming even tiny insects and plants. As such [they avoid eating things like root vegetables that require the entire plant to be killed in order to harvest them.

  Interestingly they are not necessarily against drinking milk, as milking an animal is viewed similarly to harvesting a fruit. Though its my understanding that they may still object to industrial milk production.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨100% all natural hand-drawn comic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Modern day chemists have succeeded where alchemists failed by finally isolating phlogiston.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon critiques humanity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A group of fit humans who know what they’re doing can kill any animal on earth with sharp sticks.

  This includes things like whales and woolly mammoths, which we hunted to near extinction or complete extinction using pointy sticks. Keep in mind that these animals were not only thousands of times stronger than a human, but the environments they lived in were also completely alien to the one in which we evolved. The ocean and the taiga can kill an unprepared human in just a few minutes simply by them existing in it, while the native animals are perfectly adapted to live there.

  And despite all that we went onto their home turf and killed them all with pointy sticks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.

  This gave me conniptions when playing Control. I couldn’t just stop and look at the environments, which clearly had a lot of work put into them, or listen to the ambient sounds, for more than minute without the getting a loud “BRRRR” alarm in my ear and having a full screen text popup that says “BOARD ALERT: HISS COMMANDOS IN WASTE PROCESSING”.

  This was compounded by the whole ‘randomly spawn in some random group of enemies at a random point every time you enter a room’ design of the game. That’s bad enough for other reasons, but those two things together gave the impression that the game designers were terrified of the player having 10 seconds to sit there and have a thought enter their brain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games can no longer use virtual currencies to disguise the price of in-game purchases in the European Union⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If anything gaming culture has regressed, at least in this aspect.

  Remember when the $2.50 Oblivion horse armor DLC was considered to be a ridiculous?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they’re both better and worse.

  In the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s AAA games were becoming increasingly hollowed out husks, with dumbed dumbed down paint-by-numbers gameplay and tons of QTEs. And its not like their narratives or art direction were any good either (it being the brown piss filter era). In the same time period we saw the rise of predatory practices like day one DLCs and preorder bonuses.

  In more recent times I think we’ve actually seen a reversal of the gameplay hollowing out trend, and an improvement in art direction. However with the rise of lootboxes, trading, and gatcha, monetization schemes are more predatory than they’ve ever been (though these are mostly concentrated in multiplayer games). Its also really common now for games to release in an completely broken and unplayable state.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Least extreme biophysics phd⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.

  They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn’t, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.

  It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deep Rock Galactic roguelike dev says innovation for innovation's sake is too expensive to survive: "We're a studio of 50 people with bills to pay"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly “it’s this game but with that.” could be a pretty good way to innovate unless you’re totally phoning it in IMO.

  Metroid was created when people at Nintendo wanted to combine the skill-based platforming of Super Mario Bros with the exploration of a Zelda game. That ended up being one of the two founding games in the Castlevania genre.

  System Shock was created by people who wanted to make a game with the same “emergent gameplay systems as a puzzle/playground” aspect of dungeon crawling RPGs like Ultima, but in a SciFi rather than fantasy setting. What we ended up with was something that combined fast paced shooter gameplay and a tight narrative presentation on the one hand, with letting the player make their own solutions to levels by manipulating open-ended gameplay systems on the other. This is very similar to the situation with metroid IMO, in how it tried to combine two very differnt styles of gameplay. Today we have an entire genre of games inspired by System Shock called immersive sims (though its more of a design ethos than a genre IMO).

  The famous level design and exploration of Dark Souls was inspired by the 3D Zelda games, and while I don’t have a source for this its hard for me to believe that the lock-on mechanics and basic idea for the movement weren’t at least a little inspired by Zelda too. Or, in other words, Dark Souls is basically a 3D Zelda game but with the tone and difficulty of their earlier King’s Field series.

  Now, I don’t mean to imply that combing two good things is a guaranteed way to get something good. Or even that, if you do hit upon a good combination, that that’s the only thing you need to put into your work. The games I’ve just talked about are all absolute classics and obviously a lot went into that. For example, the genesis of the iconic multiplayer aspect of Fromsoft’s games came about during the development of Demon’s Souls, when Miyazaki was trying to drive up hill in a bad snow storm. There was a line of cars, and when one began to spin it’s tires then ones behind it would intentionly push on it to help it up. This all happened without the drivers being able to talk to each other, and, seeing this, Miyazaki wondered what became of the last car in the line, but knew he would never get an answer since he would never see these people again. It was this experience that inspired the creation of phantoms.

  However, what I am trying to say is that taking something you like and understanding what makes it tick, then making it work in a new context, can end up creating something that then seems wildly innovative in that context.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You better say "Thank You"!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  …harvard.edu/…/high-protein-foods-the-best-protei…

  Seitan is also very high in protein, containing 75g of protein per 100g compared to 10g per 100g for scrambled eggs (although its not a ‘complete’ protein, so it should be balanced out with other sources).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trust your training⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, that’s the word that everyone uses for the large generating stations that create power on a large scale like a manufacturing plant creates goods on a large scale.

  Its rare for us to have “power houses” now, and when we do no one calls them that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trust your training⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s interesting to me about that phrase is that no one uses the word “powerhouse” for anything else any more, except maybe to call something powerful.

  Since it’s not the 1920s any more and we have an electrical grid and centralized power generation. We still sometimes do use temporary off-grid generators, but we no longer have any need for a dedicated word that means “building or shed that we keep our generators in”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anti-acknowlegements⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t understand the “computer girl” one, did the technician think that her being a woman meant she was doing computer science instead of physics?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pokémon games have become consistently ugly, and it's alright to wish they weren't⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:

  Image

  Or like this.

  So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.

  To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird. If a character is a low rez blocky mass representing a person it doesn’t look that weird if they teleport into a car, but if they’re nearly photorealistic you suddenly need a highly detailed animation of them opening the car door and climbing inside, one for each size and shape of car that exists. You also need a system that can smoothly transition the character from standing there to playing that “entering car” animation without it jerking or looking weird. And you need to tweak their pathfinding to make sure the way the character walks up to the car looks natural, so they don’t approach from an odd angle that would demand the aforementioned system rotate them in an unnatural way to get them lined up.

  Now multiply all those concerns with everything a character needs to interact with in however many gameplay sequences or environments they exist in. Instead of just creating some level geometry and plopping down some NPC entities now making a level is an entire ordeal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Algorithm⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently that’s (quasi polynomial time)[quora.com/Is-O-n-log-n-polynomial-or-exponential], which grows faster than polynomial but not quite as fast as exponential.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xenon⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t listen to the people who say it works by displacing oxygen. It would never be used as a general anesthetic if that was the mechanism of action.

  Xenon has been used as a general anesthetic, but it is more expensive than conventional anesthetics.

  Xenon is a high-affinity glycine-site NMDA receptor antagonist.[155] However, xenon is different from certain other NMDA receptor antagonists in that it is not neurotoxic and it inhibits the neurotoxicity of ketamine and nitrous oxide (N2O), while actually producing neuroprotective effects.[156][157] Unlike ketamine and nitrous oxide, xenon does not stimulate a dopamine efflux in the nucleus accumbens.[158]

  Xenon has a minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of 72% at age 40, making it 44% more potent than N2O as an anesthetic.[164] Thus, it can be used with oxygen in concentrations that have a lower risk of hypoxia.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My YouTube homepage after I watch one balatro video⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there’s a sort of perfect storm that can happen. Suppose there are two types of YouTube users (I think there are other types too, but for the sake of this discussion we’ll just consider these two groups):

  • Type A watches a lot of niche content of which there’s not a lot on YouTube. The channels they’re subscribed to might only upload once a month to once a year or less.

  • Type B tends to watch one kind of content, of which there’s hundreds of hours of it from hundreds of different channels. And they tend to watch a lot of it.

  If a person from group A happens to click on a video that people from group B tend to watch that person’s homepage will then be flooded with more of that type of video, blocking out all of the stuff they’d normally be interested in.

  IMO YouTube’s algorithm has vacillated wildly over the years in terms of quality. At one point in time if you were a type A user it didn’t know what to do with you at all, and your homepage would consist exclusively of live streams with 3 viewers and family guy funny moments compilation #39.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At to end of the day it comes down to this:

  Is it cheaper to store steel stock in a warehouse or terrawatt-hours of electricity.

  Is it cheaper to perform maintainance on 2 or 3x the number of smelters or is it cheaper to maintain millions of battery or pumped hydro facilities?

  I’m sure production companies would love it if governments or electrical companies bore the costs of evening out fluctuations in production, just like I’m sure farmers would love it if money got teleported into their bank account for free and they never had to worry about growing seasons. But I’m not sure that’s the best situation for society as a whole.