drosophila
@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction 1 day 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 3 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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" 1 week 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"! 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 weeks ago:
When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:
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 4 weeks 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 5 weeks 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.
- Comment on My YouTube homepage after I watch one balatro video 1 month 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):
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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.
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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.
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- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 1 month 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.
- Comment on Anon experiences German humor 1 month ago:
In some cases you can replace a pun with another pun that works in the target language.
In other cases, where you’re translating a religious text, doing something for scholarly reasons, or otherwise think your audience would really like to know what’s going on in a text you have to add a translation note.
- Comment on Anon visits America 2 months ago:
I’ve never heard any European say this about American junk food even once.
About the only thing I think I’ve heard in regards to flavor is “sickeningly sweet” and “even stuff that’s not supposed to be sweet is sweet”.
- Comment on Enjoy this out-of-context conversation with my wife. 2 months ago:
Please relay the information about the 60s ghost anime.
Or at least give us it’s name.
- Comment on my ketchup ambitions have been ruined 2 months ago:
I honestly feel like if this wasn’t regulated ketchup would slowly be watered down until it was just weak tomato juice.
- Comment on Anon misfires 2 months ago:
- Comment on The European mind can't comprehend 3 months ago:
Who’s to say that the medical benefit of many friends or relatives visiting is worth less than a house.
Doctors and medical researchers are in a position to say what the effects of public policy are on public health. And they’re saying that car-centric urban design has a negative impact on it.
In general activities that have a negative impact on society should be discouraged, and certainly not subsidized so that they’re favored over the alternatives. There are many ways to make it easy to visit a hospital, not the least of which is simply allowing people to live in close proximity to one, which is something that has a positive impact on medical outcomes.
- Comment on The European mind can't comprehend 3 months ago:
There’s an opportunity cost associated with using land for parking, particularly in dense urban areas.
In many cases a parking spot uses more space than the person who parked there uses to do their job (if they work in a cubicle for example). But they also need to be able to park not just at their job, but at their home, at the store, at their doctor’s office, etc. In the US there can be as many as 8 parking spaces per car, which collectively take up one third of the urban area.
- Comment on The European mind can't comprehend 3 months ago:
This is the case for many things in the US, not just healthcare.
- Comment on Even better than a cart of apples 3 months ago:
- Comment on AND THEY DIDN'T STOP EATING 3 months ago:
One of the issues with cryonics in large animals is sufficiently saturating all of the tissues with cryoprotectants to prevent frostbite. Some have speculated that it might be possible to engineer an organism to produce it’s own cryoprotectant proteins inside all of its cells, as some arctic fish and insects do.
That wouldn’t help with getting even heat into all of the tissues for thawing though.
- Comment on 🍃 🐑 4 months ago:
The really interesting thing about costasiella kuroshimae is that its digestive system branches and goes up into all of those ‘leaves’, which is how the algae makes its way there to have its chloroplasts extracted.
- Comment on Womp womp 4 months ago:
So, I think the whole “well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!” trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although if executed correctly I think it can still be very good, even if i don’t really agree with the theme as applied to real life). But I also think you really have to consider where the “mad scientist” archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:
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To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.
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Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern ‘howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles’ mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.
There’s other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man’s vs god"s domain above, but there’s all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.
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- Comment on c o e x i s t 5 months ago:
Strangely enough I feel like that crucification isn’t much associated with the Romans. Even though the Romans were the ones who carried it out Judas gets almost 100% of the ire.
Even Jews are given more blame by antisemitic Christians. Like, no one is starting up a pogrom against Italians because their great great great grandpa might’ve been the guy who stabbed Jesus in the ribs.
- Comment on c o e x i s t 5 months ago:
When people think about Rome they usually imagine the roads and the aquaducts and not so much the crucifixions and the slavery.
I think it’s important to keep both aspects in mind.
- Comment on Pacific Drive | Drive Your Way Fall 2024 Update 6 months ago:
From watching the opening I didn’t like the writing of the dialogue.
- Comment on Go already 6 months ago:
But the fact that even just a single rail car holds 360 commuters, equivalent to 180 cars or more on the highway changes the math completely.
Absolutely. The fact that 3 million people pass through Shinjuku station every day is a testament to that.
If all of those people lived in a city in the US it would be the country’s third largest, behind NY and LA.(If we’re going by the entire urban area instead just within city limits it would be the 20th, just ahead of the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metropolitan statistical area.)
All in a single space that’s smaller than most highway interchanges.
And that’s not even using two-level train cars (which is where your figure for 360 people per train car comes from I think?).
