Ephera
@Ephera@lemmy.ml
- Comment on A Pivot To Indie won’t save us [AURAMBLES blog] 3 days ago:
Certainly some food for thought, but I feel like people saying indies will save us are saying that as consumers and a lot more selfishly. AAA is struggling to deliver interesting games and indies are killing it, so you play indie titles instead. Whether those indie titles are actually produced organically and whatnot is kind of secondary for that purpose. The mass layoffs in AAA are bad, but in the New York Times article, for example, they’re mainly seen as indicative of the business model faltering, which will naturally give more room for indies.
- Comment on After the catastrophe of Concord Sony is reportedly cancelling other projects including a God of War live service game 4 days ago:
It would certainly be weird, after their recent games were so story-driven. You can’t tell a good story, if you need to always keep the end open for possible expansions.
- Comment on After the catastrophe of Concord Sony is reportedly cancelling other projects including a God of War live service game 4 days ago:
Yeah, and they often launch with loads of systems where future content could be plugged in, but the actual content itself is typically bad or at the very least incomplete. The publishers try too hard to build a platform rather than a good game…
- Comment on After the catastrophe of Concord Sony is reportedly cancelling other projects including a God of War live service game 4 days ago:
Yeah, theoretically the exact model for monetization isn’t as important, but many publishers are hoping to get players to pay subscriptions indefinitely.
- Comment on Unusual Pollinators 4 days ago:
Original image:
Image - Comment on Microsoft lays off employees in security, experiences and devices, sales, and gaming — separate from performance cuts 4 days ago:
Fucking hell, man, with how many very publicly visible security problems they had last year, you’d think the stakeholders would be on board with doing security for a bit.
- Comment on Same 5 days ago:
There were a lot, back when 3D graphics became a thing in general, because companies felt like they’d get left behind, if they didn’t somehow make their games 3D.
But yeah, these days, I don’t think this happens much. 2D rarely translates well into 3D, because the whole gameplay works differently. And while 2.5D doesn’t have the same problem, it’s also a lot of effort for what’s essentially just a different art style.
- Comment on Private parking rules review prompted by £2,000 five-minute fine 1 week ago:
Here in Germany, 5 minutes of leaving your car would not count as “parking”. It’d still be in the realm of just “stopping” your car. If you walk away from your car like the defendant did, then it can be viewed differently, but in practice, it still means that no one’s mad enough to try to fine you in that time.
- Comment on ScIence 1 week ago:
If 10^27^ would be Hella, would 10^-27^ then be Hello? 🙃
- Comment on Why it redownloads files that are rendered in my app\browser? 1 week ago:
Yeah, sometimes I even then can’t download the picture, even though I was looking at it just then, because the server can apparently tell the difference and returns an error code instead.
- Comment on Potatoes ftw 1 week ago:
I mean, you say that, but I once had some carrots which had turned black on the outside and when I peeled them, they still looked and tasted like fresh carrots.
- Comment on Fallout creator asks why triple-A RPGs focus on violence, doesn't provide very hopeful answer 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I tried to create a non-violent game for a while in a genre that’s typically violent (roguelike) and so often, I’d play some existing roguelike and then have an idea, like for example, I could make the ice spell cover an area in the shape of a snowflake. Yeah, alright brain, what exactly is that ice spell for? Cooling the snacks?
And if you decide – fuck it, we’ll cool some snacks – a food-themed roguelike sounds nice and non-violent, then that leaves you with a ton of new questions. If the ice spell targets snacks, does that mean you’re defending against them? Why are you defending against snacks? Do they just make you fat? How do you reflect that in the gameplay?
And then you spend two days coming up with all kinds of ideas for making this work, until you realize it sounds like a fever dream and you have no idea, if it’d be any fun. - Comment on GRINDSET MINDSET 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I can understand that someone who’s into coding would also be nerdy enough to separately care about keyboard layouts, but truly, I would hardly benefit from faster typing speed, because my brain’s constantly rattling while I do that. If I finish typing early, I still won’t have finished thinking. And for the rare times, where there’s no thinking involved, chances are that you can copy-paste 90% of it and then have to edit select places. So, not really hugely beneficial to type faster either.
- Comment on GRINDSET MINDSET 2 weeks ago:
2022-01-02
Yeah, that checks out. This person would be gushing over ChatGPT instead, if it had already been released at that point. Because clearly, more words = more better. Doesn’t matter, that no one wants to read your 120 articles which all say the same, because you haven’t done any research in between.
- Comment on Infamous vs Prototype | 15 Years Later 2 weeks ago:
I could never get over how boring the gameplay of Infamous looked. Comparing it to a third-person shooter is pretty apt. Like, you’ve got these crazy lightning powers, but 90% of the time, you just use your hand buzzer to give folks a bit of a zap. Riveting.
- Comment on Why do games like Minecraft require a launcher? 3 weeks ago:
Luanti is kind of the obvious example to point to, with it being a community-developed engine for Minecraft-like games. But yeah, what @Azzu@lemm.ee said very much makes the difference. As opposed to Minecraft, Luanti has modding support built-in.
- Comment on Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, that frustrates me a lot, too. They almost had it right, that they need to go beyond realism to make truly good-looking games. But in practice, they say that only to show you the most boring-ass graphics known to humanity. I don’t need your pebbles to cast shadows. I can walk outside and find a pebble that casts shadows in a minute tops. Make the pebbles cast light instead, that could look cool. Or make them cast a basketball game. That’s at least something, I haven’t seen yet.
- Comment on Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good 3 weeks ago:
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
- Comment on Has Android's Material You dynamic color theming been implemented in other platforms? 3 weeks ago:
KDE has a built-in feature to change the accent color based on the wallpaper:
Image - Comment on How do we know the government doesn't just have a secret hardware backdoor in all our devices? 4 weeks ago:
Hmm, I just realized that “backdoors” in my previous comment had somewhat of a double-meaning. They do provide the NSA access to data that they have on their servers. In that sense, a backdoor exists, which is also what this PRISM article confirms.
But actually integrating vulnerabilities and making these available to the NSA is another shtick entirely. And I’m not finding anything in that article that says so (although I only read the parts that seemed relevant).
- Comment on How do we know the government doesn't just have a secret hardware backdoor in all our devices? 4 weeks ago:
I’m not aware of us knowing that they provide backdoors to the NSA. If US companies have data, then they’re legally obliged to make it available to the NSA (PATRIOT and CLOUD Act). The NSA may also separately develop backdoors (e.g. EternalBlue). But that the NSA coerces US companies to actively attack their customers, is news to me.
- Comment on Like a boss 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Why virtual desktops always have same background? 1 month ago:
On KDE, there’s actually a separate feature which provides essentially virtual desktops with changing wallpapers (and widgets and a few other things), which is called “Activities”. You can also then use multiple virtual desktops per Activity.
I think, that’s kind of the main reason: Many people use virtual desktops differently.
For some folks, they represent different larger topics, where the Activities feature would match very well.
For others, virtual desktops are more like a second monitor, so they just want to see different windows, nothing more. In fact, some desktop environments like GNOME, create and destroy virtual desktops per demand. They couldn’t really remember the wallpaper for those workspaces. - Comment on feral naming 1 month ago:
Armadillidae
Not to be confused with Armadillidiidae.
🙃
- Comment on feral naming 1 month ago:
Apparently, they’re not actually insects, but rather crustaceans.
- Comment on Binary search 1 month ago:
Thanks, I changed it. I wasn’t sure, what the correct English word is…
- Comment on Binary search 1 month ago:
You know, after posting that comment, I really doubted myself, if it really is binary search, because Wikipedia also tells me it needs to be a sorted array.
But yeah, I think that’s only relevant, if your method of checking whether it’s in one half or the other uses
>and<. As far as I can tell, so long as you can individually identify the fuses, a.k.a. they’re countable, then you can apply binary search. - Comment on Binary search 1 month ago:
Oh, well, you switch off half the fuses, then you go check the wire.
Let’s say the wire still has power on it, so now you know that none of the fuses in that half affected it (which you can turn back on now).Then you do the same thing again with the other half of the fuses, i.e. you switch off half of the fuses in that half and go check the wire.
Now, let’s say the wire is dead, so now you know that the fuse you want is in this quarter.So, then you flick off half of the fuses in that quarter and check the wire again, and so on.
With every step, you eliminate half of the remaining fuses, so for 60 fuses, you need at most 6 steps (which is the logarithm for base 2 of 60).
- Comment on Binary search 1 month ago:
My dad once told me that he had to find the fuse that corresponded to a particular wire and because we have around 60 fuses in our house, he had to flick one off, run down and check the wire, run back up, flick the next fuse off, and do that quite a lot of times.
In that moment, I got to explain binary search to him and he was genuinely interested. 🙃
- Comment on What's wrong with Bluesky App? 1 month ago:
For me, the biggest red flag is that they decided to create their own protocol when the Fediverse is well on its way with the ActivityPub protocol. They claimed, they decided against ActivityPub, because they expect to be able to come up with something technologically better.
I don’t doubt for a second that some of their techies might have wet dreams about that, but it wouldn’t get financed, if their management and investors didn’t see an angle for making money off of it.
Which is ultimately what this is. Yet another venture-capital-backed company trying to get enough users on board, to the point where network effects prevent the users from leaving, and then the investors will want their money back manifold.
If they open up the protocol too much, the network isn’t under their exclusive control anymore and they lose the ability to squeeze users for money, so I cannot see them following through with their promises of actually making it decentralized.
