squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on Anon conserves power 1 day ago:
But there was no switcharoo
- Comment on I am two of them 1 day ago:
I hope you didn’t take that as being mean, that’s not what I wanted to be here.
If you spend 10+ years with an asexual partner, anything that could provide a chance of sex starts to look appealing.
- Comment on I am two of them 1 day ago:
Seems like your sexuality is “sexual”. You just want to have any action, but socially you have the chance for none.
- Comment on Carnivory in Plants 1 day ago:
Is it vegan if you eat carnivorous plants?
- Comment on Hytale, once touted as the Minecraft killer, is ceasing development 2 days ago:
“Privacy”
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 3 days ago:
Same with Minecraft. Minecraft looks like crap, and improving the lighting, shadows and so on just shows that off even more.
Minecraft is a game that’s deliberately not about the looks.
- Comment on Republican Senator callously says 'biblically, we are supposed to work' to millions set to lose health care 3 days ago:
Yes, these politicians should be redacted.
- Comment on Republican Senator callously says 'biblically, we are supposed to work' to millions set to lose health care 3 days ago:
That’s a different bible with a different title. It’s really close, so maybe that’s why they confuse it. But that testament they are quoting from is actually called “Mein Kampf”.
- Comment on I'm not okay. 4 days ago:
I can’t remember when I last saw fireflies. They used to be quite common 25 years ago when I was a kid. Damn, time flies and I’m getting old. And fire apparently doesn’t fly any more.
- Comment on [Satisfactory] 222 hours in, I have built a factory that makes 20 heavy modular frames per minute. (more pictures and details in description) 4 days ago:
Never had Eternity lag before. Impressive.
- Comment on [Satisfactory] 222 hours in, I have built a factory that makes 20 heavy modular frames per minute. (more pictures and details in description) 4 days ago:
That’s a game I’d love to play, but right now I still have a semblance of a life left and I’m not sure I want to risk that.
- Comment on Make dinosaurs weirder 6 days ago:
Roughly 30% of published, peer-reviewed scientific studies are estimated to be not reproducible. Because nobody takes peer reviews seriously and everyone is just rewarded for publishing, no matter how much of it is garbage.
Remember the “chocolate helps you lose weight” study that went through every stupid newspaper? It was obvious garbage, employing p-hacking, using a fake researcher’s name, using a made-up university institute. And yet it went through peer review without issue, was published in a journal and was picked up by every newspaper under the sun.
Then the author stepped forward and said he only created this fake study to show how easy it is to publish a garbage paper. The thing he didn’t expect was that nobody cared. Nobody printed anything about him retracting his own obviously fake study. No consequences at all were taken to his finding.
Because everyone is incentivized to publish every piece of toilet paper they can find, and nobody cares about the quality.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 6 days ago:
The huge majority of indie games never make any money at all. This link is a little older, but it claims that 50% of indie games on steam never make more than $4000, only 25% ever make more than $26 000 and only 14% cross the $100k mark.
Considering the cost of developers, that’s about 1-2 man years for the $100k mark, and then there’s only a 14% chance of even recouping that.
Passion projects work out because the people making them don’t value their time as work time, don’t make a salary from it, and even then in the huge majority of cases, it doesn’t work out financially.
Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.
This statement holds true for pretty much every other corporation. Imagine owning a huge farm and not setting aside a few farm hands to grow old artisan vegetables. Imagine owning a supermarket chain and not setting aside a few shops for exotic sweets from Central Africa. Imagine owning a fast food chain and not setting aside a few restaurants for artisan burger variations.
Yes, every corporation could afford to do stuff like that, but they aren’t there to advance humanity by investing in arts and crafts, but for making every last drop of money they can. And yes, there’s much to criticise about this goal, but making little indie passion projects doesn’t work well with corporations.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 6 days ago:
So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games.
That only happened in the 2010s. That’s when the Ubisoft formula really took off. Assassin’s Creed 1 was only released in 2007, Far Cry 2 in 2008 (FC1 was a quite different game). GTA also only started to get imitated in the 2010s.
Open World in that sense (non-scripted encounters that can be approached from many different angles, with a “living” world) only became a thing in the late 2000s, precisely because of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2.
I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.
While I do get your point about hand-crafted deterministic enemy placement, it’s just two different kinds of approaches that work for different players.
When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct? While some players love or even need punishing difficulty levels, others play for other reasons. (Maybe check out the Bartle taxonomy of player types. It’s a bit outdated, but it shows some of these different reasons quite well.) If you want to just kick back and relax after a hard day of work, punishing difficulty might not be the right thing. Some players want to have to learn (or even memorize) levels/bosses/encounters and repeat them repeatedly until they know exactly which button to press when, and that’s fine. For others that’s just tedious busywork, everyone’s different. I quite enjoyed Far Cry 2 and its random encounters and having to adapt to different scenarios all the time.
I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.
Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.
To get back to the original point:
20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.
That was in the 2010s, not in the 2000s. In the 90s, game development was pretty much completely low-budget, with games rarely having more than 5 programmers on staff, and maybe 5-10 content creators. In the 2000s games started getting bigger, but the studios were still led by game developers, not by finance dudes. Budgets were still not nearly where they are today. Assassins Creed 1, for example, had a budget of $20mio. Compare that to e.g. the $175mio that AC Valhalla cost to make. And AC1 was comparatively expensive back then.
It was only in the 2010s when finance really got into gaming, budgets ballooned and risks were lowered to nothing.
- Comment on What the fuck 6 days ago:
It’s an old, outdated joke, that wasn’t funny 17 years ago and hasn’t gotten any better in the time since.
You have to be pretty brain dead to think that repeating the same lame joke for 17 years would make it any better.
- Comment on Make dinosaurs weirder 6 days ago:
Tbh, these artist renditions are almost completely made up. They are made up, because the press won’t print a “We found a piece of bone shrapnel and we guess it might belong to a dinosaur”, but they totally will print a nice image of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, no matter if it’s truthful or just purely made up.
Science is hard and getting proper science published in regular non-scientific press is even harder, unless you make crap up.
That’s why the fake “chocolate helps you loose weight” study made it into every newspaper front page in existence, while the reveal by the author that the study was faked was completely not covered at all. (He did that to expose how easy it is to get fake science published. He just didn’t expect how little anyone in media cared whether the science published is actually science.)
Real science is hard. Fake science is easy. Debunks and negative peer reviews are just not published. Hence, there’s a huge amount of garbage science floating around and hardly anyone disputes it. Because of blind, unquestioning, religious faith in science.
- Comment on Make dinosaurs weirder 6 days ago:
There’s a website (can’t be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It’s ridiculous.
That’s why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.
Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.
At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.
- Comment on What the fuck 6 days ago:
Loss is the lamest, most boring joke around. Anyone still posting loss memes deserves an “ok boomer” by now.
- Comment on What the fuck 6 days ago:
Loss must be the lamest meme around. It wasn’t great in the beginning and it only went downhill from there.
Anyone still posting loss jokes deserves an “OK boomer” by now.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
I think your perception might be 10 years off.
Assassins Creed 1 came out in 2007, less than 20 years ago. It was mindbogglingly fresh and innovative back then. An open world where you can’t just run anywhere you want, but also climb anywhere? And your character dynamically climbed up walls, finding places to hold onto everywhere? That was amazing back then. It was the first game that even attempted anything like that, and it was really, really good. AC only became lame when they started doing the same over and over again with little change.
Similar story with Far Cry. FC1 came out in 2004, only FC2 was also released in that decade (2008). Both FC1 and FC2 were doing something new, fresh and genre-defining. Looking back from now, yes, these games look like everything else that followed it, but because these games defined it.
But in this decade we saw a lot of other genre-defining games, like Warcraft 3 (2002/2003), WoW (2004), KOTOR (2003), Bioshock (2007), Crysis (2007), Fable (2004), Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), Portal (2007) and also a lot of AAA flops that happened due to too much experimentation and shooting for the stars, like Spore (2008).
And most of the games I listed above don’t have a piss filter.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
Less so though.
Yes, being “safe” means you won’t make the next Minecraft, where a hobby budget turns into the best selling game of all time. But it also means that the people who buy every instalment of Fifa or Assassin’s Creed will also buy it.
These popular franchises almost always turn a calculable profit as long as they don’t experiment and do something new that bombs.
As sad as it is, it actually does work out.
That’s why we gamers shouldn’t trust on AAA titles bringing something great to the market. If you want to play a game like you watch linear TV (plonk down on the couch/in front of the PC and to whatever to relax and waste time), then AAA is great. If you want to play something new, something exciting, something that you haven’t played before, then go with lower-budget titles.
AAA is the McDonalds of games. You don’t go to McDonalds for the freaky hand-crafted vegan fusion kitchen bacon burger with crazy Korean curry mayo and caramelized lettuce.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
20 years ago AAA games could still experiment, but that was because back then AAA games had about the same budget as big indie games now.
You just can’t gamble if you have 10k employees and hundreds of millions riding on it.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
This. And none of these games with their totally predictable normie plots get any shit for that, let alone anything major.
And Watch dogs 1 was such a terrible game, it would deserve getting major shit.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
This is spot on.
In 2013 I was much younger and believed ahit I read, so I was swept up in the “Sarkessian wants to destroy games” crap (as if she could and/or mattered enough to actually affect change in any way).
A few years ago I looked up her videos (cudos to her that she still kept them online) and I was honestly almost disappointed in how bland and obviously true her points were. Sure, her research wasn’t perfect and she could have presented them a bit better, but what these videos deserved would have been mostly bored acknowledgement. Similar to TLOU2. It wasn’t a super exciting game. The story wasn’t great but also not terrible. The characters were adequately interesting for the most part. The gameplay was again not great but ok, and certainly not worse than part 1.
Could it have been better? Sure, no question. But it also didn’t nearly deserve the hate it got.
Same with many other similar media, like e.g. the Ghostbusters remake or Twilight.
But what happened there was that people got seriously offended by these games/shows/movies and then made it their mission to destroy it. And that’s ridiculous and pathetic, but it happens all the time.
- Comment on Hertz, showing the difference between science and engineering 1 week ago:
It’s a broadband bang that can be heard across the whole spectrum. It becomes audible when listening to radio broadcasts.
Regular radio transmissions are comparatively narrow band, allowing lots of simultaneous transmissions in the same airspace, each on its own frequency. The spark gap transistor is very wide band, so it basically sounds as if you are sending a bang sound across all radio frequencies at the same time.
It wouldn’t destroy radio equipment, but the radio transmissions. It’s basically as if you’d use a radio jammer as a morse code transmitter.
- Comment on Hertz, showing the difference between science and engineering 1 week ago:
Pretty much the first type of commercially viable radio transmitter was the spark-gap transmitter (“Knallfunkensender” in German). It worked by charging up some capacitors to up to 100kV and then letting them spark. This spark sent a massive banging noise on the whole radio spectrum, which could then be turned into an audible noise using a very simple receiver. That was then used to send morse codes (or similar encodings).
They went into service around 1900, and by 1920 it was illegal to use these because they would disrupt any and all other radio transmissions in the area with a massive loud bang.
- Comment on Hertz, showing the difference between science and engineering 1 week ago:
This.
There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it’s really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.
For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn’t be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn’t fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there’s hardly a point).
So when looking at the technology in an early state, it’s really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.
- Comment on Why do people like Mario Kart? 1 week ago:
- People who don’t play games because they are too grown-up to have fun aren’t grown-up but sad.
- Catch-up mechanics even the playing field, so that people of different skill levels can have fun together.
- Comment on Blurble 1 week ago:
590-620nm. Identical to orange.
The difference between brown and orange is the brightness level, and since the eyes have an automatic brightness adjustment, brightness levels only appear in context.
Light becomes a darker variant if there’s brighter light around and vice versa. Shine brown/orange light into a dark room, and it will appear orange. Shine the same light into a brighter context, and it will be brown.
It’s exactly the same thing as e.g. dark blue or light blue. Both share the exact same wavelength, and their brightness becomes apparent in context.
If you’ve ever been to a cinema and you saw anything brown or orange on screen, you have seen the effect. If you have ever seen a dim conventional light bulb in a bright room, you have seen it too.
Brown has just as much a wave length as orange, because it’s the same color.