justdaveisfine

@justdaveisfine@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you open up an unmanned store in the US and will it stay in business or close down?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on what’s being sold and where its at.

  People set up honor systems like these for plant seeds, books, wood logs, etc and they all seem to work alright.

  I couldn’t see it working well for anything easily resellable (with decent profit) as someone would likely exploit it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a place online where I can buy a US 50 cent piece for like a buck or two dollars? Trying to learn the coin rolling thing across the knuckles.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  (Assuming you’re in the US) Back in the day, banks used to have them, you could just walk in and exchange currency without a fee.

  That’s how I got a collection of $2 dollar bills.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Too old…⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a coworker who would easily pass as a teenager even though she was in her early ~30’s, so yeah, I could see why the doctor might have assumed that. Some people just carry that young look.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  With all these studio closures and layoffs, its hard to imagine what will be left of the industry here in a few years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨fucking douchebag firefighters⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The first picture has a tree growing out of concrete, then placed in a grass patch in the next picture so…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I will not be opening for Ed Sheeran⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The better question is why wouldn’t Ed Sheeran invite the Dairy King?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many older people talk to themselves in public?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Like narrating actions ("I’m buying these cookies") or carrying on conversations or ‘thinking out loud’ ("I wonder if it will rain today?") kind of stuff?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Happy 25th Birthday to the Nintendo GameCube!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember dishing through Twilight Princess in a weekend or two.

  … And then losing the memory card somehow. Which kind of ended my time with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Post and user deleted after finding out Ai was used⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah that’s the scene. I was definitely off but it seems this was the line I was thinking of:

  "In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it."

  Maybe its about time for another reread, it has been awhile.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Post and user deleted after finding out Ai was used⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d hate to say it like this, and I have an incredible amount of bias as someone who dabbles in indie game development, but allowing self-promotion posts tends to bring out some of the most hustle-culture indies there are. Even when contained to a weekly thread, it can get funky.

  Plus I like the general not-advertisement-heavy atmosphere so far.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Post and user deleted after finding out Ai was used⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m weirdly reminded of the neuromancer book where the protagonist remarks on a bartender who looks rough but doesn’t bodymod himself to look good. He says something like “When good looks are so cheap, there’s something beautiful about being ugly.”

  I probably butchered that quote but I can’t find my copy of the book so it is what it is lol.

  Anyways it stuck out as a profound thought and it definitely rings true now. It may not be pretty but its genuine and that’s the most important part of art.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You have to stop doing this.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Its been awhile since I’ve played this one, but as I recall she has two pokeballs so yeah, I think the intended joke is that she is stuffing them in her bikini top.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Post and user deleted after finding out Ai was used⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It probably was the dev.

  If I had to take a shot in the dark, they may have felt very insecure about their own art, started using AI, then made a post to basically say look how much ‘this person’ improved and their art is ‘good’ now, hoping to get a second look or praise.

  Which I get - Publishing art can be weirdly difficult and sometimes you get bad feedback or even no feedback at all, leading you to over-analyze your own work. AI is seen as (and sold as) an easy route to “professional” results.

  I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. If it wasn’t you, someone would have eventually pointed out the AI art at which point it would (probably) have to be addressed.

  If that dev still lurks here (and making assumptions that it was the dev), I hope they gain confidence in their own art and continue to work on games if that’s their passion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a good and easy to cook deep south southern food in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Lot of grocery stores sell the white gravy mix packets in the baking/spices section. Add in some chopped breakfast sausage and you got yourself a pretty decent gravy for the biscuits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many games in certain genres all so samey in the places they really should not be?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry I forgot to reply to this.

  Its hard to nail down specifics with general awful parts but I have a few notes on why some things get to be a little janky:

  • Many mechanics/systems in survival crafting games have to work in all scenarios. Because of this, you can’t (usually) be 100% certain its always going to happen as intended.

  …For example, let’s say you have a treasure chest, and when the player interacts with it, the game plays a fancy animation of the character opening and while the inventory screen fades in. But as these chests get placed around the world, you can’t guarantee they’ll always be reachable, at the right angle, or the player doing something dumb (like standing on it while opening it)

  Now those are all ‘solvable’ but it starts to become a ‘just optimize the production’ in Factorio style problem where you’re chasing edge cases. Even then, players will find new ways to break foolproof designs.

  The general solution is just ‘keep it simple’ where box pops open (or just makes a sound) and a UI pops up. Not great… And sometimes kind of sucks.

  • Secondly, many of these games are online/multiplayer. This normally shouldn’t be a huge deal but networking has a few quirks that tend to show up. For example, networking infamously doesn’t like replicated physics. Games like Rocket League are actual magic on how they figured out how to make that work.

  Anyways the end result is a lot of fairly static world objects, and when you do get physics, they tend to have a lot of potential jank involved if you’re not hosting the server.

  • Regarding UI, making a good UI is honestly a difficult and rare skillset. A lot of engines have some built-in tools (You most definitely have used an Unreal Engine Uniform Grid Panel at some point) that work out of the box but sometimes have quirks or design issues that crop up as games get more advanced.

  Making it work for gamepads and KB/M, readable on big screens as well as SteamDecks, and do background tasks like asking the server what my character’s inventory or whatever is tends to be a feat when it all works correctly.

  • Open world (which many of these games are) means a lot of content which means a lot of work for sometimes diminishing results. I think it was a developer for Destiny(?) who once said you might work on an area for a month only for the player to fly through it with a Sparrow in like, ~2 seconds.

  • A lot of survival crafting games tend to be early access. This is ‘fine’ but some very vocal players are ravenous and burn through years of content in a solid weekend and still want more. The Early access effect is easy to see in these games where some mechanics are not well thought out or abandoned in later updates because rather than reiterating on them, devs are pushed to move onto new content, so you end up with weirdo design decisions or new game directions or whatever.

  You also have devs who perceive something as more popular or more true to their vision or whatever and neglect certain aspects while focusing on others.

  • Basebuilding has quirks, and its name is navmeshes. AI has to navigate through buildings using a mapped out mesh, basically. When you handcraft a location for enemies, you can tell them to do specific things like jump handrails or step off this platform to fall behind this fenced area, etc. When players can freely build bases, you need the AI to account for a lot of ridiculous things the player might have done, like build massive dirt walls in Valheim, which causes the AI’s logic to stumble.

  This has a side effect too though as now your AI has to account for terrain/location/etc before considering to do things. (Unless you built two different AI logic sets for each enemy, which is oof) Such as, the player is in range, but is the player standing on something? Is the player crawling under a wall and stabbing at AI’s shins? What if the player is somewhere the AI can’t reach at all, do they run away or throw rocks or what?

  End result is sometimes you see AI doing funky/janky things in unintended cases.

  (There are more issues but this post has gotten a little too long as it is)

  All this being said, I agree with you, the genre has a lot of jank and it gets ridiculous sometimes. I have a joke saying that its a design law for all survival crafting games to have some serious game-breaking quirk, and so each new one that comes out, its not about if its flawless or not, its if you can handle whatever inevitable serious quirk it does have.

  I have played a lot of games in the genre and always hope one of them will eventually nail it but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I do not recommend: Marvel's Wolverine (Review) - Skill up⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oof that does look very hand-holdy.

  Definitely not a game for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many games in certain genres all so samey in the places they really should not be?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Extremely unlikely they used the literal same code unless it was from a template or asset pack.

  That’s also probably intentional because people tend to like the familiar ‘tropes’ and if you go out of your way to do it in a weird way, that design may be burned at the stake in the reviews/feedback.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I heard we posting art?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Iron Giant

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dean Takahashi⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel compelled to share a gaming goof of my own:

  Having come from Morrowind, I didn’t realize Oblivion had a fast travel system until WAY later in the game. I felt totally dumb for having missed that somehow.

  On the plus side, my athletics level became alarmingly high.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah that was it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I played a LOT of Project Eden on PS2. It was such a quirky (and buggy) game but I still have a lot of great memories playing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ace Combat 4 was one of the most legit games of all time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Buying new trends is a choice⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oblivions not 20 years old lol

  … Oh. Oh no.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think its unfortunate because there’s a lot of games that fall into that next ~15-25% that are decently good games (though sometimes flawed) but won’t make enough to let the developers survive a second game.

  That being said I don’t think there is a particularly easy solution, and to Valve’s credit, they have tried unique approaches to combat this, but it’s still a problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Easy Delivery Co. I'll just be a little car driving a kei truck around a mountain town.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Monster Hunter World.

  First thing I’d do is head directly to the canteen and get something served by those cat chefs, because that food looks insanely delicious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it just the norm now-a-days for grocery stores to have lots of stuff on the shelves that's past the best-by date?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm… I know a certain grocery store chain that got acquired by a bigger store a few years back, that’s located in the Midwest, and has been having a significant issue with leaving expired items on the shelves…

  But no I don’t think its normal. Its very likely margins getting thinner because everything and management or the owners trying to keep the numbers looking good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did Google discover public links of Claude chats?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Without looking it up, I’d somewhat presume they pulled those URLs from people’s metadata if they’re using the Chrome browser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We've All Been Here⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  She’s high and doesn’t want the cop to notice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Empathy: as essential as toilet paper⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re all just trying to get home from the lettuce eating competition 😔

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hill I will die on: Games are the opposite of fun, and I’d ban them for anyone over 12 | Emily Watkins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I semi-agree only in that those are some of the worst party games.

  Usually when someone says they don’t like boardgames, its because they’ve only ever played Monopoly , Scrabble, or Sorry which are kind of terrible to play. It seems like she falls into this category.