He likens Arkane’s approach to studios like Larian and FromSoftware: “Those are people that have been doing, over and over, the thing they know exactly how to do, until it hits super hard. So to me, that’s what Arkane had to do.”

Damn, what a concept: doing the same kind of game multiple times, iterating on the design to perfect it. Obviously Bethesda gets releasing the same game over and over again, but this idea of “improving” the design is so alien to them. Wouldn’t adding thousands of microtransactions be an improvement?

Because it got 7/10 average review scores and didn’t sell as well as GTA. Then GTA3 (and its immediate spin-offs and eventual sequels) came out and started breaking all time sales records. So retroactively, GTA 2 was “a mistake” for not being GTA 3 two years early.

But like the guy says, the point of the article even, is that you don’t create run away successes without experimenting on the formula to find what’s good, without “failures” like GTA 2 to learn from.

Found a few things:

A carved and polished table, shows color and cross section well.

A wiki for a minecraft clone that already has baobob wood.

Following another poster’s advice, here’s a cross section of one cut down.

In other depictions it often has little holes in it, which seems like a thing that happens to some baobob wood, otherwise it kind of just looks like medium color wood with some dark bands.

Stephanie Stirling has been beating the drum on fake “quality” modes that give you RT at the expense of everything else. Think it was this one but it might also have been this one.

I don’t know exactly how much code reuse Sawyer had going back then, but if you’ve ever played Transport Tycoon (or more likely the open source version around today, OpenTTD) then you know that the interface and graphics are extremely similar. So it’s not like he started from scratch each game with nothing but a hot spinning disc and a magnetized needle.

But yeah, the main reason to put up with all the modern framework bloat is the ever-ephemeral promise of being able to write your thing once and have it ported to run anywhere with minimal to no further effort.

2 on the outside, 8 on the inside, all day, every day

It’s because they ruined Linux! Damn Linux users!

Neon White was my suggestion as well. Ultrakill is fun but is going for a more Devil May Cry style game where score and style matter significantly.

Neon White i found a little confusing at first until I got the feel of it. Its a movement puzzle game, with some shooting. Precision and repetition are key to learning the levels and beating them quickly, and once you get into its groove, time flies by. For being a time-challenge game, I find it surprisingly relaxing and forgiving.

I’d wait to see if fans are still trying to port Starfield to new engines in 20 years before I start talking about my company’s “best” work.

I don’t know who really got that trend going. I’ve enjoyed up to hour-ish long videos on more or less anything, but a few years back the first truly excessively long video I remember is Whitelight’s 7 hour long overview/miniseries on Death Stranding. And to be fair, I did find that faster and more enjoyable than playing Death Stranding.

(Also I get why folks make them: more ads plus having that much watch time heavily biases the algorithm towards you so it’s more money overall. And the kind of person that watches 7 hour long reviews in the background (or while sleeping), aka me, certainly help weigh the scales for super long videos.)

But also, I kind of like when shorts are like a minute long or less so I can watch one when I’m like, on the shitter and not accidentally end up with a video essay. I mean 10 minutes used to be the limit of every youtube video! Will they introduce a new, even shorter format? Bring vines or blips back?

Alright, I split the differance, I think that should make everyone happy.

Can’t wait for 10 hour long reviews of Elden Ring, BUT VERTICALE AND LOOPS NOW!?!

I truly do not understand my fellow countryfolks’ minds. Why toilet paper, again?

A quick search can tell you what goods might be affected, and paper products don’t even make the list! https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/transportation/2024/10/01/strike-at-the-port-of-ny-and-nj-what-imports-are-affected/75468183007/

Imports into the Port of NY and NJ

• Furniture
• Appliances, machinery and parts
• Plastics
• Beverages, spirits and vinegar
• Electric machinery and parts
• Apparel and accessories, knit
• Rubber
• Vehicles and parts
• Iron and steel
• Toys, games, sports equipment

So as you’d expect: cars, furniture, electronics, fast fashion, some raw materials

In other words, very little that is essential or that you’ll miss in the next few months, but a lot of luxury things that cheap importers make a lot of money on.

Honestly, we’d be better off as a country if we permanently stopped importing a lot of this shit and went back to making it outselves.

Man, I’d love to play Alan Wake 2. Big Remedy fan; Control was my game of the year for two years. Be nice if they’d release it on a platform I’d buy it on.

The best written games are all indies now. Text and story heavy games are pretty common, with varying amounts of “game” to carry the story. Check out Citizen Sleeper, Disco Elysium, or Book of Hours.

Poor people move where it’s cheaper to live. It’s cheaper to live where risk is higher. This is how risk is systematically offloaded onto the lower class. We build and live in these dangerous places, and we suffer all the loss and damage from those risks. The owner class takes all the profits and value from those places while investing little to nothing in them (too risky!)

I guess assembler is sumerien then, only still written and understood? And cobol or fortran? Linear a and b?

My mother raises hens and a dozen birds can actually make so many eggs that our entire family has trouble using them all. A bird lays on average one egg a day, and pasture-raised eggs are so rich as to be almost unpalatable to eat directly.

I don’t think every farm needs to have some strict limit like that, but more numerous, smaller, more localized farms would be better for everyone in almost every way. Better environmentally, more humane to the birds, people get fresher and higher quality eggs, and more people are employed. Also more limited damage from diseases, droughts, and so on.

Our current system isnt just bad because “factories bad.” It’s bad because it’s heavily centralized and top-down controlled. This is much cheaper to operate and funnels money towards the owner much better, but is so much worse in every way that local farms are better.

We’re making millions of birds suffer and getting shittier, more expensive product because of it so less than a dozen people (the real bad eggs) can stay filthy rich.

Wow, hadn’t thought about that one in a long time. I thought it was an old Scott Hanselman blog and I was correct! I’ll have to reread it, been years now.

I’m not sure there’s much why to it exactly. I feel like a small fraction of people I’ve met in life were truly passionate and excited about the work they did. Most had some passion for an art, or a hobby, or for their kids very commonly, but people who really want to grow and master their craft are somewhat rare generally. Most folks just want to do well enough to keep their jobs and then go home to whatever they actually care about.

Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code “right”. The majority of programmers I’ve met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.