To the people who come into point-of-view threads like this one and downvote what other people took the time to share, how about describing your own experiences instead? It would make Lemmy a nicer place to be, and might even add something of value to the discussion.
As with nearly everything in astronomic optics, it’s named after people associated with its creation. Robert Jones and Thomas Bird are the two in this case. Here’s a thread on Cloudy nights with good info.
my fav from that thread (and i propose to make this a copy pasta):
My entire gripe around these scopes is the instruments being offered today, the sub-aperture lens arrangement is not doing any corrections. The lens is a straight up Barlow, nothing more.
If you look at the Bird-Jones design, the design is very specific in the design of both the primary & correcting lens. This means that both elements need to be not only matched but also well manufactured in order to work as designed. When you then look at the few true Bird-Jones instruments that were manufactured, such as the Tasco 8V (which was manufactured by Vixen), the Celestron G8-N and one other (escapes my mind right now but I’ll add it when I remember), these scopes were not cheap but pushing flagship status for these brands & supplied with swish mounts. And none of these scopes can be readily collimated by the end user as the alignment of the optics is so precise it is done in-factory. The 8V alone still maintains almost cult status.
The Bird-Jones design is not without its own shortcomings. It is not perfect without aberration. It is important to remember the ideas behind its design, to provide a short tube OTA option with what was able to be readily manufactured at the time, that being good spherical mirrors.
What is made today is a far cry from what a Bird-Jones offers performance wise. Made cheap with a poor spherical primary & that they are totally collimateable by the end user shows these are not a precision scope. Add to this that not a single Bird-Jones instrument is to be found anywhere else besides these cheap things. Doesn’t this say something?
These cheap instruments, really all cheap instruments are a double edge sword. They make astro more accessible, yes, but their poor quality ends up killing off more people’s enthusiasm for astro than firing it up. Add to this that for many novices if the mount is not a complicated equatorial one then it isn’t an astronomical instrument, & the difficult manner of using a wobble-tron mount & tripod with the mental gymnastics required just too much for most people who buy these and just give up way too soon.
Yes, there will be a few people who will be able to make these scopes work, being all they can afford, and all power to them. I will support such persons. But these are very few compared to the overwhelming number of people who just give up after the poor experience they get from these instruments. Too them astro is just all too hard, and mainly because of a poor instrument.
Call these cheap instruments what they are, a barlowed Newtonian.
Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They’d consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren’t played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
That kinda explains the dissciation gamers and game makers (studio,publisher etc ) have with each other today. And the publishers continuus trying at live service games. I imagine similar thing is happening with consoles. I personaly knew it was a thing with FIFA but i never knew it was so widespread ( fifa and sports game are kinda special or at least i thought they were ). Maybe those pepole bought one game a year additionaly sometimes if it was aired often enough as ad on tv.
That actually explains so much shit we see today , like online subcsriptions on PlayStation and xbox. If the majority ( or large enough minority ) will play one game only making them pay for online is a goddam goldmine. F* i would probably do it if was ceo of PlayStation and actually knew the stats ( and Obviusly if they were favorable ).
20 years ago, we paid for online because it was better than what you got for free on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Now an online subscription is probably one of several reasons that people are moving to PC.
I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
A lot of those are going to be alts people made to evade game/server bans or smurf.
I may or may not have made 10 accounts that only had Garry’s Mod on them circa 2010.
That may be true, but you can also see, for instance, that there are a ton of Chinese users who only play Dota 2 or only play PUBG. You’ll see the percentage of Simplified Chinese users ebb and flow with a similar cadence to just those two games.
Simple premise is basically Minesweeper, but all the puzzles are handcrafted with some neat designs and concepts that will stretch your puzzle solving to the limit. Also importantly, no guessing required to solve and it’s dirt cheap for the amount of hours of puzzles you get!
No guessing is required to solve any puzzle either, despite some variants seeming completely impossible.
Fun fact: There’s an achievement for stumbling across a level with a conpletely empty starting board, without any spaces being revealed to be mines or non-mines. Yes, that can be solved without guessing.
Fun Fact 2: I’d argue there are more than 14 variants.
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
I know the “hold a button to lock-on to an enemy” was in Mega Man Legends, but in the first game you had to stand still for the lock to work. On MML2, you could lock and run around freely, but that game came after OoT
The fact they used Navi to do the targeting really demonstrates how the devs felt they needed to explain the new mechanic and not just use it ‘because game.’
While we’re on the topic of EU initiatives, the tax the rich initiative still needs signatures. It aims to set a floor on tax rates for the very wealthy, and have member states use that new money for environment, employment and social policies.
They’ve hit the threshold for France and Germany, but still need more signatures everywhere else.
I had a harder time getting good at and staying interested in ITB. I still really enjoy a playthrough every now and then.
With FTL I guess it just feels more replayable and “on edge” to me. There is just something special about ftl runs, be it overpowered, under powered. There are so many ships, weapons, systems, and crew combinations that no run really feels the same.
The same could be said about ITB and their different mech teams but I guess it just doesn’t have the same feel. ITB feels like I’m selling my services to big corporations with saving people as an after note. FTL feels like a suicide mission for the fate of the galaxy and I think that feeling is what really makes me come back to FTL.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing, I don’t really disagree with any of your points. Maybe I just liked the style of ITB more…I do love isometric tactics games
Personally one of the aspects I enjoy a lot in FTL is managing my power levels mid-fight (Do I need my oxygen powered right now? I could probably turn it off until the fight is over…) I don’t know if any other game that has you shuffling around power like that.
Ultimately, the world is not a grid. So while grids may be great for pure strategy games like XCom (and I really enjoyed XCom, not knocking it at all), I think a lot of people would say that for more story-focused games like RPGs, they break the immersion. Thus, BG3 (which I’m also really enjoying) does not use one. Neither do any of the party-based RPGs that I can think of off the top of my head. For me personally, it depends on the game. I am perfectly happy without one in BG3. But I enjoyed having one for XCom, and more recently for Warhammer 40k Mechanicus. I would offer that as a suggestion if you are looking for a gridded turn-based strategy game.
I’m really confused as to why everybody’s saying BG3 doesn’t have a grid. It’s not visible, but it’s there. BG3 is obviously built around a grid of hexagonal prisms as its basic building block and it shows in everything, including combat and level design. They’ve done a great job with graphics and animations to make them smooth and make it seem like the grid is not there, but it is.
Of course the ground itself needs some kind of abstraction, there is no actual computing in the real numbers. Thats not the kind of grid OP is talking about though, they mean a grid where a character uses up a single tile.
There is only one magazine video game advertisement I really remember from seeing in the wild in an actual magazine, and that was the Quake 3 Arena one of a computer in a crusty-as-fuck basement bathroom in front of a toilet with just a super dirty setup.
Wow this is incredible, thanks for sharing. I find it funny that Nintendo fostered their famiy friendly appeal seemingly right after the GameCube and GameBoy Advance. Those particular ads are saucy.
Absolutely what everyone else says. Keep signing. There’s a good chance this petition could reach the most signatures ever for a EU Citizens Initiative. I believe the current record is 1.7mil.
As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.
There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.
It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.
Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.
Generally, yes. But Epic is not competitive in any way.
Their idea of being competitive is not to deliver an amazing product, it is to buy exclusivity for games so they can’t be sold on other platforms, which benefits no one except themselves.
Gog, then? Itch? I'm not even going to try with Microsoft or the publisher stores because people were so mad at them they effectively killed them.
Turns out nobody is competitive in any way against Steam, which seems to be the whole problem of lacking competition and having a single player dominating a market.
GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.
Unless it’s infrastructure or something with a natural monopoly.
The main competition with steam is buying physical copies of things. If we want to support retailers selling physical copies of games and bricks and mortar shops, that’s a good thing.
Alas, I think the games industry is chosing to abandon them. And Steam has the ability to add games purchased outside of Steam to it for convenience. Unlike Epic it puts the user close to the top of priorities.
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