Game asset development is one of the places where versioning systems are least used. Not only versionong “binaries” is taxing for the system, but even game code itself (¹) is often not version tracked, or controlled at all, with more of a “cowboy coder” approach.
It all stems from most non-online games (²) being sold “as is”, with no intent of supporting them long term; the moment a studio/producer gets the money, they stop caring about their user base, until it’s time to promote the next game. Even games with post-release DLCs, are regularly developed this way, and they end up as a giant clusterf… mess.
If Deck Nine was the “lowest bidder”, with 70-80 hours a week “crunch” months, chances are they cut corners on everything, starting with proper asset versioning.
(¹: engine code is a separate thing, which gets suported across multiple games, so tends to be properly developed
²: online games, and games with microtransactions, tend to be kept in better shape, since their income depends on them working for more than a single playthrough)
I guess a “patriotic story” could be made in any country about its respective fight for independence, and/or any war. Something like every character having a well built background, then sacrificing it for the greater good.
Maybe with the goal being to unmask the traitor, but the traitor being an NPC, then everyone learning of everyone else’s sacrifices as the game progressed, empathizing and ending up crying?
Dunno, I guess there could be many ways to make a mostly scripted game a patriotic one, when nobody can say “I throw a box of lit dynamite sticks into the air and cry Leeeroooy!!”, or “A book? I read aloud whatever it says. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh…”
Going 3D would require variable size tops, variable heights, more tilt, and more granular control. Doesn’t seem like this design would allow any of those. It’s still cool, but is no solid light yet 😉
Depending on how exactly is it made, it could have fewer moving parts than it looks like. The tilt seems to be controlled on a whole module at a time level, and I’m guessing all the tops of a module might be rotating in the same direction. That would still leave a lot of linkages and bushings or bearings, but make it easily serviceable by just replacing them. The modular design seems to indicate you could pick a whole hexagon tile, replace it with a working one, and service the damaged one in the background.
The spinning tops might be 3D printed, but there are some motors and pressure sensors involved, plus some electronics, and you probably want a steel plate underneath holding it all together. Tolerances would also be quite tight.
Seems to be a lot of cylindrical pillars with pressure sensors and motors, that can be tilted by a slight degree in both X-Y axes, or they have a fixed tilt and just the tilt direction is rotated in Z (seems like the pillars of a whole module get adjusted all at once), making only some borders be in contact with an object. A program can track the position of an object, then calculate how to tilt and rotate the pillars so the borders in contact with the object will push it in the desired direction.
It reminds me somewhat of an omniwheel control system, but applied to the floor instead of the wheels.
Both updating the controls, and removing stereotypes, should be optional, at most behind a parental lock.
Some historic material is evil shit, and some people may understandably not want to get exposed to it… but it shouldn’t be some censor’s decision which scholars get access to the historical originals, while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.
Everyone should have the option to see as much evil as they want, no more, no less.
Going back to your Bambi example, I learned a lot about 1942 US by watching the now censored scenes, much more than by just listening to the opinions of those who condemned them.
That’s a possibility. Then again, Steam games are getting stripped of DRM right now (and possibly enhanced with some malware), so the moment the value proposition of just installing Steam and not having to do anything else goes down, it’s likely for generic DRM strippers to appear, at least for older versions.
Yeah, the businessman with followers, indictments, and victim of an unfair witch hunt, who keeps rambling during depositions. Looks like a Trump’s apprentice.
Games using Steam’s DRM, have the benefit that if Steam ever goes down, there would be a massive amount of people interested in breaking it to free all the games at once.
It actually happens all the time, but Steam can roll out new “patched” versions of the DRM as long as it stays in business.
They are also aware of this, and even have promised to release a DRM bypass if they’re ever about to close shop… but in practice it wouldn’t really matter; whatever last version of the DRM they ever release, will get broken in record time.
Yeah, back in chess club at school, we also got a visit from the local (future) GM as a treat on one of the last days. He took us at something like 15 simultaneous games at once… and beat us all.
Go is slightly different; it only has one piece type, the rules are much simpler than chess, the board is much larger but with 8-fold symmetry, so the first 20-30 moves are likely to fall into some “basic” patterns in some of the octants. By comparison, the patterns in chess get hard to manage after just 10 moves, while Go pros may plan even 100 moves ahead. Where Go gets really complex, is when the patterns start meeting, and the complexity tends towards the 10¹⁷⁰ possible moves, way more than the 10⁴⁰ practical ones in chess.
They have an exponential number of valid positions, that happen to surpass human abilities to abstract, memorize, and predict.
Chess is estimated to have 10⁴⁰ valid moves, which means not even everyone playing chess throughout all of history, have explored all of them. Like, a billion people playing 1 distinct move a second for 1400 years, would only reach about 10²⁰ moves.
They still can be trained, meaning one person can be way better than another… but a computer trained even more, can be even better… and yet the games surpass even current computers abilities to explore the full possibility space. Maybe quantum computers will be able to do that.
The best games of all time are: Go, Soccer, Chess, Poker, Tetris… they’ve stood the proof of time over and over again (respectively: 4000, 2300, 1400, 200, 40 years).
A honorable mention should go to Doom, as in the “can it run Doom?” meme, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it will stand for another 30 years.
All the likes of Zelda, Mario, Halo, Pokemon, etc. are going to get forgotten as soon as the last generation playing the last re-release as a kid, grows out of time to play it actively, and as servers for the multiplayer versions get shut down.