Enough creators I follow are coming out as trans that I wonder if I’m missing something about myself. I don’t think it’s me… but if not, I sure can pick 'em.
Admittedly the rate among webcomic artists is through the fucking roof.
Apparent scale is inverse linear, i.e., proportional to 1 / distance. If we want the apparent scale of two objects to be about 90% accurate to their actual relative scale, their relative distances to the camera can’t be more than 10% different. Pluto being 40-ish astronomical from Earth, you’d want to shoot from about 400 AU. Voyager I should be in prime position circa 2140.
For the uninitiated, crouch jumping is a mechanic where you can increase the height of ledges you are able to jump on by holding crouch after jumping, like a simulation of pulling your legs up in real life....
Debatable. Half-Life’s early development was a hot mess until they started building around how things actually worked. Like, they had the soldier AI, and it completely fell apart outside of some corridor-heavy environments… so they remade all the soldier encounters to take place in hallways and crate mazes.
The crouch jump was almost certainly an accidental invention. But its inclusion in the game was surely devs going ‘this is neat, let’s make it a whole thing.’
I made an FPS that runs on 1980s hardware and you can get onto any surface you can see over. You just walk. Halo 4 or whatever introduced “mantling” and it was like, oh, why didn’t everybody think of this? Its absence now highlights any game with unimpressive obstacles. Even the Half-Life machinema series Freeman’s Mind highlights how Gordon should be able to chin-up over some ledges and skip whole chapters.
Another example specific to Half-Life: the PS2 version’s long-jump module is a double jump. You just jump in midair and it fires off. No wonky crouch-then-jump command. Movement isn’t any less deep or complex. It’s just simplified to the point you can do it by pushing a button twice instead of playing piano.
Neatly showing off how our moon is exceptionally dull. Here we are, the only dot in the sunbeam that’s not black or white, and our sole natural satellite is this flat dark powder-gray.
And it’s tide-locked! We don’t even get to see all of it. Imagine if Mars had its twin enormous boulders, and they always looked like cardboard cut-outs. Thank goodness for all this water and life and crap, or we’d be a C-tier heavenly body.
Platforms are an obstacle to customers, from the developer’s point of view. This has been obvious since the PS2-PS3 transition - and it’s why Sony is freaking out about PSN accounts. They don’t give a shit about your data. They desperately want to go back to when every game was made for one system and maybe got a conversion or two. The closest they can get is roping people into their ecosystem to justify the continued existence of their deliberately0incompatible AMD laptop opposite Microsoft’s deliberately-incompatible AMD laptop.
Same deal with Epic refusing to make Fortnite work on Steam Deck. It’s not a technical issue. They’re just having a slapfight with Valve. They want their store to stand up against (let’s face it) the de-facto monopoly source for major PC games, and the market says no.
Where this ends is the death of consoles.
There is no reason to release a game three or four separate times, with a private screening process for two or three of them, even if each release is goddamn near identical. All that’s really different is which middleman slices off an entire third of the publisher’s revenue. There are no technical reasons three of these platforms couldn’t just run the same executable with the same data. There’s differences - but not important differences. And even the ARM version could be served if games were published in .NET or SPIR-V or whatever. Slow startup time? Yeah, once, but games already take their sweet time installing. Even shaders need to compile and cache. That nonsense would be a lot more sensible if it let you buy whichever hardware was best from whoever the hell was selling it.
So really, where this ends is the death of platforms.
The ones who were there 47 years ago remember it clearly: Han shot first. But in nearly every version of 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope that you can find today, Harrison Ford’s charming smuggler was a little slow to the trigger in his face-off against Greedo — one of the many changes that director George Lucas made to the...
George, you don’t even own your movie anymore. The mouse bought it for four billion dollars.
Art belongs to its audience. Nobody has a right to censor it after-the-fact - least of all the artist. If you wanted it to be yours alone, you had the choice, and you instead decided to publish. Any control after that is a gift from us to you, and it’s a gift for the explicit purpose of getting us more art.
Oh right, this is .ml, where we’re playing make-believe that the lifetime figurehead who won an election against nobody is toootally a legitimate example of popular democracy. Because it would be impossible to criticize The West™ unless the immediate alternative was completely flawless.
Inventing a domestic video-game company obviously isn’t totalitarian, but it’s some Kim Jong Un shit. It’s an autocrat copying a theme park, with blackjack, and hookers. (Oh god. Tell me I’m not gonna see people pretend the Kims are anything but a hereditary monarchy.)
It started in “free” mobile trash and is now in $70 single-player games. This shit costs almost nothing to add. The backlash doesn’t outweigh the extra money squeezed out. This is the dominant strategy. It is half the industry’s revenue. What else needs to happen, to tell you everything else is in trouble?
‘Just don’t buy it!’ I’m not, and yet: it keeps getting worse. It’s half the industry by revenue. And growing.
‘You just don’t like it!’ It monetizes human misery… inside entertainment. It makes gaming objectively worse.
‘Don’t legislate content!’ This is about the bus-i-ness mod-el. Sell whatever sex and violence you want. Just sell it.
‘There’s no exploitation here!’ Games make you value arbitrary worthless goals. That’s what makes them games.
One genius argued ‘other studios make several games over the decade these wallet-siphons have been dragged out, so they’d have to cost hundreds of dollars on release!’ Or. And this is just wild speculation about the cutting edge of computer science. Or they could make several games? Over time? And sell them for normal prices, less than a decade apart?
These people act like the just-sell-games model is unproven and hypothetical, in the same breath they insist it’s unaffected by this alternative of tricking people into tolerating endless fees. They’re not arguing. They’re just shuffling cards.
I mean, when I saw an ex-Jagex employee making a new MMO I thought it was going to be slightly inspired by RuneScape… But this game looks exactly like RuneScape, and the description of the gameplay also matches it perfectly - this is essentially RuneScape 3 but managed by someone else (and with a much newer engine)
And then the post-bro-culture company fired Matt Bragg, a blameless font of positivity and beloved addition to any video. This was a long time coming.
Even if they hadn’t betrayed Ray over streaming, the whole Let’s Play format was going to trend down as Youtube stomped around blindly across people’s livelihoods. The company maybe could’ve been ahead of the curve on managing streamers? But ehhh. Their live content was never as good as their edited content.
Blah blah blah. Shove that copyright-maximalist take. You own things, god dammit. Even if you only own your copy of a book, it’s not somehow an ink-and-paper license to a copy, it is your copy. That’s what ownership means.
If you don’t know the difference between individual property and intellectual property, stop spitting at people who do.
‘No, see, he meant exactly what you thought he meant.’
Again: I know the difference between individual property and intellectual property. I am condemning the corporate word-games that would deny one of those exists, and the the tutting of people who take that for granted. I don’t need a fucking primer.
On the contrary, I’d expect individual NPCs to be refined first. Like if the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 was mostly improvising. Or if you had a halfway genuine friendship with your buddy Superfly.
Or lean into that passive-aggressive vibe the actress took. She got assigned to some half-naked cat who stumbled into town smelling like an execution, five minutes after he killed a creature of legend. There’s a bit of Commander Kiff in that “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”
On the other hand - I don’t do tagalongs. I sat her ass in Breezehome as it got larger, fancier, and piled high with obscenely rare weaponry. It was kinda sad every time she stands up like we’re gonna go somewhere. Lydia, honey - this is your house. I use the chests, the bookshelves, and the gratuitous enchanting table that might actually be a mod. Go hook up with Farkas in one sense or other. I should come in and find you drunk on mead, out in some dungeon, or improvising whatever a sock on the doorknob is for a culture that has neither.
‘Ignore the systemic problem and there is no systemic problem’ is never sound advice.
No kidding there’s always going to be some games that don’t commit this abuse - but anything with marketing and payroll will be tempted, and damn near all of them will go for it, because the downsides are fucking slim. The market brought us here. The market will not magically get us out of here.
Yeah sure, it’s my fault for describing a problem, that’s what really causes the problem. Not a multi-billion industry where an ever-shrinking sliver avoids this psychological manipulation to attach a siphon to people’s wallets.
Pointing a finger at me, personally, will do less than nothing to fight this trend. Do you want to address that objective reality? Or do you want to project more accusations onto the person describing it?
‘Why are you ignoring the problem?’ cannot be answered with ‘why are you ignoring not the problem?’ The existence of things outside a growing issue don’t make the issue go away.
This is half the industry, by revenue. ‘But it’s only half!’ is aggressively missing the point.
I’d be fucking thrilled if this all just rolled back of its own accord. But it’s not gonna. Outright boycotts accomplished very little - and then dried up. These companies are throwing millions at this crap because it makes billions.
Some of the alleged “retreat” from wallet siphons with no cover charge are just games that will instead have a cover charge. They’re not changing the part where you can pay real money for fake hats. They’re not changing how much of the game is built around shoving players toward that decision, as often as possible.
Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company. Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.
Games built around this are a gamble, but slapping it on whatever’s already coming out remains cheap, low-risk, and alarmingly popular. It’s in full-price, flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’
Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.
That’s why it’s spreading. So long as a fraction of people get sucked in - your non-participation does not matter.
Those victims “voted with their wallets” and their vote counts for ten times more than yours. This is why outright vitriolic boycotts barely made a dent. This is why it can creep into existing games, including ones you already bought. They’ve got your money. They want more.
This business model amounts to a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to anything inside that make-believe. Convincing you that you need some random imaginary geegaw is half these people’s job.
No kidding nobody should throw money at that.
But I don’t know why anyone defends its continued existence.
The sino-soviet split of the modern age.
cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/3674063...
Unreal Engine 5.5 Megalights - Tech Demo [Video 5:49] (www.youtube.com) angielski
With Ryujinx Gone, We Can't Trust Nintendo To Be Reasonable - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
Fuck Nintendo.
Dragon Age Creator Slams "Woke" Criticism: "You're an Idiot" (comicbook.com) angielski
Size Comparison: Pluto and Australia
Source
What are your thoughts on crouch jumping? (lemmy.world)
For the uninitiated, crouch jumping is a mechanic where you can increase the height of ledges you are able to jump on by holding crouch after jumping, like a simulation of pulling your legs up in real life....
From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth - NASA (www.nasa.gov) angielski
Why the gradual death of the console exclusive makes business sense (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
George Lucas Explains Why You’ll Never See A 4K Restoration of A New Hope (www.inverse.com) angielski
The ones who were there 47 years ago remember it clearly: Han shot first. But in nearly every version of 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope that you can find today, Harrison Ford’s charming smuggler was a little slow to the trigger in his face-off against Greedo — one of the many changes that director George Lucas made to the...
'Marketing's dead, and I can back this s**t up': Larian's publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Spectator rushes stage at CS2 tournament and gets tackled into trophy, smashing it to pieces (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
So, looks like Putin's ordered the Russian government to 'consider the issue of organising' domestic versions of the Steam Deck, SteamOS, and Steam itself (with a side order of Steam Machines) (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Jagex co-founder and ex-employee (Andrew Gower) announces new MMORPG inspired by RuneScape (store.steampowered.com)
I mean, when I saw an ex-Jagex employee making a new MMO I thought it was going to be slightly inspired by RuneScape… But this game looks exactly like RuneScape, and the description of the gameplay also matches it perfectly - this is essentially RuneScape 3 but managed by someone else (and with a much newer engine)
Warner Bros. Discovery Shuts Down Rooster Teeth After 21 Years (www.hollywoodreporter.com) angielski
Deus Ex star says that Eidos asked him not to talk about Adam Jensen in public any more (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Ubisoft Wants You To Be Comfortable Not Owning Your Games (kotaku.com) angielski
This is what 11 years of usage to to a mouse. RIP my baby, hello baby's brother (I bought it somewhere 2014 after I fell in love with the first one) (lemmy.world)
Nvidia’s AI-powered NPCs are getting better, but still sound uncanny (www.polygon.com) angielski
Netflix might add in-app purchases and ads to its games no one plays (www.vg247.com)