I agree, strong typing is for weak minds. I work with a weak mind so I want strong typing.

There’s no difference in speed between typing disciplines. In point of fact, there cannot be. You must know the structure of your data to program against it. Whether you write it down explicitly or implicitly changes nothing but the location you wrote it down.

My guess is that this is really a measure of how much abuse the language will tolerate. C# probably lets you get away with a bunch of things (like checking for nulls) that F# requires.

Rather than saying it’s better than say Oblivion, I’m saying it’s closest (among the ES games) to being what I’d want out of an “ultimate” ES game. Oblivion has mods that fix its bixest shortcoming (OpenCities and various magic mods) but I’m not inclined to give Bethesda credit for the work of modders.

Even Skyrim wasn’t bad. I put like a thousand hours into it. It’s just not exactly what I’d call “ultimate”.

Oblivion was good. It’s dated at this point and like Morrowind combat is not comparable to say Elden Ring. Oblivion solves the whole open world (as in OpenCities) thing in mods, but Morrowind has it to start with. Which is why I think Morrowind is the closest the series has been to my ideal.

Also ES has some of the best, deep, insane lore. The series is at its worst when it tries to be grounded.

Even Skyrim ends with you going to the afterlife to gather aid from the dead and fight the embodiment of the cyclical nature of time by imposing the concept of mortality on it. And somehow that was a bog standard dragon fight.

Unless they’ve made some major engine changes… I feel like it’s going to be hard to top games like BG3, Elden Ring, or even Breath of the Wild.

BG3 has the deep story and npcs. Elden Ring has the emphasis on combat. Breath of the Wild freeform exploration.

Yes, I want a game that combines all of those and in the ES series the closest was probably Morrowind (combat being perhaps the most notable lack.)

I don’t mind the fishing mini game in Breath of Fire 3. You can see all the fish and it’s just a matter of skill not patience. That said, it’s optional (the only fish you need, I believe you can buy) and trying to 100% it is a chore I’d rather not do again.

It’s not super painful in Soulsborne games but it’s still enough of an annoyance they got rid of it in Elden Ring.

I think it’s fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.

Provided that I must work to feed myself, to shelter myself from the elements, and to receive routine medical care: I cannot be described as consenting to work. I am coerced. In an ideal system, I would not be coerced to work as my access to basic necessities would not be predicated upon my employment.

In nature, survival makes certain demands of us but as intelligent creatures capable of automating most work there is simply no need. People who wish to do more deserve more but no one should have to work to be alive. Without life you cannot have liberty and without liberty you cannot find happiness. The goal of any society should be equity of happiness. This implies sustainability as consuming resources leaves none for those who come later and thus deprives them of opportunity.

More concretely, I find it difficult to believe that those in entirely different environments can have great insights into the challenges faced by others. Thus smaller societies should be preferred to larger ones. Outside of crisis, any decision should be unanimous among representatives. Locally, provided the capacity to re-home each community should decide how it runs for itself. This is effectively an initial pure democracy with majority rule which may then evolve in any direction. It’s fine for local groups to be disfunctional as society as a whole relies on social experiments to determine what works best in any given environment.

I frequently use Kate as a backup as well. Do you configure it in anyway?

Polynesian for the original source of mana as a loan word would be cool. I also find stuff like Aztec would work really well for an RPG.

If I had a wish though, it would probably be to make a scaled down world that samples most of the historical cultures of each continent. Then do something where quests need you to do a bit of syncretism to solve them.

It would have to be motivated by the indie scene. Ideally with support from like Godot so people can just build games for the VM and have “native” support.

I’ve always thought we should have some sort of standard emulator format for games. I get that cutting edge graphics are always going to be too much to run through a virtual machine, but a lot of indie titles in particular could do it without problem.

We might need a few generations of emulators but it would still let us preserve games by just porting the VM instead of every game.

It’s not the worst thing. Like any other test there are more and less valuable methods. Imo, the hardest part is not coupling yourself to the incidental. All tests have that issue but UIs are almost entirely incidental. Styles, layout, and even data and function can be incidental and thus likely to change.

So so many unit tests I see don’t meaningfully test anything. It would be faster to just read the unit under test because the test itself presents nothing that you wouldn’t instantly recognize. Or the test is so tightly coupled to some arbitrary property that of course the test fails whenever you change something. UI tests at my current place are terrible for this, as they’re just comparing DOM structures so any change breaks it.

I finally got around to emulating Breath of Fire 4, though I restarted to play on the computer since some friends were interested in watching.

To play a little bit of devil’s advocate.

People do have an ingrained instinct for in/out groups and dehumanizing and even wishing for harm to befall the out group is very much a part of human nature. That there is harm being inflicted on the in group by the out group (perceived or true) will of course reinforce this.

Having said that, most people will agree that we should be more than our base instincts and use at least logic if not compassion in our decision making.

Yeah. A hack is usually a little more than just a modification, but there’s no strict definition or anything.

I basically like the way Knave is, but there’s a few things that I found didn’t work well at my table.

• Item choice paralysis. Do you buy/carry a hammer? Nails? Chalk? Ink? An hourglass? … There’s like 36 odds and ends in the game (100 in 2e.)
• One use per day spell books. Knave 2e solves this with Int uses of spell books but I mixed it with:
• Ability to lose items. A character built around a concept should retain the ability to use that.

So I changed some things.

• We use item kits. These are quantum bags of items related to a purpose. Say a climbing kit or an alchemy kit.
• Item kits can be tracked with item slots as they are, but most kits will be like 2-3 slots so it makes more sense to cut the number in half and stop varying size of items.
• Having cut the number of things to track in half, Art slots are added back in. These represent proficiencies/abilities that can’t be lost. Most of them literally are just kits but they can’t be taken away. So a Climbing Art does what a climbing kit can do (save for things like pass an item around since this is a personal ability).
• I use a standardized art point system so all arts consume these points to activate.

There’s some knock on effects too. So I have different ability scores for instance.

I’m working on getting yet-another-Knave-hack together. Also beating my head against its inability to write lists without getting very bored.