KubeRoot

Edit: possibly relevant, apparently the game had some pretty bad bugs with the navigations on launch. I played it after those got patched, so my experience may have been different to yours

Unfortunately not the issue, I didn’t play it early after release, and tried playing multiple times over the years. The ship navigation alone isn’t too bad, but it can absolutely get tedious, and I feel like the game acknowledges it by giving you the option to skip it after some time… But you’re not in control of when that option to skip appears, and when the game dripfeeds you dialogue instead.

It mostly feels like good ideas that just don’t work well together for me, or are ruined by a few decisions that I find annoying, like slow animations everywhere.

I tried multiple times to get into heaven’s vault, last time with a mod to speed up gameplay (speeding up game time, faster cutscenes, skipping ship navigation), but it still feels so painfully slow, and the thing that killed the last of the fun for me was when I realized the game occasionally making you “review” translations is basically forcing you to lock in the correct solution by eliminating any wrong ones you got.

Like dammit, is it supposed to be an on-rails walking simulator, or an open-ended puzzle game? Because it feels like it’s trying to be both, and failing on both counts.

IIRC people were testing cybertrucks for some auto-closing functionality, and if they encountered resistance, they would back off… Then try harder, slicing through hotdogs

At the risk of starting an argument (sorry)… I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people. It’s stealing the results of hard work of people to produce derivative work with the intent of replacing those same people. Thus, while self-hosting does remove some concerns related to big corporations, I think it still empowers them by supporting the tech they deal in.

I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.

And of course an instance isn’t homogenous with regard to its users, and I don’t condemn people for using db0, but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.

db0 is also pro-GenAI, which seems unfortunate to me.

Yes, the publishers have control over that, which is why I’m saying it doesn’t make sense to praise Steam over games on it going on sale.

That’s just the thing - the publicly visible rules are about the keys, but the email that’s part of evidence isn’t about the keys. (Also, steam isn’t just distributing the game, but providing other services for workshop, cloud saves, multiplayer, forums)

Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email submitted as evidence from a Valve employee telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.

I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.

Yup, and this kind of stuff is why I support the lawsuits against Valve - in the sense that I do want oversight and fair judgement on the issues being raised, especially since one included an email from a Valve employee saying a developer isn’t allowed to sell their game cheaper than on steam.

I imagine if Valve isn’t doing anything wrong, it’ll just waste some time - but it could also do good for game developers and players, by reducing the cut, but also potentially by opening up Steam’s tools for networking, input, workshop to not be locked into their platform (since that can definitely keep devs on steam in cases where they might want to diversify)

I don’t think OOP’s nature makes them necessary, so much so as it enables them and popular programming principles encourage them. I think they’re a good thing, especially if there’s a way around them in case you can’t get the public interface changed and it doesn’t work for you, especially for performance reasons, but that should be done with care.

Funny story, when modding Unity games using external modloaders you’re writing C# code that references the game’s assemblies. And with modding you often need to access something that the developers made private/protected/internal. Now, you can use reflection for that, but a different trick you can use is to publicize the game’s assemblies for referencing in your code, and add an attribute to your assembly that tells the runtime to just… Let you ignore the access checks. And then you can just access everything as public.

If it was a single question, that does sound lame, my other thought was that those “online polling tools” might not be viable because you can’t put internal company communications into them… But if it’s stuff like food choices or something, then that might also not be a problem.

That said, my point still stands - what you describe does sound like what I’m saying. If you make a sheet with a dedicated field to put the answer into, it should be possible to reliably automate pulling out answers from all the files with excel-level knowledge, and without any additional sites or servers, just spreadsheet editing software and email.

Am I getting it correctly that the excel sheet was basically a form to fill in, with fields and labels, but as a spreadsheet? If so, that sounds pretty clever to me - there’re many better ways to do this, but if everybody working there has excel anyways, that’s a fast and easy way to get the data in a unified and automatable format without any extra infrastructure.

Unless something changed, players who don’t own DLC can’t play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).

Both java and go seem excessively complex at runtime for fundamental system utilities, featuring garbage collection. Rust, on the other hand, keeps the complexity in the compiler and source, keeping the runtime code simpler. And of course it’s doing that while trying to make it easier to manage memory and harder to make mistakes, without forcing extra runtime logic on you.

Are you sure that site is trustworthy? It kinda reads like an LLM being told to explain the difference between two names for the same thing and basically rephrasing the same thing. I’d imagine it might just be a different name to get rid of a male-coded word.

That’s basically the cult of Eserion

Now it seems every tutorial I see is really just clicking around in a gui. Very little actual typing of code, which is the part I actually find cool and interesting.

Not sure where you’re seeing “just clicking around in a gui”, but if you like computer games, there’s some fun gameplay you can have while coding. Some of those very much contributed to my experience.

BitBurner is a free idle incremental programming game, where you write scripts to hack things to make money to begin with, progressing onto both progressively more complex mechanics (how about automating a manufacturing corporation with a script?) and utility scripts to automate things you’ve been doing manually.

If you like Minecraft, there’s fun to be had with ComputerCraft, scripting things in Lua. With some add-ons (Plethora IIRC) you can access chest inventories via cable and transfer items between them, and set up your own fully automated storage system with recursive autocrafting, as just one example.

Or how about modding games - if there’s a Unity game you enjoy that doesn’t use IL2CPP, like Risk of Rain 2, it’s very moddable using C# and interacting with Unity APIs, and for advanced stuff modifying the underlying IL that C# compiles to. Quite a lot you can learn, and if you stick to pure code mods to begin with, not that hard to get started - though code mod means nothing like new items, new enemies, new characters, buildings etc. since adding models/textures/sounds tends to be more involved.

Yeah, answering questions and debugging issues sounds great to me… As long as the employer acknowledges that takes time and work, and brings value. And also somewhat acknowledges it as a proper role, and not something being done “in the meanwhile”/“on the side”, since just interrupting work to answer questions knocks you out of the flow, so to speak.

This is certainly an odd suggestion, and not what you’re really asking for, but makes me think of Space Station 13. It’s a janky round-based multiplayer roleplay/social intrigue game. It’s free, and the game is opensource (though not the engine), which also leads to there being many servers with unique variations. It’s cheating to suggest a multiplayer game when talking about single player natural language processing games, but using actual players is probably the easiest way to pull it off.

The reason it reminds me is because on a roleplay server, you’ve got something like 20 people, each with their job to do, talking to each other, talking on common radio, etc. - and if you’re lucky, a player playing as the station AI, complete with a (modifiable) lawset they have to follow, Asimov’s laws style. And of course, a few antagonists that have objectives to do.

If you’re curious, I personally recommend BeeStation, though there are a lot of fine choices for the server, just maybe stay away from the 18+ ones.