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warlaan

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warlaan ,

It’s not reductive, it’s misrepresentative. A puzzle game is only a puzzle game as long as coming up with the solution is the main task. There are more than enough games where coming up with the right solution is not difficult, but performing it is.

Also the name puzzle game implies that there are designed puzzles. Any game where you have to make decisions in generated situations aren’t puzzle games. For example if you take a specific chess situation and ask which move would lead to check mate in x moves then that’s a chess puzzle. That doesn’t make the game of chess itself a puzzle.

warlaan ,

It doesn’t say that I’m the text. It literally says that it is CALLED a gateway drug because of what SOME people do.

'Vortex Cannon vs Drone' - Mark Rober shows off tech from a "defense technology company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems". That seems bad

I’ve enjoyed Mark Rober’s videos for a while now. They are fun, touch on accessible topics, and have decent production value. But this recent video isn’t sitting right with me...

warlaan ,

I understand the criticism of the tone of the video, but what I totally don’t understand is that some comments say that this technology was “scary”.

How? You are aware that we are loving in a world where missiles can carry nuclear bombs and where thousands of those are kept in working condition so they could be launched at any moment? A world where terrorists have successfully destroyed a building in another country with a plane? Where school shootings are a thing? Where there is a war in the Ukraine where much cheaper drones are used to kill much more efficiently with explosives?

I guarantee you that no one will ever acquire one of these drones to attack an individual because there are so many ways that are cheaper and easier and have been around for decades.

warlaan ,

Name one situation where this device makes killing someone easier than it already is.

You think that this device is considered less lethal than the knee that killed George Floyd?

Do you think the police officers who shot a civilian in the back several times or who shot a man in his car when he told them that he had a licensed firearm in the glove compartment were thinking rationally enough to be worried about collateral damage?

These drones are too expensive and unwieldy to be used in situations like that, so they could only be used in a premeditated killing. So let’s check these out:

A civilian wouldn’t use them, because attaching a bomb to an off the shelve drone is much cheaper, and you can buy everything you need without raising eyebrows.

When the government kills one of their citizens they don’t kill them on the spot. They put them on death row for years, kill them with an injection and then watch John Oliver make an episode on the people and companies that were involved.

When they kill people in other countries collateral damage is not really holding them back. And also: they already use missiles with blades instead of explosives.

I really can’t imagine a situation where these drones would make things worse than they already are.

warlaan ,

Well, I am sure there is a scam, because there’s money involved and it’s happening in this day and age, but talking is free, listening is free, yet the phone company makes both sides pay so they can talk and listen, and I wouldn’t consider that a scam.

warlaan ,

Like I said I was expecting some sort of borderline legal scam. It’s just that the meme only mentions that you have to pay them which in itself is not a scam.

You are going to be trapped in a room for 12 hours with a mid 2000s office desktop with no internet connection and an external hard drive; what are you putting on the hard drive?

I’ve got some DOOM WADs I have been meaning to play so I would probably grab Trench Foot, Total Chaos, and the sequel to Ashes 2063, Ashes: Afterglow with a portable install of GZDoom to play them....

warlaan ,

Boy, this question hurts.

For anyone above a certain age with kids below a certain age this isn’t a punishment or a challenge, this is A DREAM!! Heroes of might and magic 3, system shock 2, Anno (any version up to 1503), Morrowind, Civilization 3, Age of wonders shadow magic, Baldur’s gate 1 and 2…

Whenever my wife finds the time she goes to her room to play Morrowind. She just got a new laptop and the first thing I did was install OpenMW and copy her save file.

It goes without saying that you couldn’t finish any of those games in those 12 hours, except for System Shock 2.

warlaan ,

You may enjoy having a look at F#. It says that it’s “functional first”, but I think a better description would be “an opinionated version of C#”.

For example it doesn’t have a “const”-keyword. Instead it has a “mutable”-keyword, because everything is const by default.

warlaan , (edited )

The real naming fail is calling the class “GameManager”, still my number one pet peeve. With a class name as vague as that you would have to add tons of information into the variable name. (Also the class name begs for unorganized code. I mean name one function or variable that you could not justify putting into the “GameManager” class. After all if it’s managing the game it could justifiably perform any process in the game and access any state in it.)

Once you put the first bool into a class with a name like AccessibilitySettings, calling it something like HighContrast is completely sufficient.

warlaan , (edited )

you’d never have player movement in the GameManager class

You want to bet? (Source: I teach game programming on a college level.)

But yeah, your comment about the gear icon is sadly more true than people may realize. Game developers do questionable things. => Engine developers cater to people. => Students argue that if something is supported it can’t be that bad. Sometimes it feels like fighting windmills.

warlaan ,

At my first job I was working on an MMO and we had a DatabaseManager class with 10k+ lines of code. Less than the first 200 lines actually used any of the members of that class.

warlaan ,

No, actually C#'s answer should be: “What Java said - hold on, what Python said sounds good too, and C++'s stuff is pretty cool too - let’s go with all of the above.”

C#, or as I like to call it “the Borg of programming languages”.

warlaan ,

Because they are selling the product the customers think they are getting, not the one that they actually get. I guarantee that a device with thumb sticks and lousy performance will sell better than one without sticks and with better performance.

warlaan ,

My first thought was well. “Father expelled as PE teacher after being exposed as convicted marathon runner.”

warlaan ,

Have you had a look at the Affinity suite? It certainly can’t replace everything, but for many users like me it’s not really missing anything for a one time payment.

warlaan , (edited )

When I start a free trial I immediately set a reminder in Google calendar. And when I am looking for a specific movie I buy it used online. That way I have all my favorite movies on my NAS and can cancel my subscriptions when there is nothing especially interesting.

warlaan ,

Of course trickle down works. I just don’t get how people came to believe that the rich people (i.e. the place with all the money/water) is the top of the mountain and the poor people were the ocean.

There are so many reasons why money constantly trickles from the poor all the way down to the rich.

Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun?

Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.

warlaan ,

That’s the thing: progress quest isn’t an idle game. It’s a parody of modern games that was made long before idle games were a thing. It wasn’t fun just like a joke isn’t an interesting story.

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