bernds74

Not because of Captain Sisko?

So one thing I've been wondering is: The Witness had one aspect in it (which I won't spoil) that I thought was mindblowing and was a large part of what I felt made the game great. So far I've not seen any suggestions that OotSS has anything like that. Have you seen anything in the game that goes beyond "I'm signing up for 500 hours of Sokoban"?

One small but charming game is Urbek City Builder. Has voxel graphics and less of a simulation and more of a radius placement system. Not very well known but it's one I've really enjoyed.

Same experience here. Amazing first run, but it's not really a city-builder you replay constantly, it's more of a solved puzzle game once you finish the run. Definitely worth playing though.

You need to add Chess-Network to your usual suspects.

The London Underground have been doing it in reverse for a long time. "There is good service on the Piccadilly line."

I would argue that even the basic concept behind STL is misguided. The rationale I often see is "you only need N algorithms for M container type, instead of N*M". This ignores the fact that algorithms and data structures are not independent of each other, and also that most of the time these days you're operating on vectors, so M ~= 1.

Case in point: list::sort. You don't want to try running quicksort on a linked list. Or remove_if: great we've abstracted the difficult task of removing things without erasing them, except we can't do it on maps. (C++20 seems to add an erase_if, apparently admitting that the two-step remove/erase is silly).

Then there's the fact that C++ iterators are basically pointers into the data structure, where for vectors (your common case) you'd do much better with index/container pairs, both for stability and bounds checking.

I had a chemistry teacher who told us that hydrogen reacts violently with oxygen, and this is how the hydrogen bomb works.

A brand new pair of brogues, rattlin' o'er the bogs...

There's this: https://www.ifwiki.org/ZILF https://zilf.io/

Although I haven't played with it and can't tell you whether it can compile the open source Zork.

"if let" just breaks my brain, it feels backwards to me and takes me a minute each time to work out what's going on. In 40 years of programming I've never seen a syntactic construct that I found less intuitive. And it would probably be easily fixable, if it was more along the lines of "if x matches Some(let z)".

Same here. Hollow Knight was simply wonderful - the graphics, the music, the characters, the boss fight designs, the melancholic feeling of the world. It's hard to say whether it was my best gaming experience ever because there's stiff competition, but it's definitely in the nominees. And I only heard about it way after the Kickstarter campaign.

It is that bad, at least for me. I enjoyed the first 8 hours of Silksong, but it turned very quickly after that because the punishments were just completely outweighing the rewards. No health upgrade in that time, no meaningful combat upgrade, and just an endless amount of bullshit.

Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.

10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).

With everything doing 2 points of damage, including environmental hazards, the player is at effectively 2.5 hitpoints for a large majority of Act 1, as opposed to 5 in Hollow Knight. This changes the feeling of the game from "oh, a challenge, let's see what will happen and I'll learn" to "shit, a new room, I don't want to explore because I'll just get killed, where was the last bench, can I even get back here?"

It was slightly more fiery than a mere "observation", hence "anomaly".

Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than he was.

Perhaps this is a good place to mention that someone is working on remaking the SMAC engine, the project is called "glsmac" on github. Unit graphics seem to be one of the major sticking points since the game used some kind of ancient forgotten voxel format.

For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...

Well, clicked on it thinking it might be about an old favourite Infocom game, but apparently it appears to be about an old favourite Firaxis game...

Are you the author of the web site? Please make sure the PgDn key works for scrolling through the page. At the moment it switches images which are just barely on the screen.

Actually it means "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll".

You should be so lucky.

How do we actually know these browser forks don't contain malware of their own? If you can hide something in a tiny package like xz-utils... and a browser would seem to be a very juicy target.

To me this has always sounded like the kind of error-prone excessive cleverness that I wouldn't want anywhere near my version control system.

Nice to see that traditions are upheld, such as the unreadable font and colors.

Mercedes have figured those out already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e21ZjwZGjiQ

Donald could be pretty dense at times.

I first opened it in Firefox on Linux. I think whatever subpixel rendering it's trying to do doesn't work with light fonts on dark background, there is blurriness and colour fringes. It seems to look a little better in Chromium. Just adding some weight to the font would already help.

Another thing that's hurting readability is monospace.

I'm interested, but... could I convince you to change the font and the colours into something that makes the site readable? Very thin font, light on dark, very little contrast is about the worst case for readability.

Racing sims are the killer app, because depth perception really helps with sense of speed, and tight corners on a monitor are often outside the field of view and you can't just turn your head to look at them.

Even then, it's not something I can do indefinitely. I've played GT7 on a friend's PSVR2, and sometimes elevation changes in particular tend to mess up the brain for a moment. It's somewhat disconcerting. Also, as someone who wears glasses, there's just no way to make the headset fit entirely correctly, and it tends to slip over time and the view becomes blurry.

Outside of that... control schemes are the major issue for me. You can't just blindly walk around in your room without falling over things, so movement is highly unnatural in VR unless you're in a cockpit. And the various attempts at making the player manipulate something with those hand controllers are just embarrassingly bad. I think this is one of the reason why so many VR games feel like toys you play with once before discarding them as a failed experiment.

The only other killer app are pinball simulations. It's surprising how much depth perception can make it so much clearer what the ball is doing, and the downsides of VR don't matter because you're stationary and only need two buttons.

I like racing sims, so I was interested in VR in the early days, but after experiencing it, I decided for now that I just don't want the associated hassle.

Properly indenting code is fine. Now try modifying that code, like removing an if statement inside somewhat nested code and trying to ensure that everything still has the same meaning as before. With Python, you can never be sure you did it right.