ingonealan3

I still lament the fact that people don't seem to be interested in web forums any longer...

Humanity's arrogance, believing that another being is somehow inferior (and ourselves, by implication, superior) and should not be part of this reality.

I am starting to believe that this is, most likely, the best way out of a lot of the mess we find ourselves in, in the modern digital world. We, the laypeople, are under scrutiny in so many ways, our lives being recorded all the time. The basic asymmetry is that, on the other hand, the powerful have tools at their disposal to hide from scrutiny, and at the same time have access to the data collected on us. With well designed systems, we could remove this unfair advantage that they have, and level the playing field.

For someone who's completely out of the loop, what changes are the Unity peeps doing to their business model?

Could this be ported to a simple smartphone app, if it works only by listening? I'm sure many people would find it useful in that form as well.

I'm really glad that we (the startup I am part of) decided to migrate away from Twilio about two months ago, in favor of a smaller, more local SMS provider. Now if I could only find a decent alternative to SendGrid, I could maybe argue to cut all ties with them!

To take the point further: nothing, ultimately, has any inherent value.

I'm more curious to watch and see how they're gonna kick out the assholes from government. If anybody stands a chance to set a good example in that direction, it'll likely be them.

Oh shush, and just go type "lynx" into your beloved green glowing terminal /jk

Speaking of keys, I vaguely remember there being a key which, when held down and a direction key pressed along with it, would make the digger dig on the square adjacent in that direction. If the target tile was soil or diamonds, it would disappear, while the action would not have any effect on the other types of tiles. I tried the usual SPC/CTRL/ALT, but they don't seem to work in this way. Am I misremembering this feature, or is it simply not part of this implementation?

Yes, as far as I can remember.

To point 3), it's not that difficult. Even in this space, you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel: there are quite a few embeddable languages to choose from. Lua, microPython, GNU Guile, Janet, and plenty of others. It is fairly trivial to implement one of these, and it is up to the one implementing what capabilities should be exposed to the scripting language. It's not hard to do this in a safe way, i.e. to only allow the scripting language to control game logic, and not allow it to talk to the operating system.

Most games don't allow you to script them because you wouldn't be playing them as intended, for better or worse. Secondly, if we're talking about games with a multiplayer element, it would allow you to gain an advantage against those players that play in the intended way (this group also being considered the target audience by the devs, again, for better or worse).

On the other hand, people modify and script games anyway. It happen for both games that permit it, and games that condone it, and even for games that try to prevent it. It takes the form of mods and cheats.

And lastly, as other have pointed out, there's plenty of games that are actually designed to be played through scripting. I'll add one example here that I've enjoyed playing a little: https://screeps.com/

Am I missing something about modern backend development, or does this article assume that all backends are built using a microservice architecture (and this implies some form of inter-service communication, for which message queues are a good fit)?

To put it in another way: if I were to build an (fairly simple, monolithic) API, would I automatically benefit from using a queue? If yes, how exactly would a queue be used, and in what way would it bring a benefit?

I see a fundamental problem in the following general attitude: "make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game". Why do this? Why not just put the game out there, and if it's any good, players will start raving about it. Sure, in this case it's pretty harmless. But when most executives and/or developers start thinking this way, it turns into a sort of arms race for users' attention. User attention is basically the new "market share" that they seek to maximize. I think that as long as this is the general view on things, the companies' incentives (or individual developers, to a somewhat lesser extent) is misaligned with the public good.

And specifically on notifications, we have evidence that they don't have a positive impact on our attention spans: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2858036.2858359 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26121498/

As a technical demonstration, this little project is really interesting. There's only one aspect I'd like to poke at a bit:

"Mobile gaming is more interesting than PC/web clients to me. If nothing it means developers can use push notifications and make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game on their computers."

This is one of the dark patterns that are actively eating away at our attention spans, and should be avoided. Develop ethically, please.