Quetzalcutlass
@Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
- Comment on Gunstoppable is vibrant, fast and full of explosive wall-running action 1 day ago:
A quick and dirty search shows about ten thousand words starting with un-, so gun puns are safe for the foreseeable future.
- Comment on I'm not saying Bethesda are trolling me specifically, but Fallout 4 and Skyrim updates are imminent just as I've modded up the latter for the first time in ages 1 day ago:
Yes and no. The thing about Bethesda’s games is they use a scripting language for mods. That means there should be no ABI compatibility breakages between versions like you’d see with compiled programs; things should only break if an API hook or parent script changes. And Bethesda famously don’t fix scripting errors in their games after the first few months of patches, leading to their titles universally having unofficial patches maintained by the community to fix the thousands of bugs Bethesda left intact.
Which makes it weird that their updates still tend to break mods, since the parts of the engine mods interact with* should be stable. Granted, they’re messing with the Creation Club so some impact should be expected, but the vast majority of mods don’t rely on that.
* Mods reliant on the third-party Skyrim Script Extender being a major exception, as that’s a compiled library that uses hardcoded memory offsets to target unexposed functions in the engine, meaning unlike scripts it has to be changed and recompiled after every engine update.
- Comment on Gunstoppable is vibrant, fast and full of explosive wall-running action 1 day ago:
How long until all the good portmanteaus are gone, I wonder?
- Comment on "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies": The Witcher 3 lead on designing NPCs that react appropriately 5 days ago:
They added the ability to neuter your pets.
- Comment on "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies": The Witcher 3 lead on designing NPCs that react appropriately 5 days ago:
It’s one of my favorite Dwarf Fortress stories! Though my actual favorite would probably be the tale of the catsplosion, which shows how interactions between complex systems can break things in unexpected ways.
Basically, dwarves in the game have infamously short tempers, and when their mood gets low enough they have a mental break and rage and break stuff, which tends to upset other dwarves, starting what is known as a tantrum spiral. These are often run-ending.
One thing that helps keep a dwarf calm is having a pet, of which there are many types to choose from. Cats in particular are popular since they clean up vermin, preventing the bad thoughts caused by their presence.
Cats also have one other unique mechanic, though. Instead of a dwarf adopting them like with normal pets, cats choose a dwarf at random and “adopt” them, becoming their pet.
Now here’s where things get messy. Animals can breed in Dwarf Fortress, and the normal way to keep their numbers down is to set excess unowned pets to be butchered. Except you can’t stop a cat from becoming a pet, and killing a pet causes a huge morale drop in its owner (often enough to cause a tantrum on its own).
So, onto the catsplosion: if you have at least two opposite sex cats, they’ll breed and grow in number exponentially with no way to get rid of them, filling your fortress until your CPU can’t handle the strain and your framerate slows to a crawl. This was the death of many a fortress back in the day until it got fixed.
- Comment on The US Senate are investigating Roblox for prioritising "revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children" 5 days ago:
Good for them. That said, it’s ridiculous that this child predation gets their attention after they’ve spent the last few years ignoring several elephants in the room.
- Comment on I'm not saying Bethesda are trolling me specifically, but Fallout 4 and Skyrim updates are imminent just as I've modded up the latter for the first time in ages 5 days ago:
ARK released an (incredibly buggy and half-baked) underwater-themed expansion for the original UE3 game some time after the UE5 remake was released. And several years after all the modders for the original game had moved on. It broke everything.
Conan Exiles just did the same thing recently, though at least theirs was a free upgrade to a new engine so they had an excuse.
- Comment on I'm not saying Bethesda are trolling me specifically, but Fallout 4 and Skyrim updates are imminent just as I've modded up the latter for the first time in ages 5 days ago:
Yeah, but it’s Bethesda as well so you could chalk compatibility breakages up to their usual incompetence.
- Comment on "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies": The Witcher 3 lead on designing NPCs that react appropriately 1 week ago:
Meanwhile, in Dwarf Fortress women used them as ablative armor.
(The priority of child care was set so high that dwarves would carry their babies into battle, with predictable results.)
- Comment on Rideshare Stimulator finally gets its genAI disclosure after much Saber-rattling, and it turns out the game also uses the tech for in-game music 1 week ago:
That’s just RPS “humor” (or humour given they’re British). They started as a comedy review blog and have kept the decades of in-jokes and references despite all the actually funny writers being long gone.
Modern RPS is a hollow shell of what it used to be.
- Comment on Paralives' latest update throws out its wonderfully awful homunculi babies and makes it so that dead bodies should no longer litter the streets 1 week ago:
They got rid of Medieval Tapestry Art Baby?
- Comment on A retro gem returns and rebuilt, Knytt Classic is out now and free 1 week ago:
I hope Knytt Stories gets a similar treatment. There were so many excellent user-generated levels that shouldn’t be lost to time.
If you’ve never played it, try the level “Don’t Eat The Mushroom”, and go in blind.
- Comment on EA expect their $55 billion sale to Saudi Arabia and private equity firms to close next week, with "all regulatory approvals required" in place 3 weeks ago:
Last I read the “deal” is saddling EA with $20 billion in debt, so here’s hoping.
But also, leveraged buyouts are fucking disgusting and should be illegal.
- Comment on Rideshare "Stimulator" is an Uber driver sim set in a city full of weirdos that I'm hoping is satirical enough to pull the concept off 3 weeks ago:
Crazy Taxi is also the reason there aren’t more games like this. Sega patented the gameplay and UI and later sued Fox and EA over The Simpsons: Road Rage’s similarities. Fear of Sega’s legal team killed the genre until the patent expired.
- Comment on Indie open worlder Future? No Thanks! gets last minute delay after Steam content mods allegedly demand a "watch the sex scene" button 4 weeks ago:
Edwin?
*checks article *
Edwin.
- Comment on Valve aren't putting any exclusives on the Steam Machine because they see "the whole PC catalog as our 'launch exclusive'" 5 weeks ago:
“Shut it down now!”
“It’s not- it’s not shutting down!”
*cut to scientist mashing keys in vim insert mode as resonance cascade begins*
- Comment on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced's standard edition is "is the full, complete experience", Ubisoft insist in response to Steam DLC furore 1 month ago:
“Yes, we put out $85 in DLC on day one, but don’t worry. It’s all unnecessary crap!”
What excellent marketing.
- Comment on Vampirium: 1997 is a mysterious looking choice-filled minimalist immersive sim 1 month ago:
It looks closer to interactive fiction or a Twine game than Nethack or other roguelikes, unfortunately.
- Comment on Vampirium: 1997 is a mysterious looking choice-filled minimalist immersive sim 1 month ago:
Thanks! I’d like to pretend there’s a clever story behind it, but I came up with it by randomly adding and swapping syllables around Quetzalcoatl until I accidentally stumbled upon something decent.
- Comment on Vampirium: 1997 is a mysterious looking choice-filled minimalist immersive sim 1 month ago:
“Minimalist” isn’t a word I’d normally associate with “immersive sim” (which are all about emergent complexity from the interactions between systems), but in this case it seems to be because it’s basically a text game with a GUI bolted on top.
It looks great and it could be good, but I don’t see how you could possibly do anything not explicitly programmed in by the devs in such a system. I personally wouldn’t describe it as an IS to avoid getting players’ hopes up.
- Comment on Microsoft warns Authenticator now blocks rooted Android and jailbroken iOS, verify if you're affected 1 month ago:
Google is doing their best to strangle those too, by only releasing their source code when a new major Android release comes out. Custom ROM developers then have to rebase and integrate several months of commits all at once, with nowhere near enough time or resources to actually vet more than a tiny fraction of the changes.
- Comment on Microsoft warns Authenticator now blocks rooted Android and jailbroken iOS, verify if you're affected 1 month ago:
Probably Play Integrity, since it’s still working on my phone with the Play Integrity Fix Magisk module installed.
- Comment on Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is getting a "Story Expansion Pass" amid a heap of DLC to help it wrap up the remake trilogy, leaked store listings suggest 1 month ago:
Don’t forget the Yuffie expansion for the first game that they made early adopters pay for (though it’s now bundled with the game).
- Comment on Dinosaurs have arrived in the latest Dwarf Fortress update 1 month ago:
I give it a week tops before a player drops an entire mountain on one.
- Comment on Lasagna dreams, spaghetti reality 2 months ago:
RimWorld couldn’t make the meeting due to an outstanding warrant from the ICC.
- Comment on Valve Engineering 3 months ago:
- Comment on US patent office revokes Nintendo’s patent on summoning characters to make them battle | VGC 4 months ago:
IIRC the more problematic legal challenges are in Japan, whose patent laws are insane.
- Comment on What game had you like this? 4 months ago:
It’s a cliché, but Dark Souls. Rented it through Redbox with my brother-in-law, made it past the tutorial boss, then pissed off the Crestfallen Warrior on accident and got ganked at spawn a dozen times before putting the game down.
A few months (and many articles praising the game) later I picked it up on sale and played the whole way through, and it’s now one of my top games of all time.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
Is this the real reason self-driving cars are expected to need 300gb of RAM, so that they can remember a failed route from thirty seconds ago?
- Comment on Oh god... what have I become... 5 months ago:
Court cases in a world with illusion magic must be wild.
