tal

Unfortunately, we haven’t managed to domesticate huckleberries, so getting the huckleberries for the sauce is probably going to be a pain if you don’t live somewhere near where they grow in the wild.

I used to store my operating system and all important applications on a single 400KB 3.5" microfloppy for my Mac 512K.

cdda.social, for the survival horror roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Thanks much. Their subreddit only references their Discord. Wasn’t aware that they had something up on the Threadiverse,

I remember when it was something of a privacy scandal that RealPlayer would phone home to check for updates.

Still, end of the day, if people aren’t willing to pay for services with money, directly, then they’re going to pay with their data.

I mean, kbin is fine too, but there are a ton of Lemmy instances.

What I think the Fediverse Observer needs is a bot that measures response time and uses that to recommend an instance.

Ehhh. I don’t think that they’re trying to kill Mastodon. I think that they see this as an opportunity to take on Twitter, who is their competitor to be The One Social Media Company. Now, sure, in the long term there may be embrace-and-extend concerns, but…

That’s not a feature of even Lemmy itself, so how do you expect Jerboa to pull it off?

From a technical standpoint, I’m pretty confident that it could be done client-side via polling the list of followed users. Lemmy does expose their comments.

In all seriousness, Google needs to get on providing an easier way to specify that a search should hit the Fediverse. site:reddit.com works for Reddit, but there is presently no analogous operator on Google’s search for a distributed system that spans many domains.

I mean, it’s great that you’ve made this, don’t get me wrong, but they really should do that as well.

Well, assuming that this is even directly related to the forum, as opposed to, say, email logs from the Reddit internal email server or something, things that might not be public:

• Private messages between users.

• Browsing data. I mean, maybe a user only posts on /r/politics, and that’s public, but spends a lot of time browsing /r/femdom or whatever.

• IP addresses of users. Might be able to associate multiple accounts held by a user.

• Passwords. While hopefully stored in a salted and hashed format, so they can’t be simply trivially obtained, they can still be attacked via dictionary attacks, which is why people are told not to use short and predictable passwords.

• Email addresses (if a user registered one)

• Reddit has some private chat feature that I’ve never used, which I imagine is logged.

I kind of assumed that everything that could be logged was, and that it would be data-mined insofar as value could be extracted from it down the line.

I always played games primarily on the PC, so I’m pretty agnostic as to the console itself.

I think that the one that I liked the most was the PS2 controller, the Dual Shock.

• Had rumble motors.

• Was wired. I am fine with wireless, but I don’t gain much from it, since I’m sitting at a desk normally. It adds weight and potentially radio interference and charging issues.

• It did not have analog stick drift, at least that I experienced. I don’t entirely understand why, but essentially every gamepad I’ve gotten in recent years – and I’ve gone through about six, for different platforms – with potentiometer-based analog sticks has had issues with analog stick drift. Maybe changes were made to manufacturing processes on potentiometers or something. I recently finally gave up on potentiometer-based gamepads and got an 8bitdo Bluetooth Ultimate pad – which uses Hall effect sensors, which don’t experience stick drift problems. Note that the non-Bluetooth version of this gamepad uses potentiometers. Unfortunately that pad doesn’t have rumble motors…

• The D-pad is more-gentle on my fingers than some.

• Pretty durable. Eventually, the surface on the analog sticks started to wear through, but it lasted quite some years.

There are genres that each do well in.

For example, some of my most-loved games are roguelikes. In that particular area, I can’t think of anything even approaching an AAA release.

But on the other hand, I also enjoy open-world first-person games like Fallout: New Vegas, and there isn’t much by way of indie titles there. Big asset creation costs that aren’t really practical for small-budget games.

I didn’t play it on DOS, though it also saw a DOS release, but Syndicate would be high on my list.

Carmageddon was a late DOS release that I liked.

I never did actually get around to The Ancient Art of War, though I did want to play that.

I didn’t play it on DOS, though it saw a DOS release, but the original Sim City aged pretty well.

Loom and the other games written for that platform can now be run by the modern Scummvm, if you have the data files.

Gog.com currently has Loom on sale for $2.09. IIRC they have something rigged up to run it on modern systems, though I don’t recall if it’s Scummvm or some sort of DOS emulation environment.

Tyrian’s data was made freeware, and a modern open-source reimplementation that can use the data was done.

On Debian Linux, it’s in apt as opentyrian.

https://github.com/opentyrian/opentyrian

I think of roguelikes as a game genre often optimized for the long-term player.

Let’s say that you want to make an image meme involving a cat. Microsoft Paint, if you’re on Windows, is a good choice for that. It’s very easy to pick up. So you spend maybe a ten minutes learning the tools and then you can make cat memes, add text to an image, and paint simple diagrams on the thing.

Photoshop is a bad tool for that, for most people. The vast majority of Photoshop just adds a lot of complexity that is totally unrelated to making a cat meme.

However, let’s say that your job is making marketing brochures to sell houses. You want to use drop shadows and you want to airbrush out power lines from phots. You can do it in MS Paint, but the tools are very limited and the result probably won’t be great. The amount of time you’ll require to get a couple of good brochures is going to outweigh the time investment required to learn Photoshop’s much more extensive set of tools.

Paint makes sense for users who are going to use the thing a limited number of times. Photoshop makes sense for someone who is going to spend a decade where a lot of their daily work is manipulating images.

I think that many roguelikes games are kind of like Photoshop is. They are heavily designed to be ideal for the long-term user.

Roguelikes often don’t have very pretty graphics. But…I think that a lot of value of pretty graphics is in their novelty. You see them the first time, it’s really impressive. The fiftieth or five-hundreth time, it starts to become old hat. If you play a roguelike for a decade, the graphics don’t provide a lot of benefit.

Roguelikes often have single-key combinations that the player needs to memorize to perform operations. That’s a hefty learning curve for a new player, but if you’ve been doing it for a year, it just doesn’t matter. You got the “muscle memory” in the first month or so.

Roguelikes often don’t have great “intro” systems to help teach you the game. Having a good tutorial system is a big deal if you’re gonna play the game for ten hours and three are spent learning game mechanics. I remember some great essay about how Super Metroid was very carefully designed to teach the player game mechanics without him noticing. Having a really good system for doing that is really important if a game will be played for maybe ten hours. But if they’re going to play it for a thousand hours…well, optimizing the time spent learning the mechanics becomes less critical, because that time is a much-smaller portion of the time spent playing the game.

Well, to be pedantic, strictly-speaking Crawl was the original game, and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup the continuation. But unless one is very specifically referring to the early versions of the game, yeah, they’re basically synonyms.

There were mods that third parties later out out that significantly-changed the Skyrim progression trees. I hope that Starfield is amenable to modding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun

The sun gun or heliobeam is a theoretical orbital weapon, which makes use of a concave mirror mounted on a satellite, to concentrate sunlight onto a small area at the Earth’s surface, destroying targets or killing through heat.

The definition isn’t an absolutely hard one, but I think that DCSS would be pretty uncontroversially a roguelike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

See the section on “Berlin Interpretation”, which is one commonly-used set of factors to determine whether something is a roguelike.