MoonMelon

joined 1 year ago
[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Broodwar remaster was also good. If they faithfully uprez the graphics, fix severe bugs, and do nothing else then there's hope. The 2D remasters have a good track record so far.

That said, had anyone played WC2 recently? It's pretty rough. It's fun for nostalgia sake and if you're into the lore of Warcraft or the history of RTS, but it doesn't hold up like Broodwar still does.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

When my sibling first started teaching high school, decades ago, none of the public schools were hiring because of America's perpetual budget crisis in public education (tons of vacancies, but zero openings). The only option was a Yeshiva. We're not Jewish, or even religious, but the rabbis didn't care. Every other private school was Christian, and they all required every employee to sign a "loyalty oath" affirming all kinds of shit that would otherwise be illegal but somehow isn't because of their status as a "religious institute".

So this has been happening for a long time. It all worked out though and fortunately my sibling never had to subject themselves to such a place.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

One of my favorite old school game illustrators. If you like his work check out Phil Hale as well.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 47 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (13 children)

It's the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, "Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people".

But if you take a step back it's reasonable to ask, "WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don't spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus' forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose."

So given that realization it's also reasonable when told you must choose to say, "Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt."

That's the essential argument. There's the realpolitik decision to do "less harm", but you can also reject the fucked up premise.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 15 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Sucks, but sounds like they're taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It's also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Sorry that doesn't drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that's just "Steam but Worse", so I'm afraid you need to close your studio. What's that? Sorry you're breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 6 points 7 months ago

Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 25 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 7 points 7 months ago

A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 months ago

"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember [literally anything that's free of plastic]."

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 months ago

Denethor prefers tomatoes raw. More explosive power.

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 months ago

Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar's Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.

It's been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the "glue" language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.

view more: next ›