zerofk

Do you think these are personal PIN numbers?

A “best RPGs of all time” list will inevitably include Baldur’s Gate 2, and likely other Infinity Engine games, most of which are definitely not games without difficulty spikes or required side content.

The Wolf Among Us, and I imagine other Telltale games (but that’s the only one I played so far). It felt a lot like Life is Strange in gameplay and storytelling, even though it’s also a lot different.

In a similar vein, point and click adventure games like The Whispered World, The Book of Unwritten Tales, or Syberia. The modern ones usually don’t have a failure state (as opposed to the infamous Sierra games), but unlike LiS you may get stuck on a puzzle.

We will rememb…. Ooh squirrel!

Also the Herald of Free Enterprise and Chernobyl.

Figuratively watched. It’s when you watch figure skaters.

We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since the world’s been turning. No we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.

I think they usually bring negligible improvements in visual fidelity, provided the traditional methods are well implemented.

I also think it’s silly to focus on these while the physics coding hasn’t kept up. Even showcase trailers often have weapons clipping through armour. A slightly more realistic shadow isn’t going to immerse me into your world if the slightest touch sends a huge bear carcass flying through the air or my sword clips through walls.

Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.

A nice post, and certainly worth a read. One thing I want to add is that some programmers - good and experienced programmers - often put too much stock in the output of profiling tools. These tools can give a lot of details, but lack a bird’s eye view.

As an example, I’ve seen programmers attempt to optimise memory allocations again and again (custom allocators etc.), or optimise a hashing function, when a broader view of the program showed that many of those allocations or hashes could be avoided entirely.

In the context of the blog: do you really need a multi set, or would a simpler collection do? Why are you even keeping the data in that set - would a different algorithm work without it?

When you see that some internal loop is taking a lot of your program’s time, first ask yourself: why is this loop running so many times? Only after that should you start to think about how to make a single loop faster.

This is deep.

This didn’t “reveal differences in human perception”. Those differences were well known already. What was lacking - and still is, as far as I know - is a good model of human colour perception.