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Mindustry is basically Factorio with more focus on tower defense.

Also kind of breaks immersion when there’s tons of different enemies, but they never fight between themselves. Only when the player character shows up, they’re like, imma ruin this woman’s life.

Hmm, you mostly press the button in the top right to progress through turns as well as through the individual ‘decisions’ within a turn. And each decision is something like “What should this unit do?”, so it will automatically select a unit and you can instruct it by either clicking on the map to tell it where to walk/attack or with the buttons in the bottom left.
In your first turn, one of those units is a settler, which you might tell to found a city. In that case, you also have to tell the city what building to construct, for which it will bring up the city screen and then you select that in the list on the left. Well, and if you do build a city, you also have to select a technology for it to research, which brings up another screen with the possible technologies in a tree structure, where you select one technology and confirm it.

I’m sure, there’s tons of places one can get stuck on, but it is fairly linear gameplay, so don’t overthink it…

Well, if you played it a few years ago, the tutorial was also still rather sparse. That should be better now, too.

Oblivion Remexicoed.

Needlessly absolute take. Yes, there’s going to be parents, who’d rather pay extra than look into what other games they could give their kid, as well as loyal Mario fans, who will pay pretty much any price. But there’s obviously also players who do weigh up their options based on price, and who will make different decisions when they have to decide between two titles, when one of them is cheaper. Especially with the additional invest for a new console and the more dire economic situation, I could see many players not buying into the Switch 2 at all.

Yeah, leaving moral reservations aside, it’s especially annoying to me, because it’s being pushed with complete disregard whether it actually helps me.

I’ve been working in a programming language for the past two years, in which I’m well-trained. Better than the statistical average that LLMs blurt out, at the very least. So, I’ll often end up correcting whatever it generates, rather than just typing out the same directly. In particular, I also find it much easier to think while typing, rather than while reviewing code, so I need pauses to think anyways. And I also just find it disrupts my concentration when the autocompletion-style LLMs keep flickering their suggestions at me.

Similarly, flavor images. So much of management is fucking excited about generative AI, because they can type shit like “wombat hanging off of a line of code” and then it slops out an image, which they can slap into their presentation and pretend it has meaning.
I don’t like those images. The AI-generated ones look terrible to me, but I did not either like them before they were AI-generated. It’s just pointless imagery, why are you showing me this?
Obviously, management can disagree with my stance, many people do, but if they want me to present shit, they need to respect that my presentation style just does not include flavor images, no matter what flavor image generator we pay for.

I mean, if it’s still shit and it’s getting even worse, I don’t know why we wouldn’t continue to mourn that, or at least call it out.

Well, traditionally, console prices were subsidized by the more expensive game prices. They’d sell the console at a loss to then make that back per game. Them raising both the console price as well as game prices is what makes it awful.

Yeah, I don’t have first-hand experience with Arch for that reason either. Well, and also because I do want a distro to set things up for me. You could set up the snapshotting (with BTRFS and Snapper) on theoretically any distro, but not having to figure out how and what settings are good, that’s why I go with openSUSE.
I might look into NixOS at some point. It obsoletes the need for OS snapshots, because the entire OS configuration is made in configuration files. But from what I hear, it helps to be a programmer (which I am) to really appreciate NixOS.

And yeah, don’t know much about Bazzite either, but from what I’ve heard, it really has some design decisions that make it feel more like a games console. The atomic/transactional updates, for example. As I understand, updates and such are applied to a copy of your OS, which gets swapped in when you do the next reboot. This helps keep the system stable after applying updates, but implies that you can’t really just poke around manually in your root partition.
It can be helpful for users not looking to experiment, but yeah, can be a pain, if you do want to.

As for a real-time kernel, the JACK FAQ says you don’t need it, but the distro might limit real-time scheduling anyways: https://jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
I’ve had JACK running on my system about a year ago, although I didn’t really have a need for low latency, so I can’t say, if it actually worked correctly.
Perhaps also worth pointing out that “Pipewire” is becoming a thing, which tries to make interfacing with JACK and PulseAudio much easier. I believe, I also used Pipewire back then. But yeah, folks who’ve dealt with JACK a lot more than I have, seem to be really excited about it, so it’s presumably doing a great job.

Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
There’s tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn’t match what they wanted.

If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:

• Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other “Spins” are available.
• Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It’s really up-to-date, so much that it’s referred to as “bleeding edge” (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It’s also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
• Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I’m on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
  It’s the most “maximalist” mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I’m biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You’ll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it’s less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you’re less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.

As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you’ll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you’d notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint use apt, openSUSE uses zypper, Fedora uses dnf and Arch uses pacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it’s still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both…

Well, that was kind of a general statement. Mint is boring. That’s what it’s good at. That’s why it’s loved and why it’s recommended for new users. Specifically, it’s similar to Windows in many ways. It’s somewhat more customizable, but that’s about it.

With you having used Linux twice before, you could consider something less Windows-like, less boring. I’ll be talking about the desktop environment (DE) rather than distro, because it has much more influence on this. You can use these DEs on various distros.

• My personal favorite DE is KDE Plasma. The default-layout is also Windows-like, but it’s got all of the bells and whistles and options you could imagine. It’s kind of power-user heaven and almost like a toolbox to build whatever workflow you want.
• The other big, popular DE is GNOME. It’s more macOS- and Android-like and focuses on a specific workflow. People who can get used to that workflow, then often really like it. The workflow itself is sometimes frustratingly uncustomizable, but it’s also fairly customizable when it comes to the details, typically by virtue of also having lots of features, which can then be customized.
• Well, and I guess, I’ll throw in Xfce, too, since that’s likely what you used, back when you used Ubuntu Studio. (Ubuntu Studio uses KDE since the October 2020 release, but used Xfce before then.)
  Xfce isn’t necessarily what modern beauty standards would get flustered by, but many folks like it for its simplicity and because it is perhaps even more boring than Mint (without being Windows-like). There’s a good chance that it still works a lot like back when you used it.

Perhaps also worth mentioning that Mint’s DE is called “Cinnamon”, although it’s developed by the Mint devs, so if you like that a lot, it’s typically worth sticking to Mint.

Well, Mint is still one of the top recommendations for new users. It gets support for the newest hardware at a bit of a delay, so if you wanted to follow suit with your new gaming PC, it might not be as great of a choice for that for now, but for your laptop, that’s what I’d recommend, if you’re not looking to experiment.

What distro did you use before?

This is a very mild violation, but I like to play these puzzles: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
…except that I create a custom difficulty level which is quite a step below the easiest difficulty and then I almost rather speedrun the puzzles.

The Rectangles puzzle at 5x5 size has been my crack for the past months and I’m at about 13 seconds now (using my phone as input).

I mean, it’s very casual speedrunning. No one cares about my time, so I actually never timed myself before just now. But yeah, I just like the different challenge of thinking fast rather than complex.

Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There’s been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already…

Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs…? It’s a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.

I think, it’s a combination of things.

To some degree, it may make the player choice seem broader, as you can go full hero or full villain. In some sense, you can also go into the middle by kicking a puppy at one point and then helping an elderly lady at another.

But then, it’s also just hard to portray nuance. If the options are “pet kitty” and “punch kitty”, you know what’s what. But if it says “pet kitty” and “ignore kitty”, it becomes a lot less clear. Maybe the kitty does not want to get pet by a random stranger. You probably won’t be able to gauge its reaction from the character model to know what’s the right choice.
But you also won’t know what “pet kitty” really means. Will your character be gentle and back off, if the kitty does not appreciate the gesture? Or will they stroke that kitty until it bites them?

I’m actually aware of the difference, but would also argue that this difference isn’t that big. If you have to bypass security mechanisms to be able to use hardware as you please, that doesn’t sound to me like you actually own it.

Yeah, I was gonna say: Oh, like most laptops then? If the hard drive is not encrypted, you can just boot a different OS to access what’s on the hard drive…

Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.

I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.

The thing is, the age of the engine doesn’t say anything. The Unreal Engine started its development before 1998. But you do have to put in work to upgrade an engine over time and Bethesda doesn’t have Fortnite money for that.

If it is in Unreal, that’s going to be interesting. Presumably, mod support is out the window then.

Damn, the buildings in that screenshot do look like the terrible assets you got in simulator games ten years ago…

Sure, but so it’s still non-sensical to compare a transistor to a whole chip. That’s like saying a trumpet is louder than an orchestra.

1. No, it just isn’t.
2. If we’re somehow talking about an orchestra made up of lots of trumpet players being louder than a traditional orchestra, like alright, but then we still gotta figure out what it actually looks like in an orchestra. Does this new transistor actually use less space, for example? What’s the price for it? And so on…

Am I stupid or is a transistor a very different thing from a chip? Like, a chip has lots of transistors on it, but comparing them is still rather non-sensical…?

Well, my initial reaction was “What year is it?”. As far as I’m aware, this practice has largely fallen out of favor in the industry. And it’s been more than a decade since the last GTA release, so their stance might have changed in a similar vein, or at least their management would have likely changed.

Well, this news is about their valuation, i.e. their stock price, which is only partially tied to their profitability. If there’s bad news about their consumer cards, that could still lead to people selling their stock, because they expect other people to sell their stock, too. If you’re the first to sell, you still get a relatively good price compared to everyone else.

I think, part of the frustration is that many people have been wishing for realistic Pokemon games for a long time, to experience their favorite anime as if it was real. Pokemon Colosseum gave people a lot of hope when it came out a million years ago and then it’s just been disappointment after disappointment. Even the recent games hardly look better.

Yeah, honestly even if this guy was the greatest balancing guru in the world, why did they start two weeks before launch to try to get this right? Did they not do proper playtesting before then?

Yeah, fair point. It doesn’t make it impossible for a manager to decide to downsize the studio after a launch, but at the very least, you won’t draw as much attention to that being an option, when you don’t need to pitch a new project while you’re about to run out of things to do.

The problem is that even when a studio publishes a successful game which brings in sales over many months, you can still generally reduce short-term costs by firing those devs. And investors love short-term profits.

I have no idea, if it’s any good, but apparently this exists: https://content.luanti.org/packages/JALdMIC/aw_personaje_anthro/

I believe, you could in principle use any Blender model, although I’m guessing, they’d need to match in terms of animations. I’m not deep into either Luanti modding or Blender, so not sure how it works together, but here’s some documentation describing it: https://docs.luanti.org/models/using-blender/

I’d argue it all started, because Microsoft is Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions#Personal_computer_versions

Very interesting, thanks. I kind of got stuck on Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which used to have a food clock until a few versions ago, now it’s just no respawns. They also scale XP amounts up for higher levels, so when there are more low-level enemies around than needed, they won’t give you a ton of extra XP.

I’ve played around with Angband and ToME a few years ago, and I tried to like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead multiple times, but yeah, I feel like that’s probably the reason then why they never clicked for me quite like DCSS. I am absolutely the worst for optimizing the fun out of games, if given the opportunity.

Yeah, its game mechanics are very similar to Civ5, which is still considered one of the high points in the Civ series. And it does reproduce them quite well, so I do think that can give you a good impression, if Civ is for you.

Then again, I do own Civ5, but still end up playing Unciv instead, because I’d rather have my laptop not screaming at me while it runs in the background and I do a couple turns every so often…

I was thinking that roguelikes are kind of the antithesis to what he proposes, as you’ve got rapid character progression (paired with rapidly rising difficulty) and you certainly don’t want to get attached to your character. Didn’t know there was roguelikes with cannon fodder, though. 🙃

I mean, stock price rarely correlates with actual need and more with just hype. If you expect many people to buy a given stock, it makes sense for you to buy before them. If you expect many people to sell a given stock, it makes sense for you to sell before them. The actual need kind of just provides a baseline, i.e. even if the hype dies off completely, it’ll still make some profit and pay out some fraction from that to anyone who’s willing to park their money there.

It would certainly be weird, after their recent games were so story-driven. You can’t tell a good story, if you need to always keep the end open for possible expansions.