Best posts made by Sparks

It's not like it's a first-party game (Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn) wherein the platform owner also owns the game and IP; there's not much chance we'll ever see either of those games ported to PC. Nor is it built atop an engine which is tied very closely to a given platform's hardware (again, Breath of the Wild, or Horizon Zero Dawn), making it unlikely to be ported when the whole engine would need to be rewritten. (It's actually a little annoying how good the Decima engine is, considering it's so deeply tied to the PS4 platform.)

The FF7 remake is built atop Unreal, which runs on pretty much every platform in existence. Including, possibly, coffee makers; I wouldn't put it past them. There's no technical barrier to a fairly easy port. And unless Sony paid them an absolutely breathtakingly large amount of money for a permanent exclusive, there's no reason it shouldn't get a PC release someday.

@kumakun said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I absolutely love Ares' web integration, it's inspirational. Evennia's integrated too, but I feel Ares focuses more on the community aspect.

There's no reason you can't do the same integration on Evennia, fwiw; Ares is just a complete game out of box, while Evennia is a flexible system to build a custom game from scratch.

I prefer Evennia, but that is merely because I like to build custom stuff and am vastly more at-home in Python than Ruby; Ares is definitely the easier/more friendly option to get something up and running right away.

@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Usually drives fail (in my experience) due to temperature issues, but I've kept my apartment quite chilled because Texas.

Not quite true. NAND flash (used in SSDs) can only be written to a certain number of times for reasons of actual chemistry; each write operation to a NAND cell erodes the oxide layer a tiny bit, and when that layer is sufficiently depleted, the cell loses the ability to store data. If the drive is used predominantly for reading, it could last pretty nearly forever, but each write costs it a tiny bit of lifespan; SSDs that are written to more often will die more quickly. This is alleviated by wear leveling (i.e., moving data around so that you don't write to any one cell too often), but the lifespan is still finite if you are performing writes to the drive.

This is why SSD drives are best used for things where you write to it less frequently, but read from it really often.

How long a given SSD drive will last depends on the NAND manufacturer (i.e., where in the theoretical range of maximum write cycles this particular NAND memory falls), how many levels that NAND has/how many bits a cell can store (SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC) and whether it's planar or 3D NAND.

That said, a decent high-end SSD should last a long time under average use; if it's only been a couple of years, I'd be surprised if you've exhausted the write cycle lifespan. Where I you, I'd be curious what Open Hardware Monitor or a similar tool says about the SSD health. (SSDs can report their write cycles and general state of 'health', and OHM will let you view that data.)

@Jennkryst said in General Video Game Thread:

Elite Dangerous is adding Space Legs. Whoop whoop!

I'm looking forward to booting it back up and trying that out once Odyssey hits!

Meanwhile, I loaded Star Citizen up for the first time in forever a little while ago and holy flipping cheese.

Logged into a city (New Babbage) on one of the corporate-owned planets (Microtech) in the Stanton system. Got up, went downstairs, took a maglev train over to a shopping mall area, bought some new clothes (and a chicken burger!), took the train back to the residential area, got one of my vehicles out of storage in a garage, drove around in the snow outside, drove out of the city and off into a forest, wandered around, drove back when the weather got shit, went back inside, took a train to the spaceport, got one of my ships out of storage, got takeoff clearance, flew across the system to another planet (ArcCorp), got landing clearance, hopped out, got transport over to Bevic Convention Center to check out the displays for the in-game "Invictus Week" stuff, went to the shopping area, bought different clothes (FASHION IS THE TRUE ENDGAME IN EVERYTHING), went back to hop on my ship, was planning to fly off to somewhere else for more clothes shopping when I got poked on Discord with "Hey, we need a healer, the one who was going to go run this with us can't make it, can you come help?" and logged off of Star Citizen to go play FFXIV instead.

It's interesting, really. Elite and Star Citizen are trying for very much the same sort of full living universe, but have taken very different approaches to it.

Elite went for a deep but narrow cut of their system; they picked a very small number of things and built those systems, then built a whoooole bunch of content for those systems. It let them release something functional very early on, but it's also meant that sometimes as they add new stuff—like when they added planetary landing and whatnot—they have to backtrack and rip out things (hence why getting out of ships has taken them so long, among other things). But it means what they have live at any given moment is a fully functional game.

Star Citizen, in contrast, is building out a broad but shallow version; they're building every system in the game (landing, ship maintenance and customization, mercantile, cargo, cities, enivronmental biomes, procedural content, ship-to-ship combat, FPS combat in an environment with gravity, FPS combat in zero-G), but then only making one or two bits of content with the systems to tune them and make certain that everything interconnects and works together well, building out one solar system to make sure all the pieces work on a wider scale, and then expanding out into the rest of the universe. It meant any one system you could play with was pretty cool, but the whole thing felt more like a very large engine tech demo than anything else.

So Elite always felt to me like we could do things, but there wasn't a lot of detail to anything and they were all sort of siloed systems. You had a universe to fly around and explore and mine and trade in, but it felt narrow. Everything you could land on that wasn't a space station was a rocky surface, every space station you landed on was just a menu you interacted with from in your cockpit, etc. Star Citizen, in contrast, always felt to me like they had a lot of detail—look, I can walk around inside my ship! I can see how systems will be damaged, and how I'd need to put down and repair them in a dire situation, if dire situations could arise!—but not much to do, because every system was getting just enough content to test the system and show it worked; like I said, a tech demo more than anything else.

And now Elite's starting to add some of the missing major systems/features into the established game, while Star Citizen's adding all kinds of content into the systems they've spent all this time building and interconnecting with planets and missions and storylines and whatnot, and I'm actually really eager to see where they both go. Right now SC still feels like a tech demo in alpha 3.9, admittedly, but it's starting to really feel like a tech demo of a game instead of an engine.

It feels like we're on the cusp of a very good time to be an internet spaceship enthusiast.

Atlantis does not run on iOS, no. (Assuming I ever finish the complete 2.0 rewrite, that is written to run on both macOS and iOS.)

@faraday said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

Side tangent. I think that's just a matter of being used to one vs the other. I think that Python is a perfectly fine language as well, but as someone who learned Ruby first, there's just a cognitive dissonance because things are similar enough to feel like: "Oh! I know this!" But different enough to be like: "Crap, that totally doesn't work."

Oh, definitely that. It's whatever you used first, or whatever you use most often. I'm getting a little rusty in Java, even though I've known it longer, because everything I would've done in Java for Android test harnesses and such I'm now doing in Kotlin. I've been toying with Ares on the side, experimenting with adding some features, and even just doing that has been exercising the metaphorical muscle memory (i.e., the "oh, right, I can do this that way in Ruby" knowledge); now switching between the two feels like the difference between driving my car and my housemate's car, versus driving my car and a random rental car.

Which—back on topic!—is why I do like to find out when interviewing someone what the language they're most comfortable in is. Like, if you are interviewing for the team that's responsible for cloud/enterprise components of an ecosystem? If you write all your stuff in Ruby these days, it would be somewhat cruel of me to then test you in Java, even if you know both; I want to see how you work through the problem presented, not watch you stumble with "oops, the gear shift is on the center console here rather than a stick on the steering column" as you try to adjust to a different language.

(If you answer that your preferred language is PHP, though, that should honestly be grounds for instant disqualification.)

@PuppyBreath said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

As a woman who excelled in a coding bootcamp and received a 4.0 while finishing a degree in Software Dev, I've largely given up trying to find a job in tech because I'm the worst interviewee and generally terrified of men.

I feel you on the nervous interview thing. I think six years of being in a hybrid engineering/management position where I actually have to review resumes and do interviews—as well as being in a client-facing role where I have to talk to clients—has done wonders for letting me feel more in-control and collected when in a meeting or interview where I might otherwise feel nervous, but that really just sort of allows me to hit 'snooze' on the nervousness.

(Which means I will then leave said situation, go somewhere private, and go "WAAAAUGH" as the snooze button runs out and the nervousness hits at once.)

@PuppyBreath said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

I'm not sure why I decided to get a degree in a field dominated by them. Add in my now sizable gap in work history, and I'm basically unhireable despite not sucking at the actual programming stuff.

Putting on my "hi I have hiring responsibilities" hat, I can say that while a sizable gap in work history would earn a raised eyebrow from me, that's easily made up for—at least to me—if you have side projects out there you can point to. Especially side-projects that are open source and on Github. I love those! Please include things on Github in your resume! Then I can see your coding style! I can see if your commits are nicely separated into bite-size updates or if you have giant commits touching the entire code tree at once encompassing like two weeks of work! (Why do people do this?? That's not how source control is supposed to work! It wasn't how it was supposed to work even before git's distributed model!)

@HelloProject said in Computer Science:

@faraday Isn't Evennia straight up Python? Nothing wrong with that, just asking.

Evennia is basically a portal based on Twisted (providing Telnet, SSH, and web access to the game), connected to a Django-based backend.

All of it is written in Python, yes. But for instance, if you know Python but not Django and you intend to write custom webapp components, you will want to learn about Django models, querysets, managers, and so on. And even if you know Django, you'll want to learn how Evennia's command parser works so you can add new commands, how the TypedObject system works so you can create new subclasses of objects. Etc.

@Taika said in RL Anger:

Fuck cancer. That is all.

I feel you on this so very much right now. My mother is going through chemo, my writing mentor just passed away of pancreatic cancer in April, and an acquaintance has just received a "you have 8 months or so" terminal diagnosis.

There is, thankfully, one person I know who was diagnosed, but it was early, they removed the mass, and so far they appear to be clean.

But overall? Fuck cancer.

@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Sparks said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I really think something developers writing games nowadays should do where possible is make a standardized, generic UI library. A standardized method of headers, of footers, etc.

I dunno... in my experience the headers/footers are one of the first things people want to customize when they take my stock codebase and make their own game with it. I don't really see how this will help - especially when dealing with such vastly different codebases.

Ah... sorry, I should clarify. The coder on a given game should make a standardized UI library for that game.

I.e., if I take AresMUSH and make, I dunno, SecretMUSH based around the general setting of The Secret World, I-as-coder should make an effort to provide a library that standardizes the UX.

I'm not saying you with Ares or Griatch with Evennia should provide wholly standardized UX that everyone should stick to because, yes, you're right, gutting it and replacing it (or ignoring it outright) would be the first thing about half of the staffers out there did.

@Auspice - Conga rats!

@Thenomain I think the problem Apos is referencing is when people either don't act on the responses to their requests or don't put in requests in the first place at all, then complain they aren't involved.

I think part of the problem is that people sometimes view "the staff is GM'ing a scene for me" as the only sort of involvement with metaplot that matters. Which is deeply unfortunate, because staff on most games doesn't have time to run complex GM'd scenes for everyone; requests and such are likely to give you the plot hooks to run with and involve others in order to get a plot to the point of group GM'd scenes.

@silverfox said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Pineapple on pizza EVER.

(Pineapple, with the right ingredients, is the topping of the gods! Sausage is just not "the right ingredients". Hrmph.)

My answer is 'both should draw from the same source'.

AresMUSH has the right approach, where the web portal works like a wiki -- characters and scenes and everything -- but you have the same information on-game. (Evennia makes it possible to do the same thing, albeit doesn't include right out-of-box.)

@Too-Old-For-This said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@Sparks Olives are gross. And oregano is the devil. Its an herb that easily overpowers everything it touches, yet its thrown about with casual abandon.

I actually agree with you on oregano inasmuch as it should be used sparingly. A little bit of oregano on a pizza is wonderful; many places do put far too much on.

If we're talking just past characters...

Orianne, my young idealistic mutant over on X-Factor NYC. She started out so naively idealistic about the world, and her entire arc was basically an ongoing struggle between that idealism and the realism the world tried to grind into her. With every plot twist and character development, something chipped away a little more at her belief that people could get along. And yet she kept trying so hard to maintain her cheery demeanor.

And that was surprisingly fun to play in no small part because she had such a good group of other players to bounce that development off of, even if the game was small.

(Plus, I always had fun with the many creative abuses of Anne's "puppeteering" power. Who needs a battering ram when you can make a triceratops?)

@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

This used to be my life in meetings at work; I had a lot of coping mechanisms like digging fingernails into the palms of my hands so that the pain was a thing that would force me to remember "hey there's pain for a reason" and that reason was "force your brain to stay on this one topic" and stuff.

Then I got ADHD meds, which was amazing and I no longer had to struggle and force myself to stay aware/processing in long meetings. (And no longer associated such meetings with physical pain!)

Then we had a pandemic, and I ran out of ADHD meds, and they took an abnormally long time to get refilled.

Going back to this for the past couple of weeks has not been fun. Thankfully, the one benefit to Zoom meetings is I can screen-record the meeting and rewind if I have to. (And thankfully I got my ADHD med refill yesterday, finally.)

@kanye-qwest said in Characters You Enjoyed Playing:

Honestly/weirdly, the characters I miss, the ones I yearn for, are characters i played in MMOs. Alarice in EQ2. Lianhan! I played a banshee who was creeping on a total party wipe and a mass res brought her back to life into a magical body and she was corporeal and pissed off and WEIRD and creepy.

Oh, man, if we're bringing MMOs into things, I still have a deep and abiding affection for all my WildStar and Secret World characters, even as obnoxious as Google Docs and forum RP can be to try to keep a scene going.

@too-old-for-this said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I have bounced from job to job to job to decades because the repetition KILLS ME. I get so bored doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I'm afraid, because my current job is nothing but repetition, and I've just passed the one year mark, and I'm feeling antsy. Its a great company, I could get really far... except I don't know if I'll last long enough to get there.

Belatedly...

This is, I think, the entire reason I love my current job. All my previous job hops were trying to do something new; from data modeling to video game development to cryptography to working at a microchip company to telecommunications to... etc.

But it turns out that being part of what basically boils down to the engineering equivalent of a mercenary company is amazing for ADHD; people run into difficult tech situations their own company can't solve, and come to us to make a working Thing X for them. So I could spend six months working on a video game console, then another eight on a medical device, then six on a satellite, then another six on an industrial sensor array...

I can stay in the same place, at the same company, with the same people, and still be functionally hopping from one thing to a different new one!

@icanbeyourmuse said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

It's clues and story lines. I just get a lot of 'We're rehashing this stuff.' after a certain point. Because /they/ have the information but /I/ don't.

This is what @theories are great for.

When I was playing Aislin, I made a point of trying to put together cohesive theories for the things I went over frequently, so I could hand out a summary easily (and even potentially share all the associated clues, though that was AP-expensive), and then we could semi-hand-wave the almost cut-and-paste explanation and focus on the inevitable Q&A afterwards. Especially since that Q&A was generally much more interesting and engaging RP for everyone involved than just "Aislin stands and lectures on a topic for about seven pose rounds."

Now, not everyone wants to use them, and that's okay too—RP'ing out the rehash can also be a lot of fun for the person just learning it. But if you find yourself constantly rehashing chunks of metaplot and unwilling to do so in order to involve others, shortcutting that is part of what @theories are really good for.

@pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I think, maybe, that some of that stuff isn't as 'out of date' and resolved as people think it is, also. Sometimes PCs think they know/understand more than they actually do. If there's something that really intrigues you as a character, I'd definitely try and pursue it on your own, too - through an action or something. You might find something that surprises you (and other people, too).

I found, as Aislin, that even 'outdated' clues were still often relevant to things. Just because a given chunk of metaplot isn't the current focus doesn't mean it's not relevant to fleshing out the history of the world, or that it might not be relevant to future metaplot foci. Putting together the puzzle pieces is half the fun, and sometimes a clue fits in more than one place.

@Thenomain said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

What left Andromeda buggy was EA's fault, the same issue that made Dragon Age 2 a bland and incomplete game, the same problem that plagues a lot of the games industry and what makes CD Projekt RED a stand-out.

I'm actually not entirely willing to point the finger at EA on this one.

This was supposed to be Bioware Montreal's chance to shine, Montreal being the B-team who usually did side-quests and stuff for previous games. But Edmonton—what we think of as 'Bioware'—was supposed to be there to pick up the slack if needed, as the more experienced team. But rumor is Edmonton pretty much left them to their own devices instead, in order to focus on Sekrit Unannounced New IP (whatever that is).

As a result, I'm guessing Montreal got into the weeds as they tried to handle making a giant sweeping game. Worse, none of the old ME code, written for the Unreal engine, could be brought over to EA's own in-house Frostbite engine; they had to build for this game from scratch.

Rumor has it EA had to sweep in to bail folks out by ordering Edmonton to actually help Montreal get the game to launch, bringing on the team from DICE to flesh out multiplayer, and bringing on the Frostbite engine team themselves to make things run smoothly.

I do wish it had been more polished at launch, but I still find the game perfectly playable—moreso now that, for instance, the colony administrator doesn't look like a soulless sociopathic android due to those cold, dead, staring eyes. And, you know, not spending half my lifetime watching the animations flying from planet to planet.

(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)