The array of different disabilities is so vast - a controller which works for one player may not work for another.

I mean, there are some nits I can pick.

Places don’t feel as alive as they did in the original. The original was still deeply flawed, mind - but this goes even further than that.

A great example - when there was a firetruck putting out a fire in the original, you could see little dudes squirting water. CS2 doesn’t even have guys come out; the fire just magically goes away. Multiply this by… everything.

There’s no bikes (at least as far as I can tell), and the pedestrian path tooling seems to be a huge step back (the only dedicated pedestrian path I can find is technically considered a 2-lane road, but it doesn’t allow cars).

The music has these cute little segments inbetween. But there’s only like… 5 of them. Once you hear all 5, you’ve heard everything and they start to grate. The other 2 “radio stations” don’t have the NPR segments, but they do have “ads”… and by “ads” they mean exactly 1 ad that you hear every time for “Spaz Electronics”. You can turn the ads off but I’d expect more than just a single one.

Everything overreacts to anything you build. If you upgrade a road, it technically disconnects power + water + sewage for a hot second. Then you get a bunch of spam about “I don’t have any power!” blah blah even though the game was paused and they absolutely had power.

It’s really hard to see what trips Cims are taking. The original let you see the paths Cims took throughout your city, which let you make informed decisions around public transport. Now you can just see… how much traffic there is? Which doesn’t tell you anything about where Cims are going, just where you have bottlenecks. It very much encourages a “just 1 more lane, bro” kind of thinking.

Not having a wide variety of public transport options is a bummer. It feels like they left some stuff out for a future DLC (e.g. monorails).

There’s no light shining from the camera at nighttime, so it can get actually literally pitch black at night. Like “turn off the day/night cycle because this is unplayable” levels of dark. A subtle light coming from the camera when not in photo mode would’ve done wonders.

The zoning information is really hard to read. I can’t tell what areas I have zoned with something else because it colors areas from other zones as white and unzoned areas as clear… on a mostly white background. It’s really really hard to tell at-a-glance what needs to still be zoned in some cases.

The more I play it, the more it feels like CS1 is the sequel and CS2 is the original. There’s just so much that’s not done as well or that’s simply not there. The stuff they added is cool, sure… but like, I wish it was additive on top of what we had before, and not “back at square one”. It just makes me want to play the original.

If the good folks on Lemmygrad or Lemmy.ml could read they would be very upset at this comment.

California it is. WARN act.

I mean, in the late 2000s I was kind of a shitty person. But in like 2014 I realized I was a piece of shit and started to work on myself.

I stopped basing my personality on how many girls I could land and started just focusing on myself and not on relationships. I spent 2 years guiding myself to a much better place, and then in 2016 I met my current fiance.

Revenue, not profit.

In other words - Twitter would lose even more money. And they’d lose it to people that can take it straight from their bank accounts. 6% of it, to start with.

So $0.48 of every blue checkmark would go straight to the EU.

If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.

Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it’s not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity’s main edge is that it’s easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there’s no real benefit to Unity.

Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that’s meant to be easy to learn. It’s FOSS so you don’t need to worry about being screwed over - but it’s a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.

But my advice is to make small things. Don’t hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.

When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.

When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller “just getting started” games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn’t proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public… and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.

One thing I found especially dumb is this:

Jobs that require driving skills, like truck and taxi drivers, as well as jobs in the sanitation and beauty industries, are least likely to be exposed to AI, the Indeed research said.

Let’s ignore the dumb shit Tesla is doing. We already see self-driving taxis on the streets. California allows self-driving trucks already, and truck drivers are worried enough to petition California to stop it.

Both of those involve AI - just not generative AI. What kind of so-called “research” has declared 2 jobs “safe” that definitely aren’t?

I split my time like so:

• Kbin.social: 35%

• Lemmy: 55%

• Reddit: 10%

I prefer Kbin the most, but Ernest has been slow to update the main site and the mobile API is missing (meaning it’s quite bad on mobile, even with the PWA).

Sync works great with Lemmy, so on mobile I use Sync (hello from my phone).

Historically, I’ve used Relay for Reddit for many years at this point. Relay is the one third-party app that didn’t leave. So far, I haven’t had to pay anything either, and nothing has broken.

While my Reddit usage is down, I still occasionally go on Reddit both in my browser and via Relay (while it still works). I usually go to Reddit for the WorldNews live threads and to check the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit.

I do find myself missing out on news I would otherwise have known about. I don’t see dev diaries for Paradox Interactive games here on Lemmy/Kbin, for example. This makes me surprised when a patch comes out (since I don’t see the dev diaries in my feed). Likewise, there are other niche things that I only find out about way later than I used to, and that kind of makes me miss Reddit.

I also find myself engaging more with other social media. I watch a lot more YouTube and TikTok. My Google Pixel has a “for you” article feed as part of the launcher itself; I used to ignore that but find myself browsing it now. I play more games on my phone than I used to.

It’s sort of plugged the hole, but not really. Even when I’m on Reddit nowadays it’s simply not the same.

This is my “main” account nowadays; I still keep that older account around because more places federate with Lemmy.ml than Lemmy.world, so it’s handy to have accounts on multiple instances (I also have a Beehaw and a Kbin account).

Of the 4, I actually prefer Kbin, but it doesn’t have an API yet and thus doesn’t have mobile apps. I avoid Lemmy.ml because of who the admins/maintainers are, and Beehaw - which used to be quite good - has gone downhill since they can’t keep up with the growth of Lemmy. (Which again sort of adds to my point of “it really depends on what instances you cared about before the migration”, which that survey doesn’t quite capture.)

This guy is always super duper clickbaity and has this holier-than-thou attitude all the time. Thank you for summing it up so I don’t give him the clicks.

I’m a little sad. My last studio was literally next to a Gold Line station here in Los Angeles. I could bike to the Gold Line and make it to work, and the Gold Line ran frequently and late.

My current job is a mile away from a Metrolink station. On the one hand - at least there’s a nearby station! On the other hand - the Metrolink trains are running the wrong direction for me, I’d need to make a connection at LA Union Station, and the latest one that goes the direction I need it to go (while still allowing me to make my connection) leaves at 5 (which is still considered core working hours for me).

The schedule is like… impressively bad. I’d use it if they ran it later, but they don’t seem to think anyone could possibly be headed in any other direction other than “towards LA” in the morning and “away from LA” at night.

Benefits matter, too.

I’m in the AAA gaming industry. EA laid me off earlier this year, and so I wound up looking for work elsewhere.

I’ve learned that really - the pay doesn’t matter if you hate your life every day. If I wanted good pay, I would learn COBOL and write software at a bank. What matters the most is the quality of the team you’re working with (primary), and what benefits your employer has (secondary).

If Meta were to call me up and say “Hey, we want you to be on a team with the greatest coworkers you’ve ever had,” then I’d at least hear them out. What is their culture? Do they believe in crunch? How do they handle sick days? Vacations?

And yes, WFH is part of that, too. But if they were willing to pay to relocate me, buy me a house near a metro station… yeah, I’d take it.

But if they were to offer me that exact same deal - except there’s no guarantees about production schedules/timelines, there’s the “bus problem” (where the project couldn’t survive someone important being hit by a bus), there’s a lot of crunch (or just bad experiences from friends who’ve worked there… Blizzard offered me a sweetheart deal and I said no because of that history)… I’m less likely to want to bite.

And everyone has different preferences. I’ve known some people who love the office. I don’t mind it myself, with the right group. But everyone has to make their own call.

Microsoft is bigger.

Nintendo’s market cap is about $56.7 billion.

Microsoft’s market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.

Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.

These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.

This isn’t an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That’s a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would “only” cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.

The issue isn’t necessarily the price; it’s the regulators.

Unreal has explicit licensing terms that forbid them from doing this. Terms which people are going to pay very close attention to.

Not to mention that Epic gets their money from Fortnite, not necessarily the engine. They have no reason to squander their goodwill like that.

On top of that - if you want to release on a console, you need to write all the console-specific code yourself. This is quite a lot of work, especially for an indie developer.

Godot is a great start, but it’s got a long way to go before it’s a commercial-ready engine.

Does Jellyfin allow you to bring in your music libraries?

Also, does Jellyfin have Samsung TV clients, or do you need to cast from your phone? I’ve been trying to de-Google myself and I don’t want to have to keep investing in Chromecasts, and part of the reason why I’ve stuck with Plex is because their app is everywhere.

Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?

Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?

Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?

Surely you’ve been around these kinds of dogs before. It’s not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You’ve seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I’m sure. It’s why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don’t have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.

So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?

That’s not simply because of “a poor owner”, although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It’s because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.

It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They’re too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can’t rely on humans to keep them under control.

It’s not the dogs’ fault, mind - it’s their instinct. But that doesn’t mean that future generations should have to deal with it.

Freedom of speech. Everyone is able to be heard, even if their opinions are distasteful. It’s what the US was built on and why people can fly swastikas and wear klan hoods without being arrested.

They can only be arrested if they commit a crime, not because their views are horrible. You can walk down the street yelling racial slurs at everyone and that’s perfectly legal as long as you aren’t being violent or inciting others to violence.

That doesn’t mean society has to tolerate them - counter-protesting is alive and well, and Nazis have been fired from their jobs for their views. But the government can’t arrest them simply for being Nazis.

Unreal is much more entrenched than Unity is. At the AAA level, more places hire Unreal devs than Unity devs.

Unity is popular with indies because it’s dead simple (Unreal is a complex monster of an engine). But even Unreal doesn’t have a monopoly, between things like Source, Lumberyard (which is now FOSS and run by the Linux Foundation), etc. Not to mention you can always roll your own engine, which many places already have.

Depending on how much money you expect to lose, that may be the more prudent option for some.

At the very least you’d have something to work with - it’s not truly “from scratch”.

I work in the AAA industry and I’ve ported code from one engine to another - it’s not fast by any means, but at the very least you can assume the code that’s there is largely correct. The killers are materials/shaders, porting over design work, and fixing timing issues. If you have netcode that can be tricky as well.

But at the very least you can have the core of your game running again reasonably. It’s how things like Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe went from Source to Unity, and how Pokemon BDSP went from the proprietary Pokemon engine to Unity.

Indies and AAs can hire some extra hands to work temporarily with their existing engineers to port and they’d probably lose less money than Unity is charging.