KubeRoot

Ended up ranting about metaprogression, oh well.

I appreciate games that know what they want to be, and have an intended difficulty for you to experience/master (I also have nothing against adjustable difficulty and/or accessibility options, but I like knowing what the devs expected). I also appreciate roguelikes’ uncompromising approach, with the original concepts like non-modality, and expecting you to face challenges to get rewarded instead of bypassing them.

Metaprogression… Goes three ways. There are games which get easier as you upgrade across runs (which either get easier than they should or start too difficult), games where beating them at a difficulty unlocks harder difficulties (love that, as long as there aren’t too many things to separately unlock, since it lets you ramp things up to your comfortable difficulty while providing a ultimate challenge to reach), and games where you unlock content as you play (can be good for easing players into the game, but take it too far and you’re back to having to put X hours into the game to get the full experience)

Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Luck be a Landlord do the second (StS has ascensions, Dead Cells has IIRC boss cells, LbaL has floors), but they do things differently in other regards. StS has you unlocking content based on accumulated score across runs with a specific character, but it doesn’t take too long. It also has a true ending that you can’t do on your first runs. Dead Cells seems to have a ton of content and upgrades that take a long time to unlock. LbaL doesn’t have any other metaprogression IIRC, but it does lock at least two important mechanics to specific floors (and up).

Heaven’s Vault.

I gave the game multiple tries, because I love the idea of a language puzzle game where you have to figure out the language bit by bit, based on context, environmental clues, and similarities between words. I also like the story and lore I’ve seen so far, and would like to see more.

But I just can’t get past how the gameplay is built. It feels like the game is trying to do multiple things at once and failing at all of them. Every part of the gameplay is slow, with long animations and slow cutscenes everywhere.

While playing you get dialogue opportunities with your robot, but taking them means you need to either stop what you’re doing or risk missing things, or even interrupt them through an arbitrarily placed cutscene/dialogue trigger. And if you don’t take them, you don’t know what you’ll miss.

Traveling between locations in your ship looks fun, but it’s also slow, while also having dialogues happen during it. It also has the option to have your robot take over steering, skipping the navigation sending you to your destination… An option that shows up according to the developers’ whims, so you don’t know how long it might take to show up.

On my last playthrough I decided to try using a mod, I think it was called RuinVault, which speeds up animations and dialogue, lets you skip navigation immediately, and even has a button to straight up speed up time - and what killed that playthrough was when I was leaving a location and my character went “Hmmm, I think I have some of my translations wrong”, and straight up forced me to pick a different option for some of my translations. It made me realize the game is basically forcing me to get the puzzles done “on time”, instead of letting me actually figure them out. I thought I was playing a puzzle game, but if the game decides you’re having trouble with a puzzle, it slowly forces you into the correct solution?

In the meanwhile Chants of Sennaar came out, and while it seemed simplistic compared to Heaven’s Vault’s language, it also felt like an actual puzzle that the game let me solve, and it could still tell a story through both environments and the text I had to translate.

I reckon I might just need to find a playthrough video to watch because playing the damn game is just endlessly frustrating.

I’m going to say yes, but if you just can’t enjoy the “proper” experience, but you enjoy it with the slight “cheat”, then that could be better than not playing.

Worth noting is that the time it takes to start raining varies, food respawns, creatures move around. If you can’t make it to the next shelter and die, you restart the cycle in the same way - but if you grab enough food to hibernate and go back to the same shelter, you might find it easier to progress on the next cycle.

That’s funny, I like Terraria, but I kinda feel the opposite way, because building stuff serves little to no purpose, progress is generally dictated by going to specific places and talking to specific NPCs, killing specific bosses, finding/grinding specific items. It all feels relatively on-rails, whereas in Factorio everything I build has a purpose and no predefined way I have to do, and there are a lot of choices and optional things I can do.

Of course I’m not saying that to dismiss your opinion, just wanted to share my side.

A bit of the second one, but not fully? I don’t think using “female” as a noun when talking about a person sounded good, but it’s appropriate for animals. I imagine incels chose that because it wasn’t the way people spoke, but was only weird at worst, so it wasn’t that suspicious initially.

I’m going to call out rEFInd for dual booting, since it doesn’t require you to configure anything and finds and recognizes bootable partitions at boot time. Less stuff to mess up, less work when you want to add/remove an OS.

How about I reach out to the editors and offer them 80% of that money to not play any sound effects? Though the interpretation of the editors in question being humans implies they will still know everything about my life in realtime, and I’m not sure I’d take that kind of sacrifice

But, a more practical and effectice way to address those things is to attempt to provide an alternate, more equitable, more transparent paradigm for its use.

Yeah, the issue is that I simply disagree, and consider the usage of models trained on data obtained without permission to be immoral, and thus unless the model is trained entirely on data supplied with consent (which is supposedly implausible), and thus people facilitating and/or promoting the usage of such to be… ethically unaligned me, and thus I don’t want to associate with them

All that said, I also don’t want to argue or try to convince you here, and want to thank you for being civil in the discussion

I’ve also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying… though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.

I’m pretty sure some of the most popular communities on db0 use GenAI art for banner and icon - checking now, the banner art for piracy, ADHD memes, anarchism, yepowertrippingbastards appear to be GenAI (admittedly fewer than I expected), and the icon for the instance itself is suspicious.

Unfortunately though, that’s also not a problem exclusive to db0, and with the nature of federation it’s kinda inescapable when most people don’t care, unless I want to lock myself to niche communities.

I will also note, I believe db0 is hosting or participating in some kind of distributed GenAI network called The Horde, so it’s not just individual community members’ opinions, it’s an organizational endorsement of GenAI.

At the risk of starting an argument (sorry)… I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people. It’s stealing the results of hard work of people to produce derivative work with the intent of replacing those same people. Thus, while self-hosting does remove some concerns related to big corporations, I think it still empowers them by supporting the tech they deal in.

I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.

And of course an instance isn’t homogenous with regard to its users, and I don’t condemn people for using db0, but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.

db0 is also pro-GenAI, which seems unfortunate to me.

Yes, the publishers have control over that, which is why I’m saying it doesn’t make sense to praise Steam over games on it going on sale.

Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email from a Valve employee submitted as evidence telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.

I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.

One point on perception - doesn’t the sun appear somewhat yellow because the blue light has a stronger tendency to scatter, meaning that the roughly white light of the sun is less blue, with all the blue color of the sky being taken away from the color of the sun?

Not the same thing, since the movement of a shadow from point A to point B does not cause any transfer of energy or information between those points, whereas the shattering of glass can be initiated from point A and travel to point B at the given speed, transferring information (and possibly energy) between them.

As for not being a moving object, that’s fair, and why they mentioned it’s not quite the same thing in their comment.

I had to dig through the website shoving paid services down my throat and found the script builder, is that what you mean? If yes, I can see it generate either a command using chocolatey, or a config file (to feed chocolatey?), which seems to require me to install chocolatey manually first.

Looks like it doesn’t meet the basic requirement of being a standalone script, and requires you to do extra setup first. I’m also very much not a fan of the website so far, but I can give it a pass since ninite being opinionated in the package choice is a subjective thing.

The great thing about ninite is how you can go there ahead of time and generate a single file, and when you’re done installing you just run that file. I suppose one could generate a batch script that installs stuff with some other package manager (you’d need to include install/update for it first, I remember reading about how Winget can come outdated with a broken version), but the issue with that is simply that ninite definitively exists and works reliably, while I don’t know any such service to generate install scripts.

Ambiguous, yes; very ambiguous, though, sounds like you’re preemptively dodging any blame for misreading :P

There are a lot of cases where rules are a bit too strict, and it’s expected you might violate them where they don’t make sense - though if you do, you might be putting yourself at risk, and if something happens, the rule might protect anyone else involved.

But what pisses me off is that speed limits are consistently ignored. People might get mad at you for driving the speed limit. Either the limits are set stupidly low and need to be changed, or society needs to get its shit together and stop endangering people. Probably both.