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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Not sure if “bands” is necessarily the right word here. Most of the artists are solo producers, and them touching anything acoustic for their music is a rare sight these days.

    There’s definitely still a huge scene out there for the Early Hardcore stuff, with most of the crowd going into their 40’s now. And a lot of the originals are still performing to this day. Most of the scene is concentrated around the Netherlands though, as loud, obnoxious music is definitely in our collective DNA. But we are seeing increasing amounts of tourists traveling from far away just to be part of the larger events like Thunderdome, Masters of Hardcore, Ground Zero, Defqon.1, Dominator and so on.




  • Just to be clear, Monster Hunter is 60% boss rush, 30% resource management and 10% gear progression.

    Compared to Souls gameplay, Monster Hunter is more grindy and mission-based and you’re always pointed at the next big thing. Beat a monster, collect materials, craft weapons and armour, repeat ad nauseam. And do everything all over again when you hit High Rank.

    Don’t go into Monster Hunter expecting a Souls game, it’s a different experience.

    That said, I absolutely love the Monster Hunter series and have probably sunk over 800 hours into different entries combined. Definitely give them a go! And if you do, keep in mind that the newer games have some handholding QoL features not found in older games, so keep that in mind when you decide in which order you might want to experience the games.


  • I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

    At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

    Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.


  • Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven’t grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don’t fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you’ve failed to be a self-aware tech user and you’re now demoted to a braindead consumer.

    I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what’s happening here.

    It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It’s just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.


  • NATO was originally founded so that we’d stop invading each other, which should still hold true today.

    I like to think of most developed nations as young adults. All of us are supposed to be mature, which means no more war. We can just talk about things like responsible adults.

    Sadly, some of these younger fucks still haven’t grasped the concept of “don’t be an idiot”, and we now need NATO for a strong message of “no, you’re not going to touch us, there will be consequences”. It’s a sad thing that we still need to do so, but I’d rather have a large group of friends that I’m sure will have my back if someone would start shit.

    So yes, Sweden joining NATO is a good thing. If anything it will lead to better cooperation and coordination between our countries. Not just in the event of war, but just sharing defense resources and intelligence as well. But the best argument is that we just like you Swedes, and we want to keep hanging out together.


  • Having carried over an account from the original RS2 back in the day all the way over to modern RS3, getting multiple 99’s, and now currently exploring all that OSRS has to offer, I bet I’m one of those crazy enough to grind out all the things in real life too.

    I still consider properly implemented progression systems (where you’re always working towards the next thing) one of the more enjoyable and rewarding game mechanics. And I find there are too few games out there that actually implement them correctly. Most prominent examples I can think of are RuneScape and Terraria. There is just something about progressing through the tiers and experiencing all the different shinies that come with them.

    But you probably know this, otherwise you wouldn’t be working on this app. :P






  • For this to become a serious issue a couple of conditions need to be met:

    • there has to be enough second hand supply to meet demand and keep prices low.
    • …which means lots of people need to circulate their games.
    • …which means they didn’t like your game enough to want to keep it in their collection for replayability
    • …which means you made an unremarkable game

    Now, given the fact that I have full confidence in your ability to create something worthwhile (because you would do so from passion), this cycle will likely be broken at some point.

    There’s also the other option where people will circulate their second hand games with the knowledge they’ll be able to buy back another copy somewhere down the road.

    But yes, you’re right that this will bring a new factor to the gaming industry that everyone has to take into account. Keep in mind that your financial security in the indie gaming sector is fully dependant on wether you develop something worthwhile. You are in no way entitled to be able to make a living from publishing games regardless of their quality. Which is the beauty of the indie games segment: the more love and care you put into your game, the bigger the chances are that it’ll be a success.



  • Honestly that probably goes for any interpreted programming language that supports imports.

    Many Javascript frameworks just put their configuration into -.config.js files in the project root. Which is a pretty elegant solution that does not require custom parsing. Just import the config and go nuts.

    Compiled (and by extension bundled) software obviously requires a different approach, but at that point you should probably consider storing your config in some kind of database.

    Maybe there just isn’t a right answer to the config conundrum if all the general solutions are janky in some way.


  • Which is exactly why my first sentence explicitly states “product leadership”.

    I agree, we don’t need any more games that prolong a shitty experience just to use collective playtime as a metric of success.

    The correct metric could be play time AND experience rating: If I manage to put 300 hours into a game, none of it feels repetitive and I’m still having fun I’d be willing to spend more than if I get a couple hours of amazing gameplay and a giant “collect all these flags” middle finger for 100% completion.

    Ultimately we need publishers to stop their short-term value strategies and start investing in long-term value from reputation, popular IPs and games that will be remembered.


  • Yeah not a fan of YAML either. I simply don’t see the benefit of getting rid of delimiters and replacing them with indentation. Yes, it does save several bytes, which might be important if you measure space in kilobytes I guess. It does provide cleaner files which may or may not be more readable.

    It does not provide any advantages in parsing complexity. It does not provide any protection against typos.

    I guess the same can be said of python, which forces indentation and therefore readable code formatting. Which is a problem that does not exist since the invention of code formatters and linters.

    I like python for what it does but delimiters are actually useful in terms of readability. They provide an extra hint that the text you’re about to look at conforms to a specific structure.


  • This only works if you spin this with a product leadership strategy:

    Shovelware games that don’t offer a solid chunk of hours or any kind of replayability should be priced lower, and proper games should be priced normally.

    The thing is, this is not at all how pricing works if you’re building a business model. Prices are always heavily influenced by what the consumer is willing to pay, or in this case what they’ve been used to for years. For as long as I can remember “full price” has always been $50 or $60.

    Special editions with marginal bonus content, $10 price increases on the base game and shitty DLC (horse armor comes to mind) are all examples of corporate shit tests, designed to see how far they can take it.

    History has proven though, that changing consumer expectations is among the more difficult things to do in a market where alternatives are rampant. Though the whole franchise loyalty thing kinda ruins that, but I’ll be damned if I have to pay $200 for a game. That will promt me to just play something else instead.



  • The free games are 80% shovelware not worth playing, 15% indie experiments that have the potential to become a full game with another development iteration, and 5% AAA games that can be bought on sale for a fiver anyway.

    I doubt much of their Fortnite money is actually being spent on licenses for these games. They likely negotiate some kind of “do it for the exposure” deal with the smaller developers in order to keep the flow of free games going.

    Chances are the games given out for free will end up in a Humble Bundle at some point anyway. Which is when you acquire a steam key anyway.