Who knows the connection between badgers, mushrooms, and snakes?

Rot is an essential part of our digestive process, assuming rot just means biological processes converting food from one state to a generally less appetizing state.

Yeah, though I’d argue using kanji is different notation. Unless you meant delta and five both being spelled out in English. Should have used Δ lol.

Yeah, that last one is my preferred one. Who knows if it’s true or not, but if I could pick which one was true, I’d pick that one. I think it would have the best combination of getting all questions answered while also being able to keep existence interesting. It’s a way to be immortal without regretting it, if mortality even applies to whatever we really are that is experiencing all of this.

I wonder if there were eons of boredom before the possibly even occurred and if there will be eons more of boredom after the one ends. Or if there’s simultaneously a multitude of planets with life that we can experience. Maybe even a multitude of universes to experience life on.

Going really far with the idea, there’s a possibility that all fiction and creative storytelling is actually a part of us just recounting something that happened to other parts of us in places with similar rules or very different ones.

Like infinite monkeys in infinite universes with infinite laws of physics and infinite definitions of “monkey” playing out every possible permutation of every possible existence.

A few more:

Delta, there is a god and he’s good because nothing in this reality really matters, it’s just a test (for us) or experiment (that we are a part of).

Five) after being more hands on in the old times, and trying many different things, god decided to try again elsewhere and just lets shit play out as it will here.

六> We are god experiencing a reality as lesser beings because it gets boring being all powerful and knowing. Any godly effects are done for entertainment purposes rather than making things better or worse.

They meant they wanted a game set during the conjunction of the spheres but didn’t know if witchers were a thing yet at that timeframe in the lore. The wording made it seem like they were talking about your first witcher idea but they were talking about a different alternate timeframe setting they’d like to see.

Exactly. Oh and I also just remembered another angle: their anti-linux stance. They used to make games with native Linux support, but as I understand it, they’ve even removed Linux support from some games that already had it, trying to keep the Microsoft monopoly going. I wonder how much money ms is giving epic for that.

Same reason why a lot of the non-steam handhelds are non-starters for me. And yeah, I can live without games that depend on Windows kernel-level anti-cheat.

My backlog is so full I could keep entertained even if I ignore every single game I don’t currently have in my steam library. Hell, I even ignore some that are there when I realized they have denuvo or something like that after buying and the refund window has already passed when I do notice.

Lol I stayed away because the anticompetitiveness was immediately obvious (they should have opened with the free games but showed their hand early by starting with exclusivity deals), but I’m not surprised it gets even worse.

Yeah, they expressed that they wanted to join the online game store scene and the big feature they were offering to draw in users was… anticompetitive exclusivity deals!

Plus the company killed off the unreal tournament franchise because they didn’t want it to compete with fortnite.

I have no interest in supporting a company that thinks removing options is the best way to get users to use their products.

It’s the same shit that has turned streaming services from great back when it was new to now having content spread across many competing services. I’d rather they competed based on their own platform’s features and advantages than the whole “if you want to watch x, you must use service y”. It’s just a series of mini monopolies.

Could have a system where a government site cryptographically signs a birth year plus random token provided by the site you want to use.

Step 1: access site
Step 2: site sends random token
Step 3: user’s browser sends token plus user authentication information
Step 4: gov site replies with a string containing birth year, token, and signature
Step 5: send that string to the other site where it uses the government’s public key to verify the signature, showing the birth year is attested by the government

No need to have any direct connection with the user’s identity and the site or been the gov and site.

A moment? I had a few during my first playthrough. PD, RL, W, T, DL. And many moments of forgetting to keep an eye on that oxygen meter lol.

Does it also include those cutscenes where you have to press a button that pops up on the screen or you have to start the cutscene over again?

I hate those because:

1. Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
2. I like cut scenes being little breaks where you just watch and soak it in. At least assuming the character doesn’t make choices I hate or suddenly surrenders because a few enemies point weapons at them (after probably having fought more of those enemies actually using their weapons instead of just threatening it).
3. If I’ve seen a cutscene already, I’d rather skip it and get back to the good gameplay. Maybe the interaction was intended to reduce that “go away cutscene, you’re boring, I want to get back to the fun stuff” but I don’t find it accomplishes that at all.
4. It’s not good gameplay. Even if I don’t end up panicking and hitting a wrong button or missing it because I’m not ready to think about where the X button is on this particular controller, it’s not rewarding at all to succeed, other than the “yay, I don’t have to repeat this stupid shit anymore”.
5. And I especially hate ones that prompt mashing buttons as fast as you can or rotating a stick as fast as you can (and this applies outside of cutscenes, too). I don’t find anything interesting about testing the physical limits of my thumbs and wearing down the buttons or sticks involved faster in the process.

Even after, some of it is pretty crazy.

Like the driver for controlling one vendor’s LED lights had a generic PCI FW updater (or something similar) included that it exposed to user space. This meant a) changing the LED colours or parameters required a firmware update rather than the firmware handling input from the system to adjust colours without new code, and b) other software could use this and just change the bus id of the target to update other firmware willy nilly.

It also had to compete for bus time and sending a full firmware update takes more time than a few colour update parameters. Average case might be ok, but it would make worst case scenarios worse, like OS wants to page in from disk 1 while a game needs to read shader code from disk 2 that it needs to immediately send to the GPU but the led controller decides it’s time to switch to the next theme in the list oh and there’s some packets that just came in over the network and the audio buffer is getting low. GPU ends up missing a frame deadline for the display engine and your screen goes black for a second while it re-establishes the connection between GPU and monitor.

With the caveat that there’s a lot of space in which users can do things that even kernel level anti-cheat can’t detect. Like it can’t see what’s going on inside plugged in hardware to know if an attached video capture device and the mouse and keyboard is actually all connected to an embedded system that analyses the video stream and adjusts the actual user input to automatically fire if it detects an enemy that would be hit or to nudge the looking direction a bit so that firing would hit.

I’ve also seen reports of exploits that use the presence of cheat detection combined with other exploits to install cheats on target systems to get their target banned from the game entirely. Which both forces them to deal with a situation they never intended to in the first place (they never tried to cheat), it also gives plausible deniability to actual cheaters who get caught.

One of those cases happened during a live tournament. Dude is playing and all of a sudden can see enemy locations through walls. He knew what was up and left the game to avoid being banned, which makes the tournament itself a bit of a joke.

Yeah, the line between AAA and Indy games is kinda blurred at this point. Especially because quality has split into production quality and gameplay quality and higher production quality seems to be getting more accessible to smaller dev teams.

Like I’ve been playing Enshrouded and have been enjoying it. It’s a large game (like I think the map is comparable to a WoW continent with fewer total regions but each region is larger… I think it’s a bit bigger than breath of the wild) but I have no idea if it would fall into the AAA box or not. Nothing about the game screams “Indy” or “small development team” other than the game being (IMO) really well done and not feeling like a product of a ??? step between “start making game” and “profit” like so many AAA games have felt like with all their season passes and MTX.

Ultimately, “good game” vs “bad game” is more important than “AAA” vs “Indy” (or whatever other categories), which is why I first asked about it. My bias has gotten to the point where I’ll ignore a lot of the games that look like they are AAA games tuned for engagement and profit rather than necessarily being fun, but I could be missing out.

Any AWD Lambo in Gran Turismo. Especially after getting used to powerful RWD supercars.

With FWD cars you start out with, you can pretty much go from full throttle to threshold braking back to full throttle as aggressively as you want while taking turns. As long as your speed is low enough to go around a corner, you’ll make it and if you make a mistake, you have a chance at recovery.

With RWD, you’ve gotta be super careful with the throttle on turns. If you try the instantly apply full throttle approach, you’ll end up spinning out when the rear tires (that provide stability) lose traction. A lot of the videos of people fucking up their supercar are instances of being too aggressive on the throttle when they weren’t going perfectly straight. I’m not sure how accurate Gran Turismo is for this, but you can give it full throttle while cornering, but you have to ease into it slowly. You don’t have much opportunity for correction, though with careful throttle control you can sometimes turn it into a drift, though that usually doesn’t work out unless you plan on drifting going in to the turn.

With AWD, just point the tires in the direction you want to go in and give it full throttle. Start losing traction? Try more throttle. It was a fun moment discovering this, after being used to the RWD approach. Might need to max out your tires and tune your suspension for stability to get these results, though. Just angle the tires outwards a bit for camber, go as low as you can without seeing sparks, and add some downforce on the front and back and it feels a bit like an F1 car.

Though the actual F1 cars they have are pretty awesome, too. A step closer to the arcade style racing where you didn’t need to learn the brake button.

I’m more curious if there were any AAA games that didn’t disappoint this year.

“Ur, ur, ur!”

If it’s water based, the temperature won’t go over 100 C. Ideally, you’d want to simmer it below that rather than cook it at a high boil. Then you’d just need to make sure there was enough water in it that it wouldn’t all evaporate off while unattended (though more accurately, you’d want enough water to prevent the bottom part from drying out faster than more water can replace it to avoid it burning on the bottom, though that’s not so much a safety issue as it is a quality issue). Or just cover it so that any evaporating water recondenses and ends up back in the stew (though this only really slows the rate at which you lose water, since the pressure buildup will force the cover open and let some steam escape and many covers have a hole to equalize the pressure, so still keep an eye on water levels if you do a long cook).

If all the water evaporates, then the heat can rise, potentially to a flash point of some ingredient, which would start a fire, which I’d think would be the main safety issue with a slow cook like that, assuming you maintain a safe temperature above 60 C.

For microbial food safety, cooking over long periods is safer than soaking, generally speaking. It depends on how it is prepared/stored.

Like canning or jarring could be considered a soak, but you need to seal the container (so no new microbes get in) and cook it in the jar (to kill off any microbes that were already on the food), or use another method that creates an environment hostile to microbes, like make it too salty or acidic.

Or another option is to deliberately introduce microbes that play nice with our guts and allow it to ferment, which is essentially allowing it to digest a bit outside of our guts. The idea there is that any new microbes that try to move in can’t compete with the existing colony and either die off or maintain a population small enough to not cause harm.

A long cook is basically maintaining the temperature that canning uses to kill off microbes without then sealing it away from new ones. New ones will arrive but then die due to the heat.

Note that some foods can break down into harmful compounds if cooked long enough or can contain harmful compounds that require a boil to cook off, like kidney beans. Also if the food already contains heat-resistant toxins, obviously cooking it for a long time won’t get rid of them.

How do you sell an indie game studio? Doesn’t sound very independent even before the sale to me.