• 2 Posts
  • 321 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle

  • There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.

    When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.

    Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).

    There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.



  • I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.

    MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.

    My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.



  • WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.

    I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.



  • Rainworld

    spoiler

    All living things are trapped in “The Cycle”, and no one likes it, they all want to die and be free of the burden of living. They called this “The Big Problem”.

    To try and find a solution to “The Big Problem”, people* built 3 AI that would constantly be running to try and compute a solution to The Big Problem. This requires a ton of energy, and an ocean’s worth of water to keep them cool. The AIs are generating so much heat that it evaporates oceans worth of water, resulting in periodic violent rainstorms (thus the name of the game). People moved to structures built above the clouds to be safe from the rain.

    One day, one of the AI finally solved The Big Problem, notified the other AIs that it was solved…and promptly died before sharing it. The remaining two AI (named “Looks to the Moon” and “Five Pebbles”) continue to iterate on solving the problem, but both have all but given up hope.

    You play as a Slugcat, a species specially evolved by the AI to squeeze through pipes and keep their systems clean.

    *I said “people”, but I don’t think it’s ever established what planet you’re on or what race of creatures built the AI.

    There is a ton of detail I’m skipping…

    …but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn’t care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn’t care if you “finish” the game, it’s just there to be experienced.



  • If coding is the means to an end they want, they will learn it.

    I started learning how to program because I wanted to mod Halo 20y ago. Gaming is often a motivator. I had a co-worker who started in the 80s, whose only option to play games on his C64 was to type up a bunch of BASIC from a magazine. He had to take care not to make any typos, then play the game, and then didn’t have any persistent tape to save it to, so he just lost it all on a reboot. Turns out, if you’re “forced” to type code in all the time, you start to figure out which bits do what, and you start changing it to behave how you want.

    “Hacking” could probably work as a motivator, though with great power comes great responsibility.

    But yeah, a kid won’t be interested in programming unless they see it as their only option to do what they want to do. PICO8 might be a good entry. Or something like Minecraft modding.



  • Merging the space after your Data partition is easy. Merging the space before it is slightly less trivial, but doable. GParted is your friend. It has the ability to grow an NTFS to the right, as well as slide it to the left. The slide is copying everything over though, so it will take time.

    (Note that if you are mounting Data in your fstab using the string /dev/sda4 and you delete the partitions before it, you will likely need to update your fstab.)

    Personally, I don’t think you need to go as far as unhooking your Linux disk and live booting, but I understand being unsure about it. If any data on these drives is your only copy, that’s your first mistake. Back up your data elsewhere (rule of 3, ideally). Then just use gparted carefully.

    Afterwards, you’ll need to regenerate grub to get the extra boot options to go away. Should be straight forward on mint.

    It’s gonna feels so good deleting all those nonsense windows partitions.

    Edit: I glossed right over your links to your updates saying you had already done all of this lol. GG glad it went smooth for you! Also, I am surprised canceling the NTFS slide mid-copy didn’t break anything lol. You might want to back that up and format the whole drive just to be safe. Never know when you’ll find the files that were corrupted by that…maybe run an fsck on it.




  • I’ll be the first to say I don’t like Linux gaming’s dependence on valve. I wish steam wasn’t the best experience, and I applaud all the effort that the FOSS community puts in to keep them honest.

    But for the “gambling” monetization in particular, this is really a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation. It’s on people/govts to regulate this. If Valve said tomorrow, “you’re right, we’re not going to monetize gambling anymore because we think it is unethical”, they would just lose to a competitor who is less ethical.

    It’s the same as saying, “if you’re rich and are pro higher taxes, why don’t you just choose to pay more? Nothing is stopping you.” Because that’s not going to fix anything, it’s just a losing strategy. What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.

    To that end, Valve’s most ethical move would be to lobby the govt to ban unethical monetization. I know they’re making bank, but whether they’re making enough to out-lobby all the others who are also doing this, I don’t know…also we all know the US is not exactly positioned for effective FTC policies right now…




  • I have a friend who was trying out endeavor with kde. He uses a trackball mouse, and configuring the acceleration curve has been a nightmare for him. Apparently it’s the wayland compositor’s job to expose the ability to configure libinput, and only certain ones do it (KDE being one of them), but configuration isn’t as straight forward as in windows.

    He was more able to configure it when using X11, but kept hitting a bug when using a custom acceleration curve where the cursor would shoot to the top left of the screen (I think it triggered when moving the cursor while clicking).

    I haven’t looked into it much myself, but it sounds like it has been one of those unfortunate sticking points for him right out of the gate.



  • AW2 was incredible, but I knew it wouldn’t do well when I played it, because it’s too niche. I love the Weird Fiction universe they’re building, but it’s just not pulling the Resident Evil audience.

    Firebreak I think was their attempt to monetize the IP, but oof, it’s just not fun. I feel like they could have gone more “friend slop” in tone and been much more successful. Imagine a game loop like Repo or Lethal Company, but set in the Oldest House, interacting with weird, goofy phenomena. Instead it’s a very dry shooting experience wrapped in a very dry upgrade system. I want to support them, but it feels like work to play this game…