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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I played it for about 70 hours like 8 months ago, and quite enjoyed it. Will definitely go back, at some point, to see what’s been improved. There’s a REALLY solid foundation there, I think. I like to say it’s the factorio/automation genre, but distilled down to nothing but the gameplay, in its purest, most-concentrated form. My wife and son picked it back up immediately today, when they realized the big update dropped.

    One thing they’ve talked about doing is improving the high-level progression. Specifically, they said their concept for better progression will be that milestone products will feed into future milestones, rather than having them just get thrown away, just like you describe. Not sure if that’s made it into the game yet, or not.

    For $25 in Early Access, I think it’s a deal. If you’re really worried about there being enough gameplay/progression to keep you interested, wishlist it, and keep an eye on what the updates are adding.



  • I don’t see the game getting either of those things.

    Duos, you can already do, you just have to take on a rando as a third. They could scale the difficulty down for 2 players, sure, but Elden Ring’s mutiplayer scaling is notoriously terrible, in part because no amount of scaling can account for the lost potential for splitting aggro, in a game where splitting aggro is king.

    Voice chat is something that FromSoft has INTENTIONALLY never included in any prior game, despite there being co-op in all of them. Making players coordinate with each other with very limited communication tools is one of FromSoft’s signature design choices. The fast pace of this game compared to prior games makes the lack of communication tools hurt a lot more, for sure, but it’s still very much playable. Anyone who dislikes this design choice is absolutely free to, but it’s not gonna change.




  • C, C++, C#, to name the main ones. And quite a lot of languages are compiled similarly to these.

    To be clear, there’s a lot of caveats to the statement, and it depends on architecture as well, but at the end of the day, it’s rare for a byte or bool to be mapped directly to a single byte in memory.

    Say, for example, you have this function…

    public void Foo()
    {
        bool someFlag = false;
        int counter = 0;
    
        ...
    }
    

    The someFlag and counter variables are getting allocated on the stack, and (depending on architecture) that probably means each one is aligned to a 32-bit or 64-bit word boundary, since many CPUs require that for whole-word load and store instructions, or only support a stack pointer that increments in whole words. If the function were to have multiple byte or bool variables allocated, it might be able to pack them together, if the CPU supports single-byte load and store instructions, but the next int variable that follows might still need some padding space in front of it, so that it aligns on a word boundary.

    A very similar concept applies to most struct and object implementations. A single byte or bool field within a struct or object will likely result in a whole word being allocated, so that other variables and be word-aligned, or so that the whole object meets some optimal word-aligned size. But if you have multiple less-than-a-word fields, they can be packed together. C# does this, for sure, and has some mechanisms by which you can customize field packing.








  • I’d say it depends on WHY you like the art. Does it tie into the toxic or reprehensible traits of the artist? Was the artist trying to send a toxic or reprehensible message with this art?

    If not, then it’s just a matter of ensuring that your enjoyment of the art doesn’t translate into support for the artist. Or, at least, that it doesn’t cross your personal line of support for the artist.

    So, for example, does the Kanye music you like have nazi themes or messaging? Far as I’m aware, no, the nazi-ism is just his newest shit, so you’re probably fine as long as you’re not streaming from Spotify or YouTube, or otherwise giving him revenue.




  • The REAL problem is that the industry collectively uses JS almost exclusively for shit it was never meant to do. Like you say, it’s intended for it to not throw errors and kill your whole web page, because it was only ever intended to be used for minor scripts inside mostly-static HTML and CSS web pages. Then we all turned it into the most-popular language in the world for building GUI applications.


  • My big reason would be “it hurts readability”. That is, when writing code, readibility for others who aren’t familiar with it (including future me) is my top-priority, and that means indentation and alignment are HIGHLY important, and if I spend the time to write code with specific indentation and alignment, to make it readable at a glance, I want to be certain that it’s always going to display exactly that way. Tabs specifically break that guarantee, because they’re subject to editor settings, which means shit like the below example can occur:

    I write the following code with an editor that uses a tab size of 4.

    myObject.DoSomething(
        someParameter:      "A",
        someOtherParameter: "B",
        value:              "C");
    

    If someone pulls this up in an editor that uses a tab size of 8, they get…

    myObject.DoSomething(
        someParameter:          "A",
        someOtherParameter:     "B",
        value:                          "C");
    

    Not really a big deal, in this simple case, but it illustrates the point.

    My second reason would be that it makes code more difficult to WRITE, I.E. it’s not that hard to insert spaces when you mean to insert tabs, considering that you’re not LITERALLY using only tabs just only tabs for indentation and alignment. And if you do accidentally have spaces mixed in, you’re not going to be able to tell. The guy on another machine with different editor settings will, though.

    I’m aware there are fonts that can make spaces and tabs visible and distinct, but that sounds like a NIGHTMARE to write and read code with. I mentioned above, my top priority is easy readability, and introducing more visual noise to make tabs and spaces distinct can only hurt readability.