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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Yeah, the wording is confusing. A long time ago, there was no paid software, there was only software where you got the source code and other software where e.g. it was pre-installed on some hardware and the manufacturer didn’t want to give the source code.

    In that time, a whole movement started fighting for software freedom, so they called their software “free”.




  • I don’t have much experience with IPv6 yet either, but as I understand, the primary benefit is that you can get rid of a lot of the crappiness of IPv4, which you might just deem ‘normal’ at this point, like NAT and DHCP. It does happen quite a bit, for example, that we’d like a unique identifier for a host, but with IPv4, you need to store a separate UUID to accomplish that.


  • A few years ago, I would have fully agreed with you, but having tried my hand at (hobbyist) gamedev broke those rose-tinted glasses for me. It’s just extremely hard to curate gameplay mechanics.

    The only real way to know whether a mechanic works in your game, whether it’s fun, is to implement it. That means you’ll be programming for weeks and at the end of it, you might end up deciding that it actually isn’t fun, so you get to rip it back out.
    This is also a somewhat linear process. If you think of another mechanic at a later point, you’re not going to re-evaluate all previous mechanics to see whether a different combination would’ve been more fun. Instead, you just decide whether this new mechanic adds fun to your mechanic-soup or distracts from it.

    Point is, even as a hobbyist and idealist, with theoretically infinite time, I quickly learned to swallow my pride and appreciate when something just adds fun, whether it perfectly fits in or not. You’re just not going to create the perfect game. And a game that’s a sum of inconsistent, fun parts is still more fun than a coherent game that doesn’t exist.

    Of course, this does not mean, you should include mechanics even though they’re overused. That seems to rather be a result from long development cycles, where games decide to include the mechanic when it’s not yet overused, e.g. when a popular game featured that mechanic, but once the game comes out, then a whole bunch of other games have come out before, which had also decided to include that same mechanic.


  • I think, part of it is also that it’s a rather isolated feature which is fun on its own. You don’t need multiple systems working together to make parrying fun. Instead, you just react in the right moment and there’s your endorphins. Pretty much the hardest part about implementing it, is to make enemy attacks readable, which you likely need for dodge rolls, too. And then especially for AAA titles, which can’t afford to experiment much, such an isolated feature is just a no-brainer to include.






  • Well, as the others already said, it’s a matter of taste and different factors play into it, but your argument with the AI is precisely why I find this decision so jarring: You don’t need nor want unpredictability in a skating game.

    It’s not a competitive genre where the unpredictability makes it interesting. And I remember watching a video of a guy playing Skate where NPCs would constantly walk into his path and it was the most infuriating thing. If there would’ve been no NPCs, no unpredictability, the game would’ve been better.
    Of course, with an MMO, other players will probably have no collision. But if you can still see them where you’re skating, they’ll still get in the way of you seeing what you’re skating on, particularly if you run into trolls.

    I’m not completely negative to the MMO concept. Maybe it is fun to see just the sheer chaos of hundreds of others skating in the same place. Maybe they have some sort of idea to actually make interaction with other players relevant in some way. Maybe it’s kind of cool for folks to log into the Skate MMO and just hang out. Or maybe it’s only an MMO hub-world and you don’t have to see other players on the individual courses. But yeah, I’m just not holding my breath.