Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

Looking at how they handle character controls, probably not actually. It looks like you control your character like a puppet or marionette.

That’s awesome. I think it’s also a really smart way of converting a game like that to VR.

The binding of Isaac has shit ton of them.

Do old build-engine shooters like Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc count?

Sapienza, Italy in Hitman has outfits for red and green plumbers.

Sam and Max has references to all kinds of things.

Hypnospace Outlaw has a ton of references to pre-y2k pop culture.

Power Wash simulator has a number of official crossovers with IPs like SpongeBob, Warhammer, Laura Croft, Final Fantasy VII, etc. (oh shit I just checked and there’s a Shrek one coming out soon).

Eh, reputation is still a thing and they probably aren’t getting to keep any of the IPs they worked on, like Stray or Outer Wilds. They also won’t get to keep whatever cash the company might have had in reserve. My understanding is that the idea of spinning off a studio to be indie is that you get to keep developing your IPs to some extent, you still have your brand and your reputation, etc. Otherwise they probably would have done this at the beginning.

So, no, they didn’t really spin it off heh.

I wonder if there’ll be a round two of The Internet Idiots vs The Hedge Fund Dumbasses.

Okay, keep digging your own grave Nintendo. Twitch streamers and YouTubers are a major source of advertising for you, even for back-catalog stuff. The only reason why I see Nintendo directs is because a streamer I enjoy watches them. My interest in Nintendo stuff is pretty low but I’ve been persuaded to buy a few Nintendo games as a result of YouTube or twitch videos. But here’s the thing: these guys have no filter. They swear constantly and love innuendo. They will probably get caught in Nintendo’s net and stop streaming Nintendo stuff. As a result, I will no longer be paying attention to what Nintendo’s doing.

Isn’t Minecraft still mostly original devs though? I thought Microsoft basically paid notch to fuck off and then basically told Mojang to keep doing what they were already doing; as long as papa Microsoft gets their cut, they’re happy kinda thing.

Quick, download it before Nintendo gets it.

Jesus Christ what a wild story. Is it possible that Craven simply wanted to do good, but “as a white, abled man” wasn’t opening doors so they felt they had to pretend to be someone else? From what it sounds like, a lot of what they and their “”“partners”“” did was legitimately helpful. The thing that leaves me confused is that they probably could have fleeced people for significantly more money but didn’t. They didn’t have to put the amount of effort into it as they did. Is it possible they were trying to do the right thing but were going about it the wrong way?

As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”

Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They’re awesome!

It is kinda lazy to have “full masculine” and “full feminine” as your only choices while pretending they aren’t just “male” or “female”, but at the same time, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Today the options might be “not-man” and “not-woman”, but the future might have “not-man”, “not-woman”, “man-woman” and “woman-man”!

First, to make something clear, I’m not necessarily arguing for or against banning macros, I’m mainly addressing the snap tap/rapid movement change and saying that you could effectively reproduce it with a macro.

It is as you say in that 1 and -1 result in 0, but this is done in the game’s movement code, intentionally, to force players to learn to only press one of the two opposing keys at once, as a skill.

What I’m saying is that I don’t think that was originally a skill choice, but done out of necessity. It may have eventually become associated with skill, but that the choice likely wasn’t originally intended to increase skill.

Theres a reason many pc FPS players consider the source engine to be the gold standard for control responsiveness and player movement design/feel, and this is one of them.

They should play more gzdoom then. Source feels laggy and unresponsive in comparison. :p

Also I am fairly sure the macro set up you are describing to allow for the strafe cancelling is a null bind, which Valve has also banned.

Only because valve banned it in response to hardware manufacturers.

This is different than just setting your mouse dpi to be more sensitive, or your analog sticks to be more sensitive, or your whole keyboard to have less travel time.

What about deadzones? Those are used for analog buttons and sticks so players can customize how far the player has to press the buttons or tilt the sticks to register a press.

Valve’s own software allows you to set different deadzones for analog sticks and triggers. I mean, their software on steam deck lets you trigger different actions based on whether the trigger is a full press or partial press. You can have the sticks trigger things based on whether they’re being touched, pressed, or tilted.

When the steam controller was released, they made a big deal about how you could chord button presses, create macros, create action sets (which change what the buttons do) and so on. Valve’s own system allows for it.

Its getting banned now because now we have keyboard manufacturers just straight up releasing keyboards with features that exceed in speed what used to only be done by a handful of people with too much time on their hands.

And what I’m saying is that it doesn’t require a special keyboard, it just lowered the barrier of entry. As such, I see it as a skill issue, not a cheating issue. What? The player in front of you is wiggling too fast for you to track? Get good. That’s the entire point of the game. It’s not like they’re seeing through walls or automatically locking onto your head.

Then, what if everyone had these keyboards, or if windows had macro support built-in? Would you still see it as cheating?

Finally what if someone had a seemingly unnatural ability to press A/D alternating in a way that resulted in <10ms of delay/overlap between inputs, who owned a hyper-sensitive keyboard that triggers keypresses the moment a key moves? They’re able to “wiggle” almost as well as someone using one of these keyboards; except they’re just inherently that good, and their keyboard has no other special abilities except that it’s super sensitive.

Are they cheating because their natural, unskilled ability rivals that of a so-called cheat device? Would it be more fair to handicap the player with freakish ability, or to allow other players to use devices that negate the inherent difference them?

Again, I don’t care much about macros being banned; I brought that up simply to state that the fast-tapping, wiggle thing could be at least mostly reproduced via macros. It’s the outrage about new keyboards making it easier to wiggle effectively that annoys me. It comes off as a bunch of people crying because the game suddenly got harder and they don’t want to learn how to aim better.

Imagine if people complained that racing wheels and peddles made racing games unfair against people using gamepads or keyboards; or that using a hotas setup was cheating in flying games.

Like, I don’t own one of these keyboards and I don’t play highly competitive fpses anymore, yet it’s still annoying. Like, analog keyboards have a lot of potential to be really cool devices, but I’m concerned they won’t get past the “fad” stage because the analog switches will be associated with cheating.

I understand how it works (or at least I think I do) and why people consider it cheating; what I’m saying is that that’s just how keyboards usually work and the reason why they don’t always work that way in games is an intentional decision.

Don’t believe me? Open up a word processor. Hold the A key. Notice how it starts entering a line of As? Now, while holding the A key, press and hold the D key. It should start entering a line of Ds. Then, when you release the D key but keep holding the A key, it should start entering a line of As again (at least that’s what used to happen). This is the most likely to work if your keyboard has true n-key rollover, but it may still work regardless.

If that doesn’t work, try a different key combo, your keyboard may be losing inputs due to conflicting inputs (or word processors may have changed how they deal with simultaneous keypresses). Cheap keyboards will combine sets of keys to cut down on complexity and cost, however it can result in some key combos becoming impossible to input. That’s why n-key rollover is awesome.

So why does holding strafe left/right (and forward/back) result in null combinations?

I suspect that it’s due to controller support. Instead of having a series of if-then statements which directly translate a keypress into movement (something a lot of new game developers do), they’re likely translating keypresses into a 2d vector which gets applied to your character’s movement speed. An “A” press would correspond to “1”, a “D” press would result in “-1”. These get combined and become “0”.

Why do it that way?

Because controllers use analog input, so you aren’t going to get a “1” or “-1” without fully tilting the stick. However, a half-tilt shouldn’t result in a “1”, it should result in a “(-)0.5”. That “0.5” is then multiplied by the player’s move speed and (optionally) the player’s current vector gets interpolated to the new vector.

So what is the keyboard doing that stops the null state (horizontal movement = 0) from occurring?

It’s basically overriding the A key when the D key is pressed (not sure if it’s actually “lifting” the A key or just throwing away the input, either works) or vice versa; and then pressing the A key again when the D key is released (assuming the A key is still being held). You can make a macro to simulate this behavior.

As far as sensitivity thresholds go, so what? People have been able to do that with analog sticks (and sometimes analog triggers, depending on the game) for like, forever. Hell, you used to be able to mix controller, keyboard and mouse controls to get analog movement and mouse control (like those standalone “macro/num pads” with the thumb stick). I dunno if it’s still possible or if driver changes have nullified it, but regardless, imo analog keyboards are overdue. Getting mad about it is like someone getting mad about mouse-look in the 90s.

It doesn’t require a fancy keyboard though. If anything, that’s how keyboards usually work, it takes conscious effort to stop them from working that way. Personally I had to learn how to program character controllers so they wouldn’t function like snap tap.

Even so though, I’m 90% sure you could use a macro to do the same exact thing so long as you have a keyboard with n-key rollover (afaik most keyboards have it nowadays)

Afaik it should see both inputs simultaneously if you have n-key rollover, which is a pretty common feature now. I think the last time I was looking for a keyboard, they all advertised n-key rollover. As such, it’d be on the game, not the OS.

You can actually test this in the Unity editor if you have some programming experience (or I assume any other engine for that matter). It’s very easy to write a character controller in which A+D results in the game using the last input instead of adding the inputs together. I actually had to learn how to make a game not do that. It wouldn’t function exactly like the keyboards currently under fire, but it would function very similarly.

I’m pretty sure you can also do this very easily with a macro (assuming you have a keyboard with n-key rollover), no special keyboard required as well.

Edit: your specific example is an example of a cheap keyboard losing inputs, which n-key rollover fixes. Ironically, find the right cheap keyboard and you might be able to partially reproduce the effect they’re talking about (having one key override another other).

It’s not automation though. It’s just changing the way A and D interact. Like, it’s not sending any extra commands, if anything it’s sending fewer commands.

Edit: the main thing I’m concerned about is the “snap tap”/super wiggle thing. Macros are kinda w/e, but A and D zeroing each other out is an artificial limitation which was likely the result of wanting to support controllers/analog input, and not a design choice to increase player skill. If the rules of the game allow someone to get a significant advantage simply by changing the way A or D are registered then maybe it’s a problem with the games rules and not the hardware. Consider adding momentum, bullet spread when moving, or some other mechanic that negates or diminishes the power of the wiggle (or alternatively just git gud skrub).

Next they need custom player models.

Imagine if Flight Simulator 2024 ended up being the sleeper killer social app of the decade. How surreal would that be? Like, if you showed me that screenshot without context, I’d think I was looking at a new hitman or second life: third life or something.

Edit

"The way I think of this now, it really just comes down to, how good is the data we get, and how much are we throwing at it. I mean, for example, I’m currently on the, I call it the living world. We added hundreds of species of animals that run around. I worked on things like Zoo Tycoon…we have tons more animals than the native zoo game, and it’s just a tiny little feature in Flight Simulator, but it feels like, oh yeah, we can do that.

“Right now, we have every ship on Earth, right? Every ship on Earth sends us a transponder signal… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first person shooter environment. I think we’re in a new era of making games that I think are going to break new ground, from a scale and complexity perspective.”

Dude, what are you actually trying to make right now? Like, this isn’t flight sim stuff anymore.

Damn, they really couldn’t wait to shut it down huh? Are they deleting everything because they’re going to try and write it off or something? I dunno how you’d manage to do that considering how long it’s been around, but like, damn. Y’all need to chill a little and give people time to archive shit.

dusts off the ol’ valve-spiracy hat

It’s curious that they chose “white sands” because that provides 3 possibilities, two of which point to Half-Life or something related.

The first possibility is that name is completely unrelated to the project or the project is unrelated to an existing Valve IP.

The second possibility is that it’ll be another game set sometime around the Black Mesa resonance cascade. White Sands, New Mexico is where the original nuclear bomb test occurred. This suggests that the game may take place in New Mexico (where Black Mesa was located), and possibly before or during the resonance cascade.

The third possibility is that it’ll be the Episode 3 everyone’s wanting. White Sands could also refer to snow, particularly a snowy wasteland. Considering the direction Half-Life is headed in, they could be finally bringing Gordon to the Borealis.

OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK I’VE BEEN WANTING A GAME LIKE THIS SO LONG HOLY SHIT.

Space Cadet was one of Maxis’ Full-Tilt Pinball tables. Afaik it’s not in the public domain, Microsoft licensed it from Maxis. However, I’m not sure EA would actually enforce the copyright unless someone was making a lot of money off it.