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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 500+ people for a videogame is insane. That’s kind of cool - despite the problems they faced. I feel like these games don’t reflect the number of people being hired for them. I’m not sure it should linearly scale (probably not), but they seem like they scale down rather than up with an increase in staff.

    I feel like modern producers are missing the forest for the trees. Games are not successful for being infinitely large. Skyrim is small by today’s standards. So is Oblivion. So are hundreds of other contemporary indie games that have captured the hearts of thousands.

    It’s not about more content. It’s about content that feels deeper. Depth over breadth. Baldurs Gate 3 proves that out. I don’t think you can expect these large groups of 500 people to all work towards a deeper game without major changes in roles. I’m no expert by any means, but I am a software engineer with some side-hobby game development experience. I think games are flat because mechanics aren’t growing with the power. We’re getting graphics, dialogue, and places. But the places aren’t any more “deep” than 5 years ago. The dialogue isn’t more interesting. The graphics are nice - but hardly why people buy games. I want to capture the “anything is possible” feeling when I hop into a game. BG3 recaptured that illusion for me for a long time.

    /Rant

    TL;Dr developers can’t throw more bodies at this problem. It’s an artistic and structural problem. They need to reframe how they create the art. It can’t be mass produced without ending up flat.



  • I disagree. The number of “stuff” is important for RPGs. If you could only pick up “important” things, the game would have no real balance of mystery. Every meaningful item would obviously be useful in some mission or goal. I like it better where the stuff is plentiful and the mystery/puzzle is: can I use this? Can I use this generic poison in this giant pot of booze? Can I use this person’s hand?

    I feel like the puzzle is sort of beneficial by hiding important items or clever usages of boring items in the midst of all the guff.

    I get why it’s annoying but I think it adds to the games charm.


  • Just to clarify a bit further. You browser doesn’t specify ports in the URL because HTTP and HTTPS have basically coopted the 80/443 ports. You could have a website running an HTTP server on another port like 3000. But then you’d need to specify the port in the URL since the browser - by default - is looking at 80/443 and not 3000.

    You should be able to configure the port for your Jellyfin server. I’m not a Jellyfin user, but most applications allow you to pick a port to run it on. So you’ll have to change the port to port 80 and then expose that port on your docker container in the docker-compose file.

    Edit: actually now that I think about it… You could just point your local port 80 to the docker container port. I forget the port mapping schema but it’s something like

    ports:
      - 80:1234
    

    You might have to flip the order of the ports. But basically that example above is trying to map port 80 to port 1234. If that fails, you might have port 80 being used by another application on your computer and you’d either have to shut that app down, pick a different port for that app or you’re back to picking a different port for Jellyfin




  • I’m not sure I agree. I don’t like those two solutions. They basically try to centralize the platform. I think Lemmy is a little confusing at first, but that’s a UX/UI problem and not necessarily a good enough reason to change underlying features of the platform.

    I think a user subscribing to communities across instances is a pretty tough technical challenge and it would be very difficult to manage. How are particular communities decided to be a part of a multi-community? Is it voted on? Is there a mod of the multi-community? If so, that could still lead to bifurcation wherein you now have a multi-community that claims to provide all /c/pokemon content across instances but is potentially missing many viable communities on some instances due to things like moderator in-fighting or moderator preferences.

    I like how Lemmy allows for sort of duplicate communities. Reddit already had that issue and people naturally flocked to the communities that had the content that suited them. I think it would behoove Lemmy to stay away from trying to centralize it all.

    However, I agree that it is confusing. I think this is a UI/UX challenge which needs to be solved. I don’t have the solution, but I think it’s clear that the app language needs to help users naturally feel comfortable living within an instance and moving across instances.

    I am open to suggestions and I am fully happy to be proven wrong. But as a software engineer, the second GitHub issue gave me the heeby-jeebies on a technical front. Seemed a little hairy for a young platform to take on right now. I think there are plenty of other lower hanging fruit id prefer for the community to solve:

    • Building a nice mobile android app Jerboa is pretty good but it needs some TLC. Timeouts happen frequently on my app and crash it/erase content I was reading
    • Provide better documentation/marketing materials for new users. I’m open to the idea of a centralized website where users can go to create accounts, learn about Lemmy, and maybe initially subscribe to popular communities

    All in all though, I feel like Lemmy is totally usable. Actually, the most confusing thing to me was learning that I could see my comments and posts on Mastodon. That threw me through a loop. I still don’t understand Mastodon since the UI - to me - just seems to be random comments. I don’t really have any thread-based context to understand the comments I see on my Mastodon app. So for now I stick to Jerboa.


  • I personally don’t appreciate it. As someone who has always worked on a budget-mid tier PC, I find that “high end” graphics just means “don’t download”. They tend to perform terribly regardless of the quality I set and they tend to look really bad with the quality dropped; compared to games that intentionally have low res textures and simpler game engines, which look and perform much better.

    I like games that are more focused on providing me with new mechanics to learn and overcome. I like puzzles. I like strategy (e.g. RimWorld).

    Cyberpunk is also a good example because it was all flash and no substance. It ran terribly and had nothing new to provide to the gaming world. I liked it a bit, but downloaded dozens of gigs just to get bored in an hour or two was not super fun. I often am comparing memory usage to how many hours I’ve put in a game. CS:GO, RimWorld, CitySkylines, etc are all relatively much smaller in total size and yet I’ve poured days into them. I just feel like at a certain point, these AAA titles are just spending money on design because they don’t have the patience to value mechanics. So we end up with 100GB of textures and a re-roll of the same classic mechanics we’ve been playing for a decade.