I haven’t been playing competitive FPS games for a long time, but they used to be a dime a dozen. There must be some kind of alternative multiplayer FPS that you could just play instead if you’re not happy with Call of Duty.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

my thought was, '“oh am i going to have to do all this myself?” Idk why I would want to spend my time and effort doing what someone in Rimworld does without needing micromanagement.

Not really my cup of tea either.

I don’t think that Stardew Valley is really all that similar to Rimworld. Maybe Oxygen Not Included, Satisfactory/Factorio, Kenshi, or Dwarf Fortress if you’re looking for something similar.

I would call Hades and pretty much anything people call an “action roguelike” a roguelite, but I have a hard time calling something not a roguelike for using graphics, even being pretty strict about the definition. Like, there are a number of originally-ASCII roguelikes that have tilesets. Those don’t functionally change the game in any way than other than directly dropping the tiles in. Does that mean that Nethack-family games or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup aren’t roguelikes?

My red lines are:

• Gotta be turn-based. Maybe I’d accept a purely forced-turn version of a turn-based roguelike, like Mangband.

• At least some element of procedurally-generated maps and loot that alters how one needs to play the game from run to run. I’d definitely call many games that still have many handcrafted maps – Tales of Mag’eyal 2 or Caves of Qud, say – roguelikes.

• At least the option for permadeath, and that that be the primary mode of play. Some Caves of Qud was originally permadeath-only, but added a mode that avoids it.

• Grid-based. Hex grid is fine, like Hoplite.

Those are Berlin Interpretation elements. In addition:

• Top-down view (or functionally-equivalent, like equivalent, like isometric). I wouldn’t call a first-person grid-based game – and there were a lot of 1980s and 1990s RPGs that used that structure – a roguelike.

• Only direct control of one character at a time. I wouldn’t rule out Nethack for indirectly-controlled pets or Caves of Qud for letting one switch which character the player’s “mind” is controlling.

I don’t think that I’d make it a hard requirement, but all good roguelikes that I’ve played involve a lot of analysis and trying to find synergies among character abilities or item or monster or map characteristics, often in nonobvious ways. That’s a big part of the game.

I don’t think that the problem is 2FA itself so much as poor UX on existing systems.

Let’s say that I have a little USB keychain dongle in my pocket with an “approve” button and a tiny screen. When I sign in, at the time that I plug my password in, I plug the dongle in. It shows the information for whom I am approving authentication. I push the “approve” button.

It’s got a trusted display (unlike a smartcard, so that a point-of-sale system can’t claim that I’m approving something other than what I am).

It can store multiple keys, and I basically use it for any credentials that I don’t mind carrying with myself.

I then keep another, “higher security” dongle at home with more-sensitive keys.

Does that add some overhead relative to just entering my password? Yeah. But is it a big deal? No. And it makes it a lot harder for someone to swipe credentials.

I agree that using phone-linked SMS 2FA authentication is problematic (for a number of reasons, not just because it locks you to a phone, but because there are also privacy implications there).

for some reason

It’s called price discrimination.

If there are multiple groups of potential purchasers who have different levels of willingness to pay, if you can identify some characteristic of people willing to pay more, then you can create a version of the product that targets that characteristic and thus the group.

Price discrimination (“differential pricing”,[1][2] “equity pricing”, “preferential pricing”,[3] “dual pricing”,[4] “tiered pricing”,[5] and “surveillance pricing”[6]) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[7][8][2] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[2] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay[8][2][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[9]

• “Product versioning”[8][16] or simply “versioning” (or “second-degree” price differentiation) — offering a product line[13] by creating slightly differentiated products for the purpose of price differentiation,[8][16] i.e. a vertical product line.[17] Another name given to versioning is “menu pricing”.[14][18]

In this case, you’re going to have something like a group of “value customers” who care a lot about how much they need to spend on the game. And then you’re going to have “premium customers” who aren’t too fussed about what they pay, but want the very fanciest experience.

If you had just one version, sold the game at the “value customer” price, then you’d lose out on what the “premium customer” would pay. If you sold it at the “premium customer” price, then you’d have a bunch of “value customers” for whom the game would no longer be a worthwhile purchase, who wouldn’t buy the game, and you’d lose the sales to them. But by selling it at multiple prices, you can optimize for both groups.

EDIT: l’d also add, on the technical rather than economic side, that I’ve messed around with having a custom HRTF model myself, as Linux (and maybe elsewhere, dunno) games that use OpenAL let you specify a custom HRTF model in the config file. My own impression was that any impact on audio experience was pretty minimal. Might be different if someone had really weirdly-shaped ears or something, dunno.

I remember being outdoors feeling like a relief in the original Half-Life.

In Far Cry, I definitely preferred being outside. Same with Metro.

I think in most FPS games I’ve played, the player doesn’t have the developer ambush them with stuff outside. Maybe that’s a factor.

I don’t think that you can patent game mechanics in the US, have read about that before, but it sounds like this lawsuit is in Japan, and their IP system may not work the same way.

EDIT: Sorry, I’m wrong. It’s that game rules aren’t covered by copyright, that’s what I was remembering.

!buildapc@lemmy.ca for a link that will work for anyone, regardless of their home instance.

Apparently the EULA blocked them from lawsuits, as people have tried suing them before.

This guy tried suing them six years back over his $4500.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/star-citizen-court-documents-reveal-the-messy-reality-of-crowdfunding-a-dollar200-million-game/

Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He’s got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. Between April 2013 and April 2018, Ken pledged $4,495 to the project. The game still isn’t out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn’t refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.

On June 13, 2018, a judge ruled in favor of Star Citizen. According to Lord—and the LA county court records—the judge dismissed the case without prejudice, saying an arbitration clause buried in the Star Citizen end-user license agreement prevented Lord, or anyone, from taking RSI to court for a refund on a game that some backers think may never come out.

I suppose a class action lawyer might be able to find some jurisdiction in which they were taking money and running afoul of consumer protection laws.

Thing is, I think that a class action lawyer is going to want to go after someone with money, and when CIG runs out of funds, I don’t expect that they’re going to be a very interesting target.

https://gamerant.com/star-citizen-development-history-kickstarter-budget-delays-fans-disappointed/

In October 2012, Star Citizen was officially revealed, alongside a Kickstarter campaign that would be opened a week later. The Kickstarter page discussed the game in pretty extensive detail, boasting a long list of features that the game would allegedly have by launch.

Star Citizen was going to have a “persistent universe,” a vast multiplayer environment that allowed players to trade, fight, and talk amongst each other, acting as a simulation of a real sci-fi galaxy. Alongside this, a singleplayer campaign named “Squadron 42” would also be released, featuring co-op. Upon release, Star Citizen was going to have no pay-to-win mechanics, and no ongoing subscription model. Simply put, if people pledged money once, then they were done, and would receive the full game at launch, slated for November 2014.

Twelve years ago, the game had a release date set to be two years in the future.

Today, it also seems to have a release date of two years in the future.

https://www.33rdsquare.com/demystifying-aaa-games-the-past-present-and-future-of-blockbuster-gaming/

Lengthy development cycles – Given their complexity, AAA games take 2-5 years to develop. This allows time for extensive testing and polish.

Two years is at the lower end of what it’d take a studio to do an AAA game from scratch.

I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You

I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.

But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.

Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.

I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.

But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.

If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.

I did like Sim City a fair bit.

I feel the same way.

I wonder if some of it might be due to the Microsoft acquisition.

Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet

NUT has a hardware compatibility list.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

Oddly-enough, it doesn’t on lemmy.today’s Web UI, but it looks fine on beehaw.org’s Web UI. Not sure if there’s some sort of problem with propagating updates, or if it just takes a while, but I reckon that you’ve done the right thing if it looks fine now on the instance hosting the community.

Thanks!

Tales-like

I’ve been kind of out of the RPG loop for a while, probably not the best person to suggest, and haven’t played the series, but I’m thinking that if you could expand a bit on that, it might help provide suggestions…I mean, not clear to me what you’re looking for that’s specific to that relative to other RPGs. Similar setting? A long-running RPG series with many entries? The combat system (absent the real-time aspect)?

You mention “depth of story”, so maybe something with a similar level of storytelling?

&

OP, you might want to manually clean that up.

I wish that the Lemmy Web UI “suggest title” code would do one of:

• Translate HTML entities to their Unicode equivalent, which is what the Web UI actually wants in that field

• Change the Lemmy Web UI’s title field to support HTML entities.

I have to manually clean up titles myself on a not-irregular basis, usually because of various dash-like characters, like em- or en-dashes, or typographic quotes.

I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they’ll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.

The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.