Depends on the cloud provider. AWS, as an example, have up to three “availability zones” within a single data center. If the customer needs HA, they are encouraged to run their applications in separate availability zones. It means different subnets within the VPC, redundant LBs spread across those zones, and more.

There is also probably DNS-based global load balancing across different data centers.

That’s just the hosting infrastructure. I’m sure Chujo works on the office LAN as well. He might wear the infosec hat also, which means he’s up to his eyeballs in firewall policy.

I don’t envy my brethren in software development orgs. Been there, done that, got that t-shirt long ago.

This is a software development business, which is a positively bananas trade no matter what’s getting written. And the smaller the business, the more hats network guys wear. We work with everything from the server app down to the coffee machine fueling the devs. And 100% uptime isn’t the most crazy demand I’ve heard. I’m sure Chujo is busier than a one-armed paper hanger with jock itch.

At least he’s got money to throw at his hosting company. Scaling up would have been much slower in the old days.

Your roommate Roy is about to get really pissed at you.

“Roy! Where are you buddy?”

“FOR THE LAST TIME I’M RIGHT FSCKING HERE”

For most games, the real consequence of failure in a game is being forced to repeat what just happened. And getting caught in a Groundhog Day-esque situation that repeats once every few minutes suuuuucks.

It’s even worse when a failure causes your character to lose stuff. That’s even more time wasted, in that the time and effort taken to get the thing is gone.

Paint the rainbow on my proud carebear chest if you must. I just want a place to escape to for a little while, a place that doesn’t frustrate the shit out of me.

I don’t disagree. Those guns could use bigger and more expensive ammo also.

I’m confused. Are you talking about rarity or (what I like to call) quality? A rare weapon has 1-3 extra modifiers, like +10% damage to humanoids. Quality affects base damage. An Advanced higher quality weapon does more base damage than Calibrated, for instance.

Space games really aren’t that much fun. They seem fun when I read about them, but they’re not.

NMS is the least worst analogue to Starfield, and I can’t play that anymore because it’s the same thing over and over.

It’s a bit slow to ramp up, but it’s really good towards the end. Unexpected choices and capabilities.

In terms of exploration, it’s very similar to No Man’s Sky, another boring space game. Every planet has similar terrain, similar plants and animals, similar goals, and similar structures. The differences are ambient light shades, colors and patterns on the plants and animals, and clutter in the artificial areas. The player can go scan life forms and blast bad guys. That’s about it.

But I don’t see how it could be any other way. How else does a studio scale up a galaxy such that every one of the 1000-odd planets is its own unique, interesting, engaging snowflake of a setting without spending hundreds of employee-years on each one?

Maybe AI will be the answer, but I’m not holding my breath.

There is, and it absolutely failed to be a comfort when I tried it after I got sick the first time. The comfort mode functioned, but my brain was done with VR. I could not even use Google Earth VR without getting queasy.

VR was fine for me until I landed on a planet in Elite: Dangerous. The rover pitching back and forth was way too much. Never again will I put a headset on.

Good question. In Skyrim, everyone slept except the guards. I wonder if it was just too tough to model with the different day intervals on each planet?

That happened to me last night, so I’m not sure it’s been patched out just yet.

Delvin Mallory is listed as an inmate at The Lock.

Just music I like that fits with the theme of the game. I’m solely responsible for the track flow, subject to change.

It is now. Great track. Thanks for the suggestion!

TIL images overwrite URLs in the post. Thanks for your note.

I think it’s the Astrophysics skill that gives the ability to scan remote objects, up to 30 ly away. Rank 2 gives the ability to scan anywhere in a solar system.

When planet scanning, zoom outs and ins can take a fair bit of time. Instead, hit the left mouse button to focus on a planet. Keep the mouse cursor over the planet you selected, then hit R to scan. Move the camera, find another unscanned planet, then left-click on it to zoom directly to that planet. Lather, rinse, repeat until all are scanned.

If you hit R when your mouse cursor is over another planet, the map will zoom out, then in to that other planet, taking valuable time that you don’t have. ;)

The crickets in the MAST District are definitely straight out of Whiterun Hold.