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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • This guy is the kind of scumbag that gives lawyers bad names and… that is a REALLY REALLY high bar. His “do I not seem approachable” stance on investigating sexual harassment says it all. His focus is solely on damage control, nothing else.

    That said: The way he tells it (and considering this was high profile, he read his notes before or even during the interview): He very specifically did not threaten the parents. They asked if it was hacking. He never said it was hacking but he DID say that hacking is a federal crime.

    And this is why, much like cops, never talk to a lawyer without a lawyer present.


  • I am not saying embracer or MS or Sony or whoever else are “good guys”

    But actually look at the hellscape that is indie development right now. Studios with solid track records are fighting tooth and nail for publisher deals. And newer studios are just fucked. NoClip have done a few episodes of a “documentary” about making a game and Danny O’Dwyer gave a really depressing take on what it is like pitching for a publisher that compared it to Tinder and being glad if someone is kind enough to actually say “no” rather than ghosting you.

    Some of the studios involved might have been able to secure publisher deals. Most would have gone out of business likely even sooner.

    Its easy to blame big corporations and big corporations deserve a lot of blame. But it is more important to understand what is actually going on so that maybe people don’t throw shitfits when developers use Early Access or even try the kickstarter well again.


  • The sad truth is that most of these devs would not have survived without embracer. MAYBE some of them can pull a Platinum and say “Yo, want to pay us to make a really mediocre tmnt game?” to help make ends meet. But with funding in the indie space what it increasingly is becoming… the odds of pulling that off are poor.

    Of course, BECAUSE of the mass consolidation by platform holders and publishers those studios don’t even have the opportunity to try and make a shitty transformers game to keep the lights on.

    Like, a decade or two ago the talking point was the EA killed all these amazing studios who were one hit wonders when they were bought out. And yeah, fuck EA. But there is a reason most of those genres ALSO died out with the studios because… they were one hit wonder genres. People loved the novelty of Dungeon Keeper and then rapidly lost interest with every iteration.

    But also? Maybe those studios could have pivoted and we would have had what we see today with The Defenestration Trilogy and so forth.



  • I think these days most people use their video card as a sound card because monitors/displays generally have audio out as well.

    But yeah. I remember having endless problems getting one of the Splinter Cells to run (I want to say Pandora Tomorrow?). After literally weeks of googling and discussing the issue on forums with others with the same problem, we found out that it had issues with the onboard sound for certain motherboards. Went out to Best Buy, bought the cheapest soundblaster they had, and no problems.


  • Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.

    And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?

    I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin’ A.




  • It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:

    1. GOOD voice acting
    2. Significant “choice” and branching narratives
    3. Plenty of content that players will “never” see.

    Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.

    And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.


  • The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.

    And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.

    A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not “fully voiced” which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.

    My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.



  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptoFediverse@lemmy.worldLemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
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    1 month ago

    Again, how does that work if c/linux is “the same” on every instance?

    Will comments and posts exist on the world view of c/linux but not the zip view? At which point… what are we actually getting over the status quo? Because you can bet that anyone who has hexbear unblocked would see two different versions of every single thread because nobody else would see the hexbear posted thread.


  • There have been a number of articles (pop and scholarly) about malicious code being social engineered into codebases over the past few years. And, in this case, the malice is “expected” from one of the long time developers to begin with.

    Also: We got INCREDIBLY lucky that Andres Freund detected it when he did. Because that was hitting right around the time a lot of the major distros were preparing their major releases (Fedora basically escaped by the skin of their teeth).

    Malicious manipulation of open source projects has always been a concern. And the vast majority of us do the equivalent of signing whatever form we are given because “oh it just looks like a standard contract”.


  • What you are describing is basically Mastodon (or, if you like porn and hatespeech, twitter… non-consensual porn because a lot of Mastodon instances are REALLY horny).

    The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey.

    Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?


  • All moderator elections would do is let chuds stack the ballot. Look up shit like the sad puppies debacle.

    The answer is that a site needs to decide what its rules are and then moderators need to enforce those rules, regardless of how the community feels. Which, ironically, is what ml is doing (even if they don’t publicize those rules). And if the community dislikes the rules, you disassociate with them.

    The issue with the fediverse is that you need to defederate or else you are tacitly approving of their bullshit.


  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptoFediverse@lemmy.worldLemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
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    1 month ago

    You… should probably pay more attention to the news.

    It is very possible for bad actors to inject malicious code into an open source project. And it is very probable for people to not notice because the vast majority of developers never read a single line of the open source code they claim to value so much.

    “Any bad code will be detected by the armies of people who do rigorous code analysis of every single pull request” was always nonsense.