Tarte

He drove me back into using RSS after more than a decade for staying up to date. Much better for the mental health. Thankfully, since Wordpress and also some other CMS have the RSS feature enabled by default, many websites have it even if they’re not advertising it.

Feedbro, it’s a browser extension.

I‘m using a RSS reader with rule based filters to remove uninteresting articles (to me) and upvote or downvote articles with certain keywords (for me). That way I can aggregate lots of media and have my own personal feed.

It takes some time to set up and fine-tune, though.

In case someone doesn’t know the reference to Futurama in the first paragraph: https://youtu.be/Wxu7z7hfVns?si=6nR-JTSaYVDA4IEt

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Great update, and an interesting read, too!

That is not legally possible in the EU. You can grant irrevocable usage rights, but you cannot give away your copyright.

Why would anyone switch from Unity to Unreal to evade the revenue share? Both engines have that.

Godot might be an alternative.

“non-retroactive” clause directly in their contract

I also wonder how Unity‘s approach will work in countries where that is the legal default. I have a feeling that we will be seeing quite a few lawsuits next year, if they actually go ahead with their plans.

I have yet to find an LLM that can summarize a text without errors. I already mentioned this in another post a few days back, but Google‘s new search preview is driving me mad with all the hidden factual errors. They make me click only to realize that the LLM told me what I wanted to find, not what is there (wrong names, wrong dates, etc.).

I greatly prefer the old excerpt summaries over the new imaginary ones (they‘re currently A/B testing).

I love the mechanics. But the naming could be much better. This is not WoW.

Nintendo has historically been slow to change and, more specifically, innovation.

The company was founded in 1889 and produced physical playing card games. From a historical perspective, I think they had more than their fair share of change and innovation, all things considered.

In recent years, I‘d agree with your statement.

That’s an interesting comment, because I felt almost the exact opposite. I greatly enjoyed the story and world building, too. But I also mostly enjoyed the combat. What was boring to me were the mundane riddles. I did not finish the game because of all the stupidly easy riddles that I felt were only wasting the player‘s time without adding much. However, since I was already pretty invested in the story, I watched the ending on YouTube. I liked it, and while it was not particularly surprising (there were many not so subtle hints about the circumstances of her „illness“) it gave me some closure.

I understand why they did the two disjointed variants of gameplay together with that story/theme. It didn’t work for me. Maybe they should have focused on one type of gameplay instead of two.

I don’t remember if it was like this with the game Myst specifically, but generally speaking: Some hardly solvable riddles were put into many point and click adventure in the pre-internet era, because they usually came with an expensive help hotline that they wanted you to call.

I know that you are mainly looking forward to the new content, and that just quality of life improvements aren’t the kind of things that make people buy the game and get excited for.

Nope. I’m preeeetty excited about QOL changes here. :-)

Unreal Engine is a 25-year-old game engine, too.

Great news! I‘m looking forward to the expansion (haven’t played Factorio for years now), but I’m already happy about the regular Friday Facts that will certainly bring me joy.

Beyond All Reasons. It’s a spiritual successor of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander using the Spring engine.

It’s also a great game in its own right, especially the various advanced unit positioning and selection features had me amazed. The graphics are good and the performance with many units is finally very good too, after some patches last year (or two years? I don’t remember).

Is this an inside joke, a technical bug or a mistake? Your link directs me to this post, going in circles.

Thanks for the suggestion! Eve is a nice trading simulation, from all I have heard. Many friends have suggested it to me, but I have not yet played it. The required time investment and grind of MMOs is what‘s scaring me off. The older I get, the more I enjoy offline games that I can pause at any time.

However, I don’t believe (from my outside perspective) that trading in Eve is a good simulation of trade in the early modern period.

Lovely game. Much more than just an Age of Empires clone. I love that there are no „peasants“ but every soldier does farming if not in battle. Also the circular maps are fantastic for RTS gameplay.

I want a historically accurate trading simulation set in the early modern period: I want a multitude of ever-changing regional hard, soft and bookkeeping currencies, also bills of exchange, individual units of measurement for each product, paying in kind, putting sth. on the cuff, installments, various per item or volume based taxations, tolls, tithes, tenure, social privileges, staple rights, scheduled trade fairs, regulated fixed prices, lot sales, return freight, regulated transportational services, craft and trading legislation, significance of saint days, city level legislation, guilds and other corporations, the very relevant concepts of honor, contemporary obligations of social responsibility, familial structures and needs for a network of professional connections, monasteries as large economical entities, etc. pp.

All tycoons I have played just reproduce a shallow version of our current concepts of money and trade and skin it with historical images without even trying to research the historical setting they’re in. They add complexity in many other ways that don’t focus on trade (i.e. combat).

No fighting. No leveling. No building. Just trade.