Quoting: Pyretic

Quoting: PhiladelphusI'm still looking for a game that has exactly what I want in a Pokémon-like on PC

Out of curiosity, what IS your ideal Pokemon game?

Heh, I've thought about this a lot, so apologies if I get verbose here…

The thing that first drew to me Pokémon, as a ~9 year-old watching his friend play the first-generation games (I've never actually had a Nintendo system of my own), was the concept of being a Fantasy Biologist. (In essence, I connected with the original idea of the games being about "digital bug-collecting" for urban kids.) I enjoy the complexity of the battling system too, but a lot of that complexity comes through the complexity of the 'mons themselves, with so many different types and moves (and later abilities). So for a setting, I'd like to see something like either the first humans migrating into the Americas over the Bering land bridge, or an astrobiologist landing on a planet, some setting with new and exciting lifeforms to discover, that thrill of exploration and encountering the unknown.

Another thing I'd like in my ideal game is multiplayer (hence my comment above), and specifically I'd love it to have a feel something like playing Stardew Valley with friends: something you can take at your own pace, play together, play apart, relax with some low-intensity crop-watering or gear up and take on the mines. Pokémon except instead of NPC rivals it's your own friends out there competing in friendly battles, getting up to hijinx, just doing crazy things for the fun of it, that sort of thing.

To go along with the theme of exploration, it'd be neat if the world map wasn't static, but procedurally generated to some extent so that every new game comes with surprises and the fun of finding out what's behind the next hill. This might not be quite RimWorld/Dwarf Fortress/Minecraft levels of generating the entire world (though that might be fun in its own way); perhaps something like general guidelines to a region, then filled in XCOM 2-style with smaller and smaller hand-made random elements. (Like if routes in Pokémon always connected the same places and had the same general shape, but could have randomly-varying internal layouts.)

Circling back to the creatures themselves, I'd like them to be to complex and with a better simulation of a real ecosystem. Not just random encounters, but you could find them going about their lives in the world, maybe getting into some emergent situations, perhaps something like Rain World's detailed creature AIs. Actually simulating a real ecology might be too taxing, but there are probably a lot of things that could be done to make the world feel more alive (a day/night cycle and seasons with seasonal behavior would be cool!). And while I'm dreaming, all of it being easily moddable would be great, so people could add their own creatures, biomes, map pieces, moves, etc., etc. :smile:

So, yeah, it's a pretty specific picture I have; various monster-catching games have come close in different ways, but I'm still waiting for something to really get into. Hopefully the fact that we're starting to see more of them on PC means I'll get something I want sooner or later. :smile:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Hmm, 7am in Hawaii…on a Wednesday…it does sound interesting though. Maybe I'll see about tuning in.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm still looking for a game that has exactly what I want in a Pokémon-like on PC; Cassette Beasts, Tem-Tem, Coromon, Monster Sanctuary, none of them are quite there, but we're getting closer, and multiplayer like this is one of the things I'd like, so I'm happy to see this addition. :smile:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I was wondering if there were any security implications. (I don't run KDE so it's of no particular concern to me either way, just curious.)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: radube

Quoting: ToddLI hope no one thinks Nova means "no go" in Spanish because if they can't get their replacement working out right, then you know the name sounds appropriate. However, I'm sure in due time, they'll sort it out and hopefully, make something better than Nouveau. Now, I must be feeling old because that name reminds me of the early 2000s with trying to get those Nvidia cards working on Linux with little success.

I suppose you are sarcastic about the "no go" driver, but just for the record to mention:

Nova means "New" (female gendered) in several Indo-european languages, same like Nouveau which means "New" (male gendered) in French.

I look forward to the eventual replacements Nuevo, Nieuw, Nou, Novu, Neu, Nua… :grin:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: LoftyBTW It's of course somewhat scandalous to DRM a printer cartridge, although there is always a (weak) counter argument that a 3rd party cartridge could destroy the printer.

Random tangent: it occurs to me that if there were actually a non-infinitesimal chance of a 3rd-party cartridge destroying a printer, printer companies should be all over getting people to use them: "Oh, how sad, that 3rd-party cartridge broke your printer? Welp, guess you learned a lesson, and guess where you need to spend more money getting a replacement printer!" The fact that they'd rather sell obscenely expensive ink with DRM tells me that they know they can get a lot more money that way than from hypothetical printer replacements.

Quoting: LoftyForgetting the hardware vendor for a moment (sony, microsoft, nintendo, valve etc..) Do you think the seller has a right to keep their creative vision locked into a specific platform because that is both

a.) where they expected to sell it

and

b.) how they wished it to be played ?

Or does the creator, artist developer have no right to expect this ?

I don't think so, no. Consider a hypothetical example: someone makes, say, a puzzle game that plays on a touchscreen, with no sound effects. Someone blind wishes to play it, so someone else releases a version (don't worry about the details) that works on a different, tactile interface, maybe with added sound cues, etc., whatever is required to make it playable without sight. Does the creator have a right to say, "No!!! It's only to be played on a touchscreen, anything else is destroying the artistic integrity of the work and isn't how I wanted it to be played!"? (For a real-world example, think of the modders releasing Half-Life: Alyx for non-VR systems for people who can't handle playing in VR.)

Yes, you can indicate how you want people to experience your work. But Death of the Author is a thing, and once a work is out in the real world you can't realistically stop people from poking, prodding, and transforming it; that's just how art and culture work, new things transforming and building upon what came before.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Drink…mayonnaise. :neutral: Uh, sure Eric, whatever you say. (Release two immediate hotfixes for "yes I'm being held hostage and forced to add that", one for "no"! :tongue:)

Jokes aside, I can't wait to jump in and try it out! Still have my very first save file, though it has a bunch of mods so I might need to prune some or wait a few days for updates. One thing I didn't see mentioned is that the new Meadowlands farm starts you with two chickens, making it great for playthroughs that want to go for more of a ranching playstyle immediately.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: knroI have an issue in this game where ALL the images are not displayed in game (avatars..etc). I tried to verify, reinstall, disable all DLCs, all downloadable content ...etc to no avail. Unfortunately, I cannot play this game due to this annoying bug. Anyone have any ideas?

No, unfortunately. A quick search of the technical support forum turned up this [External Link], but I can't tell how similar that is to what you're seeing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: drjomsI don't have that option in my vanilla game.

I'm guessing Chrisznix is talking about the Globe Coverage option found in the vanilla game during planet generation. (Link [External Link] to wiki.) Choosing a smaller globe coverage definitely has an impact on speed, and it's not like you ever interact with 99% of the map anyway if you pick the biggest size. Though I also have the My Little Planet [External Link] mod to shrink the actual planet size down too (not just the fraction of planet that has land).

The lack of multi-threading is certainly one of the big pain points in the community, so it's nice to hear that at least some steps are being taken with this update offloading the pawn rendering logic to a second thread (so only 30 of your cores will be sitting idle, instead of 31. :smile:)

(For the record, 64 GB of RAM is utterly overkill for the game without any mods; I'm running about 550 mods, including a bunch of the large Vanilla Expanded ones, in 24 GB of RAM.)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library Guyit means the game's locale is based on a real star system

It's a fairly famous one as these things go – seven planets in resonant orbits around a red dwarf, with up to four of them being in the right temperature range for liquid water on their surfaces. Wikipedia notes:

Exoplanets are often featured in science-fiction works; books, comics and video games have featured the TRAPPIST-1 system, the earliest being The Terminator, a short story by Swiss author Laurence Suhner published in the academic journal that announced the system's discovery.[333] At least one conference was organised to recognise works of fiction featuring TRAPPIST-1.[334]

View this comment - View article - View full comments