Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt is good to see High Dirigible Reusability coming to Linux. Too many people just treat their dirigibles as disposable, another tragedy of unnecessary waste. Littered dirigibles can float away and become entangled in wind turbines, or smother bird nesting sites.

In other words, what's HDR?

High Dynamic Range, though Wikipedia [External Link] can probably explain it better than I can. For visual/imaging stuff, I gather it's basically ways to better represent a wider range of illumination levels in an image. (So instead of an image with black shadows and blown-out highlights, one with details in the brightest and darkest bits.) I don't know how it works specifically, though.

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Quoting: KomorebiI'd like to mention "Fights in Tight Spaces" as another game in this genre.

How is that? It's on my wishlist but I haven't looked at it in a while.

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I actually just beat the Heart with the Ironclad for the first time a few weeks ago; the same time, not coincidentally, that I did a 999-damage Body Slam. (That was only my third time doing so, after managing it twice with my favorite character the Silent.)

I definitely feel like I haven't masted the Ironclad's sacrifice playstyle yet, but for what I did you really only need a few cards: Barricade to retain your block between turns, and Entrench to double it (I had two copies, which helped). Then having a few cards like Impervious to give you a one-time boost of lots of block to be retained and doubled helps, and a Body Slam to be able to turn your hundreds of block into damage is the cherry on the cake. Obviously it's random whether you get any/all of these cards (and there's still a lot of luck involved even then), but it's not that many so might be a bit easier to get lucky with. I think I might've had a card or two that let me Exhaust other cards to pare out the useless Strikes etc. that were left to allow me to get through my block cards quicker, but those may not be necessary if you don't take too many cards and remove as many as possible in other ways.

Quoting: junibegoodStS does exactly the opposite. You don't know what cards or relics you will get, so you are not trying to build an optimized deck. For most of the game, you are trying to build a deck that is just good enough to avoid dying against the next elite / boss you might face. And if you manage to do that for the whole game, congratulations, you won ! :smile:

These two approaches lead to very different game experiences and clearly don't target the same players. We could probably consider them two separate sub-genres...

It's a lot like FTL in that respect; it isn't a deck builder, but it's similar in that you pick a starting "character" (ship) which is the same every time and the fun for me lies in seeing what random weapons/crewmembers/rooms I get and trying to craft a winning strategy for the Flagship with what I've got. It's frustrating if you go in with the mindset of "I want a boarding team of Rockmen and Fire Beam"* or some similar specific level of detail because your chances of getting that exact loadout on a particular run aren't great, but if you go in with a flexible mindset and see what you can get out of it as fate takes you, it can be a lot of fun.

Of course that's not the One True Way to Play or anything, and as I said I like the sound of a game that lets your customize your starting deck/engine. That's an interesting thought about it being almost two sub-genres depending on whether you get to customize your starting layout or not.

*My favorite playstyle. 🤫

Quoting: g000hWhen I started with it, I often played it at lunchtime at work: Munching a sandwich with one hand and controlling the game completely with mouse.

Ha, same, though doing it on my Deck. :grin:

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I only got into Slay the Spire around the middle of last year so I'm still enjoying it quite a bit* – I only just did a 999-damage Body Slam for the first time a week or two ago. :grin: But I definitely appreciate the recommendations and a few of them sound interesting enough to check out. (I especially like the sound of customizing your opening deck.)

*It's one of the most-played games on my Steam Deck due to the combination of great Deck controls layout and being 2D so less power-hungry. And a few months ago I discovered the multiplayer mod for StS and have now got one of my friends into it, and we're having great fun duo-romping our way through the Spire.

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Quoting: scaineTrue. But it's only been good for about 3-4 years. Also, mobile phones were around for decades before they caught on too.

So, I've been thinking about this, and I don't think that comparison works in VR's favor. Cell phones are, fundamentally, about convenience: first the convenience of calling people without needing to be at a physical landline location, then later the conveniences that come with modern smartphones (texting, Internet access, apps, etc., although they were catching on years before the smartphone came around). But I think (the majority of) people could always recognize the potential for convenience they represent, even if they hadn't tried one yet. People weren't buying early smartphones because the value proposition wasn't there yet, not because they didn't realize the potential (I looked up the development of the mobile phone and discovered some pre-90s phones took like 14 hours to charge for 30 minutes of talking time; you're not really gaining much convenience with a device like that).

VR, in contrast, is fundamentally a less convenient way to interact with a screen. Sure, it enables new kinds of experiences, but it doesn't make anyone's life more streamlined or allow them to do things easier. (And while it works fine for games or watching video, I politely scoff at the notion that anyone would ever want to use it for, say, working with spreadsheets or programming.) There's nothing wrong with that, but the kinds of things that inconvenience people tend to remain hobbyist or enthusiast devices rather than being universally adopted. (Yes, you can argue that some widely-adopted things inconvenience people too, but people only put up with those inconveniences because the thing in question provides a net positive amount of convenience elsewhere: I put with the inconvenience of having to keep my car maintained because having it is a heck of a lot more convenient than walking or biking everywhere.)

I could be wrong, of course; I'm not prescient, and don't particularly care either way. But that's how the situation reads to me. I don't think the obstacle to widespread adoption is "more people need to have a good VR experience", I think it's "VR needs to become (comparably) as convenient as sitting down at my computer and using the keyboard and mouse".

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Quoting: scaineAnyone who's tried (good) VR and didn't feel sick wants more of it, but the cost is still sky high.

Counterexample: I've demoed a Vive once or twice, and played through I Expect You To Die 1 and (most of) 2 on a friend's PSVR, which I would consider to be quite good VR games that take advantage of the format well. I have zero problems with motion sickness. (Like, ever; I'm currently considering getting into FPV drone flying, even.) I also have zero interest in getting any sort of VR system for gaming.

I don't have anything against it, or people who enjoy it. Good on yah, there's some interesting experiences it can provide that are difficult or impossible to get otherwise. But it's not the case that every person out there just needs a good experience with it to be instantly converted. Some will, some of us remain uninterested.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPOr watch a playthrough of someone [playing Half-Life: Alyx] - but careful, you might get dizzy because of the camera movement. At least that happens to me (and I don't get dizzy when actually using VR), not sure if that's a common phenomenon.

Yeah, I don't enjoy watching feeds of people's views in VR* because it constantly jitters around all over the place as it tracks the normally imperceptible micro-movements of peoples heads (obviously it's fine for the person with the headset screen at a fixed location from their eyes). We need some sort of Rockstead/Reelsteady/Gyroflow for VR footage to smooth out all the micro-jitter and make it easier to watch for the people who aren't in the headset. 🙂 (Actually, I wonder if you could get the position information from the headset and put the footage through Gyroflow somehow? 🤔)

*Though I do it occasionally from various Youtubers I follow, and have actually watched something like the first 45 minutes of Half-Life: Alyx.

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Recently, mostly Slay the Spire and Pokémon: Infinite Fusion, a fangame whose gimmick is that you can fuse any two Pokémon together to get a new one (it has "only" 420 Pokémon, but that still means ~176,000 possible fusions; all fusions have computer generated sprites by default, and there are already [tens of?] thousands of hand-drawn sprites with thousands more being added per month). It runs quite well on Proton, and I haven't had any crashes or instability.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: PhiladelphusI like the new way to interact with pre-FTL civs now; it felt a bit clunky before, but Observation Posts now have buttons to go directly to the diplomacy view and espionage, which is how you carry out things like secretly providing technology or indoctrinating aliens towards your ethics. Wait, "diplomacy view?" Yes, pre-FTLs now have a diplomacy screen like other empires even before you've officially met, consolidating lots of information like their technology level (and progress to the next one), ethics, "awareness" of extraterrestrial life, etc. into one easily-accessible place. And, it's now possible to make contact before they achieve space flight (without landing troops on their world :wink:), allowing you to talk to them while they're in the Renaissance Era or whatever, which I just think is kinda fun.

That does sound rather nice. But isn't most of that stuff in the free 3.7 update?

You're probably right, base UI stuff does tend to be in the free update.

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First Contact is definitely a bit more of a niche expansion (which is why it's a Story Pack I suppose), but I'm enjoying it so far. I decided to do a Broken Shackles playthrough this time around, and I started with 29 pops from (I think) 19 different species. My planetary species breakdown pie-chart looked like a rainbow, and it meant I had species available with 8 out of 9 of the basic planetary type preferences immediately, allowing me to colonize any planet I found from the get-go. (A few of them were lithoids, too, or had the Survivors trait for +100% survival on Tomb Worlds, giving even more habitability options.)

I like the new way to interact with pre-FTL civs now; it felt a bit clunky before, but Observation Posts now have buttons to go directly to the diplomacy view and espionage, which is how you carry out things like secretly providing technology or indoctrinating aliens towards your ethics. Wait, "diplomacy view?" Yes, pre-FTLs now have a diplomacy screen like other empires even before you've officially met, consolidating lots of information like their technology level (and progress to the next one), ethics, "awareness" of extraterrestrial life, etc. into one easily-accessible place. And, it's now possible to make contact before they achieve space flight (without landing troops on their world :wink:), allowing you to talk to them while they're in the Renaissance Era or whatever, which I just think is kinda fun. (Though I feel like I've come across a disproportionate number of Stone Age civs on Tomb Worlds with the Survivor trait…maybe it's just random, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is seeing something like that.)

I've only recently unlocked cloaking so I don't know how big an effect it'll have on the game, but I'm trying out the new barred spiral galaxy shape and connection between the two halves is blocked by the Xenophobic Fallen Empire on one side and one of the only empires in the galaxy I don't have open borders with on the other, so I might try sending some cloaked science ships through their borders to continue exploring on the other side.

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Now now, there's no need to get fired up over this – let's all take a deep breath and coal down a bit.

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