Sounds like some good updates, looking forward to it.

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So, obviously security vulnerabilities are bad and I'm going to update ASAP, but just how bad are these, really? Do I have to worry about some carefully crafted bad GIF on a shady website making my GPU run arbitrary code as root, or what? :dizzy:

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Interesting to hear about the update. I've actually put 11.7 hours into the demo already, finding it rather engaging, at least up until the point where I had all the industries running and had built pretty much everything the demo had to offer. Might have to give it another look now.

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Glad to hear the bug in the Trends section was fixed, dealing with NaN data points takes up so much of my time in my PhD… :cry:

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Quoting: slaapliedjeAgreed. My only point was that China used to be isolationist. https://www.gavinmenzies.net/ [External Link] has some interesting books about why / when they became that way. But for sure, not now. Don't have any other explanation to why it works that way in the game. Bug?

Ah, fair enough, apologies if I misinterpreted you. :smile: I think Plague Inc. actually does have pretty good models when looking at single countries, it's just in the "country to country spread" that I feel like their models are less-than-realistic based on what we've seen over the past year. But maybe I just have bad luck getting my pathogens to spread. :happy:

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I've been thinking about learning Rust since hearing about it near the start of this year, and making a simple game would probably be a great way to throw myself into the deep end. :tongue: Bevy definitely sounds interesting for the purpose!

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: PhiladelphusWhile Plague Inc is certainly a fun game (and this DLC looks interesting), I now find its claims of being a "realistic simulation" especially ludicrous when nearly the entire population of China can be infected with my new disease before a single person in a single other country catches it. Sure, a lot of diseases aren't as infections as COVID-19, but if upwards of a billion people can catch it in the same country surely someone in a nearby border town's going to pick it up, right?

I bet they figured in that China is (or very much was) a very isolationist country. I mean when I play the game, I choose Madagascar and they are an island, and it still spreads everywhere before that whole island is infected.

I just picked China as the country with the largest population*, but it's my experience with every country in the game: unless you take specific mutations to increase air or water spread, you can easily infect 50—100% of the population of any country before a single person in another country contracts your disease. In the real world, though, SARS-CoV-2 spread from China while there were just a few thousand cases in the country at most. And not just to a single other country, but multiple countries had infected people traveling to them around December–January a year ago (which then spread to other countries, etc.). Once your disease is infectious enough to have infected a few tens of thousands of people (at most), it absolutely should start showing up around the world, because people move around a lot these days (or did, at least).

*But also, China is hardly isolationist—people come and go to, from, and through it all the time these days. I flew through Shanghai on my way back to Melbourne from visiting family in California back in January, a Chinese colleague of mine was visiting her family around the same time, and one of my PhD supervisors moved from China just last year. And that's not counting all the non-Chinese tourists and business people who visit China year-round, who would be prime targets for picking up a new disease and taking it back home.

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I gave up on Portal Stories: Mel some hours in, because it felt like puzzle after puzzle after puzzle was just "Here's a room, divided into smaller rooms with Emancipation Grids. Laboriously and carefully take a cube through them, by carefully turning them off and on in an irritating sequence. And if you mess up the tight timings required and accidentally vaporize a cube in the next-to-last grid, have fun doing it all over again!"

That's my memory, at least, though to be fair that was years ago at this point and I've been thinking of replaying it recently to see how my memory holds up. Perhaps I'd appreciate it more now. Maybe that was just a "phase" of the game and I stopped before it got good, who knows.

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While Plague Inc is certainly a fun game (and this DLC looks interesting), I now find its claims of being a "realistic simulation" especially ludicrous when nearly the entire population of China can be infected with my new disease before a single person in a single other country catches it. Sure, a lot of diseases aren't as infections as COVID-19, but if upwards of a billion people can catch it in the same country surely someone in a nearby border town's going to pick it up, right?

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Nice to see Valve updating various parts of the UI over time like this. :smile:

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