That's inspiring, a theoretical physics post-doc going into game design, I say as an astrophysics grad student nearing the end of my PhD who's been thinking lately about trying my hand at some game design. :smile:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I wouldn't call VR a gimmick, exactly, but I don't own a headset and have no plans to, and yes, I've tried it on two different occasions. :wink: It was a neat experience for 15 minutes to be sure, and I enjoyed it, but I have zero desire to play games in it based on my gaming preferences. Motion controls for VR are great at handling gross motor functions, but absolutely terrible at handling fine motor functions, because you can't rest your arm on something like when you're using a mouse. I don't mind VR games existing—I think they open up a world of gross motor control to games that is more difficult to replicate with mouse-and-keyboard or controllers, and I'm happy for games existing that other people enjoy even if I don't—I'm just not interested in VR myself, because the vast majority of games I play are ones that require fine motor control. Yes, the immersion is neat, but I don't really need it—my imagination's powerful enough to immerse me as much as I want in a game, without the hassle of not being able to instantly see my surroundings if I have to. :smile: (Plus I have a hard enough time with some of the horror segments in HL2+Episodes already just on a monitor, I don't want to be more immersed than that! :tongue:)

Uh, back on topic, I'd probably like to see Valve come out with something else in the Portal vein, either Portal 3 or else some new wacky off-the-wall game like it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Sounds fun! Will be a good excuse to pick up the Necroids species pack as well for a new game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: aokamiNah, the rendering is done by the browser and through the compositor. You'd likely have to run a rogue application or a very badly designed rendering application that'd run arbitrary code. I'll try to go get some more information.

Fun fact: simple stuff taken for granted like jpg libraries had countless vulns and exploit in older versions, and carefully crafted image files could have been detrimental.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/97856/can-simply-decompressing-a-jpeg-image-trigger-an-exploit [External Link]
Not to even mention ImageTragick.

Interesting, thanks. While my question was a bit hyperbolic, I'm glad to learn about things like this. :smile:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Sounds like some good updates, looking forward to it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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!

View this comment - View article - View full comments