I just played it multiplayer with a friend a few days ago for the first time in maybe six months or so, and it definitely feels more…polished, somehow. Like nothing I could point to that was a huge improvement, but it just felt that much smoother overall. Definitely a fun game, especially playing with the ability to jump on! :woot:

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I like this, it's cute, but I can't get over how utterly weird it looks having a frog with front and back legs of equal length. :S:

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This looks really interesting, I'll have to give it a shot! Always good to get more practice with regexes.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWeird. The definition sounds like a straightforward, fairly intuitive thing. What makes them so hard?

The main point of regexes is that they can use wildcards—symbols which don't match a literal symbol, but any of a (possibly very large set) of (possibly combinations of) literal symbols. (Like using '*' on the command line, but much more powerful and complex.) Using them for any but the simplest tasks thus usually requires a lot abstract, symbolic thought, and generally people aren't too good at being able to follow the combinatorially-explosive number of consequences that can come from changing a single symbol in the regex.

Like, imagine scanning a webpage to find a company's mailing address. As humans, we've got a lot of in-built tolerance for what an "address" might look like—depending on where the company is in the world it might have more or fewer fields than would be the norm in our home country, maybe the street or city name contains multiple separate words, etc. But we have a mental "prototype" of roughly what an address looks like and can use fuzzy logic to recognize things which, while deviating from the strict image of that prototype, are still addresses. Now imagine trying to get a computer to do the same thing; regexes allow you to encapsulate that insane amount of flexibility via (appropriately complex) combinations of wildcards. (Actually attempting to set up a regex that could handle addresses sounds like an unutterable nightmare. :O)

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Wow. I never knew I wanted a game with the visual style of Renaissance paintings, but I kinda do now. :O And if it's full of Baroque music (one of my favorite musical periods), well…

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and it's not surprising people forget about so many fantastic games when that happens.

Interesting, for me it's somewhat the opposite: I love the feeling of having my games auto-updating in the background without me needing to do it manually*, so when I fire up Steam I like to just check what's downloading, and sometimes I'll see something I haven't played in a long time and go "Oh! I should play that again."

*I only got Steam a few years before I switched to Linux, so it was my first exposure to the novel idea of there being a better way to update software than laboriously going to each individual program's page and manually downloading updates. (Fast forward to today, and having experienced the wonder of package managers ensures that I will never use an OS that doesn't have one ever again on a personal machine. ^_^)

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As long as we're showing off cool and unusual keyboard designs, have the Keyboard.io [External Link]:

Quoting: SirLootALotSo why wouldn't I just buy a Das Keyboard [External Link] instead. Looks much more customizable, more standard and it comes with a german keyboardlayout. Its Software is also free [External Link].

That's pretty cool. Haven't heard of that one before.

Quoting: AciDIt's weird nobody mentioned the awesome Typematrix keyboard, and its Dvorak layout:
[…]

Also haven't heard of that one before, and also pretty cool! All these nifty keyboard options make me slightly sad that my Corsair Vengeance K70 I bought back in 2014 is showing no signs of needing replacement anytime soon. :P

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Philadelphus†Pun not intended.

Suuuuure.

Well, at least it wasn't when I wrote it. Then I decided to keep it. :D

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Quoting: Luke_Nukem

Quoting: Purple Library GuyLooking at that prototype . . . OK, so on a normal keyboard the spacebar is too long, I'll buy that up to a point. But, maybe my eyes are getting old here, on that prototype I can't see a spacebar at all, which isn't really an improvement. Like, down where the spacebar would be I'm seeing alt, shift, backspace, ctrl. So is one or more of those blue and orange things supposed to be "space"? I don't want to be hitting "space" with my pinky!
Also not sure if I'm seeing an "enter" key.
Still, I'll be interested to see a later prototype.

No, those two split keys where space was are meant to be assignable - so maybe you want backspace on the left and space on the right of the split (as opposed to what they are labelled as.

I think they will need to try and poll everyone for a reasonable layout to pick out what keys would be what, and offer a set of keycaps so they can be labelled.

Adding to this, I read another article about this where someone at the company said basically "The pictures don't reflect an actual product, we just took pictures of what we had while we were messing about with the layout, which is why there's no actual "Space" key on the keyboard in picture." Which seems a little odd to me, if nothing else I'd put a sticky note labeled "Space" on one of the keys so people don't get the wrong idea (as this seems to be a pretty common misconception), but whatever.

Now, I won't be using this keyboard because it has no number pad (and if you ever need to enter lots of numbers*, one-handed number pad entry beats the number keys at the top hands down†), but I kinda like the idea of breaking the space bar into two so that my left thumb can actually contribute in my typing. Having the right side be space and the left side be backspace makes a certain amount of sense to me.

*Or play Dwarf Fortress.

†Pun not intended.

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Maybe it's more to do with the Magna Graecia content pack and focus on Greek city states?

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For anyone wondering, I got a reply back from the developers of Filament:

I'm afraid at the moment the demo is only available on Windows. It was all a little last minute to put one together for the Steam Festival. I am going to see if we can sort out a Linux demo for the remainder of the festival.

Which is what I realized was probably the case about an hour after sending the email. Oh well, I certainly don't begrudge them not taking more time away from working on the main game to make a Linux demo! I just wish Steam would let me download the Windows demo so I could try running it with Proton.

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I really wanted to give the Filament demo a try after hearing about it here some months ago, but I get an error "An error occurred while updating Filament demo: invalid platform" when clicking the "Play Game" button. I tried Carrion and that worked, so I'm curious if anyone has any tips for making it work.
Edit: Hmmm, Spiritfarer and Neon Noodles both worked as well, so I guess it's just a problem with Filament. Maybe I'll send the devs a message…

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