A great step toward eliminating racism would be to eliminate the thought of distinguishing people by the color of their skin

That's naive and the world doesn't work like that. Studies have shown that again and again and again.

If you don't promote things like this, at best the status quo keep staying the status quo. At worst, it gets worse, because you're not going to have bigots suddenly go "oh, I'm going to be fair and not promote my bigotry, then!".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

As others already mentioned on various places on social media, the series Game of Thrones contains "images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part" and also incest (the only thing it doesn't feature is, IIRC, bestiality). And yet, you can buy the Blurays without any problem everywhere.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Games containing Nazi swastikas are region blocked or region adapted in Germany and Austria

It's a bit more complex here in Germany.

Steam basically blocks all 18+ games, including porn games and games marked as such for excessive violence (like Dying Light) here in Germany. The reason is that those games aren't allowed to be sold "over the counter" here in Germany and no public ads for them can be shown. Which means you can't buy them at all here in Germany, and you can't even see their store page (but, someone else outside of Germany can buy it and gift it to you).

Now, Valve could instead implement age-gating, allowing users which are veried to be of age to see and buy the games. Germany even has a system for that, POSTIDENT, which can be done either in person in a post office, or, more comfortably, online using either a webcam (in which you show your government ID) or the NFC chip in your government ID in combination with the NFC reader in your smartphone. The latter is also used for government functions like ELSTER, where you file your tax return, and it's pretty well-working and established. Germany also already uses that combined system to identify you when unlocking a SIM card, opening a bank account or when ordering 18+ items by post (I had to once do that to order a children's game from the 1990s, from before the current rating system, which means it automatically got assigned the highest rating).

But instead of doing any of that, Valve just said, fuck it, and hid all these games in Germany.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Too Americana for me in my current mood

Yeah, USian navel-gazing is just...really tiring. Or "cringe", as the kids say.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It sure would be very interesting if someone ended up making a machine-learning tool that can mass reverse engineer software.

As someone who has reverse engineered old games... yeah, that's not going to happen.

Perhaps it’s more likely that it could be used by human reverse engineers to probe and test obscure functions faster.

We don't need AI for that.

IDA can already identify tons of standard library functions by pattern matching against a library of known functions. With that, you already strike off like 90% of all simple functions. The rest you can figure by yourself pretty quickly.

The issue is the non-simple functions that depend on a large context, of passed in parameters or, even worse, global state. There, being able to run the game and attaching a debugger to catch the state helps. AI doesn't do anything there.

Maybe you'll now say, well, let's attach AI to the running the game and have it analyze it like that... well, that just boils down to the halting problem, so we know that doesn't work.

So...

You know what would actually help game preservation? Companies being mandated to 1) keep their source code around and 2) openly publish said source code with a FLOSS license. And then also doing that for the source history, asset sources, documentation, internal process documents, etc.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Lesser known franchise that mainly existed on PC with Realms Of Arkania games before

I mean, The Dark Eye / Das Schwarze Auge is a well-known and established "franchise" with a 40 year history of pen & paper roleplaying games...within German-speaking Europe (DACH [External Link], as it's called here).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: hell0They got €32k out of their kickstarter. Being based in France, a quick search suggests a monthly salary of around 2500€ would be reasonable. With just 2 people full time, they would be out of funds after 6 months

You're forgetting Kickstarter fees. And taxes. That's more like 3 months for 2 devs.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: grigiHmm, like Dragons?

Which one, Lofwyr?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

GAMIFICATION OF HEALTH AWARENESS BASED ON A WAKE-UP TIME

An object is to provide a user with motivation to enjoy waking up in the morning and guide the user to sufficient awakening by generating a breeding event in a breeding game of a virtual life form when the user wakes up in the morning.

CN: lewd, making the obvious joke

Spoiler, click me

I think a different kind of breeding would provide far better motivation to enjoy waking up in the morning

I'm sorry.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yes, as an ex ScummVM dev... The retroarch people aren't exactly well loved among many projects and devs in that space. I make no secret of my personal views there either, I think they're scum, and not the good kind.

Just because I think stenzek has issues and he's had rows with the retroarch crowd, doesn't mean I'd go kiss their feet. More than one party can be awful at the same time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments