can any of the xbox players around here exolain the appeal of the left analogue being so far up, arguably less comfortable to use than the d-pad?

as a playstation player i always use the left analogue stick to move the player character around and i don't really see how the xbox layout can be better for anyone

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development-adoption cycles for SDL can't be very fast... it must offer a truly stable API once each version is released and the older versions must keep working after a new one is released (directly or via a drop-in replacement shim from the old version to the new, as was done for SDL 1.2 over SDL 2)

this is because games are mostly proprietary static apps released once and never touched again afterwards (not by their devs, nor anyone else), unlike common foss linux apps that are constantly adapted to newer libs and their modified APIs

if they release new versions of SDL every year they'll quickly build up a huge inertial mass of legacy APIs/libs to support forever and that will eat away from new efforts

they could delay SDL3... but that only helps if Wayland devs clearly signal they'll solve their end of the issue soon with high priority... which seems a bit unlikely, though Valve does have plenty of people working for them on both things, iirc

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this looks great!!!

as a biologist, i've been flirting for a while with the idea of making a curator channel just for nature, biology and conservation-related games... this plus the 1.6 update to Stardew Valley may be the last push i needed ❤️

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those "good uses" were called "Expansions" and the wider catch-all name "DLC" was coined to put "bad uses" under the same umbrella and slap extra DRM-control on them

the oldest expansion i'm aware of... probably "Hellfire", for "Diablo 1"

It's an expecially interesting case because Diablo was done by Blizzard and Hellfire was done by Sierra Games, so it was pretty bold!

More so if you realize it wasn't an independent adventure but added in-game extra content (a new story arch, a new cave, new high-level spells, etc) to the original game

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what's the most profitable way to hunt whales?

is it to hunt just under the amount of newly bred whales each year so their population (and your business) doesn't get gradually over-hunted into oblivion?

nope... it's to hunt all of them at once, get the money and invest in something completely different

it's the fallacy of self-regulating markets, based on the wrong assumption that money must stay on the same business, while capital investment rules make it all too easy to scorch the earth and move on to a new business

this and the fact that even when a market does self-regulate it does so *after* bad things have already happened in a big way to most people involved (clients, workers and often even some of the investors)

i think this neatly summarizes what's happening with open capital gaming studios/publishers nowadays

hm... how's that triple "i" story unfolding? time to check on them again

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FWIW: if the official game engines refuse to work, then OpenRA (alternative game engine for early C&C series games) seems like it might be a really nice way to play them too

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looks like at least cheats A and C could be solved by server-side verification instead of deploying more aggressive local anticheat

if you move faster than possible, then you moved faster than possible, pretty damn straightforward (though deploying such calculations in a game that wasn't designed for it may be a PITA)

life points and damage can be entirely handled server-side or just doublechecked, no biggie either...

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: MarlockYep, it was all tongue-in-cheek

I must confess, I wasn't 100% sure because the bit about the yes-men was actually pretty true-to-life! As an ex-fan, I've seen first-hand the crazy lengths they'll go to in order to try to justify poor decisions from the company, and you got their mannerisms spot-on. :tongue:

There is nothing more tongue-in-cheek than Yes Men. I'm a real fan!

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis points to a more general problem with the virtual town square as opposed to the real one, when it comes to popular power: In the virtual one, it's like the authorities have doctor Manhattan. "Listen closely: You will all return to your homes." "Yeah? And what if we don't want to, ya blue-faced freak?" "You misunderstand. It was not a request." (Poof! Crowd all gone)

In-game virtual squares are not actually public squares at all, though gamers that are deeply involved in a game may use it as such for a while, even for more than in-game interaction.

On the other hand, whenever a company goes Doctor Manhattan and makes a big enough crowd go puff, it does become news...

...and Nintendo can only make those people go puff in the game, not on the real world and Discord and Reddit and Youtube and Insta and FB and etc, all at once.

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: Marlockimho relentless virtual protests in nintendo's virtual world squares (now that all games are MMOs) would be cheaper

Guessing this might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, since none of Nintendo's games have live virtual squares and they don't run any MMOs? :tongue:

From what I remember, even the hub-cities in the Splatoon games just pulled names and outfits from a pool of users who are online when you log on and then just put them in random poses in your personal temporary local instance of the area. The maximum interaction you have with them is to view a message or such (if that), so long as displaying them hasn't been disabled by the user or parental controls.

Quoting: Marlock(zero cost for nintendo users, which are the primary interested parties)

Nintendo charges for its online service, though... :huh:

Yep, it was all tongue-in-cheek

Nintendo is too controlling and too murderous for any in-game protest to actually work..
They'd probably ban and sue users over it, same as they do with emulators, spin-offs...

... 3rd-party mods... ... ow wait, there are none either because their platform is ludicrously closed off

AFAIK (but i'm not a nintendo cult follower) the only pokemon square in a nintendo game that's an MMO was real world squares in Pokemon GO

hum... now where did they place those rare pokemons?! :p

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