High res textures (especially normal maps) and higher quality/coverage audio really made game sizes take off. Unreal’s new “Nanite” tech, where models can have literally billions of polygons, actually reduces game size because no normal maps.

Good. The other day there was a wildfire near me and I literally couldn’t read statements from the fire crew without making either a Twitter or Facebook account. Every news station, community org, and even the national park service uses one or the other. This is despite the fact they have websites, which apparently only host long term data. Fucking sucks.

Homer, are you still holding the can?

without any account

Did they make this easier? I have a Sage and I had to open a SQLite database file on the e-reader, then flip some flag, to bypass account sign in. But that was a few years ago.

Raw mushrooms are amazing for hunger, and they have a ton of potassium (helps if you are watching your sodium balance).

I wouldn’t be surprised. If the tariffs go through and prices skyrocket the admin will need a scapegoat, and I don’t think “woke” will resonate. My guess is they attack unions. Despite the absurdity of that notion it has a proven track record. Whip up a furor, use it to kill the NLRB. Nothing changes but by then six months have gone by and nobody cares.

Broodwar remaster was also good. If they faithfully uprez the graphics, fix severe bugs, and do nothing else then there’s hope. The 2D remasters have a good track record so far.

That said, had anyone played WC2 recently? It’s pretty rough. It’s fun for nostalgia sake and if you’re into the lore of Warcraft or the history of RTS, but it doesn’t hold up like Broodwar still does.

One of my favorite old school game illustrators. If you like his work check out Phil Hale as well.

It’s the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, “Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people”.

But if you take a step back it’s reasonable to ask, “WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don’t spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus’ forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose.”

So given that realization it’s also reasonable when told you must choose to say, “Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt.”

That’s the essential argument. There’s the realpolitik decision to do “less harm”, but you can also reject the fucked up premise.

Sucks, but sounds like they’re taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It’s also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.

Sorry that doesn’t drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that’s just “Steam but Worse”, so I’m afraid you need to close your studio. What’s that? Sorry you’re breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.

Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.

Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.

A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).

“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember [literally anything that’s free of plastic].”

There’s a nuke underwater somewhere off Tybee Island, GA.

Denethor prefers tomatoes raw. More explosive power.

Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar’s Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.

It’s been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the “glue” language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.

I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.

I think about that a lot.

I worked there during this time, and this pretty much confirms what everyone feared when the merger was announced. Part of me wants to read this book, but I know it will make me really mad.

Just a little anecdote, we had a meeting shortly after where Frank Pierce told us that major changes would basically happen over Morhaime’s dead body. So when he left (and Pierce also) it was clear that it was over.