Oh yeah! I forgot about Daikatana. Are we still all John Romero’s bitch?

Star Citizen isn’t the only game in the “be all other video games simultaneously” genre, I mean remember Peter Molyneux’s Fable? But that eventually came out with a reasonable RPG scope. Star Citizen is the extreme example, that has gone the farthest with the least to show for it.

In some ways yes.

Decompiling a game means reverse engineering the game to a point that you have a program written in C that compiles to identical machine code as the commercial release. That makes it easier, but not entirely straightforward, to just compile the game for another architecture, because it might be written for hardware-specific features that might not be present on, say, PC.

A minor example is Mario Kart 64 has these big screens around some tracks that are playing footage of the race. That relies on a hardware quirk peculiar to the N64 and it’s been difficult if not impossible to get it working anywhere but real hardware.

A really weird one is Super Mario 64. The retail version of the game was apparently compiled with debug flags on. The game has been decompiled, and then compiling it without the debug flag actually causes the game to run smoother, particularly in Dire Dire Docks which chugs so bad on a retail cartridge that speed runners use camera strategies to keep the submarine out of view for better performance.

Mario 64? Kinda yeah, because the Mario franchise has been more or less alone in the 3D platformer space, and everything since 64 has either been expansions on it like Sunshine, Galaxy and Odyssey, or that time they made the same 2D-but-in-a-3D-engine game 5 or 6 times. New Super Mario 3D World Land Wii U Switch.

Ocarina of Time is kind of similar: the classic Zelda franchise is kind of alone, especially after the 16 bit era ended nothing has really played like a Zelda game. They’ve only made like six of them; OoT got the formula almost perfectly right on the first try even if they were pretty much just re-implementing ALttP in 3D. Majora’s Mask took the same engine and assets and made a heartburn simulator. I personally think it’s less pleasant to play because of the constant time pressure but it’s the most interesting one to study. Wind Waker returns to the formula with the sailing gimmick as “we gotta do something different” and as a way to mask loading screens. Twilight Princess was a reaction to fan clap back at Wind Waker’s perceived childishness, it’s basically OoT again, It’s also the most blatantly unfinished. Skyward Sword is just Wind Waker but worse. The control scheme is hideous. You can feel Nintendo corporate breathing down the necks of the dev team talking about "we went full Japanese on motion controls this console generation and the best we have to show for it is the pack-in bowling demo. Put in as many motion controls as possible, even if the joystick would make more sense. After that they gave up and started making Just Cause games.

Because Christianity, Islam and Judaism are religions of butthurt. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the butthurt. How would they remain in power over world events if they didn’t have each other to harm en masse?

Was Star Citizen scope creeped?

I seem to remember it kind of always being sold as one of those “do everything for everyone” games that can’t possibly exist. Fly spaceships to different planets, be a bounty hunter, be a cargo freighter, go way out in the wilderness and explore, be a back alley prostitute, get into fist fights, join the navy, run a government. Meanwhile what they’ve made is a marginally Elite: Dangerous without an actual game in it.

My favorite thing about TempleOS is it’s written in Holy C.

I don’t know about dogs but cats can’t synthesize their own taurine, kind of like humans can’t synthesize vitamin C, so their food has to be enriched in it.

Don’t think beverage, think drug.

I would rather talk about Rampart.

I’ll warn you now it can get a little tedious, because you refer to the data in a spreadsheet like referencing variables in a Python script. In most fields you can type in a dimension, you can click a formula button or hit the = key and then type in a formula. Or you can reference a cell in a spreadsheet. that might look like “=spreadsheet.A4” for the contents of cell A4.

That isn’t very readable and I don’t trust it not to break if you add rows or columns or whatever, so there’s an Alias function. You can give each individual cell a name. Which is slow and tedious. In the Addon Manager you’ll find some macros, one called EasyAlias which, select a cell, click the EasyAlias button, and the cell to the right of your selected cell gets the contents of the selected cell as an alias. In other words, if Column B is a bunch of labels and column C is the actual data, highlighting B2-B17 and clicking the EasyAlias button will automatically alias C2-C17. That feature should be built-in. There’s also a macro for clicking a dimension, clicking a sketch feature, and then semi-automatically applying a dimension. It’s slightly temperamental but it works faster than typing “Dimensions.notch_height” over and over.

I dry and chip them. Three plants can keep me in red pepper flake for a year.

My way into CAD software was 1. Dealing with DXF editors like QCAD. 2. Trying to tackle parametric CAD, I ran Onshape’s tutorials, they have pretty good technique tutorials, like how to draft a paperclip, that are applicable to most parametric CAD packages. Then learning how FreeCAD’s spreadsheet works.

FreeCAD has a full-on spreadsheet built in, now it’s feature poor compared to Excel or LOCalc but you can store and calculate dimensions there and then use them in the main drawing. Other software has features that accomplish this but it’s not as flexible and familiar as a spreadsheet. FreeCAD has some usability issues but everything else out there is either drawbackware or subscription.

I grow cayenne peppers to save money. One plant yields so many peppers that it’s legitimately profitable.

I do save money growing mint over buying it at the store, because mint is eternal. I’ve been making juleps and jelly out of the same mint plant for about 6 years now. But mostly I keep mint around because I like it.

Tomatoes? It’s not really about the money, it’s that grocery store tomatoes are designed for durability rather than flavor.

I’m a CFI.

when r/fuckcars thinks they know anything about aviation.

You’ll hit a point where the payload is so poor it isn’t worth operating.

Multiple redundant motors are heavy.

That ain’t gonna happen on a civilian airliner.

Blown wings are basically powered lift. You’re planning on bringing a civilian passenger plane down final approach at a speed it can’t glide at if the power plant fails?

I could see that for a carrier based aircraft where STOL is a factor but no you’re not doing that in airline operations.

The Gameboy Advance is a little weird, but most cartridge-based game systems featured little to no boot or loading time because the ROM chips in the cartridge are attached to the CPU the same way the RAM does (electrically speaking), and has similar performance. So game data, things like textures, sprites, level data, audio, are just…accessible to the CPU already. It has to do a very brief initialization to set up some variables but other than that everything is just ready to go.

On a disc-based system like Playstations, the game data is on an optical disc. So the game has to be read into memory from the disc before the game can start. That takes time, hence boot times and loading screens. PCs are similar, it takes time to load the game data from a hard disk or SSD or optical drive or diskette into working memory. Fun fact about this: CD-based games usually stored the background music as red book digital audio, so the console would load game data into memory, start executing it from there, then the optical drive just starts playing the disc like a normal CD simultaneously, which 1. allows the background music to be very high quality and 2. completely frees the CPU from that task.

Another fun fact, on at least some consoles it was possible to add additional RAM or even sound or graphics accelerators to the cartridge. Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES has additional RAM in the cartridge, Star Fox on the SNES has a 3D accelerator chip.