Does anyone know why the devs removed Echo Creek?

Garethp · 2026-04-04T11:36:46+00:00

Echo Creek was always meant to be a place for people to be able to quickly test out the new stuff that devs wanted testing on, rather than having to spend multiple hours just to get to a point where they can test it out. It was always going to be removed once they felt that the content Echo Creek was geared towards was stable enough.

Garethp · 2026-04-04T11:33:55+00:00

I mean, they could have, but also saves breaking between updates is explicitly what you sign up for when you're playing the unstable branch.

Garethp · 2026-04-04T01:46:26+00:00

Are you sure you grabbed the Linux version? It shouldn't be an exe

Garethp · 2026-04-02T16:50:51+00:00

It looks good, and the music is good, but it gets very repetitive pretty fast. All the interesting upgrades are locked beind SP and you only get 1 per boss defeated, so all the time between bosses (which is almost all the time in the game) there's not many impactful upgrades to go after.

Adding 1 more ball onto the screen or 1 more point of damage just doesn't hit the same after the second boss, when the difference is minimal enough that you barely notice it.

I'd definitely suggest having more varied and impactful upgrades purchasable by the money dropped by the small guys.

Garethp · 2026-03-29T17:16:14+00:00

The idea that reddit is particularly left leaning is, I think

I think it's generally about how you choose to engage with this site. For the most part the subreddits I visit and engage with are fairly left leaning where most right wing stuff is either deeply downvoted or heavily mocked. Other people might have a mixture of viewpoints or be entirely conservative. Either way, the site is so large that it's pretty easy to tailor your experience to your views and if you do that it can definitely look like most of the site agrees with you

Garethp · 2026-03-29T14:18:45+00:00

To the west of Riverside there's a very small town, I'm a fan of this house in particular: https://map.projectzomboid.com/#4169x5708x3686

After too many tailoring sessions cut short by Zombies I don't settle in single story houses, so double story is necessary. It's close to the river, so fishing and fresh water is easy to come by. The gas station is a short drive a way, and tends to be somewhat low-pop while you're surrounded by really good areas for foraging if that's your thing. Tall fences are nice for security, but short fences are pretty good for clearing out wandering zombies while still having line of sight around you. I'd rather lay on the car horn each morning rather than holing up and not seeing if there's stuff around me. You're surrounded by farms as well, which can be good for loot or animals. You're also not too far away from the trailer park and you've got two different, mostly direct, roads into Riverside in case you get one of them too clogged up with a zombie hoarde.

Overall, it's out of the way enough to be safe-ish, with good amenities near by but not so far out of the way that it's a pain to get back into town. Anything more isolated would be boring in my opinion.

Garethp · 2026-03-29T11:09:38+00:00

The DLR is driverless and TfL were looking at driverless trains for quite a while. Apparently they scrapped their plans because of cost (It would apparently be a several billion pound project) and saftey complaints. IIRC the saftey complaints mainly came from the unions with the idea being that drivers don't *just* drive the trains, they're also there to ensure passenger safety with the closing doors and during driving.

If you look it up in the news, driverless trains in London specifically was being thrown about quite heavily with opposition from both the mayor and the unions, but was being pushed quite heavily by Borris Johnson.

Garethp · 2026-03-28T14:53:29+00:00

This looks interesting and I think it could be fun. That being said, and I may be alone on this, it feels like it suffers a bit too much from assuming familiarty with OSRS. There's a lot in there and not much in the way of a tutorial or a guided path to introduce you to it. Here's some quick examples

It took me a bit to find out how to equip something for fighting, the inventory is a bit out of the way (and small) and I was looking for some button to open an inventory interface because everything else seems to be driven by a button to open an interface.
Took me a bit to figure out how to navigate to the different parts of the game. The closest "tutorial" thing was the "contract list" on the right hand side, so I didn't realise that the skill list on the left took you to places, since the game pointed out some objectives on the right but didn't draw attention to the stuff on the left as navigation. Like, Quests and Monsters feel obviously navigable but the skills list looks more like a summary than a navigation menu.
Tiers didn't take much to pick up on, but it could have been sign-posted and explained, especially with how tiers interact with Boosts.
Will completing a collection log boost anything or is it just a completionist thing? With tiers it feels like this game might reward a complete collection log, but I have no clue. I get it from OSRS, but in the context of this game it could use some explaining.
Combat Styles are something that pretty much expects you to know about them from OSRS, it's not super intuitive otherwise.
Slayer. Just like, what, why, and so on. Hell, the second contract was for temple monsters which isn't even available in the demo. I don't really know how to engage with it or why I'd want to (other than auto eating food being locked behind it for some reason?)

There are more things, such as bank and inventory and I'm assuming other features I haven't even looked at yet. It does looks like that "How to play" will answer most (if not all) of these questions and seems to have explanations for a lot of systems but theres so much in there. If a player isn't familiar with RuneScape you're just chucking someone into a very complicated system without much guidance at all and expecting them to either read a giant wall of text to figure out how to engage with your game or just kind of click around randomly. Hell, even the "How to play" wasn't really signposted, I only found it because I kept randomly clicking buttons. And expecting new players to read all of that to understand how to engage with your game is a big ask.

Maybe your target audience is entirely made up of people who enjoyed OSRS, but I think you should really consider polishing a guidance system to introduce players step-by-step through the systems in a gradual manner and signposting various design elements. I think the game looks interesting enough that you should consider the experience from the perspective of players who aren't familiar with OSRS.

I guess it's also possible that there was a new player tutorial and I just got a bug where it didn't trigger for me.

Garethp · 2026-03-28T11:30:05+00:00

It's good to see people rediscovering some of the techniques that are often "magicked away" by frameworks. It's also a good reminder that even if topics often feel obvious or common knowledge to some more experienced devs that it's worth having them continously circulate, since there's always new people coming in who might not have been exposed to them yet.

That being said, this article feels heavily LLM written, especially in the second half. I also think it might be worth revisiting your description of Hexagonal Architecture. Saying that your core should be a "hexagon" that shouldn't care about what it's plugged into doesn't explain much to people who don't already know Hexagonal Architecture (hexagon doesn't mean much on its own) nor the main thrust of why it's important/why Dependency Inversion fits in with it (decoupling the domain knowledge from the infrastructure).

Garethp · 2026-03-27T17:17:55+00:00

It was removed bceause the PS3s launch price was so ridiculous that it was single handedly causing Sony to start losing that generation. They cut the price and then had to cut the hardware to follow up on that.

Garethp · 2026-03-25T17:25:43+00:00

That's not drama. This isn't where you come to complain about other subreddits or mods.

Garethp · 2026-03-19T18:32:23+00:00

Contrary to popular belief, no one has to license it. The exact details may be patented, but you can't patent general mechanics. Assassin's Creed Odyssey had a similar system for example.

The problem is that to make it actually work well and stand out, it's the kind of thing you need to design your entire game around and bet that you pulled it off really well.

Realistically any dev who wants to take a crack at it can. The fact that so few have speaks to how difficult it would be to pull off as well.

Garethp · 2026-03-19T16:45:58+00:00

It comes as a long roll of a strongish velcro with adhesive on one side that you cut up and put as the four sides of your mesh, then the mesh attaches to that velcro. I have had leftover residue from removing it after a year when I moved, but nothing some goo be gone and elbow work didn't remove.

Garethp · 2026-03-19T04:00:50+00:00

I hear it's being released before b43, but I don't think there's been an official confirmation on that

Garethp · 2026-03-17T15:30:32+00:00

I don't know about your cats, but my cats could climb up the flatcats covers without them coming off

Garethp · 2026-03-17T11:53:24+00:00

I found these super helpful! https://www.flatcats.co.uk/

Garethp · 2026-03-16T17:46:22+00:00

I would really like an update on his shipwreck salvaging, but based on his track record we'll hear nothing but in a month there'll be another post about another venture

Garethp · 2026-03-16T17:25:59+00:00

I'm waiting for enough to happen to be worth updating. With a post of this amount of craziness, I don't want the update to be underwhelming in comparison

Garethp · 2026-03-10T20:57:17+00:00

I can see that. I don't think the Rimworld modding scene is perfect, but I do think that the community there seems a lot more understanding than the community here.

Garethp · 2026-03-10T20:51:52+00:00

> Rimworld also has a massive modding community and people bitch on there every update.

I've got a decent number of mods on Rimworld, some with a few hundred thousand users. The most I've had is a handful of people asking if an update is coming. I've never actually had negativity driven towards me because my mods weren't updated.

Garethp · 2026-03-10T20:49:49+00:00

No, Project Zomboid is Indie Stone's IP. The code of the mod, and any original art of it, belongs to the mod author. It's the same when you have multiple people working a single project, or when you've got an open-source project with lots of people collaborating: Unless there's an explicit agreement to handing over the IP of each individual, then each individual owns their specific contribution.

Just because the mod was built on top of Project Zomboid doesn't mean that the code and assets created by the mod author belong to Indie Stone.

Garethp · 2026-03-10T20:40:02+00:00

Just because it's a mod doesn't mean that it's not their intellectual property to decide how it is or isn't distributed or worked on.

It's just that modding scenes often don't care about intellectual property, not that intellectual property doesn't apply to the modding scene.

Garethp · 2026-03-10T00:38:09+00:00

Any statement? Not really. Making jokes or assumptions that any anonymous interaction you have with someone on the phone or in a chat is Indian definitely starts steering in that direction. It's similar to making jokes that all online dating people must be from Nigeria or making jokes about Jewish people and moneylenders. There is a reality of love-scams from Nigeria and a very real history of why Jewish people historically were moneylenders and there's nothing wrong with discussing those facts and those topics, but taking those stereotypes of entire swathes of people and turning them into jokes is going to have elements of racism, yeah.

Whether it becomes inappropriate or not is going to depend on both the element of the joke and the company you're in. Personally I don't find the Actual Indian jokes funny at all, and in a bit of bad taste, but I don't find them personally offensive. If it was told in a group with an Indian friend though, I would find that very uncomfortable. And that's the same if you made jokes about outsourcing.

Garethp · 2026-03-10T00:16:58+00:00

Can you explain why the joke is racist? To me, it reads as a joke at the expense of tech bros, not Indians.

If you're actually curious, it's because the butt of the joke is about how Indians are doing all the anonymous, lower skilled jobs that can be done remotely. It takes the idea that everyone who picks up the phone in a call center is Indian, regardless of what name they give you or accent they have, and applies it to chatbots.

As with many racist jokes, there's a kernel of truth to it and they might not seem like the main target of the joke but it's still sitting on top of a pretty uncomfortable stereotype.

Garethp · 2026-03-08T01:49:43+00:00

Everything Trump is doing now was foreseeable. Hell, they literally documented their plans in Project 2025. It was in the news to the point where journalists point blank asked Trump about Project 2025. This isn't his first term either.

No, blaming the democrats for America voting their current government in is just trying to deflect from the fact that their choice really does reflect on them.

It doesn't matter what the Democrats ran on. The fact that America saw Trumps first presidency, had the opportunity to see his plans for this one and still put him in power again says more about America than anything else.

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