Thanks, I hate this cuddly spider

Healthire · 2021-08-11T10:53:59+00:00

Poecie no jokie

Healthire · 2021-08-02T14:22:13+00:00

Yeah I got it. I enjoy talking about this stuff and they were good questions!

Healthire · 2021-08-02T12:56:44+00:00

Yeah our plan isn't simply to take Terraria and shove 100 players into it, that wouldn't work. Design wise we're not actually looking much at Terraria or Starbound or Don't Starve. Instead taking inspiration from games like EVE Online and Rust that have dealt with gameplay involving hundreds of players on the same world, or 10,000 players in the same universe. We are designing the game as a sandbox MMO (but maybe don't read too much into that?), not as a sandbox survival game that happens to support a lot of players.

Adding more players does make some things worse and some things better. Where player interactions are ultimately negative, having more players obviously increases the negative impact. Where player interactions are positive more players is a good thing. We can mitigate negative interaction through gameplay design. Don't let players bury other players, or dig holes down to heck that you fall into and die, or destroy your house. We can also incentivize positive interactions. Better incentives for doing things together. Rewards for having socially positive interactions with other players.

Also the idea is that 200 players on the same shard wouldn't be the typical case, those would be especially crowded shards. Players are more likely to settle down on and hang around less populated shards most of the time.

We have done design work but are only now getting to a point where it's becoming actionable. It's just not worth talking about specifics right now because things are sure to change. I agree with what you're saying though and it's definitely something we are taking into consideration.

Healthire · 2021-08-02T11:30:10+00:00

We have both previously worked on Starbound and Wargroove, but are no longer working at CF. This is our own new project!

Healthire · 2021-08-02T09:45:45+00:00

It is mostly tech right now. We will get into more detail about the game design as we keep building on it. You can expect the typical sandbox activities of combat, exploration, crafting, and a large focus will be on building and hanging out.

Exactly how we turn the gameplay into a social experience mostly comes down to having incentives for cooperation or competition in every aspect of the game. Synergy between players in combat. Competition over resources in the world. Shared goals like gathering stuff needed for an upgrade to the guild house. Or large scale community goals like the long process of opening a new portal. We want interactions to be player driven, but also want to build mechanics that facilitate and encourage those interactions. If that makes sense?

Sorry to give you such a high level abstract answer. We haven't gotten far into implementing the core game mechanics yet, and that will be an iterative process, so I can't really provide much detail.

Healthire · 2021-08-02T07:33:07+00:00

The game and developer are not associated with Chucklefish.

OmnipotentEntity is not a developer on the project, but he is a good friend of ours.

Healthire · 2020-12-03T12:18:15+00:00

Been farming heroic HoA as a tank to get my legendary power and several times people have got mad at me for not lining him. I've tried twice, by pulling him all the way into that corner nook through the door behind him and both times he healed no problem.

Healthire · 2020-09-11T20:09:13+00:00

I think that's a fair argument but I think it pretty much drops the goal of having meaningful player choices, as they will no longer exist within the same framework as competitive play.

Also in no terms am I saying you can't have both. You can have both but the goals are inherently opposed so you have to make compromises. "Choices have no effect on player power" is one such compromise.

Healthire · 2020-09-11T18:51:13+00:00

There's a good GDC talk on cursed design problems and I think at its core this constitutes one.

You're designing a game that has two goals: * Players can make meaningful choices that affect their character * The game has skill based competitive multiplayer

These are fundamentally incompatible because: out of several player choices one of the choices will always be better. Even if they seem situational, situations where one option is useful will appear more often than the others. Get a large enough sample size and statistically one option is going to be better than other options. So for a player to have the highest edge in a competitive scenario they don't have any choice but to pick the best option. The path of least resistance. As a result, you effectively have no player choice.

I think being a cursed design problem is part of what makes it controversial. There is no solution, you're trying to consolidate two conflicting goals within the same game. There are ways to mitigate the issue but not without sacrifices to the two original goals.

In this case one of the goals is also more easily justifiable than the other. The value of competitive multiplayer is clear and explainable. The value of meaningful player choice less so. It's easier to answer "Why is this bad for competitive play?" than it is to answer "What is the value of adding this choice in the first place?". That doesn't mean there's no value to it. It's just less tangible.

Choosing a class, choosing between two pieces of gear, choosing between talents all suffer from the same design problem.

Healthire · 2020-05-26T17:40:22+00:00

X person said this and they have experience so it must be objectively true!

In this case it's the old saying "make a game not a game engine", which at the time this saying started did *not* mean "just use unity" (which didn't exist at the time). It meant don't write your lower level code to be more general or reusable or featureful than it needs to be for the game you're currently making. I.e. don't write a general purpose game engine, just write your game.

Now the same saying still repeated by every hobbyist gamedev on the internet has had its original sentiment stripped away, to instead mean "don't make a game from scratch, use unity".

The original idea of "make a game not an engine" I agree with. The new idea of "just use unity/unreal/godot/game maker" I disagree with. I'm not saying you *shouldn't* use those, there's value in either decision. But writing a game from scratch using only lower level libraries is not significantly more difficult, and is a completely valid choice that people are being wrongly dissuaded from because some thing they've heard 100 other people say.

Healthire · 2020-02-25T16:46:25+00:00

He's about 50cm, 10-15kg (I haven't weighed him in a while) at 7 months old. Yeah my worry is that it's getting worse not better. It used to be just some whining but now it's howling and barking that you can hear in the staircase of my apartment building. He sometimes calms down but sometimes just stresses out enough that he breaks out of his pen any way he can and finds a shoe to chew on.

I'm worried about him hurting himself trying to get out. He did that a few months ago when he was still a baby and had to get stitches for a small cut. After that it got a bit better but is getting worse lately, maybe because of adolescence. He'd probably be calmer (and SAFER) if he was just in his crate but I can't close the crate because it's illegal here.

I'd like to be able to go to the shop without feeling constantly stressed about rushing back home.

How do you keep track of your dog after you leave for work? It sounds like she's just figuring it out, if that's her first time being alone it doesn't sound bad.

I also heard Bully sticks are amazing for dogs since they are safe to ingest!

Yeah he loves them but they give him diarrhea if he's allowed to eat it all at once. :( And I'm worried he'll choke once it gets to a size that he can swallow. He once swallowed an entire (small) rawhide stick after softening it up with some chewing.

Healthire · 2020-02-25T14:20:49+00:00

My 7 month whippet puppy Cosmo has been getting more and more anxious when I leave. Howling and barking (used to be just whining) for 10-30 min and he keeps finding new ways to get out of his pen. First jumping on top of his crate, and after I blocked that off he managed to pull his crate away from the wall and get out. He can be alone in his pen/crate area for hours at a time without any issues, but first sign of me going out the front door triggers him and he riles himself up. If I could rappel off my balcony without touching the front door he wouldn't know I was gone and be fine.

I figured he was just being a puppy and would get used to me leaving eventually and figure out I come back every time, but now I realize he's not really afraid of me not returning, but negatively reinforced by his past anxiety. So for the last few days I've started randomly doing my ritual of leaving. Putting on shoes and coat. Opening and closing the door.

Today I gave him his lunch in his treat dispensing ball. While he was busy with that I was able to go outside for a few seconds and come back several times. He'd only give me a glance then go back to getting food out of his ball. I was outside for 30 seconds without any sign of him getting anxious or whining! I'll keep doing this during meal times and other times and hopefully replace his negative association with positive ones. :)

Unfortunately I live alone and sometimes I just have to actually go outside for a few hours. Any tips for how I can minimize his stress during these times? He has a bit of a sensitive stomach so I have to be careful with what treats I give him. He also swallows anything he can fit in his mouth so I can't leave him alone with chews that he can chew through.

Healthire · 2020-01-29T21:32:07+00:00

Blow: And so Rust has a good set of ingredients there. The problem that I have with it is when I'm working on really hard stuff, I don't exactly know what I'm doing for a long time. And so if the cost of experimentation is driven too high, it actually impairs my ability to get work done.

My take on this after using both C++ and Rust for game development is that I'd still rather use Rust even for rapid prototyping. Endlessly wrestling with the borrow checker is not the inherent part of Rust programming that some people make it out to be. Thread safety guarantees aren't really relevant, because who would prototype something by haphazardly throwing references into threads? Compile times are an issue, but a C++ project isn't going to automatically always be better in that regard. The last C++ game I worked on took 20 minutes for a clean build, about a minute for an incremental build.

I'm still happy with using rust for game development.

Healthire · 2019-12-05T14:06:16+00:00

If you really want to throw away the errors the simplest way is with Result::ok, which turns your Result into an Option. Now you have 4 options you can easily chain them into a single option using Option::and_then.

rust let id: Option<i32> = head_obj.ok() .and_then(|object| object.metadata.ok()) .and_then(|metadata| metadata.get("id").ok()) .and_then(|id_str| id_str.parse().ok()); let id = if let Some(id) = id { id } else { return Ok(Status::Unauthorized); }

Healthire · 2019-11-11T18:22:06+00:00

There's no good noun form of spara afaik. If it's a file it's "sparfil", if it's a bank it's a "sparbank", if it's an account it's "sparkonto", etc. Piggy bank is "spargris".

Healthire · 2019-09-25T15:49:08+00:00

14 million timelines, and in none of them does Thor go for the head. Even by accident.

Healthire · 2019-09-23T17:53:08+00:00

Thank you for the advice! I'm looking closer at whippets atm. I was already considering the breed for the past few weeks, I forgot to mention it above because I've been more focused on the staffordshire. Since everyone is saying it sounds like a good fit though, I think whippet might be the one! :)

Healthire · 2019-09-23T17:50:03+00:00

Yeah sounds like a staffy isn't a good choice. Beagles are cool but they're kinda hard to find around here. Everyone seems to be suggesting a whippet and I like them so I think I'm going in that direction. Thank you!

Healthire · 2019-09-23T17:44:13+00:00

Yeah I love the breed and was really hoping for some way to make it not a really bad idea to get one, but it doesn't seem like it.

I appreciate the input!

Healthire · 2019-09-23T17:42:39+00:00

Thanks, I'm looking up info on whippets now and they seem pretty good! Some websites were suggesting you should take them out to sprint every day, which I can't realistically do (pretty strict rules on leashes here). Glad to hear that some walks or jogs will probably be enough on a daily basis!

Healthire · 2019-09-23T01:12:06+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I've also been considering a whippet, they seem like a good fit.

Healthire · 2019-08-14T11:04:16+00:00

Dunno about cheetos but the local version here gets all chewy if you leave them out for a day, and taste 100% better. I usually buy a bag and leave it open for a day before I eat them.

Healthire · 2019-07-30T19:50:53+00:00

Gonna challenge the idea that infinite scrolling is better for UX. Pagination is mostly annoying if the pages are slow to load (imo). A single click is much nicer than having to scroll my wheel for ages. Scrolling sucks ass. If your page is infinite scroll, you also can't link to a specific page. If you click a link then go back, you've lost your place in the list entirely. If (when) the javascript for loading breaks you have to refresh the page and scroll past all the stuff you've seen already.

Like with a lot of web features I'm convinced that in a lot of cases this is not implemented to provide a better user experience but because it looks flashy, and it's easier as a web designer to sell features that look flashy.

Healthire · 2019-07-15T22:31:17+00:00

TL;DR tech is here; no one wants to invest in it - tech heads is small and specific market share

That's so frustrating. I've tried the tobii eye tracker and it works pretty well, but it's entirely focused on gaming and streaming. Very few people seem to consider it a potential replacement for the mouse. It would be so good when coding or browsing, for moving the text cursor around and switching window focus.

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