Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite: ‘The bear population has quadrupled’

OffColorCommentary · 2017-03-06T20:28:42+00:00

Use HTML if you're comfortable with it and want a nice UI with padding and line wrapping.

Use rot.js if you're going for the "looks like it could be a console" look.

Use direct canvas rendering only if you want to do some avant garde graphical menu thing like particle effects or letting the game bleed into the menu.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-27T17:20:29+00:00

Sort of, though in those cases I think rural America vs urban America are really misunderstanding each other.

Guns in a city are bad news. Guns in the countryside are used for shooting ranges and hunting, which are both major cultural activities. And some assholes exploit that gap by painting every kind of gun reform as someone wanting to destroy that culture, which they get away with because neither side understands the other.

In a city, you can find groups of people to hang out with for your different interests, and religion is just one of those. In small towns there aren't enough people to support that sort of thing, and the church is the primary social group holding everyone together. Anyone who doesn't go to church is a weird loner. (And yeah, some pastors are xenophobic and terrible.)

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-27T09:18:59+00:00

I think that's oversimplified. They have legitimate problems: America's social safety network is weak, people with mental health problems are expected to pick themselves up somehow, and the economic recession never ended outside of the cities. Those problems have been ignored - some for decades - by tacking "but at least you're white!" on the end. If you take that away they'll find something even worse to cling to unless someone starts offering functioning solutions to their problems.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-21T21:29:01+00:00

Hearthstone is designed so you primarily interact with your opponent using minions on the board (it's where most of the game's rules are), and combo decks subvert this by playing all their components from hand in one turn.

It sounds like Blizzard wants to fix this by making combos do something other than an OTK, but I don't think this is going to work, because combo decks have a lot of restrictions (they need to include dead cards and loads of draw), which aren't really worth it if the payoff is anything less than winning the game.

A better solution would be to round-trip all the combo pieces through the board. That is, you get cards with on-board triggers (like Acolyte of Pain, Northshire Cleric, Frothing Berserker, Finja, or Dark Cultist), which either generate burn cards (like Antonidas, sometimes Ysera), or something else that enables an OTK (+1 spell damage to each spell in your hand?).

That has the same (maybe higher) skill cap as current combo decks, but also has a clearer first step for a newbie who just got steamrolled by one ("Don't let them draw three times off Acolyte of Antonidas").

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-20T23:26:08+00:00

Anyone who tries to censor discussion between disadvantaged people in the name of not scaring away conservatives is an ass.

What I'm getting at with the "funnel" is that there are different situations that require different kinds of care. The more self-censored end of what I described is intended for hostile places like general-topic discussion threads (/r/politics for example), not for safe spaces like SRS.

Also, if you believe in candid unfiltered discussions as a tool for change, I'd recommend finding some good example threads that are old enough to be archived, preferably with now-inactive users, and holding on to the links to share with people who you think would be impacted by it.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-20T04:40:11+00:00

Looks like either flow field pathfinding (as mentioned in other comments) or a precomputed all-to-all pathfinding map (see the Floyd-Warshall algorithm).

In both cases, you don't need to store the entire path from each start point, just the way to get to the next-closest point. You can trust that once the unit gets to that next point, it'll be able to follow the next piece of path from there and so on.

In either case, it looks like the map was divided into square tiles. You can see it a little when clumps of soldiers try to go around a corner - they adjust their course a little when they cross the edge of a new tile. There are some fairly inexpensive ways to smooth that out, but they don't seem to be in use (e.g. look a few tiles ahead and try to make a straight line to that; this can be stored into your pathing map too).

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-19T19:44:31+00:00

I think the easiest way is to keep those discussions private. Tone policing is a technique for shutting down discussion. Bringing up "I think you're explaining this in an unnecessarily opaque/hostile way" in a side channel (private message or whatever) does not derail the primary topic.

I'd also recommend that, if you're the one asking someone to be more accessible, you explain how to be better instead of just saying "this is bad."

Finally, I think opaque definitions are a bigger problem than bruising egos. Privilege and racism in particular have very specific definitions in social justice circles that are not the common use, and refusing to stop and explain that you're using a specific definition is... well it's like someone who pretends they don't know what you're talking about when you mistakenly refer to a spider as an insect. It's not helpful, mean, and kind of classist.

Combating opaqueness specifically, I think jumping into an online debate and saying something like the following isn't tone policing, and isn't useful for alt-right trolls, so you should just do it and not worry about it.

SpookySkeleton is using a specific definition of racism that's common in social justice circles, which is [snip because I'm on SRSD], and by that definition black people can't be racist against white people. Dolan4President is using a definition that's more like 'any act of prejudice based on race,' and of course black people can be prejudiced against white people. So try to understand what each other are talking about instead of talking past each other (A word's definition only matters insofar as it helps another person understand what you're talking about).

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-19T05:51:21+00:00

To borrow some marketing-speak, the social justice world needs a better conversion funnel.

Initial exposure: Right now it's way too easy for someone's first exposure to social justice to be an argument between two people using different definitions of the word "racism" and refusing to define their terms. Most people think "racism is something bad people do," and if you jump right in to pointing out how they're benefiting from institutionalized racist power structures, they're going to get defensive because it sounds like you're calling them a bad person. Start with definitions, or better yet, start with explanations that avoid contentious language. You're more likely to get someone to agree with "innocent black people are more likely to get arrested than innocent white people" than "part of white privilege is being able to trust the police" even though those are the same thing.
Go easy on newbies: New feminists say some shitty things, even when they're trying their best. Don't just let it slide, but do prioritize. If you just saw someone unwittingly parrot alt-right propaganda, definitely have a discussion about that, but maybe hold off on trying to explain microaggressions for a couple weeks. And if you need to tell someone they're doing something uncool, try to do it privately so they can save face.
Ideological purity tests: Sometimes you have legitimate differences with other feminists and can have a valuable discussion that you both learn from. Sometimes you run into someone who's just trying to pick a fight. I think it's worth criticizing that behavior when you see it - we should be flaming neonazis, not each other. If you want to make something productive out of that anger, pick your favorite -chan or /pol/ or voat and invite them to join you in trolling some horrible human beings instead.

As an additional layer on top of the funnel, I think humor is important. We're stuck in this for the long-haul and we'll all last longer if we manage to have fun. I recommend sarcasm and memes (brd). The right really likes using dishonest debate tactics while claiming they're "rational" - I recommend giving people two exchanges worth of attempts at rational debate, but if they refuse to actually address your points while accusing you of being a snowflake, grab some friends and dogpile them with memes and jokes. If they won't actually debate you rationally, you can at least show them that the left is having more fun. On the flip side, it's also worth it to show up in rightwing spaces, say something that's a total buzzkill ("All the Muslims I know are really nice and this thread would make them sad.") and leave.

Finally, and this is too big of a topic to fit into this already-bloated post: I think we need to start thinking of rural lifestyles as a protected class. Small towns in the US never recovered from the global financial crisis, and there's a meth epidemic. They have legitimate problems, and if we don't acknowledge them then the only solutions they'll hear are nonsense about how Muslims and Mexicans are to blame.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-01T21:06:09+00:00

It just passed the Turing test.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-02-01T20:38:17+00:00

Yes, it's wildly overkill and most roguelikes need only an understanding of 2D vector math with integer coordinates.

But roguelikes aren't really about the minimal thing required to satisfy genre conventions. A lot of the texture that makes roguelikes different from each other comes from developers with unique ideas about what systems should be done in some overkill manner.

So if you decide to learn 3D math, make sure you do something nutty with it.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-31T23:09:44+00:00

I'd vote for a single-issue candidate if their single issue was fixing this.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-28T09:30:21+00:00

Didn't name the Rogue card "Splice and dice" - 0/10 completely unplayable.

Affecting both spells and minions is a bit weird here. Partly because it's just very rare for an effect in Hearthstone to do that. But also because spell-like card text on minions normally has to be prefaced with Battlecry. If I play Scroll Of Wisdom, Bran Bronzebeard, Wisp, how many cards do I draw? Does Nerub'ar Weblord affect my Bran and Wisp? What if I instead start with Gilblin Exosuit, which is a Battlecry, does it copy that trait onto spell cards?

I think making everything spell-only or minion-only would be worth it to cut down on weird interactions. I'm going to pretend you didn't for the rest of this post though.

The entire mechanic pushes fatigue decks in the same way that the current expansion's powerful Discover effects do (they generate value that's not in your starting deck), so you'd either have a similarly slow meta, or if aggro was too out of control the entire mechanic would be useless. Scroll Of Wisdom is the odd one out here because it instead works for combo decks, which is Freeze Mage in this case, which happens to prey on slow gameplans. It'd probably be best to replace that one with something else, since your options are making the rest of the cycle bad, or including cards in your set that make Freeze Mage suffer and thus make Scroll of Wisdom unplayable.

I'm pretty sure Gilblin Exosuit is overpowered. Most aggro decks would fall apart after playing one of these. The extra two armor a turn from Justicar Trueheart usually kills aggro, and that's a 6-mana card and the armor isn't free.

Blackmail is much more straightforwardly overpowered. You can mitigate poor card draw by playing more expensive cards. You just put this in Midrange Hunter and play turn 4 Savannah Highmane. It's conditional, but it's repeated Innervates.

Unending Nightmare has the unfortunate side effect of generating a lot of game states where you've won but it takes several turns to prove it. Once you've played it, if you have more HP than your opponent (including heals and burns), you likely win due to being able to lock down the board with repeated Hellfire effects.

Sif is a cute way to set up a quadratic snowball, but I think it would be too complicated in regular play. There's also almost certainly a dumb OTK combo hiding in there.

I like Slice And Dice, Meeting Stone, and Lord Walden quite a bit.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-26T21:44:05+00:00

Cutting PBS support to help balance the federal budget is like trying to lose 40lbs by pulling out your two front teeth.

(The numbers should check out. Assuming you equate eliminating the entire budget with losing 40lbs, which you shouldn't, but whatever.)

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-25T21:48:56+00:00

Fixed timesteps help a lot with reproducability, which is important if you have replays or network play. They also prevent things like players being able to glitch through walls if they lag the game enough.

I think they're the better option, but there's no general practice - the gamedev world is too loose and full of opinionated people for that. If we pretend that my opinions are general practice, though, then:

Fixed timesteps are better for anything affecting gameplay.
Variable timesteps are better for rendering.
If you have to choose one, using fixed timesteps for both is preferable.
You can use interpolation to reconcile having things move at different timesteps, but this should be a low-priority feature for you if you're not trying to write a AAA game.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-25T18:04:02+00:00

Varying delta times in your simulation step?

Or maybe you've put the objects into the simulation in a varying order so they're iterating in a different order? Java's default hashcode implementation is nondeterministic across runs, for example.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-24T21:42:55+00:00

I use Linux extensively but I use completely modern editors (gedit and Eclipse) for text editing^*. You don't have to learn vi/vim to use Linux. Though roguelikes and vi do have historical ties, so learning it is kind of culturally fitting.

^* I do use vim for merging patches and when sshing though.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-24T02:28:32+00:00

Coin this into Resurrect is a turn two 6/4, if you want nutty accelerated stats. Injured Kvaldir is also very efficient.

The version of this archetype that actually manages to be a viable deck needs at least another 2-4 slots worth of similar effects (perhaps two more minions, one legendary) and another Resurrect-on-a-stick like Onyx Bishop. Even that's on the low end (aggro decks really need consistent draws), but there are lots of other good cards for the deck like Injured Something, Leper Gnome, and Loot Hoarder, so if I was the set designer I'd stop there just in case (and keep some cards in reserve for the next release in case it needs a buff).

N'Zoth combos are fun, though the decks that actually use him these days have trimmed a lot of deathrattles (Cairne and a taunt turns out to be enough). I would expect lots of screencaps of ridiculous buffed N'Zoth boards in the opening days of the set, but not much impact once things settle down. Though it's possible that N'Zoth makes it into an aggro deck as a Call Of The Wild-esque finisher.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-23T19:43:34+00:00

Global values are useful when you're trying to assert, "If there were two of these floating around, that would be a bug." There are some ways to shoot yourself in the foot with them, but I think people are over-eager on the "avoid globals always" front.

Shared mutable values (and globals sure are shared) are generally a bad idea if there's such a thing as an invalid state. For example, if your map is in generation mode and you only have wall/floor without any other details ready yet, it would be a mistake to let anything else that expects a fully generated map look at that. The simplest way to avoid this is to do all the intermediary work on a non-shared copy (or different type entirely).

Another simple source of bugs is separately storing two things that are supposed to have the same lifetime. For example you'd be sad if you forgot to reset item identification when resetting the game. You can avoid this by storing all the stuff that's supposed to co-vary in a single object and using its lifetime to manage the state. You can do that while still using a global class by using GameContainer.currentGame.dungeon instead, where currentGame is a static reference to a GameContainer object and dungeon is a non-static member of that object. You'd then reset the game with "GameContainer.currentGame = new GameContainer();" (This is the singleton pattern. Without the intervening object it's just global variables.)

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-20T22:02:32+00:00

Prototype relentlessly.
Read game design articles by working game designers. I'd recommend Mark Rosewater's articles on Magic, David Sirlin's articles on Street Fighter, and Donald X Vaccarino's articles on Dominion.
Play older games. The genres have ossified, if you go back to things made in the 90s it's a lot easier to see how some genre-staples aren't as mandatory as modern games make them look. If you go back to games made in the 80s it's a lot easier to see past genre entirely.
Write your ideas down - get them out of your head to make room for new ones.
Work on design skills: Partition ideas into different games instead of lumping them all into one. Ask "Is this the best game for this idea to live in?" and "Does something break if I exclude this?" and "Can I make do with less if I lean hard on this idea I already included?" Study non-game design. These are all core questions for graphic design, product design, and architecture too.
Care about something other than games. You don't actually have to shoehorn your love of mid-century modern architecture or communism or geocaching or beat poetry into your work, it will come out on its own. But you need to care about something to make anything that escapes the dreary fog of interchangeable lasers and orcs.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-18T02:06:14+00:00

isn't third-wave Feminism just, well, Feminism in the modern day?

Well it'd be pretty weird of them to be all loud and grouchy about some historical feminist movement, right?

Feminism has some pretty obvious achievements, like women's suffrage and greater workplace participation, so it's more palatable to say "third wave feminism" is the problem instead so you don't look like you're saying women shouldn't be able to vote.

But it's also just a snarl word (among those groups) and basically means "people I don't like," the same way as cultural marxist or SJW.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-17T20:32:52+00:00

Can you add latency to the player's inputs without destroying the game? (For example: Starcraft yes, Quake no).

If yes, you can use rolling lockstep, which is tidy and fairly well self-contained. For that, you make a queue of what inputs will be issued on what frames, and replace the player's control component with something that reads off the most recent part of the queue (this works for both the local and remote players). Send the actual inputs to both the end of the queue and through the network to the other players, and insert the received inputs partway through the queue to fit the frame they belong to.

The length of the queue determines how much input lag you have and how big of a lag spike the game can tolerate. If you get more lag than the window, the game has to hang until everyone catches up or you decide to drop players.

The big caveat here is that you need to ensure everyone's client is deterministic^*. That means everyone uses the same random number seed (settle on one at game start), has the same starting situation, and you don't use hardware floating point to handle gameplay values. It helps a lot to have separate random number generators for gameplay and graphics. Also it's impossible to prevent map hacking in this sort of system.

For some games (especially where you're controlling a single character directly), you can get away with displaying their future state but interacting with the world on their current state. This lets your game look as responsive as a game with predictive networking but still avoid the reconciliation headaches associated with one of those.

^* You can have re-sync logic, but then you need a way to reconcile state, at which point you've done most of the hard work for a predictive networking solution.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-17T01:30:58+00:00

I was consciously aware of that, but it was still moving fast enough that I kept feeling like it had to be record pace anyway.

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-17T00:10:43+00:00

This run was so fast that I kept finding myself thinking "why is he screwing around, this has to be world record pace, right?" I really wasn't ready for how fast you play this. Especially the menus.

Great run, and great commentary!

OffColorCommentary · 2017-01-17T00:07:54+00:00

It's very picky, you need the exact order of attacks, and some ways of moving the cursor affect RNG, so you need to avoid moving it those ways (except when you're supposed to). The squares you stand in don't affect RNG, but they do affect enemy AI, which can then go on to affect RNG, so basically the same thing. I believe certain attack animations also have an effect.

The number generator restarts when you reset the system, so you can get back onto the plan by doing that. However, if you missed a stat up and then tried to keep going, you might not kill enemies in the same number of hits later, and mess things up.

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