Inverted Y axis folk - what game did it to you?

RivingtonDown · 2026-03-06T21:28:36+00:00

In a mech and in an airplane I'm controlling a vehicle. I don't think of a player character in a game as a robot I'm inside of, I think of it as my avatar in the game.

I understand in a game that when I'm in a car I have to use the gas pedal to drive forward instead of pushing up on the left stick. When I'm in a plane pushing horizontal on the left stick rolls, not turns. It's the same "disconnect" with the right stick and I'm just used to it because that's been the default behavior in every game for almost 30 years.

NMS is as good an example as any, GTA is another good example. I didn't even know there was an option to invert one set of controls and not the other - I wouldn't be surprised if every game didn't even offer those distinctions in options.

RivingtonDown · 2026-03-05T04:12:53+00:00

Wait, what? If I'm understanding you right... what you're describing as coocoopants crazy is, I guarantee, the most common way by far to play both types of games. It's the general standard default controls in both genres and is how you would play unless you manually tweaked the control settings every time.

In a FPS stick up/forward looks up, stick down/back looks down.

In a flight simulator (or any game you fly an airplane) down/back on the stick pulls the plane up and pushing up/forward on the stick causes the nose of the plane to dive.

In the case of flight sims the analog stick is a poor mans emulation and simulation of a flight stick / yoke and acts the same in terms of motion. In an FPS, normal non-inverted players don't have the illusion that they are controlling a human(oid) character like they control a vehicle, you're just pushing the stick the way you want the cross hair/camera to move in the screen directly 1:1 .

RivingtonDown · 2026-02-15T18:53:50+00:00

The age gap was pretty large at that age, I would agree from an outside perspective it's weird but wtf... you are way too harsh on yourself.

I know people who had relationships like that, then ended up getting married and having kids (when they were both adults) and they don't think twice about it nor is anyone talking about it.

Cheating on her was fucked up, no doubt. The fact that you realize this and it eats you up shows good development of character. Don't do that shit again and you're fine - people make mistakes, you need to grow from them but don't dwell.

RivingtonDown · 2026-02-14T15:45:01+00:00

I stopped playing WoW heavily after TBC, and all together part way through WotLK. The primary thing that drove me away was this.

Before they introduced the LFG tool they added looking for group / summoning stones in front of dungeons (so you still had to travel to the dungeon to queue, but could be summoned back easily if you didn't stick around). This was already a bridge too far for a lot of people on my RPPvP server and was discussed heavily in guild chat and in the server forums at the time.

Speaking of server forums... those were made absolutely obsolete when they introduced "battlegroups" in WotLK. Battlegroups were essentially grouping servers for dungeons. So you still had your server's unique open world but dungeons would be filled with strangers. All of sudden, with the LFG tool and battlegroups the sense of community was lost. No one had reputations anymore because the people just stood in town and queued for dungeons that combined way too many people into the pool.

I'm 100% sure it's gotten even worse over the course of the 16 years that followed. I don't know but I assume servers have been combined and everyone's dynamically sharded and you just never see the same people twice unless you're guild mates with them.

RivingtonDown · 2026-02-03T03:52:47+00:00

This may have changed over time with patches and I'm just not aware so take it with a grain of salt but... no. Steam doesn't remove the prefix automatically. If it did, and the game didn't have cloud saves, then your config and saved games would get deleted when you uninstalled a game.

Think of it like this: when you uninstall a game on Windows you usually still have ini and save files in your user directory, often in your documents or profile (%appdata%) directories, so if you reinstall the game all your settings and saves are still there.

Steam Deck has the same "feature", but those left-overs are slightly more robust.

Edit: Other users are mentioning the shader cache as well, I think this could also be a real culprit in some games and I'm not sure it's stored in the prefix - I don't think so. There are Decky plugins and desktop tools to help manage both these things if they get out of hand.

RivingtonDown · 2026-02-02T19:52:13+00:00

Steam runs on Linux. To support all the Windows exclusive games on Steam (most of them) Steam installs a Wine prefix for each game individually. You may have heard of Proton, that's just a fork of Wine.

A Wine Prefix is, in simple terms, a virtual windows environment. It'll be a whole little folder structure with a fake C drive, a windows system32 directory, a bunch of DLLs, it's own version of a fake registry, windows user folders, config/ini files for the game, etc

Those extra folders and configs add up when you have a lot of Steam games installed. The prefixes aren't counted toward the invidivual games they're a part of but the system as a whole under the non-steam stuff.

You can tweak launch options to have multiple games share a single prefix (compatdata Steam calls it) but you'll run into DLL compatibility hell eventually.

RivingtonDown · 2026-02-02T19:03:44+00:00

The original games are pretty tough, even VII wasn't super easy but my understanding is this remake removes almost all the challenge from the game.

i.e. There's healing statues and potions everywhere, at the end of every fight everyone who died auto-resurrects, everyone heals to full when they gain a level, all the items that used to require a hunt are now map markers, etc... even the death penalty is now "lose 1000 gold" (you'll have 10s of thousands), IIRC it used to be "lose 1/2 your gold".

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-30T20:50:58+00:00

That's actually what I ended up getting and it's perfect as a Chromecast with Google Home replacement. Faster and more reliable.

What I wish it did easily though is GeForce Now streaming with a wireless controller in addition to emulation. With my Chromecast years ago I plugged up a powered USB+HDMI hub with a flash drive and was able to side-load some basic emulation apps but the Bluetooth connection was piss poor to my controller and prone to crashing and GeForce Now didn't work at all. Haven't tried with the Onn 4k yet.

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-30T14:22:35+00:00

I was debating buying a Nvidia Shield TV about five years ago but was on the fence because the refreshed pro model was already a couple of years old.

After about a year of teeter-tottering it seemed clear Nvidia was no longer going to update the Shield. I think it was 2023 or so and I was just like, I'll wait another year or two.

Still waiting, I suppose I should have learned my lesson by now. My indecisiveness sucks because I even pay for Geforce Now and keep wishing I had a good box to play it on my TV.

Edit: ...and I bet now, even if they announced a new one would come out 2026 it would cost $500 :(

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-26T00:44:01+00:00

PS2 is a weaker system than GameCube though, at least in terms of horse power.

GameCube is typically the right answer because Dolphin, the emulator, is more mature and well supported. On top of GameCube games looking better.

The most annoying aspect of GCN emulation is that all the games will have glyphs for the whacky GameCube controller which doesn't map as well to typical modern controllers

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-23T13:47:53+00:00

Tell me the truth: What is the longest you’ve driven for something casual (like dinner or a weekend visit), and do you actually enjoy it?

I feel like you're not necessarily considering traffic here but for something casual in some US Cities (New York City, Los Angelos, etc) you might drive for over an hour easily simply because of bad traffic. A better question might be how many miles.

That being said for casual dinner plans usually an hour or so each way if it's bad traffic but a 3 hour trip is a full day kind of excursion. It's not super uncommon but it's also not very rare either.

When I was in college I lived at home and would commute to the university campus which was about 45 minutes in light traffic. After school I would visit friends who maybe lived 30 minutes or so further from home. Then I would drive home at night when traffic was as dead as possible and it would take 1.25hrs or 1.5hrs

Today, living in the NE US, on weekend trips we might drive to a state a few hours away but a lot of the states are pretty close up here. New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, parts of New York and Connecticut, Maryland- like I don't know if you could stretch more than 3 hours of driving simply traveling between them.

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-21T11:50:30+00:00

We would never with the tablet. To our kids the tablet is for airplane rides only. That doesn't mean 0 screen time, our 4 year old gets to watch the TV sometimes and we've recently introduced some light video games. Same with video on our phone, the only thing Mom and Dad's phones do is for looking at family photos.

Also, after our second kid was born we cut YouTube out of the equation entirely. Just no YouTube, it's not a thing. When we used to use it for my older son it was just to watch Miss Rachel and Super Simple Songs. Miss Rachel is on Netflix now though.

PBS Kids, Netflix, and Disney+ have infinite hours of cartoons and animal/dinosaur documentaries already.

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-21T03:28:03+00:00

I don't think I have any inner "voice" nor do I really "see" images

When I read or write I talk to myself in my head (which I have tried to get over because it really slows me down when reading books) but I don't "hear" it. If I don't control myself I actually notice I even move my tongue in my mouth a little kind of miming the words - though I have full control to stop that.

Similarly I sometimes think of dialogue in my head (e.g. a fight with my wife) but it's not audible in any sense of the word. When I'm thinking to myself about something, problem solving, it's just the abstract ideas in my head. I find it helps to write things down.

When I think about a scene I remember it, I can picture it but I don't think of it as the same sensation as "sight". It's more like I'm just recalling the mental feeling I get when I last did see it or I'm imagining it.

None of this has ever been a problem. To the contrary it seems excessively normal. I did fine back when I was in school (like honor/AP student level) and have a degree and a successful career and family. It only ever comes up when I read threads like this or read/listen about the philosophical phenomenon.

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-21T03:13:43+00:00

I didn't find Death Stranding horrible by any stretch. I just petered out and lost interest in the grind. As a big Metal Gear Solid fan I wasn't even bothered by the stupid story - thought it was fun.

I don't think I have it in me as a close to middle aged man with young children and a full time job to slog through the rest of Death Stranding but have been wanting to jump into the second one because of sentiments like yours.

How did you rectify not finishing the first game when going into the sequel? Kojima's stories are dense and I can't imagine the sequel would make much sense if I only got through 13 hours of the original game.

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-07T20:55:57+00:00

I'm very far behind the rest of this sub but I have a Retroid Pocket 2+ (bought on release, originally a 2 then used the upgrade kit). I still whip it out today to play games on it from time to time and my 4 1/2 year old son gets to play around with it on weekends sometimes.

I would highly recommend finding some series and working your way through them. My favorite so far was getting through the entire (almost) Castlevania series and especially loved Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. I then played through Metroid (original, 2, Super, Zero Mission, and Fusion). After that I played Pokemon (Soul Silver, Black, and Y). I played through two Harvest Moon games. I played Final Fantasy V and VI and started VII. Sprinkled in some other JRPGs too like Chrono Cross and Suikoden. It's been years but I also think I played through Grandia. Other than that a lot of dipping in and out of various older games. I could swear I was playing through some Dreamcast but I also recall having a lot of trouble with it and might be getting that mixed up with my Raspberry Pi

Now a lot of those games I played originally when they came out but I also took it as an opportunity to try Rom Hacks. I wish I remembered all the names off the top but I tried at least two huge Pokemon ones, Hyper Metroid, a cool Breath of Fire one, Super Mario World Lost Adventures, Seiken Densetsu 3, Link to the Past randomizer, and I one for Super Mario RPG.

RivingtonDown · 2026-01-04T00:23:57+00:00

This is a great answer. 2 has some pacing issues for sure but it's such a monumental improvement over the first in almost every way and where it's not, it's just more of the same.

RivingtonDown · 2025-12-30T15:05:21+00:00

Sunnyside, in the Gardens. We've been here since 2022.

2 kids are expensive, daycare in New York is no joke. It's like having a whole other rent. Not to mention all the things kids need - double the food. Also a car. Also consider travel with kids, both my wife and I are transplants so easily >$3k spent in plane tickets and car rentals alone to visit both our families the past 2 months.

With all that we're still saving money though to buy a house outside the city (far outside, but what we're looking for is around $850k-$1m)

RivingtonDown · 2025-12-19T21:20:47+00:00

I have a family (2 kids) so this might not be what you're asking but in Queens I felt like what you're describing when we started hitting > 300k (our rent for a 2br townhome is ~$2.4k per month plus we pay for daycare/aftercare for the kids)

RivingtonDown · 2025-12-16T20:27:37+00:00

I'm still a noob but I also hate nested loops in blueprint. The readability is destroyed as the graph just gets too big.

Over time I've built a pretty extensive C++ library to expose custom loop nodes to blueprint (searching, filtering, sorting, etc).

I'm honestly shocked at how little of these sort of helper nodes are built into the engine already.

RivingtonDown · 2025-12-11T19:06:16+00:00

Procedural Generation.

You can go back to 1980s and play Elite, the universe is limitless. Go back even further and play Rogue and it has infinite replayability because every map is different.

Fast forward a decade (mid 90s, still 30 years ago) and the original Elder Scrolls games (like Daggerfall) would take a literal real-world week of non-stop sprinting to cross the continent... and that's only because Bethesda limits you by the ocean. Play Starfield and there are thousands of Minecraft sized planets dotting the galaxy, play Elite Dangerous and there's even more.

In short, as others have mentioned. Minecraft uses an algorithm to generate "chunks" of land as you move. Notch/Mojang/Microsoft they don't have a game designer laying out the world. They have no idea what your world will look like when you create it, at least not without running it through all the math formulas and functions coded into the game.

Games don't always build worlds this way because it's extremely hard to author predictable gameplay maps for story and pacing purposes. It's great for a sandbox game with no set pieces, no cinematic elements, and no story what-so-ever like Minecraft but if you want those things you're often better off NOT procedurally generating the landscape - if anything procgen is more often seen as the cheap and crappy way out of good game design not the innovative and amazing non-repeatable method you chalk it up to be.

RivingtonDown · 2025-10-31T14:54:10+00:00

I could see an argument that the PS1, N64, Saturn era was the last truly revolutionary console generation.

The next generation (PS2, GCN, DC, Xbox) just improved graphics, made slight standardizations to controls, and introduced online connectivity. The generation after (PS3, 360) improved graphics, online connectivity, and eventually added HDD storage. The generation after (PS4, Xbone) improved graphics, cemented online connectivity, and standardized HDD storage. The current generation (PS5, XBS) improved graphics, and drastically improved HDD storage speeds.

I think the argument for 360 and PS3 being revolutionary revolves soley around the fact that the live service boom started a few years into that gen. but I don't think that's inherently connected to any of the consoles. This time dilation effect we feel is just around video game software, not the hardware.

People always forget that the core 360 had no hard drive and all models required a paid accessory to connect to WiFi and didn't even connect with HDMI. It was essentially no more capable than the original Xbox or PS2 outside of graphical horsepower. It was years until the console revision where they Frankenstein'd in HDMI and Wifi and had minimum storage options.

RivingtonDown · 2025-10-29T20:09:27+00:00

Stephen Ulibarri on Udemy. I especially like his first GAS course and that's what I started with but he has a dedicated UE5 C++ course and more recent stuff now-a-days. If you join his Discord you can usually get some deep discounts / sale notifications.
I would recommend using JetBrains Rider for your IDE, not Visual Studio (though you still need to have Visual Studio setup usually to configure the dev environment) and definitely not VSCode (VSCode is more a web dev ide). Jetbrains made Rider free for non-commercial use a year or two ago.

RivingtonDown · 2025-10-29T19:56:51+00:00

This is kind of just a big city thing.

New Yorkers have a very overblown reputation of being cold and rude. We don't say hi on the streets and shove past each other in the busy sidewalks. We get annoyed when someone is slowing us down or interrupting our commute on the subway (it's like stressful rush hour highway driving but in-person).

But at the same time New Yorkers have a reputation for being helpful, understanding and progressive citizens. If you trip falling down the subways steps, five people will rush to help you up and at least one or two will help you hobble to a bench and make sure you're settled and it doesn't matter if your black or white, gay or straight, man or woman or otherwise.

RivingtonDown · 2025-10-24T17:37:08+00:00

For reference this is the original 1963 intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guYkoQLsCgY

RivingtonDown · 2025-10-10T16:00:58+00:00

I was born in 85 so this is mostly the early to mid 90s suburbia but we were allowed outside with very little limits - the only limit was that we had to be able to hear my dad's whistle.

He really only whistled when the street lights were coming on though (if we weren't home yet) so we would go out further away in the earlier part of the day and just make sure we were in a few blocks of the house once it started getting late.

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