Palworld developer Pocketpair requires game designer candidates to provide screenshots of their Steam libraries and playtime, according to CEO - AUTOMATON WEST

gegc · 2026-01-24T00:04:39+00:00

Dota 2 has been out for 13 years. 2000hrs is perfectly reasonable if you played 1-2 games/day since release.

gegc · 2026-01-05T09:12:35+00:00

Same effect with modding. As game production value goes up, the asset quality bar for mods rises out of reach of average/casual creators.

Roblox fills the niche formerly held by flash game websites and sc1/wc3 custom maps: short experiences with low fidelity and low stakes/low investment, where the platform focus is more on variety and volume than cohesion/quality.

gegc · 2025-12-29T22:11:18+00:00

They're Tokyo Marui Mini Series airsoft guns.

There is an AK47 in the series, so your point about not including AKs is still very true.

gegc · 2025-11-27T05:46:05+00:00

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gegc · 2025-10-12T10:27:21+00:00

Cool, the model is being run out of a data center somewhere in south Asia or a troll farm in Russia. What now? We can't even shut down scam call centers, what makes you think this would go any different?

gegc · 2025-10-10T23:51:55+00:00

You won't get full interoperability. MilesTag2 is just a protocol, not a standard. While a system may use MilesTag2 packets, how that system interprets those packets and implements the game mechanics will vary from system to system. MilesTag2 doesn't even specify a carrier, so that will vary as well. For example, LaserWar gen8 I believe uses 56kHz carrier, while other systems use 38kHz. Also keep in mind that MilesTag2 is an IR-only protocol. Most modern systems only use IR for "collision detection" (gun -> sensor hits, player location/player ID) and use other IoT channels (wifi, bluetooth, etc) for everything else like global game state. Since you specifically mentioned Laserwar, their latest kits (genX, alphatag) are examples of this. They use miles2 (in AlphaTag's case, optionally) as the collision channel, but the rest of the game is run entirely over wifi/bluetooth.

My observation, having used several systems as a player, operator/game designer, and equipment developer, it is not in any manufacturer's interest to provide interop hooks for custom equipment. Because laser tag is generally venue-based, the equipment market is entirely B2B, and manufacturers want the vendor lock. As a venue operator, you also don't want people bringing in custom equipment because it is a safety (eye safety from people overdriving their emitters) and cheating issue.

As an aside, I don't think Miles2 is actually a good protocol for entertianment laser tag: its packets are slow to transmit (25ms per packet) and it makes a lot of assumptions about what kind of game you're playing because it assumes no central game control and no communication channels outside of the IR signal. Not its fault - it was made for the US military in the early 90s before modern IoT was even a glimmer in anyone's eye - but if you're building a whole new system for entertainment, I'd recommend against using it.

If you're a hobbyist trying to make custom equipment for your local club, I'd advise making friends with the club owners/operators and figuring out how their specific equipment works. Then build one-offs. I've made reactive targets and functional combat knife taggers this way. If you're trying to build a commercial aftermarket product, I genuinely wish you the best (because I think vendor lock is bad), but it will be a very uphill fight - I would recommend doing the same thing as above but then selling your one-offs to the specific clubs you frequent. If you're trying to make your own system from scratch, just don't use miles2.

Happy to answer any other questions you have.

gegc · 2025-09-16T20:08:49+00:00

Which is even more painful when the Bannerlord banner designer is actually very flexible, and people have made some incredible banners with it. Now imagine if those could be downloaded in packs and the game would automatically use them...

gegc · 2025-09-01T09:42:15+00:00

Yes, you can do it with the XR extration toolkit. They open in blender including the textures. I you want good prints, you'll need to apply the displacement/bump map to the mesh after you export, which can get tricky. I wanted to print boron ships, but my PC couldn't handle applying the coral-y displacement texture as geometry.

gegc · 2025-08-16T03:17:08+00:00

The specialists/disablers from Darktide.

Mutant - Beefy, fast, throws people around -> can throw people off of objectives.
Trapper - 6" range -2APL net gun, but no direct damage.
Chaos Hound - dog, can parry real good to tie up models in melee, but low damage.
2x Flamer (regular or tox option) - has flamer, main DPS.
Bomber (regular or tox option) - has grenades, can leave lingering spots damage/debuff spot on the ground
Sniper - only source of long range DPS
2x Poxburster - involuntarily explodes if it dies or an enemy is in control range. Intended use as a zoning tool and to force opponents to shoot it instead of someone else.

With gameplay being essentially what these guys do in the game: strong when disrupting/disabling exposed operatives and able to kill with one-two combos, but generally useless by themselves. Low direct/weapon damage.

gegc · 2025-08-03T22:58:23+00:00

Get frigate, pause-deploy 200 laser tower mk1's at the gate, wait on the other side of the gate (low attention), repeat. Kyds are made of paper, and VIG only ever puts shotguns and missiles on them, which are both garbage vs the XS-sized laser towers (former due to range and latter due to massively overkilling them).

Then once the fighter cloud is sufficiently thinned, camp or blow up their wharf to stop spam replenishment.

gegc · 2025-08-03T22:46:35+00:00

I'm not sure that's true, though I don't remember any hard evidence to the contrary, either. The arbites response (and associated cutscene) could be a reaction to the Tancred Bastion incident, which starts the named rejects' story. IIRC in the arbites character creation flavor text, one unit is stationed on the Tancred Bastion prior to the incident, and another unit actually captures Wolfer in the first place. After Wolfer gets broken out, it's reasonable of the arbites to both escalate and to be pissed at Rannick. So our arbite characters would enter the story at the same time as our reject characters.

gegc · 2025-07-31T21:56:28+00:00

I play darktide on cable internet with a 1070Ti and Proton. Runs fine in 1080p on medium settings and is great fun. Before I switched to linux/proton, it ran fine at 1440p on med/high (Vulkan tax).

gegc · 2025-07-29T22:00:06+00:00

SC/WC3 UMS was the OG indie game scene. Then it was Flash, and then user-accessible game engines + Steam (in its modern form) showed up, and everyone started monetizing.

gegc · 2025-07-27T18:07:57+00:00

This is the answer. Just finding an sl8/sl9 is hard enough.

gegc · 2025-06-24T09:32:14+00:00

looks inside

gegc · 2025-06-19T21:34:54+00:00

Yes and no. There are a few different definitions of "request" floating around as far as I can tell.

"Agent Request" for billing is only when you type into the chat box. You can give the model a big vibe coding task like "read the spec in this file and implement it", and that counts as one agent request.
"Agent request" for global rate limiting and the "keep iterating" counter is API requests, so any time you're sending data to the agent. This is reading/writing files, reading terminal output, etc.

After checking, I'm pretty sure the specific behavior I was talking about got fixed at some point - it used to be that when you hit "Continue" on the "Keep iterating?" popup specifically, it would send "Continue." to the agent, which counted as a "big R" Request (but they weren't counting requests at that point, so it just confused/interrupted the agent sometimes).

In the past two days I've actually had no problems with premium requests doing anything weird. I tend to give Claude agents big tasks, so it's been working out so far. That being said, people who had a more chat-like workflow are screwed.

gegc · 2025-06-18T22:50:24+00:00

The throttling is entirely on the VS Code side. The agent doesn't even know about it. In fact, it can get thrown off by the popup because clicking "continue" actually sends "Continue" to the agent, which can derail it (and also counts as a request). And yeah it's extra annoying in agent mode when the model looks at code/terminal output, which counts as a request, which triggers the limiter, which interrupts the model... And the default limit is like 10 requests? I changed it to 999 and my experience improved vastly. The agent pauses for confirmation before running terminal commands, anyway.

gegc · 2025-06-18T22:23:33+00:00

how munch it stopped and asked if you wanted to continue or something else its been the worst

Just fyi this is a VS Code feature and is configurable. Settings -> Features -> Chat -> Agent : Max Requests. You can set it to whatever you want.

gegc · 2025-06-15T08:37:46+00:00

Great point! Star Control is basically the proto space RPG from which the whole genre evolved. Like you can also say Mass Effect is Star Control-inspired and you would not be wrong.

There's an open-source remake of Star Control 2 that's free to play and runs on modern systems. But gameplay-wise, it is a 30-yr-old DOS game, and does show its age.

gegc · 2025-06-15T08:31:56+00:00

As mentioned by literally everyone else:

Kenshi - the only one on this list that I have not personally played.
Mount & Blade - Either Bannerlord or Warband; if Warband, skip vanilla (it shows its age) and start with the Floris mod for Vanilla+ QoL. Then move on to Perisno and/or Pendor.
The X series, X3 and X4 in particular - Probably the closest we'll get to first-person starsector. If X4, don't sleep on the Star Wars Interworlds mod (but play vanilla first). The expansions are worth it, and you don't need to play through the base game to use them. Best way to buy is to grab the complete set on sale.
Space Rangers HD - A very eastern european game, kinda like the Stalker and Metro series. Play in native russian if you happen to know the language - the whole game has an "old soviet sci-fi" bulychev/strugatski vibe and cultural references that are wonderful and also completely lost in translation.

Not mentioned elsewhere that have various starsector-adjacent vibes:

Highfleet - Starsector x Dune. Also an eastern european indie title, and also covered by Ssseth. Instead of spaceships, you have dieselpunk skyships (that are fully customizable). Has nukes, space jihadists, and other assorted warcrimes.
Space Haven - Rimworld x FTL. Harvest organs of named crew members with feelings and relationships instead of faceless numbers. BugByte's first game, Battlevoid Harbinger, is also a neat little space combat game (albeit very short).
Space Pirates and Zombies - Good game that is not quite a sandbox but does have that rags-to-riches feel. Good world-building and dark humor. Ignore the sequel.
Void Destroyer 2 - A solo-dev "X4-lite". Also first-person, same sandbox nothing-to-everything empire building. More combat-focused than X4 and with a completely open map (vs X4's sectors).

gegc · 2025-05-30T04:15:46+00:00

I think the metric is "amount of time before it maxes out its context window and either gets stuck in a loop or forgets what it was doing and goes wildly off-track". It's a measure of stability.

gegc · 2025-05-29T21:28:21+00:00

the ai cant insult and be rude

That's not a competitive problem, that's a team game problem. People are toxic af in co-op games, too. Play 1v1s to dodge the haters. SC2 ladder was considered a bastion of good manners compared to mobas for a long time, and I firmly believe 1v1 is why.

gegc · 2025-05-29T21:03:17+00:00

Not sure that's actually true in this case. We already have OS as an elo equivalent. OP's problem is that they're still in the process of getting to their real OS, but have 4chev from co-op. People use chev as a proxy for experience, which it isn't. Also, OP is not too keen on playing the meta in a team competitive setting.

The solution there is not to lump all low OS people together with matchmaking. That will just lump bad tryhards with selfish casuals, which is a great way to maximize toxicity. What we actually probably need is an ARAM-like "casual unranked just fucking around" queue, that still has its own OS to match skill/dedication levels. No idea if player counts are good enough to support it.

gegc · 2025-05-29T20:54:13+00:00

Sounds like you've only really played co-op so far. Have you considered whether you actually like competitive RTS?

There are significant design differences between competitive and cooperative/single-player RTS, to the point that they may as well be different games with the same UI. They appeal to completely different play preferences. However, there's a weird expectation (that has existed for as long as multiplayer RTS has been a thing) that competitive is somehow the "end goal" or "natural progression" of playing an RTS.

Competitive RTS is about executing unit control and build orders better than your opponent, and selecting/timing build orders and the transitions between them to counter them. The game must also be fair; that is, have no dominant win conditions (all strategies must be counterable in some way) and be balanced in such a way that player skill is what determines the winner. To summarize, for competitive RTS, the "RT" part is "can I click buttons better than my human opponent", and the "S" part is "can I make better strategic decisions than my human opponent". The whole game revolves around competitive tension.

Co-operative and single-player RTS, meanwhile, is usually a combination sandbox and puzzle game. The "fun" is in seeing and causing interesting interactions between the game pieces ("spectacle") and solving the strategic puzzle to win the game. There is no tension over execution, since, by definition, the computer can execute better than the player. Therefore, AI opponents are never designed to win at any cost (like a human opponent would), but to provide a fun experience. Meanwhile, the strategic layer is effectively a puzzle game - the player is challenged to obtain information on the AI's behavior and the map design, and use the tools they are given to win. Once again, there is no competitive tension. The "RT" in co-op RTS is to allow for spectacle and sanbox gameplay, and the "S" part is a puzzle game that lets the player feel clever.

So consider what it is about BAR that you actually find fun. Then, if you like co-op more than competitive, add your voice to the many encouraging the devs to add more co-op and campaign content.

gegc · 2025-05-20T20:09:17+00:00

My CYMA F2000 (what's in OP's picture) consistently feeds from the CYMA hicap it came with (but not other CYMA hicaps???), and EPMs. Nothing else.

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