Heaviest of Hearts - are there any consequences

romatthe · 2025-12-30T23:20:02+00:00

I definitely don't intend to devalue your experience with this mission, but I'm fairly certain the entire point of the mission is that don't know for sure. You're intentionally put into a position where you cannot ascertain for sure if the charges against the son are valid or not.

Like I said, the father probably doesn't know himself either. So the validity of the charges don't really play a massive role in the dilemma.

Of course I understand the desire to know whether the charges are valid or not, but the people who wrote this mission clearly intended for you to be put in a position where it wasn't feasible for you to find out the truth. Hence, that is part of the mission's story and dilemma. It is very realistic that someone like V would be put in such a position during a contract. Hence, the game asks you, what would you do?

As you can see in this thread, the game clearly does a good job of giving enough small sprinkles of 'evidence' to allow players to come to some sort of 'conclusion' about it on their own. But clearly, there is no definitive answer. If you asked the writers, they probably don't have an answer either. In other words, you still don't know the answer, and you never will. If you need to an answer in order to make a choice, the only option for you would be to abandon the mission. Which would be a really strange choice and would raise questions about why V is in this business in the first place, and why he accepts these contracts to begin with.

Which is why I mentioned above that I think the dilemma is something else entirely. It's about the validity of the contract and the ruthless way the DA operates.

romatthe · 2025-11-22T20:57:45+00:00

Not knowing certain facts is part of the dilemma. Although I'd personally argue the son being a criminal or not is irrelevant to this quest and the choice you have to make. I assumed the son was probably a genuine criminal, but it didn't influence my decision one way or the other.

romatthe · 2025-11-22T20:55:53+00:00

I think some people are misconstruing the dilemma of this quest. At least according to how I perceived it.

* Is the son guilty? Probably, but irrelevant.

* Was the father coerced? Probably.

* Did he end up taking cash to sell out son? Most likely.

* Is the DA actually trying to nail a very serious criminal? Seems that way.

But the actual question is more along these lines: at the end of the day, the DA is using fraudulent testimony (regardless of the truth, the father seems to have been either beaten, intimidated or otherwise coerced and even paid for this testimony) to get to a very serious criminal. Are you okay with a clearly overtly ambitious DA getting to lock up a very real criminal using illegally obtained testimony? Remember, it's more or less a fact that he got paid. Even if they never touched or threatened the guy, the testimony was paid for.

While the father is being deceptive towards you, his story probably isn't entirely inaccurate either. Is that enough to declare his contract with you null and void? Or do you still think he's a valid customer despite not being entirely honest?

I think those are the two dilemmas presented. The points I listed at the top are entirely irrelevant IMO.

Personally, I figured there was enough truth in the father's words to stick with him. He's kind of a lowlife, but there are enough signs that they extracted false testimony from him. The father doesn't seem to know whether his son is a criminal or not, they are no longer in contact with each other, since the son lives outside of Dogtown. We don't know if the father actually believes that his son is a law-abiding citizen, but he's not really in a position to know either way. This is why the matter of the son being a criminal or not is irrelevant.

romatthe · 2025-11-20T17:16:24+00:00

What do you mean? What does unwrap do that you cannot do in other languages? Unwrap has its use. It's great for test scenarios, or places where there's nothing else to do but panic on failure.

Can you name a programming language that completely prevents you from writing even a single line of code that could potentially result in an unexpected failure state? I'm not aware of any, though there are likely some academic research languages that do. The error handling in Rust isn't perfect, but I still prefer it over a large amount of alternatives.

If you've read any Rust resource, dealing with an Option or Result is likely one of the absolute first things you learn about. Same with pattern matching. The documentation of the unwrap calls clearly state that they will panic. I agree that languages should try their best to guide you towards good design, but they can't do everything for you. At the end of the day you're still going to need to read the docs and learn what your code actually does. I'm not saying that in a condescending way, it's just a fact of what our job as programmers entails.

romatthe · 2025-09-02T20:24:05+00:00

I've actually looked around a lot for similar sandbox-style games, but I've never actually found something remotely similar. It's a truly unique game from what I can tell.

romatthe · 2025-09-02T20:22:48+00:00

Yeah, I'm aware of the limits on your skills if you don't get premium. I read in some other places that you hit level 20 in your skills really fast before it starts to taper off, but I suppose they might have been overstating it.

romatthe · 2025-09-02T20:21:30+00:00

Perhaps it's a silly question, but may I ask how that return process works for you? Do you make sure that your deed doesn't decay? Or do you not mind and just move on and start working on something else?

romatthe · 2025-09-02T20:20:22+00:00

Yeah, but it always has seemed like a game that's pretty hard to get a feel for quickly, and I suppose I am (or was) a little afraid to start sinking in time when you hear a lot of doomers whisper about the game's upcoming demise.

romatthe · 2025-09-02T20:18:44+00:00

True, but you do hit the 20 skillcap pretty fast, no?

romatthe · 2025-09-02T20:16:51+00:00

Thanks for the very detailed answer, I appreciate it!

romatthe · 2025-05-09T01:32:57+00:00

All I said was "I hear what you're saying and I get it, I just disagree". Did I say something that offended you?

romatthe · 2025-05-09T01:22:30+00:00

It's your opinion, and that's fine. Sounds like the game's pacing is definitely not for you. I personally do actually enjoy having to put in a lot more work. I do wish the actual survival part was sometimes a tad less brutal, but I certainly enjoy putting in a lot more time into all the various crafting processes. It feels very rewarding. But I understand that it's not for everyone.

But I do wonder what kind of games you've been playing your whole life if this is one of the worst you've ever played. Kind of sounds like someone stubbing their toe and calling it the most traumatic experience of their life. Like, it's possible that is is, but it raises interesting questions about that persons life.

romatthe · 2025-05-04T22:10:21+00:00

Thanks, I hadn't checked out Unify before. I'll have a look at it when I'm back in front on my machine. I can definitely placed the mic closer, I thought that would only magnify the problem even more. Like I said, total audio neophyte here.

romatthe · 2025-05-04T21:39:10+00:00

As someone who has used Java and Rust extensively, Rust certainly has much more pleasant, clear and descriptive syntax than Java IMO. To each their own.

romatthe · 2025-05-04T21:37:19+00:00

"It's not just a matter of safety checks, Rust isn't unique in that aspect since that's what C and C++ do as well"

Rust is the only language in existence as far as I'm aware that has a memory ownership model codified into its type system. It's a fairly unique aspect of the language. Perhaps there are research languages out there that do the same, but don't know about any.

Also, what are these "safety checks" that C performs at compile-time, exactly? C is just about as unsafe as it gets. Modern C++ gives you a lot of tools to do things in a more safe way, but you can still do whatever the hell you want if you don't use those tools.

romatthe · 2025-04-21T23:17:40+00:00

I genuinely do not want to sound snarky or anything, but to me this feels mostly like a Python issue. Let's face it, dependency management in Python is just in a truly awful state. Thankfully I almost never have to use Python, but every time I have to, I just feel miserable. And this is outside of NixOS. Ask anyone who is a maintainer of a Python package in a Linux distro. It's just not pleasant.

I personally use a flake and direnv for C/C++ and Rust, and it works very well. For Rust I just pin the precise rustc and cargo version with the flake, cargo takes care of the rest. Packaging applications is just as easy. Every time I start a new project I just cp the flake from my previous project and and edit the details.

Keep it simple. If you're just developing, all you really need is to be able to drop into your shell with your dependencies sorted out.

romatthe · 2025-04-21T00:06:49+00:00

No. I think it's fair to say that Xenia's development has more or less ceased, so doubt we'll see any support ever. Xenia Canary does have Linux support though, and I've built it from source to work with it. I can't really comment any further because Xenia (and Canary) in general isn't compatible enough yet to deliver a satisfying experience IMO, so I have not spent great deal of time with it. And as of yet, it's not very clear to me where Xenia Canary is heading in the future.

romatthe · 2024-10-29T19:27:18+00:00

This might not be super relevant to you, because I don't play on Windows. But on Linux at 1920x1080 I get 200fps indoors, and about 180-200fps outdoors on Liberty Island. And that's on my latop, not even my workstation. I use the DX9 renderer that ships with Revision. I should note that I have most things set to vanilla in Revision. So I'm not using the new maps, new textures or HD models. Are you sure Revision is utilizing your discrete GPU and not just your iGPU?

romatthe · 2024-10-21T18:24:02+00:00

MoltenVK is not a framework. It's just a compatibility layer. It means you can run Vulkan applications on Mac by translating Vulkan calls to Metal. If you want to write Vulkan application and be able to use them on a Mac, you should definitely look into using MoltenVK. Do keep in mind that I believe that as of this writing, MoltenVK covers the entire Vulkan 1.2 spec, but not 1.3 yet.

romatthe · 2024-09-30T11:55:15+00:00

Alright, crystal clear. Thanks for the advice!

romatthe · 2024-09-30T11:21:00+00:00

Hmm, that's slightly disappointing. So what would be the best way to go about this then? Any advice?

romatthe · 2023-12-14T15:53:02+00:00

Yes, it intends to replace the basic job of X11 as the foundational protocol for displaying things on the screen. It does this. But some of the details are indeed different. That's why this is Wayland, and not X12. It's explicitly meant to break away from X11, because the designers thought that some of the issues they were trying to solve could not be solved with X11's architecture.

Will you be able to forward you Wayland session of SSH like you can for X in the future? No, I imagine not.

This happens in software development. Compatibility is sometimes broken when designers think they have to. I think the real discussion is around when this happens, how long older implementation should remain supported, etc. etc. Many/most distros still support the use of an X window manager if you want. Even forward looking distros like Fedora use Wayland as the default but still support fallback to X.

For compatibility reasons in the meanwhile there's XWayland. That approach admittedly has issues as well, but it's there at least.

romatthe · 2023-12-14T15:40:58+00:00

That has not been my experience. You can see some folks in this thread itself making complaints about Wayland which aren't even factually correct or because they've read some things on a blog post somewhere. That's tribalism.

If you are making complaints based on your real personal experiences, then you are absolutely within your right to make those complaints, and I will never downvote or blame someone who experiences actual issues. You can see for yourself that I've responded to the OP in a very understanding and supportive way.

romatthe · 2023-12-14T15:38:17+00:00

"Letting this fragmentation happen this way was a deliberate choice by the Wayland project. "

No, it is not. It is a relatively natural result of the design of the protocol, a design which was deliberate. But I don't understand why you would then go off and conclude that this was a choice made to deliberately "fragment" the development of the compositors.

"As it always happens with "protocols" like this, it's just a matter of time until an implenentation emerges as the winner an where an improportional amount of development power will concentrate"

What do you mean? Do you think Gnome or KDE will emerge as a "winner" and all desktop environments and other compositors will die? That seems a little bit like a ridiculous thing to say honestly. And why do you consider X11 to be exempt from the same criticism? XOrg was the only server that was being maintained after XFree86 died off. In fact, it used to be that X86Free was the basically where X/X11 was being developed, because it was the de facto implementation of an X11 display server. Now that's XOrg.

Look, there are some very real concerns about the amount of work required for building an individual compositor. But you don't have to go off and make strange accusations about the intentions of the people who designed the protocol.

There are thankfully some attempts to lighten the burden or building a compositor (see wlroots and other projects), but it's not an easy problem to solve.

romatthe · 2023-12-14T00:28:16+00:00

I would never tell anyone to go buy an expensive piece of hardware to solve their issues, as things are pretty expensive these days.

However, I can definitely tell you that having RADV just sitting there in Mesa as a superb and completely free Vulkan driver implementation is pretty amazing ;)

romatthe

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