DizzyDoo

Hmm, I'm not convinced that one team dominating a league leads to exciting outcomes. What do you think about Bundesliga's situation?[0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesliga#List_of_champions

For anyone wanting a short piece of fiction about human-animal communication development, I enjoyed this one (or part one of one) from Lars Doucet: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-s...

It doesn't look like Streamlink is immune to the challenges of Twitch ads: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/4949

A week ago I just so happened to look up some of your older blog posts and Candy Japan articles that you had written, it was an enjoyable reread!

For anyone else, here are some links:

https://www.candyjapan.com/life-in-japan

https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes

Not specific-language related, but see also Canada's CanCon legislation on Canadian-made music quotas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

About the trash police - is there anything stopping a neighbour planting plastic in the garbage and then calling the authorities? Or just saying that the plastic isn't theirs, and perhaps the neighbour planted it? It just seems hard to prove either way.

I enjoyed The Incredible Machine as a kid, the modern equivalent (though still 10 years old) is 'Contraption Maker' - https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker/ - which was designed by the same person. Glad to see he's still going all these years later!

This is not 'Incredible Machine' related, but while I'm here, I'm working on an engineering-adjacent game where you build and automate a zoo full of spooky monsters. Might be of interest to some! https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...

I very much enjoyed RPS in the days of the original four writers, and also when Quinns was contributing, though I haven't kept up so much in the last eight years or so.

Eurogamer seems to cover the games news and reviews in the way I like best right now, and Digital Foundary's writing and videos that lean on the more technical side of games are just excellent. (I believe DF also have an arrangement to do some content for RPS, so it's probably being shared around as it should.)

I mean, it was Russell Kay[0], David Jones[1] and Mike Dailly[2], though I don't know if they're here.

Personally I enjoyed the Lemmings Revolution game in the series, and that was much later than the Amiga version.

[0] - https://www.mobygames.com/person/685/russell-kay/

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jones_(video_game_develo...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Dailly_(game_designer)

Exactly, and it's not just about reading but also (perhaps even more so) about writing. If Nintendo control the manufacture of their proprietary disk, well, it's unlikely that a pirate outfit will be able to build a disk manufacturing factory that produces something compatible with retail Wii U's they can then sell their own non-Nintendo licensed games on. Or burn Nintendo's own games onto. The cartridge era of games were much easier to reproduce the physical medium onto, and this was super-widespread.

This did break down for Sony later on in a way it hasn't for the Nintendo Switch, a widely shared opinion on why the PS Vita flopped was because it was incompatible with standard SD cards _and_ that their own flash game cart and memory card offerings were so incredibly expensive. (And there were cheap SD-to-PSVita adapters that were released anyway. [0])

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Vita#Hardware

I'm having problems with Discord, Spotify and Gitlab right now. I wonder which cloud service that's running a third of the internet is struggling right now!

There's lots of reasons people 'cheat' in games. In this case it might be:

• You enjoy playing Pokemon but you don't want to or cannot find the time to grind out the few hours of leveling up you need to progress, or to find your specific favourite handful of Pokemon, so you use a device like this to save yourself some time.

• You want to succeed in the competitive space (yes, competitive Pokemon is a thing[0] and is ongoing right now in fact[1]) and you don't want to grind for Pokemon with specific Effort Values, which are the randomly generated numbers that effect how strong your Pokemon attacks are. So you use a device like this, though probably altering a save file would be just as easy and not detectable by Game Freak/The Pokemon Company.

• You don't really care about Pokemon, but you know you can sell Pokemon on eBay[2], so you automate it with a device like this.

[0] - https://www.pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon/pokemon-events/pokem...

[1] - https://worlds.pokemon.com/en-us/

[2] - https://www.ebay.ca/itm/225598189077

I... guess, if you're only looking at the outcome (boxes of caught Pokemon) it is similar?

But the linked post describes a Raspberry Pi + Capture Card + OpenCV solution that is scanning the screen to detect when Shiny Pokemon are found, which is much more involved.

The $30 'Switch Up' device I linked to seems to operate only on emulating button inputs. Like, you can record and playback a macro.

There is also a physical USB cheat/hack/mod[0] that you can plug into your Switch that lets you automatically farm eggs, move you about automatically to hatch eggs, and then release entire boxes of Pokemon you don't need[1]. It's like factory farming Pokemon! There's support for other games and even other game console controllers too, it's an interesting device.

For Pokemon I think it's more interesting than simply memory hacking your save file and altering the Effort Values of the Pokemon, which is the simple way to go about this, though a bit boring and as I understand it very widespread if you battle online.

[0] - https://collectiveminds-ca.myshopify.com/collections/nintend... [1] - https://www.switch-up.ca/pokemon-sword-and-shield-mode

I make games for a living, I deeply enjoy the creative freedom of working on projects independently. After university I got my start with a SaaS accounting business, backend Python stuff - I liked it, I learned a lot and worked with some very talented and experienced programmers. Still, I love that with games I get to do deep systems work, animation work, I get to paint and design, write silly jokes, and make something a bit strange that no one else is going to make.

Now, I work independently, there's no publisher or licensing partner, perhaps if I were working for Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard or Rockstar Games I might not enjoy it so much? But I found lots of things to like working on an accounting SaaS project, so if I ever did try it, perhaps it would be just fine.

Related - has anyone listened to the new audiobooks with Bill Nighy, Peter Serafinowicz, and so on? I'm interested because they're unabridged and look like they have very high production values, but they're also quite pricey (understandably so) if you want to buy them and download them permanently.

I recently quite enjoyed this video[0] about beginning to decompile an old Lego PC Game I remember from when I was a child.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MToTEqoVv3I

Yes, the Factorio devs had an approach where they optimised everything happening in the game in the original singlethreaded environment, before moving onto multithreaded support. That's where the game is now, and as far as I understand it the multithreading occurs on each independent set of conveyor belts or belt lanes, and there's some info on that in this blog post[0] for anyone interested.

[0] - https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364

You've misundertood the list, Lightyear ranks one place below Cars, so (on this list at least) it's viewed as worse than Cars. But better than Cars 3 and Cars 2.

Heh, it's like all those YouTube videos where someone uploads a song and the uploader puts "No copyright infringement intended" in the text description, sometimes with five or six exclamation marks just to really make sure they avoid the takedown.

That was certainly the case for the older ground effect craft like the ekranoplan[0] (which is a very interesting read), but perhaps there are important differences/improvements with this far, far more modern model?

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan

My dentist here in Canada has signs up that advertise that you get a free electric tooth brush if you leave a 5 star review on Google. I've not done that, it seems quite wrong, but I would imagine this is also very much against Google's policies? I was surprised how clear and obvious the signage was.

Seems to have worked though, the dentist's office has lots of 5 star reviews.

You can take a look at the Python codebase for Sentry over here: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry

Could you expand? I'm a video game designer myself, so I enjoy thinking about these things - how can you get around the hunt-and-peck nature of a mobile phone screen, where your thumb or finger covers up the unit you're selecting? And then how do you ensure accuracy in the exact spot they move to?

Yes, that's a good overview.

In addition, I think in the last few years the swing has been towards bigger publishers or corporate holding groups (Embracer, Microsoft/Sony, Tencent, etc) sweeping up lots of previously independant studios (Eidos, Riot, Double Fine, Mojang, etc) in acquisitions - for the sake of owning the intellectual property and freedom to do more with the license. But also, and crucially, stopping other rival companies doing the same thing first, leading to big arguments like this one: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623363/microsoft-sony-ft...

Perhaps the colder global financial situation will cool this acquisition/centralisation spree, but maybe not!

Are they? A traditional RTS like Age of Empires 2 or a Starcraft requires quite a lot of accuracy in quick-selection and movement orders, it would drive me nuts to try and do that on a mobile screen with no mouse. I know MOBA-style games are popular on mobile, but there's only one unit to control there.

The only non-keyboard-and-mouse RTS I can think of is Tooth and Tail[0], designed to play nicely with controllers (in a similar way that that Halo Wars was back in 2009), and while I'm sure high-level play in those games was indeed very high-level, the whole experience nonetheless just doesn't work for me, it feels 'dumbed down' still.

[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/286000/Tooth_and_Tail/

I liked Windows 7 a lot too, only switched to 10 when it got to end-of-life.

How is this 'Firefly Model' trained and sourced? Will it be on the contents of the stock.adobe.com library?

Clicking through the available pages it seems like a lot of 'coming soon' talk, so there's not really any detail about any of the underlying process.

This went pretty terribly for Fall Guys[0] because the moment a false positive slips through, and then that player posts their clip of a game with close to 100% cheaters on Twitter or Reddit, it exacerbates their image of a game with a serious cheating problem. Everyone saw a game taking place jam packed with cheaters and it became a PR problem they had to overcome.

[0] - https://www.pcgamer.com/fall-guys-once-had-a-secret-cheater-...

Some links for these:

• https://retream.itch.io/quod-init-exit-iio

• https://protovision.itch.io/sams-journey

• https://csdb.dk/release/?id=212190