kruczek

You are doing the same classification. It all depends on the definition of what a living being is.

> On the economical side, you need to realize that whenever you are playing and enjoying a game, it's most likely due to the fact that the previous games sold by that developer have been successful in making money, which was most likely made possible by Denuvo. > > In other words, making piracy harder allows the next generation of games to be created.

That's an extremely bold claim. There are many games which are successful and don't use Denuvo. In fact I'm quite sure there are more successful games that don't use Denuvo, then those which use it - so I don't believe that "whenever [I'm] playing and enjoying a game" it was "most likely" created thanks to Denuvo.

And then there are people like me who simply refuse to play any game which uses Denuvo. There are thousands of excellent games out there, why should I waste time on those which treat me as a thief?

> Players who want the "pure" game experience can simply not look things up on the wiki.

Unfortunately it's not so simple, if you need wiki to search for the most basic information, because they game doesn't provide it. It's what the author actually describes as "terraria problem" and I fully agree with that sentiment: in Terraria you can craft things, but the game doesn't show you what you can craft, unless you are near the correct crafting station AND have sufficient resources on yourself to craft it. So in order to play without wiki you'd need to:

1. stuff your inventory with all possible resources you'd otherwise store in various chests

2. go to each of your crafting stations

Needless to say, it is extremely tedious and still you might not see that some item can be crafted at a given station, because for example you only have 99 pieces of some resource and that item needs 100 pieces of that resource.

So I'd say it's fine for some cryptic or more advanced mechanisms to be covered on wiki. But when I need to go to wiki simply to get a list of craftable items, then there's something seriously wrong with the UI design in the game.

That's an interesting example, because I never felt the need for 3rd party tools while playing Elite Dangerous. I did some upgrades to my ship, mainly based on what I found in store of stations I visited. I did a bit of mining and was able to sell it for some profit.

I'm sure I would be more efficient, if I'd use 3rd party tools, but it still didn't prevent me from actually playing and enjoying the game. I'd say it's much different to the "terraria problem" mentioned in the post.

You are partially correct - of course my expectations for Terraria were set partially by prior knowledge of similar games. But they were also set by Terraria screenshots, trailers and feature lists, where crafting was presented as one of the core features. Nowhere did they mention they are missing such a basic feature as a crafting list and I'd never suspect a modern game may be missing such a basic feature. So I don't really think it's unreasonable expectation on my part.

A person who lived under the rock and found Terraria one day, probably wouldn't call it unplayable, having nothing to compare it against. I remember back in old days, where you'd have to figure out many cryptic mechanisms on your own in the old games. But yet here we are - decades later, and yes I do expect modern games would fully learn from mistakes of the past and provide such basic functionality as crafting lists in the game itself.

> I would be really amazed if this person makes a good game when their focus is make players do A rather than B instead of "how do I make this game as much fun to play as possible".

Would you consider Terraria a good game? I think at one point it was the highest rated game on Steam. And yet that game is exactly this way - it makes players do A rather than B: it is pretty much impossible to play it WITHOUT the wiki, because of the design: there is no list of all craftable items in-game.

And because of this I could never really get into it, because I had to tediosly collect all my resources and then go to each crafting station one by one, simply to see what I am able to craft.

Velocity measures how fast displacement changes. In the same way, displacement measures how fast absement changes. This means if displacement is small, then absement will grow slowly; if displacement is large, then absement will grow quickly.

I think in the linked article there's a good real-world example of that with a valve:

> opening the gate of a gate valve (of rectangular cross section) by 1 mm for 10 seconds yields the same absement of 10 mm·s as opening it by 5 mm for 2 seconds. The amount of water having flowed through it is linearly proportional to the absement of the gate, so it is also the same in both cases.

This reminds me of the same revelation I had when observing my cat in a backyard. There were many snails around, but my cat seemed completely oblivious to their presence; it wouldn't register them as living animals, because they would move so slowly.

> there is even a curator on Steam that marks games that use Denuvo, which is helpful for doing exactly that.

Could you let me know which curator it is? I'm also actively avoiding any game that uses Denuvo, so I'd certainly find such a curator useful.

I switched to Ubuntu for my gaming PC over a year ago and from my Steam library of hundreds of games so far I only found maybe 1 or 2 that did not work on Linux, but worked on Windows. All the others work flawlessly*

* there is one caveat to that though - if you have a VR headset, then there are many people reporting performance issues on Linux with those headsets. And personally I also find VR performance subpar on Linux (although it still improved in the last year).

This is actually what Plato also mentions, a few paragraphs later:

> He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

Then perhaps based on user's voting history, it could be calculated how likely a user is to always vote +2/-2, and how likely to actually differentiate between both axes. This could then be used as a multiplier for user's votes on the contribution axis.

It would probably require hiding comment scores though - otherwise it'd be easy to observe how the multiplier changes and game it.

Not all infinities are equal, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number:

"A fundamental theorem due to Georg Cantor shows that it is possible for infinite sets to have different cardinalities, and in particular the cardinality of the set of real numbers is greater than the cardinality of the set of natural numbers."

But here we're talking about one particular CVE:

> everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products

This one fault doesn't tell anything about overall quality of the product.

> So, yeah… Their "anti-piracy measures" actually lost them a sale that would have likely turned into a repeat customer

Yeah, and in the same vein, I skip buying games which have certain DRM systems in place (like the nefarious Denuvo). Again it's a lost sale for them, since often it's the only thing preventing me from buying an otherwise good game.

Exactly. As the article itself mentions:

> Granted it’s not very readable and log / pow probably makes it less efficient

So, the "improved" solution is both less readable and probably less efficient... where is the improvement then?

The blog linked in the article actually focuses mostly on vulnerabilities of autofwd.com. So I find suecrypt's response crazy, especially when compared to autofwd.com's response - the latter offered bug bounty, shut down the service and allowed to publish an article about it (and all of that within a single day!).

But yes, never heard of this messenger before, now I know one more thing to avoid. Talk about Streisand..

> a change as small as a naming convention

This "small" change had to be split into 29 parts, so that each part stays below 100kB. This means nearly 3MB of changed code. How many hours did developers have to spend to consider what needs to be changed, make the change and then validate it? In my opinion these are hours wasted, that could be better spent on some real problems.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind when playing TTS is the need to learn three things simultaneously:

- how to use TTS,

- what are the rules of the game you want to play,

- how those rules are applied in the specific TTS game/mod you use.

The first thing need to be learnt only once, and honestly there's not much to learn. All one needs is:

- WASD/click mouse - scroll

- F - flip

- R - shuffle

- left click - pick/drop

These cover 99% of all use cases.

But then learning rules of a pariticular game and learning how those are applied - these need to be learnt each time when starting a new mod. One way to mitigate this is playing with people who already have experience with a particular mod.

When starting with a new mod by yourself, first it's important to determine how much scripted it is. Some mods are raw physic playgrounds with components from the game, while others are scripted to automate and simplify gameplay. I think those raw mods are easier to get started, because you basically only need to know rules of the game itself and do everything manually same way you'd do when playing actual board game. On the other hand, once you get to know the range of scripts in a scripted mod, it's much easier to play the mod - it's often more like a computer game, where things happen automatically.

Because these mods are all independent, so it's often difficult or impossible to find any documentation about scripts used by the mod. Often figuring that out is basically trail-and-error, which is unfortunate. There are some which provide written instructions though.

I've played Twilight Imperium, Gloomhaven and Gaia Project and I found all of them very enjoyoable (once I learned how to play them). PM me and maybe we can setup a game :)

> You need a solid gaming PC (with a 2070 or better).

As a counterpoint, I am using Index together with 1070 Ti and the performance is flawless.

Spreaking of bike routes, personally that's why I prefer Grasshopper over other route planners - exactly because it seems to show the most direct path, often avoiding large roads. Riding a bike along a road with heavy car traffic is not enjoyable.

True. Then going by Steam's VR statistics from August (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey):

46% for all Oculus types 36% for Vive+Index

Well, Oculus does seem to be more popular and perhaps that is what the parent meant by Facebook "winning" VR segment. To me "winning" sounds more like total domination, where any competition is near a statistical error. This doesn't seem to be the case here (though I admit Steam statistics may be skewed towards Vive/Index).

Well, if you use it only for their messenger, then they can still for example track webpages you visit (either via cookies or some finer fingerprinting based on e.g. user agent).

It may also be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but in a world where even seemingly innocuous data is used to find unexpected correlations and identify people, I certainly prefer to keep a safe margin of error and steer away from companies which live on our data.

Quest 2 requires to have a Facebook account linked. And to have a Facebook account you need to provide phone number and real name (as per their TOS). If I provide fake information, they may terminate my account. And if they do so, I fear it would make that $299 piece of hardware useless.

Besides, knowing Facebook's hunger for data, I certainly don't trust them enough to install any piece of their software on my PC. Nor do I trust them enough to use a device which could potentially identify some unique traits of the way I move in VR (akin to gait analysis).

I'd say all it means is I value my data above $700, which I understand is not the case with many people. If I would not have enough disposable income, then I wouldn't buy Index nor Quest.

> At this point it's clear that Facebook have "won" VR.

Eh, it doesn't look clear at all to me. It looks like its main advantage is slightly higher resolution than Valve Index and wirelessness. On the other hand from what I read Quest 2 only now will finally get 90Hz - this is what even old Vive provided. And Index goes beyond that - up to 120 and 144Hz. Also I wonder how Quest's screen quality compares to Index, besides resolution and refresh rate - couldn't find any information about Quest's field of view, pixel persistence or fill factor. And with Facebook behind Quest, I consider Index to be cheaper - I'll take $999 any day over $299 + my data.

I'd say it's hardly a clear "win".

> it seems insane to me that the whole thing is predicated on the idea that simulated physics is the best way to play a board-game online

I disagree that's the approach of Tabletop Simulator. I mean, yes, it is a physics playground, but it is also much more. It includes some common actions like flipping, shuffling or drawing from a deck of cards. It includes grids to easily align game pieces. And most of all, it includes scripts which actually put some constraints on the "simulated physics" part, automating "maintenance" parts of a game, while also potentially enforcing game rules.

Why is calling things slaves bad, though? I'd say calling (and treating) humans as slaves is bad.

I see no macabre at all in these statements. I don't think anyone was talking about taking away the right to live from 90% of population. It is enough to limit number of children born and population will naturally decrease.

I can understand better privacy of cash when buying something uncommon. But when doing standard everyday shopping, I don't really see much point.

It's either:

1. Every day I pay with a card at the grocery store, this leaks information about my whereabouts, or

2. Every X days I withdraw cash at the ATM, this also leaks information about my whereabouts

Is there any advantage (in terms of privacy) of using cash in such scenario? The only thing that comes to my mind is that price is also leaked when using a card. But I don't see much use of this information.