phaser

Technology doesn't always work like that.

A new game is a totally new world with everything created from scratch. A creation. A model, on the other hand, is a reinterpretation machine for hundreds of years of human creations, but not a creation in itself, more like a discovery.

You would think that by now we would have a much better Bitcoin that's taking over the payment networks of the world but what we actually got is a shitload of shitcoin.

You can run mediawiki at home but you won't have wikipedia. You can run a video server but you won't have all the movies that Netfix has. A local model is actually the real thing.

What intrigues me the most about AI progress, is not AGI or the model du jour by $AI_UNICORN, but rather what can be run locally. I remember having an amusing, but rather useless model in a beefy gaming PC that I had 6 years ago; and now, something that’s a hundred times better on my M5 laptop.

Should the market react to the memory shortage, the progress of the Apple silicon continue at the same pace, and what we’ll be able to run locally in 6 years will be very exciting. or frightening.

Also I don’t know what this means for the valuation of the AI companies. I remember asking about this very idea to one of their employees at an event and instead of answering he bailed out to grab a cocktail.

I didn't learn anything about tulips, markets, or the tulip market in this article.

I see. I'm adding an option to "disable" a building, so you'll be able to suspend a city service due to budget constraints or any other reason.

The camera is very very close to isometric but as you've noticed, it's not an ortographic projection. During early access I decided against it but tbh I can't recall why. I'll go back to the drawing board on this one (or at least allow it to be enabled in settings)

I love GOG and I would publish there in a heartbeat but I never hear back from them :(

There's plans for: river map, island map, peninsula map, port zone, (with docks and containers), industrial fishing.

All in different stages of development. Can't say for sure when it's gonna be live but it's locked in.

The compositions are by Pablo Rubio, a long time collaborator. Originally it's inspired in the soundtrack of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The music is not tracker music but we made the artistic decision to use similar limitations (small number of channels, sample-based instruments) to get the aesthetics of tracker music (actually SNES music but practically the same principles). The soundtrack is still getting expanded. Every month we add a new track to the playlist.

Up and down arrow keys will change the tilt. left right to rotate in 90 degree steps. WASD to pan.

(the keys can be changed in control settings)

If you're looking for a free-angle view we don't have it, the game is designed to be looked like a isometric game. Having said that, I'm working on a "photo mode" that frees the camera and lets you choose a lens (with depth of field) and a film but so far it's only for shooting pictures and not for actually playing the game.

That's a super cool idea. Actually we have an internal thingy to export your city to blender, then we can have nice images like this one: https://microlandia.city/assets/press/keyart/t21.jpeg

Maybe we manage to make something that doesn't need blender (though it probably won't look as cool) or we just stop dev-gatekeeping the function that exports the 3d file. Consider it done for the next point release :)

I’m taking a look at that right now. Thanks for flagging this

At this moment, not so big but lately I've done some interesting technical breakthroughs that will enable large maps :D ... or at least a lot larger than SimCity 2013

I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going.

The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that).

Sure, there's something great about Cities Skylines that (at least with very powerful hardware) can look and feel like reality. But at the same time the game engine, in order to make this photorealism of terrain elevations with infinite possible shapes of infrastructure, is so complex that the actual simulation is sloppy, and feels to me like a big downgrade from SC3000.

Traffic, economics, zoning, crime, pollution. are so much practical to simulate (both in the computer, and in our mind models) in this classic isometric style.

* https://microlandia.city

edit: spelling

This advice is sound only if you think of success as defined by SV-investor-echo-chamber standards.

Too many "tales of side-projects that grew into successful businesses" can narrow your understanding of what it actually means. I agree that it's OK to abandon a side project, but it is a much deeper reflection.

Here’s how i do it: I create a lot of stuff using AI to the max, but I also spend the necessary of time on reviewing that the AI is producing code that passes my cognitive load standards. this involves some tokens spent on grooming code and documenting well. Most of this is effortless thanks to an AGENTS.md based on this: https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/blob/main/READM... but i have a good sense of catching when things are getting weird and i steer back.

Then, when credits run out. It’s show time! The code is neatly organized, abstractions make sense, comments are helpful so I have a solid ground to do some good old organic human coding. I make sure that when i’m approaching limits I’m asking the AI to set the stage.

I used to get frustrated when credits ran out because the AI was making something I would need to study to comprehend. Now I’m eager to the next “brain time hand-out”

It sounds weird but it’s a form of teamwork. I have the means to pay for a larger plan but i’d rather keep my brain active.

Starlink was never about giving people untethered access to the internet.

In Chile we have an expression that reminds me why I love my home dialect so much: "Vender humo" (to sell smoke) - not quite the same as smoke and mirrors, it conveys that someone, in a spectacular way, manages to sell something that vanishes upon reaching the hands of the buyer, like smoke.

Reminds me of the people of the future in Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” who watch large TVs where most of the space is taken by advertising.

It’s amazing how this one turned morphed from humor into an eerie warning of the future in 20 years.

https://youtu.be/YqQ6D0Bu-a8

Yeah, the choice of title is indeed strange. But it does convey a personal point of view about the platform very well. Largely inscrutable? Compared to what?

Is Microsoft the really the main force drowning the internet in slop? I appreciate the discussion on the subject but why is it so specific on Microsoft and the userbase of Bing?

It’s funny because I wanted to register this domain for the lulz 3 months ago (Microslop is a fictional company in my videogame Microlandia) but the price was ~15k so i settled for the cheaper microslop.net

Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;)

Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

edit: formatting

yeah! I love the em-dash — they really took it away from us :(

I get that a lot. I’ve wondered why. It’s a bit sad and funny at the same time. I’m not a native english speaker which makes it even more confusing…

it was in this link included in this same story https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/

I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience.

It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious.

Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews.

It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953

I have the exact same problem. plus, I have usually surprised system processes eating up CPU like ‘suggestd’ and it’s hard to get information about what it does. I guess one could find out by reverse engineering, but that’s not the point. they could easily make it transparent and documented and the feeling of my own computer being a black box is constantly pissing me off. I regret all my investment in the Apple ecosystem and I wish I hadn’t locked me in as much.

Maybe this is the living room dumb-TV that I was waiting for

Do we have mass murdering CEOs now? What did I miss?

Microlandia - The Brutally honest city builder.

I started making this game several years ago, sporadically, abandoning it for month-long periods, but after posting it here a few times in Show NH I got the encouragement I needed to publish it to itch.io, then to Steam.

This month it crossed the $500/month mark by far, but it was a long road to get it to a state where it can actually be an interesting enough game to make money.

https://microlandia.city