swordsmanluke

@swordsmanluke@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there are 861 roguelike deckbuilders on Steam all of a sudden⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.

  Balatro came out two months ago.

  I have 93 hours in it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia is gauging interest for an extension that uses AI to see if any claim is cited on Wikipedia⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  a quick web search uses much less power/resources compared to AI inference

  Do you have a source for that? Not that I’m doubting you, just curious. I read once that the internet infrastructure required to support a cellphone uses about the same amount of electricity as an average US home.

  Thinking about it, I know that LeGoog has yuge data centers to support its search engine. A simple web search is going to hit their massive distributed DB to return answers in subsecond time. Whereas running an LLM (NOT training one, which is admittedly cuckoo bananas energy intensive) would be executed on a single GPU, albeit a hefty one.

  So on one hand you’ll have a query hitting multiple (comparatively) lightweight machines to lookup results - and all the networking gear between. One the other, a beefy single-GPU machine.

  (All of this is from the perspective of handling a single request, of course. I’m not suggesting that Wikipedia would run this service on only one machine.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anybody have favorite Master System games?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No - but it is the game based on the anime that inspired the phaser design! Er, more directly both the phaser and the Zillion game were based on an anime named Zillion.

  The Master System phaser was such a slick design. Perhaps not as iconic as Nintendo’s blaster, but I think it’s much cooler looking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s start a patent troll company that exclusively deals in dark pattern bullshit. Then sue every company that implements any of our terrible patents for as much money as possible. Use the proceeds to bribe lobby congress to pass stronger consumer protection laws.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anybody have favorite Master System games?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Self-replying to add a couple other classics that aren’t already in the thread:

  • Penguin Land: A Mr-Driller-like puzzler where you are trying to carefully bring an egg safely to the end of the level - but it can only fall one block distance without breaking. Also, there are polar bears you can crush with boulders.

  • Zillion: This game has no business being as good as it is. Side scrolling adventure game where you are tasked with rescuing your captured spy-buddies. You have to loot secret codes from the bodies of fallen enemies, use them to unlock laser doors and progress further into the enemy base. It uses exceptionally large and detailed sprites for the time and is a surprisingly “mature” game for the Era. (Not meaning nudity, just that it is more interesting to someone auth the patience to map out a base and write down secret codes)

  Skip the sequel, however. Zillion 2 sucked. a lot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anybody have favorite Master System games?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  True, true… yet still more reliable than LoZ’s “hold the reset button and hope” method of saving the game…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anybody have favorite Master System games?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  GOLVELLIUS

  This game is a blatant… homage to OG Legend of Zelda. But IMHO it does almost everything better.

  The game begins with Link Kelesis entering a cavern where an old woman tells him to take a sword - and some boots because our boy can’t even dress himself.

  After that, you know the drill. Top-down action rpg mode, slaying monsters, leveling up, finding secrets and better equipment.

  Where it improves on the original LoZ is that the Master System was more powerful than the original NES, so the graphics here are brighter and more detailed and the audio is crisper.

  The structure of the world is more linear than LoZ - but that means it’s a lot harder to get lost. Also, as you unlock gear and powers you can backtrack to discover new secrets in old locations.

  The game’s characters vary wildly in tone from angry old ladies berating you for lacking the funds to shop to meandering fairies commenting on snow cones.

  I replay Golvellius every few years on whatever the handheld platform dujour is. …I think it’s about time to give out a spin on the steam deck again.

  Anyway. If you like that classic Zelda vibe, give Golvellius a spin. It’s seriously one of the best games I played on the old Master System.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Spring Sale is now in full swing⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you liked FO3 you’ll like 4.

  It’s a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.

  The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.

  Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.

  As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.

  It’s a good fuckin’ game. It’s just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Spring Sale is now in full swing⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is why I loved thee Demon’s Souls approach - single player game with crowd sourced miniboss AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Steam Spring Sale is now in full swing⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you haven’t played it already - Inscryption - by the same author - is also really good.

  … and I should lay off the emdash for the rest of the night.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨free: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on epic⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And it’s currently $5.00 on steam. You know, if you’re price shopping.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Desperate TikTok lobbying effort backfires on Capitol Hill⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Google AI Watched 30,000 Hours of Video Games—Now It Makes Its Own⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So… unlike Stable Diffusion or LLMs, the point of this research isn’t actually to generate a direct analog to the input, in this case video games. It’s testing to see if a generative model can encode the concepts of an interactive environment.

  Games in general have long been used in AI research because they are models of some aspect of reality. In this case, the researchers want to see if a generative AI can learn to predict the environment just by watching things happen. You know, like real brains do.

  E.g. can we train something that learns the rules of reality just by watching video combined with “input signals”. If so, it opens up whole new methods for training robots to interact with the real world.

  That’s why this is newsworthy beyond just “AI Buzz” cycle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have you started planing this years garden plants yet? You might need these⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t have enough zucchini markers.

  Hmm. How many kilos do you have? It doesn’t really matter how much zucchini you plant - you will need at least three times as many markers as you think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games with *zero* replayability?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well - I played both and I quite enjoyed Heaven’s Vault as well.

  I played HV through twice - once for the story and then a second time to see how far I could alter that story with different choices. My wife even played a third time to try for a really particular set of events.

  The translation game in HV goes much harder than Chants’. After the first playthrough, you get longer and more challenging texts to decipher.

  Also - there’s no backtracking really required. The game is pretty strict about telling you where you can and cannot go and reacting to what you found or didn’t find. You can cut whole plot lines in HV and it’s no problem.

  Which makes it one of the better games for replayablity in my mind.

  It is - for sure - slow paced. Almost meditative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games with *zero* replayability?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh man - I loved WRoEF, but the bathtub segment has ensured I can never play it again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games with *zero* replayability?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ugh - this game!

  I loved it. The mechanics of The Scene is still one of the most amazing bits of storytelling I’ve seen in a video game. I think about it frequently when I’m considering how video games can tell stories in ways that movies or books just can’t.

  The game as a whole is good, but a little uneven IMO. But I’d put that scene up there with Braid for the sheer impact of storytelling-via-videogame-mechanics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games with *zero* replayability?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you don’t already know… the “corrupt” text in the terminals is where a lot of the semi-secret story clues are - especially in the beginning. If you want to know how to read it, lemme know and I’ll tell you what you need. Otherwise, no spoilers.

  That said, the puzzles in the game are pretty consistent throughout, so if solving 3d spatial arrangements of laser beams isn’t fun for you - it’s not gonna get any better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games with *zero* replayability?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also… A big part of playing Death Loop was figuring out the proper order to kill everybody. … and sadly, there’s only one order that will work. So once you know the order, a big part of the challenge is eliminated.

  It would have been really cool if the game selected a random ordering for your character at new game start and each target’s vulnerable timing changes accordingly. Something similar to how some of Dishonored’s missions could have multiple solutions.

  … but I get why they didn’t. Dishonored had mission variants just switch up some text which is relatively cheap compared to having fully different behaviors and speech and so on that would need to be created just for the tiny set of players that not only finish but replay a game.

  As someone who played through Dishonored 1,2 and all their respective DLCs multiple times, I was sad that Death Loop didn’t have the same level of repayablity baked into the overarching structure, but I still quite enjoyed the game itself. I just finished it once and moved on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be horribly pedantic… Not necessarily!

  It could be Apple users -> Windows users -> Linux users – with larger numbers of Apple -> Windows conversions than Windows -> Linux conversions…

  You know.

  Maybe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I had to design a simple general purpose language for university, so I tried creating "ZoomerScript" with Jetbrains MPS⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Compilers are a specialized topic - and syntax design is fiddly - but it really is no harder than any other sort of program. A lot of the hard theoretical work was done back in the sixties and seventies. You don’t have to start from scratch. These days it’s “only” a matter of implementing the features you want and making sure your syntax doesn’t leave itself open to multiple interpretations. (just as arithmetic, e.g. ‘5 × 4 - 1’ requires some rules to make sure there’s only one correct interpretation, so do language syntaxes need to be unambiguous to parse. )

  Don’t get me wrong - writing a language is a lot of work and it’s super cool that OP has done this! I just want to stress that language development is 100% doable with an undergrad degree. If you understand recursion and how to parse a string you already have all the theory you need to get started.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Season 1 is wildly uneven. Some episodes are a TV-14 Seth McFarland raunchy comedy in space and others are Star Trek, but with real people. If you don’t enjoy the (admittedly purile) sense of humor, The Orville probably isn’t for you. The show never completely abandons that tone even as it explores more classic Trek style writing.

  There are some episodes though, like S01E08 which are played almost totally straight and those are the ones that feel the most like a TNG revival to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any games like Diablo but not Diablo because Diablo?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Funnily enough, Diablo was originally a rogue-ish game inspired by the likes of NetHack. The engine was even (technically) turn based - there’s a pretty cool anecdotes about how they made it real time over the course of a single weekend with some clever hacks.

  I don’t know if it was ever supposed to have permadeath outside of the hardcore difficulty setting though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Street Fighter Vs Mortal Kombat⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Alas, I am a lifelong Soul Calibur stan.

  I got into it back when SC-II was the only game in the arcade I could beat on a single quarter.

  I have played every game in the series - even the awful ones.

  I love the stupid, overwrought storyline.
  I love the wild assortment of weapons the characters bring to bear.
  Though… I’d be okay if Ivy calmed her tits. Just a bit. Lady is one good sneeze away from a traction bed.

  I’m hoping Bamco makes enough $$$ from Tekken to throw a few dollars to their other fighting game franchise… but I kinda doubt it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Glibc Flaw Grants Attackers Root Access on Major Linux Distros⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  glibc is the library that provides basic functionality for C programs. It provides the bottom level implementation for things like opening files, requesting memory, and other OS-level stuff.

  glibc isn’t the only implementation out there. Even on Linux, there are other options, such as muslc.

  It gets updated regularly, as the C standard or operating system needs. So while it has been around for a very long time (by software standards anyway) it’s still an active and evolving piece of software. --and one that underpins many critical functions of our systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Most Ambitious Manga Fighting Game - Jump Ultimate Stars⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … Befriending his opponent and trying to convince them not to kill him in a tense series of cat and mouse conversations?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Willow Protocol⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Once upon a time, I built a proof of concept distributed social network that ran entirely on cell phones.

  I eventually ran into enough complications that I abandoned the project. But the tech did work. I could create posts, add friends, etc. (It just wasn’t reliable in its sync mechanism and I gave up trying to fix it.)

  So… Imagine Lemmy, but a community’s data is stored collaboratively on mobile devices, the load shared by all its subscribers.

  We all walk around with goddamn supercomputers in our pockets. We should put them to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Willow Protocol⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. I thought Iroh was implementing the IPFS protocol.

  Maybe IPFS can be described by one of Willow’s parameterized forms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every goddamn time⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. The fakest thing in that movie is the MacGuffin that can z break RSA encryption.

  …Also maybe a bunch of hackers stealing a ton of govt funds, donating it to greenpeace and the NSA not immediately busting heads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Veteran Videogame Analyst: Subscription growth has flattened [in video games]⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mIss shareware games.