monotremata
@monotremata@kbin.social
- Comment on Subset Games created two amazing games: FTL & Into The Breach 7 months ago:
It's not exactly the same, but Slay the Spire scratched some of the same itch for me. It's got the same meta-structure as FTL, but the fights use a deck-builder format. It's really well done.
One Step From Eden seemed like it should be even better for me, since it borrows the positional strategy stuff from the Mega Man Battle Network games, but I couldn't get into it. Mostly I remember it being just way too fast. I really wanted to like it, but basically didn't.
And yeah, as someone else mentioned, Advance Wars is good, too. The thing that Into the Breach did that Advance Wars didn't, for me, was that Advance Wars basically depended on the AI being a bit crap so that you could overcome an initial disadvantage and work up to victory. Into the Breach gets around that by making the enemy wholly predictable instead, which is arguably more fun. The only other game I know of that worked that way was an Android game called Auro, but I don't think that's playable anymore and I believe the dev has abandoned it. It's a shame, as it was really well made.
Other than that... you could try learning Go (aka igo, baduk, or weiqi). It's a board game with very simple rules, but very deep strategy that emerges from those rules. The main disadvantage is that it's multiplayer only, but there are puzzles, problems, and AIs you can use to turn it into a solo time killer.
- Comment on Anti-doom-and-gloom post 9 months ago:
Yeah, I agree about the textures, but I think you're overestimating the existing LLMs. I think folks are already starting to recognize the style of the current LLMs and finding it off-putting. I think that's only going to increase as people try to apply them in even more places.
- Comment on Anti-doom-and-gloom post 9 months ago:
I kind of disagree about AI, I guess.
I do think it's a valuable tool, but honestly there's not a ton that it does that you couldn't already do with an asset store. And there's a fair amount of risk associated with using AI in the near term. Folks already have a lot of qualms about the ethics of how those AIs were trained. And the first games that come out that rely heavily on AI are likely to be really janky--there are devs who will have tried to entirely replace a role on the team with AI, and the quality will suffer as a result. So I think in the near term there's going to be a pretty severe backlash against AI-generated stuff in games. Folks will say it all feels generic and low-effort; it'll be the new "asset flip."
Long-term, I think it will have a place in the workflow for sure, the same way that store-bought assets do; you'll just need to adapt them to fit in with the feeling you're going for in your game, and hand-revise some things. But near-term, I think there will be a lot of folks who lose interest in a game if they find out there's AI involved. And that goes triple for AI voice acting. A bad human voice actor can at least be interesting, but AI has that uncanny valley quality that really turns people off once they notice it.
- Comment on Anti-doom-and-gloom post 9 months ago:
I think it's going to get even better in the next few years, too. The tools for 3d modeling are poised to improve in a way that makes it dramatically easier to create very high quality graphics. Nanite is one component of this, reducing the need for multiple levels of detail in polygon-based rendering. But 3d reality capture is improving too, both thanks to hardware like depth sensors and software like Gaussian splatting and NeRFs.
Indie games are just going to keep getting better, basically. As will AA games. I think the days of the AAA blockbuster may be numbered.
- Comment on Spotify is creating fake music to save on royalties 9 months ago:
The last time this happened, the deal was that the music was generated by bots, and also listened to by bots. Basically it was a scheme to get money out of Spotify.
But also, folks will use AI to generate anything these days, like these books that suggested that a good way to identify whether mushrooms are poisonous is to taste them.
- Comment on Is "If A then B" equal to "B if and only if A"? 10 months ago:
Honestly what the homework is probably looking for is that it's equivalent to "B or not A." But yeah.
- Comment on Why do we still use stepper motors? 10 months ago:
Doesn't the "missed step detection" on the Prusa printers already achieve a lot of that? I think it monitors the current to the motor and flags any abnormal behavior, without needing extra hardware on the motor.
That's not to knock the value of positional feedback, which is clearly superior, but just to say that I don't think this idea has been entirely neglected.
- Comment on Toshiba exec claims hard drives are 7X cheaper than SSDs and will continually evolve for large datacenters 10 months ago:
It's also used for sending huge amounts of data long distances. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." That's usually attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but wikipedia follows that with "other alleged speakers include..." so take that with a grain of salt. They do note that the first problem in his book on computer networks asks students to calculate the throughput of a Saint Bernard carrying floppy disks.
- Comment on Every sign has a story 11 months ago:
It's less of an appeals process and more of a peel process.
- Comment on 40 years of Turbo Pascal 11 months ago:
Turbo Pascal was the first language in which I had serious classes (I had tutoring in Applesoft Basic earlier on, but that language has a lot of limitations), and I used it for years afterwards. You could write auxiliary functions in Turbo Assembler and link them in; I used that to write a library that allowed access to the 320x200 256-color VGA mode (the built-in graphics only did EGA and were super slow), and other libraries for mouse and joystick control. I tried to control the soundblaster for FM synthesis but it was too complicated for me to figure out how to do anything useful without better access to documentation (this was before the world wide web). The experience also taught me a lot about assembly language basics, function calling conventions for C and Pascal, stack manipulation, and so forth, which gave me a huge head start in my compilers courses at university.
On the whole I would still recommend C over Pascal as an early language--it gives you much better insight into memory layout and so forth, where Pascal kind of obfuscates such things, and C just generally kind of acts like both Pascal and Assembler rolled together. But Turbo Pascal definitely gave me a good foundation.
- Comment on Rebalancing the price to represent the value... 11 months ago:
Oh, I literally misread it as OpenSCAD. Laughing at my stupid brain right now.
- Comment on Rebalancing the price to represent the value... 11 months ago:
I'd say it's more like Premiere vs ffmpeg.
- Comment on Does this compiler exist? 11 months ago:
It really sounds like you're describing Make. Is there something you need it to do that Make can't handle?
- Comment on The art of the sacrificial 'duck' in programming projects 11 months ago:
The only real objection I have to this as a term is that it's too easy to confuse with "rubber ducking": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
- Comment on Introducing Numbat: A programming language with physical units as types 11 months ago:
I do a lot of this stuff with the HP48 Units menu (albeit at this point via an emulator on my phone).
- Comment on A Journey Into Shaders 1 year ago:
Shaders are terrific fun. I highly recommend ShaderToy if you want to experiment with them; it makes the loop between changing the code and seeing the effect very tight. I also recommend the YouTube channel "Art of Code" for good examples, well-explained.
- Comment on New to Fusion3D, trying to change parameters, but getting an artifact. 1 year ago:
The timeline should be at the bottom of the editor window, if you're in the default design workspace. If you started in the mesh editor workspace then "design history" might be turned off, in which case you wouldn't have a timeline. It looks like this:
https://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/ENU/Fusion-Assemble/images/animation/timeline-groups.gif
If some of the icons are highlighted in yellow, those have errors, so, things like broken projection links, or missing objects for some operations. You can usually fix those and patch things up.
- Comment on New to Fusion3D, trying to change parameters, but getting an artifact. 1 year ago:
Did you get any warnings or errors when you changed the parameters? Are any of the elements in your timeline highlighted in yellow?
- Comment on Possible over extrusion, any advice appreciated! 1 year ago:
Could still be temperature if the thermistors on e printers read differently--that is, the same setting doesn't necessarily work out to the same physical temperature on two printers, even if they're the same model, because the thermistors vary. My suspicion would be that you're printing a little hot, and the filament is contracting after it's extruded. On the first few layers it can't shrink much because of all the material in the middle, but on the vase mode layers there's nothing preventing it.
- Comment on Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’ — Amazon is in trouble 1 year ago:
Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it's a bit of an arms race. They don't just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from "review farms" that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don't have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren't easy for manipulate.
- Comment on Can I print PETG onto PLA? 1 year ago:
It also doesn't with with PLA and ABS. Same issue, they won't stick together well.
- Comment on Does anyone know how to create a 3D wireframe? 1 year ago:
And when you say "laser or printer" here, are you referring to a 2d printer, or a 3d printer?
The questions are because, fundamentally, a wireframe image like the one you linked is just a different way of rendering the same file. So if what you want is literally an image like this, then there are tools to do that, which will depend a bit on what operating system you're using. Blender, as mentioned in another comment, is one such option.
If, on the other hand, what you want is a 3d printable structure that resembles a wireframe rendering of the object, that's a more complicated task. The STL file just lists the triangles that make up the surface of the object; in order to make a solid structure that resembles this, you'd need to create a solid (e.g. a cylinder, maybe with balls at the ends) for every edge in the file (3n / 2 edges for n triangles, since every edge in a properly printable ["manifold"] STL is shared by two triangles) and then takes a boolean union of all of them. I don't think a tool to do this exists currently, as it's a rather specialized need, but it wouldn't be too hard to throw together a python script that could take an STL file and generate an OpenSCAD script that you could then render with OpenSCAD to get the STL.
- Comment on I feel like are all stuck in a movie where all the rich people live on some kind of floating island or satellite with everything they need to live well, and all of us have zero chance of going there. 1 year ago:
Good sci fi usually isn't about the future, aliens, etc. It's about the present, but portrayed in a strange way so as to bypass your existing preconceptions about the situation, so you can look at it with fresh eyes.
- Comment on Unable to print TPU 93A 1 year ago:
So, one thing to consider is whether you could have remnants of a previous filament getting stuck in your hotend and carbonizing and causing partial clogs. That depends a bit on what you were running just before running this filament. If this is the issue, a cleaning filament can help. Another possibility is that your nozzle isn't tight against the heatbreak, in which case plastic can accumulate there and cause issues. The only way to fix that is to disassemble the hotend and put it back together correctly--this usually involves tightening the nozzle when it's hot, but check the details for your specific printer.
But yeah, it could also just be bad filament. That's probably the easiest thing to fix, anyway.
- Comment on Host 3D parts? 1 year ago:
Sure. You can always include both as well. Folks who don't have CAD software may not be able to use the STEP files.
- Comment on Host 3D parts? 1 year ago:
Lots of people post STLs because you can feed them directly to the slicer for printing. But it only represents the surface mesh of an object, and only as polygons. A STEP file basically captures how the part is designed in CAD, so it's much better if you need to modify the part. It also gives you the original form of things like curves, where the STL would be quantized into a fixed number of polygons.
- Comment on What is "attention", really? 1 year ago:
Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn't specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.
Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it's an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.
- Comment on What to play after experiencing Chrono Trigger? 1 year ago:
Yeah, at the time it didn't seem so out of line. I guess I just feel like it hasn't held up as well against modern games as something like Chrono Trigger or FFVI.
- Comment on What to play after experiencing Chrono Trigger? 1 year ago:
II is very good, but it does get VERY grindy right at the end.
- Comment on Any electroluminescent filaments for 3D printing? 1 year ago:
It mostly avoids them, but it doesn't necessarily do that on the first layer, and it does a big travel at the end to park the print head. You could probably get something to work if you wrote it with the FullControl Gcode Designer.
