Codex @ CodexArcanum @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Are you in the czech republic, speaking in Czech, and presumably not using a VPN?

Who would win?

Two human skulls 💀💀

One twirly boi 🚁

Calling it a mod is a disservice, this is a customized GZDoom with a whole new renderer, plus the voxel sprites, plus lots of texture and map work to add reflections, lights, emissive textures, and more. It's really impressive work! Sunlight streams in through skylights, looks slightly hazy, colored lights look great, buttons and screen textures glow. They even made the spectre have predator-style cloaking! There's some cools settings too like being able to 50/50 split the screen with the default renderer so you can make your own "RTX enabled" memes and screenshots.

But yeah it definitely goes a little overboard. Turning off Bloom helps a lot, but I wish you could just turn it down. Even deactivated objects glow super bright, and things that light up when active all blow-out to pure white in the center. The map are way too dark generally though, to make the new lighting more dramatic but it's bad. Also the metablob blood effects are funny and cute (woah, liquid blood that splatters and flows!) but it looks kind of terrible and very silly.

Still there's some great surprises and gorgeous views! Definitely worth a spin!

Incorrect. Hospitals must attend emergency patients, even if uninsured.

They make up the costs by charging everyone else more for everything. They also have to jack up costs to pay for malpractice insurance because doctors get sued frequently for all kind of reasons (valid and not).

One could argue that universal healthcare and fixes to patient rights so that civil lawsuits weren't the only means of redressing a medical wrongdoing would all actually be a lot cheaper for everyone because it properly distributes risks and costs into society as a whole, and reduces long-term and recurrent medical costs. Instead of dumping all that onto "individual responsibility" in such a way that owners of hospitals and insurance companies get rich while everyone else suffers.

It's the data diving that's really ruined the fun of this. You can't hide anything in a game now because for a legion of hackers, exposing every locked or hidden thing in new releases is the game. I think that's why so many indie games that want to have deep hidden content end up making ARGs, so you only have to put hints in the game and the solution is on your website or in a geocache or something. Then the worst the data miners can do is dig up all the clues faster.

I also feel like part of the appeal of "lore over plot" is tied up in this. With YouTube and Twitch, it's likely that more people will consume your game in the form of "lore analysis" videos than will ever play your game.

If your game just tells a straightforward plot, then a 12 hour commented Let's Play is going to eat some amount of people who might otherwise play your 60 hour game. I definitely found Whitelight's 7 hour walk through of Death Stranding a lot more interesting than playing it.

With the lore-heavy games, there's no consensus story to spoil so everyone can make their own 10 hour long interpretation of what Goldmask's finger positioning implies about the elden lord's dining habits. It feeds a whole speculative video ecosystem and encourages people to play the games and "decide for yourself" what it all means.

I'm dying (from eating carcinogens?) from laughter here! Brilliant!

Someone's mind was blown by the first hour of Prey (2017)

I mean, is this story set in the 90s? Where can you order pizza from today that:

1. doesn't have caller ID (oh hey, the same number is calling again for the 12th time tonight)
2. doesn't require payment up front
3. Wouldn't notice that every sequential house on the same street had ordered

And yet the Kex engine still doesn't offer QoL improvements like multiple quick saves, auto saves, and control configuration is very limited, especially for mods/games that offer extra controls like jumping or inventories. No free mouse look or free aim.

Cross multi-player is neat but it was running kind of janky when I tried it. There's also a pretty severe bug that enemies forget what state they were in after you load a save (they default back to idle). I don't think that was an original bug, other ports (and pretty sure this one prior to this update) don't have that bug.

I get that Doom at this point is more community platform than game, but other ports make clearer their intent at either upgrades-and-options (gzdoom) or attempting to stick close to the original (chocolate, eternity). I don't think the Kex port makes clear it's position on this. Controller support, cross-multiplayer, and some graphical options (like the weapon icons) make it seem like a QoL port but then things like no freelook make it seem like it wants to also be traditional.

Edit:

I feel like I've only talked about the engine a few times now. The new episode, Legacy of Rust, is excellent and a worthwhile addition to the core game. New enemies slot in well, new weapons are fun, and mainly the levels are just gorgeous and extremely hard. I muddled through episode 1 on UV but episode 2 stomped my face in right out of the gate. They weren't playing on this one. Lots of nice touches too like brand new inter-mission screens, some new and expanded texture work, and the architecture is just really stunning. Some of meanest archvile placement since Plutonia as well. I really can't recommend the new missions enough, though I might see if they'll run in GZD, haha.

Remember when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize 6 months in? What will they give President Harris? Winter Olympic Gold? The Pulitzer? CMH?

hog cranking intensifies

I sort of consider dipping fries and fries with stuff on them to be two different but related species of meal, pretty much exactly like the difference between chips-and-salsa and nachos. Frychos.

As to preferences, for dipping, spicy ketchup (mix tomato ketchup 1-for-1 with siriacha or other hot sauce); for frychos, fucking everything! Load em up: guacamole, chilli, cheese, onions, peppers, bacon, mushrooms, gravy, salsa, mustard, marshmallows, spinkles, alright alright I'm getting carried away now, you get the idea!

If you check the folders as well, all the .WADs are there for everything (if you want to use them with a different port/engine). Not sure if it detected which games I already owned, but my version is actually Doom + Doom 2 + Final Doom + Master Levels + Sigil + NRFTL + LOR (new campaign). Plus all the featured mods (from the recent console ports) and a regular user-driven mod browser.

It's a pretty overwhelming update to the already decent Kex engine port that's been on consoles for a while. They added a bunch of dvd-extras too like concept art and such. It's not my favorite way to play but it's still a pretty great free update!

I should get to work on my opus, "Dirty Code"

Inside I'll reveal all my secrets like: not writing tests, not documenting anything, putting the whole app into a single python file, object-disoriented relational mapping, obscure SQL tricks, unobscure no-sql tricks, and more!

Well, because Exodus 20:4-6, the Second Commandment, says:

4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Belief It or Not just did an episode about it, too.

What's interesting is both how lax Christians and Jews are about it, and how severe the wording actually is. By some interpretation, any visual depiction of nearly anything is an idol. Certainly a big statue of Jesus or a fresco of God should both qualify, and yet...

My father is quite proud that as he nears retirement, he's scrounged and saved enough to break into the millionaire's club! He also voted Republican for his entire life, and now I probably won't ever be able to retire, so thanks a lot dad! (This is also one of many reasons they aren't ever getting grandkids.)

I think this probably applies...

So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.

In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc...) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).

There are still updates regularly released for it too!

I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.

It might be easy to brush off my complaint as a case of paleo-pedantry, but word choice matters. "Dinosaur" is a word for a specific group of creatures united by shared characteristics and which had their own evolutionary history—it is not a catch-all term for anything reptilian and prehistoric.

We have known about this distinction for a long time, and I bet that your average 10-year old paleo fan would know not confuse the groups.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

It looks like the Extra Fabulous guy, yeah. (Not PBF though, very different style. I guess your link was a joint work?)