How To (res)Train Your Dragon

Did anyone ever bring it up, or were there just awkward silences whenever they introduced themselves?

2d art. I just meant not live action.

Sure, why not? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, right? So we can just use the logic of magic any time we imagine a sufficiently advanced technology.

Brilliant.

Oh my Gods, they were Rome-mates!

Could be worse. My sister picked one that ended up being the username of a popular drawn porn artist over a decade later.

Every few years I think “this is true photorealism; we can’t go further”. And every few years they introduce some new technology that upheaves everything and requires a new generation of graphic engines and tech to properly show off.

Though maybe it’s just my eyesight getting worse, but I think the first Star Wars: Battlefront reboot was close enough to reality that they could have stopped there. That or the FOX Engine - the tech demos from before Konami killed it would show a real video side-by-side with a render and they were nearly indistinguishable. (Edit: might have been this one?)

Skin and facial animations are what’s really holding us back. Forget yet another lighting revolution, focus on the basics!

Ah, Malazan, the series that filters out most of its potential audience with the driest and most incoherent first book I can remember reading.

For anyone who bounced off it, know that it gets so much better after that. It’s like asking Tolkien readers to start with the Silmarillion - I just skip book one entirely on rereads.

Though given how later on he tried to weave all his books together into a single shared universe, there’s probably a bunch of arguments out there about which order to read them in.

We already know a bit about Valve’s internal culture due to leaks and interviews, and it’s dysfunctional but in a completely different way from almost every other company.

Thanks to having a small headcount plus more money than God, Valve has zero (internal) pressure to release, and has embraced a culture of freedom where developers can work on whatever they want. This has led to tons of Valve projects getting 80% finished before being abandoned once they reach the final stages of development and are no longer fun to work on. Every release they’ve managed since Steam took off has been due to a few major players with the charisma to swing others to join their pet projects and stay for the long haul.

In a rarity for the field, I’m not aware of any toxicity issues in Valve’s workplace or a single complaint about Gabe himself. Those who’ve quit have nearly always said it’s because their passion project got canned due to it being so hard to get anything past the finish line. Other than that, employees seem to love working there (the massive paycheck probably helps too).

Gabe seems to be held in high regard, even though the internal structure he’s cultivated is such a mess. And I still prefer this clusterfuck of inefficiency to literally any other AAA developer.

Well there’s my D&D character names sorted.

Kraken Express responded quickly. Days later, on April 30, the studio pushed out a “housekeeping” update addressing SSD and CPU usage, connectivity issues, missing building blocks, and various bugs.

The results were dramatic: pre-patch, RocksDB was generating roughly 90,000 - 130,000 writes per second, while post-patch testing during sailing (one of the heavier write scenarios) showed an average of just 20 – 30 writes per second, with peaks never exceeding 60 writes/sec.

Am I crazy for thinking 20-60 writes per second is still way too high? I know it’s small enough to no longer matter performance-wise, but wouldn’t it make way more sense to increase the database cache size further and batch write the changes to disk every few seconds? That’s still well within the margin where players wouldn’t notice the lost data in the event of a crash, while also making it so the game’s not queuing disk IO operations nearly every other frame.

Given the reason she revolted in the first place, it makes sense she’d do anything to avoid falling into Roman custody.

Genuine question, has there ever been a conservative party that lasted more than a few generations without becoming corrupt and self-serving? It makes sense given conservativism is at its core a desire to preserve traditional power dynamics, but even ones in cultures with a heavy focus on honor and civic duty seem to fall into the same destructive spiral.

He’s not dancing, he’s stumbling in circles due to the massive concussion.

Wouldn’t that be the one where a dog was dreaming about howling atop an overturned car and a bunch of newspapers pulled it because they thought the dog was having sex with the car?

Edit:

The character designs would be interesting.

Taft as a mass of corpulent flesh grafted to a living claw-footed bathtub. A tag team against Teddy Roosevelt as an agile melee strongman and FDR backing him up in a Gatling-equipped wheelchair. Andrew Jackson as just some guy with a hickory cane, but with a line all the way out the door of people wanting to punch him in the face.

The official forums and main Discord are fine - the original community still hangs out there and remains chill and friendly. It’s just the wider community (Reddit, 4chan, etc) that spawned after Sseeth’s video that’s a problem.

For example, some guy on 4chan made a lovely little mod called R*peSector where you can capture enemy officers and story characters and… well, yeah. When the subreddit mods tried to ban discussion of it, the community went nuts and was like 90% in favor of a mod that adds explicit sexual assault as a feature to a freaking spaceship combat game, one where character interaction is a perfunctory feature that makes up like 1% of the experience.

Seeing the new community rally around that kind of thing destroyed my interest in the game, even if by all accounts the dev and official communities are horrified by its existence.