Stormsinger wrote on Jan 7, 2018, 16:16:
I don't believe I've ever seen the word "impertinent" used in a legal document before.

The primary definition in normal English is the one you're aware of, but lawyers use the second definition which means 'not pertinant'. Similar to irrelevant.

I think Star Citizen is probably doomed, and they deserve to fail for how horribly they have strung along their backers. That said, I'm glad that the lawsuit appears to be frivolous because that means there is a slightly better chance than 'none' that the game will be completed.

That's silly. HTC's doing OK. I think they just don't care. They're a software company, the hardware thing isn't that important to them. Not their core business. If they have 10 competetive VR headsets prices drop, more people get VR, and Steam sells more games... that they take a 30% cut of. Every. Single. Sale.

They can afford to be philanthropic, because gains in VR are gains for Valve.

DotA 2 also groups players by a combination of skill and behavior. Never get reported, never abandon... up to 10k score, and your teammates will be 9k or higher also. Rage, dc, feed... and you'll be placed with other malcontents of similar ilk (when you're not working your way out of the crappy Low Priority Queue). It works pretty well... I almost never have players who rage easily in my games. Everyone has a bad day (and games like DotA can bring out the worst in anyone) but it's impressive the difference in the quantity of angry players I've had to deal with since they implemented behavior matching about 18 months ago.

This is not going to change much except for the early adopters of small indie games... it might be a few weeks before the cards appear. Otherwise this is a non-issue for the vast majority of games and gamers.

It's transparency and timeliness... many other developers don't say they'll be late until days before the due date.

Most of those complaining about the change are developers (and only some of the developers). Most of those lauding it are consumers. I think Valve made the right call.

I also think that Valve probably could have found a way of fixing it that didn't just nuke every non-Steam key, but they almost always opt for the 'doesn't require manual review' choice whenever possible. It's the only way to run their multi-billion dollar company with under 500 employees.

Love it.

There are two main modes... a 'normal' mode teased months ago that lets you view the game on a virtual screen, surrounded by a huge minimap, representations of the characters, and stat graphs. You can walk around this room... move close to the screen so it fills your vision, or go over to the statues to examine the cosmetics that pro is wearing.

Then there is the map itself, which you can teleport to and around to view the action directly. You feel like a giant floating about fifty feet above a miniature forest. The fog could be a bit less restrictive... this mode is a little claustrophobic. But it's very fun to float over teamfights and watch the spells fly, or shrink yourself down to the level of the creeps and view the chaos up close.

It's not a better experience than normal, it's just different. If you have a large room you can literally walk around the map (at it's smallest, I think it's about 5m by 5m, with fog at just over 2m out). But when viewing the map you have none of the context... you can't view scores, character inventory, etc. So it's better for watching a reply where you know what's going to happen... you just want to see it from a cooler angle (eg, The Play).

The world is only as interesting as your algorithm. 5 billion unique planets doesn't mean 5 billion unique ways the planet can look or behave.

I'm frequently frustrated when people are ignorant of the limitations or procedural systems. You'll see repeat creatures, repeat aliens, repeat spaceships, repeat resources, repeated flora, etc... you just won't see the same mix of colors and animals on a different planet.

But a blue florp under a purple sky isn't that different from a cyan florp under a azure sky. Seing a green florp eat purple leaves is not a unique experience from seeing a yellow florp eat blue grass.

I'm sure we'll see a lot of great screenshots, and like Minecraft I'm sure there will be the occasionally enexpected terrain generation that will rightfully take our breath away. But... I expect thousands to be let down when every planet is not a unique work of art.

Every snowflake is unique. That doesn't mean you won't bore people with an art gallery filled with snowflakes.

And yes, I'm ranting at nobody. Get off my lawn.

I'm glad you're still here Blue, and that the site is still paying your bills. :-)

The site is also so overloaded it's not working (at least yesterday when I checked).

The coupons are also anemic.

All in all, Ticketmaster is likely giggling, and the lawyers on both sides are buying a new house.

I was wishing it was Ruby, personally. Mock away.

That said, I've been playing this for about two weeks (got pre-release access funding their Kickstarter thingy). It's well done. The interface is well documented, there are good example scripts. The community is helpful and frequently online. Bugs are squashed quickly. They have quality-of-life code published (like deployment scripts, JSDoc files for syntax highlighting in your IDE of choice, and Github integration).

The complexity you deal with as a coder also rises cleanly with the size of your base. New objects are added that you need to code to or handle. You have the ability to manually do stuff early on with some interactive command line code that you later handle automatically with your code.

And code efficiency and quality matter, because you are charged for the runtime of your code.

All in all, I'm happy with my purchase.

I like the 2D simplicity of the gameplay. 3D is nice, but in many ways 2D gameplay allows your art to be more interesting because the foreground and background don't have to have gameplay hooks; they can be there for looks. It's also easier to control in 2D, and thus easier to find the fun.

Whether it will be a good game, I dunno, but I liked what I saw.

I pre-ordered mine, but not on day one; I won't get my Vive until May. I feel like I'm a child again, waiting impatiently for Christmas.

Appears, on the surface, to be done better than the Frankfurt compendium. Also a lot of welcome bugfixes.

They are accusing a customer of corporate espionage? For talking to another (former) customer? On twitter?

I don't give a crap what they talked about, or how much they hate some of their customers, that's not the definition of corporate espionage.

The idea of Star Citizen is nice. Their execution is poor. I'd say they are selling snake oil, but they're actually selling pretty label designs because the bottle factory isn't finished yet. Maybe it will be... eventually.

I'm not holding my breath.

You can get away with being coarse when you are also kind. The benevolent dictator effect.

If he had said 'Sorry, I fucked that up. We think a lot of people will still enjoy Binge On, and we aren't changing how the plan works, but we shouldn't have tried to fuck you over with the wording,' then everyone would have stayed liking him.

What's for him to write? They haven't released (or even admitted working on) a story based product in ages. I don't think writing the backstory for DotA characters is a full time job, and whatever else he pitched in with (nobody has a fixed role there) probably wasn't his cup of tea.

jacobvandy wrote on Jan 2, 2016, 15:24:
So they basically endorse this practice, which ruins the ability to offer a special, limited-time discount, because you end up losing a lot of the extra dollars per sale you were getting from people who had bought it the day or the week before.

Bullshit. Take a look at this article, and pay special attention to the graph of Steam Revenue halfway down (the third one).

Notice how the revenue (not sales count, but REVENUE) in the month before a sale is shit, and shoots way up during the sale. That means that the number of units sold before the sale are minimal compared to the number sold during the sale. Now this is one small indie game, and not every game has such low revenue between sales, but there are many examples of similar behavior. Steam sales are huge revenue earners for most games, and the few people who bought the game just before the sale (and the even smaller percentage who played less than 2 hours and want to go through the hassle to get a refund) are insignificant.

This effect has nothing to do with deep discounts as far as money goes.

Are some developers stupid, and making bad decisions because they are afraid of this effect even if it's not rational? Sure. Nobody ever accused CliffyB of rationality. He's always been a hothead.

Edit: typo

I've been looking forward to this for a while. I'm not certain it'll be good, but I'm interested to see how Jonathan will translate his indie game dev skills to a new medium. It is always interesting to find out what unique characteristics a developer will become known for. You can never tell until game two.