Veyrdite

I also tried hitting enter and had the same problem. Thankyou for the solutions. The other difficult thing to do is delete quotes: You cannot select them like a region of text and then hit backspace. Instead you have to click on their titlebar and then hit backspace, or manually tap backspace through them. There are many things in plain old [bbcode] that we take for granted [/bbcode]. We only realise how good they are when the difficulties of more complex systems arise.

The intro of GD has traditionally been a good mood setter. The music, the pictures. It makes the episodes heavily contrast against the "Hey everybody, today we're playing!" many people use instead. I think that it should keep changing. Different art and music. But always a tone that suggests you have found something... different. This is not a normal dungeon.

Big warning: don't play quake's singleplayer without first checking if the difficulty selection is working! A few years back I found that many of the modern sourceports ignored the /skill cvar and instead always defaulted to the easiest setting. This means: A large chunk of enemies don't appear Almost infinite ammo spread everywhere Weak monsters This made the SP completely boring. I only realised when I came to a part I knew should have several flying enemies making it really hard to continue, but instead it was an empty room. I had chosen the normal difficulty, but I was stuck on the equivalent of an empty world. EDIT: This was 3 years ago. I still have the footage. I had planned to investigate it much further, but never did.

> functionality, operation and dependency That's really vague. A year or so back I was asked to write an essay that had a similar vagueness. It was so open ended it felt like I was being asked to "write about anything related to topic X and make it at least Y pages long", especially since the marking criteria was more concerned with formatting and referencing than actual content. This was the hardest essay I have ever written and I did not feel happy submitting it. @Charlie Vermin: Please chase the person who issued the assignment and ask them for more help understanding it! If they don't understand your question then point out some examples of what it could potentially cover, examples that you think would be "wrong" areas. Perhaps things like "hey half of the stuff on that list really isn't handled that much by the OS" or "are you including the standard c library (libc) as part of the OS (as well as the kernel), or do you mean just the kernel?".

Thankyou Ekket. My apologies.

Now I too shall break the quoting system, for it hath angered my ability to split a quote up into multiple parts. > @Ross: it could be a bit of a warning for me to be more choosy about which games I cover, because the less there is of a hook for me to latch onto, the more it can turn out like this Possibly. If you feel a game does not have as much to talk about then embrace this, review it the way you want it to be viewed. Each game review is unique, some don't want to fit the same mould. > @Ross: As for the dead game aspect, I figure I cover that on DGN, so I didn't want to hammer it as hard on RGD anymore (I almost had a line like that in the episode, but it was just a death march getting all this done. I do have more coming along those lines however. Ah, we're probably talking about two different things: (1) General discussion of DGN and DGs. (2) Chasing the problems and history of one particular dying/zombie'd game. It sounds like you are afraid of talking about item (1) too much. But number (2) is something that has previously formed interesting parts of various dungeon videos. I'll be vague here because you have taken things many different directions before. Sometimes even technical adventures.

I have not received any emails from the forum yet. Are you guys getting them by default? That would indeed be horrible. (EDIT: my email is valid/correct) There still stands the problem of there being no way for forum members to find what topics are active, without having to click into each subforum. This sort of page/feature is important if you spend your time across multiple forums, not just the one.

@BTGBullseye: How do you find out if people have replied to your topics? Indeed the notif setup here is a bit assaulty by default, with virtual popups appearing when you're on the site. The EEVBlog forum system shown above stays out of your way unless you click it. This can be emulated by telling the notifs on the forum to not pop up, so you have to click on the icon on the top-right of the page to get to them.

Agreed. Very interesting to find out about these. I used to play a fan-made mario game (some permutation of 'super mario brothers') for Windows. It was available free download and I even remember contacting the developer by email at one point because all released versions were debug builds (where pressing 'a' would win the game and holding 1+5 would make you fly). Amazing fun, and it has either been killed or lost to my modern keyword knowledge. A copy of that game would be like a forbidden scroll. An artwork forgotten, a book that has been banned (hey, my country still does this!).

Disclaimer: harsh criticism. This episode feels lower quality compared to the usual Game Dungeons: Very long audio sections of "reaction" style commentary whilst playing Castlevania clones. Lack of digging into games that Ross can no longer play. Where are the attempts to harass the devs with emails? What are their personal points of view? Can old versions still be found? In a nutshell: too much game and play, not enough digging into the paradoxial timeline of music releases. Game Dungeon has traditionally presented what Ross thinks a game means and does, with less emphasis on normal gameplay than other video producers. There's still of lot of that here, but the density is noticeably lower.

Over the past few days of using this forum I've had a really hard time following activity in topics I want to participate in. Things have felt very inconsistent and strange. I've now worked out what's actually going on: If someone directly quotes me with the forum quote feature, I get told. Otherwise I have to manually opt-in to getting told about replies. This might seem OK from a intentionalist persepective, but in practice it has a massive hole: This forum currently assumes that, by default, I don't care about people's replies to a topic I posted in or even started myself. What? This seems so alien and strange. I'm having to manually navigate to topics to check up on them, and then manually enable notifications on each. I didn't have a clue anyone had replies to my Civilisation Problems topic until I decided to manually visit there today. I'll compare this to the system used on a forum I spend a lot of time on, the EEVBlog forums. Here's the frontpage of the forum: I've mentioned the two links at the top ("Show unread..." and "Show new...") in my previous posts. My main focus is on the "Show new replies to your posts" feature. It's like the notifications feature on this forum, but it's not something I have to opt-in to. Instead I can visit it any time I want and it will list replies people have made to topics I have participated in (or started): EDIT: To be clear, I've found the settings I can change (as an individual user) to fix this: The disabled-by-default "notify me" per-topic feature on this forum feels really amiss. Has this default been chosen for a reason? Can this default be changed?

This brings up the interesting topic of how the government and private systems will interact. We're seeing a bit of everything at the moment. In some places governments are working to try and reduce the data-collecting powers of big companies. In most they are utilising these companies to help them. Competition between governments and companies is where this is going to get interesting. Where companies outright challenge the sovereignty of countries. Subversion of power through new indirect methods. There are so many directions this can go, and I expect we're going to see a bit of everything in different countries across the planet.

Based on a *topia described by this ABC article on China: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a-model-citizen-in-a-digital-dictatorship/10200278 Ignoring the human issues and focusing instead on the technical: I can't see any of this working for more than a few years at large scale. Everything I know about how large IT projects are handled tells me that: It's impossible to process a town's worth of data, let alone a whole country Neural networks (and similar) are constantly being shown to be simultaneously impressive and dumb (pretty links at bottom of post). One day we find a way of making them generate more beautiful images, the next we find a few bits of black tape on a stop sign confuse them to hell. Humans can't possibly monitor all of this, limiting the system to trying to follow specific individuals. Management for projects this big is too separated from the technical issues. Backups will fail or not exist where they should. Data will get horribly disorganised. Logic/systems will be discovered to be doing completely stupid and arbitrary things. Arbitrary and stupid decisions will be made by management to try and fix things. Vendors will be brought in. Massive delays, blame gets thrown everywhere. Oracle or IBM will get involved, and then you know things can only go downhill from here. Systems this big are impossible to secure You can't prove every camera/info source to be authentic. Video streams can be faked, for example. A large chunk of the world will be trying break or manipulate your system to their advantage A market will be created for people that can improve your standing within the system using technical exploits. Exceptions will have to be made Politicians, people of power, etc. Keeping this socially acceptable OR a secret will be hard/impossible in the long term. Any thoughts? I'd really like to get the issues ironed out before we hit production. Aside: some fun stuff about neural networks (no maths) including some practical examples of their limitations: http://aiweirdness.com/post/175110257767/the-visual-chatbot#_=_ http://aiweirdness.com/post/178619746932/imaginary-worlds-dreamed-by-biggan#_=_

[...] You can follow whatever content you would like including your own. Apologies, I have explained myself poorly. A global "latest posts" page is the more useful page. Useful for both non-users gauging the community as well as existing members looking for action. SMF (a different forum engine) has a variant of this called "Show unread posts since your last visit". The old Accursed Farms form had a variant called "Active topics". Does this forum engine have a similar feature? Eek. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/security-against-attack.html ^ do you have MySQL's internal encryption support turned on? If not then everything but the handshake is done in the clear. Largest and first issue: this allows third parties to sniff potentially private user data. Forum user passhashes, birthdates, emails, ips, etc, anything entered into the forum DB that you access. It also might put you on the bad side of recent EU legislation regarding information handling. I do not recommend trusting MySQL facing the web. Even if you plug the default security issues it's still a potential DOS target. General suggestion/option: bind mysql to local and use an SSH tunnel to get at it. (Happy to talk in private if you want to continue this elsewhere)

Does this forum have support for a global "latest posts" and a user-specific "replies to topics you have posted in" pages? The previous forum has a variant of the former by the name of 'active topics' that I used to see what was going on in the forums, rather than having to click through all of the subcategories. Also useful for those not in the community (and therefore not logged in) to see what the forums are like.

Thanks ekket, greatly appreciated.

(5) The post edit timer is much too short A few minutes (3?) after posting I can't edit any more. I'm on a remote Greek mountain villageside at the moment, I don't have reliable internet, and now I can't fix my typos

This looks like the place to report problems. (1) Frontpage: Blog feed broken Nothing happens when you click on the RSS icon. Hidden behind the scenes is the message: <img title="RSS feed has not yet been implemented, sorry!" ... Suggestion: make the feed link work, but point it to a static page/feed with the above message so people can see it. (2) Ross' old feed is still "up", so people using feedreaders think Accursed Farms is dead http://feeds.feedburner.com/AccursedFarms ^ it still works, but only lists old content. I assumed Ross was still down for the count due to his recent disruptions. I won't be the only person that follows the web through a feed-reader. Suggested solution: Don't take the feedburner feed down. Instead add one more article/post to it telling people that this feed has been abandoned and where they can go. That keeps everyone in the loop without having to burn too many thatch rooves. (3) Forum: Unergonomic on small laptop screens (1366x768) I can only see about 2-2.5 posts at a time: Scrolling every few sentences makes it inconvenient to read the site. 1366x768 is a very common laptop resolution. Suggestions Remove the spacing between posts (articles) Float the "Posted date" to the right of post content. Float the post actions (multiquote, quote, edit, like, etc) to the right of post content. Reduce signature font size slightly, so sigs look visually distinct. Here's a quick hack together of these ideas using only CSS. I wasn't able to properly float bits to the right due to the HTML layout, so I have temporarily hidden those items instead (imagine them on the right hand side): I'm opinionated about websites: it come to them for their unique content, not their appearance. Appearances are cheap, I can get them elsewhere. You spend most of your time on a forum page caring about: Who is talking What they are saying Only after reading this main content do you then sometimes spend a small amount of your time interacting with secondary information, such as: Post metadata (post date, ip, etc) Post actions (report, quote, multiquote, etc) I don't think these latter items should be displayed as so large or important. They should be easy to access, but not at the cost of making it harder to read and follow the primary information. Just my 2c. I find myself wrangling with site templates perhaps too often (4) Forum: Mr data has lost power On behalf of starfleet: BTG_Bullseye is an important member of the crew, his mobility is paramount for our continued safety and operations. We feel threatened by his loss of animation and encourage all parties to resume the normal running of time.

No experience with farcry, but I have modded other games before, so I can give some hints. You will need to find a way of accessing the game resources. Depending on the game they might already be extracted into folders or hidden inside large archives. Often communities make tools for getting into the latter. Once there you'll need to hunt for images related to the hud. Edit them to be transparent. They could be in one of a variety of formats (TGA, DDS, etc) and will probably have obscure names. Order the images by size and start by looking at the smallest ones. EDIT: Possibly some hints here https://www.moddb.com/mods/infamous-fusion/ . Search the web for 'custom hud farcry 2' and see what files other people have played with.

Yep. This is a heightmap game and the jiggles are transitions from one mesh resolution to another. Given the size of the maps I assume that the heightmaps are only roughly pre-designed (eg 1 pixel = 1 metre or more). The "fine detail" is probably a noise algorithm thrown on top. Why are you looking at the ground anyway? You should be looking at the bloom. Regarding Ross' theory of texture mapping ALA playstation 1 era games: unlikely to be the case here. You can tell because there is no jiggling on any of the other textured 3D objects in the game (trees, people, walls, etc). This game is using perfect texture mapping (not the affine/sim approximations used on the PS1), it's well beyond that era of graphics. Some Playstation 1 games tried to combat this effect by dynamically increasing the polygon count (tesselate) as you got closer to the objects. Hence the jiggles. The other fun PS1 graphics artefact was 3D object vertices going wibbly as they were moved around/animated. Each vertex's position was stored using a low-bitdepth number, so vertices had to move in discrete steps during animations. I've seen this in some early PC games too (FPS weapon model anims?) but I can't remember which. Enjoyed the vid Ross

Insurance fraud, doctor, piano --> possibly one of the animations in HL2/SFM that people made for Guy Noir, private eye?

Some interesting comments over on the lawbreakers Reddit forum: https://old.reddit.com/r/lawbreakers/comments/92oji5/dead_game_news_lawbreakers_ubisoft_amp_streaming/ This brings an interesting twist to the saying. Is the arm chair the correct position to review games and consumer policies? Anyway, you could pretty much slot any perspective (user, developer, reviewer, armchair) into that sentence and it would still hold as showing limitations. I'm not a fan of the fuel analogy either and I suspect this general response will emanate from many devs. Alas I'm disappointed that parasiteartist doesn't explain why he doesn't like this analogy, because there's some good room for fun explanations here. A more accurate version of the car + fuel station story would read similarly but with the car being driven by a team of chimpanzees wearing ties. If it's a small team then you can use logical arguments and get the driver to pull over to get petrol. If it's a big company then it's impossible to convince the other chimps of your worry about game death, because that's a concept that only makes sense when looking consequentially, not intentionally, and you're not wearing enough ties. You're more likely to be thrown out of the car than listened to. Too big to be true. Perhaps the cause of all of this is that parasiteartists feels that Ross is calling on the devs to try and pressure this change. For small projects this works, but for larger ones most devs don't get to wear the ties. I think you can see more of this later on: This brings up a really important point. Who best do you try and motivate to prevent games dying? Legislation would force everyone's hand, but that's hard. Videos can take the end users and some developers. Perhaps an important missing step is trying to find out how making games not die can appear more profitable to non-devs in game companies. Target the management rather than gov, devs or users. What we need is a way of encourage managers to think about archivability and.... no. I don't think is going to work. Not unless I can somehow work it into the same sentence as "open plan offices" or "downsizing". I am the embodiment of defeatism, sticking to trying to convince the public might be a better idea. As a player I'd be happy with... nothing on that list other than chat. And chat does not require a separate server, program or process unless you are doing something really really whacky. Anticheat always gets broken after a game reaches EOL, regardless of whether companies kill the game or not. Putting effort into porting it can delay this problem but not remove it, so it may not be worth doing. Crates: What you can easily do to fix this completely depends on your exact implementation. I've not been involved in any such project so I won't comment further. FWIW I don't play crate games either, so I only have a shallow view of what's out there. Does anyone have any thoughts here? I'd say this is not because of anything technical, it's because of social fashion (microservices!) and social motivations. I think fashions are one of the most dangerous things in the programming industry, not because of any fashion-intrinsic reason, but instead because the recent increase of popularity (~10-20 years) mixed with the general lack of acknowledgement that they are fashions. We learn about the limitations of fashion when it comes to many common areas (clothing, management styles, etc) but find it harder to do so in an industry without as long of a history to look back upon. Let's not mention my government's slow crawl of failing outsourced IT projects, they're too recent for educational comedies to be made about I want to write a website. "Use a framework!". Why? "Because that's how you have to do it!" I want to write a massive game. "Split up the tasks into different servers!". Why? "Because that's how you have to do it! It's too big, you need to scale!" I've had arguments with people where I have realised the other person simply doesn't know things were ever done any other way. There's only the present and the future, not the past. *dons grumpy old man hat* Some more consequential vs intentional. We hope that never happens. It always happens. parasiteartist you've lost me here. This completely conflicts with the rest of your arguments Anyway, some really good points

Bad example, as Glide has had an OpenGL wrapper for years... Ditto for old directX versions, Wine wraps them to OpenGL. I suspect vulkan wrappers for opengl and the likes will also eventually appear. Especially fixed pipeline opengl (I'm not familiar with using the flexible pipeline, but I suspect it might require translating bytecode). What about (non-graphics) hardware and APIs in general? Virtual machines seem to be the going option.

Released yesterday. http://www.accursedfarms.com/the-crew-extra-videos/

Yes you can put multiple active devices inside a single tube, but it gets hard. "Multisection" tubes like the Loewe 3NF exist. I've never dealt with them myself, but I suspect it's hard to keep each device separate because they all share the same vacuum. You can try and put physical dividers in, but unless you completely seal each one off into its own vacuum tube they will interact with each other. The one circuit I've found for the 3NF shows the tube being used in a way where positive feedback from each stage is not a problem, because they all amplify the same signal. Analog computers still use transistors. They're needed for amplifiers, multipliers and inverters (subtractors). Without transistors you can only do memoryless computations, which in the analog computing domain is something akin to adding numbers. If all you can do is add numbers then you are not turing complete, so you would not be able to make anything even resembling even video-game AI, let alone real intelligence. I'll also jump into the definitions debate and be broad with how I use the word 'transistor'. To me anything that can amplify might be called a transistor, I don't think it should be a term limited to silicon devices. Especially since many transistors made today don't use silicon I'd vote both. Perhaps making the vacuum tubes flat -- like vacuum displays used on the front of DVD players and VCRs to show the time: From there you might be able to place 'blockers' between elements, or weave them in clever ways to make fabrics of transistors. The other thing they'd have to get around: self-repair. Tubes have glowy bits that degrade over time. A tube with many filaments will have to be self-repairing or have redundancy to survive. Whilst I'm here, some other cool stuff with pretty pictures. William's Tubes are a form of memory using CRTs and glowing phosphor: Core memory is also lots of sex: Selectron tubes baby!