The studios who do this mostly aren’t looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.
They do exist and in greater numbers and variety than ever before. Play Undertale, Baba is You, BeamNG.drive, FTL, Disco Elysium, Emily is Away, Islanders, NEO Scavenger, Rodina, Whispers of a Machine, Proteus, etc.
Totally random examples, but I could name dozens more. We are spoiled with great games that are pure expressions of their developers’ visions. There are more of them than anyone can realistically ever play.
That’s not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It’s also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.
Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It’s practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that’s invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it’ll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.
Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn’t care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there’s nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.
I’m curious if he was okay before.
I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
I’m probably missing a joke here, but irrecoverably as in they most likely needed another computer to fix it: In this case, create a new startup floppy disk - there was no hard drive, after all.
Have you looked at the source code of a capsule? It’s delightfully simple.
I considered mentioning it, but I’ve been accused of being far older than I am, simply because I know about things from the past, so I skipped it.
Similar idea, but entirely new. I don’t think many people even here know what Gopher is.
Not the project’s fault, given that it came out four years earlier.
What are your favorite sites?
Thank you!
I have to say though, the AI imagery is off-putting as an idea alone, because what else from the video is AI-generated? Text and perhaps even voice as well? I’ve seen this before, entirely artificial videos with absurd mistakes as part of the content or even entirely nonsensical content.
Which videos did you watch?
Is there a Gemini search engine?
I’ve found this one:
gemini://geminispace.info/
Needs a client to access, of course. Basic, but functional. I found a general-purpose forum not too different from reddit or lemmy through it (and they decided to call it a BBS, because the Eternal September hasn’t happened to Gemini yet):
gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/
Is there support for Forms/server side code
To the best of my understanding (and it’s highly limited, since I only just learned about this, so take everything with a grain of salt), what Gemini does is primarily limit what the client can do. No local scripts, highly limited markdown. The server side is not limited. You can write any complex code you want that works behind the scenes - but it still has to deliver static pages (called “capsules”) to the end user. This series of articles explains the basic underlying tech and uses the example of a simple server to illustrate how Gemini works:
And yes, forms are possible, even though there appears to be a somewhat widespread misconception that they are impossible. Please excuse the sketchy-looking IP address instead of a URL, this was the best resource I was able to find on this (and yes, I checked if this page is on Gemini - this appears to be not the case):
http://216.218.220.144/tutorials/sig-tutorials/misc/gemini-forms.gmi
Screenshot if you don’t want to click on the above link: https://i.imgur.com/s2mL3bM.png
Disclaimer: This is two years old and I have not tried to implement it myself. Looks entirely plausible though.
How big is it? Is there like just a few sites or a few hundred?
According to the search engine linked above, there are 2420 domains and 1,854,666 individual pages as of yesterday. This is about comparable to the World Wide Web at the same time 1994, a number that grew to 10,000 by the end of that year; I wouldn’t expect the same explosive growth from Gemini - the field has already been plowed, after all. Gemini Space is small, but not a ghost town.
There’s a new application-layer Internet protocol like (but also very much unlike) http by the name of Gemini. It was first launched in 2019 and until yesterday, flew completely under my radar. It’s primarily meant to be used for uncluttered text-only pages (although any type of file can be distributed), which are created using a deliberately simple and limited markdown language. Unsurprisingly, this results in a plethora of small niche blogs being published through it.
The basic user experience is essentially the same as browsing the web, until you notice just how much it isn’t. You enter URLs (except that they start with gemini://) you read texts and you click on hyperlinks - except that every page looks exactly the same due to the markdown language. There are no pop-ups, no ads, nothing autoplays, nothing wants your consent to exploit your user data. Even images only load when the user clicks on them. It shows just how little is actually needed, how many aspects of the modern web are completely unnecessary and mere pointless distractions.
Gemini pages - and this is a small hurdle that will keep most people away from it - can not be accessed with a normal web browser and instead require a specialized client for viewing (although paradoxically, creating pages often requires a web browser, at least for now). The idea is that both the underlying tech and the browsers are much more straightforward than anything related to http and html. A Gemini client is not effectively an entire operating system of its own that can execute near arbitrary code. It displays formatted text with basic images and videos - that’s it.
Here’s a neat, but slightly outdated introduction that also recommends a few clients and where to find pages to read:
The entire thing feels very early, tiny, experimental and odd, almost like a parallel reality, as if the World Wide Web didn’t exist and someone came up with something like it only now, using today’s hard- and software. If Lemmy is a response to social media in general and reddit in particular, Gemini feels more like a response to the World Wide Web as a whole or like a time machine back to a highly idealized version of the early days of the information system (the primary difference being the lack of horrendous '90s UX design and malware everywhere), including some unfortunate aspects that I had long forgotten about, like how the common method of finding content next to feeds - manually updated indexes instead of search engines - is plagued by dead links; and these dead links, unlike on the normal Internet, cannot be attempted to be resolved using the Wayback Machine or some other cache, at least not yet.
Gemini is equally parts exciting and promising, like a new frontier, but also at times confusing and frustrating. Don’t expect your Gemini client of choice to replace your web browser any time soon (or ever), but it’s still worth trying out, if for the novelty alone.
Flintstones wasn’t originally meant for children, but for adults, that’s why there are cigarette commercials with these characters.
Huh, I guess living in a small town with gas stations that have had the exact same pumps for many decades has its perks.
This is one of those American absurdities that thankfully hasn’t made its way over to Europe yet, at least to my knowledge. I hope I have an electric car by the point they start introducing these here.
I haven’t really kept track of Android sites, since I’m rarely playing native Android games other than The Battle of Polytopia, an accessible, but endlessly replayable Civ-clone. Please send help - I’ve been playing it almost since its release seven years ago and can not stop. The base game is free and each additional tribe is only a small one-time purchase. The more tribes you have purchased, the larger maps are unlocked. A single tribe purchase unlocks multiplayer. There’s also one additional skin for each tribe. Perhaps the best monetization model on mobile to date.
There are few standout titles like these for mobile devices. If you want to seriously play games on your phone or tablet, use an emulator. I’m currently revisiting Vice City in GTA Vice City Stories, a lesser known, but nonetheless high quality spin-off in the series (there’s also one for GTA 3: Liberty City Stories), which runs perfectly in AetherSX2 (although I should switch to NetherSX2, which continues development of this PS2 emulator). If you have a less powerful device, you can play the only slightly inferior PSP versions (worse textures and significantly downgraded lighting, some missing side-missions, but overall the exact same games) in PPSSPP, which has much lower hardware requirements. You can even add a second thumb stick to the PSP versions using this patch:
https://github.com/Freakler/ppsspp-GTARemastered
The PSP version of Chinatown wars is superior to the Android port, having better visuals and more missions, so consider playing this one in PPSSPP as well.
I’ve recommended PSP racing games here:
https://beehaw.org/comment/2784912
And PS2/GC/Wii action games here:
https://beehaw.org/comment/2994175
I would highly recommend using a controller for most of these titles. You can connect almost anything to an Android device, either wirelessly or through USB. Wii or newer, PS3 or newer and Xbox One S or newer work via Bluetooth in every emulator I’ve tried. With wired controllers, you can go as far back as you want. I’m playing PS2 games using an original PS2 controller with a PS2 to USB adapter, which is connected to a USB A to USB C adapter. If portability is of concern, 8bitdo makes very high quality, but nonetheless affordable controllers that you can easily fit into even the smallest pockets. The d-pad on my FC30 Pro is perhaps the single best d-pad I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.
Because it would meant hat the CCP would have to retreat out of this particular part of life and give up a method of control and oppression, which a totalitarian party could never do.