borntyping's recent activity
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Comment on X4: Foundations 7.00 trailer in ~games
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Comment on [SOLVED] What does the unsubscribe button on Outlook or Apple mail do? in ~tech
borntyping Link ParentI somewhat-unreliably recall the List-Unsubscribe header coming a whilte after emails having "unsubscribe" hyperlinks becoming more common due to the EU and US passing laws that required easy...I somewhat-unreliably recall the List-Unsubscribe header coming a whilte after emails having "unsubscribe" hyperlinks becoming more common due to the EU and US passing laws that required easy opt-outs from marketing communications (The EU's "e-privacy Directive" in 2002, and the US' CAN-SPAM Act in 2003).
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Comment on 'The gold rush is over:' Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon devs say that big Game Pass and Epic exclusive deals have dried up for indie devs in ~games
borntyping Link ParentIndie usually means a smaller team without any support from a publisher. I feel like it'd be useful to have a word specifically for games made by just one or two people, there's certainly...Indie usually means a smaller team without any support from a publisher. I feel like it'd be useful to have a word specifically for games made by just one or two people, there's certainly something special about those kind of projects. I've sometimes seen indie used to mean the amount of resources development took - when The Witness came out there was a lot of discussion (including from the developer) on wether it counted as an indie game after it's $6 million budget.
Slime Rancher's 12 person team would generally fit most definitions of "indie", I think. Cuphead, Undertale, Stanley Parable, and The Witness all had similar sized teams.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
borntyping Link ParentI almost wish I'd known this coming in — I spent some of the game worried about the self-recording mechanic coming up and thinking that it'd make some of the clever mechanics get much harder. I...I really like that this game almost completely does away with the more frustrating puzzle mechanics of the original, such as exploding minebots, machine guns or self-recordings.
I almost wish I'd known this coming in — I spent some of the game worried about the self-recording mechanic coming up and thinking that it'd make some of the clever mechanics get much harder. I loved the story of TTP1 more, but as a puzzle game TTP2 is definitely a massive improvment. Both are on my very short list of games I'd recommend without reservation.
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Comment on Do you have any game sub-genres that you have a name for, but aren't big enough to be "official" sub-genres? in ~games
borntyping LinkLogistics Games Games where you both plan a journey and then execute it, with Death Stranding and Snowrunner being the main ones I put in that tiny subgenre. It maybe extends to some of the ____...Logistics Games
Games where you both plan a journey and then execute it, with Death Stranding and Snowrunner being the main ones I put in that tiny subgenre. It maybe extends to some of the ____ simulator type games, like Euro Truck Simulator and Construction Simulator. It's definitely distinct from factory/supply-chain/tycoon games where the focus is more on planning the journey and scheduling repeated routes, since a lot of the fun with these games comes from dealing with mistakes or unexpected things that happen during execution of a plan.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
borntyping LinkI've made a second attempt to play Anno 1800. I got to the end of the short story campaign this time, though I'm struggling to get further as it feels like I'm constantly going back to early-game...I've made a second attempt to play Anno 1800. I got to the end of the short story campaign this time, though I'm struggling to get further as it feels like I'm constantly going back to early-game production lines and having trouble keeping track of all the different production lines and trade routes. I've got through Factorio and some of the harder mods for it, but it feels like I can't use the techniques I had there to modularise things and make higher level production lines work.
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Comment on Some thoughts about Starfield's world in ~games
borntyping LinkI was so excited when Starfield came out. I had some time off so I could dedicate some time to playing it, and I loved Skryim and Fallouts big open worlds with hundreds of hours in each of them. I...I was so excited when Starfield came out. I had some time off so I could dedicate some time to playing it, and I loved Skryim and Fallouts big open worlds with hundreds of hours in each of them. I came in with such strong expectations for it that carried me though the game far longer than I would have played otherwise, I think (~60 hours?) and it was all just so... bland?
There were a couple bits that stuck with me, but they were all tiny bits of creativity around the edges, like the starting perk that let you have parents you could go visit and occasionally encounter in the world. Those were the only characters that stood out to me — I remember being really suprised when I reached the end of a companions questline and had the option to start a romantic relationship and thinking "was that it? I've barely met this character."
I think my criticism, the great criticism in your post, and the other criticism in this thread could all easily be leveled at Bethseda's previous games, but I feel that there's something that makes them stand out when directed at Starfield. It might be the lack of any real exploration and finding the unexpected, or just that none of the many parts of Starfield seem to work together. I always described Skyrim as greater than the sum of it's parts, where the total experince was fun because of how it all fit together even if many of the systems on thier own weren't very good. By the time I decided to put down Starfield for good, the main emotion I'd got out of playing it was nostalgia for Skyrim and Fallout.
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Comment on Game recommendations, specifically (round 2) in ~games
borntyping Link ParentFor driving games, maybe try Snowrunner or Expeditions: A MudRunner Game? They're more focused on trucks than cars, but it's purely about exploring and transporting things without any timers or...For driving games, maybe try Snowrunner or Expeditions: A MudRunner Game? They're more focused on trucks than cars, but it's purely about exploring and transporting things without any timers or competition.
For an even more out there suggestion: I really liked just driving around in Grand Theft Auto V, even though I liked the rest of the game a lot less. It's got a huge map that looks great, feels great to drive around in, and a lot of different vehicles. If you can put up with... everything else, it might fit.
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Comment on Is an ethical social media platform even possible? in ~tech
borntyping LinkI don't think it's perfect, but Mastodon remains the social network I'm most happy with. At a small scale private groups or well-moderated ones like tildes are excellent, but for any kind of...I don't think it's perfect, but Mastodon remains the social network I'm most happy with. At a small scale private groups or well-moderated ones like tildes are excellent, but for any kind of broadly public network I don't think anything that's entirely controlled by a single company will ever be safe or long-lasting, and in the shorter term it's very unlikely to be ethical as its very hard to profit off a social network without heavy advertising and/or selling user's data.
The common failure case of large social networks seems to be that they end up in control of a management team (or worse, a single guy) that doesn't have the network's best interests in mind. With Mastodon I can and have picked a server based on how much I trust the people running it, and it's far more than I trust Zuckerberg, Musk, or Dorsey. But even if I don't trust them as much, I'm not beholden to their choices forever — I can move to another server, or run my own, there's effectively no way to permanently ban someone from the Mastodon network (which is not to say I don't think moderation is good and important).
Community or privately funded services also seem like a far safer way to run the infrastructure of a social network, with lots of smaller costs spread across the ecosystem instead of one hyperfunded tech corporation that'll take the entire thing out with it when it fails to make a profit, or sell it off to someone that has entirely different priorities for it.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
borntyping LinkHelldivers 2: Great fun in co-op, more fun than I expected solo and in random matchmaking. I think this might fill the hole Destiny 2 left when I got tired of how Bungie was evolving it. Had some...Helldivers 2: Great fun in co-op, more fun than I expected solo and in random matchmaking. I think this might fill the hole Destiny 2 left when I got tired of how Bungie was evolving it. Had some performance issues (more heat and noise from my tower than stutter), but some combination of limiting FPS via the Nvidia control panel and fiddling with render resolution setting seemed to fix that.
X4: Foundations: Abandoned a long running save—the furthest I've got in the game so far!—as I'd got myelf into an unwinnable war against one of the pirate factions. Started again with a different scenario and followed some different plotlines, and finding it quite nice to go back to the small scale of the early game where flying around and doing tiny jobs matters.
No Man's Sky: Returned for the expedition, instead ended up with a new save and didn't touch the expedition at all. It's so easy for my time to disappear while playing this game. Found out save editors can very easily add items you missed from previous expeditions and now I have far less fear of missing out on them, and don't feel the need to open some muted streams in the background for twich drops.
Enshrouded: I think the best implementation of the survial+base building genre I've come across, but I'm starting to realise that genre doesn't do that much for me. They quickly start to feel like a job, even more so in something like Enshrouded where building something very pretty is possible but limited by material collecting. I'll give it another try once it leaves early access, I think, though it's absolutely in a fully playable state right now.
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Comment on Does anyone else have posting anxiety? in ~tech
borntyping LinkYep, that's me. I generally get past it a bit once I can see a community is welcoming, responds in good faith, avoids heated arguments, and so on (hi Tildes!). In private communities where I know...Yep, that's me.
I generally get past it a bit once I can see a community is welcoming, responds in good faith, avoids heated arguments, and so on (hi Tildes!). In private communities where I know a lot of people I end up very chatty. I think for me it's very much overthinking how people might perceive my comments and the potential stress of dealing with negative responses.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
borntyping LinkI've been generating some pretty diagrams of production chains from the game X4: Foundations. It's a reasonably niche game so guides and documentation for it have been hard to find, outputs can...I've been generating some pretty diagrams of production chains from the game X4: Foundations. It's a reasonably niche game so guides and documentation for it have been hard to find, outputs can have multiple ways to be produced by different factions, and there's not nessacrily a clear progression of interim stages between raw resources and finished products.
Generating diagrams in d2, graphviz and plotly was mostly pretty simple; but working out sensible data structures and ways to select what I wanted was a lot more effort. D2 was an early experiment I abandoned for graphviz later on, but I'm tempted to make another attempt at using it now I've managed to simplify the graphs so that they don't have a huge amount of crossing lines.
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Comment on Any other developers also strongly resistant to adding secondary data stores to their software? in ~comp
borntyping LinkI've always found myself very hestiant to add a second data store to anything based on my past experience in operations teams. Understanding a single database well enough to run it well at any...I've always found myself very hestiant to add a second data store to anything based on my past experience in operations teams. Understanding a single database well enough to run it well at any kind of scale isn't easy, and the end result of adding more and more types of datastore to a platform seems to be that you end up with several that no-one in the company understands well enough to fix serious issues with. It also seems to end up making the barrier to adding new types of datastore much lower, and soon there are 5+ different types and very few of them are doing anything that actually benifits from the new datastore.
For a few years, I've joked that my answer to the question "what database should I use?" is always PostgreSQL, on the basis that a) it's good enough for most uses, and b) anyone that really has a use case that needs something more specific probably doesn't need to ask for help picking a database.
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Comment on How would you teach math differently to young kids if budget was not a concern? in ~talk
borntyping Link ParentI felt much the same way in college - I found the modules on mechanical maths which mapped clearly to something in the real world very easy, while at the same time I found the more abstract math...I felt much the same way in college - I found the modules on mechanical maths which mapped clearly to something in the real world very easy, while at the same time I found the more abstract math modules I couldn't relate to anything so frustrating that I ended up dropping the entire course. A year or two after that I remember a friend explaining some of the concepts that frustrated me so much by explaining how you'd actually use them for a problem and I got it immediately.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
borntyping LinkMade a third attempt in as many years to get into X4, and this time managed to reach a point where my economy starts to snowball and I have a fleet large enough to get into some big fights. It's...Made a third attempt in as many years to get into X4, and this time managed to reach a point where my economy starts to snowball and I have a fleet large enough to get into some big fights. It's fun, though certainly not a fast game and save-scumming has saved me from a lot of otherwise very painful mistakes.
Returned to Astroneer, which is quite good fun with a friend. It's got a nice loop for a crafting/survival game where you can very much set your own pace.
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Comment on Easy mode is actually for adults in ~games
borntyping Link ParentSame for me – I've tried plenty of times but I don't have the reflexes to play games that require a lot of speed or coordination. The frustration that lead to my original comment is how often...Same for me – I've tried plenty of times but I don't have the reflexes to play games that require a lot of speed or coordination. The frustration that lead to my original comment is how often people recommend Dark Souls or Elden Ring to me because I like fantasy stuff, but I just don't have the reflexes to play them well or the patience to play something that requires a lot of repetitive practice.
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Comment on Easy mode is actually for adults in ~games
borntyping LinkI feel like there's a couple of things the discourse on game difficulty misses almost every single time, though the article does touch on the latter: Hard can be very different from player to...I feel like there's a couple of things the discourse on game difficulty misses almost every single time, though the article does touch on the latter:
- Hard can be very different from player to player.
- Not all players are looking to get the same thing out of their experiences.
It can be frustrating to see how often a certain type of person will insist that the difficulty of a game is not only essential, but that it's the point, as if that difficulty is actually the same for all players or that all players should want to experience that challenge. "Difficulty" also seems to often get conflated with time and effort rather than skill or understanding.
Even worse is the conflation of accessibility and difficulty, and the idea that adding difficulty or accesibility options might make a game worse by "cheapening" the experience... by not having all players have the same experience? An entirely terrible goal to aim for in the first place when one of the many wonders of games is how many different stories can result from different people playing the same game. The modding scene around many games is a great example of how in other contexts selecting the experience you want from a game is seen in a far more positive light.
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Comment on Reducing the friction of publishing online? in ~tech
borntyping LinkI've been using GitHub Pages for a good 10 years now. It's needed very little work, has been very stable, and is completely free. Jekyll isn't anything amazing, but it's reliable and pretty well...I've been using GitHub Pages for a good 10 years now. It's needed very little work, has been very stable, and is completely free.
Jekyll isn't anything amazing, but it's reliable and pretty well documented at this point, and it's very easy to find nice themes for. I think now GitHub Pages prefers the use of GitHub Actions it's pretty easy to swap it out for any other static site generator, but really I quite liked the original limitations since they kept me from spending more time fiddling with the site than writing.
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Comment on Is fandom.com actually getting worse? in ~tech
borntyping Link ParentFor almost anything I play for more than a few days and that has a decent wiki out there, I end up adding a search keyword for that wiki so I can skip google entirely (e.g. typing melvor dragon...What really gets me is that these utterly useless pages, devoid of any content whatsoever, somehow still rank well in search.
For almost anything I play for more than a few days and that has a decent wiki out there, I end up adding a search keyword for that wiki so I can skip google entirely (e.g. typing
melvor dragon clawwill go straight to Melvor's wiki, and for a clear enough result Mediawiki instances will go straight to the right page instead of a search results page). It's astounding how badly search engines rank this kind of content and pages with no useful information at all will top the results because the name is in the title.I try and contribute small amounts to wikis where I can, though I gave up on Fandom long ago. I don't know if it's still true, but at the time a lot of the content was templated even for blocks like the one you quoted, so it wasn't very practical to improve individual pages. (In fairness to fandom.com, this could well have been a specific wiki, it's long enough ago that I don't remember accurately.)
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Comment on Is fandom.com actually getting worse? in ~tech
borntyping LinkI've been using the Indie Wiki Buddy extension for a while and can't imagine browsing without it. It'll redirect to less ad-heavy/more-readable mirrors, but more importantly it'll redirect to...I've been using the Indie Wiki Buddy extension for a while and can't imagine browsing without it. It'll redirect to less ad-heavy/more-readable mirrors, but more importantly it'll redirect to offical and community run wikis when they exist. I've found those tend to have far more reliable and useful information than fandom.com wikis, tend to be a lot nicer to read as they often seem to have better handling of structured information and nicer styling, and most importantly, often have a much closer connection to the game's developers and communities.
I think your perception that fandom.com is getting worse is certainly a common opinion. I think wiki.gg has been part of a pushback against fandom.com wikis from game developers and their communities — Terraria's announcement about moving their wiki to wiki.gg and how fandom.com insisted on keeping the old unoffical one up is a good example.
And I'm perfectly happy with the idea of using an ad-blocker on fandom.com even though I avoid it — they bear a lot of responsibility for the current dire state of games wikis and have been a bad actor in the space for a long time. The "Controversies" section on their wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)#Controversies) has a good overview, though personally I mostly remember how often they'd start competing wikis or not let existing ones move away, relying on SEO to drive people towards their wiki even when the quality was far lower.
On a more abstract level, I'd go as far as to blame them for some of the worse wiki writing habits that have become very common now, such as creating one-line stub pages for every single item in a game (because it has better SEO → drives more traffic → more ads), even though that's almost always a terrible way to present information that would be better displayed as a list or table.
I've put a lot of time into both over the years. The major differences are that X4 is a completely solo game, with a partially randomised universe created for each save game, and that it's generally a more management oriented game. ED's ships are far more detailed and there's a big focus on the UI all being "in-universe", whereas X4 has simpler graphics (though still pretty!) and a lot of focus on some very bare management UIs used to focus on the economic parts of the game.
You'll still fly your own ship around, but depending on how you play you might sit in a passenger seat with an NPC pilot flies the ship, or sit in an office in a station, all while managing entire fleets of ships. Most games still start you in a tiny one-person equivalent of the Sidewinder, though the largest ships in the game are carriers and builders that dwarf even the bigger ED ships.
Trading focuses more on setting up your own production lines and repeating routes than finding good opportunities or loops. Ship customisation has a similar level of complexity, mostly focused around factions providing different versions of components that optimise for different stats. Combat is a little simpler when you're flying a ship directly and fighting one-on-one, but wars and other mass combats can have hundreds of ships involved. Like ED, the parts of the game you focus on are very self-directed.
Singleplayer also means support for mods, or multiple saves with different starts and different choices leading to a different universe. Factions quite actively fight each other, and even before any player choices are made two saves might end up with zones being owned by different factions.