Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 12

A reliable sign of a wartime society, or one that still remembers wartime, is a fully-stocked pantry.

In this context, "fully-stocked" doesn't mean a decent selection of spices and jams.

It means things like a 50kg bag of potatoes or a month's worth of bread. Basically cheap staple foods in large quantities. That's what actual real-life survivalism looks like, as opposed to cosplay.

Sure, a rifle under the floorboards can be useful, too, but the anti-starvation measures are essential.

I once had a mouse, it lasted 15 years or so and was super comfortable. It was no longer being sold, which is why I bought another, which in turn was pretty bad, and is now beginning to fail. That previous mouse is apparently in retail again, so it's my first choice, but...

...apparently it has a cult status now and the amount of sales BS surrounding it is frankly offputting. Plus, they've added some "gaming" stuff I don't need.

Not the first time I'm buying something *despite* the marketing.

@glassbottommeg For my current pet project I picked something similar to what you can see in the videos in this profile: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueTurtle
The main reason is it's a pet project and I wanted to be able to ask someone to draw a decent amount of art on a super-tight budget, so it was important for each picture to be doable in a short timespan.

This profile is meant for my gamedev stuff, but I just can't ignore how important it is in the grand scheme of things that recent polls are showing our left-wing candidate for the mayor of Warsaw in the second place, pushing the dreaded PiS into third and out of the runoff (which may or may not happen, but I have a strong hope that it will).

As much as I don't mind nudity as such, and I'm not particularly offended by porn, either, a lot of these games feel disturbing, because they seem to revolve around various form of abuse. Just reading the blurbs sometimes makes me think this isn't just inappropriate IRL, it's outright illegal.

Just browsed my discovery queue on Steam, and at one point there were two games in a row that looked pretty much the same. Both were "card battlers" with 2D side view cartoon graphics. The style was similar enough that you could exchange some art between the two.

The one obvious difference was that only one of these games features female characters being violated by dildo-shaped tentacle monsters.

I guess that's one way to secure a USP.

Nothing like re-approaching an old task with a clear head.
When I did this dungeon crawler homage the first time, I took the "precise" approach to perspective. It's only now that I've realized old dungeon crawlers were faking it so that they could generate the scene using a lot of uniform scaling. This cuts the amount of required artwork by about an order of magnitude, and the result is sufficiently plausible to be enjoyable.

@mmby @losttourist @Lazarou Germany's two biggest cities (Berlin and Hamburg) happen to be on the right (i.e. north-eastern) side of Elbe, and I know some people in both cities who are all right in terms of geopolitical priorities, hence the assessment. But I'm not here to argue about it, since I know next to nothing about Germany beside having some acquaintances here and there.

@losttourist @Lazarou No one west of Elbe ever treats what we say about Russia seriously. February 2022 was a big "see, we've told you" moment for us and still no one listened.

Contrary to intuition, Polish left is traditionally the most anti-Russian faction in Poland, and let me tell you , knocking some sense into some heads on the Western left in the last two years was a capital-S Struggle.

@Nifflas People who buy licences are laypeople. They might listen to their engineers, but then they might not. Conversely, people who appreciate stability, maintenance and QoL features are already locked into the platform.

That's why Unreal still doesn't have decent documentation, BTW. Unity had developed theirs while they were still the young challenger trying to attract non-professionals, and "easy to learn" was their key selling point.

I had a pet project in the works, but then Unity did that pricing thing that made me lose my trust in them. But! then I got a job where I had to learn Unreal, so now I'm finally restarting the pet project in it. Admittedly bit of an overkill, since it's a dungeon crawler.

This is the humblest of possible beginnings: testing the custom editor functionality for a future 2D level editor.

@Nifflas The mistake in that reasoning is we're not looking for a finite sequence. The further away from 0 you are, the longer the sequence you need gets. For an infinite chain, it tends to get infinitely long.

@Nifflas That's a Markov chain, and no, Markov chains aren't always guaranteed to go back to the initial state, depending on their parameters. There's math for that, but I'd have to do a refresher to calculate the actual chance. It's not very high, though, because it gets exponentially worse the further away from 0 you are (and you will get away quickly).

One of my pettiest pet peeves is how the collective subconscious of the modern pop culture has decided to ignore the fact that tardigrades are about 1mm long, i.e. not even visible without aid (you wouldn't tell them from a speck of dust).

@Nifflas The sheer amount of things I need to catch up with makes this an easy choice. The inability to make anything that lasts would be frustrating, though.

If you're doing one of those silly lists of "top dishes from X", maybe consider not including dishes that literally say in their names that they're from somewhere else.

@petealexharris Interesting times.

@ToreJuloe @Nifflas @mcc You could then open tiny, tiny gateways for your guests and tell everyone you can turn water into spirits. Hmmm, I think I've heard that one before...

@alina A bit tangential, but reminds me of an old Polish novel for teenagers called "A way to trick Alcibiades".

The plot goes like this: teenagers in a school don't want to study so they develop ways to distract teachers. A history teacher nicknamed Alcibiades is particularly tough but you can distract him with historical trivia.

The plot twist is he's using this method to trick them into learning history by learning trivia to "distract" him. They end up winning a prize for excellence.

Someone should do a large public awareness campaign that says

EVERYTHING ALWAYS GETS DELAYED