/games/ - Games

Every empire in popular sci fi games/franchises are always portrayed as these nationalistic or facistic entity. In a real empire on that kind of a scale, most people in it would be fully atomized. There would be no family structure, internal hierarchy, sense of glory or even identity with whatever faction any member partakes. Everyone in it would be too busy doing their designated roles like little cogs while bureaucratic divisions take charge of promoting the never ending expansion of their faction purely to better their own situation.

do u like any of my juiced up cars
do you hate any of my juiced up cars

Any fans? Anyone still playing? Thoughts on the setting?

Been thinking about how to change the screen ratio in emulation without distorting the pixel shapes. There is a mod for Super Mario World doing this: https://github.com/VitorVilela7/wide-snes
The mod works because the unmodified game already simulates a wider playfield than the screen and the player can move the view left or right with the shoulder buttons, but making the mod still required a ton of tweaks. There is no general method of simply expanding the view port of old games since they usually don't simulate a bigger area than what the player sees in the moment.

It occurred to me that it is not necessary to reverse-engineer game code to rearrange where the HUD appears. In principle an emulator can just modify the screen output based on registering certain pixel patterns. This can also be used to change illustrations on the frame around the playfield based on the level the player is in.

It's also possible to implement achievements with that as long as the game has unambiguous pixel patterns for that, think the score in the HUD reaching X digits or a cutscene playing. There are already achievements modded into old games, see: https://retroachievements.org/ …but these seem to be hard to program. What I'm thinking about could be "programmed" by playing and marking a section of the screen when a particular event is triggered that makes that screen section look like that.

Now this seems like an obvious idea. Does it already exist?

I’ve been coding some more in vscode and learned a few important things about coding player movement for really any 3d game. I then went to test and compare results to both movement shooters like ultrakill, apex and titanfall and with games with generally pretty good movement overall but aren’t as free like mw2022, insurgency sandstorm and the latest version of arma 3

It’s hard and complicated, and should be treated with a lot of care. Generally the players overall speed should never, under any conditions be set to a specific value. What do I mean? It’s simple, just make sure the players net velocity is always open to change and isn’t locked into a set speed under any given moment(unless they’re attacking or preforming an interaction that’s a little tricker to handle) since it gives the player the inertia they need to quickly transition into other forms of movement or interaction they wouldn’t be able to preform if it was locked completely on frame one. Why locking in movement causes this is because of startup frames, if your speed ever gets locked in to a set value then every time you try to preform any other action you have to wait for the startup frame duration to end before you have the speed to preform any other action. For example transitioning rapidly between ADS while sprinting. From what I could gather if the player quickly decelerates but doesn’t lock immediately into their aiming speed they have the momentum to cancel out of that speed and go back into a full sprint without stopping. If there speed and movement were locked frames they would aim but they’d have to wait slightly longer for the end lag of the ADS animation to start and then finish before they can move at a faster speed again. There’s many more interactions that handle way better with a little acceleration like this and it’s part of why it’s important to allow some level of inertia for the players character available at all times, helps make movement feel faster even in games that don’t have necessarily strong movement in comparison to others.

A thread for traditional roguelikes.

Many of these games are free.

Traditional Roguelikes:
DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)
ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery)
TOME (Tales of Maj'Eyal)
CoQ (Caves of Qud)
Cogmind
Brogue
CDDA (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead)
Nethack
Dwarf Fortress (Adventure Mode)
Infra Arcana (HP Lovecraft inspired roguelike)
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I feel like it’s important to recognize how this platform fighter both failed to compete with smash bros, it’s biggest competitor brawlhalla, and managed to go through the same player base loss as Nickelodeon all star brawl.
This game had a lot of problems at launch and still does now. It was never finished at launch, the bugs were obvious and the lack of clear physics seen in smash bros and brawl in the movement made the issue way worse for its accessibility. The game doesn’t have many playable characters and most don’t work at all when played in the same setting as others mechanically or visually.
When you throw that in with the fact that it somehow runs worse than smash, isn’t ported over to the switch and multiple other consoles for the sake of backwards compatibility and accessibility like brawlhalla, had issues with server stability and a disagreeable monetization policy, the game was simultaneously having issues pulling in players, and even more retaining them since plenty just couldn’t play the game at all even if graphically speaking it’s not anything special.

Tragic

I saw gameplay of gta 5 and found myself confused seeing the player fail to drive safely and use their signals. It was then I remembered that the person was playing a gta title. In the time since gta 5 released I graduated high school, got a license, learned to drive, got 2+ years of experience, and am finding a first job, yet the only game released by rockstar was from over half a decade ago, and that’s just the release schedule of one major game company out of like 5-6 others whom we only got one star field game out of…

I’ve been thinking about part 1 again and I’ve felt even more indifferent towards Joel’s death than I did than I was coming into part 2. I can see why his death pissed the living shit off so many players but I can’t see what about him specifically made it seem like it wasn’t something inevitably coming to him by his characters setup.
It’s obvious that his relationships with Tess, Ellie and later on with tommy after reuniting with him made him a significantly better person, the problem, he also spent 2 decades attacking both innocents and criminals, not just attacking, but often attacking completely isolated, to ensure his own survival that caused his loved ones to separate from him to begin with and fucked over an entire faction. It wouldn’t have mattered if Abby was even born plot wise, the amount of damage his character has inflicted onto everything around him even before he met Ellie along with the new damage he brought out with his time with her against the fireflies, and Fedra would’ve had him killed by anyone else, whether far more sadistically or gracefully the result would’ve been the same.
It’s a symptom of how isolated he was for so many years. other characters like Marlene, Abby, Tess, that guy fat Geralt, and David, they had people to fall back on for support and defence against confrontation. Joel didn’t, he only had whatever scraps were available from FEDRA and whatever he could get running around the USA with Tess as his only occasional alternative for support. You can’t survive in the real world behaving like that, you wouldn’t survive even if you didn’t if you had that little support from anyone, definitely not in a world like tlou.
For this I feel like his death was the most tragic but most appropriately done because it highlighted what his character fundamentally was like. An isolated man with little support from those around him who’ve been emotionally pushed away from his past actions. He never got to repair his relationship with Ellie because he never did enough to justify what he did to her fast enough, not to tommy either despite the progress he’s made.
Coming back, it’s also why I’m so happy knowing Ellie didn’t turn out like him in the end( for the most part). She still has a life ahead of here where she can fix things with Dina, she still has the opportunity to not spend god knows how many years isolated and constantly miserable over the family that was taken from her by others, she still has a Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

After playing so many different fps titles made recently along with older ones I’ve come to the conclusion that the fucking giant that is call of duty is unkillable for the same reasons for why WoW hasn’t been annihilated when games like gw2 and oars exist. Outside of having larger player bases the games are mechanically better than the vast majority of their competition.

I hate to say this but it’s correct, I’ve noticed most fps titles that come out have horrible issues relating to the pacing of gameplay and responsiveness. Tactical shooters are a monument to this, crawling around for scraps of ammunition in stalker or leaning every second in a game like r6 or arma simply isn’t fun. I don’t know how they did it but infinity ward and trey arch found through years of play testing and redesigning how to craft a game that has a balance between the free movement and action of a game like half life/doom while having the restrictions and sense of weight you’d find in a game like counter strike or the last of us 2 and it just works, too well. I fucking despise the monetization and managing practices of activision by I’d be lying if I said a game like xdefiant or mw2022 wasn’t legitimately enjoyable for me to play through after waiting for a game that felt like half life 2 or far cry 2. The only games I can think of that have even done anything to bring attention away from the franchise are ADS free shooters like ultra kill or battle it remastered and phantom forces, both games that function more like battlefield alternatives than cod killers. Maybe there will be change maybe…