They’ll let it rot, and then they’ll give it to one of their private prisons or holding facilities to feed to their prisoners and save money under the guise of “eliminating waste.”

Reminds me of an old favorite CollegeHumor video comedy skit series - “A Message From Your Favorite CEO” featuring the Tumblr CEO…

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There was a ban on selling machine guns to civilians that was passed in 1986.

The original Terminator film came out in 1984. So now? Yes, but then?

Probably accurate.

Flying on the balloon was used to mask some loading times, but that was waaaaay longer than transitions from space into the world in Astro Bot.

It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :

1. Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
2. replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
3. Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…

…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.

Looks like it’s a behind the scenes image from the recent film starring Margaret Qualey and Demi Moore - The Substance.

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Wanted to better illustrate my point about asset modernization, here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

This is a 7.45MB animated GIF embedded among several others on the page for Helldivers 2 store page on Steam :

Here’s that same animation converted into an animated WEBP around 800KB… (I did an AVIF at 215KB with default settings from some random online conversion tool, but apparently Lemmy won’t allow those to be embedded / shown directly) :

It is literally ~10% the size, looks nearly identical (could make 1:1 with less compression for just a few KB more), loads faster, and will play back in everything except e-machines from the late 1990s.

Additionally, modern formats support things like wider color gamut - which means you can create HDR assets.

It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.

My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.

When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.

…But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.

I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIF / WEBP and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries. They could even have fall-back compatibility when they detect an ancient device that can’t decode them for some reason.

Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅

Just need to check again later. I had this same error at first.

you’ll only see water bead up when you hit certain temps.

Leidenfrost effect FTW

Basically If you FIRST heat up your stainless steel cookware to the point that when you drip some water on it, it “beads up” instead of immediately boiling away, your cookware becomes temporarily non-stick. Just don’t want to go a lot hotter than that, or you’ll do things like burn butter (unless using Ghee butter or something with a higher “smoke point”)

Former game studio guy who got out and into general software dev and doubled his pay back in like 2012 and haven’t looked back…

This is correct… that plus a couple other things :

1. Western game studios have ZERO qualms burning through people because they believe an endless fresh crop of 20-somethings can be brought in to burn out by forcing 96-hr work weeks for garbage pay

2. Even many of the “once-great-studios” got rid of / severely reduced the bonuses / profit-sharing you used to get when a game was successful and just lay people off or close studios right after the games ship (even when they’re “successful…”) which means if you ever want to be a home owner, or have time to set aside for a family, or just not be terrified you’re going to be financially ruined… you’re kinda screwed.

So what this means you’ve got a bunch of people who largely have ZERO experience on each project, and are in survival mode, learning from mistakes that otherwise experienced devs would help avoid as they grew, usually making sequels to popular games that are worse than their previous entries - at least as far as tech goes (see Far Cry series where they show the tech used in FC2 vs newer entries), and when it’s done, they are laid off or have their studio shut down and then have to struggle amongst a now even more competitive job market to find another position somewhere else… or they bounce… like I did.

The only outliers (besides tiny indie devs hoping to make a hit) among the major game companies are based outside the U.S. along with only a handful of studios in the U.S. (whose games I guarantee you love) and - surprise surprise - when you look at their teams… they’re a bunch of guys in their 50s and up who’ve been making games since the 90s and aren’t being let go after each project ships or being asked to stay at the office and work over the weekend until Sunday at 3am for the entire 4th quarter of the year.

I really want to switch my main desktop to Linux, but use it for remote work too, so I have MS Teams… is there a way to reliably virtualize it?