The Official Status Thread
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What I don't want is my character being trapped in a prison while I'm forced to listen to the same dialog I've heard on every previous playthrough without any way of skipping ahead.
This.
Any game which lets me skip the cutscenes does cutscenes better than Half-Life 2.That question makes so little sense I don't even know how to answer it.
Also this.
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You only want story that you can ignore?
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You also can't skip that dumb sequence where you have to play catch with the dumb robot I hate.
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You only want story that the developers added a way for you to skip?
Ben L, do you know a single person IN THE WORLD who thinks cutscenes should be unskippable?
Do you think cutscenes should be unskippable?
Be honest here.
Look, Half-Life 2 is a great game. Nobody's going to deny that. But it makes some bad choices, and the way it did cutscenes was one of them, and that's why it's never been repeated by anybody else. Accept the truth.
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Ohhhh, I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, it's pretty stupid.
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That dumb teleporter cutscene is basically the reason I don't replay Half-Life 2 anymore.
3 minutes keeps you from 10 hours of content. Check: 12-yo with ADHD.
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Call me what you want, unskippable cutscenes still suck ass. They sucked ass in 2004 and they suck ass now.
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Status: Running the program took 660ms, or 0.04% of the total execution time with all my optimizations. Computing optimizations took 3.31s, or 0.2% of total execution time.
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What I don't want is my character being trapped in a prison while I'm forced to listen to the same dialog I've heard on every previous playthrough without any way of skipping ahead.
We still don't appear to be at the point where it is possible to give free rein to people while telling story. Just too many variables I expect, and our ability to create even limited AI is not yet there; game designers are left having to script stuff, and those tools suck. You can't fool me there. Their screenshots in their release notes — things to advertise the capabilities of their software — make me think “gee guys, you're soon going to be catching up to the point where you're just 30 years behind where programming languages are…”
So expect there to be many problems with getting story-telling in games right for a long time to come. The tools to do it right are really not there yet I believe.
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Status: A full minute was spent on this line:
Yay for checking if an array has more than 0 elements three times in a row. Great job, really fast compiler.
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Status: Been sick most of last week, now home alone on a saturday night bored as shit and stircrazy.
Blauhdsayjhusayghdygdygsayg
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Status: Threw my back out today while laying subfloor. I hate being old.
Also, wondering why the painkillers I took managed to make my back feel better, but made my carpal tunnel throb like a tooth ache.
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Status: (read: mini-WTF)
<hidden=nobody better comment on the red circle/arrow OR ELSE>
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Status: I discovered something about myself this morning. I am OK with my kids being growing up to being straight, gay, trans-whatever, successful business owners or starving artists or anything in between. As long as they are happy and healthy. I even bought our oldest son dolls when he asked for them because I think most gender identity roles are bullshit.
But I woke up this morning and my oldest son was watching My Little Pony and I was not OK with that...
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That's like letting them play Dwarf Fortress or use crack cocaine.
Not even once.
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Also, Logjam.
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That goes without saying.
Status: Putting pants on to go to work. I fucking hate crunch season.
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Status: Welcome back, @Onyx.
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Status: Apparently I have been shadowbanned on Reddit. Have no idea why.
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On Reddit?
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Why not?
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May that place then rot in hell.
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Has anyone checked their StackOverflow accounts for collateral damage? I haven't yet but I quit SA because it always told me to go away until I had enough rep to use it.
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Mine still seems to live.
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Status: Remember when the Activity page in Steam worked?
Me neither; it's been too long.
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Has anyone checked their StackOverflow accounts for collateral damage?
Jeff sold SO to Joel Spolsky. I don't think he has anything to do with it now.
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That's like letting them play Dwarf Fortress
I am not ok with My Little Pony.
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Is Spolsky still reasonably sane? Are there any other people writing about the reality of software engineering process in an authoritative sounding way that lends to bring forwarded to management with a "here is what you can do to improve the situation" note attached? Because coding horror isn't useful for that anymore, and Joel doesn't write anymore.
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Is Spolsky still reasonably sane?
As sane as anyone can be who masterminds a project like Wasabi.
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They are mostly trying to figure out a sustainable business model for SO, before the funding runs out. I just don't think they are succeeding.
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Is Spolsky still reasonably sane?
Has he ever been? I remember him as that crazy guy who ranted about exceptions.
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Good point. Let me restate the question. Where does one go these days for articles to forward to the boss to prove that we're doing something wrong and/or that he should treat the devs better
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Where does one go these days for articles to forward to the boss to prove that we're doing something wrong and/or that he should treat the devs better
The Daily WTF?
Seriously though, I don't know any people with blogs who could act as role models. I'd say Raymond Chen, but he doesn't do much on management and processes.
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Good point. Let me restate the question. Where does one go these days for articles to forward to the boss to prove that we're doing something wrong and/or that he should treat the devs better
Take any sort of Behavioural Psychology study on the topic of Operant Conditioning and which of the four methods presented therein are the most effective.
Spoiler: It's Positive Reinforcement.
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Status: Defining a type system for a garbage collected virtual machine that runs on top of BIT.
So far I have a type forest, with
type
,garbage
, andstack
being single-element trees anduser
being the parent of all user-defined types. Each type has fields, which can be an integer of a certain byte width, a 1-word pointer to a type, or a 1-word count followed by that many of either integers or pointers. Types can only have a repeated field as their last member and types with a repeated field cannot be parents of other types.Objects have a two-word header with the first word being a pointer to a
type
and the second word being the size of the object after the header in bytes. Objects may be up to two words larger than the call to the allocator requested.type
has a single field namedmethods
that is a repeated 1-word integer giving a location in the goto table for each method start.garbage
has no fields and is used to mark memory that can be reclaimed.stack
has two fields:parent
(a pointer to astack
that defines where to go when the stack is popped), andcontents
(a repeated pointer to auser
used for register saving or whatever).user
has a single field:refs
, a 1-word integer used for a reference count. Objects start with 0refs
when they are allocated (some systems might start with 1, but that makes determining if an object is unreferenced take multiple bit checks). Ifrefs
underflows, the object's pointer fields' reference counters are decremented, and the type is changed togarbage
. If the object directly before and/or directly after the object being deleted is alsogarbage
, they are merged.The same deletion algorithm is used when a function returns, except that the
parent
field of thestack
is kept as the new stack pointer.Allocation starts at the first byte of memory (not the zeroth as pointers to 0 are reserved for null pointers) and steps forward through the heap until it finds either a
garbage
object that is large enough or it hits an object with a null type. If it is agarbage
object and the size is less than two words longer than the requested size, the object's type is changed and the entire size is used. If thegarbage
object is two words or more above the size requested, the two words directly after the new object are turned into a garbage object holding the remaining size.
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But how do you positively reinforce bosses that won't engage in behavior you want to positively reinforce?
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Status: for a couple of days now this is apparently a thing that happens:
It only happens when mouse-wheel scrolling past one of @Polygeekery's posts. The width is variable but the height is always the same as the entire post. Can't seem to catch it on the object inspector, but it is reproducible on the the two computers I have with Chrome on them. It does show the whole post after a variable amount of time (milliseconds to a few seconds).
It's new and unusual anyway...
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That used to happen when there was a spoilered gif within the loaded posts. Haven't seen it otherwise.
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It's on every single post of his and no others (that I've seen anyway). I did have a poke in the raw for a few posts just in case it was something like that.
It's even weirder now that I've started to have a look at it. Not only do I not see anything changing in the inspector I can't see the posts even flickering when the inspector is open.
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They refused to accept any bug report against their game without a screenshot. Even if the bug report was, "completely black screen when X". So the guys I worked with just made completely black screens at the correct resolution in a drawing program when they got push-back from the jerks at Bungie.
I may have mentioned this here (or back on CS) but I once tested a POS application that, among other things, produced a zero-byte file instead of an invoice. I logged a bug report with "Zero byte file name 'abc123.doc' produced instead of invoice" and they asked me to attach the zero byte file before they'd investigate.
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Has anyone checked their StackOverflow accounts for collateral damage?
Nothing noticeable, but then again I might still have a meta.d account too. (I really didn't use m.d much in the first place, and I probably still smell like a satisfied customer over there. )
Jeff sold SO to Joel Spolsky. I don't think he has anything to do with it now.
While yes, Jeff sold out of SO, he is still a ♦ moderator. Best not antagonise him further there, though given his activity level (almost none) it's unlikely to be a venue that he'd use unless extremely riled. Keep the fight in the playground.
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for a couple of days now this is apparently a thing that happens:
Blame it on jet wash.
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They are mostly trying to figure out a sustainable business model for SO
- Create a community of experts
- Allow them to exchange their knowledge for compensation
- Draw the compensation from users looking for answers
- Abuse your page rank to become the first-listed page for any given answer
- Break Google's rules, and present different content to Google rather than end users, so that answers are indexed, but hidden behind a paywall when a human visits
- Offer sex changes, apparently.
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Re: the cutscene discussion that happened a few "pages" up, but fucked if I'm going to infiscroll up to find it...
Some of the best cut-scene handling I ever saw was Dead Space 3. The ones that were just yakkity yak yak you could skip. It'd then Save Point you so that when you died, you didn't have to go through the cut scene again.
But the REAL genius is... there's some cut scenes (that are also loading screens) that are 100% fully playable and full of action. Plot is happening, but it gives the player something to do at the same time. It's so well ingrained with the action that you don't even notice there's a cutscene or a loading screen happening!
There's one scene that uses action, and clever camera angels, so that you don't even notice that not only has it loaded a new level, it's loaded an entirely new world!
Too bad the game was mired by shitty, shitty EA management decisions around multi-player and microtransactions. =(
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@Lorne_Kates said:
clever camera angels