Java was too slow to support our feature set so we rewrote it in HTML



  • @blakeyrat said:

    instead of moving towards another platform.

    Which would be?

    Minecraft vs Terraria? Bitch please!



  • @skotl said:

    Mod Connor (what a twattish name) is Irish.

    Oh man, I wish I had invested time looking up this developer's genealogy so I wouldn't look like a fool!

    @skotl said:

    Ireland is not in Britain...

    And yet Northern Ireland is in the UK.

    TRWTF is that you think I care about the difference between a bunch of tea-sipping pussies and potato-chucking layabouts. Also, none of this changes the fact that the British still pronounce it "beeeeeta".



  • @eViLegion said:

    You do understand that you're the guys who pronounce English incorrectly though, right?

    No.

    @eViLegion said:

    And if we're talking about Anglicised greek words, clearly this remains true.

    Even if the original word was a lot closer to how we pronounce it?



  • @derari said:

    Minecraft vs Terraria? Bitch please!

    Seriously?

    Minecraft and Terraria are accessible and fun. Dwarf Fortress is inscrutable and not fun even when/if you figure it out. I have better things to do with my time than play a "game" that takes 3 years to learn and isn't fun anyway. For example, playing good games.


  • sekret PM club

    @blakeyrat said:

    @derari said:
    Minecraft vs Terraria? Bitch please!
    Seriously?

    Minecraft and Terraria are accessible and fun. Dwarf Fortress is inscrutable and not fun even when/if you figure it out. I have better things to do with my time than play a "game" that takes 3 years to learn and isn't fun anyway. For example, playing good games.

    Now, Dorf Fort I can have fun with, just because I enjoy occasionally seeing how long I can make a fort survive through insanity, war, and famine. I don't play it often, but when the mood hits me I play it for a few weeks at a time.

    That being said, there are a few mechanics that I've just avoided using. I've tested the new-ish minecart mechanics but laying out track would probably need graph paper, I don't bother with any sort of traffic designations on walkways, and I never let my armies train naturally since it takes too farking long.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:
    It's a shame that Minecraft is such fun.

    Terraria is a better game, made in less time, in a better language/environment.

    Minecraft has also spent the last 2 solid years doing nothing but ripping-off ideas from Terraria.

    Terraria's a really fun game, but it's only 2D. You can't make something like the Iron Trench in Terraria.



  • @FrostCat said:

    You can't make something like the Iron Trench in Terraria.

    What a fun game. I want to play "hover around a featureless void".

    What am I looking at and why do I care?



  • @FrostCat said:

    You can't make something like the Iron Trench in Terraria.

    Oh joy, a nearly-two-hour Minecraft video. I think you just found the cure for whatever the opposite of boredom is.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @derari said:
    Minecraft vs Terraria? Bitch please!

    Seriously?

    Minecraft and Terraria are accessible and fun. Dwarf Fortress is inscrutable and not fun even when/if you figure it out. I have better things to do with my time than play a "game" that takes 3 years to learn and isn't fun anyway. For example, playing good games.

    Pussy

     



  •  RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!



  • @drurowin said:

    RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!

    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @drurowin said:

    RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!

    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..

    or Mimecraft.  How is being a mime exciting?

     



  • @drurowin said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @drurowin said:

    RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!

    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..

    or Mimecraft.  How is being a mime exciting?

    I think it's M-I-N-E craft, although that still doesn't explain why you'd want to play a game where you get the black lung or you end up trapped in a cave-in with 25 of your fellow West Virginians while a doughy, flop-sweating spokesperson for the mining company assures Wolf Blitzer that your corpses will be recovered with the utmost urgency.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..

    That would actually be more explainable, it sounds like a horror game if you take the name as a directive (flee the enemies).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    @FrostCat said:
    You can't make something like the Iron Trench in Terraria.

    What a fun game. I want to play "hover around a featureless void".

    What am I looking at and why do I care?

    Heh. Yeah, that's a ridiculously long video. Here's the setup: it's common, when doing a tutorial video (which this is) to do it in creative mode, where you can fly and have unlimited use of all the blocks. Someone really building this probably wouldn't do it that way, but would use a regular world.

    What this is, is a massive abuse of game mechanics to avoid having to mine for iron. Under certain circumstances, NPC villages will spawn a mob called an iron golem. If you kill it, you can get about 5 iron ingots from it--but they're pretty tough. So people figured out how to create a Potemkin village designed to produce golems. Because they don't spawn often, the next evolution of the design was to stack four villages next to and over each other, combined with a trap that nearly kills the golems, with a mechanism at the end that finishes the job and hands you the iron.

    Then someone figured out an interesting quirk of the rules for how the game decides what's a village, that allows you to create villages that are one square wide...instead of being a sphere of radius 32. With that in hand, the psycopath who invented the Iron Trench figured out how to stack 32 villages all next to each other in a roughly 32-block cube. This increases iron ore production by a factor of 10.

    The video is so long because he spends 10-20 minutes talking about how it works, then the next hour or so actually building it.

    I don't know how many people actually built one of these--it strikes me as overkill. A four-village farm is a lot more reasonable, (for some values of the word) although if you are doing it strictly in Survival (non-cheat) mode it takes a long time. I have one I'm building that's about 65% done, and it's taken me probably a couple dozen hours, because I've done it entirely without cheating--every block mined, smelted, dug, or chopped. The structure is ~70 blocks high, 30 blocks deep, and about 100 blocks wide.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @FrostCat said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    @FrostCat said:
    You can't make something like the Iron Trench in Terraria.

    What a fun game. I want to play "hover around a featureless void".

    What am I looking at and why do I care?

    Heh. Yeah, that's a ridiculously long video. Here's the setup: it's common, when doing a tutorial video (which this is) to do it in creative mode, where you can fly and have unlimited use of all the blocks. Someone really building this probably wouldn't do it that way, but would use a regular world.

    Forgot to say--again, the reason you'd do this is because iron ore is not all that common, and once you build a golem farm, you have an infinite supply of iron.

    Other common, but much less complex things, are automated chicken farms, that collect chicken eggs, automatically hatch 'em, wait for the chickens to grow, kill them, and harvest and cook the meat and feathers. This gives you an unlimited supply of food and one of the three ingredients for arrows.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Heh. Yeah, that's a ridiculously long video. Here's the setup: it's common, when doing a tutorial video (which this is) to do it in creative mode, where you can fly and have unlimited use of all the blocks. Someone really building this probably wouldn't do it that way, but would use a regular world.

    What this is, is a massive abuse of game mechanics to avoid having to mine for iron. Under certain circumstances, NPC villages will spawn a mob called an iron golem. If you kill it, you can get about 5 iron ingots from it--but they're pretty tough. So people figured out how to create a Potemkin village designed to produce golems. Because they don't spawn often, the next evolution of the design was to stack four villages next to and over each other, combined with a trap that nearly kills the golems, with a mechanism at the end that finishes the job and hands you the iron.

    Then someone figured out an interesting quirk of the rules for how the game decides what's a village, that allows you to create villages that are one square wide...instead of being a sphere of radius 32. With that in hand, the psycopath who invented the Iron Trench figured out how to stack 32 villages all next to each other in a roughly 32-block cube. This increases iron ore production by a factor of 10.

    The video is so long because he spends 10-20 minutes talking about how it works, then the next hour or so actually building it.

    I don't know how many people actually built one of these--it strikes me as overkill. A four-village farm is a lot more reasonable, (for some values of the word) although if you are doing it strictly in Survival (non-cheat) mode it takes a long time. I have one I'm building that's about 65% done, and it's taken me probably a couple dozen hours, because I've done it entirely without cheating--every block mined, smelted, dug, or chopped. The structure is ~70 blocks high, 30 blocks deep, and about 100 blocks wide.

    Hmm.. interesting. However, isn't this whole thing sort of cheating, by exploiting weird loopholes in the game engine? And isn't that the kind of thing they will just randomly change with a patch?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @drurowin said:

    RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!

    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..

    I thought it was Runes Cape. Presumably there's a guy wearing a mantle with embroidered norse symbols.

     



  • @FrostCat said:

    I have one I'm building that's about 65% done, and it's taken me probably a couple dozen hours, because I've done it entirely without cheating--every block mined, smelted, dug, or chopped. The structure is ~70 blocks high, 30 blocks deep, and about 100 blocks wide.

    I feel much better about the time I've spent in MechWarrior Online now.

    While you were doing that bullshit, I was tooling around in a Stalker.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Hmm.. interesting. However, isn't this whole thing sort of cheating, by exploiting weird loopholes in the game engine? And isn't that the kind of thing they will just randomly change with a patch?

    It's OK, because most people who have java don't apply patches.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Hmm.. interesting. However, isn't this whole thing sort of cheating, by exploiting weird loopholes in the game engine? And isn't that the kind of thing they will just randomly change with a patch?

    It's OK, because most people who have java don't apply patches.

    True, although I think Minecraft requires you to patch to connect to a server (assuming the server is patched) and the server might be patched.



  • @lushr said:

    (OpenGL isn't known for being a clean interface)
    More like OpenGL is known for having a ugly interface, since it is implemented in C, and not C++ there are no classes, no overloading etc. so the functions are all like glFrobThePixels3f.

    The design of the interface is fine, you can hide it behind a true object oriented class framework without much difficulty. The rendering pipeline/engine/whateveryouwanttocallit is essentially a giant state machine; the software engineering of openGL is rather solid, if ugly.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Hmm.. interesting. However, isn't this whole thing sort of cheating, by exploiting weird loopholes in the game engine? And isn't that the kind of thing they will just randomly change with a patch?

    The most obvious ways to eliminate this kind of behavior would also eliminate all kinds of other things you can do. The minecraft rules for what constitutes a village is, somewhat simplified, one or more houses and one (two?) or more villagers. Where it gets hinky is that a "house" has a definition that's open to being gamed: it's a door for which the five squares in front of it and the five squares behind have a different number of those squares occluded from sunlight. Therefore the minimum house is a door with a block on the ground one square behind it. A common technique is to create an apartment complex--one big building with a crapload of doors. This causes a large number of villagers to spawn, as long as there's at least two to begin with. A village is basically a sphere of radius at least thirty, that encloses all the doors the villagers recognize as belonging to housing. (I'm simplifying some.) A regular golem farm, then, is four buildings designed a particular way so that each one makes a different village, and placed far enough apart that they don't collapse to one village. By contrast, the iron trench is definitely abusing the village rules to allow 1-block-wide villages next to each other.

    Regular golem farms have been around at least a year, probably longer, and there's been a number of updates to the game (something like 7 or 8 releases, not counting beta builds) that if they really wanted to they most likely would have done it by now. I mean, all you'd have to do is increase the radius or make it so you can't have two villages on top of each other, and that would significantly complicate matters (albeit the last change, by itself, would allow some rather amusing alternative designs, by offsetting the villages so they don't stack, and essentially adding ramps to funnel the golems. Come to think of it, that very idea provides an easy way to double the iron output by putting 8 villages in two crossed planes instead of 4 in a single plane.



  • @esoterik said:

    @lushr said:
    (OpenGL isn't known for being a clean interface)
    More like OpenGL is known for having a ugly interface, since it is implemented in C, and not C++ there are no classes, no overloading etc. so the functions are all like glFrobThePixels3f.

    The design of the interface is fine, you can hide it behind a true object oriented class framework without much difficulty. The rendering pipeline/engine/whateveryouwanttocallit is essentially a giant state machine; the software engineering of openGL is rather solid, if ugly.

    I always feel sorry for game developers, because they get stuck using the worst fucking tools. C++ is one of the most abysmal anythings built my humans, but C's too low-level and nothing else is going to be fast enough, so C++ it is.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    @FrostCat said:
    I have one I'm building that's about 65% done, and it's taken me probably a couple dozen hours, because I've done it entirely without cheating--every block mined, smelted, dug, or chopped. The structure is ~70 blocks high, 30 blocks deep, and about 100 blocks wide.

    I feel much better about the time I've spent in MechWarrior Online now.

    While you were doing that bullshit, I was tooling around in a Stalker.

    Hey, glad you had a good time. Aren't you the guy who built a submarine in Terraria?

    All I'm doing is building something that's some kind of mix between performance art, a resource generator, and a city. (Some crazy people are building Westeros--in particular, a ridiculously detailed King's Landing--in Minecraft too. It may be crazy but it's not invalid just because it's not your cup of tea.)

    Personally, I'm just making my iron farm mainly for the sake of doing it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @boomzilla said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    Hmm.. interesting. However, isn't this whole thing sort of cheating, by exploiting weird loopholes in the game engine? And isn't that the kind of thing they will just randomly change with a patch?

    It's OK, because most people who have java don't apply patches.

    True, although I think Minecraft requires you to patch to connect to a server (assuming the server is patched) and the server might be patched.

    Yeah, but that's mainly Minecraft patches, not Java ones. If you connect to a server running a particular mod, the odds are you need to be running the same mod on your client. The game (mostly) doesn't care about which version of Java you're using, as long as it's 1.6 or later. People are generally migrating to 1.7 anyway, as it seems to make the game run faster. As has been noted, Notch is somewhat of a hack and the code is inefficient.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Yeah, but that's mainly Minecraft patches, not Java ones.

    Yeah, that's what I was talking about, though. boomzilla was bringing up Java as an example of the kind of software that would be run by people who don't patch, but I was pointing out that they would patch Minecraft, if only to keep playing their favorite mods or servers.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Hey, glad you had a good time. Aren't you the guy who built a submarine in Terraria?

    No, that guy is a dick.

    @FrostCat said:

    All I'm doing is building something that's some kind of mix between performance art, a resource generator, and a city. (Some crazy people are building Westeros--in particular, a ridiculously detailed King's Landing--in Minecraft too. It may be crazy but it's not invalid just because it's not your cup of tea.)

    You're objectively wrong.

    @FrostCat said:

    Personally, I'm just making my iron farm mainly for the sake of doing it.

    If you were making something original, I guess I could probably get behind that. But you're just making something hundreds of people have already done.

    I confounded a buddy of mine while talking about the game Antichamber, me explaining why I didn't "finish" it. At one point there's a puzzle that involves you placing dozens of blocks in lines of very precise length in a constrained place where it's hard to not wall yourself in while placing them. Here's the thing: once I figure out *how* to complete the puzzle, I didn't have any patience for sitting on my ass for 45 minutes to actually place every block in the correct position. He didn't understand my reasoning. It is this: figuring out how to solve a puzzle is fun. Actually solving it is not fun.

    Portal gets this right, because none of the puzzles repeat and once you figure out the strategy for solving the puzzle it (typically) only takes a minute or two to put your strategy into motion. Antichamber gets this very wrong.

    Anyway, point is: once you know how to create the iron golem farmer thing, I wouldn't have any patience to spend 12 hours actually building the thing because it would be boring as shit. But maybe I'm just a mutant.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @FrostCat said:
    Yeah, but that's mainly Minecraft patches, not Java ones.

    Yeah, that's what I was talking about, though. boomzilla was bringing up Java as an example of the kind of software that would be run by people who don't patch, but I was pointing out that they would patch Minecraft, if only to keep playing their favorite mods or servers.

    Oh, yeah, absolutely.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Anyway, point is: once you know how to create the iron golem farmer thing, I wouldn't have any patience to spend 12 hours actually building the thing because it would be boring as shit. But maybe I'm just a mutant.

    I'm with you, except I don't usually have the patience to play games at all. Like, I just hate solving puzzles. Why? Because there are only a handful of basic types of puzzles. They may vary in execution or presentation, but the "hook"--the core thing that defines the puzzle--is always something I've seen about 5000 times before.

    It was fun when I was a kid and the puzzles being presented were something new to me. Now it's like "Oh, it wants me to stack blocks or factor numbers or some other bullshit. Yay." There's no real challenge: I know I can solve any puzzle in any commercially-released vidja game. It's just a matter of whether I want to spend the time and mental energy doing it, and I don't. I also know I can calculate Pi to 10,000 digits by-hand, but why the fuck would I?

    A lot of my friends who play video games don't get this. "Why won't you play more than one round of Multiplayer Party Game du Jour?" Because it's fucking tedious, that's why.

    I do like trivia games because they test my recall and I learn new facts. I also like some old games like Mario 3 (best game ever made, period) because of the feeling of comfort and nostalgia. I've beaten that game 500 times and I can do it with my eyes closed but I like the comforting feel of letting my hands do their thing while reminiscing about playing it as a kid.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I also like some old games like Mario 3 (best game ever made, period)

    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the best game ever made, period. FISTICUFFS!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    I also like some old games like Mario 3 (best game ever made, period)

    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the best game ever made, period. FISTICUFFS!

    The old Sonic games were pretty cool. (Actually, the Genesis was a cool console, but it always felt bizarro. Like, all the normal kids had NESes and SNESes, but there was that one weird kid who had a Genesis. All the normal kids would be talking about Mario and Luigi and the weird kid would be puffing on his asthma inhaler and trying to get a word about Sonic in edgewise.)

    When Sonic went to 3-D it was like Sega saying "Remember what you liked about the Sonic games? Watch as I take a shit on those things and then set it all on fire, using your dead pets as kindling."



  • The problem I have with OpenGL wrappers is they can never abstract the giant state machine away entirely, and you're still left with lists of functions that must be called in order etc..

    I actually like the direction DirectX went (resource pointers into GPU memory), since it exposes the drawing pipeline in a much clearer way, that has the side-effect of preventing users from doing totally bone-headed things (to a certain extent).



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I just hate solving puzzles. Why? Because there are only a handful of basic types of puzzles. They may vary in execution or presentation, but the "hook"--the core thing that defines the puzzle--is always something I've seen about 5000 times before.
    I play this a lot:

    (you can probably deduce what's going on pretty easily)

    The reasonings I make to solve the puzzles are exactly the same every single time, and they're not even hard. Yet, I enjoy playing these again and again and again. There's no real challenge, but they soothe me. It ends up becoming mindless... well, perhaps not "fun", but entertainment in any case. Most of the time the speed in which I can solve these is limited only by how fast and accurate I can move my mouse.

    Same thing happened back when I played Minesweeper. But I got bored of that one faster; there was an element of pure dumb luck which I disliked. I also enjoy playing Sudokus.

    To each their own.

    And while I haven't played either Mario 3 or Sonic 2, I'd like to propose Supaplex as the best game eva.



  • @drurowin said:

     RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!

    Even worse. Habbo hotel is still a thing.



  • Speaking about building games, Garry's Mod had so much potential, but it just lacks usability.

    With some improvements it could have been a damn good meta-game (in addition to animation tool).



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @drurowin said:

    RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!

    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..

    Don't tell me you wouldn't like to play a flash game named Run Escape. Not even a little?



  • @spamcourt said:

    Even worse. Habbo hotel is still a thing.
    Habb, paed, who'll notice the difference?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the best game ever made, period.
    Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of the release of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game (June 23, 1991)



  • @FrostCat said:

    The game (mostly) doesn't care about which version of Java you're using, as long as it's 1.6 or later. People are generally migrating to 1.7 anyway
    I have Java 7 update 47,382  is that the same thing?



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the best game ever made, period.
    Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of the release of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game (June 23, 1991)

    Thanks Doctor Factoid.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the best game ever made, period.
    Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of the release of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game (June 23, 1991)

    Thanks Doctor Factoid Factlet.

    FTFY



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the best game ever made, period.
    Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of the release of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game (June 23, 1991)

    Thanks Doctor Factoid.

    I only know that because I saw it on Wikipedia yesterday in their "On this day in history..." section.



  • @Ben L. said:

    Just so you guys can see why the RuneScape community is so excited about this update, I recorded a video of today's RuneScape.
     

    Dear God in Heaven. 

    @morbiuswilters said:

    think it's M-I-N-E craft, although that still doesn't explain why you'd want to play a game where you get the black lung or you end up trapped in a cave-in with 25 of your fellow West Virginians while a doughy, flop-sweating spokesperson for the mining company assures Wolf Blitzer that your corpses will be recovered with the utmost urgency.
     

     Out of pure curiosity, what games (if any) do you dig?



  • @Ben L. said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @drurowin said:

    RUNESCAPE IS STILL A THING?!

    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..

    Don't tell me you wouldn't like to play a flash game named Run Escape. Not even a little?

    I was more intrigued by that original Playstation game Rape Escape.



  • @Castaigne said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    think it's M-I-N-E craft, although that
    still doesn't explain why you'd want to play a game where you get the
    black lung or you end up trapped in a cave-in with 25 of your fellow
    West Virginians while a doughy, flop-sweating spokesperson for the
    mining company assures Wolf Blitzer that your corpses will be recovered
    with the utmost urgency.
     

     Out of pure curiosity, what games (if any) do you dig?

    The aforementioned Mario 3 (and 1 & 2). The original Dr. Mario. Doom & Doom II. Half-Life. Team Fortress Classic. Total Annihilation. Master of Orion II.

    Any adventure game put out by LucasArts until they were gutted and turned into another huge black dildo to fill one of George Lucas's seemingly-endless moneyholes.

    Alpha Centauri!! That game was the shit.

    So, yeah, if you couldn't tell I haven't been a gamer in over a decade. I still occasionally will play Mario 3 on Virtual Console. The only modern game I've really played with any joy in the last decade was Wii Jeopardy, but that's the kind of game that barely counts as a vidja game.

    Other than that, I tend to prefer board games with friends. (And not that faggy Warhammer shit. Just games like Scrabble or The Game of Things or Apples to Apples, etc..)



  • @Zecc said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    I still don't get why'd people would play a game called "Run Escape"..
    I thought it was Runes Cape.
    There is a reason that the official orthography has been RuneScape since about 2002.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    TRWTF is that you think I care about the difference between a bunch of tea-sipping pussies and potato-chucking layabouts. Also, none of this changes the fact that the British still pronounce it "beeeeeta".
     

    No we say it "beta", at lease we don't say "beayta" like most Americans.

    Also pretty much nobody in Britain calls themselves British unless they are some sort of Politician. Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish do not call thereselves "British", I dunno why this is such a difficult concept for most Americans.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I'm with you, except I don't usually have the patience to play games at all. Like, I just hate solving puzzles. Why? Because there are only a handful of basic types of puzzles. They may vary in execution or presentation, but the "hook"--the core thing that defines the puzzle--is always something I've seen about<dfn class="dictionary-of-numbers"> 5000 times before</dfn>.

    I'm not sure I can follow. Take Crossword puzzles or Sudokus, for instance. I know I can solve them (unless they are advertised as extra hard), and it's basically always the same thing, but they always require actual thinking and give a feeling of accomplishment.

    It's the same with Portal. I know there are the two portals and I somehow have to squirt white gel into them, just like the last time, but it still feels good once you did it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    He didn't understand my reasoning. It is this: figuring out how to solve a puzzle is fun. Actually solving it is not fun.
     

    Programming is not really your thing, is it?

    /snark

    [quote user="blakeyrat"]Anyway, point is: once you know how to create the iron golem farmer thing, I wouldn't have any patience to spend 12 hours actually building the thing because it would be boring as shit. But maybe I'm just a mutant.[/quote]

    It's not about building the farm. The farm gets you other things. I.E. more iron. It's all an implementation of a solution to a problem.

     

    @morbiuswilters said:

    It was fun when I was a kid and the puzzles being presented were something new to me. Now it's like "Oh, it wants me to stack blocks or factor numbers or some other bullshit. Yay." There's no real challenge: I know I can solve any puzzle in any commercially-released vidja game. It's just a matter of whether I want to spend the time and mental energy doing it, and I don't. I also know I can calculate Pi to 10,000 digits by-hand, but why the fuck would I?
     

    I understand the mentality of figuring out the system and "breaking the game" means you've won.

    In RPGs, the meta game for me is always to find the (local?) optimum of powers/skills/traits/gear/whatever. That's the winning conditin for me. Not the final boss-- although that can be seen as the final exam. And good games will set up a boss fight as a final exam: if you haven't been paying attention learning the game mechanics, you should fail the boss. Hell, you should fail the game if you're not going to actively learn it.


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