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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • I love Elite and it’s definitely amazing in VR. For everything in a ship I agree with you, NMS is childish in comparison.

    However, NMS is attempting a way more multi-cultural galaxy, and I often wish Elite had more diversity in aliens, and more interesting planets similar to NMS. Especially when Elite has so much grind to do rep etc. I wish just once I’d be doing a delivery quest to an acid jungle planet covered in hostile turtles, instead of yet another dead planetoid with a few outposts sticking out of it.


  • No Man’s Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.

    However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren’t nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it’s mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest… But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.

    You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you’re looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.



  • I’m not quite sure what the advantage of doing it that way is

    If I had to guess, it just kept the programmers from being super lazy about it. If the individual enemy AI doesn’t have exact coordinates of the player, it actually has to move around, search a space, potentially manipulate the environment, and possibly fail to find the player, versus doing what is effectively an idle animation while waiting for the player to step out of cover.


  • So, the answer to the question “Can Linux directly host another Unix-like operating system’s binary interface?” at the moment is “partly, experimentally, and impressively.”

    As if there was any question on that? You can have Linux “handle” Windows PE binaries by telling it to invoke wine, dealing with a Unix-like scenario is a much lower bar.

    The question is who is this useful for? FreeBSD has the Linux compatibility layer because it’s playing catch up to Linux, but the Venn diagram of stuff FreeBSD can do but Linux can’t is tiny, especially if extra special kernel feature stuff is stubbed.

    Can anyone name a project that is BSD first, doesn’t rely on BSD kernel features, doesn’t have a native Linux port, and isn’t a distro tool?



  • I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.

    Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.

    I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.



  • Hitman wasn’t really a sandbox until Freelancer mode was added. The story mode has always been pretty linear. Same level order, same objectives every time. I’m not expecting my choices to matter to the narrative, but I am expecting to be able to choose between quiet and loud, lethal and non-lethal etc. to finish the given mission which should be a pretty low bar.










  • I have a giant FLAC collection and I sometimes wish I could use these local players because I used Winamp/XMMS/quod libet back in the day, but I feel like I just can’t give up consistent access from outside the house.

    I ran Tauon for a while (and have run a few of the others over the years) but I always end up back at my Airsonic setup. Works in any browser, works in a few different Android apps (Subsonic compatible), less of a pain than mpd.

    Maybe it’d be different if I was still sitting in front of my computer virtually all the time, but nowadays phone to Bluetooth speaker/car/Chromecast is like 90% of my listening.