#I need to redesign this once I replace the programmer art

[tyler-mon]

What mysteries could lie inside of the charlie brown wearing the slick hat save file.

How could this relate to everyone's favorite game about cats and boxes.....

[jackdawyt]

Your bird is back with another Dragon Age 4 News Update!  🐦

For the first time this year, I’m doing a massive monthly news recap of everything we learned about Dragon Age 4 going forward (JUST) in the month of March, because slap my arse and call me Andraste, this month was huge for Dragon Age 4 updates, we’ve got a lot of exciting info to get into!

(Romance Tweets)

Calling all romance fans, you can bank on Dragon Age 4 to fulfil all of your intimate desires, perhaps even more so than the previous games. Jon Renish, Foundation Programming Area Director working on the next Dragon Age had a few things to say whilst watching a romance scene script read through:  

“Don't want to alarm anyone, but I'm starting to think 'Dragon Age' games might be a bit randy.” (March 3rd)

‘Randy’, according to the Oxford Dictionary, means ‘sexually arousing’ and ‘exciting.’ So, we can prepare for that, whatever that is! Jon continues his tweet thread with:

“Well now it's all sad and sweet and emotional. I was not prepared for this rollercoaster.”

In true BioWare fashion, we’re going to have a lot of sexy times, however, brought together with moving and character developing moments – y’know, the ups and downs of the romance as the relationship builds and grows throughout the entire game experience.  

“Oh, nothing like that.  Just watching a script read through.”

Jon confirms that this was indeed a script read through, as we can tell reviewing a potential romance scene. As a romance advocate myself, I am very interested in the direction romances will be going in for Dragon Age 4. That is something that I will especially be keeping my eyes on. 

(E3/EA Play 2020 Update)

EA Play and E3 2020 are generally the most expected places to see a new Dragon Age 4 reveal trailer.

E3 2020 has been cancelled due to the current outbreak, however, we’ve yet to be updated on the status of EA Play 2020. Of course, it is most certainly cancelled since the tickets for the show were supposed to drop this March. But, we still don’t know what will replace the show.  

The teams behind E3 2020 are supposedly working on a digital showcase to display new announcements that would’ve been revealed on stage. We can only assume that EA will follow suite and do the same for EA Play, making it a digital show, like Nintendo’s Direct conferences.  

Regardless, this is something that we’re going to have to wait and see until EA speak out, and when they do, I’ll be sure to cover that in a news update. I feel we could have a Dragon Age 4 reveal, with an expected release of 2022/2023, but with everyone hectic right now, I’m unsure.  

(C Virus Update)

Speaking of hectic... with the current outbreak, EA have spoken and shared a statement about health and safety during these times:  

(March 13th) “These are challenging times for everyone.  We’re working to look after our employees and their families, and make sure we’re doing the right and responsible things to fight this pandemic illness.”

Thankfully, everyone working at BioWare have been asked to work from home. Justin Masse, Experience Designer working on the next Dragon Age tweeted he’s “working from home until April 1st", confirming the length of this situation.

According to Crystal McCord, Associate Producer of Performance Capture and VO, working at home has been very productive for the team at BioWare as they have “exceeded all expectations.” 

So, it’s great knowing that despite the crazy situation in the world right now, BioWare developers are staying safe, working from home and progressing hugely on the next Dragon Age title!  

(Slack Server)

(March 13th) While Mark Darrah was working from home, he tweeted a picture regarding his tiling progression, as he’s currently redesigning aspects of his home. However, in the very corner of Darrah’s picture lies a laptop screen with a Slack Server revealing many Dragon Age development secrets!  

The server shows plenty of channels for the BioWare developers regarding specific work notes on all aspects of progression. A large amount of the channels are abbreviated to “MOR_” - which is most certainly shortened from ‘Morrison’, Dragon Age 4’s current project title as we know.

This list of the channels are endless, and I could spend forever looking into what exactly they all refer to regarding the production of the next Dragon Age game. We have one channel called ‘mor_announcement’ - does this hint at a new trailer to soon be showed off, or is it an old channel since The Dread Wolf Rises teaser? Are they planning an upcoming announcement? Surely, they would be right? Is that anytime soon?  

Another channel is called ‘mor_da_week’ which from what I can assume stands for Dragon Age week? We have a Dragon Age Day created by the fans and made offical by BioWare, but a Dragon Age week, that’s something I’ve never heard of...  

And there’s just plenty of channels referring to Dragon Age 4’s current development, there’s even a bad design ideas thread, an ask Mark anything chat, approvals on key aspects of the game, marketing assets, and so on!  

It’s a gold mine of tidbits, orchestrated by none other than Mark Darrah, the Executive Producer on Dragon Age. He has once more tweeted a cheeky little tease that may appear mundane, passing a blind eye to it, however, when you take some time and actually look at what he’s posted, it reveals a nug-ton of info we can speculate on.

(New Associate Producer / Jobs)

Illustrator and Creative Professional “Mad Bee” has returned to work at BioWare, they previously worked on Anthem as an Art Quality Analyst. However, this time around, they are an Associate Producer, most likely working on Dragon Age 4. 

And, following that, BioWare are currently hiring! I’ve seen this news piece get quite the few news articles, but I figured I could break this one down better, rest in peace PC Gamer.

So, indeed BioWare are hiring for many roles at the company, the most prominent role is a ‘Technical Director’ for ‘the next major title in one of BioWare’s most prestigious franchises.’  

Considering Mike Gamble, the new project lead for the next Mass Effect game tweeted this hiring out, I’d assume this position is needed for the Mass Effect team who are also in Edmonton, opposite the Dragon Age team.  

What’s most concerning about this job listing relating to the future of Mass Effect is that, according to the job requirements, the applicant needs to have experience ‘developing, debugging and optimizing AAA multiplayer games on PC or console.’  

To throw away my suspicion that Mass Effect or Dragon Age are going to have a heavy multiplayer experience, I looked at the other job listings located at Edmonton’s studio and I discovered other job listings, like an Engine Programmer which require the same experience of developing and debugging games, however, without the multiplayer element.  

So, perhaps BioWare have two teams, one working on the main single player element and the other working on the much smaller multiplayer aspect? I’d be naive to not reiterate the fact that future BioWare games are going to be live service, however, we still don’t know to what extent that will look like.  

(Tevinter Nights)

Patrick Weekes teased that Dragon Age 4 is most certainly in Tevinter following there Tevinter Nights Book plug, however, Patrick still calls the next Dragon Age game an unannounced project? Which I don’t understand because The Dread Wolf Rises teaser trailer at The Game Awards 2018 most certainly confirmed that a new Dragon Age game is currently in production and has been announced.

Unless Patrick is calling it ‘still-unannounced' because they’re planning an announcement soon...

I feel like Patrick is just joking at the fact that the next game is most certainly set in Tevinter, considering PC Gamer made an article a while back stating that Dragon Age 4 is set in Tevinter based on the Tevinter Nights book reveal, it made plenty of the BioWare staff and community laugh at their credulous Journalism. So, it could just be that.  

Anyhow, March has actually been an amazing month to be a Dragon Age fan! We had the final issue of Blue Wraith and the release of the anthological Tevinter Nights!

Tevinter Nights dropped plenty of story hints for the future of Dragon Age. I was lucky enough to receive an early copy, as of which, I’ve created plenty of content regarding all of the story threads uncovered in the novel that you should check out once you’ve read the book for yourself, I’ve still got more to content to come from Tevinter Nights too!  

However, if you have not read it and very much care about the future of Dragon Age, which if you’re watching this video, you most likely do. So, you should go and read this book because we learn A LOT going forward for the future narrative of Dragon Age. The book is a huge spring board for the next game, so go and read it!  

(Blue Wraith)

The final issue of Blue Wraith launched and as much as I enjoyed it, the comic ended on a cliff-hanger!

The lead writers Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir are hopeful for another comic to come, stating:

The two also spoke in a comic-centred interview by Deconstructing Comics about the direction of their entire Dragon Age comics. That since Knight Errant, their comics are created to prepare for a hypothetical Dragon Age 4, but not as a prologue or a plot for the next game. Nunzio suggested that fans should instead look at Tevinter Nights.

Nunzio shared on BSN Forums that hopefully the wait for the next comic won’t be as long as last time. Dragon Age: Deception came out through October – December of 2018, whereas Blue Wraith came out through January – March of 2020. So, perhaps the next comic run could come mid-2021.

(Future Books/Comics)

Speaking of future books and comics, just after I finished Blue Wraith and Tevinter Nights, I was asking myself what’s next to look forward to regarding Dragon Age content. However, on March 23rd we got not one, but two book announcements coming later this year.

Dropping on the 13th of October, BioWare are revealing a new development book, charting the legendary game studio's first 25 years in a massive retrospective hardcover book at $39.99. Perhaps we’ll learn more about Dragon Age 4’s previous iteration, project Joplin?  

Following that, on October 27th, the five Dragon Age graphic novels are being put into a massive collection for $29.99.

This book collects Dragon Age: The Silent Grove #1-6, Dragon Age: Those Who Speak #1-3, Dragon Age: Until We Sleep #1-3, Dragon Age: Magekiller #1-5, and Dragon Age: Knight Errant #1-5.

But not Deception & Blue Wraith? Potentially they’ve left these two out because Dark Horse wish to progress with these comics, foreshadowing more comics in the future to come?  

(Reddit Leak)

Moving on to a slightly weird, and most certainly fake-but-take-it-as-you-will-update... we have a reddit leak showing many upcoming games release dates, with some actually being accurate. Dragon Age 4 is listed here, and according to this leak, it’s releasing the 15th of November, 2020. Again, most certainly fake, but take it as you will.  

Speaking of fake leaks, a 2018 leak for Dragon Age 4’s contents has resurfaced, and oh boy is this thing fake. I feel like dissecting this thing as a separate video just for a laugh, but tell me down below if that’s a good idea or not.  

With that, that’s all the updates we had in March! We’re three, almost four months into 2020, as crazy as this year has been so far. I’ve already created plenty previous news updates, so if you need to be caught up to date, or you’ve missed an update, or you’re just stuck inside and need something to put your mind at ease - I have a news playlist with every single major update regarding Dragon Age 4’s development, so be sure to check that out. 

I hope you all are holding up okay and staying safe, distract yourself by telling me some of your own hopes for the next Dragon Age game, it can be anything you'd like to see! Personally, I'd love to see Vaea make any appearance in DA4!

[juno-huangjing-blog]

Mistakes I wish I'd known to avoid? 1: Overreach - Don't jump into Unity as new user with a huge complex game in mind.  You'll end up confused, frustrated, and abandoning the project. 2: Prototype - As a programmer, work in iterations.  Forget about the art, sound, and making the game fancy.  Roughly build / code everything out first, then once you have a working game, iterate over and start replacing the temporary stuff.  There is nothing worse than spending days making a level look amazing, only to find out later that you need to completely redesign it, because it just doesn't work well. 3: Knowledge - Learn as much as you can, but don't try and do everything at once.  If you try and learn everything first, you'll never get to making a game.

[samanthasroberts]

It’s Time for an RSS Revival

The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there's no panacea for what ails this internet we've built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that's been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.

For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which went the way of the ghost this month. Or maybe you haven't used RSS since five years ago, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of news headlines got the axe. For others, it means figuring out what the heck an RSS feed is in the first place—we'll get to that in just a minute. And some of you have already moved on to the next article in your Feedly queue.

No matter what your current disposition, though, in this age of algorithmic overreach there's something deeply satisfying about finding stories beyond what your loudest Twitter follows shared, or that Facebook's News Feed optimized into your life. And lots of tools that can get you there.

Cue RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format.

In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day. Think of it as the ultimate aggregator; every morsel from every source you care about, fed directly to you. Or, more commonly, fed to you through an intermediary known as an RSS feed reader, software that helps you wrangle all of those disparate headlines into something remotely manageable.

'We're trying to keep things as they were.'

Ben Wolf, The Old Reader

The difference between getting news from an RSS reader and getting it from Facebook or Twitter or Nuzzel or Apple News is a bit like the difference between a Vegas buffet and an a la carte menu. In either case, you decide what you actually want to consume. But the buffet gives you a whole world of options you otherwise might never have seen.

"There are multiple approaches to connecting to news. Social felt pretty interesting at first, but when you mix social and algorithmic, you can easily get into these noise bubbles, or areas where you don't necessarily feel 100 percent in control of the algorithm," says Edwin Khodabakchian, cofounder and CEO of popular RSS reader Feedly. "A tool like Feedly gives you a more transparent and controllable way to connect to the information you need."

With 14 million users, Feedly is the largest RSS reader on the market. And it's easy to see why; it's as feature-full as one could hope for, and has been around since 2008. (It also inherited a sizeable chunk of Google Reader's jilted audience.) It's far from your only option, though.

All RSS readers function within the same basic outline. You tell them what RSS feeds you'd like to follow—The New York Times, say, or WIRED—and they collect every new headline those sites churn out, offering anything from a snippet of information to the full story, depending on how much the publisher allows. Each puts a slightly different spin on the process from there.

Feedly, for instance, has for the last two years gravitated toward being a tool for research rather than passive entertainment. That's partly in response to platforms eating the open web. "If you go after entertainment, you're not competing against other reader news tools. You're really competing with Instagram and other things people do to kill time," says Khodabakchian. "On the other hand, if you think of this as an intelligence tool, or research assistant, we see a huge and increasing demand for that."

Still, Feedly has plenty to offer casual users. It has a clean user interface, and the free version of its service lets you follow 100 sources, categorized into up to three feeds—think News, Sports, Humor, or wherever your interests lie. It also shows how popular each story is, both on Feedly and across various social networks, to give you a sense of what people are reading without letting that information dictate what you see. Paid accounts—of which Feedly has about 100,000—get you more feeds and integrations, faster updates, and better tools for teams.

For more of a throwback feel, you might try The Old Reader, which strips down the RSS reader experience while still emphasizing a social component.

"In terms of evolution, we're coming from a different perspective," says Ben Wolf, whose Levee Labs acquired The Old Reader in 2013. "We're trying to keep things as they were."

For the million or so Old Reader users, that means not many bells and whistles. Even the mechanism to add new feeds feels just a touch more onerous than you'll find elsewhere. But once you do get properly organized, it's a fast and light experience, and if you can convince some friends to join, its social features will help you cut through the clutter. Most of all, there's not much to get in the way of the headlines, which is what you came for in the first place.

Power users, meanwhile, might try Inoreader, which offers for free many of the features—unlimited feeds and tags, and some key integrations—Feedly reserves for paid accounts. "I would say that at the moment Feedly is ahead of us in terms of mass appeal design look and UX, which is something we will try to tackle with our upcoming redesign," says Victor Stankov, Inoreader's business development manager. "Hardcore nerds love us way more than Feedly."

And those are just three options of many. The point being: In 2018, it's easy to find an RSS reader out there that suits your needs. Which, in hindsight, is no small miracle.

Throwback

Five years ago, when Wolf took over The Old Reader, he offered a prescient insight: "How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won't be getting any valuable information," Wolf wrote. "For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users. It won't be long before your news feed is worthless."

Which, well, here we are. Not only that, but two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, leaving traditional sources behind.

'RSS readers have not only survived in the era of social media, but are driving more and more attention back to themselves.'

Victor Stankov, Inoreader

The platformization of the web has claimed many victims, RSS readers included. Google Reader's 2013 demise was a major blow; the company offed it in favor of "products to address each user's interest with the right information at the right time via the most appropriate means," as it Google executive Richard Gingras put it at the time. In other words, letting Google Now decide what you want. And the popular Digg Reader, which was born in response to that shuttering, closed its doors this week after a nearly four-year run.

Despite those setbacks, though, RSS has persisted. "I can't really explain it, I would have thought given all the abuse it's taken over the years that it would be stumbling a lot worse," says programmer Dave Winer, who helped create RSS.

It owes that resilience in part thanks to social media burnout. Stankov says search traffic to Inoreader has nearly doubled since 2015, all organically. "RSS readers have not only survived in the era of social media, but are driving more and more attention back to themselves, as people are realizing the pitfalls" of relying too much on Facebook and others, Stankov says.

RSS readers obviously have their own shortcomings as well. The firehose approach can easily overwhelm, especially when multiple outlets all publish the same news at the same time. There are various solutions to this; Stankov points to filtering tools that help you skip the things you don't care about, while Wolf says The Old Reader has experimented with tools to help highlight just one story when there are dozens of near-identicals.

Different publishers also offer RSS feeds of varyingly helpful degrees. The New York Times and The Ringer, for instance, offer granular choices to help focus on the topics you care about, while others offer either only one big jumble or oddly sparse updates. Sites that publish infrequently can easily get lost in the mix. And multimedia elements sometimes don't cross the transom; FiveThirtyEight recently ran a fun, interactive trade war game that RSS couldn't parse.

The readers all have settings to help cope with these issues to varying degrees, where possible; it's just a matter of how many hours you want to spend shaping your RSS bonsai.

"Social media has mass appeal because it is simple to understand and use, with little to no challenges involved for the user," says Stankov. "RSS is whole different game, where the main goal is for the end user to research and find valuable information sources, as well as periodically clean up the news feed from irrelevant noise." (Those who want a truly passive experience outside of Facebook and Twitter might look instead to aggregators like Apple News or Flipboard, or even Texture, which for $10 a month gives you full issues of dozens of magazine titles to flip through.)

Even with minimal tweaking, though, returning to RSS this week offered up a few fun surprises I never would have seen otherwise: the Yankees getting in trouble for player beer-foam art; an American contending for the world chess championship; the latest on Ben Affleck's hilariously oversized back tattoo. These aren't the stories everyone is reading. But they're the ones I want to read.

RSS Evolution

While RSS readers offer a sanctuary from the algorithmic approach, they're also not opposed to using algorithms of their own, as they continue to evolve and regain relevance. That's not quite the conflict it might seem.

"Machines can have a big role in helping understand the information, so algorithms can be very useful, but for that they have to be transparent and the user has to feel in control," says Khodabakchian. "What's missing today with the black-box algorithms is where they look over your shoulder, and don't trust you to be able to tell what's right."

With its focus on professional users, Feedly hopes AI can better connect users with niche experts. Wolf, too, touts AI as a way to better flag standout stories. "I think algorithms are great," Wolf says. "I think the problem is when the algorithms are run by advertising companies."

And despite Digg Reader's demise, new RSS tools continue to come online. Even Winer has re-entered the fray, this week introducing feedbase, a database of feeds that makes it easy to see what others subscribe to, ideally prompting discovery and an even more open approach. "I thought it might be a good time to try to add an important feature to RSS that was always part of the vision, dynamic subscription lists," Winer says.

Still, the lasting appeal of RSS remains the parts that haven't changed: the unfiltered view of the open web, and the chance to make your own decisions about what you find there.

"The most amazing thing to me about RSS is that no one really went away from it," says Wolf. "It still exists. Somehow through all of this. It's crazy, in a way, that when you go away from RSS and then come back to it, it's all still there."

Related Video

Business

How to Fight the Bad Logic of the Internet | Argument Clinic

There's a lot of bad logic out there. WIRED's Jason Tanz explains how to spot and fight the dumbest arguments online.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/its-time-for-an-rss-revival/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/its-time-for-an-rss-revival/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT BILLS

They plan for plans to change. In principle you could take a huge VC investment, put it in treasury bills, and continue to operate frugally. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't need them.1 In effect you're insider trading, without knowing what beautiful is. Your code is your understanding of the problem you're trying to solve. Investors don't realize how much it costs to raise money from them, so they didn't get swelled heads. It had a programmable crawler that could crawl most of the different stores online and pick out the products. Acquirers will also have to get better at your job. The simplest answer is to put them in a row. The distinctive back of the Porsche 911 only appeared in the redesign of an awkward prototype. But I don't think it works to cultivate strangeness. The simplest answer is to put them in a row.2

If Sarbanes-Oxley deters people like him from being CFOs of public companies, that's proof enough that it's broken.3 Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability. So they prefer bigger deals, where they can choose those rare companies, like Google, that will actually benefit from the giant sums they're compelled to invest. I'm not proposing that you can now start a startup. Their smartest move at that point. What students do in their classes will change too. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds.4 They have to, or there's not enough stock left to keep the pressure on an investor or acquirer all the way to the closing, because the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who want to start them into the country. But funding is not the center of things is difficult to discard. You have to be paranoid. This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the Berkeley CSUA. Good design can copy.

At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. What students do in their classes will change too. I think the main reason they're so much less productive than small companies, is the sort of people will make them so. But I think the same thing. In the mid twentieth century there was a lot of bandwidth.5 Few would deny that a story should be like life.6 I find missing when I look at the other four languages. An angel who wants to insert a bunch of complicated terms into the agreement is probably not one you want anyway. Mike Moritz famously said that he invested in Yahoo because he thought they had a few weeks' lead over their competitors. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations.

It may just be my own stupidity. The most dynamic part of the economy always does, in everything from salaries to standards of dress. Part of the reason—possibly the main reason they never considered this was that they never imagined we could be had so cheap. The reason startups work so well is that everyone with power also has equity. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions, and those two constraints yield a valuation. But people will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders. It could be because it's beautiful, or because they know it's expensive.7 If Lisp really does yield better programs, you should pay particular attention to them. There's no dividing line with machine languages on one side and all the money goes to the company. Whereas hackers will move to the Bay Area to find investors. And believe it or not. But you'll have a much more enjoyable life once there than you would on a regular grad student stipend.

In principle investors are all competing for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers. No one was leaking news of their features to us. Often big companies buy startups, they're effectively fusing recruiting and product development. They're helpful in doing deals and arranging introductions, and some of the fund back to the institutional investors who supplied it, because the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who created it as well as a cost of breaking up a project.8 Six weeks is fast. Either the company is worth more. This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford. Compositional symmetry yields some of the more profitable pieces of Yahoo, and the living dead—companies that are plugging along but don't seem likely in the immediate future will replace walking down University Ave and running into a friend who tells you how to fix a bug that's been bothering you all weekend, or visiting a friend's startup down the street and ending up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I'm alarmed to be saying things like this, but there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to—that their own vision will be lost in the process.9 When would you ever want to do that.

You'd expect them to be cold and calculating, or at least the prerogative—of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical. And the reason everyone doesn't use it is that programming languages have improved—or rather, the median language, will never be able to start successful startups, and in reviews I keep noticing words like provocative and controversial. You can get the most done. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant?10 One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. In those days there was no AWS. But having ideas is not to change anyone's mind, but to try to appeal to past generations. Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have.

Notes

How much better to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's a departure from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus ca. A from a few years. And no, you won't be able to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by people who did it with. Charismatic candidates will tend to be doomed.

But one of the false positives caused by filters will have to be on the grounds that a company, and indeed the venture business barely existed when they talked about convergence. In theory you could out of about 4,000 computers attached to the yogurt place, we met Aydin Senkut. The problem is not such a low grade, which made it to profitability before your initial funding runs out. This is not just the most successful founders is how intently they listened.

Super-angels gradually to erode.

Everything is a bad idea, period. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that 15-20% of the ingredients in our own, like play in a cupboard saying this cupboard must be kept empty. To allocate research funding moderately well, but for the tenacity of the techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead.

Among other things, like the one hand they take away with the other sheep head for a solution. Letter to the option pool.

If early abstract paintings seem more powerful than ever. In technology, so it's conceivable that a their applicants come from meditating in an equity round. I never get as deeply into subjects as I do, and this is why it's such a brutally simple word is that the VC knows you well, since that was actively maintained would be easier to say no for introductions to philosophy now take the form of bad idea was that they only like the bizarre stuff. All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.

After a while ago, and it has no competitors. Strictly speaking it's not the distribution of income and b the second component is empty—an idea that was mistaken, and once a hypothesis starts to be delivering results. While environmental costs should be deprived of their predecessors and said in effect why can't you be more at the start of the Italian word for success.

From the beginning. This suggests a good chance that a skilled vine-dresser was worth about 125 to 150 drachmae.

I can't predict which lies future generations will consider inexcusable, I have no idea what they give it additional funding at a discount of 30% means when it was spontaneous.

Some will say that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality as a first approximation, it's hard to say for sure which these are even worth thinking about for the measures the federal government took during wartime. The amusing thing is, because there are already names for this to realize that in three months we made a better influence on your own?

Thanks to Eric Raymond, Sam Altman, and Sarah Harlin for sparking my interest in this topic.

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #159 - Let it Snow

Wait, what? Snow? In Crest?! Yes! This week has been all about water, in its liquid as well as in its solid form.

Community

You will read a lot about Crest's water system in this blog. What that means in short: We redirected almost all resources to improve the performance issues Crest has to make it run much smoother.

What does the water have to do with the performance issues? Although invisible to you at the moment, water is the main resource in Crest. Every island consists of thousands of tiles and each tile has it's own water-level, which gets constantly updated by the system. This worked fine in the beginning, when there was only one island and not so much stuff happening in the world, but it didn't scale well over time and needs to be reworked now.

Art

Martin

I've been spending this week with working on the new feedback for the water system. It's always been hard to see how the water works in Crest, and since it's such a critical resource we want it to be more clear. In real life clouds dump their water on the mountains as snow, which later melts and become rivers. There's not as much snow on the African continent as on others and this is where a bit of abstraction comes in. We'd rather have an easy to understand game than 100% realism. The mountain works like a batter, the more snow there is the more water can be "taken" to the rivers by nature. Below you can see a mockup of this new system.

Emma

This week has been all about doing mockups for UI in the game. We're doing some small changes to make it easier to navigate and understand it, making it more convenient for the players to use it. 

For example, below, you can see the new mockup to the left which will be replacing the current spider chart to the right. The new system with bars will make it easier for players to just throw a glance at the City Needs, to immediately know which need is in danger.

Code

Johannes

This week the other programmers and I sat down to figure out how we should fix the water system. The water system has always been kind of broken, and we've tried to fix it several times to no avail. So this time we decided to rethink it from the ground up. The solution we came up with should allow for more dynamic changes of the environment, and should be a lot less demanding on performance. So I'm very happy about that. We'll see how well it works once it's actually implemented :)

Johannes W

I participated on the discussion for the new water system during the beginning of the week and I think the new changes will make a big difference to the game, which I'm personally excited about.

The programming stuff for me this week included updating migration for both followers and animals in Crest. The followers now migrate only from commandments by the player and not by their free will. The animals now migrate to new habitats based on a grid layout on the islands. The reason for this is to have more control over where animals migrate compared to before, where a lot of randomization was used.

Another reason is for optimization. For example, when a herd of antelopes wants to migrate, we can search through each center tile in the grid and make basic assumptions where they don't want to move, for example the jungle or how far they can migrate. Then we can search the area around the center tile and make other more specific assumptions.

These updates on the migration system are just on a early stage and may be updated later. However, the new water system will have a big impact on migration for followers and animals and therefore we want to have a lot of control when we later have to create a good balance.

Jens

This week I have been cooperating with Johannes W to fix the migration of animals. At first I started to increase the affect herbivores have on their environment. If the number of animals in a habitat gets too big, they will drain the soil for resources. When they can no longer find food, they will try to find a new area for their habitat.

The result is that we will see animals moving more across the island. And where the herbivores move, the carnivores will follow. The aim is to get islands that feel more dynamic and ever-changing. I still need to wait for the reworked water system before I can finish, since it is so closely tied to how animals eat and find suitable habitat areas.

Tomas

At the start of this week I was mostly involved in design discussions. One major discussion was regarding the water system in Crest and how to improve it to affect gameplay and performance in positive ways. We found a solution that should do both. At the end of the week I have been reworking the season system to allow for harsh and mild conditions. This required a rework of how seasons are queued and changed. It can now be balanced more easily and dynamically.

Design

Emelie 

This week have been busy for me, I don't think that I have been involved in so many different things in one week before. It all started with the redesign of the water system because it has never really worked properly, this will make the nature part of Crest have more consequences. We also discussed the new look of the city needs since the spider chart could be a bit difficult to read at times, hopefully the changes will make it more clear to the player what is going on. After we had finished those discussions, I moved on to make the design for the berry bushes. We want to pace the game in the beginning a bit better because farms are too powerful. It feels more natural to have a hunter/gatherer society at first and then evolving into farming when they got enough knowledge. I hope this will make it more interesting, as with all the things that we have planned to fix.

Production

Marcus

This week I have been busy with introducing a new planning platform and making sure that everything is up to date and that everyone understands how to use it. It will be an iterative process in how we will be handling everything going forward but the team seems to like it so far.

Have a nice weekend!