#but i don't want to game the system :/ i want to reduce the size of my TBR pile

[gender-trash]

so for the past few months i've been doing a Thing where if i read at least as many books (for the first time; rereads don't count) as i acquire (and add to the TBR pile, so reference books/craft books/etc don't count) i get a beeminder get-out-of-jail-free card

and i REALLY THOUGHT that july was gonna be my month because i read a bunch of books and only bought two!

EXCEPT

yesterday (july 29) i went to san francisco with @combat-epistemologist for an event (where we ate a shitload of free food and did not talk to anybody) and then afterwards we went to A Bookstore and then Another Bookstore when the first bookstore turned out to be 90% italian books (i don't know italian) and i bought 45 books total between the two bookstores and guys i do not think i am going to win july anymore

[canmom]

how much power does tech really use, compared to other shit?

my dash has been full of arguing about AI power consumption recently. so I decided to investigate a bit.

it's true, as the Ars Technica article argues, that AI is still only one fairly small part of the overall tech sector power consumption, potentially comparable to things like PC gaming. what's notable is how quickly it's grown in just a few years, and this is likely to be a limit to how much more it can scale.

I think it is reasonable to say that adding generative AI at large scale to systems that did not previously have generative AI (phones, Windows operating system etc.) will increase the energy cost. it's hard to estimate by how much. however, the bulk of AI energy use is in training, not querying. in some cases 'AI' might lead to less energy use, e.g. using an AI denoiser will reduce the energy needed to render an animated film.

the real problem being exposed is that most of us don't really have any intuition for how much energy is used for what. you can draw comparisons all sorts of ways. compare it to the total energy consumption of humanity and it may sound fairly niche; compare it to the energy used by a small country (I've seen Ireland as one example, which used about 170TWh in 2022) and it can sound huge.

but if we want to reduce the overall energy demand of our species (to slow our CO2 emissions in the short term, and accomodate the limitations of renewables in a hypothetical future), we should look at the full stack. how does AI, crypto and tech compare to other uses of energy?

here's how physicist David McKay broke down energy use per person in the UK way back in 2008 in Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, and his estimate of a viable renewable mix for the UK.

('Stuff' represents the embedded energy of manufactured goods not covered by the other boxes. 'Gadgets' represents the energy used by electronic devices including passive consumption by devices left on standby, and datacentres supporting them - I believe the embodied energy cost of building them falls under 'stuff' instead.)

today those numbers would probably look different - populations change, tech evolves, etc. etc., and this notably predates the massive rise in network infrastructure and computing tech that the Ars article describes. I'm sure someone's come up with a more up-to-date SEWTHA-style estimate of how energy consumption breaks down since then, but I don't have it to hand.

that said, the relative sizes of the blocks won't have changed that much. we still eat, heat our homes and fly about as much as ever; electric cars have become more popular but the fleet is still mostly petrol-powered. nothing has fundamentally changed in terms of the efficiency of most of this stuff. depending where you live, things might look a bit different - less energy on heating/cooling or more on cars for example.

how big a block would AI and crypto make on a chart like this?

per the IEA, crypto used 100-150TWh of electricity worldwide in 2022. in McKay's preferred unit of kWh/day/person, that would come to a worldwide average of just 0.04kWh/day/person. that is of course imagining that all eight billion of us use crypto, which is not true. if you looked at the total crypto-owning population, estimated to be 560 million in 2024, that comes to about 0.6kWh/day/crypto-owning person for cryptocurrency mining [2022/2024 data]. I'm sure that applies to a lot of people who just used crypto once to buy drugs or something, so the footprint of 'heavier' crypto users would be higher.

I'm actually a little surpised by this - I thought crypto was way worse. it's still orders of magnitude more demanding than other transaction systems but I'm rather relieved to see we haven't spent that much energy on the red queen race of cryptomining.

the projected energy use of AI is a bit more vague - depending on your estimate it could be higher or lower - but it would be a similar order of magnitude (around 100TWh).

SEWTHA calculated that in 2007, data centres in the USA added up to 0.4kWh/day/person. the ars article shows worldwide total data centre energy use increasing by a factor of about 7 since then; the world population has increased from just under 7 billion to nearly 8 billion. so the amount per person is probably about a sixfold increase to around 2.4kWh/day/person for data centres in the USA [extrapolated estimate based on 2007 data] - for Americans, anyway.

however, this is complicated because the proportion of people using network infrastructure worldwide has probably grown a lot since 2007, so a lot of that data centre expansion might be taking place outside the States.

as an alternative calculation, the IEA reports that in 2022, data centres accounted for 240-340 TWh, and transmitting data across the network, 260-360 TWh; in total 500-700TWh. averaged across the whole world, that comes to just 0.2 kWh/day/person for data centres and network infrastructure worldwide [2022 data] - though it probably breaks down very unequally across countries, which might account for the huge discrepancy in our estimates here! e.g. if you live in a country with fast, reliable internet where you can easily stream 4k video, you will probably account for much higher internet traffic than someone in a country where most people connect to the internet using phones over data.

overall, however we calculate it, it's still pretty small compared to the rest of the stack. AI is growing fast but worldwide energy use is around 180,000 TWh. humans use a lot of fucking energy. of course, reducing this is a multi-front battle, so we can still definitely stand to gain in tech. it's just not the main front here.

instead, the four biggest blocks by far are transportation, heating/cooling and manufacturing. if we want to make a real dent we'd need to collectively travel by car and plane a lot less, insulate our houses better, and reduce the turnover of material objects.

[safelynte]

Musings on TTRPG Focus-Fire & Fighting Flanking

It's common for players to focus-fire in games, and that's fine. With 5 identical targets dealing damage, it's just efficient to dump all your single-target damage on the same target to reduce the incoming damage. But focus-fire isn't always ideal. As game designers, we always want to shake up the default strategy. There are several "counters" to focus fire. It's this game design riddle with so many solutions. Very fun to think about. But that is a whole whole whole other long talk. What I want to talk about today is flanking.

I can look at Chess, Go, Into the Breach, or some other turn-based, grid-dependent tactics game, and notice that they… don't have flanking? Well, they don't have mechanically codified benefits to flanking. But flanking still has tactical benefits. They're simply not spelled out in the rules. Flanking could give access to unexpected points of attack, enable surrounding & cornering, or access to more valuable targets. (That said, the center is usually the most advantageous spot in these games.)

Coming to tabletop, where Pathfinder 1e, DnD 5e, and Pathfinder 2e all have a numerical bonus to flanking. And I didn't notice it immediately, but the flanking bonuses reinforced focus fire! "Why would I even look at another target when I have a +2 bonus against the one my friend just ran up to?" Hitting together is hitting better! When you're surrounded in one of these games, you're pretty fucked already, and the flanking bonuses hammer this point home.

Following those thoughts, I pondered how, as a game designer, I could reduce flanking and focus-fire behaviour in these games. And this train of thought is funny.

All-around vision is possibly the most boring option as it simply excludes the behaviour. Sometimes, excluding a behaviour is acceptable. It can put grappling and tripping higher up on the priority list.

Run. Necessarily, it costs more to set up a flank than it does to avoid it (2 attackers have to move in to create one, while one creature has to move away to avoid one). Unfortunately, running away is finicky in practice. Attacks of opportunity are ubiquitous in these systems. Many a time, breaking a flank may be more expensive than setting one up in these games. Coagulation.

Fly, swim, hide, blind, slow, be far away, be up a ladder, or be across a pit of lava. Hard to access is hard to flank.

Buddy up! Interestingly, four vanilla defenders in a square are impossible to flank for vanilla (5-foot reach) melee attackers. Joining a trio or pair adjacent to each other also reduces flanking opportunities. The fortunate (unfortunate) reality is that such groups are gonna get blasted by AoE's. So there's this poetic tug of war between avoiding focus fire by staying together and avoiding AoE (and possibly accessing flanking yourself) by spreading apart.

Walls. A cornered creature is an unflankable creature! Quite counterintuitive. The average game would teach you that you don't want your back against the wall. But barriers are as good as fellow creatures for avoiding flanking. A pair of creatures against a wall is impossible to flank for vanilla attackers. And in a game where running away isn't much of an option, pressing yourself against a wall becomes much more of one. Pits and other hazards may work similarly, but beware the shove.

Get bigger! Wait, that means more spaces for creatures to flank you? In practice, though, attackers usually come from one direction. And the bigger you are, the more it costs to move around you! If you count diagonals differently, attackers may have to decide between the risk of tumbling through your space or the cost of moving around it. If you're thick enough to cover the hallway, it can be incredibly hard to flank you. In systems with increasing reach and attacks of opportunity, your size advantage makes it even trickier to navigate a flank.

Punish them! Getting back into the domain of special abilities now. Abilities such as Whirlwind Attack, Quick Reversal, Detonate, and on-death effects can punish flankers. Almost every boss should have an aura or reaction. Big note on using punishment: players will only avoid the behaviour you want to punish if they're aware of the punishment. On-death effects disincentivize focus fire on its own.

Change the priorities. Enter Crane Stance, raise your shield, cast Mirror Image, or exit rage. Have an ally appear in the enemy backline, poison the wizard, have an ally enter rage, or have an ally steal the McGuffin. Anything change that makes one a less attractive target, or makes another a higher priority problem can incentivize attackers moving to break or change focus.

Overall, there are a lot of implicit strategies against flanking. The recipes for chaos… Anyway, that's all I have for tonight. Thanks for reading this brain vomit 👍👍👍

[theresattrpgforthat]

I find myself really enjoying OSR/NSR systems like Cairn, or Durf, i like that their rules-lite, and have a lot of freedom for player/gm alike but find myself wanting classes with possible class abilities, or similar mechanics, I'm curious if you have any recommendations of that

THEME: Rules-lite Systems with Classes.

Some things to keep in mind: OSR games are stripped down to bare bones because character ingenuity (rather than brute force) is meant to take the forefront. This is why characters don’t usually have class abilities. 

What I’m hearing you ask for is something that keeps light rules, in the same way OSR systems do, but still provides a way to differentiate characters from each-other. I don’t know if all of these suggested games can be classed as OSR or NSR, but they require the same amount of creativity to push the game forward.

24XX Tides Will Rise, by Tubatic. 

A STORM IS COMING!

The crew finds themselves at a settlement preparing for a huge seasonal storm.  Using mechs like in that one movie with the aliens, or whatever you choose, help prepare the settlement to survive The Storm.  

24XX Tides Will Rise is a microgame  / oneshot designed in the style of Jason Tocci's 2400, created for submission to the 24XX Jam. 

24XX games are a distillation of OSR games, usually only about two pages or so, with dice that scale up or down in size depending on your character’s situation and aptitude. Your character will usually get a special ability related to their class, career, background, or in this version, Pilot Skill. There’s also a simplified money and gear system that gets you one or two pieces of useful items that are destined to break at some point, in order to reduce whatever harm you take. Tides Will Rise is about preparing your local settlement for an extreme weather event using giant mechs, but 24XX games could happen in nearly any setting, and are almost always deadly for your characters. If you want a quick game that you can learn and get up and running in less than 30 minutes, this is the game for you!

Hexfall, by titanomachyRPG.

You are a hyperpowered being who came into larger-than-life abilities because of a profound cataclysm. Heartbreak. Grief. The depths. Physical, emotional, multidimensional–something unlocked incredible power in you. People like you have many names across Stratus Cay, but the most common is “Diver,” a nickname derived from their affinity for falling through the Rift, either on dangerous jobs or just for fun. 

Divers�� abilities run the gamut of even the wildest imaginations, and their extreme power and durability makes many of them reckless thrillseekers. The pay is too good and the thrills too extraordinary to turn down the opportunity to go on a dive.

What will you do, falling soul?

Hexfall uses Caltrop Core, a rules-lite system that requires 3d4 and that’s it. Like many OSR games, it uses a hex map that your characters will navigate as they fall through an inter dimensional space called the Rift, their movements and obstacles determined by the roll of the dice. The characters gain tokens as they fall, which act as player currency that can affect narrative beats or navigation rolls as you play. Finally, there are 12 playbooks that you can choose to represent your character: will you be a resilient Giantborn? A liberating MotherThawed? A masterful Myconaut? Each character playbook comes with special moves that only you can do.

High Magic Lowlives, by Gem Room Games.

High Magic Lowlives is a Post-Dungeon Fantasy Tabletop RPG about wizard school dropouts who get into trouble with the Immortal Aristocracy to make coin and build their #brand. Like old school RPGs this is a game about a crew of weirdos finding subterranean vaults filled with treasure, kicking down doors, beating up guards, setting off traps, and taking home as much coin as you can carry. Like new school RPGs the mechanics are simple, drive the story forward, and don't rely on a ton of preparation in advance.

Unlike any RPG you've ever played before you can get paid for livestreaming your fight against the jack-o-lantern queen of zabraxas. Your companions would probably prefer you help them survive the fight, but they'll forgive you when you capture their critical hit for all to see.

High Magic Lowlives uses a ruleset that is a combination of Powered by the Apocalypse, Forged in the Dark, and the Black Hack. Your lowlife has 6 attributes, which could range from 0 to 3. Each character also selects a General Deal, which grants you a special ability, such as access the local library, sweet-talk computers, or gather food in unlikely places. Similar to OSR games, there are tables and tables of items that you can use for conventional and non-conventional uses, and, in step with PbtA mechanics, there are graded levels of success when it comes to hitting things with a weapon. You also have Risk Dice, which deteriorate as you use them, lending the feeling of dwindling resources as you play. If you want a game of high risk, high reward, I recommend High Magic Lowlives!

Aetherway, by Jason Tocci.

Hit the road between worlds with a black cat, a clockwork assassin, a fallen star, and a pilgrim who huffs the ashes of a dead saint. Deliver lumber to communist skeletons living on the back of a gargantuan crab. Ride a comet to a party in the skull of a cosmic god that was converted to condos.

Aetherway is a quirky, planet-hopping RPG zine, compatible with both Tunnel Goons and Troika! Use it to improvise your own adventures, as set of extra Troika! backgrounds, as a conversion guide between Troika! and Tunnel Goons rules, or a bunch of random generators for any other game of planeswalking hijinks. 

This is mostly another chance for me to talk about Troika again, because it’s a) a really funky setting, and b) a game that borrows a lot of elements from OSR-style games. You have random roll tables, backgrounds that give your characters skills and abilities, and an initiative order that leaves everything up to chance. However, you can also use Aetherway to play Tunnel Goons, which is a rules-lite game that contains much of the hallmarks of OSR. 

Planet Dungeon, by Nathan Lathroum.

Ever since birth, the dungeon is all you’ve ever known. All you’ve ever seen. All you were ever meant to see. Who built the dungeon? Is there anything beyond it? How long has the world been trapped here? You can almost smell the fresh outside air. You can almost feel the heat of the sun. You can almost taste victory. But your journey is not over yet.

Ten floors of the dungeon remain. This is all that stands between you and the mythical surface of the Aboveworld. Does it truly exist, or is it merely legend? Is there still a world beyond these walls?

Planet Dungeon is a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) designed for 3 to 5 players. This book contains all of the rules, systems, and mechanics you will need to play. Additionally, Planet Dungeon requires two regular dice for each player and a singular deck of playing cards. Be warned: Planet Dungeon is not easy, and is intended for players willing to lose.

This game uses 2d6 and a deck of playing cards. As a table, you will create the planet you live on, and select backgrounds for your characters. Each background carries with it a pre-determined set of stats and a unique ability - including the Wretched, which starts woefully bereft of any ability, but has the chance to level up dramatically the first time you reach a boss in any given session. The rooms of each dungeon are determined by a card pulled from the deck, with the suit determining the type of the room. Cards also describe your death, should it happen, as well as what the end of the story looks like, once you escape. If you like simple rules and overwhelming odds, this might be worth checking out.

Lost Eons, by David Blandy.

LOST EONS is solarpunk sci-fantasy. In Lost Eons you will emerge from the darkness into a new light, one dominated by inscrutable and terrible forces you must seek to understand. Using this guide create a post-human character, ready to face the mysteries and dangers of a far future Earth.

LOST EONS is a fast but deep toolkit. Play instant no-prep one-shots and sustained campaigns. Discover beautiful and horrifying new adventures through evocative prompts and procedural generation. This game is no-maths and instantly playable. Mashing together 24XX and Blades in the Dark, gameplay is streamlined, flexible, fast and potentially brutal. Level-up through mutation, your body changing as you evolve. Character Playbooks let you create a character in seconds, yet have limitless customisation through play.

LOST EONS uses all of the basic dice types to tackle obstacles, depending on what you’re doing and what piece of equipment you use to help you. Like Blades in the Dark, this game uses clocks to track consequences, health and adventures, while similar to the grit of dungeon-delving games, the characters find their inventory slowly dwindling the longer they adventure. Survival is difficult in this post-human future. At character creation, you choose one of six different archetypes that will give you a set of skills and a unique talent. If you’re looking for new approaches to play while holding on to some of the tone of OSR games, LOST EONS may be a good fit for you.

[werewolf-cuddles]

I miss playing Overwatch, but at the same time, i don't feel particularly inclined to return to it. I hate so many of the changes in Overwatch 2 that I'm very relucant to ever pick it up.

I hate the new user interface

I hate the redesigned costumes

I hate the new unlock system even more than the old one, and that is an achievement (Seriously, fuck Battle Passes, I hate them and I want them to die out)

I hate that they got rid of the Assault game mode entirely

I hate that they reduced the team size from 6 to 5 for no apparent reason

I hated Role Queue when they added it to the original game, and I still hate it here.

And most of all, I hate that Overwatch 2 completely replaced the original, so I can't even go back to the old version where most of this shit didn't apply. The version that I PAID FOR.

[northwest-cryptid]

honestly, completely understandable. if i may give a basic concept of my vision. consider an MMO, let's say... warcraft, because I can use it as a decent example. we take the Eastern kingdoms there, and measure it, clocks in at about 24 kilometres across. that's about the distance from my home city to the nearest one, and personally? when I hear "virtual world" that shit is way too small.

when I imagine a virtual world, I imagine it almost like an smal country in it's own, let's say for a different example, the size of florida. now consider how much server space warcraft uses, even if we estimate only a 3rd of that is the Eastern kingdoms. then we scale thar 24 Km length to... about 720 Km and you'll probably see where the sheer scale of the servers are needed. and when you've got all those servers, heat will be an issue. either one could essentially run their system through instances and try distribute the load, or you gotta find a way to deal with all that heat.

the best way I can imagine, is by reducing the energy waste of the servers, in which case my first thought was the ideal in a superconductor. if resistance is 0, efficiency is near 100% and nearly no heat is produced. alas we don't live in a perfect world, and while it's fun to think on applications for stuff like that, it's also painful to know the best we've got (in this case fibre optics and silver) isn't even close.

I can tell our visions are different, and thank you for the well wishes, I hope you can make yours a reality because like this I certainly can't.

I respect that you took what I said without hostility so I don't mind continuing this conversation.

While I don't know things like Warcraft personally; I do know a good bit about how servers work and the like. I think you're really getting caught up in the weeds so to speak. By which I mean, you're concerned about problems you don't have, stopping yourself from taking the first step because you're being prevented by imaginary problems.

If you look up EVE Online's size for example you'll find a notable quote that states: "With a total area of 11,126,487.6 Astronomical Units² (AU) — or in other words, 249 sextillion km² — the playable universe of EVE Online earns its place in the halls of greatness when it comes to sheer size." Now EVE actually only runs 3 servers, but from what I understand has plenty on the back end working to keep everything running smoothly.

In other words, what you're looking for isn't nearly as big of a deal as you may think it is. You're speaking of superconductors, heat, and resistance as if any of that honestly matters, and it just doesn't.

Data centers house literally thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of servers. Most MMORPGs run parallel instances of their game worlds 10 times over per region without any issue.

Again I really don't want to come across as being rude or looking down on you or something. That couldn't be further from my intention and I do apologize if I come across that way; it's hard for me to know what kind of tone I give off but that's not an excuse for me to be an asshole.

That being said I don't think you have an understanding of this as much as you think you do. I believe you're getting caught up on a fictional problem created by a fictional situation that you're not even dealing with yet.

I can't just let someone give up on something before they even start just because they don't have a full understanding of the actual situation at hand.

Games like FFXIV, Mabinogi, or even games like Black Desert Online, and Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky; they're all MASSIVE and yet they use tricks like instances to keep their games running smoothly while running on a singular server.

Even Warcraft, which I admittedly don't know a lot about as I don't play; can be easily looked up and you'll find that:

"Blizzard uses 20,000 systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage to power its gaming operations. WoW's infrastructure includes 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. The Blizzard network is managed by a staff of 68 people."

These aren't impossible numbers, but you're also not Blizzard. I'm not Blizzard. We're not dealing with numbers that large, we don't need to because we don't have the demand for it.

When developers like CCP Games (The developers behind EVE online) made the game in the first place, they had a few thousand people playing it and managing their servers became a real problem for them; but they also had the money and staff necessary since they were a company who was selling thousands of copies of their game; that they could afford to upgrade their servers.

CCP ran into more issues with modern tech keeping up with their demand but ultimately had the money to keep up with buying the latest greatest for their servers and staff to keep their game running.

They didn't stop themselves from attempting because of the need to run a game as large as EVE before they ever made it; they expanded the servers and game world over time through understanding current limitations and figuring out how to feasibly surpass them.

I don't say this all of this to put you down, rather I say these things because it really feels like you WANT there to be a problem.

It's easier to give up and not try when you feel like the only possible solution to your idea is entirely out of your hands. If it's an impossibility from the start, why bother right?

I used to be like that too, which is why I feel like it sounds familiar. Fear of trying and failing amounts to determining that it couldn't be done to begin with; because it feels like we're justified in giving up when the task is literally not possible.

When you say "I hope you can make yours a reality because like this I certainly can't." You're telling me you feel like you're not able to achieve what you want, despite the fact that it's entirely possible without all the fancy computers and stargates and sci fi shenanigans.

I'm not trying to speak for you, we don't know each other; you're an anon I'm just some random blogger on the internet. I can't claim to understand you and all that, so please take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, it wouldn't be wrong to necessarily say I'm projecting here; because I used to very much sound just like you.

The thing is, you're right; you can't achieve what you want. Not as you are now, not when you won't try. Because until you've created anything at all, until you have a world to put out there, you can't possibly even have to face the problem of server space or thermodynamics and shit.

So worry about what's in front of you; get out there, make mistakes, learn and grow. Open Unity, or Unreal, or whatever application you prefer and just make a small map it doesn't matter if it's good just make SOMETHING.

Take the first step.

You can call me short sighted if you want but when I think about creating a virtual world my worries are not on the problems that might happen down the line; they're on whether or not I can even get there.

A poor man worrying about what to do when he wins the lottery doesn't make any sense if he can't afford to play the lottery.

A prime example of what I mean is that, for my plan to work I need some way to link worlds to each other in VRChat while keeping the linked worlds set to private so there's only one way to access them, that way being through the hub world.

The problem here is that I'm about 90% sure if a world is set to private, it cannot have a portal linking to it in a public world; it just won't work like that.

So why am I not working on a solution to that problem? That's really simple, and it's as easy to explain as; I won't even have to deal with that problem if I can't make the worlds first!

I can't let myself get tangled up in the details of things not working exactly how I imagined they would before I even have the worlds I need to link via portals in the first place.

This is a classic example of "putting the cart before the horse"

There are a thousand different ways to go about fixing a problem, but you don't need to worry about a problem you won't ever have. That's just an excuse to not try!

I'm not saying this to point a finger at you and say you're doing something wrong, I'm saying this because I want you to consider this for yourself. I want you to take a look at yourself and really think about if those server problems and the laws of thermodynamics are stopping you.

Or is it something else?

I think you'd understand this all a lot better if you actually took the steps to try.

So here, I won't hold you to it; I won't mock you if you give up or whatever. However, whether or not you take the real first step is up to you I can't force you but it sounds like you want to, so let me try to help.

Download Unity, it's free for personal use. Let's take the first step here.

Open the Unity Hub, in the upper right you'll find a button that says "New Project" click that.

Now select whether or not you want to use 2D or 3D; I'm going with 3D because I'm going to be making a world for VRChat.

You can use whichever version of Unity you prefer.

Click Create Project in the bottom right.

My screen may look a bit different than yours because I'm using the VRChat Creator Companion which has a whole suite of plugins it adds for the sake of making a VRChat world. That being said, you should be able to follow along just fine.

(If you'd like to grab the Creator Companion and make worlds for VRChat you can get it free here: https://vcc.docs.vrchat.com/)

You should have something like this, minus the Packages/Assets that VRChat's Creator Companion adds of course

We could either create Terrain through right clicking somewhere in the hierarchy and clicking the "3D Object -> Terrain" button, or we could create a world through various assets in the asset store. No worries we'll only use free stuff. For the sake of example I'm going to be using the asset store because I find it's easier for people starting out.

To access the Asset Store we're going to click the drop down for "Window" at the top, and then select Asset Store (I have mine docked but I don't believe it will be by default).

Now in the store I'm going to search for Sci-Fi Styled Modular Pack and set the price to free. You can search for anything you'd like, but this is what I will be using.

I'm just going to click the button that says Open In Unity and add it to my project by clicking the Import button in the Package Manager that should open when clicking the Open In Unity button.

Everything should be selected by default, but if it's not; go ahead and click the All button at the top left, and then the Import button in the lower right.

Now I'm going to go into the Assets -> Sci-Fi Styled Modular Pack -> Prefabs -> Corridors and just drag the Corridor_X into my Hierarchy.

Generally speaking if you don't know how, or don't wish to edit the materials, textures, or models a Prefab or Pre-Fabricated model is the way to go.

Now I'm going to repeat this for 4 Corridor_T and 4 Corridor_L.

It should look something like this:

Obviously we don't want all our corridors to be inside each other, so let's move them into position.

We could do this using the arrows, but we could also use the Transform within the Inspector on the right.

For now, I'm going to hide the other parts by selecting them all and clicking the check mark next to their name in the Inspector to the upper right. This will just make it easier to see what I'm doing.

By clicking and dragging the blue arrow after selecting Corridor_T in the Hierarchy I'm able to see that a number around Z = 12 seems to be right for the spacing, so I will go ahead and use the Transform under the Inspector to place this part at Z = 12:

Doing this for each of the Corridors I can create a complete room this way.

Except of course by just putting the T corridor on the other side won't position it correctly for our player to walk through it, so I'll need to use the Transform or Rotation tool. In this case I'm going to use the Rotation under the Transform:

By selecting the Rotation tool I can see that the Y (or Green) axis is the one I'll want to rotate on. So I'll go ahead and set the Y rotation to -180, and the Z Position value to -12.

Once we have all our T corridors in place we can use this same system to position our L corridors in place, resulting in a small room:

Of course this is far from a completed map, hell it's far from an interesting room. So let's use some of the other parts in the prefab folder such as decorative elements and lights to make the place look nice.

We have plenty of room to work with in here but I'm just throwing something together to give an example so let's just go with some random stuff...

Okay now we're getting somewhere.

Now thanks to the VRChat Creator Companion having a lot of built in features I can go ahead and just click play to give this a go and see how it all looks in play; for base Unity you'll likely need to grab a First Person camera or controller of some kind; they're all over the Unity Asset Shop just search for First Person Controller and set the price to free:

Then just import it into your project and drop it into your hierarchy somewhere.

Now you should be able to walk around the corridor you made:

It's really that easy, and this is beginner stuff; if you are interested in this sort of thing there's a ton of tutorials on Youtube that explain how to do Terrain, textures, materials, even 3D modeling so you can make your own unique stuff instead of using stuff from the asset store.

and you know the best part? I could upload this to VRChat right now, I could just put it live and make a world. All without having to figure out the servers, or battling with the laws of thermodynamics.

You're putting up walls for yourself, stopping yourself from learning the fundamentals of the craft. Don't let yourself be held back by your imaginary fears.

Once you understand how to make a corridor you can begin to expand it into a building, once you understand how to make a building you can put that building on terrain; once you understand how to make terrain you can make entire worlds.

No server farm, or heat problem or whatever can stop you from doing that. Only YOU are stopping yourself.

You're not going to start off perfect, it might not even be good at first!

Check it out; this is the first terrain map I ever made:

Using textures from Mabinogi mind you; I didn't even make my own textures lol. The water? It's just a plane with transparency, it didn't move or anything; you couldn't swim in it.

The mountain range just gets cut off there's nothing more there, the "sand" doesn't submerge into the water smoothly at all. It's all a mess it's pretty bad, but it's SOMETHING.

So I added a skybox because I didn't know how to do that yet;

I expanded the terrain and began working on the parts I didn't like, little by little. This is the seed of a whole world I will create; it all starts here, even though this has NOTHING to do with what I eventually want to create.

Will anyone even visit my world? Does anyone need to? Who knows!

I'm not going to get caught up on the details of server farms and shit when I don't even have a world built yet, I'm not going to hold myself back from TRYING.

now I have moving water, and more space than I know what to do with, so I gotta learn how to make some buildings and decorate the place; I'm working on a fishing system that I'm having to learn how to script in UDON for.

It's not easy, and it's daunting to look at my goals and realize how far away I am. However I'm not asking myself to do everything right this second, I'm asking myself; and I'm asking you to just take the first step towards understanding how to accomplish what you want to.

If you don't actually WANT to do it, then that's fine, it's your life. However if your only reason for not trying is because of server space and thermodynamics and shit that doesn't even matter yet; I'm going to sit here and tell you that it doesn't matter and you don't need to worry about it. Don't go making excuses for yourself, you don't need to create your ideal virtual world if you don't WANT to.

But if you DO want to, just please understand that you CAN.

I'm not saying it will be easy. I'm saying it'll be DOABLE, but only if you're actually willing to TRY, and ultimately NONE OF THIS MATTER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO DO IT.

I'm not going to look down on you if you simply don't actually care.

It's entirely possible that I'm reading too much into this, maybe you just have this idea as some kind of fantastical concept but you have no real desire to make it a reality. Then that's fine! There's no shame in that, there's no problem with that. If that's the case and I've blown this out of proportion I am truly sorry.

However I say all of this because I know all too well what it feels like to want to create something, and to dream way too big way too fast; to think it's not possible without something you don't actually need, and to not even know where or how to start.

I don't want to just sit here and let someone give up on accomplishing something they genuinely want to do; all because they're worried about problems that don't ACTUALLY matter for what they want.

Now sure I get it, you likely want to do your own server hosting, you likely want to run it all yourself. I get that; but the reality of the matter is you gotta start small and build up, no one just pops into existence with a giant project and gets millions of people playing their game or exploring their world or whatever. The average person can't just buy up the server space and memory necessary for it.

However the problems you're talking about and the solutions you're proposing to fix them feel like someone talking from a Sci-Fi RP account. They're not realistic at all. You simply don't need to worry about them, and if they're truly the things holding you back then you really shouldn't let them.

Start small, start somewhere; secure funding for your project when the users who do see your work decide it's worth funding. Move on from there, hire a team; work your way up to owning a proper game company, develop the tools to make it happen.

But none of that will happen if you don't start somewhere, you know?

There's no shame in starting small, there's nothing wrong with creating something just to create it; even if it's not your million dollar idea.

If you really have your doubts, check out Scott Cawthon. Yes, THAT Scott Cawthon. Sure you likely know about FNAF, but you may or may not be aware of his entire catalogue of other works.

The guy was making games and animations nearly 10 years before ever making the original FNAF. This list doesn't even include everything he made.

What I'm saying is, if he worried about making games like FNAF when he was making bible animations he likely wouldn't have ever made FNAF OR any of his animations or other games. He likely would have just given up because the idea of making something so big it would get movies and be something people refer to as "famous" likely would have been extremely daunting.

If you start working on stuff now, you really COULD create what you want to. You could improve over the years, get better at your craft; and find ways to make your vision into a reality.

You just have to understand where to take the first step and stop focusing on problems that don't exist for you.

Anyways I've rambled on enough that I'm probably repeating myself for the fifth time already so I'll shut up and leave it at that.

Once again, I do mean it when I say I wish you the best of luck bringing your vision to life.

[ancel3]

Fun fact! Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild are ~20GB COMBINED.

20 gigabytes, for TWO incredible games, that both look beautiful and run great on the video game equivalent of a $500 pre-owned Camry.

Twenty fucking gigabytes. That's:

22.5% of DOOM Eternal (88.69GB)

25.7% of Metro Exodus (77.74GB)

27% of Death Stranding (74.31GB)

20% of Fallout 76 (95.95GB)

16.73% of Red Dead Redemption 2 (119.52GB)

35% of The Witcher 3 (57.23GB)

13 gigabytes less than Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (32.91GB)

7 times less than Borderlands 3. (138.85GB)

6 gigabytes less than Team Fortress 2, a game that came out in fucking 2007 and has received countless updates since then (26.21GB at time of writing)

I'm not one of those guys that preaches how Japan is better at everything, but like... Come on, guys. I have five fucking hard drives in my PC, and I'm struggling to make space for these games. Pokemon Violet - A game notorious for being so lazy and poorly optimized that it's embarrassing - takes up less space than Portal 2.

There's no reason for this. Literally just compress your files and give us options on what we want to download. Hell, Fallout 4 came out years ago, and it just got a 56GB patch out of nowhere. A fucking PATCH that's as big as The Witcher 3. It's the same game, but now it's 56GB heavier for people who can't or just don't want to render the new "next-gen" textures/models they're installing on our systems.

If game companies want to shift to digital media, then there should be a stronger focus on reducing file size and minimum specs as much as possible - instead, we're getting the opposite. We should be more upset about this.

[anexlomara]

TOTK doesn't really feel like a sequel.

Now don't get me wrong, it's an amazing game. Within the first 5 or so hours of playing, it shot up to my top 3 games of all time, just behind Portal 2 and Super Mario Galaxy 2. Guess I have a thing for sequels. That said, TOTK functions less like a sequel to BOTW and more like a remix, taking what BOTW laid as groundwork to change and rework into a wholly new experience.

Now TOTK as a game has its roots as DLC for BOTW, with the development team having too many ideas to put into the game as DLC, so they decided to start on a whole new game. This presents an opportunity to take what worked with BOTW and build off of it and to take some of the criticisms of it and rework those aspects, to varying degrees of success. For example, BOTW's massive open world was both a source of praise and complaint from the audience, with many praising the new direction for the series and some complaining that the world was too empty with not enough to do in the world. The development team for TOTK seems to have taken both statements to heart, effectively doubling or tripling the world size with the additions of the sky islands and the Depths, but also reworking the world to have more interesting places to explore, like the myriad of cave systems and mines. This is what many sequels attempt to do, double down on what worked and fix what didn't about the previous installment.

But TOTK doesn't just do this, it also removes aspects of the world that BOTW went to great lengths to introduce as integral to the world. The Sheikah Tribe is a major piece of the story of BOTW, with its ancient tech being the catalyst for the setting and how the player/Link interacts mechanically with the game via the Sheikah Slate. Their towers are how you acquire the game's map, their Guardians are a constant threat, and their Divine Beasts serve as the games dungeons. In TOTK, while the Sheikah Tribe exists as an entity, their technology and role in the story are massively reduced, with incredibly little of their tech remaining in the world with no explanation as to where it went. Now this is obviously to make room for the new focus on the Zonai and their technology, but without an explanation, it feels like there is a lack of context/information to what happened in between the two games.

So what do I mean by TOTK feels like a remix. Well, it's what it shares with BOTW and the changes to what they share that gives me this feeling. Take the Shrines for example, in BOTW, they are Sheikah technology rising out of the earth, as most Sheikah tech was unearthed; but in TOTK, they are now Zonai tech, falling from the sky with the coming of the sky islands, and not only that, they are in new locations, resetting the puzzles and exploration needed to find them. For another example, the powers Link acquires in TOTK are similar, but differ from the ones in BOTW. Ultra Hand is incredibly similar to BOTW's Magnesis, but allows much more freedom in with you can interact with and how. None of the other powers have good equivalents across games however, with the dev team seemingly wanting to try new ideas with how Link can interact with the world.

As said at the top of this post/essay, TOTK is an amazing game. It expands on both the lore and mechanics of BOTW and the Zelda franchise as a whole. If BOTW was a testing ground for a new way to play Zelda, TOTK is the logical next step, remixing and reworking the lore, mechanics, and world of BOTW into something wholly new yet incredibly familiar.

[leam1983]

Starfield - Impressions

Once you rip off the "No Man's Sky does it better" Band-Aid, you're left with something that's competently assembled at the barest possible level, that still packs an appreciable amount of Bethesda jank and that seriously hearkens back to BioWare's Mass Effect series, in reducing outer space to a cumbersome menu system.

Still, they've picked some good elements to steal, starting with NMS' organic focus on discovery. Planetside maps aren't gigantic, but having five or six markers with several hundred meters in-between each of them makes for an appreciable bit of real-estate. Each generated or tailored map feels like it's about the size of one of Skyrim's bespoke biomes, although you'll quickly pick up on the proc-gen aspects of it all. The same bases get repeated, the same clusters of rocks, debris and resource nodes are spaced apart with just enough randomness to break the illusion of a repeating pattern - it basically feels like No Man's Sky pared itself down and put on its best dess.

The plot has a middling start and seems a little too eager to shuttle you off into the vastness of space. Five minutes into your stint as a space miner, and you're off to bigger and better things, with a super cereal express for sure order to head to New Atlantis straightaway.

As is typical of a Bethsoft game, you can disregard this entirely and get yourself over-levelled for your meeting with Constellation's weirdly financially independent luminaries. The setup doesn't make much sense, as if Alan Quartermain could just kick your door down and issue you the Call to Adventure because you happened to find a weird nickel in your dryer's lint trap. It feels like they tried to respond to criticisms involving overly-involved intros and wanted to make sure you'd effectively be boots-on-the-ground within fifteen minutes.

Otherwise, I don't get the uproar about Alanah Pearce's findings in regards to outer space. GameBryo Creation Engine delineates and pens down player spaces by default; it really isn't surprising that space would actually be its own connection of cells linked by a menu system. It also isn't surprising that planets are basically 2D art assets and nothing more. To truly deliver on Starfield's promise, Bethsoft would have to abandon their roots, rethink their entire engine pipeline and pivot to something like UE5. I doubt that's in the cards, honestly.

As for the issue of pronouns... If anyone's biggest concern in life is the absolute fucking certainty that they receive their appropriate particulate in all facets of life, then they're not fit for public spaces to begin with. Tell me to call you Mx. and I'll call you Mx. Tell me to call you Galactic Space Waffle and I'll do exactly that. It's basic fucking respect. Getting to choose pronouns and body types really isn't an issue for me.

As for everything else, there's already a shit-ton of mods on offer.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

(Sort of urgent please? Trying to get something proposed for a game before a submission deadline.)

Is there a good reason why people could explore and have colonies on numerous galaxies and but there are still moons and planets in their OWN system still yet to be discovered or explored?

The equivalent in the real world would be like having not even discovered Pluto nor the majority of trans Neptunian objects nor the newly discovered moons of Saturn/Jupiter, but already have the technology to travel to, explore and put colonies on planets all over the Andromeda and Sombrero galaxies.

Especially without borrowing other people's technology like in Stargate.

Mod Note: Since you've marked this "urgent"  but with no actual timeline, the team is just going to throw out some thoughts, and there isn't going to be much in the way of research or further reading here. 

Ebonwing: Planets that are closer to the homeworld are always going to be easier to observe and reach, which would make the scenario you want quite unlikely–if you go with conventional space travel methods. If you have telescopes to observe celestial bodies and spaceships that you can move through space freely it’s a hard sell that people would ignore close celestial bodies and shoot for distant galaxies, but what if their technology couldn’t observe and travel freely? For instance, if they instead travel through space by teleporting, you could make up some reasons for why they can’t just teleport wherever they want. If such a method is reasonably cheap and easy to accomplish, then that reduces the need to develop actual spaceships too.

Feral: I don’t know that it would make sense for the planets and moons to be un-discovered, but possibly unexplored could work. Depending on the size of the solar system, your people might have chosen to skip over going to certain planets that didn’t make sense to them to explore. Maybe like Mercury, they’re too close to the star to be habitable so why bother?, or they’re gas giants,* or there was something else culturally that made them decide to leave it alone. 

Like, yeah, we still can’t prove whether or not Planet Nine actually exists, but by the time we were ready to venture outside the solar system, I’m guessing we would know one way or the other. At the very least it seems like it would be important to know how the orbits and gravitational effects would affect possible pathways out of the system.

*to be clear, we have set about studying Mercury, Saturn, & Neptune even if we haven’t been able to land. Learning about our solar system is part of how we learn about other solar systems

Utuabzu: Just to expand a bit on what the others have said, while it's possible to not see a planet, not noticing its effects on the orbits of other objects would be unusual for a civilisation capable of intergalactic travel. We found Neptune purely through its effect on the other planets and some maths in the 18th Century (the discoverer, incidentally, wanted to name it George). But if you don't need the planet to have been around in the system for a long time there is another option. You could use a rogue planet. There's likely no shortage of them roaming the galaxy, expelled from their systems of origin millions or billions of years ago by gravitational jostling or by a passing star.

[aira-cc]

Hello! I'm new to installing cc and have been reading a lot about polycounts and making sure they're not too high. I've noticed some of your objects are pretty high poly relative to their size. Is there a way for you to decimate the meshes like some creators do with clothes? I can't have too many high poly objects in my builds but I love your creations so I'm trying to find a middle ground. Really appreciate you including the polycounts in the descriptions by the way, it's so helpful!

Hi!! Welcome to cc world and my blog✨

The decimation process on objects does not give as successful results as on clothes and hair. While the hair and clothing remain almost the same in appearance, the process is very noticeable on the objects, especially If the item has curves. Basically, the result is not always the best aesthetically that's why I don't use decimate modifier. I reduce the polycount manually by deleting certain edges and try to do all LODs. This means that an object with 2k polys will have about 1k and 500 polys in other LODs. I thought it wouldn't be a problem as long as there was this system, but I guess there are those who play at high settings and still want to use low poly objects to speed up the game.

Personally, I'm not too fond of that sharp-edged form in very low poly but I absolutely agree with you on the object size-poly comparison. I hadn't paid much attention until you said it, but there's a big difference between a large seat and a cup having 3k polys. Problems may arise when players want to use that cup many times. I can't change my previous objects as most people will think that the objects have been updated and there will be confusion, but I can/will definitely pay attention to the next ones ☆

Sorry if the post is boring and long. I wanted to explain in detail. As I said, I will try to make objects with reduced polys while preserving the quality of the form as much as possible. Also, I am currently working on adding normal maps like specular maps. I think this will also have a good effect on the poly count. Thank you anon for your attentive feedback💛 Wishing you a wonderful day, stay well!!

[uncloseted]

I have ADHD and I also get really annoyed when people on the internet claim people are faking their ADHD. I've even seen people claim that it isn't real and people shouldn't take medication for it. The people saying these things seem to have extremely limited knowledge on ADHD. As someone who didn't get diagnosed until I was 21 this rhetoric concerns me. Not being diagnosed/medicated for so long made life so much harder and I would hate to see others not get the help they need

I think it's just a super complicated issue and the internet doesn't like nuance. Certainly, ADHD does exist- it's a neurodevelopmental disorder that has a huge impact on people's lives and well-being. And stimulant medications are the most effective treatment for people with ADHD- people with ADHD do really need their medication to be able to function. But it's also true that stimulant medications are not one-size-fits-all, and some people with ADHD don't respond well to them. It's important that people find a medication that works for them, not the one that "should" work because it works for other people.

And it's also true that some people online are incorrectly self-diagnosing themselves as having ADHD because they've noticed executive functioning issues in themselves and can't or don't want to see a medical professional about it. It's also true that there's a lot of misinformation online that leads people to incorrectly come to the conclusion that they have ADHD. That's a problem because it means those people aren't getting the treatment that they need; they're just getting an excuse they can give other people.

It's true that ADHD appears to be underdiagnosed in girls and in underprivileged communities, and it's good that people in those populations are starting to recognize they may have ADHD. But it's also true that ADHD appears to be overdiagnosed among boys in well-off communities. That's a problem because, in some communities, normal childhood behavior is being pathologized and treated as "a problem".

It's true that ADHD medication can reduce the rates of substance use disorder in people with ADHD, and so it's important that people with ADHD do find a medication that works for them. But it's also true that people without ADHD abuse ADHD medications as a party drug or a study drug, and that some people without ADHD do become addicted to stimulant medications. That's a problem, because while ADHD medication does increase life span in people with ADHD, taking it in recreational doses can lead to serious medical issues. Even in people with ADHD, ADHD medications can, rarely, cause medical complications. But it's also true that we live in a capitalist system that obligates us to work without rest, so it makes sense that some people without ADHD would want- or feel like they desperately need- that extra edge just to be able to survive, regardless of the potential long term consequences to their health.

It's true that the diagnostic process for ADHD is imprecise and complicated. It's true that getting a prescription filled for ADHD medication is currently far more complicated than any person with ADHD can actually navigate, so it needs to become easier. But it's also true that people do try to game that diagnostic process and that certain online telehealth platforms have intentionally overdiagnosed ADHD and overprescribed ADHD medications, which has, in part, caused the shortage of ADHD medications that we're in now.

I guess what I'm getting at is yes, absolutely, I want to see other people get the help that they need. I know how much getting a diagnosis and receiving treatment has changed my life, and I want that for everyone else who's struggling. But it's not so cut and dry as that. There are a lot of legitimate concerns about how ADHD gets diagnosed, treated, and how we view it culturally, and ignoring those issues isn't going to help anyone in the long run. People need to start looking at ADHD policy in an evidence-based way and to start making decisions accordingly, but that's really difficult when nuance gets drowned out.

[joelmmd]

kingdom hearts post again. dream drop distance is kind of sucking dick right now so i've been playing very little of it at a time. i might not come back to it ever so i'll just give my thoughts now the story hasn't actually gone anywhere yet, it's just teasing you with the idea that maybe it will! here are a bunch of randos from the other games isn't that crazy! pretty frustrating, i want stuff to actually happen. also, sora's more kh1 reminiscent design here really clashes with the post-2 voice and it bugs me. there are these optional story things in-between worlds (sometimes in the middle). the chronicles are nice and i appreciate it telling me what happens in the games i didn't play, but the optional cutscenes are weird. is it just so people who're only kind of engaged in the story can skip those but watch everything else? the gameplay has been sped up, which i'm not against but it was done in a weird way. feels like only the startup was reduced and the recovery of everything is still the same. combos are especially rough, the actual attacks are faster but you have to wait as long between them?? commands are back and they're good. they still work. balloon is kind of busted but that's probably for the best anyways. i just don't like how you have to fuck with the spirit system to get new ones. i don't like spirits. they really easily just get lost and stop engaging in the fight, never feels like they contributed all that much aside from a heal once or twice. also sometimes they'll teleport to catch up and it always startles me because they don't look that different from the enemies. speaking of, the enemies feel too strong here. not numbers or stats-wise, moreso their moves. so many of them have attacks with a lot of range, and you can be fighting like 7 at once, so you're just gonna get hit by stuff that was offscreen all the time. most enemies can be skipped through flowmotion though. i like having a movement system to make all the walking a little more engaging but this is kind of too far, you can just fly over everything as long as wherever you are has walls and a high enough ceiling. can't get staggered during flowmotion attacks so it's at least useful for normal encounters. kind of annoying for bosses since they don't do that much damage and you can trigger flowmotion from, like, rolling into a wall. bosses are already annoying enough, too. they're all big guys that don't get staggered by anything and most of them don't have reasonably sized windows to attack after you dodge something, so they kind of drag on. though part of that's probably just critical mode + skipping a bunch of enemies and missing out on xp talking, i wasn't doing that much damage with non-balloons. the drop system is fine? i think the timer isn't super well paced, without any modifiers you end up dropping ~90% of the way through most worlds so you go do riku's 90% and drop back to wrap up the like two fights you had left. though you get so many drop-me-nots and there's the thing that slows it down, so you can get past that annoyance pretty easily.

overall it's like on the edge of being fun. i'd probably enjoy it enough if the bosses and basic enemies were more fun to fight, but as it stands there's just not much to enjoy. i'll probably just watch the cutscenes online and play re:coded instead.

[lilyblackdrawside]

Len'en 4 - Brilliant Pagoda or Haze Castle is a game of two halves.

On one hand, it's amazing: Every character* and a whole bunch of new ones are there. There are 38 different bosses and 13 playable characters that form 5 teams of three. With each team, you can pick a Main, Sub and Support with the main contributing shot, movement, barriers and lives, Sub Flash Bomb and Bomb and Support nothing initially.

A playthrough can go down one of three general routes and there are several final stages in between by only going so much right or left.

Just with that, you've got practically three games in one - there are even three extra bosses running on the same stage selection system.

As you play the game, you accumulate a currency that allows you to unlock upgrades for your characters. With that you can gain passive effects like erasing bullets and dealing in your vicinity, having instant barrier regeneration or just starting with more lives or bombs. Each playable character has three such passive skills that modify them in some way, with some having pretty grand effects like Tsubakura gaining a bomb that pierces bomb-immunity or Kuroji dealing greatly increased damage when out of barriers and lives.

On top of that every character has a scalable upgrade that goes up to level 10 and provides more general boni like faster barrier recharge, increased Power gain, or reduced damage taken. There are some more weird things like one that passively deals damage to every enemy on screen or one to increase your shot-size or a chance to deal critical hits for 3x damage.

You can toggle all of these upgrades too if you don't want to play with them.

And on the other hand the entire game is bullshit. The enemies you face? Random. Mid-bosses? Random both in where they show up and who shows up. Stage portions? Random effects. These are the biggest bullshit. It can be benign stuff like enemies doing more damage or (anti) gravity, which slowly drags you (up) down the screen. It can also be Barrier Breakdown 1 to 4, which instantly destroys 1 to 4 of your barriers. Or Barrier Pierce, which lets enemies shoot right through any barriers you might still have after getting struck by Barrier Breakdown three times to damage your health directly. Or reversed controls, or Sudden Big Upset, which causes you to lose Power when you kill things or Bomb Lock, which prevents you from using bombs. There's also locked into Focused/Unfocused, which can just ruin your day. Also all of these effects can stack. You can get up to four at once. You could get Reversed Movement, Barrier Breakdown 4, Enemy Power Up 4, Bomb Lock and just die through little fault of your own.

Oh yeah, Barriers and Lives. Depending on who you are, you have so many Barriers that can sustain so much damage. If you manage to not take a hit for long enough (I think a minute) your current barrier will slowly recharge. If it fully recharges, you regain a full barrier, but you're now at 1 health on the next barrier, so if you get hit it's gone again. If all your barriers are gone (not like that'll ever happen though) or you're suffering from Barrier Pierce, you'll take damage to your health, which also varies by character. If you lose all your health, you lose a life. Losing a life doesn't give you your barriers back. They're basically regenerating lives.

Different enemy waves also yield different amounts of Power, so you could just get some really sucky ones and get very little to start with.

The middle path also has somewhat random bosses that can vary greatly in difficulty, depending on how good you are at certain things. I for example suck at dealing with wiggly bullets, so if Saragimaru or Shou show up I'll already be prepared to suffer.

But on the whole, I love the game. I'll complain the entire time until I hit the next boss, but I'll be having fun either way. Also you get to play as the whole Shitodo family who are just as scummy as they always are. Very funny.

Sans is there.

*yes i know.

[askagamedev]

Why do MMOs continue to be made? From everything I've seen (they require a massive constant influx of players to remain profitable, the graphics quickly become outdated, most MMOs, barring a few exceptions, shut down relatively quickly after launch) they don't seem like a smart idea. I feel like only people who can afford to make them nowadays are huge companies who can sink millions into a game that remains unprofitable for years. Is it just because of the romanticism of it all?

The reason that MMOGs continue to be made is because MMOGs are often actually quite profitable once they establish themselves. There is no real "romanticism" in building MMOGs - they are, by far, too expensive to build for the sake of being a pet project. MMOGs are a good vehicle for maintaining engagement. The social aspect of playing with many of the same friends over weeks and months provides a powerful incentive for players to continue to engage with the game. As I've said before, engagement is the most valuable metric that any game can have because it directly correlates to game revenue more than any other metric we have.

Let's examine your premises and see which ones don't hold up.

They require a massive constant influx of players to remain profitable

While this is true, there are adjustments that can be made as time passes. Profitability is a factor of both cost and revenue. As the player base naturally dwindles over time, so does the size of the team and the scope of planned future content. Thus, the cost of maintaining the game continues to scale downward with the decline of the player base, maintaining profitability. Eventually any MMOG will be placed in “maintenance mode” where no new content will be developed, but even then it can remain profitable for years as long as enough players are still willing to pay for the ongoing maintenance costs (as is the case with Ultima Online, which is approaching its 25th anniversary this year).

The graphics quickly become outdated

Cutting-edge graphics are only a selling point at launch. Many MMOGs today (WOW, LOTRO, FF14, SWTOR) are still going strong many years later despite not being the prettiest belles at the ball. Once the game gets its hooks into the player, they want to keep playing even if it isn't the prettiest game.

Most MMOs, barring a few exceptions, shut down relatively quickly after launch

The first year is where the majority of MMOGs die, primarily because they cannot grab onto a critical mass of players. The first year is also where the majority of games in general die for the exact same reason. However, if the game manages to survive its first year, the chances of a long lifespan are actually pretty good. For example, Defiance was a MMOG that was licensed and based on a Sci Fi channel cable television show that lasted for two seasons. The game launched in 2013 and didn't shut down until 2021, six years after the show had gone off the air. There are hundreds of smaller F2P MMOGs still running today because they managed to secure that critical mass of players.

I think most people don't realize that MMOGs are still a thriving genre, but have also evolved with the times. Most of them don't try the AAA big budget approach because such vehicles are somewhat obsolete. The only big AAA MMOG in the past several years I can think of was Amazon's New World Online, which had (and continues to have) its own share of problems. AAA MMOGs have evolved into more streamlined versions (a la Destiny, the Division, etc.), losing expensive systems like item trading, player housing, and so on, while retaining the social systems and retention/engagement elements. Smaller MMOGs have reduced scope and visual fidelity, instead focusing on content creation tools to save on development and maintenance costs. These gradual changes over time have changed the way MMOGs are built and maintained today. Making new MMOGs is by no means untenable.

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Friday 1/10/21 - Media Recommendations #20

Contents: Deltarune

I'd been meaning to get to this one for ages, so once again, I think to make it easier on myself, and my readers, today I am only recommending the latest videogame creation of Toby Fox. This ended up being quite an extensive article, so I split it into sections:

MY CONTEXT

OVERVIEW/PREMISE

GAMEPLAY

PRESENTATION

CONCLUSION

Deltarune (Chapter 1+2)

Toby Fox

1. MY CONTEXT

So context for my own gaming experience going into Deltarune, I have never actually played Undertale. Back when Undertale was getting big, it was only a PC game I think, and I just don't play games on PC. I probably should but yeah nah. Soon after it got popular however, I watched a comprehensive Lets Play of Undertale by Rubber Ross and Barry Kramer, and their voices for Sans and Papyrus are still to this day how I imagine those characters. Through that Lets Play, I experienced both the Pacifist and Genocide runs, and got intimately well acquainted with the characters and world Toby Fox had created, and how the actions of the player can shape how we save or ruin that world.

As a general context, I have always been a person who likes the idea of turn-based, random encounter fantasy RPGs, but the deepest I really got was Pokémon. I've been trying to change that recently, and after beating Monster Hunter Stories 2 a while back, I wanted to try more of the genre. Turn based battles are a lot more my speed than pure skill, like fighting games I've become sick of, and RPGs seem to be big on story, so when I heard the Deltarune demo had an update, I thought this is finally the time to jump into that world.

Going forward in this review, I'm gonna try and stay broad and unspecific with my descriptions, so as to not spoil. I may discuss some gameplay themes and characters, but I'm avoiding giving specifics away. I really think you need to experience all parts of the game yourself first.

Minor Spoilers for Undertale and Deltarune Ahead

2. OVERVIEW/PREMISE

Deltarune is a project of love. Pure charm and personality ooze from every aspect of the game. Dialogue is clever and snarky, and that charm even leaks into item and location flavour text. The setting and themes are fun, but with a bloodstained silver lining that is best appreciated by mature audiences. I guess I should just explain the premise?

Deltarune puts you in the shoes of a human named Kris. For unexplained reasons you live in a world of monsters and you are the only human. And by monsters, I mean curious looking critters of a variety of shapes and sizes, since, there is really nothing monstrous about them. One day at school, Kris and classmate Susie end up being transported to a whole different world where dark fountains construct monstrous subworlds, and it is up to the chosen ones, the lightners Susie, Kris and darkner (dark world native) Prince Ralsei, to seal the evils of this dark alternate world.

Deltarune is still a work in progress, and as the subtitle of this article suggests, 2 Chapters of a possible 7(?) have been released, and it is unknown at the time of writing if the rest will come out when the game is done, or as more standalone chapters.

3. GAMEPLAY

Deltarune borrows a lot of theming and game loop premise from its parent game Undertale. The tag line of Undertale was: the RPG where noone has to die. This is because the encounter based battle system is built on two courses of action to take. You may FIGHT enemies and reduce their HP to zero, or you may ACT, and talk the enemy into leaving the battle. Deltarune is built on this same system, but with extra layers. Kris is the stand in for the Undertale MC, who has the options to FIGHT, ACT, ITEM, SPARE, or GUARD. Most of those options were in Undertale too, but Guarding is a new addition where you earn Tension Points, or TP, for not engaging the enemy at all.

This TP is used for extra powerful ACT actions, or for special moves of the other party members. This is the main big difference in gameplay loop. Since the player controls a party now rather than just one person, each party member can specialise in different action types. Kris's ACT can incorporate input from other party members; Susie for toughness and Ralsei for softness, in general. Susie is the powerhouse, and if you chose the violent route, she does more damage. Ralsei is the Mage, and can heal allies, as well as use magic to resolve fights peacefully. Those extra abilities use TP.

In most turn based RPGs, there is a back and forth, where the player chooses actions, and sometimes there is a timing aspect to how well those actions perform, and then there's the enemy's turn, where most of the time you just have to wait and let it happen. Undertale and Deltarune have this truly unique system where the soul of the party members, represented by a heart, is directly controlled on the enemy's turn. It's a mini game unique to every enemy type, where you must move the heart around to dodge their attacks, and how good you dodge will decide whether you take a lot of damage, or even none at all. Deltarune adds an extra layer onto this, where if you make the dodge closer, so that the enemy only JUST misses, you earn TP, and open up more options for your next turn. I found this extra detail really endearing, and I made a lot more riskier moves than if there was no incentive to.

I probably mentioned it above, but just to close out this section, the option to either ACT or FIGHT opens up two types of play. Chapter 1, being a sort of intro part, does not differentiate, but the distinction becomes important later. ACTing to SPARE an enemy earns you money, and in Chapter 2, will lead to befriending monsters. FIGHTing will also earn you EXP in Chapter 2, making your options to hurt enemies more powerful. In Undertale, this difference in playstyle actually changed the ending in real time, and from what we know of Deltarune, it is likely going to be the same case.

4. PRESENTATION

Undertale had this unique visual charm to it that may have been a limitation of its Independent Development, but it was probably also a stylistic choice. Deltarune builds on the same type of artstyle, adorable pixel sprite graphics that bring a lot more colour and depth than its predecessor.

Many, but not all characters have little character portraits in their textboxes, and they change expressions to match the situation, and its so cute.

Character and enemy design are so top-notch. A team of designers have been brought on this time, and every one of them have brought gold to the table. Every random battle encounter is dripping with personality, as you learn how best to sweet talk your way out of battle, or how to best destroy them. Most recurring NPCs are lovable, and those who you hate, you love to hate. Dialogue is witty and hilarious, and the writing is fun.

The chiptune style soundtrack is phenomenal. Although I think Undertale's common enemy battle them was more memorable, that may just be that I have become more familiar with it. All character and boss battle themes are so catchy and energetic. Toby Fox is a master of high energy... fun music. It gets stuck in your head, and your brain bounces around at high velocity.

5. CONCLUSION

Ok so this review is already like 3 times longer than a normal Media Recommendation Article, and like 5 times longer than I planned it to be for this one game, so I should probably wrap it up here. Deltarune is a game experience I put off playing for way too long, and now I can't hold my excitement for when the next part comes out. And important to keep in mind, it is essentially a demo, in that it is just a taste of what's to come, but it is a damn meaty demo that will keep you engaged for many hours.

Chapters 1 and 2 are packaged together as a free game on most game platforms at this point, so there's nothing really stopping you from giving it a try. I don't usually rate my recommendations, but since I wrote this more like a review, I might as well...

Deltarune Chapter 1+2: 9/10

Please play it!