Rentlar

@[email protected]

beehaw account for lemmy.ca/u/rentlar

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Rentlar,

Some countries have a blank media fee on writable casettes, discs and hard drives that are paid to music and movie studios for this purpose.

Rentlar,

Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, I’ve read NFOs that say “buy the game, we did too”.

People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.

Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.

Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.

I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many of which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.

Sure, the opportunity cost from piracy’s “lost sales” to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If it’s not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesn’t see that money anyway vs. pirating it.

Rentlar,

You make a decent point, but the disconnect between people paying for content and the money going to the people who contributed effort to it is getting wider and wider.

Popular shows that people subscribed for get axed after 1 season or moved to another service. All the work people did for Warner Brothers’ Batgirl gets thrown in the trash so that WB can get a tax write-off, before any movie watcher can even give a cent to them in support.

The point is big studios make so much year after year that pirating their stuff doesn’t make a dent in whether the people they hire get paid accordingly.

Rentlar,

Official Blizzard, idk if you’ve played just the original basegame or the Brood War expansion. There is Starcraft Remastered, which has updated graphics and usability improvements but doesn’t add much other than that over the original.

An open source Brood War engine seems to exist but development appears to have stalled.

For SC2 the coop missions and the custom games are imo the most fun to be had in that game.

In terms of RTS genre, BAR is an epic scale free and open source RTS that feels like a distant cousin, but doesn’t have the deep lore that Starcraft has yet.

I’d also recently caught word from a fellow Lemming about a new game in development called Stormgate, worked on by some ex-SC/WC devs under a new studio. Gameplay has a very similar look to the former two.

Rentlar, (edited )

I did an EU Rail pass trip (same as Interrail but for people outside EU), because I love taking the train. Visited 9 countries in 3 weeks, spending 120 hours of my trip on a train or transferring. I had a lot of fun.

Every train system is a little different, fare structure is a bit different here and there. In Germany it’s easy to get around without paying extra, in France you’ll have to pay extra often. Italy it’s a small fee but you have to pay it for every reservation.

You can get used to sleeping on a train, and if you’re young enough then some NightJet 3 seater coach cabins aren’t too bad. But be careful of overdoing it; at the end of the 3 weeks I was so tired I took the wrong train from København, Denmark and ended up in Nykøbing Falster at 2AM.

Wherever you go, be mindful that cost of staying varies wildly too, especially if you’re coming from Romania. Switzerland was expensive as hell for a young and broke traveler like me.

Including the plane ticket, rail ticket and reservation fees, hostel fees, food, beer and a couple souvenirs, I spent 4000 CAD over the 3 weeks, which works out to 200 CAD a day. This was in late spring 2022.

Be aware of the weather of where you’re visiting, this is true of any international trip but if you will be travelling far across various European climates it’s extra important to remember.

Rentlar,

Wishing you a speedy recovery.

Last weekend I built a new PC which I collected parts over 6 months when I could afford them, and today I replaced all my burnt out light bulbs! My room is a lot brighter now!

sadnessstress, to gaming
@sadnessstress@mastodon.social avatar

@gaming Playing Video games can adjust my mood so much that I might forget my sorrows.

Rentlar,

Good games give me the same feeling as reading a good fictional novel: I get transported into the universe, following the character or whatever action is unfolding.

More generally, games give the player a goal to achieve, whether that’s winning over others, cooperating with others, completing a campaign, collecting a bunch of goodies (or all the goodies), relaxing and enjoying scenery, crafting min-maxed playthroughs, or trying over and over again to beat a level.

Being focused on this goal can help keep your mind off of whatever is troubling you in the present.

Rentlar,

I don’t know how likely it is (seems unlikely as it was coordinated until Monday), but if they can maintain strikes through to Christmas, then it would have a major effect. People ordering a week before will not get it in time.

Rentlar,

エアーステーション

Airstation

Rentlar,

That’s a great mindset to have. Life kicks everyone in the ass at certain points, but the will to continue forward has to come from you.

I raise my glass of milk to you and your new life.

Rentlar,

On vacation from work for a few days… really needed it (if you can see my IP you’d know where at).

Rentlar,

Land Shrimp/Forest Shrimp. That’s a new one for me.

Rentlar,

I wonder if it will be anything like the Rogers outage in Canada. A bad software maintenance update made their infrastructure malfunction and so many people were offline from a few days to a week.

Rentlar,

Good luck to Mr. Musk, the bank ain’t gonna give up my money without a fight.

Rentlar,

I’ll start, having grown a city to 40k, it’s low-medium quality and hovering at 20fps but at least it’s consistent. I don’t get huge amounts of stuttering unless I swap tabs from the game which I have to change my resolution up and down to fix. I’ve been having fun with it despite that and I’m looking forward to a smoother prettier experience later.

Traffic AI is way better, the Industries are much better integrated and freight rail being managed by the player makes it way easier to deal with because external trains aren’t clogging your lines and trucks aren’t in a long queue waiting to enter the station. I like that some citizens like to jaywalk more than others.

I still can’t figure out how to flip one way street directions. I’d like the destination path view of a person or vehicle again. I’d like to be able to assign a stop sign to only two of the four directions of an intersection.

I wish for a way to capture 30-60 seconds of a simulation to go forward and backwards in Photo mode.

Rentlar,

I agree with the majority of your points. It does feel a little bit early access and the stop sign thing was a pain point.

I’ll just offer a counterpoint to your comment of Industry, Park, University district. Although the latter two don’t have much besides individual buildings to place, Industries feel way better integrated in 2 than 1. In C:S1 you had generic and specialized industry zoning which was entirely separate from the Industry district. This sort of zoning made things brought by DLC feel tacked on. We might see DLC for C:S2 work the same way but there’s an opportunity to integrate it more fully with base Cities Skylines systems, like satellite campuses and sports arenas being an “upgrade” for a college for example.

Rentlar,

Definitely easier to manage new/remote developments in this game. Government subsidies are also a nice hand-hold but I have no idea how it’s calculated. Trains in C:S1 are super unprofitable, government investment makes it work well. (I’ve gotten subways can be profitable in C:S1 after lots of work).

I wouldn’t mind the terrain overlays if it looked clearer with it selected, for some reason it was hard to use, especially at night.

Rentlar,

Laptop with 1660ti Gpu and Ryzen 7 4800H Cpu. I have most of the visual effects off but high LoD

Rentlar,

I know I could stream/video edit, but more I’m thinking about setting up a short video within the game. For example, following a train pulling into a station but you want to get the angle and position just right or from multiple angles. Currently the simulation can be slowed or stopped but every time you play the thing the simulation only moves forward rather than returning to the previous state.

Rentlar,

Eh, I wouldn’t disparage the parent commentor for giving the release-day version an earnest try. Some people will be okay with the game in the state it’s in right now, some won’t, and that’s fine.

I think they also would agree they expect it to get better with another 6 months of active development, especially preparing for console release.

Rentlar,

Thank you!!!

Rentlar,

Yep to me it feels like Industries and Mass Transit DLC-like content from 1 was brought in and better integrated with the C:S2 basegame.

Rentlar,

It’s on PC Xbox GamePass only. Console release is delayed for sometime, presumably because it doesn’t perform well enough on them yet.

Rentlar,

I won’t disagree with your stance, but I have just one question…

In which currency are you getting $100 for the basegame? Canada it’s $70 (rounding up), but pre-release it was C$60, USD it’s $50, in NZD it’s $80. The deluxe version isn’t worth it at all, you basically get the Golden Gate Bridge and the promise of a few assets and a DLC over the next year… for double the price.

Rentlar,

Yeah, it’s definitely not perfect at release… I tell myself that Cities Skylines wasn’t either in 2013 especially before Mass transit and other DLCs. I’m hoping the incremental performance improvements will keep coming.

My city is at 90k now and it’s harder to play, sitting at about 10fps… Might be time to start a new city at 100k.

Rentlar,

It’s OK, your screen must have been upside down when you were looking at the Steam page… :)

Rentlar,

Interesting discovery! I’d bet oil and petrochemical companies would be all over funding and trying to commercialize this research, because it means we wouldn’t need to fully “wean off plastics”…

Rentlar,

$5/hr of playtime to account for hours I may enjoy and not enjoy as much. That puts it on par with a cheap night out.

My favourite games are $0.02-$0.50/hour of play time.

Rentlar,

I agree that it’s probably hard for dunkey to continue his schtick when he is starting to raise a kid. A review for a game trying to just maintain rhyming feels a little forced.

I can only laugh imagining Dunkey’s child playing League of Legends in front of him.

Rentlar,

I use it sometimes to find out which path is estimated to be the fastest if I know multiple ways there.

Without GPS I know how to get there but I’d tend to pick a way and stick with it, which might cause me to get there slower due to traffic or a roadblock.

One time when a major cellular carrier went completely offline which rendered many people’s phone navigators useless, I found it was busier than normal on the main highway. I suspected it was because people all took the familiar highway route instead of via local streets when navigating home that day.

Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release.

I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...

Rentlar,

If I wanted a mature, well-performing city-building game experience I’ll play Cities: Skylines 1.

From the reviews on that page, it sounds like Colossal Order delivered on the features it promised, but has lots of performance optimization left to do. By the sounds of it, on my laptop I’ll probably get 20fps and occasional stuttering on my gaming laptop by 10k population. I will see whether it is playable for my standards once it officially releases. I’d probably expect many game updates addressing performance and bugs in the first 6 months of release.

The demand and happiness mechanics are fundamentally different so it’s important not to try to play it like CS1 and expect the same results.

I’ve been looking forward to this game for months. Can’t wait for Tuesday, I’m theirs to disappoint.

E: corrected developer

Grayjay is not Open Source (hiphish.github.io)

Today FUTO released an application called Grayjay for Android-based mobile phones. Louis Rossmann introduced the application in a video (YouTube link). Grayjay as an application is very promising, but there is one point I take issue with: Grayjay is not an Open Source application. In the video Louis explains his reason behind...

Rentlar,

It’s non-free, it’s non-libre, but it does pass the bar of open source software. The OSI, EFF, RMS or whoever don’t have to say it is in order for it to be true.

You can distribute it but there are limitations on it, you can make a fork of Grayjay that is free to use, review, re-distribute and add parts to it adhering to other open source licenses from whence they were developed as long as it’s non-commercial, and doesn’t make any representations on behalf of FUTO or Rossman, essentially.

Rentlar,

I’ll do my part to promote Mastodon every time this happens.

Rentlar,

Talk about bad geopolitical takes. I had to endure a hell of a lot this last weekend at the (Canadian) Thanksgiving dinner table.

Rentlar,

🤷‍♀️

Rentlar,

I agree with your point overall in terms of AI not actually learning (I’d describe it as optimizing).

However, I will say that inferring from what is not said is a tricky one to apply generally, which you do in your reply by jumping to conclusions as follows:

The fact that they refused to reply hints that the reply would be against their best interests, either lying in a liable way or saying the truth and potentially ruining their investment.

This is dangerous, can be used disingenuously and I discourage using it in our discourse.

Rentlar,

Getting the money from being paid to influence for Dubai is probably pretty cool for them.

Rentlar,

They would want full control over the software and enforce their vision of having you pay forever to lease their shit.

Rentlar,

This is right! There’s a large group of artists that are making a living not by making things that use creative thought and artistic vision but for the soul-sucking sake of profitability. Think promotional flyer design, ad video filming, stock images and footage for corporate use.

These are the first places that AI will come for before any actual storylines/narratives that would require creativity can be consistently generate. So the bulk of what AI is replacing is the boring regurgitation work before the actual creative work.

Therefore, what’s really preventing creatives from pursuing what they love is not AI mimicking their work, but a society that rewards mindless profit-making bullshit than creativity.

Rentlar,

Two consecutive 4-day work weeks for people in BC, Canada. Our Thanksgiving is next week, very much looking forward to it.

Rentlar,

you could call it an indie game fad, echoing others, I dunno about “bubble”.

Rentlar,

Excellent work compiling this as always.

Great to see the expenses are stable and the project has more than a year’s worth of funding to spare.

‘Call of Duty’ Doesn’t Just Depict Bad History—It’s Pro-War Propaganda (progressive.org)

I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning...

Rentlar,

Duty Calls is the best game in the series

Rentlar, (edited )

The “Display Name” field is where you can set it to your user + pronouns. I changed mine here to show you as an example. Using Jerboa btw.

There may be a character length limit to a Display Name which is what is preventing you from appending yours to your username.

Rentlar,

Glad I could help you out.

Rentlar,

That’s a neat fact!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • KamenRider
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • All magazines
    •