Nuke

leave forward porting of mods up to modders. then you can just download the mods you want.

i think there is a fine line between replayability, and introducing artificially gruelling grind so you can claim higher value over other games. games like kerbal and minecraft certainly have a lot of replayability, but if you are a completionist you can get to the end of the game in a sane amount of time. if it takes you months or years to get to the end of the game, you are likely to burn our before experiencing everything the game has to offer, and therefore the games have less value per time played.

what about an inner hydrogen bag inside a helium bag. helium would act as a buffer gas to the hydrogen (which is going to leak out through any material) and occupy a shell around the lifting bag. if a high enough hydrogen concentration is detected in the helium buffer, just vent it through a solenoid valve at the top of the buffer bag (if the whole thing is spinning this might get difficult and might require multiple valves) and replace it with compressed helium from a tank somewhere.

the most metal beatles song ever.

old timey game design had its merits. with regards to elite dangerous, i think it has more or less the same problems as elite 2 and ffe. granted i was only able to play it for an hour or two before i gave up. needless to say after hours mining metals, on landing i got the landing gear mixed up with jettison cargo, not only did i lose several hours of work i got a fine on top of it. i gave ffe several days, and i hadn't teched up in any meaningful way. all these games had a huge problem with grind. its at least an order of magnitude worse than the original elite. this doesn't have anything to do with the flight mechanics. in the original elite i could have a ship turn a sizable profit in a few runs and you would be fast on your way to having a ship that could explore other avenues of play. subsequent games i had to scrape by on hair thin margins. games like this really need a grind slider in the difficulty section, kerbal has one, and its nice to be able to shut down the grind on subsequent playthroughs to save time. games should not feel like work. the op's point about 'respect for time' is highly valid. the old standard of 40-60 hours of gameplay which was a common rule of thumb in 90s games. its a good rule because it suits both developers and players alike. if you give a gamer a game that never ends, they arent going to have time to play new games and that hurts sales and the industry as a whole. its also bad for the gamer because you burn out long before experiencing everything the game has to offer. the developer can get around their half of the problem by going f2p to make up for fewer titles by more nickel and dime payments. f2p really isnt new. in the 90s we had shareware and demos, it was so ubiquitous that i think 75% of my cd collection was purchased because i liked the demo/shareware version. dlc isnt new either, in that we had official (and in some cases 3rd party) expansion packs filling the same role. what f2p usually does differently is intentionally make games grindy to improve the bottom line at the expense of the gamer. its gone from number of games you buy to how long you play our game. after my first experience with f2p (mechwarrior online, which i still play out of sunk cost fallacy) i have decided that i will not play any more f2p games. another huge problems modern games have is the lack of diversity. too many established genres and conformity to other games. adoption of systems that have become standard issue (achievements for example) which can be exploited to cover up bad/lazy core game mechanics. abundant asset reuse and use of stock assets make games look the same. games on a handful of game engines that all seem to share a similar look and feel to other sibling games on the same engine. niche genres are not taken seriously at all, and if you are a fan of those you are lucky you get a 3rd rate f2p or maybe an indie game. one final problem id like to touch on is the politicising of games, which i wont go into in any detail because of this forum's policy on the subject. like all media games have become another mouthpiece for various forms of ideological extremists. this has been a problem with tv and movies too, but its exceptionally alarming in games because of the appeal of younger audiences. id like to name some examples but im leaving them out because i dont want to start a forum war.

just got back from ad astra. it was a resounding meh. its sort of like how 2001 would have turned out without kubrick directing. i mean it had great visuals, but the plot was seriously lacking. slow pace and not as much action as the trailers would have you believe. little attempt at any kind of world building or character development. plot doesn't make sense at all.

which people? certainly not all of them. i could count the games i have enjoyed from the last decade on one hand (present company included). previous decade maybe 3 times that. golden era 90s games, i got a cd case full of excellent games from that period. obligatory get off my lawn. the point was back in ye olde golden age of gaming, games had to be in a much better state at release. internet was slow if you had it at all and so the games needed to run well right out of the box. now they will dump an alpha game on you, call it a beta, and release a zero day patch.

just remember 1995 buggy < 2019 buggy. i dont think ive ever encountered a game-killing bug with ffe. buy a game today and your lucky if the damn thing even works.

close to the pad like that it hasn't picked up enough acceleration yet to stretch out the tail. its still heavy and hasn't picked up much speed. when the first stage starts running on fumes and acceleration peaks, thats when the tail stretches out. ive had rockets in kerbal jump up to 5 or 6 gs before the tank goes dry. of course i like to launch with an oversize first stage, which is pretty much the saturn v in a nutshell.

good, this will make ion engines more fun.

a delay in a video game? how is this even news? seems like sop in the industry.

i remember one time i was on the phoenix juneau run. i hit up the airport pub in seattle and had several guinesses. i spent the next four hours needing to pee whilst the turbulence was so bad we couldn't used the lavatories. worst flight ever. fortunately i dont remember any of it. also dont fly through juneau, the way the mountains are shaped around there its always bad, has a way of funneling wind places it shouldn't go.

15 liters is plenty of room thanks to mini-itx mobo,. m.2 drives and sfx power supplies. i almost dropped $200 on a dan case a4-sfx which is only 7.2 liters. of course i wouldn't build under 12 liters with air cooling, and water cooling is bloody expensive. the mods ive done are pretty effective. the computer doubles as a space heater now.

c is what i started with. its good for learning the fundamentals. functions structures and pointers oh my.

lua is pretty straightforward though i think its really limited in terms of available libraries (lua calls them modules). there are a few good ones but most are really out of date. this limits its usefulness as a standalone language, so its mostly used as an extension to an application written in an entirely different language (which is why its popular for use in games). python is extremely popular but its such an oddball language that i just cant make sense of it.id rather use c++ myself.

got that new rtx2070 super mini installed finally, after 2 days dremeling my elite 110 case. more to improve airflow than anything. i used 2/3s of a container of cut off wheels and destroyed a carbide drill bit to do it. drive mount bulkhead had to come out to clear the intakes on the new gpu. i also added dual fans to the other side of the case using a 3d printed mounting solution of my own design. though it does have an issue where the outer shell wont slide on in the usual way due to an unforeseen clearance issue. this literally involved using a flat edge screw driver to bend the flap upward which allows me to flex it to get it into place. installing the card itself was also kind of tricky, no matter what angle i tried to insert it, just wouldn't go in. what i did was probably the most unorthodox video card installation i have ever done. i had to remove the mounting bracket from the video card, and install it in the case. then manuver the card into position to line it up with the slot while simultanously ligning the ports with the holes in the bracket. once the card was in then i had to go through the trouble of putting the screws back into the bracket after the card was installed. this of course required me to take everything out of the case again and drill 2 holes in the structural bits so i could put my screw driver in to drive said screws (which is where i broke my carbide as it wouldn't fit in the drill press and i had to free hand it). while i was in there i dropped in another nvme drive, this time 1tb, to replace the old sata m.2 drive i was using. cabling was not a big issue, i thought id have to make a new gpu power cable, but it turns out the psu came with a spare. there was much swearing and yelling involved in the process and i think 2 of the cats are now angry with me.

hey i only know what my compiler (maybe it was visual studio idk) told me. this is why its good practice to print(sizeof((type) your types so you know for sure what you are dealing with. sometimes its not what you expect. sometimes you want a smaller type as a storage format, like to make file size smaller, so it doesnt make much sense to make all the types the same size. but again check your compiler for shenanigans.

that 8 byte integer operation is functionally no different than a 64 bit int operation. its simply going to mask and copy when moving the data in and out of the register. there are probably single instructions for that lurking in the bowels of the instruction set. the slowdowns come when you need a bigger data type than will fit in the register and you have to break it down into 2 ops. with doubles its the same deal. actually last time i checked in gcc sizeof(double) == sizeof(float). with reguards to the vector instructions, the correct answer is that its bloody complicated. x86 is especially messy. now if you compare float to fixed point maths, you definitely lose performance with ints. sure you can say do your math in milimeters instead of meters for example, that works fine. i do that a lot on lesser platforms. but int is not a float and you will have limitations if you try to use it as such. you can do large fixed point operations to do what float can do, but the extra shifts and extra space (a multiply needs 2x the space of the data type, and a divide needs 4x, a 64 bit divide (say 32.32) requires a 256 bit intermediary) resulting in additional reg ops. in this case float is faster. using float when an integer will do on the other hand is bad practice because in that case the int math is faster.

i fathom to guess that the old programmer in questione never used a modern cpu or gpu. floating point is actually faster than int math these days, at least on x86-64 and possibly arm. ive used fixed point math on microcontrollers, gone out of my way in avoiding divide instructions, using simple bit shifts to divide by multiples of 2. on avrs hard multiply is available but its one of the 2-cycle instructions. even then if you can shift, shift. much of the slowness in the fpu isnt the fpu itself but the register ops needed to feed it and recover the result, which the move to 64 bit has effectively halved (the x87 instruction set can handle 80-bit float, but even on 64 you need 2 extra reg ops per operation). piplining is also a thing.

when the sun goes down and desalinated water production tapers off, the brine dumped into the system will want to work its way back to the ocean. how long this takes will depend on the length of the tunnels. so it would have some energy storage capability. i dont expect it to be huge and dependant on the quantity of waste brine produced. you also are going to need to have to store a lot of desalinated water somewhere. pump it to an uphill tank in the day time when your solar thermal plant is operating, and run it downhill through a turbine at night. between these storage sources and the solar thermal plant, you have enough infrastructure for a rural farming settlement.

im curious if the change in salinity is enough to provide the pumping action. assuming the intake is below sea level and output significantly deeper. assuming at each tap the salinity will increase and increase the unit mass of the water. so long as the salinity gradient in the system is steeper than that of the ocean, you will see a positive flow rate. you might even be able to generate power from the flow, though this power is a secondary product, you need the surface industry to ramp up the salinity which powers the whole thing.

presuming you do this in the desert, where its solar thermal is most optimal, you can run a desalination plant purely on solar power. you can therefor support food production in places where it would have otherwise been impossible.

there is that theoretical island of stability. though manufacturing those elements is going to be very hard and rather dubious as you need to put more energy in than you can get out of them if you are using them for reactor fuel amd compact nuclear weapons. unless there is an as of yet unforeseen application of those elements.

i think that if a ship has an anti gravity device of some sorts, it would produce a field of null gravity which would simply ignore gravity for the ship and everyone on it. a centrifuge would still be possible in this situation as its not real gravity. this is kind of boring though. the other possibility is that your ship creates a field which cancels out other gravity sources by providing equal and opposite gravity. thus the ship itself would have equivalent to earth gravity but as a repulsive force. in this configuration you could simply make a spherical ship, stick the gravity field generator in the middle and have earth like gravity at the hull. you couldn't use this as a direct means of propulsion as you can only create a positive or negative gravity field in various magnitudes and it would be spherical radiating outward from the emitter in all directions. you still need to be within strong enough of a gravity field to push off of. you could use it to amplify or invert the effects of gravity assists though, and since gravity is everywhere, travel would sort of be like hot air ballooning or sailing.

im gonna need more charcoal. were having some aliens over for dinner.