bernds74 (u/bernds74)

bernds74 commented on Microsoft makes Zork open-source opensource.microsoft.com/... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

sigmonsays · a month ago

bummer > The code relies on old internal Infocom toolchains (ZILCH compiler, WATFOR, > mainframe environment) that are not open and likely not preserved.

bernds74 · a month ago

There's this: https://www.ifwiki.org/ZILF https://zilf.io/

Although I haven't played with it and can't tell you whether it can compile the open source Zork.

bernds74 commented on When O3 is 2x slower than O2 cat-solstice.github.io/te... · Posted by u/keyle

Mond_ · 2 months ago

This point has been litigated to death. Read this here: https://matklad.github.io/2023/01/26/rusts-ugly-syntax.html

Almost everything that people think is ugly about Rust's syntax exists for very specific reasons. Most of the time, imo Rust made a good decision, and is just making something explicit.

Some things take time to get used to (e.g. if let), but for most people that's less an issue of syntax, and more an issue of not understanding a powerful feature (e.g. pattern matching deconstructions).

bernds74 · 2 months ago

"if let" just breaks my brain, it feels backwards to me and takes me a minute each time to work out what's going on. In 40 years of programming I've never seen a syntactic construct that I found less intuitive. And it would probably be easily fixable, if it was more along the lines of "if x matches Some(let z)".

bernds74 commented on The elegance of movement in Silksong theahura.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/theahura

pharrington · 3 months ago

Nope! Alot of people just really love the game. I'm one of them! I only heard about the game after its release, and the first time I played it was in during the end of 2017. The only expectations I had for it were that it was a difficult exploration game. What captivated me was the music, the level design, getting lost before realizing what exploration options were available to me - I could go on forever about the game.

bernds74 · 3 months ago

Same here. Hollow Knight was simply wonderful - the graphics, the music, the characters, the boss fight designs, the melancholic feeling of the world. It's hard to say whether it was my best gaming experience ever because there's stiff competition, but it's definitely in the nominees. And I only heard about it way after the Kickstarter campaign.

bernds74 commented on The elegance of movement in Silksong theahura.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/theahura

johnnyanmac · 3 months ago

Is it really that bad? The beginning definitely ramps things up, but I don't think anyone who beat Hollow knight would call Silksong "punitive", at least not for the 10 hours I've played so far. The area I struggled in the most was clearly one I wasn't "supposed" to go into yet, but otherwise the difficulty curve is only slightly steeper than HK's early game.

Some discourse makes it sound like we're thrown 20 hours into HK at the beginning of Silksong. I know I'm biased as someone who beat 100% of Hollow Knight (granted, there's 112% of completion, so I did not in fact beat ALL the content), since I've played more HK than average.

bernds74 · 3 months ago

It is that bad, at least for me. I enjoyed the first 8 hours of Silksong, but it turned very quickly after that because the punishments were just completely outweighing the rewards. No health upgrade in that time, no meaningful combat upgrade, and just an endless amount of bullshit.

Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.

10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).

bernds74 commented on The elegance of movement in Silksong theahura.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/theahura

zeta0134 · 3 months ago

Silksong starts very difficult compared to Hollow Knight, largely because there are many early foes that will deal 2 masks of damage. Those sorts of big attacks were generally reserved for mid to late bosses in Hollow Knight, and it caught even skilled players off guard. Hornet has a lot of mobility though, and a much easier time dodging out of the way, so once you adapt to her playstyle (be patient, dodge, and punish only when you know it's safe) the difficulty settles down and the game feels pretty fair.

As usual, you're gaining all sorts of tools and abilities along the way, and a few areas you can technically access early are best saved for later, when you have better gear. Some players aren't super thrilled with arena challenges, which this game has more of: suddenly 3-4 enemies in a small room all at once. I enjoy the meta challenge though: which tools can thin the crowd? Which minions should I focus to make the rest of the group manageable? If I can avoid taking damage, I can cast spells to thin the crowd much more effectively, etc etc.

bernds74 · 3 months ago

With everything doing 2 points of damage, including environmental hazards, the player is at effectively 2.5 hitpoints for a large majority of Act 1, as opposed to 5 in Hollow Knight. This changes the feeling of the game from "oh, a challenge, let's see what will happen and I'll learn" to "shit, a new room, I don't want to explore because I'll just get killed, where was the last bench, can I even get back here?"

bernds74 commented on SpaceX Starship 36 Anomaly twitter.com/NASASpaceflig... · Posted by u/Ankaios

zx8080 · 6 months ago

Why is this called "anomaly"? It's "exploded".

bernds74 · 6 months ago

It was slightly more fiery than a mere "observation", hence "anomaly".

bernds74 commented on Medieval Africans had a unique process for purifying gold with glass (2019) atlasobscura.com/articles... · Posted by u/mooreds

teleforce · 6 months ago

Nobody really know for sure to be honest but he's most probably one of the top ten.

The linked BBC article in the HN post has the list for top 10 richest man in history with Mansa Musa at the very top but Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor who's the owner of Taj Mahal is not even in the list [1].

The 10 richest men of all time:

1) Mansa Musa (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable

2) Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD, Roman emperor) $4.6tn (£3.5tn)

3) Zhao Xu (1048-1085, emperor Shenzong of Song in China) wealth incalculable

4) Akbar I (1542-1605, emperor of India's Mughal dynasty) wealth incalculable

5) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, Scottish-American industrialist) $372bn

6) John D Rockefeller (1839-1937) American business magnate) $341bn

7) Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (1868-1918, Tsar of Russia) $300bn

8) Mir Osman Ali Khan (1886-1967, Indian royal) $230bn

9) William The Conqueror (1028-1087) $229.5bn

10) Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, long-time ruler of Libya) $200bn

[1] Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458

bernds74 · 6 months ago

Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than he was.

bernds74 commented on Planetfall somethingaboutmaps.wordpr... · Posted by u/milliams

yojo · 7 months ago

I thought the same. There are a ton of nerds (I count myself among them) who loved this game in its day and would happily take a crack at programmatically extracting these data points.

bernds74 · 7 months ago

Perhaps this is a good place to mention that someone is working on remaking the SMAC engine, the project is called "glsmac" on github. Unit graphics seem to be one of the major sticking points since the game used some kind of ancient forgotten voxel format.

bernds74 commented on Planetfall somethingaboutmaps.wordpr... · Posted by u/milliams

glimshe · 7 months ago

I was also here for Infocom! Will the knowledge of the old classics die with us?

bernds74 · 7 months ago

For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...

bernds74 commented on Planetfall somethingaboutmaps.wordpr... · Posted by u/milliams

bernds74 · 7 months ago

Well, clicked on it thinking it might be about an old favourite Infocom game, but apparently it appears to be about an old favourite Firaxis game...

Are you the author of the web site? Please make sure the PgDn key works for scrolling through the page. At the moment it switches images which are just barely on the screen.