Readit NewsI'm actually of the opinion, that blue-green colors like teal or turquoise are both green and blue at the same time. Basically a mixture.
Having to pick just exclusively one - blue OR green - for such colors just feels, wrong and arbitrary?
You could also make a website that shows various shades of purple - and ask people is it blue or red? Well, both! Purple is a mixture of both blue and red. Why treat teal differently than purple?
hooby commented on Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009) raphkoster.com/2009/01/08... · Posted by u/fanf2
I find this hard to parse: link bit rot due to its age, there's some likely tongue-in-cheek references to himself, the layers of people and companies, UO mythology...
The answer to the question in the title, and at the end, seems to be yes! Google n-gram viewer has the first references to database shard/sharding in 2005, and Ultima Online came out in 1997.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=database+shard...
"Shards" are the inlore explanation in Ultima, for why there would be multiple copies of the game world existing in parallel (the different servers).
Some sort of world-crystal being shattered into small pieces, or something...
hooby commented on Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009) raphkoster.com/2009/01/08... · Posted by u/fanf2
Ultima Online is a very unique social experience compared to today's landscape of multiplayer games, and there are different "Eras" of the game which can impart a particular flavor to the experience, eras like: UO: Renassaince, UO: Lost Lands (aka T2A mechanics), and others.
Its a sandbox game just like Arcage, Neverwinter Nights, Albion Online, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxy, Eve Online, Black Desert Online, etc in which the game's goals tacitly produce a local society, typically from players' in-game avatar "Characters" just playing the game. PvP is emphasized on many of the servers.
Right now there is a very good UO Freeshard server called "UO Outlands" with hybrid rules that are quite satisfying and with updated maps/dungeons/landscapes designed to encourage the classic vibes you've heard about and aren't really available in other, modern games.
If you just want to take a look, there is a Youtuber named "Trammie", he prefers to play a pure-thief character and he semi-regularly records streams of live play. Its a good look at one high-level play style that is nearly unique to UO and still available.
Raph Koster is also currently working on a new game, that aims to take this ideas of social experience and player-driven virtual society and push it beyond what they were able to do with UO. (Also with less PK-ing, griefing, etc. - things he regretted about UO, but many people today consider synonymous with sandbox)
Interestingly enough, this new game is NOT going to have any shards or sharding at all - not even instancing - but just many (procedurally generated) planets, that are all part of the same shared universe and economy.
Thus, some of the very unique ambitions behind UO and SWG might actually become part of a new, more modern game:
https://starsreach.com/ (Fair warning: the graphics are still very early...)
hooby commented on Isometric Projection in Game Development pikuma.com/blog/isometric... · Posted by u/ibobev
I have generally ignored game development but I honestly it’s not for lack of respect - most of computer science is represented in good game dev
I used to say that video games do everything you might find in any other kind of software - only difference being, they do it 60 times a second.
hooby commented on Isometric Projection in Game Development pikuma.com/blog/isometric... · Posted by u/ibobev
Any alternative to Google?
weirdly enough, when asking for documentation/problem solving types of questions - chatGPT actually is a good alternative. you still have to double-check since you can't trust it... but you shouldn't trust random google results either, so that's not a big change.
it's kinda weird how the web has increasingly become optimized for bots - and filled with content created by bots... to the point where as a human you now need a bot to cut through all the bloated SEO bullshit and filter out what you actually want to know...
Regardless of whether you hire in-house developers or hire a software studio that does contract work - I believe the key to success is giving the developer unfettered access to an experienced subject-matter expert who really understands what is needed.
No offense meant - but by my personal experience, executives like yourself are a bad choice for this - some experienced longtime employee that's deeply involved in day-to-day operations in the trenches, would be preferable, I think. Ideally somebody who went through process changes before - like was already working there before your current software had been introduced.
Don't get a developer who wants to start programming right away - you want somebody who asks for time to first really learn and understand the processes the software needs to cover - and who actually questions all the underlying approaches your current software takes - but does not just rule those out out of hand.
Then get that senior employee to mentor them and teach them the job - not the existing software. I would even advise have the developer DO the work for a while - under the supervision of that senior employee.
hooby commented on Stars Reach – new social sandbox MMO by Raph Koster announced starsreach.com/... · Posted by u/hooby
I dont know who Ralph Koster is or why this announcement deserves the front page, but I have to say the art direction is surprisingly dull: there are plenty of indie games made with just free asset packs that have more personality than this…
This game is definitely gonna be known for it's systems, mechanics and simulation, and not for it's graphics - that much is sure.
hooby commented on Stars Reach – new social sandbox MMO by Raph Koster announced starsreach.com/... · Posted by u/hooby
Is there a better resource that talks about the systems side of things? It looks like there might be something interesting there but it's too opaque to figure out what that might be
The things I could tease out:
* Fully modifiable worlds
* "living worlds", or at least grass grows and other ecosystem-y things
* No partitioning of player base, all in same realm
The Discord is currently the probably best place with the most information...
Check "A brief, subjective history..." in "community-forum", for a rough summary of what is known so far.
In fairness, they mostly wanted stuff to be in English, and when necessary, to transliterate German characters into their English counterparts (in German there is a standardised way of doing this), so I can understand why they didn't see it was necessary. I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...
If you can speak English, you might be better of using the software in English, as having to deal with the English language can often be less of hassle, than having to deal with inconsistent, weird, or outright wrong translations.
Even high quality translations might run into issues, where the same thing is translated once as "A" and then as "B" in another context. Or run into issues where there is an English technical term being used, that has no prefect equivalent in German (i.e. a translation does exist, but is not a well-known, clearly defined technical term). More often than not though, translations are anything but high quality. Even in expensive products from big international companies.