SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
No bio...
User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
I hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. The Escape Velocity Override remake, "Cosmic Frontier Override", was not so lucky. The devs wasted a bunch of time poorly rewriting everything and then apparently Peter Cartwright, the original creator, died while this all was going on. Maybe it'll keep going. The remaining dev is incentivized to keep going, because he somehow made a Patreon account a year or two after the kickstarter to get even more free money to develop freelance.
Relatedly, we've been toying with maybe doing a Kickstarter for hw device with a friend and very fast came to the conclusion that the only way we would ever do is if we have a production ready prototype and need upfront capital just to order a limited batch from a contract manufacturer as well as a known set of guaranteed buyers. Otherwise there's far too high risk of ending up at /r/shittykickstarters.
If that was actually the case, my dislike for artists as a group wouldn’t increase so much of the time I interact with them in other venues too, including even the real world. Yet it keeps doing so over and over and over again.
Similar thing hasn’t happened with engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, nurses etc.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
This is overly simplistic. Let kids have interests, unless those interests are truly beyond the pale. Everyquest, Star Trek, soccer, whatever. But not toasterfucking.
I see you're not a fan of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica reboot.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
I mean if you wanted to make that argument, the first things you should ban is professional models, movie stars and most of all social media and Tinder-like apps.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
I'm a zoomer.
Wait, how does a zoomer end up referencing a game from 1992 (and one of the best games of all time) in their nickname?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
I wonder how much that is influenced by locality / microenvironmental factors that aren't shown in the statistics. Eg. Finland used to have a fairly high homicide rate (compared to peer countries) while actually being a very safe place to live as long as you weren't a middle aged unemployed alcoholic male drinking with your buddies.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
I remember playing ”Cops” as a kid in the very early 90s. It involved one guy being designated as the bad guy and the rest being cops who would then run after him and tackle him on the ground as a group. Not surprisingly nobosy wanted to be the first to play the bad guy. Ah, to be young again…
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.
Except when it doesn’t, of course. I have a phobia of wasps (and by adjacency bees because they look so similar but consider bumblebess to be harmless because their colors and flight are immediately distinguishable). While researching wasp traps it wasn’t hard at all to find many accounts of people who had gone through exposure therapy without any improvement. So YMMV.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
I have a hard time seeing how spending a year at a Wyoming ranch would improve the social skills of anyone much.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
”I’m in this moderated online debate group. You’d find it really boring.”
Nerdy subcultures are so because a small section of the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.
(bolded addition mine)
Even with that addition I'm not convinced of that explanation, not least because as far as I can tell, back in my teenager days (ie. the 90s) the only "subcultures" I witnessed were the occasional guys wearing metal band shirts (which amusingly included one Jehovah’s Witness who really loved Helloween and power metal) and a bit later some friends of a friend being into hiphop music and clothes. Even for those people it seemed to be limited purely to music and fashion and as far as I could tell, they didn't fraternize among the group any more than random friends did.
It's possible that (unlike here in Finland) in the US such subcultural cliques really were / are common but this would point towards this not being any inherent aspect of being a western teenager and more something learned via local / national cultural examples (possibly imported ones, in the case of anime nerds). Certainly there were a few "castouts" (in the sense that they were weird in various ways and seemed to keep themselves aloof of the rest of the students) but they didn't hang together either and seemed to be content with being weird loners (the very notion of a clique based on being castout / loner would have been absurd).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
As far as I know, most people arrested aren't (much) crazier than everyone else. Sure, they're more impulsive and don't have the best life skills on average but that's a far cry from most having schizophrenia or similar mental condition.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.
As an opposite experience, I also had a guy who was a JW in my class in junior high in the 90s. Apart from refusing to eat Blodplättar (which TBF weren't that popular with other people either), separate religious education and allegedly preparing to do the door-to-door thing Jehovah's Witnesses do, he seemed like a regular guy. Knew all the typical pop culture stuff, wore Helloween band shirts, had normal sounding plans for future. He even wanted me to print him a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook I had on my computer.
I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.
I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture when I was growing up in Finland in the 80s and 90s. Sure, I also had nerdy interests like programming, reading fantasy books and the occasional RPG session but I never felt like they defined who I was. They were just things I was interested in or liked to do, the same way some other kids liked to play sports without making that their whole identity.
I see "anime culture" as like that cliche nerd culture: A bunch of people who fail to distinguish between their interest and their identity (quite possibly because they don't much have one) and that leads to all sorts of issues.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
I'm pretty sure a philosopher who critiqued, say, Maxwell's equations would be rightly laughed out of the room by anyone with a clue.
Not to mention that the screenshots you linked are distinctly labeled CGA and EGA
If you look at them, the EGA image uses the same low resolution blocky graphics as the CGA, just with a different palette (same as in the Tandy version I believe). That limitation was present throughout all Sierra games made with their AGI interpreter until they finally moved to actual EGA graphics with SCI in Kings Quest IV. Of course even those were much lower resolution than what EGA was capable of.
VGA was absolutely not common in 1988
It was common enough that not only were there multiple super VGA adapters on the market but that the industry recognized the need to standardize them in late 1988. Hells, there was even a ”laptop” with vga by 1988 (My mom used to take it home from work occasionally on weekends, so that was my personal hands-on introduction to PC and programming - in addition to playing games at friends’). And besides, we're talking about "pushing graphical standards in games".
If Sierra had actually pushed graphical standards (as opposed to persistently catering to the lowest common denominator), by 1988 the games could have looked like the second and third images here. First is original low res game graphics, 2nd is how it could have looked on VGA, 3rd is how that could have been displayed on EGA without requiring any additional storage and the 4th is Nano Banana reimagining of the original that was used to produce 2nd and 3rd images by downscaling to 640x350 and dithering to 16 color images with a fixed palette (not even optimized per screen) - all images upscaled to 1280x800 for ease of comparison and avoiding aspect ratio problems. In fact the games could have looked like the 3rd image by 1985 as far as the hardware was concerned (EGA was released in late 84).
I'm guessing you're younger than me and didn't grow up in this era
Not only did I grow up in that era but by 1991 I was writing VGA graphics code, so I was familiar with what the hardware had been capable of with reasonable effort since the introduction of VGA (at least for paid developers who had actual budget to buy hw documentation books etc). Obviously I wasn't writing anything professional level, but did know enough to use the magic spells mov ax, 13h; int 10h and xor ax, ax; mov dx, 3c8h; out dx, al; inc dx; rep outsb (If you know you know and if you don't you may not be qualified to judge the topic in the first place).
Note that game logic was also a significant part of the CPU's load
Sure, for an action game. For adventure games like the ones Sierra made? Not even remotely because they essentially had no running logic until you typed something in the parser or changed screens.
please give even one example of a contemporary game that looked better.
Defender of the Crown from 1987. Note the lack of fugly blockiness.
Falcon, also from 1987. Not that the graphics are pretty as such but at least they aren't a horrible blockfest.
For VGA graphics, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade from 1989 - over a year before Kings Quest V.
A-10 Tank Killer, also from 1989.
But like I said earlier, "A lot of the late 80s / early 90s western games had self limited graphics because the artists were apparently incapable of using custom palettes and the companies had outdated ideas about common graphics hardware." The problems were industry wide and it took until the mid 90s before parts of the industry started really pushing the envelope, Doom being one of the early examples.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
paste a wall of ai slop into the comments section
This is something I truly don't understand. Why do people who clearly aren't bots on reddit still keep writing their posts and comments with AI when it provides no value for them or the readers (and will get the posts removed)?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
Sierra was one of the companies pushing graphical standards in games
If they had been, they wouldn't have released multiple games using CGA based graphics engine by the time VGA was available.
Even King's Quest I (their breakout hit) was released in EGA on MS-DOS systems in the mid-80s
That's not EGA. That's a tweaked CGA text mode which is why the resolution is only 160x200 (with a fixed palette) instead of 320x200 and why the graphics look like ass.
King Quest IV was the first KQ to use EGA graphics. By the time KQ V (AFAIK the first sierra game to use VGA) was released the graphics could have looked like this on a run of the mill new 286 PC (without animation obviously). I should know because the only reason our first PC (bought by my single mother in 1990, so far from being high end) couldn't handle 640x480x256 mode was that the particular Triden 8900 chipset had a hw bug that made it require a multisync monitor.
By 1988 common PC tech (VGA) allowed up to 320x400x256 resolution (or 640x480x16) - not that almost any game took advantage of it (I remember Scorched Earth did in 91-92 and that was written by a lone hobbyist). It took forever for games to switch to using 640x480x256 resolution with Warcraft 2 being one of the first (1995).
You can see similar stagnation on the sound side where almost every game was composed by people sitting in their ivory tower studios for hardware that almost nobody had (Roland MT-32 & later General MIDI) and then degraded with anemic results on the hardware people actually used (Soundblaster). On those rare occasions the game devs and composers had a clue, the results were legendary (the second originally composed for amiga but the only difference is in how grungy the sound quality is).
Ps. If we want to get technical, this level of graphics were strictly speaking possible on 1983 PC hardware (I recommend muting the video, it sounds like ass). Compared to that Kings Quest 1 graphics look like something a first grader might draw. What was that about "pushing graphical standards"?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
While I agree that there's no, say, Western Clannad because of budgetary reasons
Ahem. The OG Clannad might disagree about that.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
it's easy to train yourself out of a disgust reaction
My childhood would like to disagree. Even now almost 40 years later trying to eat cabbage / broccoli / any other variant causes immediate vomiting reaction (in the literal sense, not in the typical "I want to vomit"-use) despite countless tries in my childhood.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
or because they're being written as a wish fulfilment
Doesn't this describe like 90% of female romance authors?
But that may just be because I don't like ugly bastards.
The obvious answer is of course to combine western player characters and Japanese love interests.
Edit: I present Exhibit A ("1girl" anime style) and Exhibit B (from Summertime Saga, an apparently popular western erotic game). Obviously somewhat NSFW. I realize that according to the internets (or at least many such western game creators) men are obligated to prefer HHH-size boobies but, at the risk of coming off as a deviant, I'm going to have to go with Exhibit A (even though it was created in 30 seconds using an ancient AI SD 1.5 finetune).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
Western developers skipped this stage of technical limitations and went for WRPGs for their branching-choice games instead. Early ones driven more by gameplay than plot, and once the graphics caught up there was no need to dump the gameplay in favour of artwork by then.
A lot of the late 80s / early 90s western games had self limited graphics because the artists were apparently incapable of using custom palettes and the companies had outdated ideas about common graphics hardware. See eg. Sierra games of the late 80s, many of which had basically CGA level graphics even though EGA had been the norm for many years by then and VGA had been fast becoming the de facto standard (and everyone upgraded their PC every 2-4 years, so having to support particularly old computers just wasn't a thing).
I doubt it has anything to do with "flexibility" unless the strings get physically caught in the bridge / nut slots (in which case the slots may need repair work). Bass strings just don't work all that well if the tension is too low. Have you tried recording a single note and checking the spectrum?
Here is what quick googling returned as one possible cause for issues that might be perceived as intonation problems: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42452-020-2391-2 (string inharmonicity).
See if you can buy a regular cheaper non-hex core bass string and try if that also suffers from intonation issues. That is at least a cheap test and being flatwound vs roundwound should make no difference to that (at least I can’t come up with any physical basis for one).
It's easy enough to answer: Just consider how the police would have reacted in a bunch of other western countries in similar situation. If they're all "Yeah, there's no fucking way they'd have shot the tasered guy", that's pretty clear answer.
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