My master's thesis[1] was half research, half dev project, exploring how we can continue to fully fuse traditional RPGs with computers. This goal is my life quest, my life's work.
I think virtual tabletops (VTTs) as they currently stand are barking up the wrong tree[2]. I want a computer-augmented RPG to allow the GM to do everything he does in the analog form of the game. On-the-fly addition of content to the game world, defining of new kinds of content, defining and editing rules, and many other things ... as well as the stuff VTTs do, of course. The closest we've gotten in the last 30 years is LambdaMOO and other MUDs.
The app I made for my thesis project was an experimental vertical slice of the kinds of functionality I want. The app I made after that last year is more practical and focused on the needs of my weekly game, in my custom system; I continue to develop it almost daily.
I'm itching to tackle the hardest problem of all, which is fully incorporating game rules in a not-totally-hardcoded way. I need rules to be first-class objects that can be programmatically reasoned about to do cool things like "use the Common Lisp condition system to present end user GMs with strategies for recovering from buggy rules." Inspirations include the Inform 7 rulebook system.
[2] Anything that requires physical equipment other than dice and a regular computer is also barking up the wrong tree. So no VR, no video-tracked physical miniatures, no custom-designed tabletop, no Microsoft Surface... Again, just my opinion.
I don't agree on the UX, the interface is _terrible_ in many ways:
1. I can't even scroll the page horizontally on Chrome.
2. There are 2 menus with a completely different interface.
3. The Android mobile app gives you a completely different experience, and I think there is no lobby, so I often pick a match from Chrome and then switch to the app (and of course the "Open in Mobile App" button doesn't work for me).
4. In general I find the UI is very confusing:
4a. There are 3 places where to write something about a match: your personal notes (never used this, I guess the value proposition here is that your notes will be stored along the match, but I don't think almost anybody cares about notes about games played last year for instance), the chat (which works only between the current 2 players, and you can't access it from the analysis page) and the spectators chat (I suppose this has a purpose for highly spectated matches and live commentary, but I could also run a separate browser where I'm not logged in and read that too so it sounds useless to me).
4b. The match history at the bottom of the chessboard is useless to me 99% of the times, as it's completely empty.
4c. Often the same information is displayed in different parts of the page, I already mentioned the menu problem, but also when playing you can see some infos about the players both on the left and the right column. All these things complicate the UI.
To close on a positive note the feature I like the most of lichess is probably the analysis page, super useful and well done.
People trying to figure out what a "fun" game even means in terms of Live Action RolePlaying (mileage may vary on applicability to Space Zero and digital games)
You need to make multiple games and think about what did and didn't work. Very few developers it was their first game. The early PC developers were pumping out multiple games a year.
While it won't help with real time games, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanism, will get you thinking about game mechanics.
Not a gamedev myself, but I think playing a bunch of board games is huge— the complexity constraints for a board game are way tougher than they are for a computer, so designers (the good ones, anyway) are really forced to consider if each new resource, token, turn phase, victory condition, etc is really pulling its weight in the final product. The mechanics have to be ruthlessly stripped back to be just what is absolutely essential to make it work. Games like Patchwork, Santorini, Azul, Carcassonne, etc are a master class in this.
A computer can be doing mountains of bookkeeping behind the scenes, and that not only obscures what is actually going on from the player, but it can make the designer believe they have "depth" when all they really have is an overcomplicated mess.
Watch YouTube channels where board games are taught, and pay attention to the structure of a video like that— it's "you play as X in setting Y, your ultimate goal is to Z, and along the way you're going have to A, B, and C to achieve that. The game will end when conditions Q are met. The hook that makes this game unique is that ____."
A video game (especially an indie game) should be able to pitched exactly as succinctly as that.
I'm the developer of a boxing game called Leather, that I've had in the Play Store and App Store for about 6 or 7 years now.
As I'm working towards a Steam release I've been digesting a lot of this guy's advice - https://howtomarketagame.com/
Whilst much of his guidance is of course marketing rather than design related, he does write about genres and game mechanics that attract players - specifically on desktop rather than mobile. It's worth a few hours of your time to check his stuff out.
Niiice! I really like it. The spatial approach is cool, though labelling/annotations/axes would help.
I share the frustraion with getting book covers for my project ablf.io. Amazon used to make this much easier, but they've locked it down recently, so you have to jump through affiliate hoops. I ended up implementing my own thing and storing thousands of images myself on S3. If you have the goodreads IDs, feel free to use:
assets.abooklike.foo/covers/{goodreads id}.jpg
N.B. The actual goodreads website itself make it hard as well since they have an additional UUID in their img URIs, so it's not deterministic; that's why I created this.
In The Singularity Is Near (2005) Ray Kurzweil discussed an idea for the “Document Image and Storage Invention”, or DAISI for short, but concluded it wouldn't work out. I interviewed him a few years later about this and here's what he said:
The big challenge, which I think is actually important almost philosophical challenge — it might sound like a dull issue, like how do you format a database, so you can retrieve information, that sounds pretty technical. The real key issue is that software formats are constantly changing.
People say, “well, gee, if we could backup our brains,” and I talk about how that will be feasible some decades from now. Then the digital version of you could be immortal, but software doesn’t live forever, in fact it doesn’t live very long at all if you don’t care about it if you don’t continually update it to new formats.
Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted.
I think this is actually fundamentally a philosophical issue. I don’t think there’s any technical solution to it. Information actually will die if you don’t continually update it. Which means, it will die if you don’t care about it. ...
We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It’s a nice goal, but it actually doesn’t work.
I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it’s not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes.
And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn’t really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access.
So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest.
For people outside the US: use a second apple account with Region set to US.
I have used this many times for country specific public transport or delivery apps but same thing works here. You do not lose access to other apps, sync features or subscriptions.
Go into the App Store app, not your phone settings, click your profile and scroll all the way down to log out. Then log in with a US account, download the app and switch again.
You can continue using the US only apps after switching back
Big Basin is one of my favorite places on earth. If you have never been there - park down at the beach where the kite surfers like to hang out and walk up that way. It is a very long hike with some exposed areas at the beginning but totally worth the effort. You will feel like you are in Jurassic Park.
I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix.
I think a lot of overly-eager and under-informed people are jumping on the bandwagon and shouting half-baked proclamations from the rooftops to get clicks and views.
But underneath all the bullshit is something truly useful, so I wouldn't necessarily say that Confidently Incorrect™ is ChatGPT's primary ability.
Coincidentally, over the past few weeks of this ChatGPT craze, I've needed to create a lot of fake data to seed a database. Normally not a big deal, but these records need to have foreign keys pointing to one another. I wondered whether ChatGPT could help me out, so I briefly described the fields I needed, their format and data type, the type of information they contained, etc etc. It did it almost perfectly, and fixing the little errors was trivial. I was dreading having to do this because it's such a pain in the ass.
To me that kind of thing is going to be the most useful application. Everyone's freaking out (in both the "scared" and "excited" sense) over AI's ability to replace creativity, but I'm focused on it's ability to replace toil.
I'm a veteran calcium oxalate stone former; I've ended up in hospital three times because of them, and my last scan showed I currently am carrying 16 of them, (plus 3 bonus bladder stones). I'd thought I'd pass on what I've learned in the last 30 years; if helps one person, then I've been useful.
1. Drink lots of water (actually a very dilute lime juice/cranberry juice mix). I aim for 4 litres/1 gallon a day, more in hot weather.
2. Don't drink spirits (specifically - note to self - half a bottle of bourbon, no matter how delicious). They cause some weird kind of dehydration, which makes the stones painful.
3. If you start getting discomfort from a stone, drink more water. It seems to 'float' them somehow, and can usually make the discomfort go away.
4. The stones act like little breeding grounds for bacteria. So, if you have stones you will be prone to chronic infections. If you are a chap, then this can lead to chronic bacterial prostatitus, which can cause all manner of problems, leading to a having a catheter fitted. But, if you have bladder stones, the stones will break the little plastic widget that stops the catheter from falling out, which means it has to be refitted. So, you may need to take a low-level antibiotic like nitrofuratoin (there is some evidence that cranberry juice can also help, because it reduces the stickiness of bacteria).
5. If you are passing a stone, and they offer you morphine, decline it and hold out for something more powerful. Morphine seems to contract the tubes, only offers partial relief, and makes the problem worse in my experience. I once had an IM injection of (something beginning with pent~ - I wasn't in the mood to take notes at the time) which worked very well.
6. Avoid foods containing high oxalate levels, like spinach.
7. Don't take medical advice from strangers on the internet (like me).
It’s tempting to theorise why this might be, but it’s most likely just a simple statistical feature inherent to correlations themselves. I’ve heard it called “the tails come apart” - in a scatter plot of two correlated variables, the highest y value will not have the rightmost x value, and the rightmost x value will not have the highest y value. Ellipses don’t come to a sharp point at their tips, if you overlay them on a square the tips bulge out past the edges of the square.
Our dogs are frequently out in the yard, so other than spring pre-emergent I try to avoid herbicides. I bought it after a hand weeder broke pulling up crabgrass.
This thing has oddly been one of the most satisfying purchases I've made in years. You put it in the ground, step on it and the thing easily pulls out weeds and only in the spot you put it. Then you get to shoot them off the claw. I have a bucket I try and shoot them into. It's oddly therapeutic.
I go through the Equal Exchange 80% dark product about one bar every few weeks so I will be researching cadmium a bit
(later)
So after some research on cadmium and the specific data California has on it (https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/chemicals/cadmium), I think my general take on the Equal Exchange chocolate I eat quite a lot of is that the saturated fat (15g) is still orders of magnitude more dangerous than the cadmium.
Interestingly, the product itself seems much less appealing to me knowing it has this trace level of cadmium that will likely not affect me in any way, vs. the saturated fat that I already knew contributes towards directly life-threatening LDL cholesterol.
I use this method of thinking because my memory/concentration get worse sometimes and do that with age. Even a simple file or a piece of paper work like a huge L2 cache which you don’t have naturally. Outlining (indents basically) makes it even more navigatable, e.g. I write simplified sentences in a hierachical way and use that as references/structure of thought.
Thinking by writing
Enhances memory as L2 cache
Simple file or piece of paper
Outlining by indents
Makes better navigation
Easy references
Allows structure overview
I usually write 2x longer sentences, the above is just an example.
Think by writing. Someone on HN said this and recommended “How to take smart notes”, which I furiously read through and applied to my life.
That commenter said it and I’m gonna say it too: I’ve been able to think much more deeply, thoroughly, and most importantly much further along than my old self before doing this (and even further than my coworkers in ways that has already paid off).
One day I really went off on it and wrote out my thoughts for 4 hours on some important technical ideas I’ve been ruminating on. Not in one big doc, either, but using Obsidian to connect my ideas to each other. I used those ideas to knock out a massive technical problem we were having at work with half a day’s effort. Found a quick win swimming around in my head.
It’s been a game changer.
Edit: I found the original comment!! Read it, there’s two other books there that have supercharged my life. Probably the most influential comment I’ve read on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594264
I travel quite a bit for both business and personal reasons.
This means I'm driving a rental car for 100+ days a year.
I've tried all the major rental brands and Hertz is a terrible experience even when they're not calling the police on you by mistake. Their systems don't work quite right, there's a bunch of hidden fees, and their customer service is lacking at best.
I swear by Enterprise and purchasing the extra insurance to cover any damages. They've done right by me as a customer across many different cities and locations.
I know that some people are always going to just buy whatever is the cheapest or whatever deal gets them the most points with credit card or whatever. And that seems to be where Hertz makes their money.
But for anyone willing to pay a little more for a good experience and less stress Enterprise is my recommendation.
In theory interest rates should be set at a level which keeps demand in balance with supply, but isn't so high that they're out of line with economic fundamentals.
For example, imagine I were to say, "the US economy is so strong today consumers can afford 7% mortgage rates". This is obviously laughable. The underlying economy isn't strong enough to support anything even close to those kinds of rates, but because of excessive fiscal and monetary stimulus over the last couple of years the consumer has high savings, low debts and extremely low 30-year fixed rate mortgages - the Fed could raise rates to 50% and for a large percentage of US consumers today it would make practically no difference.
Similarly with the US being a consumer economy so long as the consumer is strong businesses are generally going to be fine. Some overleveraged companies might go under, but those with healthy balance sheets will likely do better than ever, keeping the labour market robust.
The problem we have today is that rates are now way too high relative to underlying economic strength, yet are doing close nothing to address the supply / demand imbalances we're seeing. In fact they're at levels so high it wouldn't just slow demand but kill it dead were anyone actually forced borrow at them.
And yes, eventually some people will have unexpected expenses which they'll need to put on credit cards, and from time to time people will need move and be forced to try to afford a mortgage at a much higher rate, but that's going to take quite some time given robust levels of savings and otherwise historically low mortgage servicing costs. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP
I guess what I'm saying is that the Fed has no effective tools to address this. The US consumer is almost completely insensitive to interest rates moves right now. What I'd argue we actually need is fiscal measures such as tax increases and spending cuts to force down economic demand.
Should rates keep rising though (which is likely given the Fed never seems to have any idea what they're doing) then eventually someone's risk model will blow up because these are unprecedented moves we're seeing in the treasury and FX market today. Expect people in developing countries to starve and expect a series of financial crises in developed economies. Of course I hope that doesn't happen and I hope eventually the Fed sees sense, but this does seem to be the path we're on today.
“We will never know” is such a contradictory statement. On the surface, it implies the limits of our knowledge while simultaneously indicating that the author possesses the omnipotence required to know what humans will learn throughout the entirety of our future. Add it to your list of things to never write.
Reminds me of a recently posted article about construction [0].
If something is changing a lot, that's one sign of high capital investment. If you look at the greatest cities in the world, they're never "done". The ones that don't have high activity are usually dying or only serve one purpose ( tourism ). Likewise with languages.The Javascript ecosystem is the largest and most active in the world. If it were a city of developers it would probably be akin to Sao Paulo, NYC, or Shanghai.
I use this trick in my blog[1] to get typographic variety within the same font.
It's become my go-to.
[0] https://rsms.me/inter/
[1] https://davidbethune.com/blog