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Technically, almost all video games are puzzle games.
  • It's not reductive, it's misrepresentative. A puzzle game is only a puzzle game as long as coming up with the solution is the main task. There are more than enough games where coming up with the right solution is not difficult, but performing it is.

    Also the name puzzle game implies that there are designed puzzles. Any game where you have to make decisions in generated situations aren't puzzle games. For example if you take a specific chess situation and ask which move would lead to check mate in x moves then that's a chess puzzle. That doesn't make the game of chess itself a puzzle.

  • [History] An editor letter by Edsger Dijkstra, titled: "go to statements considered harmful" (march 1968).
  • That doesn't make it spaghetti code though. In well-written OOP code you shouldn't care where a function is implemented. The problem is a much too high level of abstraction. If your high level code is so abstract that it is only running tasks and handling messages there's no way to write it in a way that prevents mistakes because you couldn't possibly know what the actual implementations do.

  • 'Vortex Cannon vs Drone' - Mark Rober shows off tech from a "defense technology company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems". That seems bad
  • Name one situation where this device makes killing someone easier than it already is.

    You think that this device is considered less lethal than the knee that killed George Floyd?

    Do you think the police officers who shot a civilian in the back several times or who shot a man in his car when he told them that he had a licensed firearm in the glove compartment were thinking rationally enough to be worried about collateral damage?

    These drones are too expensive and unwieldy to be used in situations like that, so they could only be used in a premeditated killing. So let's check these out:

    A civilian wouldn't use them, because attaching a bomb to an off the shelve drone is much cheaper, and you can buy everything you need without raising eyebrows.

    When the government kills one of their citizens they don't kill them on the spot. They put them on death row for years, kill them with an injection and then watch John Oliver make an episode on the people and companies that were involved.

    When they kill people in other countries collateral damage is not really holding them back. And also: they already use missiles with blades instead of explosives.

    I really can't imagine a situation where these drones would make things worse than they already are.

  • 'Vortex Cannon vs Drone' - Mark Rober shows off tech from a "defense technology company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems". That seems bad
  • I understand the criticism of the tone of the video, but what I totally don't understand is that some comments say that this technology was "scary".

    How? You are aware that we are loving in a world where missiles can carry nuclear bombs and where thousands of those are kept in working condition so they could be launched at any moment? A world where terrorists have successfully destroyed a building in another country with a plane? Where school shootings are a thing? Where there is a war in the Ukraine where much cheaper drones are used to kill much more efficiently with explosives?

    I guarantee you that no one will ever acquire one of these drones to attack an individual because there are so many ways that are cheaper and easier and have been around for decades.

  • military industrial publishing complex
  • Well, I am sure there is a scam, because there's money involved and it's happening in this day and age, but talking is free, listening is free, yet the phone company makes both sides pay so they can talk and listen, and I wouldn't consider that a scam.

  • You are going to be trapped in a room for 12 hours with a mid 2000s office desktop with no internet connection and an external hard drive; what are you putting on the hard drive?
  • Boy, this question hurts.

    For anyone above a certain age with kids below a certain age this isn't a punishment or a challenge, this is A DREAM!! Heroes of might and magic 3, system shock 2, Anno (any version up to 1503), Morrowind, Civilization 3, Age of wonders shadow magic, Baldur's gate 1 and 2...

    Whenever my wife finds the time she goes to her room to play Morrowind. She just got a new laptop and the first thing I did was install OpenMW and copy her save file.

    It goes without saying that you couldn't finish any of those games in those 12 hours, except for System Shock 2.

  • Aaargh....my eyes......my eyes......
  • At my first job I was working on an MMO and we had a DatabaseManager class with 10k+ lines of code. Less than the first 200 lines actually used any of the members of that class.

  • Aaargh....my eyes......my eyes......
  • you’d never have player movement in the GameManager class

    You want to bet? (Source: I teach game programming on a college level.)

    But yeah, your comment about the gear icon is sadly more true than people may realize. Game developers do questionable things. => Engine developers cater to people. => Students argue that if something is supported it can't be that bad. Sometimes it feels like fighting windmills.

  • Aaargh....my eyes......my eyes......
  • The real naming fail is calling the class "GameManager", still my number one pet peeve. With a class name as vague as that you would have to add tons of information into the variable name. (Also the class name begs for unorganized code. I mean name one function or variable that you could not justify putting into the "GameManager" class. After all if it's managing the game it could justifiably perform any process in the game and access any state in it.)

    Once you put the first bool into a class with a name like AccessibilitySettings, calling it something like HighContrast is completely sufficient.

  • Aaargh....my eyes......my eyes......
  • You may enjoy having a look at F#. It says that it's "functional first", but I think a better description would be "an opinionated version of C#".

    For example it doesn't have a "const"-keyword. Instead it has a "mutable"-keyword, because everything is const by default.

  • Is this a Nut?
  • No, actually C#'s answer should be: "What Java said - hold on, what Python said sounds good too, and C++'s stuff is pretty cool too - let's go with all of the above."

    C#, or as I like to call it "the Borg of programming languages".

  • Miyoo teases their GBA SP inspired retro handheld
  • Because they are selling the product the customers think they are getting, not the one that they actually get. I guarantee that a device with thumb sticks and lousy performance will sell better than one without sticks and with better performance.

  • Atheists of lemmy, what is your coping strategy when things goes downhill?
  • This is something I really don't understand. Maybe you can explain it to me.

    For me a "normal" day would be one where earth looks like the moon. The fact that we have all kinds of plants and animals is amazing and the fact that we have buildings, technology and culture is something to be very proud of, because every day that you don't run around killing people or doing other horrible things is a day where you overcame your instincts and helped hold up culture. So to me every day, even one that you would deem "shit that happens in your life", is absolutely amazing and something to be proud of.

    But for someone who believes that there is a God a normal day would be one where everything works out great, and it would just be because God took care of it. A bad day would mean that for whatever reason this God decided to let you suffer. And this is supposed to make you feel good?

    Isn't it uplifting to say that you can't explain why bad things happen to you? Do you really think it's uplifting to think that bad things happen to you because an all powerful being decided that you deserved it?

  • Are you cancelling streaming services?
  • When I start a free trial I immediately set a reminder in Google calendar. And when I am looking for a specific movie I buy it used online. That way I have all my favorite movies on my NAS and can cancel my subscriptions when there is nothing especially interesting.

  • yeah, sure thing.
  • Of course trickle down works. I just don't get how people came to believe that the rich people (i.e. the place with all the money/water) is the top of the mountain and the poor people were the ocean.

    There are so many reasons why money constantly trickles from the poor all the way down to the rich.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)WA
    warlaan @lemm.ee
    Posts 0
    Comments 24