newobject

Accidentally came up with this effect for showing the player a certain radius around them without rendering ugly transparent circles: effectively, it's a glass ring at the player's feet, with a strong distortion effect as its shader:

There’s no such thing as a kind of game that’s “easy to make”. There are only games that are less hard to make

welcome wizard #7fdps

I wonder if Army was profitable this quarter

Hey chat did we just invent casting hand shadows in video games?

Weird synchronicity

*tentatively pastes a picture of an airduct into google slides*

Don't make me re-ignite the immersive sim discourse

Here's a thing I would do: set a slider on bandcamp to pay $X a month and have bandcamp specifically spread that money over whichever artists I listened to.

Not sure about Mint but on Ubuntu it was right in Snap (the “App Store” as it were) so easy one click install :)

War is over and I lost

OBS should work fine for screen recording (?) Just make sure to do playback with VLC or something to check the quality. The default GNOME video viewer is an absolute piece of crap that can't even seem to playback >30fps video so it makes it look like OBS dropped frames.

This means war you little shits

Anyway, just putting this out into the universe because I gotta get it out of my head. If I ever getting around to building it, of course it would be free. (If you like the idea and do it, please make it free.) Ok thanks bye!

There are other issues: leaving your computer on all day and the energy that consumes (it was ok when it was my little 1mhz apple ][c, maybe nowadays not so much). There may be some practical or technical things I haven't considered that would make this DOA. (12/)

What's the point anyway? yeah man just an alternative to the other means we have of gathering online. one that's fun and customizable, where your data is portable, hell maybe one where you run textmode only. I dunno. (cont'd 11/)

Steam is just a very convenient mechanism that I think gives you at least 90% of what you'd need to make this work, crudely. (cont'd 10/)

That's about as far as I've taken the thought. Yes, Steam could decide this use of their API's is against TOS. No, it's not truly disintermediated because the data goes through Steam. Obviously an alternative middleman could be built here. (cont'd 9/)

Encryption (of communication) is another factor. I'm not crypto expert there but I'm pretty sure that you can "just" build TLS ontop whatever datagrams the BBS and its clients are sending back and forth. (cont'd 8/)

How do I verify the authenticity of that server? There's no way to make a authoritative/id-able lobby that can't be spoofed by name. Well, Steam publishers the lobby creator's player id into the lobby record. Kind of like an ssh "known_hosts" file - you can use that to confirm ownership. (cont'd 7/)

What does this give you? Your BBS (server)'s IP address is now hidden as well; some semblance of privacy. So how do you "call" this BBS that has no public IP address? Steam matchmaking. Your "phone number" is effectively the lobby the server has made. (cont'd 6/)

Now there's some interesting capabilities Steam has. When NAT punchthrough fails, it falls back to using datagram relays, so you don't even make a direct cnxn. From what I understand, you can just force the networking API into always using SDR mode. (cont'd, 5/)

Why is Steam important here? Steam mitigates this issue for the BBS "server" through the same means it mitigates network connections for any multiplayer p2p (player-hosted) game. I don't go into the technicals of that here. Suffice it to say Steam helps ppl connect to your computer. (cont'd, 4/)

Ok, anybody can in theory just run their own computer on the internet already, right? Yes, but DNS, dynamic IPs, firewalls, NAT, etc all make this kind of insurmountable to the lay person. (cont'd, 3/)

The idea here is: you (the sysop) own and host your own BBS (the configuration, the data, etc). It literally runs on your computer. This is something like disintermediation but without decentralization and the complexities that brings. (cont'd, 2/)

Just gonna put this out there. While I'd like to build it, the idea has been stuck in my head too long and I think I've gone full echo chamber on myself, so, please, offer a critique...

The gist: an app distributed via Steam that is both the client and server for a BBS. (cont'd, 1/)

Learning on Blender 4.x somehow finally cracked the nut for me, earlier versions had a certain level of unintuitiveness that made it impenetrable to me

Thanks, I’ll give it a shot!!

The virtue of indie dev is a rapid cycle of birth death rebirth, constant reinvention and refiguration. In that sense there will always be an “indiepocalypse”. Importantly this stands in opposition to the corporatized mode of gamedev which fixates on ideas with the goal of efficient/roi+ extraction.