• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I mean, there are some nits I can pick.

    Places don’t feel as alive as they did in the original. The original was still deeply flawed, mind - but this goes even further than that.

    A great example - when there was a firetruck putting out a fire in the original, you could see little dudes squirting water. CS2 doesn’t even have guys come out; the fire just magically goes away. Multiply this by… everything.

    There’s no bikes (at least as far as I can tell), and the pedestrian path tooling seems to be a huge step back (the only dedicated pedestrian path I can find is technically considered a 2-lane road, but it doesn’t allow cars).

    The music has these cute little segments inbetween. But there’s only like… 5 of them. Once you hear all 5, you’ve heard everything and they start to grate. The other 2 “radio stations” don’t have the NPR segments, but they do have “ads”… and by “ads” they mean exactly 1 ad that you hear every time for “Spaz Electronics”. You can turn the ads off but I’d expect more than just a single one.

    Everything overreacts to anything you build. If you upgrade a road, it technically disconnects power + water + sewage for a hot second. Then you get a bunch of spam about “I don’t have any power!” blah blah even though the game was paused and they absolutely had power.

    It’s really hard to see what trips Cims are taking. The original let you see the paths Cims took throughout your city, which let you make informed decisions around public transport. Now you can just see… how much traffic there is? Which doesn’t tell you anything about where Cims are going, just where you have bottlenecks. It very much encourages a “just 1 more lane, bro” kind of thinking.

    Not having a wide variety of public transport options is a bummer. It feels like they left some stuff out for a future DLC (e.g. monorails).

    There’s no light shining from the camera at nighttime, so it can get actually literally pitch black at night. Like “turn off the day/night cycle because this is unplayable” levels of dark. A subtle light coming from the camera when not in photo mode would’ve done wonders.

    The zoning information is really hard to read. I can’t tell what areas I have zoned with something else because it colors areas from other zones as white and unzoned areas as clear… on a mostly white background. It’s really really hard to tell at-a-glance what needs to still be zoned in some cases.

    The more I play it, the more it feels like CS1 is the sequel and CS2 is the original. There’s just so much that’s not done as well or that’s simply not there. The stuff they added is cool, sure… but like, I wish it was additive on top of what we had before, and not “back at square one”. It just makes me want to play the original.








  • This channel used to be great, but ever since she changed her format it’s not been nearly as good. She spends so much time now on irrelevant details and pads things out to double the length of what they used to be.

    I unsubbed when she stopped in the middle of one of her videos to make a dumb joke about being a weatherperson on TV. Like, the video stopped and it showed her presenting a weather forecast and she tapped the screen like she was stuck inside. I dunno; it just felt like bad taste to make a joke in videos like this, and with half the videos now being padding and fluff I just wasn’t feeling it anymore.

    It sucks because I used to really like her content in the older format.







  • If I run Satisfactory via Vulkan on X, it causes my entire desktop to flicker until I close the game, on all screens. Annoying, but at least I can make it go away.

    If I run Satisfactory via Vulkan on Wayland, it crashes Wayland and my entire computer freezes until I hard reboot it by pressing the power button. That is absolutely unacceptable.

    (Satisfactory on DX12 works fine for both, but the point is Wayland is still much more likely to fail catastrophically.)





  • Hey, that happened to me, too!

    I got scheduled for a mandatory meeting with 1 hour notice. During lunch.

    I asked my boss what it was. He didn’t know either. I joked that it was us being shut down.

    Sure enough, 1 hour later we were both writing LinkedIn recommendations and helping each other find jobs after it was announced that our whole studio was being shut down by corporate and myself plus all my coworkers were all now jobless.


  • Could be any number of reasons.

    My money is on 4chan/8chan/whatever today’s derivative is. I used to be super active with them back in the day when I was young, racist, and stupid.

    This sort of stuff matches their target profile:

    • Visible - Reddit has shone a spotlight on Lemmy recently, and Lemmy.world specifically has gotten called out as the most promising of all the Lemmy instances

    • Vulnerable - the tooling to stop large-scale attacks doesn’t exist. Users aren’t “locked in” to the threadiverse yet. People generally aren’t expecting it.

    • “Lulzy” - attacking a large Lemmy community would cause a lot of panic in the wider threadiverse community. The 4chan/8chan trolls thrive on panic; they think people freaking out is funny. The more panic they cause, the funnier it is.


    The methods line up, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were behind the DDOS as well. DDOS is the simplest tool they use, and when that stops being funny they escalate.

    CSAM, gore, scat, torture are all stuff they have in their arsenal, ready to spam. They go out and look for the stuff, build up folders of it to use on their victims. That stuff causes panic, and that’s what they thrive on. They want to see the biggest response they can. Scat is just gross, usually a good opener. CSAM is good because it gets operators in legal trouble. Gore and torture makes people leave a site in droves.

    Channers aren’t dumb, either. They know how to use technology. If something is open source, that just gives them something to study and look for attack surfaces. Someone will make a custom-built tool to exploit a vulnerability and it will run until the vulnerability is patched. I had dozens of random tools back in the day that were intended for one-off attacks, plus stuff in the toolbelt like Low Orbit Ion Cannon (DDOS) and Cain and Abel (password cracking).


    I should reiterate that it has been many years since I was part of that crowd - well over a decade at this point. Things are undoubtedly different. (I refuse to call these guys “Anonymous” - that name was butchered a long time ago when people started speaking on places like Twitter “on behalf of Anonymous”. I’m not using the names they call themselves either.)

    When I was a channer, one of the big targets was Reddit. Channers hated Reddit, because Reddit would steal stuff from 4chan and repost it. Reddit was just an inferior version of 4chan, but they were so smug about things and they were a bunch of prudes to boot. So Reddit was a relatively popular target until finally they got better at stopping large attacks.

    I have to imagine that a lot of channers dislike Reddit still. Lemmy is seen as the new Reddit - and worse, it’s run by commies.

    Channers that do this stuff are Nazis. They just are. (Why do you think they chose the number 8 when 4chan got sick of them? It’s not because it’s 4 times 2.) They’re extremely open about being Nazis, with jokes about gas chambers and everything. You get the hardcore tankies as well, but the tankies are generally so far gone as to be essentially indistinguishable from Nazis themselves.

    The fact that Lemmy is left-leaning makes it another reasonable target. Nazis hate commies, although they will accept tankies (to an extent). This is probably why Lemmy.ml wasn’t targeted despite being the historic “main” Lemmy instance (full of tankies). Lemmy.world is left-leaning but still highly visible, so it’d be a good target. If Lemm.ee keeps growing, that’s probably the next target on the list.


    This is all baseless speculation. Lemmygrad and Hexbear are both also reasonable sources. Hexbear is notorious for being disruptive in the same way 4chan was back in the day, but supposedly they’re better nowadays (not that I necessarily believe that).

    But I’m reminded of the stuff I did as a dumb kid, before I knew better. It matches with how they act. I’m not saying it’s explicitly 4chan/8chan/888chan/whatever, but the way it’s coordinated certainly smells familiar.



  • EA is not a believer in the sunk cost fallacy.

    I’m a AAA game dev who worked on a game at EA for 4 years (plus 2 years of pre-production I was not involved with).

    They cancelled the game a couple months before we were supposed to launch. Everyone at the studio got laid off. They had sunk literally millions into the game, but when they decided to change their minds there was nothing we could do to stop them. We literally had a working game that never went to players.


    This is not exclusive to EA, either. Disney Interactive pulled this a couple times as well. There’s an open-world Iron Man game which was largely complete but never saw the light of day (even though it was really fun!) because Disney decided they didn’t like movie tie-ins one day.

    There was a Pirates of the Caribbean game that was also nearly finished when it got cancelled. The assets/code got sold to Ubisoft and the game was reworked into Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.

    Moral of the story: never assume your game is safe until you see it on shelves.