I was on a forum that had one member who is very knowledable on the subject of the forum. But now he...only ever responds with "I asked gemini your question, here's the answer:", and it's a real shame. His online person has become totally hollowed out. (These aren't like newb question threads, these are conversational topic threads). I think he doesn't know or care how valuable his point of view was. -_- Some communities aren't affected by this AI stuff negatively at all, but I suspect some communities (and people) are getting gutted.
( When he starts his own threads, they're now of the form "I asked gemini question X and this several-page-long attached markdown file is how it answered" )
The step is a significant one, and Roblox has taken one other measure recently, restricting chat a lot for minors (https://x.com/Roblox_RTC/status/2043723470899437623) . I think this is a move to satisfy people concerned with child safety, not a cash grab. I think RB hq probably know they're making tradeoffs of keeping parents happy, while devs will be annoyed/fewer. But everyone can still make games and play them with trusted friends. Likely damages the network effect (Roblox's multiplayer aspect being one of its best parts), but oh well.
You're saying you get nothing, but you perhaps underestimate how time-consuming and expensive even the easiest company shut down in the Germany is. (I had a very smooth process winding down my company in the UK - you have my very sincere sympathies that things are a bit rockier for you).
>if your main shareholders and directors are physically in Germany and you reseat the company to where-ever, Germany is going to see and act like this is a de-facto German company. Hence you gain nothing, you get more paper work.
Looking online, here's a german tax-advisor who talks about the strategy of liquidating your company by first merging it with a uk company, saying you can close a company in 4-6 weeks by this process (though they recommend against it after brexit for liability reasons, but mention Ireland and malta as options). In germany you have a year of waiting, and lots of additional notary/accounts work. (OTOH, I don't know how you get it down to 4-6 weeks and avoid the uk's company house gazette notification period - they must pick a different kind of company - if your fees for closing down a company in germany are going into the thousands (or tens of thousands) for notaries, liquidators fees, and the like).
Once again, not my specialty area, I just...wanted you to know that it does happen, is a specialty area of work for some companies, and it's presumably not irrational behaviour.
I've been told by a lawyer that a common sensible step in closing companies in Germany is to first...reseat the company in the UK ... (at least pre-brexit - not sure if things have changed). Think of how bad and expensive the process has to be for this extra step to be worthwhile.
interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..
Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
>Trying to optimize to some kind of perfect pixel alignment shouldn't be a goal anymore.
If you're trying to display pixel art (or make games with pixel art), being able to have integral upsizing is very useful. Antialiasing doesn't cut it, and the eye notices when you do non-integral nearest-neighbour upscaling and some pixels are the wrong size.
Huh (having scanned but not read in detail the post), interesting approach. I'm not that well-versed in this area (as a game developer, I tend to jump straight to nearest-neighbour), but hadn't come across this before. I love the pathological example of a checkerboard pattern - very pleasing worst-case scenario, where I suspect it would just be a grey blur. However, the developer doesn't show us the equivalent for the suggested filter - systemically showing side-by-side comparisons of different filters would be useful. I suspect the resulting artefacts would be randomly blurry lines, which could also stand out. But nice to see people thinking about these things...
Here's a related disucssion on what 'pixelated' should mean from the css working group
(every so often browsers break/rename how nearest-neighbouring filtering works. I hope at some point it stabilizes lol - I note in the discussion linked nobody else cares about backwards compatibility ...).
> It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character
More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?
I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!
(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
Yeah, I remember a friend getting a call during coworking and her face just went white, and after the call she told us that was the tax people calling about irregularities (she had moved countries and was slow in sorting out her tax situation), and we all bought it - there was no sober "oh yeah it's a scam" advice from us - it was really perfectly timed, and took a day or to for her to reason through that it must be a scam. (No money lost though!)
>Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).
Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?
In the painting there's a delicate interrelation between colours - you have browns/greens/blues in the dark parts, and more whites/yellows/blues/pinks in the light parts. I wouldn't describe it as bland, though it is in a sense washed-out. BotW doesn't, and probably can't have that level of handling of shades colour in the enviroment graphics if nothign else because of the technical constraints of the Switch hardware.
Looking at the screenshot, what can you say - you can say that it's nice that the green/yellow of the sky is mirrored in the green landcape with yellow rivers. And the back-lighting of the sun is helping give definition to some of the mountains/hills, which is nice. But I don't see very much subtle going on with the landscape.
Looking at the art, you can see a lot more dynamic range, clearer silhouetting of mountain ranges at various distances, whereas the actual game is more monotone-green. You can also see the fog doing a lot more work of making the shape of the land clear. There are some bits of fog/mist in the screenshot as well, but they're not doing as much heavy lifting in terms of giving shape to the landscape.
The Switch is really limited on the hardware front, and I can't imagine what kind of trade-offs the art team had to make to get to where they are - it's a very difficult balancing act that I only understand a small part of. Nintendo also tend to be very conservative/restrained in their 3d style (I remember being somewhat unnerved by Ubisoft's "Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle" Mario game, because it went super high-production-quality).
It feels a bit cheap to give as an example, but the 3D MMO Love by eskil steenberg tried to emulate the impressionist style, and did a striking job:
https://imgur.com/9U18eRZ
The bloom effect is doing a lot of heavy lifting to make the bright colours pop, but even in the less glowy areas there is quite subtle layering of colours going on and one does have the feeling that the colours are playing with eachother.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc02ijaw-Tg a video of it in action, if you are curious ).
As another comparison, looking at elden ring you can see they've gotten 'using fog to make landscape silhouettes pop' down to a fine-art (maybe they're even over-reliant on it)
https://imgur.com/a/5GEePwL
And looking at the landscape you have really nice looking brown/oranges in the fields in the foreground, black/greys/browns in the mid-ground, rocky cliffs, fog is actually glowing, and you have some green forests in the top-left. That's a lot of nuance for what's essentially a brown landscape. BoTW doesn't have that - would it have it if the team had the hardware capabilities and time and budget? Who knows...
The problem I personally have with the Zelda example given is that it looks really bland to me - the landscape looks really washed out - the author says "Somebody would paint this. It’s artistic.", but I don't think anyone would paint with such bleached-out colours.