xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

@beardalaxy Yeah, I remember the game being extremely buggy, but I suspect that it had more to deal with the game running on the Mono framework (an open-source implementation of the .NET VM). I could be wrong though. But I do know that The Sims 4 starting out as some spin-off game is a major reason why people felt like it was such a downgrade. Maybe dividing towns into sections was a better idea, but I think it could've been done better instead of having the map be a 2D image. It destroys any potential for user created towns.

@coolboymew James Corbett of The Corbett Report was talking about the dangers of self-replicating vaccines literally a day before this news broke out.

https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/replicon-big-pharma-preps-the-next

@Humpleupagus https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/fda-acam2000-mpox-vaccine-warning-death-unvaccinated/

Jesus Christ, it's like they actually WANT to kill a bunch of people indiscriminately.

@beardalaxy It's such a shame to see how much the series has fallen. I haven't even played the fourth installment, but that game just felt like a downgrade just by looking at it. Why would anyone think that stripping the defining feature of the previous game (open neighborhood with no loading screens) would be a good idea? And I just didn't like how they outright refuse to add basic features like drivable vehicles, and that's all because the game literally reuses an engine that was intended for some unreleased MMO spinoff.

And it's not just a shame for The Sims series but Maxis Sim games as a whole. I used to be obsessed with those games, but they all died. Maxis stopped making Sim <insert subject here> games after The Sims became extremely popular. EA killed SimCity's one chance at a revival after their missteps with SimCity Societies by adding always-online DRM, and Spore wasn't big enough to justify continuing.

I would love to make simulation games as spiritual successors. One idea I have is to write a spiritual successor to the cancelled SimsVille, but the inner workings of those games (pathfinding, AI, etc.) are way too complex for me to wrap my head around.

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=PXkCaAIatCk

@beardalaxy SimCity games up to 3000 allowed you to load saves from previous entries. I don't know why The Sims never had anything similar. Maybe those games were too complex or each new entry added at least one thing that would break compatibility (SimCity 4 was the first not to be backward compatible with previous entries due to buildings now actually facing roads and region play).

@PurpCat Most people are afraid of manual memory management these days.

@PurpCat Their limitations prevent beginner devs from "over-engineering" while still using modern languages like Lua.

http://8agdg.wikidot.com/fantasy-console

So the recent-(ish) Minecraft movie announcement trailer along with an old chart of freeware indie games got me nostalgic for early Minecraft, and as much as I hate the cultural phenomenon it spawned, it got me thinking: Minecraft was basically an end of an era for indie gaming.

For one, it is the last major indie game to be written in Java. In fact, it's probably what got people to stop writing games in that language because it clearly showed how unoptimized its GC is for video games, especially 3D games. It also represents an era where indie developers still made their games "from scratch" instead of using an engine, and even though there are still developers who write games without engines, I feel like that practice became less prevalent when Unity became really popular.

But what truly makes it feel like an end of an era is that Minecraft was never on Steam, Origin, Desura, GOG, or Itch. It was always officially hosted on their own website which you almost never see anymore, outside of FOSS games. And their old website is a great example on how you can still have a simple, yet professional looking website.

I could go on and talk about how it was pre-culture war and that you can just make games without getting into any id-pol related drama, but I feel like that's pretty obvious. I really wish we could go back to this era.