Came across a truck in a southern town covered in stickers of anime traps (some were borderline hentai), gay pride stickers, and a whole lot of gun stickers. They had a bumper sticker that said something like “the only thing straight about me is my shooting”.

People are buying it, unable to play because of PlayStation account requirement (the PlayStation servers are having issues and not letting people log in or create an account), and then leaving an angry review and refunding it.

Also weird, the game includes the unnecessary PlayStation overlay, which makes it unable to run on Linux. The devs were nice enough to specifically disable the overlay on Steam Deck, but all other Linux players have to set a special launch option to fake being a steam deck in order to get the game to run.

From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.

8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.

They added wifi with a extra circuit board hidden inside the calculator case. It’s connected to the calculators communication port, and pretends to be another calculator. So they can use the calculator’s built in “send” function to send variables/text/etc to the hidden card, which then uses it’s internet connection to look up answers and send the results back.

The Yakuza games alternate wildly between being extremely serious dramas about underworld crime, and extremely light hearted and wacky side quests. Some people might find the change in tone breaks immersion, but I find the two extremes increase the impact of each other. When a game is serious all the time I get numb to it, there needs to be a variety of lighthearted content for me to really feel the impact of when things get heavy.

This definitely feels like terrorist attack tactics, since it does more to cause fear than actually fatalities. You make some really good points though, it’s unfortunate that you’re getting so many downvotes for factual information.

As for the terrorist group designation, you can see a list of all countries and entities that consider Hezbollah a terrorist group here.. It does include both the European Union and the United States, along with many other countries. There are some countries that don’t consider them a terrorist group, notably Russia, China, and North Korea.

I think Overwatch 1 at it’s peak could be compared to CS2.

Right, that’s why the collective play amount is ~140k when the steam daily is only ~30k

That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.

According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.

For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.

So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.

Huh, possibly bad extruder? If it’s got weak extrusion it might only be able to push it through the nozzle at higher temps.

That was a good investigation and explanation about a weird number of up votes. Thanks for explaining it.

I don’t have time right now to write a full proper response, but for quests I would imagine starting out we would still use traditional random generation the bones of the quest, but use an LLM to create the narrative and NPC dialogs for it. Games like Shadows of Doubt already do a good job with randomly generated objectives, but there’s no motive for the crimes. Just taking the already existing gameplay and using LLM to generate a reason why the crime happened would help with the atmosphere a lot. Also, you can question suspects and sometimes solve the case by them telling you they saw [person] at [location] at [time], but I think an LLM could provide actual witness interrogation where you have to ask the right question, or try to catch them in a lie.

As far as the mechanics for LLMs to actually provide dialog, I expect to see some 3rd party AI startups work on it. Some kind of system where they have some base language packages that provide general knowledge and dialog abilities, and then a collection of smaller models/loras to specialize. Finally you would have behind the scenes prompting that tells the NPC who their character is, any character/quest specific knowledge they have, their disposition towards the player, etc. I don’t expect every game company to come up with this on their own, I suspect we’ll get a few individual companies offering a built solution for it starting out, before it eventually becomes built into the larger game engines.

Obvious application is having NPCs that you can actually talk with. Not just about one or two topics that they have a pre-recorded voice line to tell you about, but about anything at all. And with AI speech generation as well, you could have them somewhat realistically talk back to you.

You could also have an LLM working as a kind of DM, coming up with new quests with stories and some content variety. A lot of games have repeatable randomized missions, but this are very formulaic and feel very repetitive after you’ve done a few. There’s usually no story, just a basic combat grind. A LLM could come up with actually interesting randomized quests, like a murder mystery where the murderer had a motive and you can legitimately question the suspects about anything they know.

It really sounds like you have a major problem with the printer that needs to be resolved. Without knowing any more details I would suggest making sure the nozzle isn’t clogged and possibly replacing the hot end.

I had similar printing issues with some filaments, due to heat creep. The printing would start ok on mine, but after the printer had been running awhile it would print like that. In my case heat was travelling up the hot end and Bowden tube, which was causing printing issues after a certain amount of time had passed. Some filaments were more sensitive about this than others, my cheap plain filaments and my multicolor filaments wouldn’t print well, but medium to high quality plain filaments would print fine.

There are a lot of things that can contribute to heat creep, I ended up replacing my hot end and Bowden tube, and lowered my print temperature some.

220° is pretty high, I would try to figure out why it won’t print below that temperature and see what you can do to bring that down. See if that fixes it.

Truly the end of an era

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4ngyely232o

Here’s the original news article, it’s actually about boneless chicken wings being allowed to have occasional bones.