Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.

Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.

Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.

Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.

I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.

This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.

(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)

Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.

Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.

This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~*~magic~*~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.

I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.

The first Call of Duty game I played was Ghosts, and it may have coloured my perception of what the series is about. Bombastic popcorn munching action that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. I was like “eeeeh it’s okay”. After playing some older ones I was like “well I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time”. (Hm. Did I ever finish MW2? And I think I put Black Ops 2 on hold after the first mission. Loved Advanced Warfare tho!)

Ooh, don’t make me link to That One CGP Grey/Kurtzgesagt Thing. Well I might as well do it. Existential Crisis One! Existential Crisis Two!

Heh, I know. I bought Sync for Reddit originally, and was really conflicted about whether I should buy Sync for Lemmy. Was, like, “what the hell, I’ll be supporting the developer.”…well I’m glad I never bought the ongoing support things this developer offered! Staunch supporter of open source threadiverse apps these days, as you might imagine.

True, the plant as a whole doesn’t die.

But this particular slice of grass on the microscope slide?

Dead.

Of course this gets a lot more grim when you realise the grass had to be sliced to put under the microscope.

So they sliced a smiling organism and captured the expression at the moment of death.

I know I’m supposed to be strong, but I’m shedding tears. 😢

Dunno about RIF, I’ve been in threadiverse since Sync for Reddit bit the dust. (Was in Kbin initially.)

I don’t have that many tabs open. I keep them neat and tidy!

Now, the bookmarks… 😩

Can someone still developing tell me what I should use for the backend today?

I recommend checking out Python (Django) and Ruby (Ruby on Rails) if you want nice and easy modern Web frameworks that also aren’t that weird if you have PHP experience.

Also I can never understand GIT as a single developer. The fuck is that? I’ve tried everything to understand.

Versioning your code with Git makes it much easier to experiment with new ideas. Cocked up a file? Pull it from the previous version. Create new branches for experiments, merge them in if they work, toss them if they don’t, or keep them around just in case, without them ever getting in your way in the “real” version.

And if you keep the code in a server (GitHub etc), that gives you a backup location and makes it easier to work on code on multiple systems.

Reminds me of how in some old Unix system, /bin/true was a shell script.

…well, if it needs to just be a program that returns 0, that’s a reasonable thing to do. An empty shell script returns 0.

Of course, since this was an old proprietary Unix system, the shell script had a giant header comment that said this is proprietary information and if you disclose this the lawyers will come at ya like a ton of bricks. …never mind that this was a program that literally does nothing.

“Cubist”, or as the old-timers call it, “the Management insisted that this thing must work on MSIE 6, and we didn’t have the budget to make it work on anything else”

Which is why I’ve mostly been a console peasant. PC games are like “So let’s spend 5 minutes installing extra shit. And maybe 15 minutes screwing with the settings and fixing compatibility. Oh and are you ready for The Modern Scourge, the Hell that is shader precompilation? We’ll be here for a while.”

Modern games are a little bit better, but yeah…

…It’s okay. I’ve programmed in far far worse languages. …It’s got its advantages. It’s got it’s problems. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Edit: If you need a serious answer: Much like BASIC, it’s a language often used in teaching programming. In that sense, I guess it’s much better than BASIC. You can, like, actually use it on real world applications. If you’re using BASIC for real world applications in this day and age something has gone really wrong.

experts warn that retrofitting it to meet presidential security standards could take years, cost hundreds of millions more, and risk national security due to potential embedded surveillance.

Oh, but that’s the mindset from before the current administration. Back when presidential whims were at least moderated by process and oversight. Back when people believed that it didn’t matter if America elected a ridiculous tinpot dictator, because they couldn’t do anything just by themselves, the rest of the government was there to see the law and procedures were to be followed at all times. Now? Nobody in the White House cares. Donnie wants a jet, Donnie gets a jet.

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…Dunno, sounds like a you problem to me.

If using plain CSS, usually it’s enough to set width appropriately, and margin-left and margin-right to auto.

If using a Modern Frontend/CSS Framework, then may God have mercy on your poor soul.

(Seriously I just started a new project with TailwindCSS and I’m so confused. But not entirely desperate yet.)

I dunno, most of my experience from Docker comes from docker compose, and it’s “put this thing in a file and edit it and then run docker compose up -d”.

So if anything, it’s best illustrated with the old meme of a dog typing on a computer going “I have no idea what I’m doing”.

Insert random copypasta about biotech breakthrough that turns water and CO2 and nutrients into sustainable building materials which sounds like space age technology but it’s just trees