Oh man, I work in a datacenter for a living. All the careful planning in the world, and occasionally, for no apparent reason at all, the NIC just straight up decides it doesn’t feel like forwarding packets, or acknowledging requests, or refreshing its route table... there’s a whole multitude of different ways that a…

I have a hard time buying this. When I deleted my Facebook profile, all of my real friends found other ways to keep in touch, and we remained friends. I stopped getting random messages from old acquaintances that wanted to rekindle the flames (a boon, in my opinion), and my family all know that they can just contact…

If the development team were using City Skylines to actually construct a model of the project they intended to build, that would be awesome! But as noted in the original article, this particular City Skylines screenshot was from an old reddit post from three years ago. They got caught being lazy, and there’s no…

This seems pretty spot on. It’s one thing to make an open source clone of the game mechanics with original art, or even to require the base game to lift the artwork from. But to include copied assets in your repo from a commercial game is just asking for trouble. Still, seems like EA are being reasonable about things;…

Albert, I have a lot of respect for you, but WHY did this article not end with “That’s All Folks!”???

I think perhaps this is a holdover from the older days of 2D animation. When your in-betweens are all hand-drawn, then smoothness is MUCH harder to achieve, and it became sort of a general purpose compliment.

As the owner of a Nintendo, Super Nintendo, N64, and several handheld systems, let me tell you that this is a particularly difficult challenge in the modern age. Some of the older games (*Especially* the better SNES titles, looking at you Chrono Trigger and Earthbound) are extremely difficult to come by at a fair…

You know, that was my initial reaction too, but I’ve had to take a step back. This is pretty far removed from a flash clicker that would deserve a $10 price tag; it’s clear the developers have put a ton of work into it, even if the gameplay is relatively simple. I don’t know that I agree with the race to the bottom…

For my day job, I actually work in a position where I take calls from customers, so this is a real problem! We have a front-line phone team that handles most of the call volume, but if they’re all busy my phone can ring for an incoming customer, and sometimes those are robocalls or obvious scammers. If it’s a human we…

Exactly my point. :) I have exactly one person (a relative) whom I expect to call me from that area code. Any other call is obviously a spammer.

For this reason, I’ve been considering implementing a block on my phone. If you’re not in my address book already, I want the call to go to voicemail. These robo callers always seem to come from my area code, which is great because most businesses I actually deal with are located in the city I live in (different area…

Just based on the description, that sounds like it’s much more likely to be one of many configuration files, probably loaded by a dynamic scripting language running most of the game’s logic. This sort of thing is extremely common in development of large, complex games, and is actually a boon to development, enabling…

I had to explain to AT&T that they had attempted to sell me an internet plan with such a low data cap, at such a high speed (1 TB / 100 Mbps) that I could quite feasibly blow through the entire data cap in less than 24 hours. Fortunately there’s a competitor in town, and I let them know they lost a customer with that…

Super Metroid is a really great game with a pretty... okay, and sometimes frustrating control scheme. It’s easier to appreciate it in the context of its era, where most gamers would have the time to sink into its winding levels and slowly acclimate themselves with its difficult controls, mastering the mechanics one…

There’s a Kinja bug that appears to cause Twitter embeds to only load at half-size, and it’s kinda random. Might be a problem with some people’s ad blockers perhaps, but I noticed it happening a few months ago and it never really fixed itself.

Ah, the author isn’t specific, but here’s the relevant quote from the article:

The 13 hearts thing is also not nearly as bad as it sounds; each Divine beast gives you one whole container, and if you've been picking up stamina wheels, you can swap them out for hearts using the evil statues, then switch them back when you're done. By the time you've completed 2-3 of the beasts, you've practically…

The unlock system in League isn’t actually all that slow. If you’re playing as much as these professional players do every day, you very likely already have every champion unlocked and a huge cache of Blue Essence (previously called IP) banked. Even as a very casual player, I’ve unlocked half the roster and am picking…

In this particular case, I think the technique could quite easily be adopted to smartphones and tablets. Any two touchscreen devices with reasonably similar DPI should be able to perform the trick as described. I wonder if we’ll see those pop up? Might be an interesting mechanic to play with as a game designer.

This is a lot closer than you realize. The “thing that makes SNES games” for the artwork in this case is a paint program that understands paletted images, and some process to take that image and divide it up into tiles, so that it will fit into the memory of the SNES’s VRAM and can be drawn correctly by the hardware.