Importing all my old posts and whatnot now. Doing this only for the sake of preserving memories, as so much has changed since then. But at least some of what was true then is still true now.
Remember Eye Yay, the public domain player I posted a couple weeks ago? It's been updated with VoiceOver support! Like me, you can enjoy countless hours of OTR from archive.org! | apps.apple.com/app/id675510251…
Download Eye Yay - Public domain player by Bucket Brigade Software Limited on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games…
Oh nice, I saw this on Reddit a few weeks ago and didn't really like the UI, so will grab it again and give it a shot. Can you only listen to select things from archive.org or search the hole library?
> “It’s hard to imagine increases beyond 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day in the next year, just given the degraded state of the infrastructure, especially the upgraders,” Daan Struyven, co-head of global commodities research at Goldman Sachs, said at the Goldman Sachs Energy, CleanTech and Utilities Conference.
DING DING DING
You want the truth about this ask the investors who finance this shit and actually understand the risk. They aren't lying
> U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said on Tuesday that an increased flow of Venezuelan heavy oil to the U.S. Gulf would be "great news" for job security, future gasoline prices in the U.S. and for Venezuela.
You don't make gasoline from heavy sour crude, why can't we have journalists that do their goddamn jobs and call these people out on their lies
I am thinking of going to #FOSDEM. But the travel time is quite long 14-16h+. So I would like to combine it with some additional trip "nearby". Any recommendations what to do in winterly times?
My company is now taxed like an S-Corporation instead of a single member LLC to reduce my tax burden. Basically: I'm passing the tariff burden back to the gov't instead of customers.
I am now required by law to post a Worker's Comp certificate in a conspicuous place.
This is the document, Trump does not want you to see.
In 1916, under President Woodrow Wilson, the United States signed the purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark, in a convention in which the United States recognised Denmark's right to the whole of Greenland.
Danish MP's of The Defence Committee will convene in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility at 18:00 to discuss the defence of Greenland.
it depends on what the legal understanding of "political and economic interests" means I guess. We live in a world where you can't assume this is decided.
That time when you're SSH'd into a Linux VPS and you want to do something like "cat /var/log/mail.log | grep blablabla" but end up just typing "cat /var/log/mail.log" then hitting Enter, and the absolutely massive infodump causes NVDA to freeze. Yeah, that. Happened to me a few hours ago.
My absolutely freeking favorite one right now is the one where the terminal does, something, and it causes NVDA to break in such a way where alt tab doesn't read, and the terminal window doesn't read, causing me to have wo restart NVDA. Can't count the amount of times on two hands that this has happened in the past 2 hours.
@Bri Yeah I decided to write my own after I discovered that pretty much all of the existing ones have some very nasty issues. I posted about it but Idk if you saw it: github.com/ethindp/prism. It doesn't have a README yet and bindings are still a big work in progress
The Platform-agnostic Reader Interface library for Speech and Messages: a new universal text-to-speech and screen reader abstraction library - ethindp/prism
@Bri Yep. I debated for like 2-3 hours whether I should expose pitch/rate/volume control because I wasn't sure if that was persistant or a temporary change. In the end I decided not to for now. And OneCore was a pain in the ass
@Bri Well, and Idk if all the invariants and such hold, which of course would be an API bug. But yeah, thanks for taking the time out of your day to tell me your thoughts! :)
Or perhaps the stupid and horrible memory leak that causes explorer to crash with a buffer underrun if mainstream games or other intense applications mess with UIA or keyboard hooking, or the fact that it now just dies sometimes for no reason and zombifies when you try TO RESTART IT, (COULDN'T TERMINATE EXISTING PROCESS)
@draeand That, along with the bug where, ya know, your terminal window will just randomly refuse to focus sometimes, and then you can be assured your terminal window will explode quite spectacularly after that
Wow, I never need to restart NVDA. I just get a focus loss every time I open a new terminal window, memory leaks (which aren't NVDA's fault), and occasionally I alt+tab back to the window and get error sounds any time I do anything. None of those require a restart though. Seems like along with being megaborked, it's differently borked for different people.
Are there tickets for your problems? Could you ping @NVAccess or provide more feedback to get them solved? I ask because I also don't have this kind of problems.
several people reporting lately that #deltachat has become their main app: They are now spending more time in the chats, also with web apps, than in any other app. It may be a turn to more private communications when social media has become more toxic, obnoxious and dangerous in many places?
#deltachat and #chatmail.is indeed about being readily available when other forms of communications become unavailable or dangerous like in Iran or Russia but also in western and other countries.
@xmppbrasil @wch423 @TagHunt the chinese firewall presents a special challenge that doesn't exist as such in the West. It blocks signal, whatsapp and many other apps. While it may not be important to you, it is something of concern for people interacting with, or travelling, with mainland china.
I have been trying to figure out what to post here about ICE activity today in the Minneapolis / St. Paul metro. It is just •batshit• out there.
Some admin mucky-muck is in town today (Noem, I think?), and ICE is putting on a full We Are A Big Fascist Deal theater show. The result of this is chaos: ICE caravans all over, vulnerable people terrified, less-vulnerable residents dropping their work to keep watch on the streets.
First I was hearing ads on podcasts for Factor Meals. Now I'm seeing ads on Facebook for Factor Meals. I'd bet that, if I posted this on Facebook, then the algorithm would factor my post in and start sending me more ads for Factor Meals. It's a nice thing about Mastodon, that I'm not going to see ads based on what web sites I visit or where I go physically or what I post about. But then I suppose I'm giving Factor Meals free publicity now, although I've never tried one of them.
I used to wonder why someone would snap and drown their kids in the bathtub but after trying to do work and constantly getting interrupted and needing to run errands that end up eating several hours of your day and completely ruining the ability to concentrate on something I think I totally get it -- and I don't even have kids
on the other hand, it took me a number of job applications from RandyLaptop.com before I clicked that a slightly more professional domain might not go amiss.
@pluralistic, over 110 hotels in Quebec are being named in a class action lawsuit submitted a few weeks ago. The suit claims they share crucial information through a common algorithmic pricing software, IDeaS, to drive up prices. Demand has held steady for the last ten years, but average room prices have increased 45% (twice the rate of inflation). Looks like RealPage for hotels.
It’s worth repeating. Android is not a viable base for an independent or even just collaborative operating system. Android is Google and only Google’s project.
If you want to see an actually transparent, international, and collaborative system on phones, support @postmarketOS
not to that extreme, I mean yeah but in a different way. The bop it download also looks very strange. I think the pull it on the download looks like a chair leg. Loool
Wow, #Gentoo moving from GitHub to Codeberg is cool. Haven't run Gentoo for years now but still have a soft spot for it (I learned so much running it as main driver).
I also use Codeberg für my code (and joined the association) but we can't just "move everything to Codeberg". That's neither sustainable nor a good model. We should have more associations like Codeberg to offer those kinds of services. Create a whole web of forges for collaboration while we can watch GitHub go to hell.
I am heading to FOSDEM again at the end of January. I go there every year and I have learned that there is a really sticker-happy audience there. The last few times I have been there, I have given away several thousands of curl stickers.
As much as Redspot gives me flashbacks to when i was 12 (22 now) I really do miss some of the old elements. Today, I managed to get onto the battlefield (it's a fixed bug now) when I was invited to a team. And the map worked fine. I just wish our suggestions were not behind a wall. Like okay, not every single thing needs to be added. But if not a change, add it as an option. We don't always want to kill. We want to gear up and build. bases, teams, bring back the true Redspot experience!
All in time, my friend. I'd urge you to look at the bleeding edge beta warning that shows on first launch of the latest client update and to remember that what you are seeing right now does not reflect the full final experience which, though may take some time to come to fruition, will be far better than the redspot of old, battlefield is not going anywhere. Right now as we are working on server and client stability, people stress testing the killing ground alone is giving us spades of data, bugs and reports to contend with before we go enabling more parts of the game and adding even more entropy to the situation, first lets be sure that the current level of entropy can be handled gracefully by the server. TLDR, I believe that more enjoyment will result from trying not to interpret the temporary disablement of a feature or game area as any sort of long-term statement about the future of the project, but rather just as us removing extra variables from the testing and fixing the bugs in segments. Meanwhile I hope you still have some fun on what is available of the game in the meantime!
@samtupy I did read the alert that popped up. My assumption was that you guys were just not gonna bring it back at all, or completely ignore it. I had no idea it had to do with all of that. Sincere apologies.
@samtupy One thing that is cheap no matter what is the game straight up killing you if you survive long enough. Why? Would it not be better to damage the players? Reduce the max shielded shots, max health, make the player lose random quantities of some item, there are so many other options that aren't just outright murdering a player for surviving too long. We did work to get those kills/items/whatever else. Yes I know. Once battlefield comes back it'll probably move you or whatever. I'm speaking about now as things are.
@threlm4280 Hey thanks for those suggestions actually, on our end we were thinking of so many angles and getting so many things ready and honestly would have rather not disabled battlefield accept that we have quite a bug list for that map on the internal dev team, making the disablement a bit last minute. We got to a point where we knew of just a couple bugs on KG and literally everything else was broken on battlefield/store/bases. I admit though even as I implemented it I wasn't a fan of it however no better solution crossed my mind at the time what with it being crowded with so many other tasks and todos. What do you think of maybe disabling all item collection for the player after that hour instead, thus forcing the user to play out the rest of their game and seeing how long what they've collected in that hour will last - thus a much more natural ending that's part of a fight? Such a system could even stay around after battlefield is back, meaning users could optionally finish their kg fight if they want nothing to do with bf, or could type /battlefield to move otherwise after their collecting hour is up. In short, the basic problem is that if we allow people to survive on KG for too long, we will create a serious balancing issue where a few tank players could hold dominion for I don't even know how long, same goes for inventories in corpses. So at base we need 1. A way for items to disappear, usually handled by moving to battlefield. 2. A way for players not to end up with ridiculous amounts of spare buffs meaning they'll never die and 3. A solution simple enough that we aren't stopping to code an entire system or sequence behind it instead of fixing the bugs that would just let us enable battlefield sooner. I admit that my creative energy is a wee bit scattered right now as I work on finishing other releases and divert the rest of it to fixing bugs, and thus am more than happy to keep an ear open to better temporary solutions to what should happen after the kg hour expires which would be more satisfying to the players than a death and a broadcasted kill count which, to be very clear, I agree is not ideal.
@samtupy @threlm4280 I would actually really appreciate a system where I wasn’t automatically just kicked the battlefield. Honestly all I care about is the killingground experience, I actually don’t want to play on battlefield and wouldn’t enjoy the game as much if I were forced to. So I for one, long-term, would really, really appreciate you if you added away for people to enjoy the game in its basis form without teams and bases and 20000 health.
@Kaliah @threlm4280 I can say for certain that long term this will absolutely not be an issue. My plan for the distant future is that you click play, you connect to what I'd probably just call the hub, maybe people will call it the map selection area IDK. But it's just a menu and a chat. The menu lets you choose what you want to play, the chat would allow communication with players that doesn't involve getting gunned down half way through your message and would let you coordinate with other players to decide where a group wants to connect to be it an arena, a map like battlefield or killing ground, or other areas/game modes in the future. If you selected killing ground, you'd probably select your hour expiry play mode before you connect E. auto move to battlefield, disable item collection, start over. That's what's in my mind right now, obviously nothing set and stone and any of the idea subject to change as it approaches actual implementation some day, but that's the general idea.
@samtupy @threlm4280 This actually sounds very useful. My main issue with redspot in 2017-2018 is that I felt a bit forced into base/teamplay when I didn't want to play the game that way. My favorite kinds of shooters are very base level ones, rs in its current form, rtr, games like that. So I'd very much appreciate a mode selection thing that would let me play it on killingground with a timeout so it stays fair. So I'm very on board with this idea.
@Kaliah @threlm4280 Indeed! I do think everyone enjoys different parts of redspot, and not everyone should be forced to engage in all of the parts that they don't enjoy.
Glad you understand that yeah. I'm not much of a shooter person myself, but if I play them, I like them simple and fun. Show up, kill some fuckers. The sheer number of items, how clunky the weapon system became, the fact that the map was ruled by a master team with invinsible players that could just sniper you as soon as you spawned from anywhere on the map, that took all the fun out of the game. Honestly, a game like that probably shouldn't allow tracking. You should not be able to just go after one particular player you have a vendetta against, nor should teams be able to pick out any newbie with no friends that just spawned and snipe them from a distance to where they can't react at all. I don't have friends really, that I play with. I like to go it alone, and I understand this puts me at a disadvantage to team players, but it'd be nice if there were other loners I could fight with. So sectioning like that sounds like a good idea. Maybe team play could even involve other games like capture the flag and stuff, while the lone arena, which is completely teamless systematically but can still have allies, is just a free for all.
@x0 @samtupy @threlm4280 That was my issue. Technically you're not *forced* into teamplay, but if you don't teamplay you're basically going to become everyone's punching bag. It becomes severely unbalanced once you allow people to just restock from bases every time they die. I strongly prefer to play shooters alone, or maybe team up with a couple friends so we can't kill each other. But I've never been into the base wars since IMO they completely break the balance of the game. Again, not saying redspot is a bad game, I just don't like how you used to be forced into base wars by the balance issues created by them.
@x0 @samtupy @threlm4280 I agree, this is why I said the mode thing is a good compromise. There are plenty of people who like the base wars, I'm just not one of them.
@samtupy @threlm4280 I appreciate this view very much. I know plenty of people who enjoy the base wars and teamplay, but my enjoyment comes from running around, grabbing stuff, shooting down whoever comes around with whatever weapons are there, and nothing more than that. Even the arenas are cool, I'm just not a base wars person. Once you exclude that from the experience you've got a good shooter IMO, but for sure not everyone thinks like that. Hence why I like your hub idea.
@Kaliah @samtupy @threlm4280 My main thing with readspot is that there's no built in equivalent to the amoun t of info sited players get when playing fps games. This might sound like I'm being picky, but sited people playing mainstreem shooters have an advantage that redspot doesn't give anyone. In the sited world, you can see the map teraine ahead to navigate, and crucially, you can locate other near by entaties with a quick look. The equivalent would be proper radar and a beacon system here. Also, sited people have aiming guides that help with locking onto targets especially with some of the more long range stuff like rifles, and even some short range stuff. Heck, some games that are mainstreem but accessible actually have an aim sound which changes in pitch based on where on the body you are aiming at, since that can affect the dammage of a shot in games that have a model like this. Also, the fact that turning is silent is also an issue, since as with the other stuff, sited people can observe their apponents doing such things by looking. For me there's just such a disconnect between the lack of information in redspot adn what sited people get just by looking at their screen in a pvp fps.
@Kaliah @samtupy @threlm4280 I usually can't target people given the current system. No visual fps that I know of has you spamming a track button to locate somebody manually, and then again, as I said earlier, visual fps games are set such that you can see what's in the line of fire of your weapon if anything is there, and in visual first games adapted for audio, the same applies.
@acerbt @samtupy @threlm4280 How do you propose to fix that issue? I don't really feel like there's an easy way in audio to match the visual experience exactly.
@Kaliah @samtupy @threlm4280 You provide locator beacons similar to items, but ones which are always active. Then whe you are prepairing to loc onto something, you provide some kind of suttle hint when you have a direct line of fire. If you haven't seen this done, you should watch a playthrough of the last of us with accessibility enabled. That has a very comprehensive fight system, all be it against npcs since it's simgle player, but the accessibility cue layer could be an inspiration point.
@Kaliah @samtupy @threlm4280 also, piggy backing off the idea of the last of us, there's a mode for everyone in which you can make the character you control focus their hearing, to hone in on the positions of enemies, and in the case of the accessibility layer on top, items.
@Kaliah @samtupy @threlm4280 even visually in the last of us, when somebody starts aiming, there's a retical on screen that you move which helps you see the alignment with things that can be shot at. The system can also be configured to optionally add resistence at certain points, such as trying to move the retical off an enemy if you are trying to target something else that isn't the closest thing you can turn to face.
@acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 So on one hand, you know I totally understand these things after having added auto locking tracking to stw. I understand the virtues there and indeed we plan to move some of stw's tracking system to Redspot at some point. One thing I must admit to though is that there is something I need to fight with or outgrow or find another outlet for or something which has dramatically slowed me down when considering stuff like this. I think maybe it's stupid IDK, but I have a very strong feeling that if I make it so you don't need to jump much in redspot and you don't need to struggle to aim, I would find myself severely under stimulated trying to play the game and I think I would enjoy it a lot less. This doesn't invalidate your points, it just explains why I have trouble working my brain around to implementing them. Because I need to spam keys and move around and have very very quick reflexes, I somehow feel like the physical energy I'm exerting at least very slightly more closely matches a semblance of what I would be outputting were I to actually exist in the fight I'm trying to virtually immerse myself in. I feel like if whether I was aiming at my target was just handed to me on a silver platter, I'd find the game so significantly less challenging that I genuinely think I'd have a lot less fun on it, and my mind blanks when I try to consider ways to keep the game as fast pace as it is now while giving people the auto tracking they want. This leaves me quite 50 50 here and has for a long time. So yeah I'm still trying to figure out how to tackle that problem, luckily we've got plenty of other things to improve, fix, and bring back online in the meantime.
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 I'm with you. I feel like adding autotracking would make the game severely underwhelming and boring. No shit on your game, I just think adding in an autotracking system would make the game far less interesting. I feel like that removes a lot of the strategy. Just wait for the straight ahead sound or whatever, then shoot down X player with no strategy or effort whatsoever. I'm not saying the jump and run technique is the answer, because maybe it's not, but I also don't think redspot is really the game for an autotracker. STW maybe, redspot not really.
@Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 For sure, I think the reason it worked so well in stw was because they are completely different challenges, most people playing stw are not trying to subscribe to the same sort of challenge they are subscribing to by playing Redspot and thus auto tracking in stw was an easy decision as combat was only a small part of that game. Where as in rs combat is the entire point, and I feel like I need to leave it as challenging as possible so as not to make the soul point of Redspot, the combat, too easy/cut and dry.
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 Absolutely. Even in STW the automatic tracking made combat very, very easy. You could set up beacons and trackers so absolutely nothing could sneak up on you. It was extremely easy to shoot down animals, and extremely easy to chase down players because you had the ability to set beacons for them, and even if you didn’t do that there was still a straight ahead indicator. In RS that's the whole point, trying to sneak up, lure people in, strategize ETC, an autotracker does not promote strategy. I feel like adding that to RS would create a thoroughly boring and unappealing shooter game. And it’s not like you could make it something optional either, because if you somehow made people able to opt out of it you know that would be abused
@samtupy @Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 yeah when i started playing rs i was like this thing should be their but as i have played it more and more i have realised that this one feature not being here makes this a lot more challenging. Stw on the other hand made very good use of this feature though.
@samtupy @acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 Speaking of aiming and weapons, cyanide. Now I will try to submit this in-game too but, it's pretty much rare to find masks. Which means as long as cyanide's around, you can stack and stack kills just by going after those who have died recently. The pistol's pretty much all you need. I propose the pistol is removed from KG. People should learn how to fight, not spray cyanide everywhere.
@acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 Honestly I disagree, I mean in the most gental way possible but if people should learn how to fight rather than spraying cyanide everywhere, then it could also be said that people should learn how to avoid the cyanide pistol.
@samtupy @acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 Avoiding a pistol that continuously stacks and stacks gas upon you that drains all your health is difficult when, again, masks are rare. Not to mention it's not easy to avoid if someone rides up on a bike firing one. But alright, it's your game.
@acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 To be clear thank you for the suggestions - I am not trying to be utterly dismissive or anything. And yeah I will give you that bike+cyanide is a pretty difficult combo to fight off. But the reason I don't think it's all that special is because for example take the m1208. That thing kills you in 2 shots at default stats, actually faster than tripple tapping someone with cyanide and waiting, and the m1208 actually has more spread than the cyanide pistol. Add a quad to the m1208 and it is really and truly over. Same for many other weapons, I have to learn that if I hear any hint of a cyanide pistol sound in the distance, I run run run and pull out the longest range weapon I have and go after them. If they have a bike and I don't, I'm probably done for. But if they have a bike and I don't, that's probably the case anyway because they can circle me with any weapon. Even if someone hits me with cyanide once and I can run fast enough, that one hit won't kill me. I'll keep an ear open to opinions on that though.
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 I'm at a bit of a middle ground here, I do think it’s fine to have that weapon there. But I do think mask spawns could definitely be made a bit more common to help with the balance of that
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 Yeah I think that would do wonders for the slight OP of it. It's pretty easy to find air, just not super easy to find a mask. Even if masks were a bit more common you could, for instance, assign the mask to a favorite item and enable it when you hear that weapon coming, right now I just think masks might be a little too rare to make a strategy like that very viable. I'm not sure that removing it is the way to go, maybe I'm just biased because I like using it, but I definitely do think the balance could be adjusted so more people have a chance against it
@Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 You got it exactly, you don't even need stored air because the mask can be on for several seconds before you die of suffication. So if you have a mask but no stored air, you do exactly what you said - alt+control+arrow to assign it to a favorite item, then when you hear that weapon coming along, you can basically alt+arrow to toggle the mask on and off as needed during the fight to help you avoid the cyanide - that is exactly how I do it.
@Kaliah @samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 Not to mention a player doesn't always start out with a stored quad or a long ranged weapon, or an M1208. So you kind of have to improvise sometimes. And at times, this improvisations involve getting within the range of a cyanide pistol.
@Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 Yep I'll give you that, however only in the cases where you are attacked, not in the cases where you go do the attacking. If you start out with bad weapons and you decide to go kill someone before spending a few minutes collecting, that's on you. If within 3 minutes of spawning someone with cyanide pistol comes after you, sure like I said granted in that case you've got a bad hand in that particular fight.
@samtupy @Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 Yeah no, if I have a bad selection I never go after someone. I'll immediately try to gear up. Unless you spawn right next to someone which, hold on a sec. They have a cyanide pistol! Shiiit I'm toast LOL. That's where my point sort of branches from.
@Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 Yep I'll most certainly give you that, I mean just in general if you spawn with a short sword, a taser and a nunchaku 50 feet away from that dude who's been collecting for 45 minutes and is mid murder spree, that just sucks in general haha.
@Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 We can probably internally condense a player's general status into a floatingpoint score/weight variable from 0 to 1, and just not spawn the player very near someone who has a very high tanking score.
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 For sure. If you have time to collect, you should be more than able to improvise and strategize against it. If you spawn into someone with it, well that sucks but that’s kind of just bad luck, not anything you did wrong
@Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 Honestly of all things what your arguments against the cyanide pistol made me think of was to improve exactly that, the spawning. It would be totally reasonable to consider altering the kg spawn such that you won't spawn 50 feet away from a really tanked up player.
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 You could even rig the spawning a little bit to ensure that you start with at least one kind of each weapon, say make sure everyone starts with a shotgun, a melee weapon, and some kind of revolver or pistol, with a random chance of happening to have something else like a flamethrower. Just so everyone has a fair chance. Or like you said calculate where the most powerful players are and avoid spawning newbies within, say, a 100 foot radius of them.
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 To be fair, you could make this argument for nearly any weapon. You spawn immediately next to anyone with pretty much any shotgun? You're probably fucked. You spawn next to someone with 50 fireballs? You may also be fucked because you have no water. Even if you spawn close to somebody with something like a specific revolver, I forget which but there's one that can take down someone with default stats with 3 or 4 shots and you're not likely to have much to combat that if you're just starting out. I don't think that specific weapon is the only thing with that problem.
@Kaliah @samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 While I see that point of view, do keep in mind that cyanide continues to affect you even after you move out of the way, and it stacks. If you get fired at by something else and you're at critical health, no problemo. Just keep your distance and make a run for it. Cyanide? Not a chance. 3 shots? What's happening to your health as you run? It's still going down, then death.
I'll then make the argument that ranged weapons, particularly some of the starting revolvers or longer ranged shotguns, can also be really hard to run from. Sure you can bounce around like crazy, but if someone has good aim and strategizes it hardly takes any effort at all to put you down. I think that in general cyanide just sacrifices range for more long term damage, if someone fights you at long range your cyanide is completely useless, and if someone fights you with cyanide your range tactics are useless. It's a balance.
@samtupy @acerbt @threlm4280 This is why I say add more masks. Don’t remove it entirely, but add masks more commonly so people have more of a chance. Sometimes that’s just the risk you have to take, you have to use the resources available to you in order to, like you said, improvise. Maybe you don’t have that specific gun, for example, but you have something else with long range. Use that then to avoid the pistol. There’s nearly always a way around it if you strategize well enough
@acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 A different way to say this might be that right now, I have to make a lot of careful judgement calls when I'm playing rs. Are they close enough? Will this weapon reach? Are they centered? These things require careful real world listening skill to determine, I need to be able to listen to speech very quickly and listen very carefully to the tracking beacon, try to be on their same jump height or stand still long enough to lure my target closer to me, I have to learn what weapons work best by trial and error. If auto tracking existed though I feel like all of that fun challenge would be simply replaced with the single goal of shooting when I hear a particular beep, and if I'm looking for a game where I react to a single or a few sounds, I can get into rhythm games or something that are actually designed for that. Following one instruction to shoot when I hear a specific sound seems so so so too easy for me, and I don't know what else I can do to reintroduce the same level of challenge with more down to earth and mainstream tracking systems.
Honestly, I think my only problem with that is that myself, I use a slower speech rate than most. It's not super slow, IBMTTS at 60, but it's slow enough that I can't be actually required to listen to rapid speech to make mid-fight decisions, I need those as pure audio cues so I can keep up with them fast enough. It doesn't need to be a center beep, a player beacon of some sort usually did well enough for that. I've run into a lot of cases where blind people implicitly discriminate based on one's speech rate and I think it's a problem.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 yeah, that makes sense to me. I can't always be expected to listen to a manually requested speech event at high speed while figuring out doing other stuff in a fighting game, especially in 3 dimentions. player beacons would give us the audio equivalent of being able to see near by players just like sited people do. They don't have to press something to get information about near by players just to know players are at close range to them.
@acerbt @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 On the other hand, it does affect stealth tactics. Which some people would want. And I despise the idea that you can just track anyone on the game, no matter the range, which allows personal vendettas and very deliberate seek and destroy of anyone new before they can get their feet under them. Hmmm. Maybe some item equivalent of the invisibility shield, you get beacons by default, albeit quiet ones, and you can apply something, maybe just the same item, to mute it for a while, if you want to try for a sneak attack, unless your footsteps give you away? But shooting dispells it.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 yeah, extreme ranged tracking is a problem. Plus the fact that the track menu isn't even organized by distance, meaning you cannot use it to gage stuff like where you might want to go to stay out of the line of fire or avoid things at all costs. Also ibm tts at 60 is pretty close to the rate I use for my sapi stuff daily, and I can't physically get the player position info from the tracker fast enough to process it and process my fighting tactic at the same time. Much faster than this and I can't understand speech anymore.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 in regards to the jump jjump jump thing, that's not a normal fps tactic. Stamina is a thing, and jumping should ideally take a lot of it, so there ideally should be a different dodge system, particularly for non firearms.
@acerbt @x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 yes that's a huge one. Jump, shoot shoot shoot, jump. It should either have a pause where you can't jump for about 0.5 to 1 second, or the ability to dive out of the way, or both.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 yeah, yo physically shouldn't be able to jump immediatly upon landing contact, as you have to make sure you regain your footing, or fall over trying if the ground is unstable or your feet are in an odd position.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 also, the whole players refuzing to help nubies should not really be a thing, even though it is. I ask for help in pk, I ask for help in redspot battles, and nobody answers me with anything. I can't learn without asking and getting answers to questions.
@acerbt @x0 @Kaliah @threlm4280 Yeah one thing I'll most certainly give you is that as the game's dev progresses we will need a proper tutorial. I think on such games the answers to such questions are usually given mid fight on teamtalk servers, not on chat which is hard to answer because you can get gunned down while typing.
@acerbt @x0 @samtupy @threlm4280 I do think jumping could be made more strategic. I'm not sure we need a whole new system, but I do think we could make you have to be a bit more strategic about jumps.
@acerbt @x0 @Kaliah @threlm4280 So one point I'd like to correct here is the comparison between Redspot and an FPS for sighted people. I want to be clear, I respect the standards that exist for a reason and I do want to learn from them. But I have never committed to conforming to such standards. My goal is to make a game where people can have fun in a similar way that sighted people playing a sighted FPS can have fun. But if the method by which people have that fun on Redspot is not semantically the same as the machinery of a mainstream FPS like fortnight, that's fine because the end goal is not to mimic a mainstream FPS. Again this does not mean I wish to dismiss what they do - there genuinely is a healthy balance to what I'm saying here. But that said I've always seen the accepted standard as something to learn from and not as something to always be conformant to. OK so say I add beacons or a lock indicator to Redspot. We still don't have buildings. We don't have the corners that people could go behind to occlude the sound. We don't have so many other points of entertainment that might be in a mainstream FPS that we need to come up with the ones that we can in the meantime, the challenge of using my ears and ability to quickly change direction while pressing w over and over again being one of those. To be clear I don't use speech for much of my tracking. I just press w a lot. And no I'm not saying that's necessarily the best long-term solution - but for example, should a beacon work if the player is behind you if we conform to mainstream FPS games? Probably not. Right now you get that info so you can turn around if you check, you couldn't see behind in a normal game.
@samtupy @acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 Actually, overwatch, I think it was, had an interesting solution to that one. If someone was sneaking up behind you, the sounds of their movement were somewhat amplified I think, their audio cues were actually based on threat level. And yeah I forgot about the tracking beacon beep thing, which is likely the primary alignment cue.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 tracking beeps should ideally actually be automatic, if in a position to aim particulaly. sited gunners look through their sites, or their scopes to visually lock in their target while prepairing a shot, so we should be able to do the same.
@acerbt @x0 @Kaliah @threlm4280 They are automatic if you press y and switch to using yourself, just encase that's not being considered. You can't use many items accept favorites and your currently drawn weapon in that state, but it does exist.
@acerbt @x0 @Kaliah @threlm4280 You can access your currently drawn weapon, however you cannot draw another one unless it's one of your alt+arrow items.
@acerbt @x0 @Kaliah @threlm4280 Sorry one other thing, you have to press y then shift+w to toggle the auto tracking on and off. Just shift+w only works when using yourself instead of items.
@acerbt @x0 @samtupy @threlm4280 Again though, adding autotrackers to redspot takes away a huge amount of the challenge and turns it into a very bland "shoot when you hear X" type of game. If I wanted that, I'd go play a rhythm game. I'm not playing rs to gun down everyone based on an autotracker that tells me when I'm in shooting range, wondering and strategizing if you're in range is IMO half the fun
@x0 @Kaliah @acerbt @threlm4280 Like I said I rarely use speech while tracking unless I'm trying to snipe or hear the word behind which comes first. For me it's 95% the indicator that plays when I press w.
@x0 @acerbt @samtupy @threlm4280 I'm not saying rely on speech rate. TBH I almost never rely on speech when I'm doing it, I'm usually just relying on the pings from W. I'm sure there's a balance to this, but don't think an autotracker is reasonable for this kind of game.
@Kaliah @x0 @acerbt @threlm4280 The way I think of it is this. If we can come up with other creative challenges that equal the stimulation provided by the lack of an auto tracker, I am genuinely all ears. We certainly have a lot planned for the game's future. But I don't think it's a good idea until we have something that genuinely replaces the challenge of aiming. Same sort of thing with jumping. I didn't really intend rs to be a game where you go boing boing boing all day long certainly. But the thing I realized is that it's a great implicit dodging and speed control system all in one. I could make it so you could hit a key to drop to the ground or something? Actually can't you by pressing y and backspace? But this method removes my character's function for a second E. oh I'm on the ground rolling and can't move for a second, and thus the same slowdown in mechanics. With jumping as it is, you have to try to time it and align with the player's jump height, or try to outsmart them by standing still and waiting until they land etc etc. Especially with the current focus just being to fix the game and bring it online before we seriously start improving it, I just don't know of a system that can easily replace that in the short term that wouldn't just result in if not less challenge, less stimulation due to simply having to do a lot less to play. I admit the challenge offered by Redspot's differences to mainstream FPS's is... unique? The areas of difficulty aren't quite where someone might expect them to be. But at this point in time I don't know what base mechanic to replace the existing sort of odd challenges with that would provide the same level of challenge and stimulation. We'll be adding 3d aiming soon from stw, that'll be a start?
@samtupy @Kaliah @x0 @threlm4280 3d aiming is a challenge in itself as, you can take advantage of it with a body system. People would then have to learn/ surmize the weeknesses of the body, based on common sense and exparimentation, to take the fight to the people they are fighting against. Like, find just the right spot, and you can put a bullet through the heart, or through the head, both with very lethal results. Similar thing with melee, accept you'd add stab and slice mechanics, of course based on the weapon.
@acerbt @Kaliah @x0 @threlm4280 Oh yeah bro we planned this entire body armor system in Redspot a long time ago to replace shields, if the body was at least a capsule shape rather than a dot that gets hit with weapons that have spread haha, we get a lot of possibilities opening up.
@samtupy @Kaliah @x0 @threlm4280 I think with that whole thing, along with the fact that human plyaers are movable objects, a full 3d aiming system would be quite challenging and rewarding for refined control. It's hard enough to hit a buls eye on a standing target, so the motion just adds to the challenge.
@samtupy @acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 You'd basically require a controller at that point. Keyboard just does not have enough fine control to do something like that.
@samtupy @acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 ANd at that point, you'd need to greatly simplify the control scheme to be able to fit on a controller. Triggers for firing would be the sensible thing, d pad for movement of course, but how would favorites work? Inventory in general? Tracking etc? You've got like what, 6 buttons you can realistically expect the controller to possess? Is it more than that that you won't expect to be overwritten by something like steam? Let's say that xbox and play station controller are the baseline, we'll ignore the retro set e.g. 8-bit-do. Of course, controllers exist for a damn good reason, so if the game could be made fully playable on one of those that would actually be great. Aaaaaaand, if you can pair controllers to phones and have them work via osmething like bluetooth, you could play actual redspot on phones with it!
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 standard controller layout has 4 face buttons, 2 sholders, 2 triggers, plus l3 and r3, Then you also have start and select. There's the d pad, plus the 2 joysticks, so you have 4 analog stick axis controls, but you also have to considder the triggers as an axis because modenr controller triggers on everything accept the switch, have analog movement. Plus, if you want to support it, some controllers, namely the switch controllers and the ps5, have gyro, which is used as an aiming contorl in some games.
@acerbt @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 The hand-to-hand combat mode probably simply wouldn't map to a controller. Would you use a fire button or one of the triggers for that hmmm. Jump button obviously. Start or select is probably some kind of menu you can pull up, which I guess one of those could be inventory?
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 movement and aiming would probably be mostly handled using joysticks. In fact a lot of games reserve the d pad for auxilery funcitons like switching weapons or camera positions. You usually will use a combination of both sticks at once for efficiant movement.
@acerbt @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 Aiming, definitely. Do joysticks support diagonal movement? I know they can physically move there often but does that register to the game?
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 yes, they can. Analog sticks in this day and age just report a value along any axis they support so you just interprate that in game as direction using formulas and such.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 in fact you can represent 360 degrees of motion in an analog stick, but they internally support even finer grain movement than that.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 analog sticks by their very nature are absolute, so they are always sending a value. It's not bynary, but continuous. Old analog sticks had lower presition, such as the wii and early playstation ones only having octaganal precision, but the tech has otten better.
@acerbt @x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 While that may be true, do keep in mind that as long as you leave the stick alone, it's going to keep the value pretty much unchanged. And there are remedies to check if the stick is actually being moved, if at all.
@x0 @samtupy @Kaliah @threlm4280 it isn't as simple as you think. All of those thigns you use to check if sticks are actually being moved are handled in software, or in some rare cases, in firmware. There is naturally going to be some jitter in an analog stick, even a centerd one, and this is especially the case with pot based sticks, which use resistive tracks and wipers that contact them. Thos particularly are very much prone to drifting as well.
@Kaliah @x0 @acerbt @threlm4280 One of my beliefs when developing a game is that if there is a way to bring the need for real world skill into the game, I should try to do it. This is for example why I love lockpicking on Redspot - sadly we won't be able to do that for a bit haha. With jumping, I need to slowly learn the *exact* time between when I jump and when I land and learn how to press space as close to when I land as possible, that takes actual practice. With lockpicking it's the timing, I have to slowly practice and learn how to do that with a lot happening around me. The lack of an auto tracker just ties a lot together E. can I have the consentration, reflexes and skill to press w enough to get updated position info and change my direction fast enough and monitor my ammo count and shoot the target while still dodging their attacks all at the same time? Can I get close enough at least to hit the player with paintballs - items that cause the player to emit a constant beep for a bit, or handle the limits of pressing y to no longer use items and thus gain the auto beacon? Those kinds of things require a lot of focus and quick thinking and multitasking, all real world traits that you have to bring to the game. Once we can find other creative ways to still require similar traits in similar quantities, I'm certainly not opposed to changing some base mechanics in future versions of the game.
@samtupy @x0 @acerbt @threlm4280 This is why I like the current balance. You have to strategize and use skills. If you want an auto beacon, that's fine, but you have to sacrifice your items to get it. If you can't do that, there are other ways. I definitely am not 100% shutting down the speech argument, because I agree it should be fully playable with audio, but I think there are better more creative balances to come to with that than just letting everyone set an auto tracker and own everyone else with no strategy. I agree with your stance that if you can bring skills into it, you should. I've never been into games that are just mindless spam or repeating the same activity/keypresses/eTC over and over, and I feel like doing an autotracking system, at least with how the game works in its current state, turns it into a mindless and boring game.
@samtupy @acerbt @x0 @threlm4280 Yeah I'm with you. I've never seen RS as something that's trying to compete with sighted shooters. It just feels like a different deal.
@samtupy @acerbt @Kaliah @threlm4280 You don't need auto traking you just need it to beep when ever the target is centered. so you can follow the target around by the sound of them walking or jumping and when ever you are lined up it makes a sound think of rtr
@samtupy I'm actually a big fan of your idea there. Disabling collection would make it so that you have to seriously test your skills, see how things can go without the idea that you can collect more and be wreckless. I vote for this. It would open up more playstyles even, force survivors to use items in ways they never thought of before. Definitely a ton more fairness there than killing off the player entirely.
I just pushed an iOS #NVDARC update adding configurable VoiceOver actions while controlling a machine. This includes things such as sending keys and custom shortcuts, as well as performing actions of the app like muting speech/releasing modifiers. @techsinger
This is seriously smart. I didn't think of that, and it's perfection. Far better than keyboard shortcuts for everything, and easy to run from the hardware keyboard. It does work, and I have my shortcuts set up in the settings which took less than a minute and applies to all servers.
This is weird, and I suspect it's something I'm doing, though I'm not sure what. the actions are not appearing when I am on the disconnect button, or on the release all modifiers button, only when I go down to the "connected" item do I get the actions available and after that item, swiping through, the actions are available. By the actions being available, I mean both that VO says they are and that the rotor shows them as part of the options. Is that the way it should be, if I may ask, or should I be doing something to make them available everywhere. I have the "release all modifiers" action as part of the actions in settings.
I thought it would be too, but it seems to disappear sometimes, and I can't tell why, and release all modifiers is before it. Is that something you've seen?
It's not a huge one for me, but that's because I only have two machines I use as jumping off points. As I said, once I'm connected, I can use remote companion and vmware to go wherever I want. For people with a bunch of machines and who want keyboard only usage though, it might be an idea to have disconnect in the list so they can leave quickly.
on my opinion it could be not more 200B (10x less). I will do it manually and let you know. It will be intresting investigation. If I am wrong I also let you know.
by removing newlines, applying svgo and removing the filename with gzip -n (or using stdin), and using -9 (not making a diff here), it goes to 399 bytes.
some webservers have the option to serve pre-compressed static files if they are present next to the original. nginx supports `gzip_static on;`, `brotli_static on;`. (zstd too but needed an external module last time I checked) They can be created with a build step.
in our case for curl.se, the actual files are cached by the CDNs for six months anyway, so having the compression done by the origin server on demand is a negligible "cost" I think.
we don't need that trick. If we want to provide it compressed we just add that magic to our end's Apache config. My point is however that since it already is brotli compressed to most users, I don't think it does much use.
Did you check how small your svgo'ed version gets with the best brotli compression?
@NTICompass Thank you. stroke-linecap default value is butt, so we can remove from style for path, remove explisit style for path in tow places and add style stroke-linecap:round only for letters. It will save extra 40B
with further tweaks (and a little slash-fix that's adding 8 bytes), this goes down to 778 (w/ svgo 766, w/ brotli-11 345), tracked in PR: github.com/curl/curl-www/pull/…
use original OCRAStd.otf glyph exports for characters (exported via FontForge).
use native SVG shapes.
use all-integer coordinates.
retain existing shapes losslessly.
rework/simplify minimization s...
I'm Daniel Stenberg, maintainer and lead developer in the curl project. I stream curl related stuff. Release presentations, curl development and related topics.
We're back from our end of year break and working hard to get Thunderbird Pro out, we promise! We'll probably have a blog update this month or next on how we're doing and updates on our ETA. :)
Motivated by a thread I seen yesterday, I decided to create a #WebExtension that would display pkpass files as inline attachments.
I managed to get all the data from the pkpass files and process them, what is giving me trouble is actually getting a `document` that is not attached to a `window` to work with html2canvas.
Like how to screenshot a document which only exists in memory?
A good place to ask for help from other add-on developers is our topicbox mailing list - this is exciting that you started exploring this! thunderbird.topicbox.com/group…
Zach Bennoui
in reply to Wil James🍻 • • •