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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 27th, 2023

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  • Methadone for F2P Skinner-box games. An endless treadmill of dungeon-crawling, basically knocking off Path Of Exile or similar - but aggressively free. No mechanism whatsoever for taking your actual money. It’d use all the tricks that make spending bullshit currencies feel good, but you’d actually find those currencies, like it’s a video game or something.

    A key conceit of the modern-fantasy setting is that credit cards are naturally occurring. Magic understands that plastic is money now, so they just kinda spring forth, as loot. Maybe less than loot. They’d grow on trees. Have as many as you like - you’ll enjoy it less than playing. The game’s incentive against spraying cash at every problem is that you still have to examine the in-game model and type in some long sequence of numbers to get a random quantity of dollars. It’s amusing but not really fun. You’ll enjoy the game more if you just play it.

    What you’d spend that fake money on is a trickle of procedurally-generated variations for every form of content I can think of. Swords, guns, hats, capes, hairpins, familiars, particle effects, et very cetera. A maximized possibility space of stuff to look at and go “want.” None of it’s ever exactly what you had in mind, because each thingamajig is a random sixty-four-bit number. That entropy translates to a bajillion trim and shape combinations and then several materials and colors on top of that. There’d only need to be a few dozen models for each thing, and a few dozen textures for each layer, and their distributions would drift over time to create a sense of changing fashions.

    A lot of this was a reaction to every live-service money-pit having “seasons.” That cyclical change would be textual and central. Summer’s ending, and it’ll come around again, but it won’t be the same summer. So - gear has affinity for its period in time. A summer sword is especially good against summer enemies. It’ll struggle against any lingering spring enemies, and eventually, against emerging autumn enemies. By winter’s end it’s just a prop. You can keep it as a display piece if you really like its randomized appearance, but all of its stats are gone.

    Loadouts are visible as a partial halo over someone’s head. Their offensive and defensive capabilities are represented as shapes along that crescent, sliding from the near future into the oncoming past. Someone optimized to hell for right now will have one great spike at the center. And you can probably tickle through their armor with half-faded sword from last season, or any mediocre early drop for next season. All these things have their place and time. There’s never a reason to spend real money on them. They don’t last. They’re not real.






  • I can and have, and it’s still a tremendous pain in the ass to launder the addresses for labels. The hottest loop in the game draws an arbitrary span of the same tile. It should be trivial to do a jump table - to grab an address from an array and go there. 13 tiles? goto jump[13]. (Or really some stack / return shenanigans, because the 6502 is odd.) But if there’s any way to get cc65 to shove the location of an instruction into an array, I haven’t found it.









  • ‘This markup language isn’t even as capable as Habbo Hotel, but it counts anyway because I just called it a programming language.’

    There is a literal hierarchy of syntaxes which are recognized by different categories of machine. Programs require a Turing machine. Anything lesser - in a subset like pushdown automata or finite-state machines - doesn’t need a proper computer. So it’s not a program.