vikingerik

7 ms·

61.
by vikingerik 10mo ago
Diablo 1 had no running or speed mechanic, movement speed was always constant. Its expansion Hellfire allowed running in town but not in combat areas. Diablo 2 (2000) added the sprinting mechanic with limited stamina, but it panned out as
62.
by vikingerik 10mo ago
PNG can be lossy. It can be done by first discarding some image detail, to make adjacent almost-matching pixel values actually match, to be more amenable to PNG's compression method. pngquant.org has a tool that does it. There are us
63.
by vikingerik 10mo ago
I agree, on where the flaws often make the games. My example of that was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 vs 3. 3 is the legendary one that everybody remembers, but I actually liked 2 better. Sure, 3 is far superior for balance and AI and cont
64.
by vikingerik 11mo ago
That happened because Voyager 2 went over Neptune's north pole rather than an equatorial trajectory. Both to get a look at a giant planet's polar regions, and because that would get it closest to the moon Triton. So Voyager 2&#x
65.
by vikingerik 11mo ago
Primates evolved six million years ago here . There are plenty of stars billions of years older than our sun (and still sufficiently enriched with heavy elements from prior stellar generations) where they could have, so that their signals
66.
by vikingerik 11mo ago
This isn't likely. The Milky Way is 100k light years in diameter. That's tiny relative to the age of life. Animals comparable to humans in complexity have existed for something like 250 million years on Earth, and could have on
67.
by vikingerik 1y ago
The assume-good-faith answer to a speed limit dip like that is usually that the road has one or more intersections with some risk factor. Like limited visibility around a bend or hill, or a short merging/acceleration area, or prone to
68.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Exactly the opposite for me. I would never tolerate contacts and hated wearing glasses too. I had Lasik, 18 years ago now, and absolutely glad I did. For me the only significant downside is dry eyes (it damages the nerves that sense dryne
69.
by vikingerik 1y ago
It's not exempt. I don't trust Steam long term and so don't spend any significant money on it. I only ever buy cheap games for like $8 or less, where I know I'll get that much worth of gameplay in a short time frame an
70.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Note that the "Earth-sized" condition in there is doing some heavy lifting. Earth is a factor of 40x more massive than the largest moon in our solar system. A body needs to be fairly close to Earth's mass to have enough gra
71.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Short answer, yes. But it's many frames, and over a time span of many nights and now weeks.
72.
by vikingerik 1y ago
I managed to figure out hacking NES Game Genie codes pretty well at about 14, even without any documentation besides the Genie book itself. I'd read enough library books about computers to understand binary and hexadecimal. So from th
73.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.
74.
by vikingerik 1y ago
If slower qualifiers got better position, then what you'd get would be qualifiers deliberately trying to sandbag themselves for that. Such an incentive is never a good look for sports.
75.
by vikingerik 1y ago
The best way I heard this put: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.
76.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Yeah, the headline is using "epidemic" clickbaitly just to mean widespread, not transmissible. The classic real example of actual transmissibility was the Zip drive click of death. A bad drive would damage disks, which would in t
77.
by vikingerik 1y ago
This is correct (if cells higher than 2048 are allowed, which varies by implementation.) But the game can still be represented in fewer than 16×18 bits, because not every board state is reachable. There can't be more than one cell wi
78.
by vikingerik 1y ago
There is a lossless JPEG spec and format, though use of it never caught on much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG
79.
by vikingerik 1y ago
VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port
80.
by vikingerik 1y ago
"Galaxies would be destroyed" is extremely misleading hyperbole. Nothing gets destroyed; at most a relatively tiny proportion of the mass hits the central black holes or gets flung out. They'll get "destroyed" as m
81.
by vikingerik 1y ago
This should be correct. For any cell that isn't green after your first guess, there's only one other possibility for its value.
82.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Well, there is survivor bias there, of course; you don't see the ones that didn't learn to dodge...
83.
by vikingerik 1y ago
I still use PSP 7. Not for anything serious or photo editing, but it's super fast and easy for anything simple like screenshot pasting and cropping. Although it doesn't handle a transparency channel well. For anything that need
84.
by vikingerik 1y ago
The map is from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a game from 25 years ago, a spinoff of the Civilization series, where a colony ship from Earth lands on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. In the game's narrative, the colonists use &quo
85.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Yes, there was. Electronic Arts owns the IP for Alpha Centauri and has stonewalled trying to do anything with it.
86.
by vikingerik 1y ago
That would be one locale-invariant sort as I said. Sure, you can pick some way of doing it that's least-bad. The codepages are roughly sorted, but what we're debating is the cases where that fails some definition of correctness.
87.
by vikingerik 1y ago
It's a circular dependency: how do you sort and list the locales or languages for someone to pick one, when by definition you don't know their locale yet? You have to either make some best-guess approximation (IP geo, browser head
88.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Because the components are Leice-ster, not Lei-cester. Same for Glouce-ster, Worce-ster etc. A very refined pronunciation might emit both "s" sounds, but colloquially they get smooshed together into one.
89.
by vikingerik 1y ago
C# or VB.NET or MS Access with Winforms still exists and you can still use it, but you wouldn't for anything more than a personal toy. I don't think you can do anything nowadays that replicates the VB style of interface design. T
90.
by vikingerik 1y ago
Football fields also have the fun property of varying in the third dimension. They're built with a crown in the middle so that water will drain off towards the edges, and that can vary significantly between instances. And pixels are

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