Day 1: Somewhat Struggling

First day of trying to go hardcore low-carb again. Maayan offered me a very good looking pasta yesterday. I took a couple of tomatoes. I made chicken salad for dinner and decided that I’m going to stick to a little meat and mostly vegetables in every meal. At work I mostly nosh peanuts and fruit. I need to put more olive oil in my salads too.


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Hasbro Bought D&D Beyond – Thoughts

I saw this video in my feed and if you’re into D&D and especially DDB, you should check this out. 1. Right now, Foundry is the benchmark, king-of-the-hill of VTTs. Nothing comes close. Not Roll20, not FG, and not what DDB has to offer. And at current rate of development, with both Roll20 and DDB working with small teams and Foundry having a small base team but a ton of community developers, I don’t see anyone able to catch up to that. I’m currently at a point that I truly treat DDB as a convenient, digital, online source… to get my D&D material and that’s it. Pretty much everything else I do on Foundry, and with no added subscriptions. I buy the software, I buy the materials, my players just log in. It’s, as if we have one set of books that everyone share at a single table. The D&D 5E version on Foundry even recently added a better level-up mechanism so I only need to download the content (possible through an amazing community developer) to Foundry and that’s it. Unless WotC decide no one is allowed to use D&D in online tools (which will probably be against their SRD and start a huge outcry) it’s not gonna change. 2. With Demiplane on the field, soon Pathfinder, Vampire, even Marvel’s new game will have the same capabilities as D&D in the online space. 3. In the video game space, a lot of companies get bought because the buyer see the Continue Reading →


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Audiobook Narration and AI

Like everything related to AI, with the ability to mimic human-sounding voices coming to the forefront, audiobook narrators now also feel threatened and, while I understand being afraid of something new and misunderstood, I see it mostly as an extension of our existing abilities and doing more with less. First of all, I’m sad that the first thing I see in that article is “circling the wagons”. You can’t avoid new technology. It’ll come no matter what. Some form of legislation can be made to restrict research and development but if the technology is not immediately or excessively harmful (like nuclear weapons or engineered viruses), a lot of people will work towards it and, as a person affected, what you really should do is find how to adapt and where you fit in in the new order. Secondly, if we move towards an industry in which voices are largely AI generated, the voice templates will still have to come from somewhere. Those providing the templates will still be a part of the process. They will be licensing their vocal likeness, like you do with a visual likeness. It will be up to them and their agents to make sure the contract benefits them and that they may have some right of refusal on projects that might not align with their views. And those around the narration will still be required. A director will need to make sure the reading is what the client wants, an audio editor will be needed Continue Reading →


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My Problem With Cryptocurrency: There’s No Room for 1

This is one of my main guidelines when designing mechanics for a game: Whatever underlying system you have, there should be some meaning to the lowest number. It doesn’t mean that you should be able to see a ‘1’ in text, in front of you, during the game, but there should be a meaning to that increment/decrement. Because, going from a 1 to a 2 might be too drastic a change in your system as that’s a 100% difference. But there should be a 3 and 4, or even just 99 and a 100. Because, if there isn’t, you’re probably just inflating numbers to make it look better and haven’t examined your systems deeply enough. And so, while I hate the way Souls-like games do it, the fact that E is lowest rank and the highest is A or S, or that the best upgrade you can get is a +10, makes every little uptick meaningful. It started to bug me when I played Warcraft III originally. In I & II, characters had double digit HP, some big or hero characters had triple digits. But the upgrades you could make, for weapons or armor for example, were 12 to 13 or something like that. That was a meaningful upgrade. If your knights did 1 more damage per hit, they could take down an enemy in 3 strikes instead of 4 and that really upped your attack group’s survivability as well. Then, in Warcraft III, everyone started having HP in the Continue Reading →


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Useful C# Features (or “Cool Things You Didn’t Know You Could Use in Unity”)

1. Tuples & Discards! Tuples is something more dynamic languages like JavaScript have been holding over the more static languages for a while. It allows you to do more with less action (higher level ones, that is). While tuples have existed in C# before as a class of their own, they are now getting a proper implementation. It basically makes a complex variable/object without having to predefine it using a class or a struct. You can even use it to return more than one element from a method(!!!). Unfortunately, the Unity editor doesn’t support handling those kinds of returns yet but they are still useful inside your scripts. Discards are those underscores you see in the example below. It allows you to deconstruct a tuple and discard the data you don’t want, only keeping what you actually need in its own named variable. 2. Pattern Matching! Pattern matching allows you to test a runtime type in an if or switch statement and then convert it to that specific type all in a single statement! It also increases the power of switch, allowing you to do a lot more with less and create much more complex testing blocks. 3. Local functions Local functions is currently one of my favorite features in C#. You could already create functions inside functions by assigning a block into an Action or Func variable but now you can just define an anonymous function and not worry about what returns or not returns a value or where Continue Reading →


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News: Average User has no Concept of How Much Game Dev Costs

Recently, some clueless joe on Twitter said he will pay 10,000$ to the person who adds a multiplayer aspect to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If he was going to donate to a modder who was working on it, that would have been fine but it seems like he was thinking that he could hire someone to do something like that for that kind of money. Here is a long, detailed response to this which you should read but here’s the summary: 10,000$ would pay for about two work months of the average+ programmer. Also, networking is hard. The hardest networking challenges in gaming usually arise in fighting games because they usually need to be exactly per pixel and per frame accurate and, probably over distances where network traffic takes more time to go back and forth than it takes pro players twitch reflexes to react. You can see how important this is if you go back and read about the network woes of Street Fighter V. Now, the demands of a PvE, open world, action RPG would probably be a lot less strict but these are still difficult problems. Especially if you’re talking about tacking on something like this onto a game that was definitely not designed for it. You want a more current example? On the one hand, Battlefield 2042 is out now and it’s buggy as hell. On the other hand, Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is also out and it’s much better. Probably because the team is backed Continue Reading →


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Portugal just became nicer to employees

Portugal recently passed a law they fondly call “Right to Rest”. It contains various measures to help employees have a better work-life balance such as the ability to work remotely when you need to take care of a child or companies contributing to household bills when an employee is working remotely a lot. But the nicest thing about it is indeed the ban on contacting employees after work hours. I’m guessing there is a stipulation about emergencies or people like server administrators and doctors who are supposed to be on call but the fact it’s enshrined in law is just amazing. Kinda makes me want to move to Portugal. :)


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Activision-Blizzard Proving Again That They Just Don’t Care

Activision Apologises and Removes ‘Insensitive’ Quran Pages from Call of Duty: Vanguard. Seriously? I mean, really? I did my basic Arabic studies and I know that the Quran (like the Bible and the New Testament) is Islam’s holiest tome and they do take it very seriously with how you treat iconography. But even if you didn’t know that disrespecting the Quran would whip up Islamic people into some kind of rage, imagine what it would feel like to you (or your more religious friends/family members) if there were pages of your religious texts on the ground where everyone is expected to walk. Or, because you’re one of the hugest game companies in the world who want to sell your games to as many people as possible, have some freaking sensitivity consultants.


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The Only Way Out is Through


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Doggos: As Above So Below


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