All other games from the same studio have the same features.
In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
It's actually a really nice spell casting system. It lets you have a ton of different spells with only 4 buttons. It rewards memorizing the most useful (like reinforce). It gives a way for things like the squid disruptor fields or whatever they're called to mess with your muscle memory while still allowing spells. It would be way less interesting if it was just using spell slots like so many other games.
The only wrong thing I've been throwing is the SOS Beacon instead of a Reinforce, which is just annoying, and not just once. It makes the game public if it was friends-only and gives it priority in the quick play queue. So that can't be it.
The dialing adds friction to tense situations, which is okay as a mechanic.
Location: Porto, Portugal
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Lua, C, C++, GameDev, Python, know some embedded and some cloud stuff.
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner
Email: [email protected]
Looking for C or C++ roles. (or similar). GameDev and Embedded at my first choices but any work with these technologies is fine. I was working as C++ engineer for a train physics simulation software at Siemens. before that my work was for a pluginless browser luxury ad game company, I was responsible for making ads created using Unreal Engine 5 run on Linux using Wine, receiving the keyboard and mouse commands sent by the browser and giving back compressed video to the browser. Before that I worked for an BMW subsidiary that works with programming for the car themselves, so automotive is fine too.
I also did DevRel in the past and recently interviewed some DevRel positions, made me realize I am also suitable for that and willing to work with that.
I have a lot of experience with iOS and Android, but been some time since I worked with these.
There are some effects that notoriously work only on rather specific combinations of screens AND cables. Those look horrible on emulators.
Usually it is effects involving transparency, some games for example literally rendered some things only on some frames and not the others, to achieve 50% transparency, others tried alternating scanlines, or the most crazy one: Sonic that made a transparent waterfall by relying on the fact that cables common at that time blurred pixels horizontally, thus it renders one column that is water and one column that is not, and hope they will be blurred into one single column that is 50% transparent water on top of the background.
Can't be shown with a screenshot: Axelay. I never seen that game running on a real CRT to compare, but on emulators that game look horrible, with distortions and flickering things everywhere, I was told this was not the intention at all, instead they relied heavily on CRT hardware to create pseudo-3D and transparency.
I had a music teacher that insisted analog recordings were different.
One day she said there is a simple way to prove it. Certain stringed instruments have the string move on their own to the correct note if you put them near a source of similar sound. If you put these instruments in front of a speaker playing from an analog source and have the strings move, then play the exact same music but from a digital source on the same speaker, the strings stop moving, even if to most humans it sounds exactly the same.
Sadly I never had the gear to test this, I am not a professional musician and was learning from that person as a hobby (she is a teacher for professional musicians).
If you do ever test this, and do it rigorously (i.e. using analogue and digital versions of the same recording, with no pitch inaccuracies) you'll find the strings will resonate equally well with analogue and digital recordings, all other things (volume, tuning of the instrument, etc.) being equal.
The problem is that all other things are no longer equal, and have not been for quite some time.
Retuning digital audio to 440Hz equal temperament is an industry norm now, even for (say) re-issued 1970s stuff. You just won't get modern digital versions that are the same as the analogue versions, and the equal temperament stuff thus won't pass a resonance test unless the test instrument is also equal temperament, which most string instruments of course are not.
The far easier test for amateurs nowadays is not to buy a whole string instrument, but to use pitch monitoring applications, which all too readily show when a sound is bang-on the specific equal temperament frequencies.
Auto tune pitch correction is entirely separate from whether a properly engineered digital recording can match an analog recording to a level well beyond the ability of human biology to detect any difference in randomized, controlled, double-blinded ABX testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test).
> The problem is that all other things are no longer equal
There are many digital recordings which have no pitch correction or other tonal manipulation applied. In those cases, all things are still equal for the purposes of the statement above.
As a separate matter, I agree auto-tune and other manipulation can be inappropriately or excessively applied, however over manipulation isn't unique to digital, it occurred in the analog era too – such as dynamic range compression and multi-band dynamic equalization. Those tools existed in tube-based, purely analog form long before digital recording became the norm and caused similar complaints when they were misapplied. There were even analog pitch correctors although they weren't nearly as flexible or precise as today's digital versions.
I find this dubious since the effect she was describing is caused by resonance frequency. Since, in the example provided, the source is an amplified speaker pushing air in both cases the outcome should be the same. The more famous test of this principle is the breaking of a glass and I would be surprised if this hadn't been done with digital signal inputs.
I agree. In both cases a continuously varying voltage is driving speaker cone deflection. If the voltages of two different signals vary in precisely the same way, the cone will deflect to exactly the same degree and the resulting pressure wave will generate the same resonant response from any surface it encounters. When properly implemented, today's high-end, esoteric ADC and DAC converters have insane bandwidth, frequency response and fidelity far exceeding these requirements.
Some of the confusion comes from the fact that back when consumer audio transitioned to digital and these production workflows were new, some early digital recordings were incorrectly engineered or mastered creating artifacts such as aliasing which critical listeners could hear. Some people assumed the artifacts they heard were innate to all digital audio instead of just incorrect implementation of a new technology. Even today, it's possible to screw up the fidelity of a digital master but it's rarely an issue because workflows are standardized and modern tooling has default presets based on well-validated audio science (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_shaping#Dithering). But even in the analog era it was always a truism in audio and video engineering that "there are infinite ways to screw up a signal but only a few ways to preserve it." And it remains true today. To me, one of the best things about modern digital tooling is it's much easier to verify correctness in the signal chain.
I got very sad when my CRT monitor died. I was using a Radeon RX 380X, part of the reason is that it was one of the few cards to still have analog output.
Then I went and played lots of recent games in lower resolution, but could turn on lots of expensive effects even with such underpowered card, because I could do low-res with anti-alias disabled and no scaling and have decent results.
But true pleasure was playing for example Crypt of Necrodancer on that screen, the game felt so easy. I eventually stopped playing after that screen died, I could never nail the timing anymore on modern screens, the response time is not the same.
Technology made driving f1 cars less brutal on the body. To start of in the first seasons a lot of stuff was unknown, for example some drivers wanted oxygen bottle so they wouldn't pass out while carefully leaving a fire. Others preferred instead to have the car to be the most easy as possible to leave, if a fire happened.
Now there is also head support, while drivers back then had to just use their muscles to hold their head in place.
The list goes on... but it still is an athletic sport. When Nico Rosberg decided to win the championship, he had to heavily change his routine to so way more fitness training than he was used to. After he won the championship and immediately retired, he hinted that one of the reasons for retirement is that he didn't want to continue with the heavy body training.
So when I got forced to use Win11 I went to look for a script that disable telemetry. Then I see the script offers the feature of using old behavior for right click menu...
I immediately started to think: but old behavior was so simple and obvious, what is there to change? The I right clicked to check. Immediately was hit with the wtf changes. Why? Why MS?
The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.
It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.
I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.
Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.
Company was founded by "visionary" CEO that is an sculptor and doesn't understand tech.
Most crucial employee is young guy hired right out of college.
Company now has 50+ developers, but the critical software is still made by that guy several years later.
Critical guy still get recent graduate salary, notices he is actually the most important person in the company, and asks for a raise.
Company denies his raise. He quits. Company hire a bunch of developers from cheap third world countries to replace him...
Company learns: 1. All software guy made a bit before he asked for a raise was on his personal, not company github. 2. The software is in other programming languages, not the one the company uses normally. 3. Everything the guy wrote since he joined the company, is extremely difficult to maintain, guy is a genius and all his code is correct, clean and well made, but his thought patterns and how they end in the code are just too different, and all people that worked with him before also were geniuses and didn't care the code was "crazy".
Note: the "other geniuses" mentioned above, also quit when other companies made them great offer and the stingy employer refused them a raise too.
In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
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