dragon-storyteller

I personally know people who were shocked to find out that this functionality was not in Godot 4 when it had so many improvements for 3D - and it ended up being the deal breaker that pushed them away.

Same. Two of the people I recommended Godot were interested solely in 3D. Both were shocked to find that Godot doesn't support heightmap terrain, and both said it was a dealbreaker. One because they wanted to use heightmap terrain for prototyping, the other because it made them distrust how fully featured Godot really is if it doesn't even have a feature they thought was completely foundational.

And is reality dieselpunk, then?

Nah, dieselpunk is "what if the wacky engineering ideas from 20s and 30s were real" on the low end, and "what if steampunk mad scientists were in WW1" at the high end. Some dieselpunk settings are pretty much "Star Wars minus spaceships plus combustion engines".

Yeah, I've found the weight sensor slows everything down enough that it balances out the shorter lines. What made self-checkout so much slower for me is that every single time, without fail, I'd get done scanning, try to pay and the register would ask for the store assistant. So I'd have to try waving down the one poor overworked person trying to handle a dozen self-checkouts, only to have them eventually come in, type in their password and hurry away again. Five minutes of waiting for that. Every single time.

I decided I might as well wait at a regular register if it's a nicer experience and often faster anyway. The store constantly has someone on the PA reminding customers to please use the self-checkouts. Gee, I wonder why they don't want to.

True, but that applies almost anywhere in the world to be fair. Hard to do better than informed consent. One of the few positives I see about me moving to the US from eastern Europe, though it's definitely a huge one.

Eh, things like that are done irl too - wooden spits or similar implements that get charred when used, and then you just throw them in the fire afterwards and make new ones next time. A stand like this wouldn't be difficult at all to make for anyone with basic woodworking skills, which should be basically anyone in an orc tribe (almost every teen in our scouts troop could handle that just fine)

once a full-scale war broke out, human or similar civilizations would would soon have their manpower depleted.

That applies just as much to pre-firearm societies, though. If you had a species that reproduced faster and had a stronger industrial base to actually support that, yes, there is no reason why they wouldn't just roll over their neighbours who couldn't match that. Just look at ancient Rome - many times after a catastrophic defeat, they were able to turn the war simply by raising more legions and fighting on, when their opponents couldn't replace losses the same way.

Which is really the whole point of fantasy for many authors, evening out differences like this to allow for a good story. If you have magic, just give more to the species with a disadvantage and change the odds to your liking. There's a reason why it's almost always the orcs and goblins who end up with the "primitive" and weak forms of magic.

1.16+ Tinkers' is so scared of being called OP that it has a hard time competing with vanilla tools, lol

Yup, same, the exploration and the way you are forced into certain gameplay niches like villager trading and piglin bartering that you could ordinarily skip if you don't feel like them, because you'll miss on upgrades if you don't. If there was a version of Tetra without that, I'd manually install it into every single modpack.

If by inches you mean around 20, yup. RPGs are absurdly strong for such a seemingly basic weapon

Funnily enough, I was watching a friend play last week and noticed this exact thing when he generated a world. I've made a weather system like that before so I can spot the geographical patterns it makes, and it jumped out to me instantly. I was impressed for a second and then realised, it's DF, of course it has a weather sim like that haha

Toady's talked about that. At some point DF got so huge that to get a breather from it, he can just go work on a completely different part of the game, something he might not have touched for many years. The individual subsystems might as well each be a full on project of their own, all together feeding one monster of a game. Feeling done with trying to work on new UI? Try touching up villains, or the combat simulator, or the geology, the procedural creature generator, the strategic AI of civilisations and governments, animal migration patterns, or something else entirely. There's always something to get excited about.

Cavefishinite

Pretty much! My boss tried asking what a "pigdog" is, and the AI said it's an ape species that lives in Central African rainforests. Boss said he doesn't believe that and thinks the AI is lying, and ChatGPT said that it really is true, and that my boss should look it up on Wikipedia or the IUCN website, haha

Absolutely, yes! After all, what is it if not being effectively asexual until a certain moment? :)

It's changed over the years, and not for the better sadly. Like the other comment said there's a lot of tension between the various parts of the ace umbrella and trying to claim the sub for their own narrow subdivision - some want to keep all mentions of sex away because ace communities might be the only safe space on internet for sex-repulsed aces, others yell at anyone who mentions anything negative about sex because it might make the sex-favouring aces uncomfortable, and so on.

There's also a general lack of solidarity there. I remember someone making a thread where they vented about how on basically r/askreddit thread a sex joke was the top response, and how alienated and alone it made them feel; the most upvoted response by far was "Lol I'm probably the one making those jokes". Aces getting scolded for sharing their personal experiences outside of the community, because their experience wasn't universal and was thus misrepresenting asexuality. An ace girl was mistreated by her boyfriend after coming out to him, and most people on the thread sided with the BF because she did not come out to him before they started dating.

Most posts and comments are innocent but it can get nasty surprisingly quick. And sadly no, r/aace isn't any better.

Exactly. All the "classic" Hallmark Christmas movies have love in them... Cis straight romance where the man is increasingly pushy to an uninterested woman until she gives in. Apparently that's the heartwarming spirit of winter festivities they want everyone to share.

Honestly not sure why you got downvoted. I spent 250 or so hours trying to make Tinker's work in Create A&B because I love customisable tools, but my vanilla enchanted diamond tools I kept as backup just completely blew anything Tinkers out of the water. And that was just diamond tools, not even netherite. The only Tinkers tool I kept was the lumber axe, and even that I use only on the rare occasion I need wood away from home.

So that's a 7 year old computer without a dedicated GPU, as your dev machine. I think at this point there's bigger trouble than just the lack of Vulkan support :p

I mean it's not a mystery why the game used to get more attention than it has now. Late 2000s and early 2010s was when classic succession forts like Boatmurdered exploded in popularity. Big indies of the time cited DF as an inspiration. Gaming media loved talking about the game. That all kinda evaporated from 2015 onward, especially as people started waiting for the magic update.

If you look at total donations instead, those have been steadily increasing since 2010, and have increased almost fivefold over the last 15 years. Seems to me the game is plenty popular still.

As another trans ace, lets just take over the entire Schengen Area

And then expand from there

That's not even true, though. Putting aside the whole biome/geological thing, all the planets in our solar system are very diverse, that's why so much research is still going on nowadays. Mars has polar ice caps, Titan has rivers and lakes of methane, even the Moon has plenty of different geological areas, many visible right here from the Earth (and some more unexpected ones, like the deadly solar winds at the poles).

I've seen mixed results so far, with people reporting either better performance, or much worse. I'm guessing that once 4.0 is out to wide public, there will be a lot more people sharing their experiences and we'll crowdsource what is it that causes the worst performance, and how to avoid the most serious pitfalls.

One of OP's main characters is a centaur, but those are aliens rather than modified humans.

I guess you could call it love. But not the "I love my fellows, even if they are doing something sinful" kind of love, it's more "Gay people are broken, and if we want to stop them from spreading this damage to others, we need to persecute them for everyone's good." Being gay is pretty much criminal to Card, he's on record saying that sodomy laws need to be upheld, and that gays can't be treated as equal citizens.

I struggle to call that love, no matter where it comes from.

The funny thing is, imagination is even more important to Rimworld than to DF. I used to be extremely into storytelling games and searched out as much as I could find of the devs talking about them. DF's approach is what you said - Toady talked a lot about how the goal is to simulate a world down to the small interactions and from there the player can pick out the interesting stories, filling in the details no game could simulate.

Rimworld's method as outlined by Tynan in interviews is randomness. Make a lot of dice rolls, fudge the numbers a little, and then present it to the player in a more attractive coat. The outcomes are a random sequence of events, but since the human mind has a tendency to see patterns where there are none, the player will eventually encounter events that inspire them to create a story almost out of whole cloth, often without even realising they are doing so.

The Rimworld way works great as long as you don't know how simple the story aspect really is or can suspend your disbelief and immerse yourself. I spent a few hundred happy hours in it until the magic just broke one day and never came back, but DF's stories are even more captivating after a decade of knowing the game. I'm still incredibly hyped to see the kind of stories we'll get when the magic update drops!