• 0 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but I think that people are more likely to put up money if they believe in the model instead of because they are being nagged into it. For example, I have a nebula subscription that I happily pay while I refuse to pay for a yt subscription despite the fact that I watch youtube a lot more. This is more out of spite towards youtube than it not being worth the money (it probably is to be honest). I also donate money to wikipedia while I haven’t ever considered shelling out for encyclopedia britannica for example.

    Video hosting is of course very expensive so I understand that it’s harder to fund wikipedia-style than wikipedia. People are probably happy paying creators they like but less so spending a ton of money on infrastructure.




  • I heart vanilla is a good modlist which has some basic bugfixes and minor but faithful graphical improvements. If you wanna make the game look even better, then Volumetric Clouds, Remiros Groundcover (or some other groundcover mod) and Normal Maps for Everything are some of my top recommendations. If you wanna go crazy then there is also a modlist on the same site called graphical overhaul, but I think that it’s worth sticking to a more vanilla aesthetic for a bit just so you have that as a frame of reference.

    OpenMW (or, alternatively MGE XE if you want to use the original engine for whatever reason) already have some nice graphical improvements baked into them though.


  • I don’t think that the driving the empire from Morrowind ever happens in game, but maybe it technically comes true as a concequence of the Red Year which in turn is a concequence of the Tribunal losing their power because of the ending of the main quest. It’s interesting that Uriel Septim sets the prophecy in motion knowing that this is part of it.

    The Tribunal where losing their power anyway, but I suppose that Dagoth Ur could have kept Bar Dau in its place if he’d won, but then everyone would have been transformed into a corpus zombie instead.

    The Red Year isn’t part of Morrowind lore, but “what is going to happen with Bar Dau now?” is kind of an open question at the end of the game so it is an event that absolutely builds on things set up in Morrowind


  • It’s weird to have something that verbose for using in the shell. I don’t want to use verbose commands when just doing stuff interactively, so I never learn how to really use its features as a concequence. Bash, while it has more footguns, is more readable to me because I’m more familiar with the individual commands. For most programing you spend more time reading it than writing it, but that’s not the case for the shell so there it’s the wrong tradeoff imo.




  • I thought fo4 was underwhelming, but I’m exited to play the fallout 4: london mod which is supposed to drop as soon as possible after the patch, depending on how quickly the script extender gets updated to work with the new version.

    It’s set before fallout 1 I think and it won’t have a lot of fallout staples like the pip boy, super mutants or the brotherhood of steel which I think will be a nice change since it feels like Bethesda have overused them a lot. A lot of the promotional material looks fantastic and they seem to have a lot of cool ideas and a professional approach to modding.

    The new vegas modding community has kind of a bad track record when it comes to large modding projects but I feel optimistic about folon, but it might be good to temper that optimism with a little bit of caution anyway.



  • This might not be what you mean when you say “addictive”, but since I’ve been addicted to it for the last half year or so, I’m gonna suggest it anyway: Morrowind.

    While the original came out in 2002 for Windows and later Xbox, there’s been a fan remake of the engine which runs on linux (and windows and macos) called OpenMW.

    It’s an open world role playing game about exploring the island of Vvardenfell, which is a strange and alien place that’s easy to lose yourself in. Most of the wildlife is made up of insect- or dinosaur like creatures. There are forests made up of giant mushrooms, and ancient wizard lords who use magic to grow mushrooms into buildings that you have to be able to fly to navigate. It’s a world with a rich history, featuring several different religions, cultures and overlapping and competing political structures.

    Despite its age, it is to this day a game with a very active modding community which can extend and improve the games mechanics and visuals. It also features what is probably the longest running active modding project, Tamriel rebuilt which seeks to add the rest of the province of Morrowind to the game. It’s about half way done and has basically another game worth of content in it at this point.







  • One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it’s practically dead now.

    Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.


  • The problem is that when everyone is using their right to deny access to their works to make people give them money, and there is only so much money you can reasonably spend on entertainment and so on per month, people end up abstaining from a lot of things they could otherwise have taken part in for no extra cost.

    I think that the things we pirate have a value: music, movies and games have a value because they are cultural products and vulture is important, software like photoshop has a value because it is a useful tool. Putting up barriers to accessing these things means destroying this value. Having a system where the main way to make money of e.g. music is to paywall it has the “destruction” of a lot of value as its outcome. In some ways streaming platforms like spotify are better in this regard but then that means giving the platform a lot of power over music discovery for example. Spotify doesn’t really do a good job of paying its artists either which is its supposed ethical advantage over piracy.


  • I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn’t pay money to but that I’ve pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don’t lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it’s a net win.

    When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I’ve pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn’t really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It’s not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.