ericwdhs

Honest question: What would you base an alternative system on? I think any economic system needs to appeal to something as basic as self-interest to survive long-term. If a population exists, there's a sum total amount of labor that needs to be done to sustain them. How do you motivate the labor?

I want you to know I sat here thinking "who the heck is Evan Apple?" for way too long.

Genius! Also, did you know "whale" comes from "large sea fish?" Ridiculous. Another one for the list.

I didn't miss it. It just doesn't cleanly fit into this framework (imagine it as a square table instead of a list):

Horror + -ble = horrible (bad) Horror + -ific = horrific (bad) Terror + -ble = terrible (bad) Terror + -ific = terrific (good)

I think your nostalgia period being in the NES era might just be too early. Successive attempts at an idea in any medium often fall into the following pattern:

Attempt one is explorative and clunky with no pre-existing material close enough to the target idea to draw reference from. The second now having hindsight fixes the most glaring issues from the first. The third and beyond do the same, but with very diminishing returns as most of the available improvement space was already claimed by the second release, which then becomes the nostalgia sweet spot where the familiarity vs. missing QoL ratio peaks.

My favorite game from my childhood is probably Age of Empires II, and that holds up well enough to still have a massive active community around it. Note that it's a second release.

The "sweet spot on release two" thing is probably also the reason for the very real "Valve can't count to three" thing. Valve's developers have generally been more interested in mechanics and technical innovation than storytelling, so they lose motivation to continue after a second release knocks out most of the available improvement they can do, even if the last release leaves a story unfinished.

Edit: Just to be clear, I know I'm not really replying to the main point you were making. AoE2 being a big studio release even adds to it. I don't think anyone has mentioned the whole survivor bias angle either.

If we're putting effort into fixing how society uses words, can we work on flammable versus inflammable first? Then I vote for fixing the odd one out in the terrible, terrific, horrible, horrific quad. Then the split between awful and awe. Then...

I'll be honest. I did exactly this very recently. In my defense, I'm an okay home cook. I was constrained to a smaller pot than usual and way too desperate to still fit a full box of pasta in it.

Obviously I don't know your life and how much your livelihood might depend on it, but if it impacts your decision any, I think you should at least start dabbling in it. You can look at any rough edges you need to smooth over as investing in the ecosystem and, for any added effort that's still too much to justify, drop any requirement for parity. Simple stylized graphics never go out of fashion, and the hardware crisis (which I think will last closer to a decade or more than a couple years) means the market will be even slower than usual to adopt the visual quality Unreal pushes for anyway.

I've not actually used Godot, but I've been following it for a while, and I think you should give it a go, especially for just "unserious playing around." It's widely regarded as beginner-friendly (as far as gamedev tools go), and yeah, while some people absolutely do not have the analytical mind you really should have for working with anything involving programming, you being in a position to do any scripting at all sounds like you're at least most of the way there.

Yeah, despite some of the stuff happening in the AAA and hardware spaces, we're still in the golden age of gaming. I have a few favorite games from the 90s, but if I had to pick between everything released prior to 10 years ago and everything already released since, I'd still go with the latter without hesitating. I feel sad for anyone not finding enough new hits to feel the same.

Yeah, there's a reason only a handful of companies on the planet even try it. On top of the time and technology requirements, there's also a massive patent minefield to navigate. Qualcomm is something like 20 times bigger than Valve with chips as their entire business model, and even they're still not big enough. Qualcomm contracts TMSC and Samsung to use their fabs.

Edit: added a bit...

Pretty sure the momentum from the perspective of the box stays the same.

How exactly are you defining monentum here? "The box sees the entire universe move at velocity V backwards both before and after passing through the portal." This is probably at least approximately true, but total momentum of the universe minus the box would have to be exactly zero to make this technically correct. "The box never perceived a change in its own momentum." This is 100% true.

The game doesn't explicitly say that momentum for the entire system stays the same

Then why are we still talking about this? Lol. I thought that was one of the main points of your position.

the box never actually experiences a change in momentum

Correct, the box never experiences a change in momentum. The box exists in one inertial reference frame and, in going through the portal, is deposited into a different reference frame. Two inertial reference frames that differ in orientation are equally as distinct as two inertial reference frames that differ in velocity. The same logic applies to both.

Maybe a better way to put it, is that the absolute momentum of the box never changes when it passes through a portal.

You're describing what I labeled as "inherent," so I'll take it.