• 24 Posts
  • 105 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I mean, there are some nits I can pick.

    Places don’t feel as alive as they did in the original. The original was still deeply flawed, mind - but this goes even further than that.

    A great example - when there was a firetruck putting out a fire in the original, you could see little dudes squirting water. CS2 doesn’t even have guys come out; the fire just magically goes away. Multiply this by… everything.

    There’s no bikes (at least as far as I can tell), and the pedestrian path tooling seems to be a huge step back (the only dedicated pedestrian path I can find is technically considered a 2-lane road, but it doesn’t allow cars).

    The music has these cute little segments inbetween. But there’s only like… 5 of them. Once you hear all 5, you’ve heard everything and they start to grate. The other 2 “radio stations” don’t have the NPR segments, but they do have “ads”… and by “ads” they mean exactly 1 ad that you hear every time for “Spaz Electronics”. You can turn the ads off but I’d expect more than just a single one.

    Everything overreacts to anything you build. If you upgrade a road, it technically disconnects power + water + sewage for a hot second. Then you get a bunch of spam about “I don’t have any power!” blah blah even though the game was paused and they absolutely had power.

    It’s really hard to see what trips Cims are taking. The original let you see the paths Cims took throughout your city, which let you make informed decisions around public transport. Now you can just see… how much traffic there is? Which doesn’t tell you anything about where Cims are going, just where you have bottlenecks. It very much encourages a “just 1 more lane, bro” kind of thinking.

    Not having a wide variety of public transport options is a bummer. It feels like they left some stuff out for a future DLC (e.g. monorails).

    There’s no light shining from the camera at nighttime, so it can get actually literally pitch black at night. Like “turn off the day/night cycle because this is unplayable” levels of dark. A subtle light coming from the camera when not in photo mode would’ve done wonders.

    The zoning information is really hard to read. I can’t tell what areas I have zoned with something else because it colors areas from other zones as white and unzoned areas as clear… on a mostly white background. It’s really really hard to tell at-a-glance what needs to still be zoned in some cases.

    The more I play it, the more it feels like CS1 is the sequel and CS2 is the original. There’s just so much that’s not done as well or that’s simply not there. The stuff they added is cool, sure… but like, I wish it was additive on top of what we had before, and not “back at square one”. It just makes me want to play the original.











  • Tangentially - I never listened to Fall Out Boy when I was a teen. I was much more into metal at the time and sort of dismissed them until 2013 or so.

    I listened to their newest album (at the time) in 2013 and found that I liked a lot of their songs. It wasn’t until like 2019 that I was like “Hey, didn’t they have a bunch of older songs I never paid attention to?” (Of course, I knew the hits… but nothing pre-2013 that wasn’t a single, basically.)

    They recently released a new album that was inspired by their older albums (they basically said in an interview “this is the album we would’ve made if we didn’t go on hiatus”). I didn’t like it as much as I did their newer stuff, but that prompted me to actually listen to their entire discography. And yeah, I don’t like their older stuff as much as I do their newer stuff. They have a couple bops, but nothing that really grabbed my attention outside the singles I already knew about.

    But I know my perspective is different from a lot of old-school fans, who love old-school Fall Out Boy.



  • If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.

    Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it’s not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity’s main edge is that it’s easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there’s no real benefit to Unity.

    Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that’s meant to be easy to learn. It’s FOSS so you don’t need to worry about being screwed over - but it’s a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.

    But my advice is to make small things. Don’t hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.

    When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.

    When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller “just getting started” games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn’t proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public… and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.



  • I split my time like so:

    • Kbin.social: 35%

    • Lemmy: 55%

    • Reddit: 10%

    I prefer Kbin the most, but Ernest has been slow to update the main site and the mobile API is missing (meaning it’s quite bad on mobile, even with the PWA).

    Sync works great with Lemmy, so on mobile I use Sync (hello from my phone).

    Historically, I’ve used Relay for Reddit for many years at this point. Relay is the one third-party app that didn’t leave. So far, I haven’t had to pay anything either, and nothing has broken.

    While my Reddit usage is down, I still occasionally go on Reddit both in my browser and via Relay (while it still works). I usually go to Reddit for the WorldNews live threads and to check the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit.

    I do find myself missing out on news I would otherwise have known about. I don’t see dev diaries for Paradox Interactive games here on Lemmy/Kbin, for example. This makes me surprised when a patch comes out (since I don’t see the dev diaries in my feed). Likewise, there are other niche things that I only find out about way later than I used to, and that kind of makes me miss Reddit.

    I also find myself engaging more with other social media. I watch a lot more YouTube and TikTok. My Google Pixel has a “for you” article feed as part of the launcher itself; I used to ignore that but find myself browsing it now. I play more games on my phone than I used to.

    It’s sort of plugged the hole, but not really. Even when I’m on Reddit nowadays it’s simply not the same.


  • This is my “main” account nowadays; I still keep that older account around because more places federate with Lemmy.ml than Lemmy.world, so it’s handy to have accounts on multiple instances (I also have a Beehaw and a Kbin account).

    Of the 4, I actually prefer Kbin, but it doesn’t have an API yet and thus doesn’t have mobile apps. I avoid Lemmy.ml because of who the admins/maintainers are, and Beehaw - which used to be quite good - has gone downhill since they can’t keep up with the growth of Lemmy. (Which again sort of adds to my point of “it really depends on what instances you cared about before the migration”, which that survey doesn’t quite capture.)