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I have been thinking about Umberto Eco’s description of Dan Brown for three days.
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Ben Chandler
@ThreeOhFour@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I make games!
830 Followers
117 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 13, 2017
Trying to understand old functions I’ve coded:
An update for anybody wondering whether I still hang out with spiders and play old games…
Hi everyone my Star Wars opinion is that this game should have been called Age of Empires Strikes Back.
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One of these nice effects just caused me to create a bug so annoying that I wasted 2 hours trying to find it, I have to lay down and think about waterfalls to recover.
I’ve been having such a nice time with OpenLoco lately. I loved Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion back when it came out, and this is a very fine open source implementaiton of it. It’s still so satisfying to watch my charming little transport empire operating.
@vga256 It still looks so futuristic - more current than anything else on the market today. It’s cohesive, thoughtful and designed with such sensitivity towards the user that it’s weird to think this didn’t start a revolution. But also the proportions are so nice, well balanced and intentional that every modern computer feels vulgar in comparison to my eyes.
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Such use of colour is hedonistic, sure, but the creative journey need not be entirely austere and morose.
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Of course being creative is self-indulgent. The feeling of satisfaction when the elements come together is the only pleasure worth getting up for. I can easily drink coffee and listen to songs about death in bed.
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@vga256 Also you can take a giant screenshot of the whole map so you end up with a 45mb PNG file where you can look at the whole world at once, so goofy and I love it.
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@vga256 I like it but my judgement can’t be trusted - I got used to Locomotion’s way of track building 20 years ago. To me it’s better than TTD’s, but I know a lot of people do not share that view. But the implementation of tracks is SO much nicer in Locomotion than in TTD.
You can have elevated railways, underground railways, you can do narrow gauge trains with rack railways to haul stuff up steep mountains. You can do such nice looping, arcing layouts with careful signal use…
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@vga256 Yes, with that mouse and keyboard too, everything feels cohesive without being dull.
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@vga256 OpenTTD makes it better, sort of, but Locomotion handles it completely differently, much closer to how Rollercoaster Tycoon handled it. This helps with the much more complex and interesting track layouts you can do with Locomotion compared to Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe which both feel really basic by comparison.
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net I think that any machine that ends up assimilating so much trash data will eventually reach a point where it is more useful to not use it.
Quite apt for a Google product, then.
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net “To use an Earthsea book to show that Tehanu is not an Earthsea book is not as good as using Tehanu to show that Earthsea books are not Tehanu books.”
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net Ha, my friend, why are you re-reading Le Guin? You *know* you cannot endure her works!
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@fringemagnet Nothing beats the expediency of a smart cat that understands the urgency of a situation.
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@mr_creosote Nice read! I was quite late to the KQ games but really got the feeling that they wanted to give the sense of a meaningful narrative without really understanding how to do so, or examining what they’d made for big flaws.
KQV’s ending is another big example, where Crispin shows up at the end to magically restore everything to normal and teleport everybody around, which he could have done right at the start. It made the events of whole game feel redundant to me.
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@et_andersson Also for me the light in computer animated movies didn’t quite have the right quality. That has obvious changed a lot in the last decade.
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@vga256 Eventually if you break it down, the best kind of arcane witchcraft is the wonder of mathematics, and it can produce miracles beyond comprehension.
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@vga256 I’ve been kind of enamoured with the idea of sacred symbols for so long. I read a great book in preparing for this project about the struggles of the likes of Aquinas to resolve the conflict between the church (who used “good” symbols in sacraments) and paganism (who used “false” symbols in rituals) and these new alchemists (who used “scientific?” symbols in “experiments”) that explained how to combine compounds to make new compounds which was either heresy or… cooking?
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@mr_creosote I genuinely think that a lot of the justification for what Alexander does is not based on what he would do as a character but “this is what happens in stories”. Zero time was spent justifying any of it because zero effort was spent in developing his character in that way.
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@vga256 Thank you! Yes, you’re right. Armed with some basic vector math and trigonometry I have everything I need to fiddle with things all night until I have it looking/feeling how I want. For me it’s the most satisfying kind of work; the arrangement of simple elements in just the right way to bring an unusual vision to life. My favourite part of the process.
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@mr_creosote KQ6 in general feels so unquestioningly devoted to fairytale stereotypes that it cannot help but be bizarre and regressive. Alexander’s call to adventure felt illogical and unconvincing to me from the outset of the game. I like seeing it compared to Monkey Island in this way.
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@lunarloony Yes, exactly. It’s perfectly valid for the reason to be “I want to”. “I like this”. Easy to fall into the trap of overthinking/overcomplicating things.
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@lunarloony In this case it falls in nicely with the triadic colour scheme I picked for the project, which is a sensible and well balanced way to pick a colour scheme. But why did I pick this specific colour scheme? I like it.
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@TripTilt Thank you! As for what happened to that figure? The same thing that happens to us all: time.
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@ben OpenTTD gets all the love, but if you missed Locomotion back in the day, it’s worth checking out. Especially if you’re familiar with the style of Rollercoaster Tycoon, which this plays a lot like. To me it’s worth it just for the beautiful track layouts Locomotion allows for which OpenTTD will never be able to match.