Coming back to the map markings. It is also economics. How many players are going to use the feature versus how much work it is. It migh seem simple thing, but when you add option for player to write on the map there are lots of things you need to take in to account.

How many symbols can be used, what happens if the games resolution is changed from the settings, how the text wraps if its close to the edge of map, what if there appears new automatic map marker under text user has wroten, are there interactive symbols for fast travelling or something else, will those go under the text or on top, what if writing uses special characters etc etc. Not to mention if devs have been cute with the map and its not just a flat texture. Skyrims map for example is the game world and you can see storms on it. Spending time to make and test all those features when it really serves a tiny fraction of the playerbase is wastefull.

About saving the game. For better or worse its also a game mechanic and now days its not necessary about the limitation. For example if you could save in a middle of an battle in pokemon you could just save the moment you start a fight with shiny pokemon and you could infinetly try to catch it without any stakes. Or if you could save in middle of epic multiphase jrpg boss it would take away from the feeling of succes after long battle.

But i absolutelly agree games should atleast have exit save, so if real live happens and you need to close the game, it should not punish the player and loose their progression.

Three first ones can also be game engine limitations. Im not saying its good desing and its always because the limitations, but there might be more happening under the hood that does not show to the end user. Things like quest stage flags or loading things behind the cut scenes.

Dialogue history i agree completelly. I love the way pillars of the eternity did this. I also loved how text refering to things like cities, characters and gods were highlighted and you could see short summary hovering your mouse over the higlighted text and clicking it opened the codex where you could read about the topic. This helped me immerse to game because my character would what the capital of the country is or what god uggapugga is. Also it helped when there was long times between game sessions.

About map markers. I like when i can add markers or text on the game map, but inherently i think game should do these things for you, either adding a symbol in the map, or adding something in to games quest log or codex. But on the other hand i lived in a era where if i wanted a map for game i needed to draw it by myself on the grid paper. The habit has stayed with me and in games like Dark souls, Remnant and blue prince i keep small notebook with me, where i write my notes and stupid theories. To me its really fun to read those scribles later and try to figure out what i have missed or how dumb i was.

Hollow knight, Project Zomboid, minecraft and Legend of Grimrock have all very different tools for you marking your map and in all of them the map system is part of the game desing and gameplay loop. While these games benefit from the map system to most of the games its just unnecessary. The ability to mark “digging spot #31” just is not necessary.

I love how in pillars of eternity and satisfactory you have in game notepads. And now days steam notepad is also great. You can even add screemshots to it, but i like my oldschool hand writing stuff more.

Same thing happens with games to some degree.

There are many stories from gaming about placeholder music becoming integral part of the game.

In original doom games Carmack and Romero loved Black Sabbath and listened it during testing amd working on the game. That led to now legendary doom ost.

During the development of Max Payne 2 Remedy used Poets of the fall song as a placeholder and in the end they decited they wanted it in to the game, but because they could not get in to agreement with the publisher, and because PoF members are just cool guys, they eventually made song just for the game to get around the licensing debucle. That song was later released as a single.

I remember hearing story about Brutal Legend having some licenced music as a place holder in meeting with investors and it lead that music ending in to the game.

Im writing this while im little busy, so everything is coming from my memory, without fact checking, so who ever is reading this take it with a pinch of salt.

I bet somebody in natzi germany said that too.

But the man with the gun was scared for his life so he was completely justified to shoot the driver in the head multiple times, instead of doing completely impossible manouver of side stepping the car/s

I cant understand what happening here. Any officer doing their duty, be it police, military or firefighter, should always act in a manner that does not escalate the thing. Shouting to person “get out of the fucking car” and lunging at the car door does not deescalate things. Especially when three armed goons are circling you.

God im happy i live in country where police school lasts four years and they have mandatory training and tests during their whole career.

Its also somewhat witty way of saying that what is happening right now seems so unbelievable it must be somekind of mistake.

Dark times make dark humour and jokes are often easiest way for people to start process things and it does not equal inaction.

If you dont want to see remarks like that, you should maybe stay of internet.

Well he IS at olympic level in mental gymnastics.

Im somewhat perplexed whats is the connection between the article and your comment.

Who does?

I like how it looked. And to me it was and is game with perfect sized map and story lenght.

Nothing feels like its too far to travel at any time, but the map is large enough to feel like city. But small enough that you can learn it.

With SA i always feel like im over the game when i get to the last island, but in vice city the story pacing feels so good and it never outlasts its welcome.

I feel like newer rock star games are just too large to complete fully and keep your intrests, but Vice City hit the sweet spot where you could complete the game without getting tired of it and after short break you could start a new playtrough. I loved gta 5, but after playing seemingly all content it had it took years and few rereleases for me to pick it up again, but VC was a game i played trough twice or trice a year for a long time.

Are you me? I 100% agree.

Why there are bugs in the release? Mistakes happen.

Your analogy is not fitting.

Placeholders are never meant to be part of the meal. They are there in the development stage when there needs to be something on the screen. They dont go trough the art department. Visual director wont review them. They are not representing the finalized game. They are there just as placeholders so people can see things work and not to need to look at wireframes when they work on the project. Often at parts of the game that has no quarantee to even be at the finalized game.

Generally graphics are one of the last things that is finalized in games. There is no point to use artists time for making placeholders, when they can spend that time doing something meaningfull.

In the end it does not matter if the placeholder is done by artists hand, is photoscanned from the doodles janitor made on toilet paper or if its done by AI. Hell, it could be pictures of spongebob fan art stolen from google search. It does not matter what people feel like is best and fastest way to get the texture, because its not representting the game and its not meant to be part if the finished product.

If you want to keep the food analogy, placeholders are the toothpicks holding your meatrolls in shape while they are in the oven. They wont end to your plate and if they do, somebody somewhere did a mistake.

Also i want to point out that not you nor i can say anything about overwhelming opinions. Clair Obscur for example has sold over 5 million copies. How big procentual part of those 5 million people you think has even read about the whole dispute, or put any meaningfull tough for the matter? Places like lemmy, steam reviews and comments on youtube videos are mostly from loud minorities that generally wont represent the whole fandom at all.

If its nicer and faster why would somebody not use it?

Any projects i have been on, if i need quick placeholder i take it from some existing library that is filled with free to use textures or i create some bullshit texture name temp.png or removethis_brown.jpg and some real artist comes and makes the final one somewhere down the line, 10-1000 hours later.

I have hard time understanding how creating the temporary texture that is never meant to be seen by end user is different when using generative tool versus paint. Especially when no artist looses their pay check or their spot in the credits.

However I do take offence if somebody uses ai to replace writer, designer, voice actor, or artist of any kind in the final product.

That sounds ludicrous to me.

Making food is more like reward than a chore for me.

Merry christmas and happy new year!

Im always supriced how many people think huntings only reason is to kill the animalls and eat the carcasses.

There are many places where humans have killed the natural predators for some animals and in those places animal population is in danger to grow uncontrollably spreading disaeses and dangering natures balance even further. Herbivores without carnivores can and will destroy the forest floors and growth if let unchecked, wich can cascade to further destroy enviroment for different species like small mammals, bugs and birds.

Most obvious fix (and best for enviroment) would be introducing the big predators back in the area, wich is very easy to say when you live in a big city and your, children, pets or livelyhood is safe and sound. People dont want wolfs on their backyards any more than people want lions on the streets of NY. Also i dont see much difference for the animal if they get shot by a rifle or tearn down by a pack of predators.

Other solution for protecting the animals would be capturing and shipping hunted animals to wildlive reservois where they could live with the predators without any interactions with humans, but that would again leave the nature where they were transported from in a unbalanced state where for example plants like vines could spread suffocating other plants.

Then there are exotic animal trophy hunting that many people seem to hate. Most places that offer that have chosen the hunted animal preforehand. Like old male lion that are not fertile anymore, but still tries to kill other lions cubs, or elephant that has started to showing extreme aggression. With that money source safaries can fight against illegal poachers and protect endangered animals like black rhinos, while they keep the other animal population healthy. Those animals would need to be killed anyway and if somebody is willing to pay for doing it I dont see how that is bad.

I personally live in rural area. This year wolfs have killed few dogs and livestock like chickens from the yards of my neighbors. Do i wish all the wolfs to be killed? No. Do i wish childrens could walk or bike to school without fear of being attacked. Yes. I have also lost family in accident where moose ran in front of their car. I definedly dont wish for uncontrolled moose population making accidents like that more common.

But i agree with your sentiment that we need to move away from animal farming. Not because reason i personally find naive and childish like “cows are friends” but because its bad for enviroment and we as a humankind are eating meat in our meals more than we need.

I absolutelly agree most people would benefit if they had the possibility and intrest to go trough all the settings. But most i also think most users would never go trough them. And for some reason some people just are against learning anything new.

Thinking about programs that show everything my mind goes straight to Blender. For first time user the amount of information is overwhelming, even if everything has pretty clear explanations and plenty of tutorial material online, for average person its borderline unusable program. Add the ability to customize the layout and thousands of possible plugins, if you mess with things there and you dont know what you are doing, you are going to have bad time with it.

Sorry i got stuck at the microsoft/windows thing.

Personally i hate win11 and if i were the king of the world, we would have stopped at win7 or xp. I also loathe how microsoft has started to force people in their enviroment, forcing people to have online account, in every turn trying to push their cloud service, trying to prohibit downloads outside of their store and generally trying to take personal out of personal computers.

But even after so i think their UI is pretty smartly designed for what is their core userbase. (Not that much for professional side)

Generally i agree with you and i see three kinds of UI designs: professional stuff like photoshop, ui that is trying to sell you something like most apps or websites and engaging uis like games or social media.

What i hate in modern times is when companies start to mix those things up. Like for example Canva is supposed to be tool for making graphics, but the sites design is allover the place.

Sorry if i offended you.