Bay 12 Games Forum

Google: the 'wet bandits' were the robbers in Home Alone. Hence, them being in your crawl space.

Tech specs should be just the specs and not inject politics.

We're talking about instructions on setting up a BIOS here, not an opinion piece.

Trump's just declared war on the World Health Organization.

https://politics.slashdot.org/story/20/04/07/239255/trump-threatens-to-withhold-funding-for-world-health-organization

What better way to celebrate World Health Day than by threatening to withhold funding for the World Health Organization. That's exactly what President Trump said he was considering today at Tuesday's coronavirus press briefing. The New York Times reports:

Quote

"We're going to put a hold on money spent to the W.H.O.; we're going to put a very powerful hold on it and we're going to see," Mr. Trump said, accusing the organization of having not been aggressive enough in confronting the dangers from the virus. "They called it wrong. They call it wrong. They really they missed the call." Mr. Trump appeared to be particularly angry at the W.H.O. for issuing a statement saying it did not support his decision on Jan. 31 to restrict some travel from China because of the virus. At the time, the group issued a statement saying that "restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions."

"Don't close your borders to China, don't do this," Mr. Trump said, paraphrasing the group and accusing the organization of "not seeing" the outbreak when it started in Wuhan, China. "They didn't see it, how do you not see it? They didn't see it. They didn't report it. If they did see it, they must have seen it, but they didn't report." In fact, the W.H.O. repeatedly issued statements about the emergence of the virus in China and its movement around the world.

The budget for the W.H.O. is about $5 billion and comes from member countries around the world. "In 2017, the last year for which figures were available, the United States was required to spend $111 million based on the organization's rules, but sent an additional $401 million in voluntary contributions," reports The New York Times.

Trump said his government will investigate the organization and that "we will look at ending funding." It's unclear if he's planning to eliminate all funding, or only some.

He's not talking necessarily about a webserver, he's talking about client/server architecture. In that, you have a process running the game, and other processes talk to that. The other process may or may not be on the same machine. The advantage of this is that your single-player game can become a multi-player game with basically zero modifications, you just have a hook for remote processes to also talk to the server-process.

https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture.html

So, in the client/server model every player is a client, but that includes the person who's computer is running the game. The advantage is that your program is agnostic as to where the game is actually running.

PROXY OR TRADE ONRY

Is that a typo or was it meant to be a Chinese thing?

It's kind of amusing (but very racist) to assume China can't pronounce the "LY" part of the word "Only". What's the most common surname in China?

BTW this one is actually a new high-point in the Diggy Diggy Hole saga:

WIND ROSE - Diggy Diggy Hole (Official Video)

I should correct myself:

"In recent battles a third of the men had no rifles. These poor devils had to wait patiently until their comrades fell before their eyes and they could pick up weapons. The army is drowning in its own blood."

It was 1/3rd of men who didn't have rifles, not 1/3rd with rifles.

There are definitely some weird psychological issues around pricing. For example, there are experiments where you put an additional option on a list that nobody ever takes, but the mere addition of the option causes people to choose differently between the other existing options, compared to when that extra option wasn't there.

Also for ranges of things, they have a really expensive one that they actually expect nobody to get, but because it makes the mid-range option look better. Generally, people like there being a choice, but the vast majority of people want a mid-range one, not cheap and nasty, not needlessly expensive. However, removing the cheap/nasty and overly expensive options change consumer behavior, even if the people making the decision never actually pick those.

EDIT: to give you an idea how this works, say you have "cheap option 1" that's $20, and "expensive option 2" that costs $100, and you get a voucher for a free cup of coffee. Now, a certain % of people will pick option 1, and a certain % of people will pick option 2. However, if you add "option 3" that's identical to option 2, but you don't get a free coffee, everyone agrees that option 3 is a shit option: it's just option 2 minus the coffee. So people pick option 2 instead of option 3. The weird part is that more people also start picking option 2 instead of option 1, even though nothing actually changed between those two options, and nobody ever picks the "extra" option 3. So, by adding superfluous options, you can actually steer people to choose what you want them to choose: add slightly inferior versions of the choice that you're trying to steer them towards, so that the desired option looks more appealing. In other words, to make a certain design more appealing, add some butt-ugly optional designs to pick from, which cost the same. If you have too many good choices, people will get choice-paralysis and not be able to decide. So you only want a couple of decent ones and some godawful ones you hope nobody picks.

This is good knowledge for game designers actually: Say you have a regular sword, and that's 20 gold, and you have a +5 sword, and that's 100 gold, and you want more people to buy the +5 sword. Well, add a +4 sword for 95 gold. Now, anyone would be a fool to buy the +4 sword, since the +5 sword is clearly better value for money. But ... now people will see the extra +1 of the +5 sword as a "bargain" so they'll be more inclined to shell out for the better sword. Even if nobody ever buys the +4 sword. Strange but true, and verified in experiments.