nickwitha_k (he/him)

  • 5 Posts
  • 446 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I’m excited to see more once it becomes available. Have already added to wishlist. A couple of thoughts, similar to what some others have voiced:

    • Animations are not everything or enough to make a good game. However, attention to detail in animations is a big plus in my book, regardless of graphical quality. It is something that I tend to notice and appreciate.

    • Mechanics are fundamental to any game, physical or digital. There’s two diametrically opposed directions that I’ve seen that result in enjoyable games:

    1. Mechanics that are optimized for enjoyment rather than strict realism. People play games for entertainment. If a mechanic is extremely frustrating, it will likely cause people to lose interest even if it is extremely realistic. In this approach, such mechanics are tuned or dropped to ensure that the player experience is as good as it can be.

    2. Mechanics that are optimized for realism to an excessive degree, with enjoyable gameplay taking a backseat. This is likely to result in a smaller, cult following as many will get frustrated and move on. A good example of this is Dwarf Fortress with its unofficial slogan of “Losing is Fun”.

    I would strongly suggest leaning towards the former as the latter is a really hard target to hit and the cult following for a game that does hit #2 perfectly may also be delayed until long after release.

    • Graphical quality can be very overrated. An enjoyable game with terrible graphics and animation may be very replayable while one with stunning visuals and terrible gameplay may be a flash in the plan that is quickly forgotten. I highly recommend ensuring that graphics are well-optimized so as to allow stutter-free gameplay on even low spec machines, if settings are sufficiently reduced.

    Keep up the good work and I look forward to seeing your future progress.



  • That’s the beautiful thing about gifting software with permissive licenses (when one wants to): it’s a gift and anyone can do whatever they want with it for free.

    ETA: I DO think that it is important for one who chooses to license software permissively to be informed about their decision and its implications. But, just like consent in other areas, as long as one enters into it intentionally and with the understanding of what the license means, it’s noone’s place to judge (and, like consent in other interpersonal areas, the license can be revoked/modified at any time - with a new version). Honestly, really weird of those that take issue with individuals choosing to gift their software to humanity - there’s way more interesting and useful things to engage in in the FLOSS landscape.


  • Here in the States, the only non-private option is through the Veterans’ Administration, which requires that one be a veteran or their direct family. It’s also intentionally bad, overly bureaucratic, and extremely inconvenient (had to drive 40min outside of the state capital to get my then-housemate to a veterans’ hospital once because he, a disabled veteran, couldn’t afford care anywhere else), embodying the right-wing hatred of actually compensating veterans. In fact, right-wing administrations have been caught instructing officials to attempt to avoid providing veterans with their contractually-entitled care and benefits.

    Those of us who are not veterans are stuck with the private US system when terrible wait times.











  • what would you do if someone used it to hurt people instead? I’d personally feel like shit if my software were used for that, and as others said in this post, they’d prefer to have entities request an exemption rather than have their code used in ways they don’t approve of. So what say you?

    I’ve a few thoughts on this:

    • Anyone who wants to use anything that I release for harm, will probably do so regardless of license. Bad actors are going to act badly. Plus, chances are that they’d see no legal repercussions as underdogs winning in court is the exception, not the rule. The legal system is heavily stacked against the little guy.
    • I tend to specifically avoid working on things that are weaponizable to reduce the chance of ethical conflict.
    • The projects that I’ve released or plan to release tend to be pretty esoteric. The one that saw the most interest was years ago and it was an adapter between abandoned gallery plugin and an abandoned social media CMS thing. It would take some great creativity to hurt people with that, other than making them read my horrible code from that era. My current projects are more about FPGA and mixed reality stuff.
    • Once I’ve created something and shared it freely, it is no longer wholely mine. I cannot dictate how one uses it, anymore than a musician can dictate how someone listens to the radio. As long as one abstains from creating tools intended to harm (or that can be predictably turned to harm), I don’t see legitimate ethical culpability. We only have control over ourselves.


  • Really?..

    Just about every FOSS and Source-Available license that I’ve seen is perfectly valid. As a software developer, one has the option to choose how they wish to license their software. This can be based upon one’s personal philosophical view or what seems most appropriate for the piece of software.

    Not everyone is motivated by profit. Most software that I develop personally is permissively licensed because IDGAF as long as I have enough to get by. If I write some code that makes someone else’s life better or easier, that’s more than enough for me.

    Wait. What am I saying? This is the Internet and, according to the rules of corpo social media, we’re all supposed to be dicks to each other to further “engagement”. WHICH ONE OF YOU SAVAGES IS USING TAB INDENTATION INSTEAD OF BLOCKS IN YOUR LICENSE FILES?!?;!!!111one