I know I'm old. I see things like this and always think of leaving Digg because they didn't want us to share a way to pirate Blu Rays and HD-DVDs, which none of us would ever use.
This would be hilarious if it weren't for shitty cars causing deaths.
That said, I always wondered why we don't find a system like RFID that could penetrate concrete and asphalt, and plant passive receivers in roads? We re-pave roads so damn often in this country (the U.S.) it seems like we could've knocked it out in the past couple of decades, minus our most rural areas.
I know RFID itself isn't strong enough, but I imagine that would've been an easier problem than figuring our complete self driving. Not to mention making GPS a secondary system for U.S. road travel in most cases.
The game has a built-in hint system. If you're ever stuck or confused hit the button and the next place to go will glow red. They did a lot of things right with this.
It has some combat, but yes, mostly it's about finding a path from Point A to Point B without dying. That includes running, jumping, climbing, and parkour. It's pretty great.
The combat was kinda required to be shoved into it, despite developers wishes, as I recall. So it's not great. It's not horrible either, it's just clunky in a way that someone who doesn't want to fight might do a poor job of it.
The gist is that you're a courier for illicit things (like information,) and suddenly the government is cracking down.
If you're remotely curious, and you see it on sale, I strongly urge you to give it a shot. Maybe the tutorial level and one or two more. And if you hate it you can always refund it on Steam.
I have used voice commands. "Hey Google, show me the way to X," on the way to my car, or "Hey Google, call X" when I have to call a place I don't know the number to. But I rarely do anymore, as Gemini takes longer to execute than it previously did. And the idea that a five second series of "speak command, register, and execute" will go even further and replace a tap to start an app or something, is hilariously bad. It's like they never used the AI they were shoving into everything.
I sometimes think of "who bought these?" I mean, I'm a little bit of a data hoarder. I never want to lose those Google chats and emails I'll never look back on. I downloaded my Twitter data (that I'll never reference) before deleting my account. But what nerd mother fucker like me, has the money to pay hundreds of dollars on this, and a subscription fee, for a service to take data I'll never own?
If I had that kind of money to waste, I'd just use that extra monthly subscription money to buy media to fill up servers (that I bought with the cost of the Pin,) on my home network.
And I don't even have a home network or a house, but bet your ass I'd have those and a million other things before this became a remotely attractive option.
This is like Quibi. You see it and you can easily understand it on one, far-off, level... But here in reality I'm just left confused. "What were they thinking?"
When it was new to me I tried ChatGPT out of curiosity, like with any tech, and I just kept getting really annoyed at the expansive bullshit it gave to the simplest of input. "Give me a list of 3 X" lead to fluff-filled paragraphs for each. The bastard children of a bad encyclopedia and the annoying kid in school.
I realized I was understanding it wrong, and it was supposed to be understood not as a useful tool, but as close to interacting with a human, pointless prose and all. That just made me more annoyed. It still blows my mind people say they use it when writing.
You're closer to a "gamedev" than me, then. You're an actual "dev" of some type! That said, I'm still trying to find the character of /c/gamedev, so feel free to toss in things you want to see there.
Hey, I'm just a hobbyist. (I've tooled around with the programming and made a few things I never released, but I work in journalism, and not games journalism!) If there's a community you want to help, the best thing you can do is comment, upvote, and when possible, make a post. And if you want to RUN one, trying is better than just letting things not exist. If people don't like it, they can downvote your posts. That's fine too.
FYI "darling" can also be used with a spouse or romantic partner. Your husband or girlfriend can be your "darling" just like "honey" or "baby". It has a similar meaning in this case, where "darling of the group" means everyone really likes them, even if not sexual/romantic.
And this use, "darling of the ____", is a slightly older, but relatively common, saying.
To anyone else out there thinking about this? Do it. I took over /c/gamedev a couple of months back. Not because I dislike anytging about r/gamedev, but because I want more than one place for that kind of thing on the Internet, and am beginning less of a fan of reddit itself.
(And yes, it's slow going, especially with the holidays and job hunting. But I'm okay with that.)
Just remember this when you see people complain about having to pick a server when joining Mastodon. It's not that, maybe it's just not easy/intuitive lile PixelFed is making it? I don't know.
And then when people were joining, I just saw them complaining about all the anger/aggression on Mastodon. It may've missed a big jump on point with Bluesky's rise, but there will invariably be more. People just have to be ready and willing.
Not "lost" as in "misplaced", but "lost" as in "missed the opportunity to bring it in, in the future".