Vintage Eric

[Moonface]

Well at least you didn't forget about us!  I always do find it funny though when someone is entirely off the radar for months on end and then comes stumbling through the front door out of the blue. For some reason my mind always imagines it as if one of those rare guest characters shows up on a TV show and the crowd cheers for it. XD

lmao that's a hilarious image. May I be bumped up to series regular?  

Absolutely.

I'm surprised to hear ZT hasn't really had that sort of thing done for it, since I always assumed it was a pretty popular game and would attract a lot of modders. Then again maybe the scene has died down over time and an API wasn't a consideration when the scene was bigger or something?

Yeah sadly at 22 years old, the game has all but lost its modding scene, but there are still a few holdouts. My hopes are that if we are ever able to pull this project off, it'll renew interest and we'd see more activity again. Hell, the API alone I'd hope would inject some life into it, but I don't know. Not too many programmers in the scene really, mostly artists. Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is an interesting parallel that has a similar age. OpenRCT2 has a flourishing modding community these days so I have hope. We'll see!

There's a chance. Earlier this year Jak & Daxter was decompiled for PC which opened up the way for modding the game heavily, to the point of even making custom level content for it, and that scene has been seeing growth despite the game never having modding before and being from like, 2001.

Aren't you a programmer these days? Maybe you'd like to learn some reverse engineering? Join the dark side Moony. Let's see the dark side of the moon. (lmfao...I deleted this twice but no no, it is staying...)

Nah, the most I've ever coded is themes. I have no knowledge of anything beyond that. I may have to forcefully learn about php though as our host plans to move us onto php8.4 in a week and I think most if not all of the plugins this board uses are still running on php7 and the creators haven't updated them yet. My choice is to either figure out how to fix any of the errors they will cause or disable them all until the creators update them, and I'm not really keen on doing the latter.

Is the growing trend of AI usage something that could pose a problem for you in your field, or is whatever aspect of Computer Science you hope to get a job in pretty safe from that trash?

I'm actually not too sure what industry I want to get into yet. Lately I've clearly been flirting with game dev, but I'm also doing computer science research over the summer and some web dev projects. I'm kind of all over the place. AI is definitely a concern and something that might influence where I end up going. For example, my reverse engineering might have interesting career prospects in malware analysis or embedded systems (firmware developers), but it I'm not sure either option sounds too attractive yet. Both I think might be safe from AI for now...but are any of us really? lol'

There's also the question of whether AI as we know it (ChatGPT, etc) is good enough to be a production-ready on its own. Sure companies are experimenting right now to see what all they can get away with, but time will tell.

The best usage I've seen of AI is giving it mundane tasks to do that involve a lot of repetition. I think a recent animated movie did that by giving AI all of the tasks that were just animating things that were very basic and used widely throughout the film while the animators focused on doing the unique and more complex tasks, which allowed the movie to be produced at a more comfortable rate and didn't take away anyone's job since all it did was just automate a menial task the animators would have had to do alongside everything else they worked on. I just can't remember the movie.


Also, I know it came up in the "When Was The Last Time You..." thread but since it fits better here, I uploaded the most notable screenshots I have saved from that Minecraft server we played on together: https://imgur.com/a/1Rudypy
It was on a custom map but I don't recall what that map was, and I only remembered that fact from the final screenshot that is very clearly not standard Minecraft terrain generation.

[Moonface]

What games have you been playing in the time you were wandering outside our airlocks before someone you found your way back in?

[Eric]

I'm still meaning to respond to the post you replied to last year but university exams have been kicking my ass 😭

Starfield and Valheim are ones I got big into the last year. I had a honeymoon phase with Starfield and took about 60 hours before I was over it and noticed the blemishes, mostly because I was doing sidequests as you do in these games. Sadly all of the interesting events in the game lore took place before the beginning of the game so once I noticed that there just wasn't any point to doing anything and for the most part quests weren't solving a grander plot across the game, I stopped cold turkey. The dialogue in the game all feels so redundant too like, I reeeally don't care what you had for dinner or how long you've been working for this corporation. Just nothing felt...alive and connected to anything.

Anyway, Valheim is fun as hell and is the first survival game that has brought back that feeling Minecraft gives you when you play for the first time. I have died loooots.

Outside of those two, well League of Legends is my go-to competitive game, but I've so desperately been trying to wean off of it. Last week I started Hogwarts Legacy and almost done with it. Great game, but I'm sadly not the target audience for this game anymore. It's obviously made for kids so the story, what I really care about, is as deep as a puddle.

[Moonface]

I'm still meaning to respond to the post you replied to last year but university exams have been kicking my ass 😭

Ah, I see. What were you studying again? x.x

Starfield and Valheim are ones I got big into the last year. I had a honeymoon phase with Starfield and took about 60 hours before I was over it and noticed the blemishes, mostly because I was doing sidequests as you do in these games. Sadly all of the interesting events in the game lore took place before the beginning of the game so once I noticed that there just wasn't any point to doing anything and for the most part quests weren't solving a grander plot across the game, I stopped cold turkey. The dialogue in the game all feels so redundant too like, I reeeally don't care what you had for dinner or how long you've been working for this corporation. Just nothing felt...alive and connected to anything.

I'm not sure if it would fill some of the holes that Starfield didn't fill for you, but have you looked into No Man's Sky at all (mostly after it received a lot of its updates because otherwise what you saw may not be close to what the game is like now)? I don't know how it is with quests but I know the exploration element is a lot of what Starfield didn't manage to fully deliver on. I tried the game out at a point but it was a considerable number of years ago so whatever content it had when I played is probably only a small portion of the game nowadays.

Outside of those two, well League of Legends is my go-to competitive game, but I've so desperately been trying to wean off of it. Last week I started Hogwarts Legacy and almost done with it. Great game, but I'm sadly not the target audience for this game anymore. It's obviously made for kids so the story, what I really care about, is as deep as a puddle.

Did you ever play any of the earlier Harry Potter games that were directly based on the books/movies?

[Eric]

Ah, I see. What were you studying again? x.x

 

My undergrad in Computer Science 🤓

I'm not sure if it would fill some of the holes that Starfield didn't fill for you, but have you looked into No Man's Sky at all (mostly after it received a lot of its updates because otherwise what you saw may not be close to what the game is like now)? I don't know how it is with quests but I know the exploration element is a lot of what Starfield didn't manage to fully deliver on. I tried the game out at a point but it was a considerable number of years ago so whatever content it had when I played is probably only a small portion of the game nowadays.

 

I've tried it out in the past year or two when its reputation had turned around and was getting praises. I can't say I enjoyed it any more than I did when it came out, and honestly I had the same reservations I did the first time. Though there are missions and such, I just felt it a bit aimless so I felt it wasn't for me in the end.

Did you ever play any of the earlier Harry Potter games that were directly based on the books/movies?

Oh yeah definitely. I can't remember which ones on the Gamecube but the ones that made it I played those with my cousin. We were huge fans so no matter how garbage I'm sure the mechanics were for a licensed game, I think as kids we tended to overlook them easily haha.

[Moonface]

Did you ever play any of the earlier Harry Potter games that were directly based on the books/movies?

Oh yeah definitely. I can't remember which ones on the Gamecube but the ones that made it I played those with my cousin. We were huge fans so no matter how garbage I'm sure the mechanics were for a licensed game, I think as kids we tended to overlook them easily haha.

I think the GameCube versions were the same as those on PS2 and Xbox, so it's likely ones you played are the same ones I did. I've never really looked back on those games as having terrible gameplay mechanics and think back fondly on most of them but I'd probably have to actually play one again to check if the rose tinted glasses are doing a lot of heavy lifting.


Welcome back btw!

[Eric]

Haha thanks! University has been roasting me alive but good news is my counselor has me clocked for graduation next semester finally. Mostly I'm worried about the software dev job market at the moment. Not looking very good!

Honestly I'm with you; I absolutely enjoyed those games as a kid but also agree that they likely wouldn't fly if I tried them today lol. I really miss that era as a kid and gaming all day with my cousins.