As an Autist, I find it amazing that… after a lifetime of being compared to a robot, an android, a computer…

When humanity actually does manage to get around to creating “”“AI”“”… the AI fundamentally acts nothing like the general stereotype of fictional AIs, as similar to how an Autistic mind tends to evaluate information…

No, no, instead, it acts like an Allistic, Neurotypical person, who just confidently asserts and assumes things that it basically pulls out of its ass, often never takes any time to consider its own limitations as it pertains to correctly assessing context, domain specific meanings, more gramatically complex and ambiguous phrases … essentially never asks for clarifications, never seeks out addtional relevant information to give an actually useful and functional reply to an overly broad or vague question…

Nope, just barrels forward assuming its subjective interpretation of what you’ve said is the only objectively correct one, spouts out pithy nonsense… and then if you actually progress further and attempt to clarify what you actually meant, or ask it questions about itself and its own previous statements… it will gaslight the fuck out of you, even though its own contradictory / overconfident / unqualified hyperbolic statements are plainly evident, in text.

… Because it legitimately is not even aware that it is making subjective assumptions all over the place, all the time.

Anyway…

Back to ‘Autistic Mode’ for Mr. sp3ctr4l.

If I was on the Bethesda team, I would actually be very interested in trying to get feedback from the only other group of devs that remotely know what it’s like to do something similar. What approaches did they take? What’s similar? What’s different? Did the choices that other team make lead to a better product? How much more elegant is their code?

… And why didn’t Bethesda do this with the Skyblivion team?

Why didn’t they offer to at least pay them temporarily as contracted consultants?

Because management is full of themselves and maniacally, socio/psychopathically profit driven.

You can’t say they weren’t aware of the Skyblivion project, they literally coordinated a publicized action with them as part of their release schedule.

…

Game dev in particular, and even software dev generally, in America, at least… is absolutely chalk full of situations where one person or team or whatever’s work is either stolen, or fought over, or someone claims credit for a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t actually contribute nearly anything to, or make a whole big show of some streamlining effort that actually just cripples or eliminates the proverbial one dinky jenga block from the xkcd comic, and then all the blame for a whole bunch of other idiots’ plans, who never even consulted with the jenga block maintainer, well that guy or gal gets utterly blamed for all of it.

As well as of course all the NDAs and IP type bullshit where nothing even resembling what you did as a contractor or for another company can be used elsewhere, and become massively succesful, without a massive legal and financial threat.

… The actual devs, yes, did their work most likely without ‘lol lets fuck over these upstarts’ in mind.

That was in the mind of upper management and c suite though, guaranteed.

They don’t talk about that infront of the servants, I mean employees, I mean, who cares really, we’ll drive them nuts with crunch OT and then lay them off anyway, gaslighting them for the entire development cycle that that won’t happen.

…

Your instinct as a senior dev to reach out comes from a reasonable and good place.

But upper management and c suite is concerned with maximizing profit and business strategy, and in game dev, these folks have a long, stories history of routinely being as ruthless, cutthroat, duplicitous as possible.

It is warfare to them.

…

And I am not just pulling my credential check out of my ass here as some kind of gotcha style rhetoric, I also have worked in game dev, in software dev, in db admin and data analyst roles, for large corporations.

Though I do truly appreciate that you actually have the relevant credentials, and are talking from your own actually relevant experience, so I want to thank you for that, for actually having the conversation.

My experience has been almost entirely upper managers and VPs and the Board consistently doing the exact opposite of what actual developers suggest, request, or warn about, and then just slyly or sometimes quite brashly blame everyone else for causing the fuckups they were warned their plans would cause.

They think they are Gods and everyone else is a contemptible, digusting, unfortunately unavoidable part of doing business… and if a truly royal fuckup happens, they’ll turn on the people that built the corporate ladder they climbed without even a blink.

Kenshi.

If you can get past the kind of… weird control scheme…

The game is basically a single player mmorpg.

You start off as an absolute weakling, and there is no … scaling, the way most other rpgs either generally have certain levelled enemies in certain areas, that you progress through linearly or unlock sequentially, or just an outright whole world spanning dynamic level matching kind of system.

You can be battling a small beast… and then a herd of very, very much more dangerous beasts, or slavers, will just happen to pass by, and royally fuck up your day.

Every character in the game, including you, plays by the same rules.

All major NPCs can be killed, the game is also full of varying factions with varying alignments towars other factions, and they will treat your character differently based on your race, the kinds of actio s you do, your reputation with other factions.

The storytelling is … a sandbox/emergent approach. Not in the sense of ‘there are no story lines or quests’… but in the sense of… a whole lot of stuff is out there, but you have to self direct yourself to go out and find it, or randomly encounter it.

Also, you can gain allies, make your own faction, and control a small army… and you can even build your own settlement, and economically interact with the rest of the world.

… Its… kind of hard to describe.

There really aren’t any other games quite like Kenshi.

Its got a good sized modding scene, and it incorperates at least some elemenrs of… every game you mentioned.

If you use a mod to up your max follower/faction member count… you can basically play the game as an RTS (with pause). Build a settlement, recruit followers (or enslave them), arm them, fees them, train them up, and go take over a city if you want.

… Or play basically solo, just you and your bonedog, maybe as a bounty hunter for hire, or a hashish smuggler, or get a pack animal and run a trade caravan.

… why would you go out of your way to install a mod and then fight against what the mod does?

Like, sure, it’d be fairly nuts to make a variant of the game exe such that it basically uses a variant of the native save file format that is such an extensive rework that it builds some kind of literal self corruption mechanic into the save file itself…

… but it would not be that hard to tell the exe (provided, of course, you have succesfully decompiled it, or the relevant parts of it such that you launch mod.exe which sufficiently acts as a wrapper that then launches the actual game.exe within it, or can manipulate the vanilla game.exe/directory in realtime) to check the last update/file creation timestamp of the ironman save file itself, and check if it matches up with some kind of hash based off of that, where the decoding method/table for the hash is built into the exe itself… and then the exe deletes any save file that has been pasted into the directory manually when you run the exe, to start the game.

Kenshi doesn’t have a particularly complex DRM or AC service you’d need to actively fight against… you would just need a legit copy of the game with a valid key. It is a single player game that doesn’t even use online verification, its an old school cd key method.

I pointed to NVSE as an example because… it is similarly an exe that entirely replaces the vanilla game exe of Fallout New Vegas.

You could make a New Vegas mod that does this iron man thing trivially with NVSE, they already did the hard work of decompiling and reverse engineering the game exe, and then expanded its capabilities.

…

Imaging your entire drive would wipe out everything and reinstall the os from scratch, probably a new partition table too.

Restoring from a backup is again, fighting against a mod you have chosen to install becauae you wanted to use the mod.

Finally, the user, especially in Windows, absolutely does not have full control over the OS, unless you are literally hacking into it to defeat parts of it that it normally won’t let you remove.

Go ahead and try to entirely remove Windows ability to verify its own liscense, or hell, even fully remove advertisements from your Start menu, and then tell me how the user has full control.

Kernel level anticheats have more access to your system than you as a user do.

… Oof.

Yes, yes Kenshi fairly brutally depicts limbs being utterly crippled, as well as even amputated (look up adventures of torso on youtube)…

But I wouldn’t say fairly realistic depiction of certain kinds of disabilities… are anywhere close to the same thing as… making a game more easily playable by a real world person with varying kinds of disabilities.

If the game exe itself can… write and delete save files… and it is fairly common for extensive mods to just… literally replace the game exe… I don’t really see why a custom exe could not just … say, delete any saves you’e introduced back into the save directory manually, other than the last one it has remembered save/exiting with.

I can think of other methods of doing something that would achieve basicslly the same result (an enforced iron man mode) via other methods as well.

… I can think of even more ways to do this by making basically an open source (so that anyone can look at the code and verify it isn’t malicious malware) shell script/utility type thing that runs on linux, and would mod a windows game running on linux via proton, but then the problem is that windows users would not be able to use that mod.

You could probably do the same with windows bash scripts, but i am just more familiar with linux.

Like… by your logic, it is impossible to crack a game such that it runs without DRM.

This is obviously false.

… Or, am I misunderstanding you, and you are just saying the concept of an ironman mode is … just stupid in concept, and no game would ever support this natively?

Because again, that is obviously false, there are many games, of many different genres, that at least support an Ironman mode without any mods at all, and even a few that actually do enforce it all the time, though yes, admittedly, the games that enforce it all the time are usually more niche.

Like uh, HOI4 and Stellaris and No Mans Sky, just off the top of my head, all have built in, vanilla ironman modes. Oh and Xenonauts!

There are many, many games that do not support an ironman mode, even with mods… but have significant chunks of their communities dedicated to self imposing their own rule sets, either to make casual play more fun, or as conditions for a class of competetive speed run.

Nuzlocke rules for Pokemon games is basically an Ironman mode for Pokemon, tons of players will just do that even for casual play, to make the game more challenging.

Every game every with a ‘No Deaths’ rule as part of a speed run ruleset.

Some even go further into… literally you are not even allowed to ever even take any damage, as well, a ‘no hit’ rule or what not.

… there’s gotta be some way to make a save file self destruct or corrupt itself if moved out of the directory it was created in.

… might have to be a more extensive mod, something like NVSE, that actually replaces/hijacks the main game exe, uses its own dlls, lol.

… I kind of find it hilarious that say… Kenshi, which allows saving and loading anytime, would have this count as an accesibility feature.

BrB, making ironman mode mod for Kenshi, save=game exits, mod allows only a single save file at a time, deletes any others, rofl.

I mourn for the leopards.

Their digestive systems were not designed to digest LiON batteries =(

… I am just trying to ‘yes, and!’ this.

I think its awesome that someone modded a Switch this hard, I think its awesome the person I replied to loves their modded handhelds, and I am just sharing my own tales of modding and tinkering with the Deck to show what you can do with it as well, and how I angle my goals of modding a bit differently than the person I’m replying to, so its a better fit for me.

I did not at any point state that their approach to modding is any kind of wrong or inferior.

You can tweak and (hard and soft) mod a Steam Deck as well.

… Your starting point is just more powerful hardware, and a much more permissive software system that basically begs you to do whatever you want to it, compared to a Switch.

I get that this level of modding if a Switch is an accomplishment, because it is more challenging… that the modding itself is what is enjoyable for many people.

But many other people enjoy a different proportion of ‘tinkering’ to ‘actually using it’. Or different kinds of tinkering.

Like… I have an OLED Deck. For me, running RPCS3 is… well, I could either dl the flatpak of it and configure it myself, or let Emu/RetroDeck take care of that, or switch over from SteamOS 3 to Bazzite, set up a distrobox instance of Fedora (what Bazzite is built off of), then just literally download all the source code and required libraries… and completely compile the entire emulator myself, on the Steam Deck itself.

I actually did this with O3DE and Godot a few times… a bit buggy, but hey, its a fun way for me to get more familiar with just… how compiling works, as well as the Fedora ecosystem… most of my previous experience with compiling/development is within Debian based distros.

You can literally develop a game, in Godot, or Unity, or many 2D only/mostly FOSS engines… on a Steam Deck.

As far as hard modding?

A year (or two?) back now… somebody figured out that you can actually take the SSD out of a Steam Deck, run the OS from the microSD card… add an adapter to the SSD slot, and then connect that to a full, PC grade eGPU with its own power supply… and this requires you to actually physically cut out (or I guess remove the entire) a part of the back exterior housing.

But, if you can do all this, you now have basically a hyper charged Steam Deck with waaay more rendering power you can basically use as a decently powerful desktop PC…

But, this only works with Windows (running off of the microSD card), and your Deck is… no longer really portable, unless you consider detaching the eGPU and SSD adapter thingy, putting the SSD back in, and put a standard backplate back on the thing… as an acceptable level of portability, lol.

Less … nearly insane … degrees of hardware modding are things like swapping out the joycons with halleffect sticks, custom body shells (the translucent atomic purple n64 style ones are quite popular, and the translucence actually helps a bit with heat dissipation),

…custom colored button and dpads… sort of … skin like wraps for the touchpads, or whole bodyshell… semi squishy grip style wraps that can help if you have larger, or injured hands/wrists…

…oh right, the LCD variants have some fairly popular entire screen replacements that give you a higher resolution than the native screen… not sure if anything like that exists for the OLED variants yet.

… Is… is that seriously … the origin of this phrase?

That does… at least make a basic level of sense…

Close!

I used to compile all the high level analytics and projection reports for all the Vice Presidents and Board Members, but they didn’t even notice when I corrected a massive category of double counted revenue within a month of taking over from the person whose position I was taking over.

After a year of being absurdly overworked, doing the job of half of the IT department for them, so that I could actually access the data I needed, being hilariously underpaid, and becoming far, far too well versed in passive aggressive, buzzword heavy, actionable information empty, corpospeak…

I left for greener pastures.

(not Discord lol. did contract db admin type work for MSFT for a bit, then said executive reports for a massive import export firm… then nonprofits, serving the homeless)

Utterly tangential, but:

… wtf is the origin of the ‘waiting for the shoe to drop’ phrase … to indicate waiting for a twist in a plot, or a secret to be revealed, an impactful complication to be explained?

How… what is the metaphor here?

???

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Yep lol, golden parachute deployed!

… For the pilot.

Passengers are still in the plane, lunch cart just came around!

None of that changes or even addresses what I said in the comment you are replying to.

Yes, a corpo flex often involves throwing a ton of money and manpower at something…

Yes, Skyblivion development will probably continue… doesn’t change the fact that Bethesda just did a giant corpo flex on them.

The… whole … point of a corpo flex … is to showcase that you have a disproportionate amount of legal and monetary power, and you can use that to humiliate upstarts, show others how insignificant they are.

Have… you never worked in a large corp? Or… studied how they make business decisions?

Have you ever worked in software development?

… never even picked the corpo background for cyberpunk 2077?

Yeah they spent years working on a remaster just to dunk on a small mod team.

Yes, that literally is what they did.

If Skyblivion had released first, even for free, far more people would be going… wait, why would I pay for yet another Bethesda remaster… when a free one already exists?

This is the company that routinely releases broken buggy games, because they can’t figure out how to actually fix their engine, their games routinely have to be fixed and patched by modders… who keep trying to figure out how to monetize mods or any kind of additional content the way record labels monetize artists.

At this point, it is difficult for me to think of a game company that is more absuive and exploitative of its most truly dedicated fans… aside from Roblox.

Ok then, keep paying all your favorite artist’s bills with ‘appreciation’.

… They call it a labor of love, without the stated goal of making money…

Because if their stated goal was to make money, Bethesda would sue them into poverty induced early graves.