Wordle 995 4/6
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I mean, it seems kind of silly to post my Wordle scores, but it’s #2 on this list!
Edit: Hilariously, my blog will not display the block characters due to an ancient database.
Here’s an image, which it can still handle:
P.S. I will not be doing this again.
…is not a blog post title I would have expected to write a few years ago, but here we are.
Specifically, the Gnome Fountain is a level in the game PowerWash Simulator (PWS). Yes, not only does this game exist, it’s my go-to for when I need to relax and de-stress. It’s so relaxing that my Garmin watch will sometimes think I am napping while playing it.
Tonight I finished cleaning the gnome fountain and did it in a particularly methodical manner, working from top to bottom. When you complete a level in PWS, you get a replay from some fixed perspective to showcase your amazing ability to wield a power washer. I found the replay so strangely mesmerizing I recorded a video of it. And here it is!
Not to be outdone by Meta’s VR world sans legs, Microsoft has announced Mesh (?), a virtual meeting platform for Teams.
They have provided this shot to media:
I mean, the only thing that would be worse is if the presentation were photorealistic. Because legless torsos are terrifying.
Really, examine the shot. It looks like all these engaged, happy cartoon people had their legs cut off and their upper body stumps were cauterized and plopped down onto the furniture. Except for the ones that just magically float like ghosts. I mean, only the furniture is casting shadows, so maybe they’re all ghosts–ghosts of workers who got chopped up while on a team-building exercise in the woods, and now they exist in this perpetual otherworldly realm, unaware that their mortal days are done, and that they no longer have to pretend to be interested in slide decks and Excel spreadsheets.
It’s 2024. Why is this Mesh1You know I was going to do this at some point the best a company recently valued at $3 trillion U.S. can do?
Fun bonus fact: Three months after absorbing Activision Blizzard, Microsoft announced its laying off 1900 workers. Never mind the record profits, there’s cuttin’ needs be done!
The problem:
The solution:
And yes, I did actually uninstall the game. My wrist and overall productivity are already thanking me.
And the hours played? Pretty sure that’s a typo. Yeah, that’s it.
Well, as many thoughts as a smartwatch can have.
My Garmin Forerunner 255 got a software update recently that allows it to track naps. I don’t take naps very often, but I did take one after a run last week and sure enough, the watch tracked the nap. It said I picked a good time to nap, but napped too long.
Today it tracked my second nap. Except I was awake the entire time. And I was playing a computer game.
Apparently, PowerWash Simulator (which is exactly what it sounds like) is such a mellow game that my watch thought I was napping while I was playing it. It also said I napped too long again. I can verify it is indeed a relaxing game, but now I’m curious about what my stats (heart rate, etc.) look like when I’m playing. Is the nap-tracking glitchy, or do I enter such a relaxed state that playing the game is effectively the same as sleeping? Questions!
Back in the olden times of CRT monitors that weighed half as much as I did, I started playing MMOs1. Although several already existed, like EverQuest and Ultima Online, I didn’t dive in until I got into the beta for City of Heroes (CoH) in early 2004 (the game launched in April of that year). As I learned later, CoH actually broke convention with typical fantasy MMOs in several crucial ways, apart from the obvious theme of superheroes. I played and adored it and made many characters, usually themed around fruit or vegetables, because why not?
In the fall of 2004, two more MMOs launched, within two weeks of each other. The first was EverQuest 2, the other you may have heard of, something called World of Warcraft. Everyone I played CoH with pretty much abandoned it for the hamster wheel of WoW. Eventually, I did, too.
As the years went by, play ebbed and flowed across various games:
Eventually, every game, even the well-oiled hamster wheel of WoW, wore on me and I left them all behind, apart from occasional forays into CoH, which is completely free to play now (the servers run on donations). And I was fine with that.
But just lately I’ve had a slight urge to revisit an MMO, to level up a character and be part of a big stinky world filled with other players. But which one?
On the one hand, some of this has been decided for me, because the MMO is dead (Vanguard, Tabula Rasa) or because I have little interest in revisiting it (Champions).
But that still leaves more than a couple. I ponder.
I’ll probably just keep not playing any of them. Maybe I should dig up some old RPG from my Steam backlog and just pretend it’s massive.
I don’t remember why I made this, but I did! I remember being very proud of how authentic it appeared.
It’s what The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim might look like if it had been designed as a typical piece of Windows 98 software. Enjoy! (?)
It’s true!
I have made several games in GameMaker and a few in Godot. I mean, they are not good games, but several are at least as entertaining as some of the Atari 2600 titles I played as a teenager.
And now, I work on my own stuff, rather than just following various tutorials. Exciting! Terrifying! With results hopefully more compelling than some of those Atari 2600 games. If I end up remaking ET: The Game, I will voluntarily submit myself to an endless parade of Nelson Muntz GIFs.
I buy Lotto 6/49 tickets–I consider them a charitable contribution–and never expect to strike it rich on that 1 in 14 million chance, but it’s fun to imagine.
This morning I got two emails announcing I’d won two prizes. Two! Was I now a millionaire? (No, the “Gold Ball” jackpot is unclaimed at $22 million.)
It turns out that on the last draw I won a free play and my free play won another free play, plus my own regular ticket won a free play. It’s free plays all the way down.
I’ll post next on this when I become a millionaire. Any draw now, I’m sure.
After almost two years of fighting regulators, Microsoft finally completed its $69 billion merger with Activision Blizzard. Here are a few thoughts on the deal, in no particular order:
I’m doing something I’ve never done before on this blog: I am setting up a reminder to check back on this post on a specific date. In this case, that date is January 1, 2024, and I’m doing so because I’m really interested in what happen next in this little saga that burst into being during Apple’s iPhone event on September 12th.
Some brief background: A company called Unity makes a game engine called Unity. It is free to use and very popular–over 38,000 games on Steam use it. The company has long advertised that it is royalty-free. Larger dev teams do pay, as Unity’s enterprise subscription plan costs thousands of dollars per dev–but any revenue you make from your games is yours to keep.
This is set to change on January 1, 2024 when Unity introduces URF (they don’t call it that, but I totally do, because it’s the sound most devs make when looking at the new pricing schemes that were announced while everyone was watching the unveiling of the iPhone 15), or Unity Runtime Fee. Whatever you do, don’t call it a royalty!
Basically, if your game hits a threshold for revenue and installs, Unity will charge you a fee (to be assessed monthly) per install. For smaller games, it will be 20¢ per install. If a person installs your game on two devices? That counts as two installs and you get dinged 40¢. The install number will be based on “aggregated data” Unity gathers using proprietary means. Or, as the entire internet has correctly surmised it: Trust us!
To say this new scheme has not gone over well would be a grand understatement. Unity has already sent out corrections, clarifications and some minor walk backs, but they have, to many devs, already irreparably broken the trust between them. And even with the clarifications, you still end up with stuff like this:
As one YouTube channel put it: “THEY SAID DISTRIBUTORS LIKE GAMEPASS – FEES WOULD BE ON THE DISTRIBUTOR – IE: MICROSOFT – LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL OH GOD. HAHAHAHAHA”
Some devs have said they will never use Unity again. Some have even vowed to switch engines on games in progress–a huge and costly undertaking. No one is happy about this, and no one should be, because the whole plan is harebrained and ill-advised. The string of clarifications show that it was obviously pushed out without any careful thought or consideration. Unity has also deleted their TOS changes from GitHub and removed parts of its TOS, rewritten it, then, as the cherry on top of the poop cake, stated that this will apply retroactively to every game in release NOW as far as determining those minimum thresholds. It’s Vader’s “I am altering the deal” except with fewer Stormtroopers in the background.
Why is this relevant to me? Well, it intersects several of my interests: gaming and tech. Also, I have been using Unity for my own indie game, and while I would need about 50,000 new friends to hit the thresholds where I’d have to pay the URF, this is such a cosmically scummy move that I am considering moving everything to another game engine.
The two I am most strongly considering are:
Technically, I have prior experience with the Unreal Engine, if you count the UT levels I made, uhm, almost 20 years ago. How much could it have changed since then, really?
The main pros for Godot are it’s open source and free, so there is no possibility of URF-like shenanigans happening. The main cons are the resources for it are far fewer than Unity, and it’s not as full-featured or simple to learn.
For Unreal, it’s also free until you generate revenue over $1 million U.S. (a boy can dream) and even then, they only take 5% of total revenue. It has a lot of resources available, but the engine is honking big, designed more for giant 3D games, and not so much 2D indie platformers. So it may be serious overkill1Serious Overkill is also the name of my Cure cover band.
For the moment, I am going through Godot’s documentation to see what I think. At this point, even a complete reversal from Unity would probably still make me hesitant to go back to it.
We’ll see what happens on January 1st, though!
I made a terrible mistake. Actually, I made two terrible mistakes:
On the other hand, I’m now a Sr. Gemfinder1This is kind of a dumb rank. I mean, the screen is literally filled with gems. Or maybe it means I’m a senior, age-wise, and because of my old and ailing eyes, I should get an award for just seeing the gems at all., see:
I mean, I don’t need to be solving the climate crisis or brokering world peace here, but I feel like I should be doing something more substantial.
I have a solution! I’ll switch to the Mac. There’s no Bejeweled there!
Right after just one more game…