It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.

Does the non-steam version not receive the same gameplay updates? I had been under the impression that the only difference was the UI.

The version available for free on their website is the same exact program as the one you purchase on Steam. It simply includes a different set of graphics for the UI. These graphics are designed to look as if they are made up of text characters, but in reality they are still just sprites. The sprites that come with the version you buy from Steam are designed to look like a normal but stylized gui.

The non-steam version also had its controls significantly changed

Is that insane? Every game[0][1] I ever helped ship has had fully localized UI. In game development that seems to be the standard way of doing things. And it requires a lot of testing and sometimes comes with workflows to automatically test that all strings fit their intended box.

[0] Before I worked on game development I actually worked in virtual surgery simulation, and there we also had a localized UI with a very large number of supported languages and tooling to detect issues.

[1] Need For Speed (2015), NFS: Payback, NFS: Heat, Lost in Random, Wavetale

I had a friend who was really into EVE online and showed me about 20 years ago. It felt too much like waiting and spreadsheets for me.

I got into Dwarf Fortress around 2015 and I was hooked. These days it's something I often play together with my son. I love how dynamic and deep it feels. It was such a privilege to get to buy a copy when it finally came to Steam.

I assume it's because the title contains "hilariously" and the author felt it necessary to state the content wasn't meant as humorous.

One of my proudest professional moments was when me and three others managed to reduce memory load of the game Wavetale from 20+GiB to under 3GiB so we could port it to Nintendo Switch.

The 100 TiB number almost gives me vertigo. Though in this context it was "just" 50%

I'd love to hear what was taking up that 17GiB if you can share, even if it is commonly optimized things like packing, still fun to hear about

It's an indie open world game originally released for Stadia and in its original form simply loaded the whole world into memory at boot.

We had to implement a streaming system and figure out a good way of chunking the world. This was a challenge because everything was on water and you could see nearby islands quite far away. An intern called Tommi did a great job identifying a good strategy and writing the system.

We also had to reduce the density and model complexity of a lot of environmental details such as rocks, vegetation, and stuff like pots and clotheslines. This was done largely by sorting things by memory size and frequency of use and identifying outliers.

One of the biggest issues was actually really silly: the journal fetched Portrait images and names of characters by referencing the actual NPC and having them embedded there. Meaning the journal, which was always loaded, would pull every NPC involved in a quest into memory including their behaviors, textures, and models.

On my end I also found a lot of silly details wasting hundreds of megabytes. Special render passes using huge textures and render targets, poor structuring of the render pipeline caused memory increases, several key shaders referenced huge textures which weren't necessary, ...

My blog posts about the project[0] mainly focus on rendering performance because that's where I spent more time and it contains more interesting content for discussion. But reducing memory was an ongoing concern with countless little improvements over the 1.5 year porting process

[0] https://agentlien.github.io

I think using AI often feels faster than it is because you put less thought and effort into the problem yourself.

Another possibility is that the people who experience these 100x productivity increases are honest, correct, and simply had abysmal productivity which has now been increased to near-average junior levels thanks to AI.

I am actually often a bit annoyed at discussions of depth in discussions of art - especially from art snobs talking about whether or not something is "true art".

I think what depth does do is help something stand not the test of time but deep continuous analysis. It really heightens the experience when you're a fan and can dive deeply into something for years and still discover subtleties you somehow missed that elevate it even further.

But if something catches your attention immediately granting you a sense of wonder and appreciation which lingers... Well, that is valuable art. Perhaps that's another kind of mastery, managing to convey your ideas so effectively that it doesn't need deeper analysis to digest?

I have had similar thoughts about "x of the week/month/year". But every now and then there's a dirge or deluge of good things and years aren't even comparable because the fourth best thing one year might have been the number one in any other year of the decade.

I think a good example for me personally is 2019 in music. And I assume most people reading this list will shake their head at my (in their view) poor taste.

1. Rammstein released their untitled album which to me remains the best they've ever made.

2. Slipknot released "We are not your kind" which I played on repeat for so long. Nero Forte remained my first or second most listened to song for three years in a row.

3. Lars Winnerbäck also released Eldtuppen, causing the one and only time someone else than AC/DC became my most listened to artist for a year

4. While I didn't like the 2019 Korn album "The Nothing", it made me realize I'd missed their 2016 release "The Serenity of Suffering", which remains one of my favorite albums of the last decade.

The nice thing about "ranking" stuff for yourself and not for anyone else is that some years can have three "best of the year" and some can have none. Embrace the fuzziness inherent in the system.

Because, man, some years really were just that good.

As a Swede, I always enjoy Ikea product names. Many of them are based on their actual function or category. Some are wordplay related to this. For example:

Rinnig - a kitchen towel called "runny"

Skaftet - a series of standing lamps and lamp stands called "the shaft"

Fejka - plastic plants literally called "to fake"

Knöckla - A garbage bin called "crumple up"

Some I don't get but are still funny

Ostbit - wooden serving tongs called "piece of cheese"?

I guess you can use the tongs to serve pieces of cheese.

As a Swede, my first reaction was "what's wrong with calling it 'ship'?"

Took me several seconds to get it.