I don’t get it. I mean I get it because it’s Ninty, but I don’t get why now?

Has there been something in a major new feature update that has finally tipped the scales into clearly taking the piss, or have the legal team at Big N finally seen their erections subside after the game’s launch and only now can move enough to do something about it?

Summit (Play Store)

Absolutely love that CCC talk, very interesting and quite entertaining too.

Cheeky bastards.

All I needed was a reason

I was brought up on C, did a module of Java at uni, and am doing an algorithms course which is python heavy.

My other half - who’s quite handy with Python - looks in sheer horror at my code which is littered with semicolons.

I was stumped for half an hour figuring out why the Python interpreter was bouncing an error before it had even reached the main program logic… turns out a { before the block of code royally ruins the interpreter’s day.

Still, I live and learn.

I have a huge collection of Doom games and merch - I’m a big id fan and bigger Romero fan.

First thing people should do with an interest of the series is get a copy of Masters of Doom by David Kushner, absolutely brilliant read.

Next, subscribe to some awesome Doomtubers like Zero Master, Civvie11, decino, and Coincident. Zero Master’s stuff is generally commentary free but absolutely unbelievable, CV11’s stuff is hilarious, decino explains the mechanics very well, and Coincident puts it all together in one facerocketing package.

My only real claim to fame was writing the first FAQ for a Doom expansion, but it’s nice to have contributed back to the community.

I bought an Xbox 360 when I found out Doom was being re-released for it - I was already thinking about it when Alan Wake came out, but took a day off work and hooned Doom when it came out on the then-XBLA. I never really bothered with the Xbox One or Series S in the house either… until the Unity port came out. It’s a system seller for me.

It’s the game I’d take on a desert island with me - partly because the feel of the game is just perfect to me, but you’d never get bored with the endless WADS for them - particularly when you use limit-removing ports.

Outstanding game. 11/10 A+++++ would play again

That’s a shame. I can sort of understand taking Unreal and RtNP from the storefronts from a financial perspective as a remaster is rumoured to be in the works, but UT99 - along with Quake III Arena - was probably influential in taking online multiplayer from the discrete deathmatch or capture the flag maps into what would be eSports and games as a service… as much as that makes me almost barf to say.

I’ve always quite liked Sweeney for being “old school” in his approach to game design and company direction, even if I didn’t necessarily like how he went about it, but it has really pulled a hair out of my arse how he’s gone off the rails in the last 6-12 months - complaining about needing more linux devs one month, and binning off hundreds off staff a few weeks later even though they’re proper rinsing the Fortnite cash cow.

Great nod to the Valve documentary though, I enjoyed that far more than I should have.

It’s a tale of two halves, literally.

(edit: crash course for the uninitiated: Fortnite was a great game, until it launched it’s Battle Royale mode - Fortnite then effectively became this game mode, whereas the base game was left to die as Save The World.)

It’s a mode that people paid money for, and Epic treat it as a second rate game even though without it, there wouldn’t even be this behemoth that Fortnite has become.

Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.

A few public sector organisations have had a compromise, where you get an hourly rate and a phone to be on-call. It’s something daft like two pounds per hour, but it does work out to be an extra £100 or £150 a month before tax with attendance expenses paid if you needed to get onsite.

There was probably a compensation arrangement too but I just took off the time that I worked at my convenience - generally the following day in the morning for a lie-in.

I suppose you could always ignore after-hours calls from work - boss or otherwise - but the fallout would unfortunately have been pretty predictable.

Good news all round. Fuck doing work outside the paid window. Unless it’s a dire personal emergency for one of my staff, then fine - but damn right I’m taking a half hour flyer one day in the week.

Awesome, I think I may go back to a language myself. Thanks for checking it out and letting us know!

Anecdotally, a friend who’s pretty handy at languages uses more Memrise than Duolingo now. Similar sort of setup, but with a different style of delivery - more visual cues and a better repetition approach.

Awesome, thanks for the insight.

I’m showing my age here, but much like we had math coprocessors running beside the 286 and 386 gen CPUs to take on floating point operations; then graphics cards offloaded geometry-based math operations to GPU’s - are we looking at AI-style die or chips to specifically work on AI functions?

Excuse my oversimplification, this isn’t my field of expertise!

Wouldn’t this absolutely hammer the battery though, or at least give the CPU a hard time? My understanding is that offloading the work to a cloud platform means that the processor-intensive inputting, parsing, generating, and outputting operations are done in purpose-built datacentres, and end user devices just receive the prepared answer.

Wouldn’t this rinse the battery and increase the overall device temperature for “normal” end users?

Fair warning: I haven’t read the two papers outlined in the article.

Yes but how are you going to leave a printf(‘oh noes I fucked up!’) statement in by mistake, for someone to find in production ten years down the line when the planets align and a strange set of circumstances occur?

That’s half the fun :)