I vividly remember a downloaded game telling me they had run out of available licences, once. Can’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty certain it was on Steam. How you run out of numbers still rascals me, all these years later. And I say this as a software dev.

Krita is fucking slow though :/

Wait wait wait… RiF ain’t dead?!

Let me see if I can improve on that summary : “Alright, look, we know, okay? But dude! So. Much. Money !”

That’s because you didn’t try our lord and savior SASS. Vanilla CSS should be illegal at this stage.

JsonSchema is a way to validate some JSON. A great thing when you want to stop any sort of malformed data from coming in. Instead of wrecking your head in your code testing whether this bit here is not null, or is that string a valid boolean (I still remember that shitty piece of code they had, ugh!) or that bit is empty or that one is an actual number, or a string that can only have such and such value, well, you can formalise all this in one place, as a data file instead of code. Very convenient.

Except when it turns out you’re using a JSON library that’s not one, not two, but six major versions behind, and the security department won’t greenlight you using anything recent because… fuck you, that’s why. And to add insult to injury, we were the Quality department. Responsible for analysing the code quality of thousands of coders, around a hundred thousand programs (mostly COBOL but also C#), of a European banking group… The JSON schema was for adding a layer of non existant security to our API. But no, let’s keep accepting shitty malformed JSON (because of course we kept receiving shitty JSON; that’s why we wanted to implement this)

So I had to rewrite a lot of custom code to patch the bugs we found in the library, and none of the nifty tools that let you put in json and generate json schema would work for us. Heck, they even have JsonSchema to validate your JsonSchema but those wouldn’t work either, so far behind our version was.

Fucking awesome experience. I’m glad it’s behind me.

I feel this in my bones. As an OG dev, I had this incredible urge to smack people when I was working for my last job and I saw the API specs with everything being sent as strings through JSON. Boolean? Sure, let’s use a string. Integers? Sure we’ll do conversion in our code, that’ll be more efficient… So fucking infuriating. Oh and don’t get me started on JsonSchema T_T

So does that compensate for all those pirated games that people actually do play?

“Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?” pause “Is it plugged in?” pause “You’re welcome”

For most devs, it’s a Jenga tower. Only fancy algorithm devs get a nice Hanoi towers setup.

I wish long press would just show us a choice wheel, right thumbstick to pick my choice, done. Free the left and right foe other stuff.

I do appreciate your point of view. I just disagree about the “it’s been like this for ages and we’re used to it and it’s part of the difficulty”. Good UI should cause no friction.

I do agree a paused menu with quaffing health potions mid-strike is bullshit. But if things are gonna be real time (not even slow down while in menu wheel like many others) then there is no reason to stick with ancient traditions. It would be simple enough to have an item wheel instead.

As it is yeah, I do play with a handicap. It’s fine, I’ve beaten other games with similar issues (from my POV). I’m just super annoyed about subpar UX in software. I’ve seen too many in my career and too many people enduring bullshit UI… so it really rustles my jimmies when I see the same problems in games. You know, software that’s supposed to provide fun.

It’s really not an ER specific pet peeve of mine; I’ve endured shitty UI/UX for the last 37 years and so I’m a bit grumpy about it, is all.

The problem is that the controls for anything other than the fighting are rather clunky. It’s not something specific to ER, but rather gamepad based games, for some reason. I’ve the same issue with Horizon Zero Dawn. In both games I play pretty much with the weapons, the healing and that’s about it because fuck all that shit about cycling through options in the middle of a fight.

For some reason it reminds me of When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth, a short story about sysadmins dealing with the apocalypse.

You would be amazed!

Isn’t it what happens on Mac? I’m told there is a command line on there, but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever met* a Mac addict who’s heard of it, let alone used it.

I’m glad it’s only the football streaming sites, but I don’t much like that companies get this kind of legal power.

I wish I could do that for Band Maid. I really want them to get my money. Not some fucking glorified delivery company.

I remember playing Wildlands and loving it so much I actually bought the game full price. Sometimes you gotta vote with your wallet.

My entire career is based on “yeah but you’re good with computers and programming!” I just wanted to do fine arts and paint for fuck sake. And I could have made a career out of it, as history as since shown! Ah well. Maybe my kids will fare better, we’ll see.