In the last couple of years in the uk, address forms ask for you street address and the rest will autocomplete from there - city, postcode. Makes things a lot easier in the way the author suggests
A lot of modern games ‘feel’ the same to me now. Same sort of lighting, blur.. even the texture loading and pop in. They all sort of blend into one mess.
I liked when games all felt very distinctly different and I feel like part of that was that they all varied on ‘engine’
That's the Unity / Unreal look. I can see why that might be a problem, but I actually really like the Unreal 4 look and think fondly about many games using that engine that I like. The way it handles lighting, fog effects and color in general makes me feel "I'm home".
This is why I am impressed by the works of Enhance Games. Their titles Tetris effect, Rez Infinte (UE4), Humanity and Lumines Arise (Unity) dont show any of the usual traits of those engines. They have done a great job of avoiding the defaults of these engines and crafting something new with the engines as the base foundation.
But I suspect that when you have multiple years to build Tetris, you can spend a lot of time crafting your own style.
That's because you're more likely than not using the best (or close to the best) hardware that generation had to offer. Try using a mid-end or a low-end machine and doing more than one thing at a time, it gets ugly real quick.
Anecdotal but the three times I’ve been in the states recently I come away feeling like trash. When I’m there I crave salads and green food pretty fast.
It feels like, as a tourist, unless you’re making food yourself from scratch the ingredients used in most food are not good for you.
I don’t feel that way holidaying in other countries..
Re-indexing does occur after an update, but iOS 26 consumes more battery life than iOS 18 anyways.
Just in one example video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 ) they see the phone get hotter and the battery drops 13x faster during non-static sequences like checking notifications, etc.
Just anecdotally, my iPhone 16 Pro seems to last half as long. Before iOS 16, I got from 80% to 20% without a problem. Now, I charge to 100% and I still need to recharge throughout the day. Apple simply fucked up our phones.
Planned Obsolescence. Increased battery consumption = reduced battery life + user hostile repairability = new purchases. I've seen so many iDiots purchase a new iPhone when their battery conks out because the cost of repairs and original battery "doesn't justify it".
The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
> The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint.
Of course the artifacts were a constraint. Whether consciously considered or not, constraints influence design decisions.
> We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
Maybe Frédéric Chopin would have written his etudes and nocturnes for the Roland SC-55 Goblins instrument patch if that choice had been available to him, but it wasn't. What we do know of are the choices he actually made facing the constraints that he actually faced.
Similarly, maybe a GBA music composer would have preferred for the music to be a high fidelity recording of a full piano arrangement if that choice had been available to them. But it wasn't, so they didn't.
We can speculate all we want about what creative choices might have been made if the people behind them were dealt a different hand, but in reality choices don't exist in isolation of constraints, and I think any line of reasoning trying to divorce the two is futile.
The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.
Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.
I guess it's hard to stop my originalist tendencies from boiling over into other topics...
What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place...
Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.
Haha, my first gut reaction to reading your second paragraph was "No, it'd be better to compare it to compositions written for harpsichord and played on piano".
I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.
That may be true, but the sound designers were still making the best of what they had. They could probably imagine how the same composition would sound better.
When you play e.g. Gamecube games in an emulator, do you run them in 480p or do you render at a higher resolution? The former is clearly what the designers were targeting, but I think there’s rarely any benefit to eschewing higher resolutions. It just looks even better.
You say that, but it was quite common to "allow" a bit of aliasing in sampling back when we had very limited equipment, to introduce a bit of "sparkle" into percussive sounds that would otherwise be lost by low sampling rates.
Given its spectral complexity can you even tell if a hihat sample is aliased?
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