I gave it an image of my crappy art and asked what steps I could take to make it look better. It gave me specific advice like varying the line widths and how to use this on specific parts of the character. It also pointed out that the shading in my piece was inconsistent and did not reflect the 3d form I was representing and again gave me specific fixes I could implement. I asked for it to give me an updated version of the piece with all of its advice implemented and it did so. I was pretty shocked at all of this.
I'm honestly surprised that VR hasn't been a bigger impact on board games. Besides the obvious fact that you can more easily get people together, software is great at handling the non-gameplay related "administration" that takes time away from the fun. Things that come to mind: shuffling decks, misdeals, misunderstood rule-sets (I'm looking at you D&D 3.5).
I guess the downside is also pretty big: no face-to-face communication - which itself can be a detriment to gameplay in games like Poker or PvPvE games like Dead of Winter. Also the tactile-ness of board games is such a nice escape from everything being digitized these days.
It's limited by how many people have VR rigs in the first place, and by the other things people might do instead if they've already decided they're going to play a multiplayer game on a computer or console, that aren't virtual board games.
I'd rather hop into Minecraft or whatever with some friends, if that's what I'm doing, than card or board game simulator. I'd guess that's a common sentiment.
Further, I'd rather play some very plain poker game (like the old Windows card games) with voice chat on than try to do some VR thing. Most of the benefits, and doesn't monopolize your attention. But that part may just be me.
I got the same "old, weird internet" vibe that you did. Back in the 90's there seemed to be more moonshot ideas like VRML and The Palace Chat - things that were maybe a little silly and geeky but at least pointed the way to something that could eventually become more useful and developed.
I wonder how many great websites we lost with the death of Flash.
Off the top of my head, I remember visiting the website for the movie Donnie Darko back when the film was originally released and being blown away at the strangeness and creativity of it.
> If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result.
Weird, I'm having the opposite experience with stackoverflow pages. Often I get pages from random websites that copy and paste stackoverflow content with some jammed-in SEO ABOVE the actual stackoverflow results.
Great timing! Just today I did a Google search in an attempt to figure out why my skin surrounding some recent scar tissue had a yellow discoloration. Didn't find my answer until the third page!
Currently working in the world of TypeScript/Node/JavaScript there's so much stuff I miss from .NET.
* Awesome standard library - very little need to install packages from randos on the internet
* LINQ makes performing complicated work with collections simple and readable
* Great async model for work that needs to be done in parallel or scheduled
Was also impressed at how much stuff they managed to add to it over the years:
* Generics
* Now runs just about anywhere: Windows/Linux/macOS/mobile
* Null reference types largely gets rid of the endless 'Object not set to instance of ...' errors
* Now supports some form of immutable data types (records)
Frankly most of the complaints I'm reading about here come from the companies that choose to use the technology rather than the tech itself.
I saw The Hobbit in a theater playing at 60fps in 3D and several people in the theater laughed at points in the film that were not supposed to be funny just because how odd certain things looked. Although I personally enjoyed the unique presentation it kind of made me realize that 60fps would never take off.
I feel like these points land harder when talking about animation rather than live action films.
Consider that when Disney made Bambi 2 in the 2000s, they came to the realization that their animators did not have the skill required to animate deer antlers and then basically had their hand forced into using CGI. In the 1930s this was not a problem: the film contains not just hand-animated antlers but beautifully painted backgrounds, an incredible score and some of the most expressive character animation ever produced.
It hardly seems to be a stretch to call animation done during Disney's golden age objectively better than what is being done today.
I don't believe there are not artists today who could animate deer antlers or paint beautiful backgrounds. Disney did not want to pay for them or wait for the time it would take to animate a film by hand.
Bambi lost $200k USD (as a result of being released during WW2) in 1942 when it released[0], the equivalent of ~$3.4 Million USD today, so I'm sure they were cutting necessary costs. It only recouped the losses with subsequent re-releases, which had the benefit of access to the European market.
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