Tencent already has Larian and they did a great job with BG3 so what’s your issue?
As long as they don’t try to turn it into a microtransaction hell like only being able to play the classes you bought in their store, it’s going to be no different except Tencent has a ton of money for funding.
Lol don’t call it ☼Masterful☼ till it works! I could be very mistaken about lava flows here though I hope to post my updates to lemmy so we can all see how it goes together.
My inspiration was, in a roundabout way,: how to find a FUN way to dispose of kings who keep making insane crafting requests like weapons made out of soap. I envisioned a room suspended over a lava tube with a hanging pillar holding it up and drawbridges providing access. If the king got silly I could pop the pillar and drop his whole royal suite into the tube.
And of course I had to keep his subjects near him so I built the fort into the volcano side but I was annoyed about how irregular the floor size and mineral patterns were. I had just learned about obsidian casting in industrial quantities (the reason for the initial volcano embark) so as I was playing the thought kept coming back: 'Well, obsidian is a really valuable mineral when carved, and obsidian mechanisms are an amazing trade good, so… what if I made a whole fort out of obsidian?
So I tried that with that existing fort, not a fancy fort with a lava tube, more like just a giant cube of solid obsidian cast off to the side from the volcano.
It worked magnificently! The rooms were all lavish with just bare stones engraved, and I had unlimited material for stonework and mechanisms.
Smiling in satisfaction I said “This is cool… but it could be cooler.”
And that’s when I came up with my ‘volcano base with a live active lava tube in the middle’.
The original took about three months of damn near every moment I wasn’t working or sleeping, hopefully my experience since then will cut that time down a bit.
I’m really excited to see how this goes, and can’t wait to share my updates.
Fun Fact: If you dig out each floor and drop them all at once, the game registers the internal hollowed out tube as being ‘outside’, meaning even after you cast the obsidian tower, all internal areas are considered in sunlight, so your dwarves never get sunlight sickness when defending raids and you can grow aboveground crops in the safety of your mountain home.
Agreed, all of the ‘drama’ surrounding this possible copyright case is largely created by youtubers and tiktokers for views.
That said, Nintendo WILL probably sue but as a formality to protect their brand, and will gracefully pay Pocket Pair’s legal fees as a cost of business once the court rules in Pocket Pair’s favor to keep their copyrights from lapsing to generic use. It’s not uncommon.
Not doing that is how Bayer lost the copyright for ‘Asprin’ in the U.S.
Now if a ton of people refer to Pals as Pokemon the same way people refer to all tissues as Kleenex, THEN they might legitimately run the risk of losing their copyright and will pursue aggressively but I don’t see that happening.
There is no legal issue, Nintendo is suing as a formality to protect their existing copyrights. They’ll be ruled against and shrug their shoulders and pay Pocket Pair’s legal fees because that is a much better business decision than risking losing their copyright to their existing creatures.
If they don’t aggressively protect their copyright, the JCO might just rule that they have become generic and common use like how Bayer lost the trademarked name ‘Asprin’ in the U.S. when it was considered common use and Bayer did not pursue it aggressively.
But that doesn’t make good youtube poop or memes so you probably think this is some kind of hotly contested hullabaloo because of where you are getting your info from.
Oh man, you may regret that work order. Incoming cliff face of (hopefully) -Well-Crafted- engravings:
So I’m redoing an old project where I turned a volcano into an obsidian caster and casted a 20z level solid obsidian fortress with the lava tube at the center. Reddit ate the original post and I can’t find the original files anywhere.
My original was chef’s kiss perfect embark, 3 biomes haunted forest, mirthful grass, and wild forest, a brook running right by the volcano. This time wasn’t so lucky, it’s just a Mirthful forest but the need for a Haunted biome was covered by the fact that I am in range of a Tower (more later). This embark also has Humans, Elves, and Goblins as neighbors, my original was a super evil world where only goblins and kobolds existed, so I guess that’s an upgrade.
My first task was to strip the volcano of trees and bushes, and setup my temporary fort where everyone will live til the casting is complete, and underneath that began digging out my water reservoir. The process is ridiculously water intensive and brook tiles refill so slowly that I’m going to need to literally just let it run while I sleep so the reservoir refills.
My next steps (tomorrow night) is to complete the reservoir and start filling it while I build a giant 4 lane water pump stack and build a huge faucet emptying in the middle of the lava tube. This will turn the middle blocks to obsidian and drop them down to the destructive surface at the bottom of the magma tube, draining it. I have to be careful on this, too much water will plug the tube and that is a MAJOR pain to clean out. Once I’ve drained the lava tube down below the level of the 1st cavern, I will build 2 double magma pumpstack and 2 double water pumpstack columns running up the middle of the fort.
The idea is to provide both RED HOT MAGMA and water to every floor without taking up the main floorspace.
Once that is complete, with the lava tube still drained, I will dig out the mountain leaving pillars at every level and hollow out belowground the radius of my fort down to 1 Z above cavern layer 1 and that will be the first floor of my obsidian casting.
As I’ve (hopefully) improved my casting process, my previous limited size (the limiting factor was that drawbridges are max 10x10 and need at least 1 anchor) of about 18x18 walls around a 38x38 lava tube should no longer be an issue and I BELIEVE that with my new style of caster that I can make arbitrarily large obsidian slabs.
My original caster had 2 levels of drawbridges surrounding the lava tube, the bottom filled with lava spilling out from the Z level of the volcano top (volcanoes in DF are weird), and the top drawbridge structure held water pumped up from a reservoir below.
Each level looked like the top of a crenelated tower, I don’t have the pics anymore so it’s hard to explain. It was cool but very very small.
My new caster is the above mockup, delivering 4x lava and water stacks straight into the casting area and allowed to spread out, unlike my original model which was filled then dropped all at once. This is how I am hoping to make larger slabs as the water pours out over a sea of 5-6 high lava at the casting floor. It may not work, this is experimental and I may have to go in after each cast and manually fill in a few gaps but the benefit of making very large slabs is worth the extra annoyance.
Once I’ve casted enough levels to about 20z above ground, I disassemble the mould used to hold in the lava and start digging my lava moat. In my original version the moat just drained off the map above 3z deep, and was a risk for lava-safe intruders so now it’s all going to be recycled through the pumpstack system leaving just enough lava in the moat to deal with sieges.
When it is all said and done, this fort should be a lava defended obsidian monolith where every surface is carved with the story of my people. It will be my greatest work to date and I can’t wait to see what I learn building it.
The Need for Necromancers
It is critical to my fort to have a pit of undead butchered animal parts for my archers to practice on, and in my original fort the animation force was the part of my fort in the Haunted biome, and it worked so much better than trying to convince militadwarfs to train archery. Nowadays we have necromancers, so I plan on capturing a necro from a raid and walling him in to a little booth where I can lift a lever and let him see the corpse target pile, reanimate them, then get shuttered again till my crossbowdwarfs finish the random pile of torsos and intestines wobbling about.
without browsers, I don’t think there would be a need for most of that, as there would be no need to create the visually compelling but ultimately ridiculously overmoduled live documents.
Esports would still exist just like normal sports existed before the internet. Technically esports predates the world wide web as coin op competitions already existed and sometimes even made it into international news.
Again streaming sites would still exist as mentioned due to the high serving costs, and esports could easily be part of their lineup.
How would we be viewing simple stuffs like blogs then?
There is still place for documents on the internet without the WWW. back in the BBS days, we’d download text file magazines to read offline (lol sometimes having to save days and days of download credits just for a TEXT file! Man dialup was crazy. That said, without having to have one (kinda) standardized way to view documents those file formats would evolve beyond just text into something more like OpenOffice document formatting, again without the capitalism-driven effort to make snazzy, eyecatching but ultimately useless dynamically served document formats.
Honestly I think the dynamically served aspect of modern WWW documents is such a ridiculous waste of resources and bandwidth that not having it may just as well constitute a technical advancement over what we have today.
Well, back in the day you’d have a series of different services, usenet, irc, email, and for articles (at the time usually scholarly articles) you could use Gopher or follow certain usenet groups to find FTP sites hosting the docs.
So if we didn’t have a unified web browser, and those technologies advanced at the pace of other similar services, here is how I see it:
Most services would be accessed by discrete apps, one for your email, one for your chat, one for your remote and local documents.
We wouldn’t see the proliferation of siloed services, platforms like Facebook that offer all of these services but only within their subscribers. They just simply wouldn’t be able to compete with the established services or add nuance or extra value.
Discord would also likely have come into existence a lot earlier and unified some of those services, but again if they chose to silo it as they are doing now, they wouldn’t gain market dominance over already existing wide communities.
Without the profit incentive, existing services have no reason to tie their users to their platform or inhibit cross platform interactions.
Streaming services would still come into existence and fragment and silo like they are now, but that’s only because of the cost of providing reliable HD video content isn’t easily dispersed across unsiloed userbases.
Web advertisements would be non-existant but you’d still get spots in podcasts and videos.
Frankly I think it would be a better internet than what we have now.
iPhones are fashion accessories before anything else.
Samsung for some fuckdamn reason just copycats everything Apple does.
The curved glass was a stupid, expensive, and failure prone attempt at capturing the fashion accessory market.
All it did was piss off eight years of customers.
It really is amazing how companies with ridiculous amounts of money for research and product testing and they hang on to an abject failure like this for so long.
It was an easy hydra but you have no idea it is the first time the cutscene starts, felt very dark-soulsey there confronting you at low levels with a boss that fills the screen.
31·8 months ago
2·8 months ago
WoTC might not sell its DND IP but Hasbro could easily sell the entirety of WoTC to Tencent if they wanted to.