Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Mongrel]

Meanwhile, I continue my 25-year crime spree of using the arrow keys where everyone else uses WASD... which I learned from playing Doom originally.

I tried to switch over when I was big into Unreal Tournament, but I could never get it to stick, so I gave up and just rolled with it thereafter.

[Thad]

Was it Marathon that invented the WASD/mouselook control scheme that everyone takes for granted now? I think it was.

I do remember playing Marathon 2 in the tech lab in high school; most people made fun of the guys who set it to the mouselook control scheme instead of using the numpad (I believe numpad was the default but WASD/mouselook was a quick toggle).

[Mongrel]

Numpad looking, now THAT'S a nightmare.

[nosimpleway]

Meanwhile, I continue my 25-year crime spree of using the arrow keys where everyone else uses WASD... which I learned from playing Doom originally.

If a game has a simple enough control scheme, and I suppose Doom does, I can squeak by. But I can't do WASD movement and if I also have to remap the hotkeys on Q E R Tab F G Z X C and the number row, eh, I just don't play that game.

[Mongrel]

Meanwhile, I continue my 25-year crime spree of using the arrow keys where everyone else uses WASD... which I learned from playing Doom originally.

If a game has a simple enough control scheme, and I suppose Doom does, I can squeak by. But I can't do WASD movement and if I also have to remap the hotkeys on Q E R Tab F G Z X C and the number row, eh, I just don't play that game.

I've been doing it so long I have a lot of defaults. Num 0 tends to be reload, with Num 1 and Num 4 for various other functions. (Alternately the numpad sometimes takes the place of 1-9 for games with inventory slots like that or whatever). Right Ctrl and Right shift see a fair amount of use (Ctrl is frequently crouch if that function exists), as do Del, End, and PgDn.

But mainly things got easier for modern games once I started using mice with a couple extra buttons (not those ridiculous ones with a damn keyboard's worth of extra buttons though).

The way I look at it, once things get too far past that, a game has too many damn buttons. Unless it's just something like Skyrim where you pretty much use the entire keyboard for function hotkeys, but most of those are just menu shortcuts or toggles and not things you use for active real-time play.

The only game I can ever recall thinking "This is way too fucking many active-function keys" was one of the Far Cry series (only one I tried... #2, possibly). There was a key for ziplining, a key for ski poles, like every damn bit of niche gear had its own key. It was absurd.

[Lottel]

I've been checking Blaseball way too much and cheering with friends over discord.

It's a fantasy baseball site with fake, computer generated teams and players. They have secret hidden stats such as "moxie" and "martyrdom" which may or may not affect the games. Each season is 99 games or 1 week and you can vote for new rules at the end of each season. You bet imaginary coins on the outcomes of the matches, which are essentially coinflips currently, but are slowly building better stats and outcomes for each team.

I keep winning coins so I can buy votes so I can vote for Peanuts! I don't think it does anything but peanuts! How can I not vote for the item without the descriptor?

[Lottel]

There's a solar eclipse today and the umpire is incinerating bad pitchers.

[Blossom]

claws up

[beatbandito]

Anyone here have interest in Fall Guys?

I realized that Transformice was basically the only online experience I've kept going back to between other games, so I might as well give this very similar experience a try either way. But it seems like it would be fun to try and get a group together if there were enough of us playing.

[Thad]

Got to play some Mario Kart 8 online with my nephew last night and I don't know the last time I've had that much fun.

The kid got gud. My wife kept saying "You should let him win sometimes" and by halfway through the first race I'm like "Honey, I don't have to let him win; he's as good as I am." (At the end of 8 races -- 4 without bots, and then 4 with -- I managed to beat his overall score by 1 point. Which was pretty much entirely down to a lucky red shell drop right before the end of the last race.)

Getting better at Mario Kart is, I suppose, a pretty silly lens to view pride in a kid growing up through, but obviously it's not really about Mario Kart.

(Sharkey was talking about his nephew the other day. I played CoH with him once, like probably back in '04 or '05. I died and he dragged me to safety to revive me. I think Sharkey went through much the same "my nephew is getting good at video games!" pride I'm experiencing now.)

[Yoji]

Kiddo 01 has become pretty adequate at Breath of the Wild during summer quarantine. Ate me out of house and home, but he can beat lynels and even got Ganon once. And now that I think of it, Kiddo 02 is about the age her brother was when he first tried Mario Kart 8 with the helper options turned on.

[Thad]

The next time we played there was no barely winning by one point; he soundly walloped me. I won one race out of eight. I noticed I do better on the retro courses, which isn't surprising; he's got more practice on the new courses but I have more practice on the old ones. (I had MK8 on Wii U, DLC and all, but still haven't played it as much as he has.)

[Mongrel]

It's sort of eerie to be playing Tanks right now. See, Wargaming is a Belorussian company. And it it's their 10th anniversary. So the garage has the usual anniversary setup... of a big outdoor party in central Minsk. Meanwhile they can't actually LAUNCH the actual anniversary update because the internet's been all but shut off for the whole country.

On top of that I'm playing on the Hong Kong server, where the connection is terrible for *ahem* other - yet similar - reasons.

[Niku]

hades is out of early access, and is really good

if you haven't seen it or checked it out, it's a top down action roguelite where you run around and beat up all the monsters in a room, and then pick which bonus you want from the next room from the ones on offer, and then rinse and repeat as you try to climb out of hell and say SCREW YOU, DAD (who is the dad of hell).

highlights are, absolutely unsurprisingly from supergiant, the writing (there is tons of unique dialogue, usually one or two bits per character every time you die and start a run again, and the story gradually unfolds the more you get to know the various folks) and combat. the mechanics unfold like a delicious onion; you start with a few weapons, and over time end up with six, each of which has different unlockable playstyles and upgrades, and which can all play even more differently thanks to branching buffs and upgrades during each run. i got my first win 25-30 runs in thanks to a boon that made my basic attacks add Doom (basically a countdown bomb, one on an enemy at a time, that explodes after a few seconds at which point you can apply another one) while my special attack would immediately proc Doom with no countdown .. and my special attack was a spinning top of death that literally could just sit on top of an enemy, so my basic attacks were doing like 800% damage thanks to constant Doomsplosions. in other words: roguelike emergent brokenness good.

the mechanics feed the story and the story feeds the mechanics in a really compelling way, and the meta layer seems preeeetty deep if you want to sink a ton of time into it. definite recommend; out now on pc and switch ! !

[Mongrel]

Say, did any of you ever play Path of Exile? And if so, do you think you might ever play it again?

Nice to play with some friendly faces, but even if you don't ever want to touch it again (it, uh, has it's faults), I still have a question.

[Yoji]

I've got a couple Minecraft questions and I'm too afraid to ask Reddit:

- Any legit way to obtain sugar cane in an all-ocean world? I need to make books and I'm trying to stay more honest than I've been. I don't think this world type is generating islands, but I did meet exactly one wandering trader

- What's the situation with world editing apps? If I can get one working, I'd like to fix some mistakes, like making an all-ocean world with no islands

[atog]

I've got a couple Minecraft questions and I'm too afraid to ask Reddit:

- Any legit way to obtain sugar cane in an all-ocean world? I need to make books and I'm trying to stay more honest than I've been. I don't think this world type is generating islands, but I did meet exactly one wandering trader

- What's the situation with world editing apps? If I can get one working, I'd like to fix some mistakes, like making an all-ocean world with no islands

Hey idk much about wandering traders, but sadly I've never seen one trying to sell sugar canes.

As for world editing, you can go about it 3 ways:

--Terrain generators. You run these as third-party apps to tell Minecraft to create and populate a world with whatever terrain and geography you want. You do this as you're creating the world fresh. Running the same app targeting a preexisting map might fuck it up. It might overwrite your existing base, or corrupt the map folders. Examples: WorldPainter, Worldmachine.

So if you wanted a mostly-waterworld with a few sparse islands, you can draw them directly in a blank heightmap on WorldPainter and then import the heightmap into minecraft, load it up like an actual world, and Minecraft will naturally populate your contours with cows, sheep, sugar canes, sea grass, etc. The only big downside is when you reach the edges of your WorldPainted heightmap (in blocks), the native Minecraft terrain gen kicks in and you get big abrupt walls and chunk border issues that are really fugly and dangerous.

--World Edit: you run this as an add-on to an existing copy of Minecraft Server (java only as far as I know). This and other similar plugins let you assign special functions to ordinary tools. When you use these tools on or near actual blocks in your world, they generate or remove blocks, change blocks to other blocks, basically act as paintbrushes and erasers and whatnot in voxel space.

There's also a huge slate of text commands that let you change your surroundings and generally centre on your character. For example you can generate a 20-block radius hollow sphere of obsidian around yourself, or assign a paintbrush function to a wooden hoe and use it to daub grassy islands across shallow parts of the sea. It does not actually generate flowers, plants, or canes in the usual places one might find them so you'd have to go into creative to do this for yourself. (Or use the replacement tool, assign it to something mundane like a wooden shovel, then use a text command to make everything you right-click with the shovel turn into a growing sugarcane segment but this is probably more work.)

You can use this at any stage in your world exploration. There's a singleplayer mod version you install in your mods folder.

--Terrain Control and other active biome-customization plugins. This is designed to be used with Minecraft Server (Java) and actively customizes every block of every biome as you want it to appear. Unlike worldpainter, you can travel 200,000 blocks from spawn and Minecraft will still be generating custom biomes as instructed, because it's doing so on the fly.

Because of its on-the-fly work, it can cause a lot of lag and frame stutter. Also, if you install and use this plugin after playing in a world for a while, you'll get the abrupt "chunk border" problem between the default terrain and the custom ones. Lastly, I am not aware of any biome/terrain mods or server plugins that are currently being updated; TC itself stopped getting updates with 1.11 Java.

Frankly in your shoes I would a) start a new world with worldpainter and a minimal number of islands (USGS or NASA maps heightmap for say, the Marshall Islands) or, if you're already well established, just jank yourself a single piece of sugar cane in creative.

[mharr]

The tools available vary greatly depending on the version of Minecraft, the most current world management tool I'm aware of is https://github.com/Querz/mcaselector which can selectively import, export or regenerate huge regions based on useful metrics like player activity heatmaps.

Your simplest brute force solution is to find a seed for a more playable ocean world, delete every unwanted chunk of your current busted world, change the seed and relaunch. There will be mismatched terrain at the border, but it'll be underwater so who cares.

[Yoji]

Complicating this further is how I've actually really enjoyed this map. I guess I've played too many vanilla terrestrial maps and this one posed some interesting challenges. Like, I accidentally picked an option that generated no islands, so I've basically had to build up my own from the highest underwater hills I could find. And I've actually had to seek out dirt for making farm land and having something other to eat than fish.

I'm pretty close to just giving myself a piece of sugar cane via Creative. I've already fudged things a bit; I gave myself a single sapling and grass block at the start, figuring it'd be a pretty short and miserable game without food or wood for tools. And I've already encountered exactly one wandering trader, so it's conceivable that I could've gotten some sugar fair and square. I just need some rules or this could go completely sideways from laziness.

If there was a way to just change the default biome type, I'd consider that too. I know there'd be the chunk border problem, but it might not be too bad if I stick to other ocean biomes or find some way to ease into them. Or hell, maybe just travel through the Nether and generate new chunks way outside my tiny existing area.

[atog]

It's extremely unlikely, but possible, to find a cavern under the ocean floor that has a water pool in it (not a flowing source block) and sand, gravel, or dirt edging the pool, and a sugar cane naturally generated on that.

Very, very unlikely. But definitely statistically nonzero.

You could use a tool to scan an entire map, or region folder, for the presence of any sugar cane blocks. It would detect any, even invisible ones underground (you could do this yourself in spectator mode, but imagine having to scan a 512 x 512 block area under the seafloor looking for a telltale clump of green stalks.) Cartograph-G used to do this for mapmakers, but that tool hasn't been updated recently and there may be newer ones.

In all honesty you've learned an interesting lesson. Perhaps double check the drop tables for wandering traders to make sure there's no chance you could meet one who would sell you some canes. Then conjure yourself some sugar canes, not a huge amount but enough so that you can start a farm. You're already cheating, but giving yourself just one piece just wastes more time getting the damn thing to grow.