• 0 Posts
  • 751 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle


  • They asked for physical pain, so psychosomatic likely doesn’t count. Not that they’re uninteresting topics or anything…

    I used to have similar “pain” from trying to imagine the scale of things. Like when I was a young teen, I’d try to literally visualize what a mile of terrain looked like, or the insanely small scale of molecules, and suddenly I’d lose reference to what ‘normal’ scale was, and it’d freak me out completely when it felt like the room I was in was both miniscule and insanely vast.

    Not really pain, but extreme discomfort that you cannot make go away. There’s a term for losing ones’ frame of reference for scale, but it escapes me at the moment. Luckily, I got better and better at visualizing things and vast scales stopped triggering what ever that was. Some people have it as a general disability and ohhh boy do I not envy them!







  • No, it crops up plenty often when many of the big enemies who actually trigger the fight progression can soak up an entire set of an ammo type without dying.

    Sure, there was usually plenty of options to eventually get back to slaying, but the point is you had to play a meta game of managing your ammo and weapons when by the game’s lore itself, the doom slayer is supposed to be a raging unstoppable beast.

    It’s not about things literally becoming impossible, but the absolute interruption to “ripping and tearing” if you had even a momentary lapse of playing the meta game.



  • The entire reason the particles can come in to existance is because the black hole curves spacetime enough to ‘eat’ one of the pair. It only exists because of the black hole. The particle leaving the black hole takes energy away because that area of spacetime now has less energy in it, meaning the black hole shrinks. The black hole isn’t magically adding energy to the space around it in order to create these pairs.

    If you throw a ball away from you, yes you feel the force, but now you’ve sent a bunch of energy away from yourself in the ball. In effect, the black hole is ‘throwing’ particles away from itself by the simple act of eating part of the spawned particles.

    I’ve explained it poorly, but PBS Spacetime has several great episodes on the specific phenominon.


  • The evaporation increases because spacetime is bent more rapidly by smaller black holes than big ones. It’s the same reason you can enter a supermassive black hole without being spaghettified, because the curvature never reaches a point where there’s a huge difference between your feet and head, sort of thing.

    That curvature drives the evaporation rate, because the particles flying off are virtual particles whos partner fell in to the black hole with it flying outward. That happens far less often when the curvature is so low that any given point around the black hole is almost flat spacetime.


  • IMO, it was more about how it forced you to focus on other elements than demon slaying. Especially with how some enemies are only really vulnerable to one weapon. So, if you even had a momentary lapse of planning, it was a, “shit! where’s the nearest scrub mob?!” when you ran out of certain ammo, which just completely pops the flow of combat.

    It wasn’t so bad later on when you had enough weapons to cycle through, but early on when on Nightmare or worse, enemies just soaked up too much damage for how tiny the ammo capacity was. It was a game of inventory management, not demon slaying.


  • Fully agreed. I HATED the game while going through on Nightmare, at least until I got all of the weapons so then I finally had enough freaking ammo. They should’ve left the weakpoint stuff as the motive for switching weapons, not literally fucking the player over with low ammo. I started enjoying it by the end when I could actually fully engage with how it was designed, but they royally failed to make that design work out for how the game progresses from the beginning.


  • Doom: The Dark Ages.

    Yes, it’s a pretty game. Sure, they hit their design goals, but it’s the design itself that I hate. It’s geared entirely towards close combat to the point where half the weapons are redundant or otherwise stupidly useless compared to others. It’s geared towards close combat to the point that the player’s projectiles disappear after a certain distance, while the enemies’ shots can travel much further. Sure, there’s plenty of ‘nice’ things they added to make it easy to churn around a bunch of groups of enemies up close, but it’s insanely dumb how it’s 100% of the game design. Especially because many of the maps are trying to show off large vistas and open areas, where it becomes VERY obvious that the player’s shots disappear while you’re being pelted by enemy fire just fine.

    The extra game modes of flying and being in the mech are neat in concept, but so insanely underbaked they feel more like a waste of time task to push through than a cool extra part of the game to enjoy. They’re not mixed in with the on foot parts well at all and feel more like basic transitionary moments they attempted to add some gameplay to.

    The attention to detail sucks, especially in the UI. A couple easy points demonstrate it: The most obvious is how their UI triggers work. You can click a button, and it plays the activate sound, but it’s not activating if you click it before the mouseover/highlight animation is done. In a similar vein, most affirmative interactions are a stupid wait for it long-press while going back to the mian menu from between levels is as simple as an escape key press. A purposefully slow forward with an instant back is just… pointlessly dumb. In a similar vein, while the game is showing you all the crap you did and found in the level, your only options are to sit there and get annoyed with the obnoxious, slow, and loud tallying of everything, or skip ahead to other pages and go back. Escape and space don’t skip or do anything there. Basically, there seems to only be one poorly thought out path to get to anywhere in the UI, with no convenient or standard alternatives implemented: Half baked.

    The story and character designs were made by edgy teenagers. It’s infinitely worse than Doom Eternal or 2016. Old Ones are C’thulu ripoffs, most of the styling of Hell/etc are now just generic scifi with a bit more red, and many of the new designs are somehow more generic ripoffs of older doom. They pull inspiration from tons of other spooky things instead of rolling with the Hell themes or other established lore. So much of the added lore is just ripoffs of greek mythology and other things, too, like a boat to ferry souls and a bunch of other crap I don’t care to remember because it’s just not memorable, intersting, nor do they fit the usual themes of Doom.

    In a similar vein, so much of the story is lackluster and uninspired. There is some interesting sounding writing hidden in the lore book, like why the slayer’s mount is half mech, but it’s simply stated in the lore instead of being a potentially cool way to introduce the mount or other things. So much of the game is ONE game loop (close combat) with few dynamic options and a bunch of extra half-baked fluff tacked on.

    It’s frustratingly narrow sighted and underbaked to deserve to follow Eternal or 2016. It feels like it’s in some parallel universe from the other games, even from 2016 and Eternal.

    I want to play the DOOM Slayer rampaging through a Hell inspired by 90’s metal, not some parallel universe written by edgy teenagers where he’s some glorified Master Chief ripoff with anger issues for a personality who’s just following orders.





  • Yes and no. You can push clocks and power higher on liquid, but the recent generations of CPU and GPU automatically push their own clocks up when there’s heat/power headroom. It’s a byproduct of both Moore’s Law dying and low power management systems becoming more and more advanced. All of the big players have introduced systems that automatically go in the other direction than low power by now.

    So, generally speaking these days, you have to go pretty extreme to get significant performance gains over air (especially with heat pipes/chambers making air waaaay better than it used to be). Liquid can still generally be quieter, though. can