Definitely a perfect timing situation, though with substantial risk. Considering the time the game was in development, an alternative could have showed up in the market.
However, I believe Stardew Valley’s appeal wasn’t simply of fulfilling a void in the market. It is great because there is genuine passion for the subject in the execution, and the content in the game is truly compelling for a wide audience. An amazing story.
This seems like a breach of publishing terms / loss of confidence on Colossal Order. They released CSII in late 2013 clearly unfinished and unoptimized, delayed paid DLC expansion and content for nearly 2 years and there seems to be no end in sight for the performance problems. But the key part is that the announced console ports never materialized, leaving a large addressable market on the table. That Colossal Order may have captured lighting in a bottle with the first title when there was a gap in the market after the demise of SimCity, but looks like the second time around they were overambitious and may have put the franchise in a position to be sunsetted.
The only solution for that - all caveats and compromises considered - was paving over Windows with Linux. I tried to be patient. Yet Microsoft is hellbent on justifying their AI investments to shareholders by sacrificing their user base at the altar of the invasive LLM. I’m out.
I wonder if Apple’s doomed car project distracted them from creating a viable CarPlay strategy with OEMs. CarPlay Ultra looked like the salvageable part of that failure and it was too late then.
MSFS 2024 already does photogrammetry from satellite photos. However, it builds triangle geometry much like is done from aerial photography, because gaussian splats are not suitable for games; you can't build collision geometry from a gaussian splat for example.
I am disappointed by this development, as the precedent for this business model is out there for anyone to see. But I have little to add about that
What I do hope to see is more talent and investment contributed to OSS tools. It would really benefit everyone if GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and others received the Blender treatment.
I was seriously irritated with Windows 11 for the past few months. If my PC went to sleep, it would wake up and freeze at the logon screen. The constant updates that would reset some preferences - and worse, reinstall CoPilot and OneDrive - pushed me over. I went and installed Bazzite on the PC I built early this year with a Nvidia RTX 5080, somewhat skeptical that it would work well despite my extremely positive experience with the Steam Deck. The result is outstanding.
Frank himself, you can get a clear picture of the ecosystem as outlined here by the end of Children of Dune.
One (possible) omission here - the sand trout traps water underground by linking and forming dams around water pockets - that’s the cause of Arrakis’ ultra arid environment, but maybe it’s also the source of nutrition?
Anyway, it is a bit silly indeed but in the novel’s context it feels grounded.
Interesting to see it crop up here. I met Ms. Covert when she released the book and have a signed copy around here somewhere. It remains relevant as ever, and has value well beyond UX practices. It’s a short read too, I recommend it.
I suspect this is happening due to the nano-banana image model becoming available to the general public. As a designer/artist, the generative image models’ impact on my field has been disastrous and depressing. For the average person, it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever seen.
I can only imagine it's worse. Exact precision is not as important and tiny mistakes are much more acceptable in most images. And then modifying the image afterward to fix mistakes is simpler than fixing code.
However, I believe Stardew Valley’s appeal wasn’t simply of fulfilling a void in the market. It is great because there is genuine passion for the subject in the execution, and the content in the game is truly compelling for a wide audience. An amazing story.
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