What are you talking about? They get plenty of exposure when they start up an OnlyFans on the side to make ends meet! /s

Nah, it’s just the most horny that are also motivated enough to make the mod. There are plenty of others for other games.

Between paid commissions and putting downloads behind affiliate links (later replaced with Patreons), they were also a way for horny teenagers to make a lot of money. Porn and furries (and furry porn) apparently bring out the big spenders.

You know how sometimes you can get the camera to clip through a character model’s head and see how they have a fully modeled mouth and eyes inside? My understanding is that the Cinematic Mod in question did the same thing with one of its Alyx models, just with a fully modeled womb and ovaries and such. It was clearly meant for making porn, but got added to the mod anyway.

Though I only know of the FakeFactory stuff third-hand via hearing other people tell the story, so it’s possible things got exaggerated along the way.

I don’t see FakeFactory on the credits page, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he changed his username after all the mockery he got for fully modeling Alyx’s internal reproductive organs.

If Valve’s Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don’t use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve’s current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we’ve gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It’s amazing what happens when all innovation isn’t black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

It boggles the mind that any language - let alone a systems programming language that most of the world’s infrastructure is built upon - wouldn’t adjust their specification to eliminate undefined behavior wherever possible. And C++'s all seem to be in the worst possible places, too.

Control shares the same universe and is more actiony, from what I’ve heard. It might be worth checking out if you haven’t already.

Google started work on Carbon due to the difficulty of getting the C++ standards committee to accept any real, fundamental changes to the language. If Google, a grandmaster at manipulating standards committees, couldn’t get something passed, I don’t foresee this proposal getting anywhere.

Null safety is orders of magnitude simpler than memory safety. Kotlin is a null safe language by default. Java is infamously not. Anyone who has worked on a mixed-language Kotlin project can tell you how quickly null safety becomes a pain once guarantees break down - and that’s in a language where these issues are flagged instantly and you can “fix” the problem in a couple of characters! Mixed memory safe/unsafe codebases would be a nightmare in comparison.

Also, C++'s ecosystem consists of deeply entrenched libraries with ancient codebases. Safe C++ might be useful in a decade or two if library maintainers could be pushed to make the switch (good luck with that, if it’s half as much of a paradigm shift as Rust), but by then there will probably be multiple competing language features that claim to solve the same problem. It’s the C++ Way™.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

For anyone who likes the idea of CDDA but bounced off its vertical difficulty and complexity curves, there’s also Cataclysm: Bright Nights. While Dark Days Ahead chases realism, BN is a fork that prioritizes fun.

It adds a ton of quality of life tweaks to make basic tasks less annoying, and removes most of the artificial restrictions DDA added to make the game more difficult. It also lacks the pockets system that DDA implemented that splits your inventory into a dozen smaller ones, so managing your inventory is a hundred times easier in Bright Nights.

It’s kind of unbalanced, is missing a bunch of content that DDA has, and is much easier than the base game, but IMO it’s way more fun. And once you’re comfortable with things, you can move on to the base game for a real challenge.

God I love Mindustry, but I feel it was a better game before it added unit factories and became a full-fledged RTS. I enjoyed it more back when it was pure tower defense with supply line logistics.

Right, and they should have fixed them - especially since people literally put together wiki pages documenting every known bug in the game. But all Bethesda did was upgrade the engine a bit (make it 64-bit, add some new graphical effects, implement support for microtransactions) and release the same broken game again and again. The engine upgrades fixed a few crashes, but for some reason Bethesda refuses to patch logic errors in their Papyrus scripts (the code that controls the actual game content) even though those are way easier to fix than engine bugs.

If asked, I’m sure they’d say it was to avoid breaking mod compatibility or something, which is kind of bullshit considering nearly every mod works with the unofficial patches that do what Bethesda refuses to. And they’ve been like this since the very beginning. Their studio is synonymous with bugs.

It’s mind-boggling how they get away with putting such little care into their multi-billion dollar franchises.

Because Bethesda didn’t focus on fixing script bugs in those re-releases, only engine ones. The game logic remains a tangled mess of bugs and the unofficial patches that actually fix things barely needed to change at all to support each new edition.

8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.

If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.

Windows ME was a crapshoot. One of our computers blue screened a few times during the couple months we had it installed; the other couldn’t even run an hour without hard crashing.

Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time Windows crashed. Newer versions are definitely a lot more stable, though suck in different ways.

The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don’t know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn’t strike me as good business sense.

Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.

Could be worse. At least it’s not Microsoft’s support forums:

Hey, I see you’re having problems with <copy-paste key words from OP>. Try the following and see if it fixes your issue.

Open a command prompt and enter ”sfc /scannow".

I hope this helps!

(Reply marked as solution, thread closed.)

It’s a forked up world.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.