The Gronk

Within the bounds of the claim block, not sure about the sleeping bag though, I happened to have the claim block bounds shown at the time.

Quick question: A "buried supplies" mission spawning inside of my base. Is that a bug or a feature? Do you want me to file a bug report? Here's a screenshot of the incident...

My bad, I forgot that public relations aren't an integral part of product development.

As you and I both know the forum rats tend to get more rabid the longer the devs stay away. Why do they get more agitated? Largely because they don't know when, or indeed if, the next interaction will take place. Keen Software House, for all of their flaws, had something good going with "Update Thursday". Of course, being Keen, they tried to post regular game updates at the same time which was a horrendously stupid idea and gave me no end of amusement watching the same bug get fixed and unfixed on a regular basis. Regardless of that, the weekly update thing was good, all it takes is a single sentence from each department about what they're working on, possibly the occassional amusing anectode. Do that once a week on a regular day and it'll help the community feel more included and less like a puppy with separation anxiety. This would likely make your job much easier and slow down the rate of posts being shovelled out of the way.

I thoroughly agree. If only there was a job title for someone who managed social media for the devs, passing messages back and forth in a clear and concise way. Some sort of social media... manager? Unfortunately not, if you're looking for someone too scared to lose their shot at "the big time" to argue back with forum rats then anyone over 30 has likely become too jaded and contrarian to do it, myself more so than others.

I realise you're just following orders but such things are why I no longer work for other people. This is an overflow area for things not considered relevant to the development. It's literally an area set aside for irrelevant discussion. placing or leaving anything in here denotes it as to be avoided by the devs so they don't have to search through crap for questions. Why would a dev come in here? It took three weeks and me causing a stink to get poor fataal to come on and answer the relevant questions*. TFP have needed a dedicated community manager for years, some millenial with a boy band haircut and a pair of permanent finger-guns to pull out questions and stuff that might interest the devs from the maelstrom. I love you Roland but you're a bit too goadable for social media management. *Do you think TFP have a system to determine which mechanics to completely rip out each alpha or do they just pick names out of a hat 🙂

Fair enough, apparently discussions about the state of the community are indeed unworthy of the developers attention. Justify it how you like, I've been lurking for quite some time now and the strict rule system is what killed the vibe.

A straw man argument? Dude, I expected better of you. "Did IQ's just drop suddenly while I was away?" Ripley - Aliens

Human nature I suppose 🙂 Obvious troll is obvious

Every form of social structure built by humans suffers from a single fatal flaw, the people involved. That's not to say we shouldn't try to build something better,

The only game I've got time to play at the moment is coinbase, turns out my score keeps going up so there's that... The problem is that every day or so the discussion is cut short which stifles the development of the conversation unless everyone is pottering back and forth between the dev diary and the dev discussions. What happens if a discussion goes around to relevant again? Does it get shifted back to the dev diary? Is the development of the community during this release cycle not worthy of proper discussion? There are companies who would pay a lot of money to develop a community which the TFP are casually discarding.

Nice guess but wrong. T'is not the new system that stifles me but the new sprog. Check my post count, it went downhill swiftly after November 2020. Do what you like with your own forum, I'm just pointing out that what was once a vibrant communty now feels like a sterile Q&A session.

You know half the staff are European right? I don't know about you but I've been a lot more productive since the only thing I can do is sit behind a computer and piddle about with code.

This has completely obliterated the vibe in here. The old system was additive, people would add to the discussion which occassionally prompted devs to add to the discussion which in turn prompted the people to add, and so on... The current system is subtractive. Anything not within a very limited set of parameters is removed, this leads to less discussion among the people which in turn leads to less interaction from the devs which, in turn, leads to less discussion from the people, and so on... To put it simply. We are only supposed to post as a direct response to a dev. Are we just waiting for a dev to blurt out random facts? How do the people encourage interaction from the devs?

Forewords: Preface to a book.

It's an utter PITA to use, being bleeding-edge tech with the associated missing features and scant/outdated documentation, but you may want to see if the DOTS system will help with this. If you can get it working it certainly does make thiings smoother.

I've got to agree with Captain Obvious on this one. You're going to be making a buttload of heads to get any sense of variation. You could add the code for simple bone/vertex manipulation but then aren't you reinventing the wheel? Would it not be better to modify UMA to your own needs instead of trying replicate large parts of the functionality from scratch?

Damn, and all I wanted was an accurate avatar. 😕

I remember those days. I used to pack enough resources to build a mini-fort and lay safe-ish waypoints throughout the city as I probed further in. I do miss that mechanic, a brutal slog through zombie-infested streets. That said, I think I hit peak mechanic preference with the variable zombie speed setting. You can pretty much set it to "traditional Romero" without much hassle or fuss.

Everyone went into lockdown when the virus hit... Joking aside, that's a very good point, the zombies would likely leave the buildings when they hear a noise outside. Unfortunately, I think the answer is that the last time we had zombies in the street it was too hard on system resources. Too many zombies, not enough computer.

Hopefully the new hair system will start with "bald" as a base and build from there. Not everyone is unfortunate enough to have a full head of hair as they get older.

🙂 "George, you can type this @%$#, but you sure has hell can't say it." Harrison Ford on the set of Star Wars

magnum noun mag·num | \ ˈmag-nəm \ Definition of magnum : firearm capable of shooting moustaches. Popular in the 1970's

( face + palm ) + ( head + desk ) The second half was the joke. Minecraft doesn't have those kind of water effects at all. It's likely a cleverly hidden blender render.

Watch it again, with your eyes open this time. 🙂