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Zed A. Shaw, Writer

Follow @lzsthw

1 Jun, 15 tweets, 4 min read

I've been playing different Ark islands to see what I like, but I still can't figure out why people like this game. I get it, you have dinos and it's got a lot to it, but it's incredibly unbalanced almost to the point of being unplayable without excessive cheats. For example:

In playthrough on Aberration I had a Basilisk (ark.fandom.com/wiki/Basilisk) find my base in the *beginner easiest zone* and camp out there. To kill one you need to be about level 100 and have another creature called a Rock Drake (ark.fandom.com/wiki/Rock_Drake) plus Hazmat gear.

I was a little level 20 newbie who had only built a base and tamed one dino, so what the hell kind of game has the most powerful creature in the game killing starting players? I ended up having to use god mode to kill the thing and it still took about 20 minutes at my level.

Then I tried the Island and thought I was doing really well. Level 59 character with a Level 77 Raptor tamed, full Chitin Armor, and the best metal weapons I could craft. I went down a beach and 4 (yes FOUR) Alpha Raptors destroyed me instantly:

ark.fandom.com/wiki/Alpha_Rap…

Not only do these creatures wipe you out immediately but they then camp on your stuff until your body de-spawns so you lose everything. Alpha Raptors are supposed to be rare so why are there FOUR of them in one area? To put this into perspective, here's my raptor vs. alpha:

That's right, an Alpha Raptor has 3600 health. I had 220, my raptor had about 400. My weapons did a max of 40-60 damage. These were level 4 through 13 and they are simply invincible at nearly every level so why are there FOUR walking around the beginner spawn areas?

To test my theory out I turned on God mode, flew over to my stuff, and even in God mode I could get my gear. I had to pause all the dinos, get my stuff, and tried to kill one. It took my character about 20 minutes in IRL time stabbing with a pike to finally kill one. What?

Even in God mode with the Alpha Raptor paused it was nearly impossible. That's nuts. And to have 4 just chilling out on an important path for my character? Yeah, that's just bad game design. Spend more than 10 minutes on your RNG so people can actually play.

It sort of falls into my rule of "Excessive Tragedy is Boring."

Ark is fun but these instances of brutal inescapable completely devastating tragedy make the game boring. Why bother playing it if you're just losing all your gear to impossible tragedy all the time?

Take the Basilisk incident as an example. If I need to be around level 100 with an end game tamed dino to beat it, and I lose *everything* I worked for then why bother working for anything? I restarted the game and now I just run around naked since there's no point.

But, that's getting boring. I want to build a base and explore the world with my gear, take some risks, but if every risk completely wipes out my stuff then why bother? I don't want to grind for another 20 IRL hours.

There's two simple things Ark could do to fix this:

1. Valheim has this great feature (found in other games) called the "Corpse Run Buff". After you get to your body and get your stuff your character gets a buff that significantly lowers damage and massively increases speed so you can get the hell out of there and keep playing.

If Ark had the corpse run buff I would have been able to go back to where the Alpha Raptors were camping out, grab my stuff super fast and then run away. My only alternative was to go into God mode to kill them, which is just boring.

There's one more thing ark could do:

2. Dead body equipment should be like explorer notes where you just have to run over it to get your stuff back. Instead you have to carefully find it, hit E, wait for animations, click move all, hit escape, then try to run. No chance when dinos camp out on your corpse.

As it is now I play until some excessive tragedy happens and I lose everything then I go into God mode to get revenge and delete the game to start over. I figure at that point the game has immediately become boring so I'll just try again rather than bother salvaging it.

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More from @lzsthw

Zed A. Shaw, Writer

@lzsthw

2 Jun

I have a couple of new gotchas for people doing Svelte:

1. fade:out, or almost any "out" transition effect is death. Avoid at all costs.

2. {#await} on a promise is great, but if you update the promise it reloads the *entire* DOM at that point. Put it into a component.

For #1, the demo involves this fade:out on the Spinner I use to show the video is loading. Seems harmless *until* you want to transition to an entire new page/component, say with svelte-spa-router.

You can see it happen here. I click the link for a related video, and you can see the current video has to "fade out", preventing that page from leaving the DOM, so it looks like both pages load at the same time. I'm at a point now where I don't use *any* out transitions.

Read 10 tweets

Zed A. Shaw, Writer

@lzsthw

1 Jun

Let's try an explanation of print() vs. return using tapes and switches.

At the simplest a computer has:

1. An input tape.
2. An output tape.
3. A code tape.
4. A memory bank.
5. A stack bank.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_t…

For all you youngins who never used VHS tapes, Sony Walkmans, a film real, or loaded your video games into your C-64 with a tape, then it's kind of like if someone wrote 1s and 0s on a roll of toilet paper as they rolled it onto another roll, so to read it you have to unroll it.

The tape dominates all concepts of computing. You wrote data and read to tapes. You printed output to rolls of paper on giant typewriters (printers), which is basically a paper tape. There were even paper tapes. Their defining characteristic is they are: LINEAR.

Read 31 tweets

Zed A. Shaw, Writer

@lzsthw

31 May

Spent a whole day figuring out a weird bug with svelte-spa-router only to find out, it's "on purpose" (which is programmer for "ooops uhhhh yeah I totally meant the"):

github.com/ItalyPaleAle/s…

One reason people hate SPAs is things like this. Clicking a link loads a new page.

The end. Full stop. Don't be fancy unless I tell you. You load the page again when I click the link. What's svelte-spa-router do?

Change two variables and then OOPS it's up to you dude to figure out how to make that work like an actual link does everywhere else.

So, with svelte-spa-router you CANNOT treat your svelte routes like pages because of this bug. And it is a bug. You have to treat each route pattern like it's a singleton instance that run onMount once and once only, then you have to sort out changes within that same route.

Read 5 tweets

Zed A. Shaw, Writer

@lzsthw

31 May

Alright, some folks have real answers AND these real answers point out the next stupidity of JavaScript NaN. First up "it's an IEEE standard" is not a defense, but here's the one reply for the reasoning:

stackoverflow.com/questions/1565…

Now...if we're following IEEE then, nope:

1. The IEEE standard is *entirely* about Math equality of floating point numbers. There is *NOT* a specification of === since that's not a math thing, that's a JS thing, so they could have fixed it there.

== is IEEE, fine.

=== is what everyone actually needs.

Then:

2. The IEEE standard is about MATH with FLOATING POINT. So then why is a NaN used when you do parseInt() on a string?

Strings are not floating point. Int is not floating point. If the JS people defend with "IEEE standard" this returning NaN in this situation is a vioaltion.

Read 6 tweets

Zed A. Shaw, Writer

@lzsthw

30 May

So much of CSS is totally half-assed. I add blur on an image when you hover over it. My box-sizing is border box, yet, when the image is blurred I get this garbage blur overflow on the edge. The solution (2nd image) is to..say "overflow: hidden" (line 66)? What?

How this *should* be implemented is that the blur is contained inside the parent box. The end. If I want the blur to go outside of the parent then I'll put it on *that* component. Nobody in the right mind wants *anything* to bleed outside of boxes accidentally.

But that's CSS all over. Just a half-assed box model that isn't a box model at all, more of a wet-paper-towel model where it seems like the browser devs make a feature and then forget to make it stay inside a box, or forget to make it work inside some random situation.

Read 6 tweets

Zed A. Shaw, Writer

@lzsthw

30 May

Remember how I talked about Ark's Scorched Earth being nothing but a death festival? I've been watching various pro-level players play Ark and there's a certain strategy they use:

1. Die often and forget your stuff.
2. Level up movement speed to out run dinos.

It does work.

Scorched Earth for those who don't know is basically a desert world with unrealistic heat properties. You die in about 4 minutes when the temp is 38c (LOL) but live if you get in a tent and make it 37c. Given that 1/2 of the team is from Egypt I find this doubly hilarious.

Unlike other maps you spawn in places and die almost instantly because of the heat, or cold at night, or millions of deadly dinos. You also can't really escape the heat inside a basic thatch structure--the first kind you can build. You just die over and over with no progression.

Read 11 tweets

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