Their terms are that you can't sell *Steam keys* for cheaper than the game is listed for on Steam.
There is a class-action lawsuit on this that's been ongoing for half a decade now, but as far as I can tell the plaintiffs have not been able to produce any actual contract text supporting this claim. The closest their filings come is some random customer support rep.
I wonder how the terms of that work exactly in practice. For example I'm pretty sure Humble Bundle includes games that are on Steam every now and then, with a pretty solid discount if you consider what you get for your money.
In practice it means Steam reviews the key requests you make for third party bundles and sales. If they decide the deal is too generous, they may deny the key requests until you've offered the game for a comparable price on Steam.
It's mentioned as upcoming in the FAQ under "How much will it cost?": "$30 on subwaybuilder.com and $40 on Steam (page is coming soon). The Steam launch won't happen for a few months after the launch on subwaybuilder.com."
Dollar General is a mega corporation that can operate on an entirely different level than local stores. They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state. On a store-by-store basis though, Dollar general is a fragile establishment, management will not hesitate to abandon the location if they are spending too much money propping up the store. And the overhead for these stores is higher than it needs to be - they build way larger stores and parking lots than they actually need. The local dry goods store has grown only to the size that it requires, and those profits go towards its own survival. It provides cultural value, economic opportunities, and is more likely to improve the lives of people living nearby.
Strong towns (who made the article) is a grassroots nonprofit that finds concrete ways for US cities to curb the effects of urban sprawl. One of those ways is to acknowledge that inviting huge commercial ventures into your small local economy is like bringing a giant mammal to roam free on a small island nation. It's probably going to affect the ecosystem in ways that don't suit the environment.
They can also operate at a loss until they drive out all competition, and then raise prices - so that you probably end up at the same prices as before (or worse) - but with a much worse quality product (i.e. how they achieve better margins).
Or open up more stores then the region can support, remove the local competition, and then close theirs stores as uncompetitive. The small town (population < 2000) my Mom grew up in is currently supporting their IGA as well as the Dollar Store, but my understanding is that they're in better shape then a lot of their small town neighbors.
One or two successful businesses makes a huge difference at that level. If something happened to their one large employer, a food factory, then they'd really be in trouble. The other businesses are restaurant sized at the largest.
> They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state.
Almost every local retail business I know of pays less than larger businesses, simply due to not meeting the 50 employee minimum that subjects businesses to a host of other labor laws such as ACA and FMLA.
You're right - what I should have said is that a local store owner is getting the direct profits of their labor. I admit that one of the short-term benefits of a big box store coming to town is that their lowest paid employees get more protections. This comes at the cost of being held at arms length from the actual power structure of the company and makes the dollar general's business practices more unsustainable.
This is actually why rotational math is more complicated in 3d than you would expect. It's something game developers get used to, because accessing and modifying a rotation requires knowing what the orientation is relative to a fourth axis. That's what a quaternion is. In the situation of this story, it's in reference to the milky way's vertical axis.
"The carbon fibre and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did." (Found the quote on WikiPedia.)
It seems insane to me. It's easy to be an armchair anything, but I don't understand why you would do such a thing. It's not like a submersible needs to be light weight, either.
Engineering a submarine is well above my pay grade, but some of the variables you have to balance are.
the walls have to be strong(thick) enough to withstand the pressure (this is obvious, I know)
the ratio of wall thickness to void(crew) space determines reserve buoyancy.
smaller submarines are stronger than bigger ones. but have a worse buoyancy ratio.
The end result is that as you design a submarine to go deeper it has to become smaller with thicker(heaver) walls until past a certain depth it goes negative buoyant and will sink. So you have to add additional buoyancy. not a trivial task given the pressures involved. the Trieste(first submersible to the challenger depth) was built like a blimp, with a tiny crew sphere hung below a massive tank of oil(they used oil because it is lighter than water and will not compress).
So a lighter material hull is very desirable, it makes the whole operation much easier. They probably should not have been testing it on commercial passengers however.
This is also the benefit of titanium, it is almost as strong as steel with half the weight.
It is insane, but not entirely pointless. A metal submersible is heavy and negatively buoyant, whereas you want it to be positively buoyant (then add removable ballast).
The way you add buoyancy is expensive fancy aerated concrete, or something like that, and a lot of it, since it's not that buoyant. But it is pressure resistant.
By making it out of CF, you save on that cost.
Not a worthwhile cost cutting exercise but at least there is some reason for it.
My understanding is that most commercial manned submarines don't actually go that deep. As with depth there isn't that many interesting things... And lot less light. So pressures they are dealing are quite reasonable. Which makes implosions pretty unlikely in normal operation. Common scenario is to operate in areas were sea bed is at depth where implosion is impossible.
It is, so it’s taken really seriously. The hulls are made from material with well characterised gradual failure modes - bending and deforming rather than sudden failure. This means metals with thoroughly inspected welds and joints to ensure no internal voids, and a process of gradually diving deeper to check the hull meets the design requirements.
Using materials that fail plastically and gradually increasing depth trials means the failure mode is hopefully deformation rather than complete failure, and will happen at the highest depth as possible so a quick surfacing can be achieved.
Submarines, along with space, are an area where innovative new methods need a lot of testing before you commit human life to it.
If I remember the early reporting correctly, this submarine had plastic deformation on every dive. So it was already failing, they just didn't do anything about it.
If you wanna talk about incentives, board games are the place to be. There's no shiny graphics and baubles to use as crutches for a stale design (or not nearly to the same degree as video games).
Model viewer is a nice tool! I was paid to make some assets for a model viewer website, but I couldn't get any of my model's colors to show correctly. Once I realized that AO was used as direct exposure value, it was smooth sailing ahead.
Most of the time I can't control what light my models are shown in, so it was great to have some control of how it was presented.
My guess is that their dubious disposability works against them. You can get self-heated coffee and ramen in a lot of Japanese vending machines, which makes sense because Japan is the capital of non-biodegradable disposables.
I was hoping their big announcement was going to be Procreate for PC, but I'm happy for all the people out there who will benefit from better accessible tools.
Pretty amazing results. It would be fun to work as a traveling 3D capture artist, going to novel locations and scanning assets to use in fantasy worlds.
> It would be fun to work as a traveling 3D capture artist, going to novel locations and scanning assets to use in fantasy worlds.
When I read this, I immediately thought of Nikon’s Natural Intelligence campaign[1]. This comment was on point with their thinking.
Akin to how being an “influencer” is now a legitimate profession. I can’t wait to see how people get incredibly creative to make a living using new AI tech.
Or rather - scanning assets in phantasy worlds and using the results for bot development. A bot, looking at the screen and using a Bluetooth keyboard for commands would be much less detectable.
> A bot, looking at the screen and using a Bluetooth keyboard for commands would be much less detectable.
this has been one of the preferred ways to go about cheating for some time; sometimes even with things like video-splitters way-back-when.
>Or rather - scanning assets in phantasy worlds and using the results for bot development
yeah but the thing with games is that the data is there, and often times trivial to deobfuscate -- and when you DO get to it, it's perfect 1:1 rather than trained AI best guesses; it's not some natural reality where a best-guest approximation is the best you can hope for.
The bar for bot development will surely drop further and further, but until efforts towards keeping The Data away from Mean Person are strengthened then the easiest way forward is through data mining.
