[-] davetansley@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

About 13 years ago, I made this fella.

https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg

It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.

It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

This!

Coding isn't for everyone, but sometimes you can get involved in a coding project just by contributing good suggestions/bug reports to github.

Be thoughtful about how you report things - if you're reporting a bug, add as much detail as you can to help the devs recreate it; if you're suggesting a feature, make a solid case for why the application might benefit from it, think about potential issues it might solve (or cause), consider how you might address users who don't want that feature (make optional).

It is extremely satisfying to see an issue you've reported get fixed or a feature you've suggested get implemented. It gives you a stake in the project, something you won't often get on the corporate-owned platforms.

1

It's incredibly rare that a set turns out exactly as intended, but it sometimes happens. Like this one - the intention was to make a set that looked like coffee, and that's just what we got!

Fittingly, this set was sold as a gift for a barista!

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Iceland. One of the most beautiful, weird, friendly places I've ever visited.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

"All magazines" to the right of the top bar goes to the same place.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Do you have "Show top bar" enabled in settings? If I enable this, Magazines disappears from the navbar.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Ah! It looks like I wasn't on the latest version... updated and it works perfectly now! Thanks!

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

This is amazing! It basically recreates my reddit browsing experience and makes the whole site so much easier to navigate!

I can see references in the code to "sort alphabetically" (which would be very welcome!)... but I can't see the button. Did that function not make it into this version of the script?

Thanks again!

2

This set uses one of my favourite techniques - hydro-dipping (or marbling).

With this technique, you drip special inks onto the surface of some water to make a pattern, then carefully dip a blank dice down into the water so that the ink folds around it. You then cast the patterned blank in resin to seal it.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

I tried Memori, a Celeste-style platformer with some cool puzzle mechanics. Some of the rooms were super-hard, which made completing them feel very satisfying. It has a chunky-pixel look and controls really well. The front-end UI needs a tiny bit of polish, but other than that I really enjoyed it. Can imagine it'll be popular with speedrunners.

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by davetansley@kbin.social to c/clacksmith@lemmy.world

The skulls in these dice were 3D printed on an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro printer and hand painted. Then they were cast in blank dice, then recast in proper moulds.

We did a run of this design as a full set last year and it proved popular. This time we're doing a run of D6s (for Warhammer/Yahtzee fans!).

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by davetansley@kbin.social to c/clacksmith@lemmy.world

I've been lurking and waiting for a dice making community to pop up :)

Dice making was our "pandemic thing". We just started down that rabbit hole one day and it grew and grew. We ended up making and selling a lot of dice, including this set.

It's a petri pour set - where you drip various inks into resin and gravity pulls down creeping strands into the dice body while it cures.

Life has got in the way of making more sets this last six months, but I'm looking for inspiration to get back into it.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I just cannot get beyond "rad".

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Back when I first started using the internet, early-mid 90s, there was a feeling that we were in control - the users. The giant corporations hadn't taken over yet, content was all user generated, the apps and early sites were all user run. It was weird, uncontrolled, unpredictable, janky as hell... but also really cool.

Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole, feel like that again.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago

I'm almost reluctant to post suggestions about what I'd like to see on Lemmy/kbin. It feels kind of entitled, you know? It's early days and there are obviously lots more important things to get stable and established first. Not to mention the devs are doing this for free and about to come under a lot of pressure. As a dev myself, used to listening to users making subjective demands about the "right" direction to take an app, I fully sympathise :)

That said, my offerings for the suggestion pile would be:

  1. Discoverability - finding and joining communities isn't intuitive at the moment. This seems to be a fediverse problem rather than a lemmy/kbin problem, as Mastodon has similar issues. It should be as simple as "search for a topic, hit subscribe". Instead it involves copy pasting cryptic strings of text, editing them sometimes, then searching, and a bit of hoping. I think this will be the number one issue that impacts adoption.

  2. UX - more one for lemmy than kbin, but there are improvements that could be made to the UI to improve user experience. A general tidy up to improve visuals (things like alignment of community names without icons, for example), ordering of lists of communities, external links opening in the same tab (appreciate some prefer this, but it tends to lose your place in a feed).For kbin, easy access to your list of subscriptions would be great.

Honestly, most of the UX stuff is low priority compared to getting the apps stable and coping with scale. I hope they figure out those wider challenges though, because there's definitely a lot of promise here.

[-] davetansley@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Steamdeck owner since August last year, here. And I love it... As a traditional console gamer, it's been great to dig into my basically untouched Steam library that I've steadily accumulated with Humble Bundles over the last decade or more. Steam sales are a game changer... I've discovered so many titles I would have otherwise missed! I should say that I am 99% a docked gamer as well, and the Steamdeck works absolutely fine like this.

In terms of games - I've just started Ori and the Blind Forest (currently on sale). I'm also playing Final Fantasy XIV on and off. I spent 120+ hours on Elden Ring on the deck. And I'm patiently waiting for the Dark Souls games to go on sale so I can pick them up and start yet another playthrough.

4

A comparison of the ports of Green Beret

Green Beret is a difficult game to love, because Green Beret is a difficult game to play. Honestly, it's brutal. Utterly unforgiving, unfair in places, and generally infuriating. Especially since every life lost is greeted by a shrill siren sound that will have even the most understanding spouse reaching for her earbuds (trust me).

The arcade version of Green Beret

It's also a simple game... move to the right, murder fools with your knife and your deep fear of communist expansion, pick up the occasional flame thrower or rocket launch to murder more efficiently... win!!!

But how did the home computer conversions handle the absurd difficulty of the coin-op? They'd have toned it down, right? Right??

The Amstrad version of Green Beret

Amstrad: This port is the worst of the three main ones. There's just something off about it. Maybe it's the loose controls or the insane difficulty, or maybe it's the fact that your green beret looks more like Robin Hood and the communist aggressors look more like merry men. Still, everything from the arcade is represented here. Just not brilliantly. And it is so so difficult...

The Spectrum version of Green Beret

Spectrum: Next up is the Spectrum. It's a port by the late great Jonathan "Joffa" Smith and it is a really neat conversion. The graphics are bright and crisp, it controls and moves around well, and it feels like the original arcade. But goddamn it's hard. I had to figure out how to use a Multiface, just so that I could poke in a cheat and get to my screenshot spot for this one!

The C64 version of Green Beret

C64: The C64 port is probably the best of the bunch, but not by a long way. It looks and sounds great, definitely the closest to the arcade. It's main problem - believe it or not - is difficulty. Again, it is insanely hard. And it suffers from some unfair hit box issues - if you jump and collide with an enemy on a level above, you lose a life, which feels wrong.

The Atari version of Green Beret

Atari: Finally, a dishonourable discharge for the Atari 8-bit version which is, frankly, a bit of a war crime.

It's beyond hard and enters an entirely different realm of frustration, with your hero wielding the smallest knife imaginable and enemies requiring the intimate closeness of a secret lover before they'll shuffle off this mortal coil

Combine this with invisible bullets (pesky Russian tech) and that awful siren that plays at the start of EVERY life and it's a recipe for an 800XL out the window.

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davetansley

joined 1 year ago