We have a big conference every year where I live for the tech industry. It's hit or miss depending on the person presenting, and it's usually a miss. Many talks can last over an hour when they could've been a much shorter youtube video and are just there to pad time. Also 95% of the people are there for other motives. Looking for investors, trying to get hired, browsing the booths, etc. Despite being very crowded it's very clear most of the people don't actually care about the talks and do anything else on their phones.
I think in-person conferences can be great experiences when done right but I really got anything out of it. For all the talks about networking with others they give very little opportunities to do that. When everyone is looking for opportunities from other people it felt almost like a competition to try and talk with companies and important people, and it usually boils down to them asking for my contact info so they can flush it down the toilet. I don't know, I just have a bad experience with them.
Less conflict of interest and more just some confusion. They've been honest W4 is not the Godot Foundation, but they claim that W4 will contribute back to Godot development regardless so nobody's really sure how they're spending the money exactly.
It's a great update for people making pixel-art games in general. Aside from integer scaling, there's a huge amount of tilemap changes and QoL. Also some new functions like rotate_toward makes things easier for beginners.
Good stuff, the multiple community feature is a game changer! I'm probably going to start browsing games+gaming casually. I also see that you added better contrast overall which is greatly appreciated.
I noticed that it loads way too many posts at once though when opening multiple communities, possibly trying to get every single post in them. It loads ~150+ posts at once and will probably get me rate limited. Looking forward to pangora releasing!
Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can't even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera's website.
I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.
Since you have programming experience getting started shouldn't be too difficult for you. You can jump straight into the introduction in the docs or just jump straight into the your first game section. It gives you a quick intro and tells you how to get around.
After that you can check out the ultimate introduction to Godot 4 video. It's a massive 11 hour video that teaches you almost everything you need to know (in 2D game development). Good luck.
It's worth reading the Using Fonts section in the official docs if you want to make text as nice as possible, it has so much info. The thing is, some settings might be better than others depending on the font.
But in general I found these my favorite settings:
MSDF on (pretty much needed if you change the scale on runtime)
Normal hinting (AKA full hinting): Makes text aggressively sharper when the text is small. Looks a bit aliased but it's so much easier to read imo
Mipmaps off. It clashes with full hinting and makes text slightly blurry.
I low-key wish there were a separate AI leaderboard. It would be really interesting to see how fast bots can actually solve a problem as soon as it goes up, and it'd be nice to compare that to last year.
There's also GPT4All which has the same concept but comes with a convenient GUI rather than run on the command line. I had some fun with Mistral-7B but honestly the weaker models are too dumb to be useful.
downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.
I think it's the complete opposite. Platforms with downvotes tend to be less toxic because you don't have to reply to insane people to tell them they're wrong, whereas platforms like Twitter get really toxic because you only see the likes, so people tend to get into fights and "ratio" them which actually increases the attention they get and spreads their message to other people.
In general, platforms without upvotes/downvotes tend to be the most toxic imo. Platforms like old-school forums and 4chan are a complete mess because low-effort troll content is as loud as high effort thoughtful ones. It takes one person to de-rail a conversation and get people to fight about something else, but with downvotes included you just lower their visibility. It's basically crowdsourced moderation, and it works relatively well.
As for ways to reduce toxicity, shrug. Moderation is the only thing that really stops it but if you moderate too much then you'll be called out for censoring people too much, and telling them not to get mad is just not going to happen.
My idea for less toxicity is having better filtering options for things people want to see. Upon joining a platform it would give easy options to filter out communities that are political or controversial. That's what I'm doing on Lemmy, I'm here for entertainment, not arguing.
Technically you're right but the thing about AI image generators is that they make it really easy to mass-produce results. Each one I used in the survey took me only a few minutes, if that. Some images like the cat ones came out great in the first try. If someone wants to curate AI images, it takes little effort.
Are there any statistically significant differences between the different generators?
Every image was created by DALL-E 3 except for one. I honestly got lazy so there isn't much data there. I would say DALL-E is much better in creating stylistic art but Midjourney is better at realism.
We have a big conference every year where I live for the tech industry. It's hit or miss depending on the person presenting, and it's usually a miss. Many talks can last over an hour when they could've been a much shorter youtube video and are just there to pad time. Also 95% of the people are there for other motives. Looking for investors, trying to get hired, browsing the booths, etc. Despite being very crowded it's very clear most of the people don't actually care about the talks and do anything else on their phones.
I think in-person conferences can be great experiences when done right but I really got anything out of it. For all the talks about networking with others they give very little opportunities to do that. When everyone is looking for opportunities from other people it felt almost like a competition to try and talk with companies and important people, and it usually boils down to them asking for my contact info so they can flush it down the toilet. I don't know, I just have a bad experience with them.