I think OpenStreeMap could benefit immensely from investing a bit in making self-hosted versions more approachable and on more platforms, especially now that vector-tiles are becoming increasingly used.
I would love to quickly install a small subset of the planet (say my home city or country) on a cheap webhost with a simple LAMP stack. Then have the map just use that server whenever it fits within the bounds of my subsets and then possibly fallback to other or the public servers if requesting data from outside.
Routing also seems like something that could technically be done (albeit less efficient than dedicated C++ implementations) on cheap servers but I guess it would require more work.
Rolling out map updates for all these self-hosted instances is a bit of another problem but I'm sure it can be done.
The game doesn't really explain that too well. You have to go find the packages first before you can deliver it. For example the old lady asks you to deliver an offering at a temple.
Teaching gameplay without an overt tutorial is a difficult skill, maybe this dev can pull it off? It's hard to get into the "new player" headspace without feedback from actual playtesters.
After clicking through the first popups with the player's inner monologue, I fully expected some help text like "Use W S A D to move" to pop up.
I had no real reason for that expectation, except this is how several games I played in recent years handled it - which made me realize now, that explaining gameplay to new players is something that's actively evolving. There may not be a rulebook, but there are clear trends.
He did not pull it off. You can't click on things, there are no "you can't do this yet" signs if you get to the temple without a package, there is no "following your nose at the start leads to your first quest". Utterly inscrutable.
That's part of the charm, in my opinion. It encourages just trying things out and learning on the fly. With such low stakes, I think it was a great way to go.
In Denmark you can. I was in my mid thirties when I went to my doctor to ask them to prescribe it. Before each shot I would go to the pharmacy and buy one dose and go to the doctor to have them administer it for me (if I wanted to). At that time I think it was free for teenage girls, now it's free for teenage boys as well.
The evolution of who gets HPV vaccines is really interesting. At first it was young women, as vaccinating young men had a very marginal decrease in cervical cancer rates via indirect protection (which itself is a function of how many young women are vaccinated). Then as HPV infection was linked to more cancers, vaccinating young men crossed the cost-effectiveness thresholds many governments use.
Vaccinating older populations is similarly just a less clear-cut case, but it's a cost-effectiveness argument, not one purely driven by if the vaccine offers protection.
Seriously. My memories of this vaccine are so foggy because I distinctly remember being told "its not effective for men" and that it would be an expensive out of pocket cost. Yet, the whole point would always have been to prevent the spread.
it's not just the cost of the vaccine roll-out though, you need test on your target demo and since these are healthy people the bar is very high. If the demographic (like males over 45) shows very little involvement in the infection vectors then testing might fail the cost-effectiveness, not the delivery of the vaccine.
BGFX (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx) uses a different approach. You basically write your shader in a GLSL-like language but it's all just (either very clever or very horrible) macro expansions that handles all the platform differences.
With that you get a very performant backend for OpenGL, WebGL, Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D 11 and 12 and Playstation. It's shader compiler program basically does minimal source level transformations before handing it over to the platforms' own shader compiler if available.
To me the BIGGEST annoyance is the iOS “End call” button.
Just as I’m about to tap it, the other person ends the call and what I’m actually tapping is some other person on my call list that it then immediately calls.
Even if I end the call quickly they often call back confused “You called, what did you want?”
Apple: PLEASE add a delay to touch input after the call screen closes.
Confirmation before calling would be nice. I've accidentally made calls when trying to get more information about a missed call. (I've also had Siri pocket dial, but I e got that disabled now.)
That too! 99% of the time I tap a missed call, it's because I want to see more info about the call or the contact or if there was a voice mail. My phone should never make a call unless I explicitly tap a big ol' "CALL" button. It should never be the default action for tapping on a contact or a missed call.
The solution needs to be global. Literally, if any part of the screen just changed (except for watching videos, which would make them impossible to interact with), add a small interaction delay where taps are no-op'd.
Video shouldn't count as the screen changing, it should just be an area of "media". It's appearance or disappearance could be counted as a change, but not the contents of the area itself. That could be a global rule to save much exception making.
It's gotten better, but using navigation. It tells you which lane you need to----nope, calendar Appointment.
and the notification doesn't self-dissapear, so stressed navigation also includes a ham-handed reach and swipe up to make the appointment dissapear. Hope it wasn't important.
The screen is MASSIVE folks. SO MANY PIXELS. keep the GPS AND the calendar appointment.
I spent waaay too long trying to figure out why my CSS rule didn't work. It doesn't accept me to overwrite an already existing one. The rules did not specify this at all.
It is not clear that the game wants me to find another rule that fixes the problem instead of adding a single perfectly valid line of CSS that does it. There is a huge difference between those two. CSS being cascading meaning that any CSS property coming after an initial rule will overwrite the previous one (in part or fully).
It would be really nice if the game would tell me if the rule I added wasn't allowed instead of just silently failing to do anything with no feedback.
I thought the site was broken for the exact same reason. Instead of being a troubleshooting / practice type test it's more of a puzzle that I do not care to solve.
You can still play that way if you want. Just open your browser's dev tools and edit the CSS rules inside the dev tools. Once you have them overlapping, you just need to do something to trigger the victory check which can be accomplished by doing basically anything (resize the window, click on a circle, type something, I haven't found any action that doesn't trigger the victory check yet).
Exactly what I did to the first one. `left: 12xxpx` did it.
Then I got back here to check if I am only one dumb enough to not understand why it does not work.
Same, because of the lack of feedback I genuinely thought it didn't work. Especially considering the fact many editing things don't work (double click doesn't select, cmd+(shift+)arrows doesn't work, etc.)
It's a perfect representation of CSS: it looks and feels like it should do what you need, but it doesn't _technically_ do what it's supposed to do, so you spend a few hours _trying_ to make sense of it, falling back to just random fuzzing and trial and error, before concluding it's all broken and finally accepting it in its current wonky form, trusting that in some browser, somewhere, it works.
I'm pretty good at handling the cascade and knowing how things work, so this experience you are describing is not mine where CSS is concerned, I doubt I've had to do several hours of trying to make sense of any CSS for probably 5-6 years.
As such that the game does not actually allow you to use the cascade as it should be used is a downside.
"I understand cascading and so I know it isn't what should be done with Cascading StyleSheets. It is right this tool to simulate CSS doesn't support CSS' nominative feature "
I'm glad we agree CSS is unintuitive on many unique and creative fronts.
It must be maddening working as a browser dev knowing that the very first thing most devs worth their corn do is immediately go to abstracts so they are able ignore your work as much as they can.
How would you deal with this common issue in many multiplayer shooters?:
- I see someone sniping
- I go behind a wall to safety
- I still die
From the enemy snipers perspective I was still in view when he shot.
From my perspective I was not.
Many game servers only roll back time to validate from the shooter's perspective.
In this case you'd want some logic to perhaps negotiate a compromise - like only dealing half damage.
I would love to quickly install a small subset of the planet (say my home city or country) on a cheap webhost with a simple LAMP stack. Then have the map just use that server whenever it fits within the bounds of my subsets and then possibly fallback to other or the public servers if requesting data from outside.
Routing also seems like something that could technically be done (albeit less efficient than dedicated C++ implementations) on cheap servers but I guess it would require more work.
Rolling out map updates for all these self-hosted instances is a bit of another problem but I'm sure it can be done.