Assassins Creed Origins

I just finished playing Assassins Creed Origins ("the one in Egypt"). I've spent 40 hours on it, and the last 8 hours of that were a race to get the thing finished, because the story was Just Not Great.

The Good

The game looks gorgeous on an Nvidia 1080. It has great landscapes and the loading times are bearable. The in-game performance is great, and the sneaking/murdering gameplay is really fun. The other Assassins Creed game I played was Assassins Creed II, the one in Florence.

The Bad

The story. Oh god, it is bad. The story in the outer world is random filler, eating up loading time. The story in Egypt dredges on too long. It is about a failing marriage and two parents on a trip for revenge.

The gameplay in the open world is largely forgettable. There is little to discover and it is not fun to just ride around, discovering the landscape. The gameplay in fights is no fun either and most of the missions are not fun either. They take themselves mostly serious and there is no connection to the quest givers and their plight. Better writing could have helped there. The only good gameplay is the one you make for yourself by clearing out the military installations, sneaking around and killing people.

The world is large but boring. It is no fun to seek out (and potentially clear) all the question marks on the map.

The ugly

The game is connected to the UbiSoft launcher, even when you buy it through Steam. That launcher updates itself every time you launch it through Steam. It also requires a (burner) email address for launching the game.

The game is single-player but wants to be online all the time, to tell you about Assassins Creed Bucks and other microtransactions.

Monster Train 2

A fun strategic deck building game, Just like the first game. Different mechanics, different challenges. There is some kind of story.

The first Monster Train made me realize what people like about Magic the Gathering (the strategy and deck management) and does not have any of the downsides of Magic the Gathering (the lootbox money sink).

The story is nothing spectacular but has at least one good reveal.

On Monster Train I have 1.100 hours logged, so here's to another 1k hours .

Providing a dark mode is good form nowadays. I like doing/having that too.

Usually, a dark mode is done by switching to a second CSS sheet or having a CSS selector switching between a bright and a dark colour set using JS or the browser preferences. This can lead to some rule repetition:

.light-theme textarea {
    color: black;
    background-color: #8dfece;
}

.dark-theme textarea {
    color: #62b190;
    background-color: black;
}

CSS also has a function to do this color switching on an element without needing to repeat the declaration in a second rule: light-dark(color1, color2) will return color1 if the light environment is preferred by the user and color2 if the dark environment is preferred.

textarea {
    color: light-dark( black, black );
    background-color: light-dark( #8dfece, #62b190 );
}

You still might want to give the user an option to set their preference only for your website, storing that in a cookie. Bootstrap 5 itself has a fairly thorough, live-switching setup for that, but it's also somewhat long. There also is a short JS snippet on Github which is mildly simpler to integrate, but which only does the switching on page load or toggling of the user selection, and not when the user switches their browsers preference.

For some time, I've been wondering what the income structure of YouTube (and other) video bloggers looks like. There always was some secrecy about it, likely imposed by the contracts the people have with YouTube.

This post talks about the revenue structure. The summary is that you get 1ct per view, but there is a minimum number of videos/views/hours you need to meet.

The main revenue still seems to come directly from merchandising, stream sponsors and other advertising that's separate in the advertising that YouTube sells.

Nash is a quite simple (and nice) document editor in a single-page . It does not handle markdown, but on the upside, it has a convenient enough toolbar to handle formatting the content.

This is not unlike my note taking app , but mine uses a backend to save the files in a central location. Nash uses the "share" and "download" functionalities of the containing browser instead.

Nash sports only a single toolbar, while my app has a top and a bottom toolbat. This is a ggd inspiration to reorganie my toolbars and see if I can reduce them to a single toolbar or at least reorganize the actions.