I believe the reason it happened, in short, is that Take2 (the publisher) were really obsessed with the release being a surprise, at the cost of far too much.

For one, this meant that basically every job listing for the game never described what the game you’d even work on was. Most of the devs they got were juniors who:

1. were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
2. did not necessarily know much about the game, or even the genre (supposedly, besides Nate, only 1 dev was an active KSP1 player and another was aware of the game but never really played)
3. this game was their first sizeable project

For two, it meant that a lot of management roles were taken up by people from Take2 to enforce the secrecy (who also saw KSP as having franchise potential, but that’s a rant for another day). Few of them intimately understood what makes us dorky nerds enthusiastic about KSP.

This is also part of the reason they avoided talking to the KSP1 devs; they were afraid of some of them even hinting that a sequel was in the works. As to why they continued to not talk to them after announcing the game I’m not sure. Perhaps they were afraid they’d tell the uncomfortable truth that the game was making the same development mistakes as KSP1 and more.

As someone who’s used both, I’d have a strong preference for Odin over Rust if it were at a stable 1.0 release. As it stands now (or, at least, when I used it), Odin is very much in flux. Spend enough time with the language, and you’ll either find a bug with the compiler or the semantics will change after you update.

That said, it would be my favorite without those problems. It is a really simple language in a good way. There’s no fancy language features that are just syntax sugar (well except maybe context, but I find that to be actually convenient). You can understand everything in an afternoon if you are already familiar with programming in other languages. Rust is pretty much the opposite in all of these reguards.

Rust also has the benefit of being pretty recognizable at this point, so if you say your project is in Rust then people will know what that means, unlike Odin. More “resume-able” in a way.

So, in short:

• Odin if you’re doing it as a hobby
• Rust if you want something “real”

While I do agree that math gets much easier with interest, and that it gets more interesting the further you get into it, and that math is inherently beautiful, etc. I feel this argument has to fall flat to people who don’t already agree. It’s the education equivalent of when someone says they couldn’t get into an anime and then the fans tell them ‘oh it gets really good around season 9’. You could be completely correct, as you are here, but it’s utterly unconvincing if you don’t already “know.”

To be fair, I think this is mostly a problem with math curricula. Math classes up through high school and early college seem to focus on well trodden solutions to boring problems, and at some (far too late) point it flips around to being creative solutions to interesting problems. I think this could be fixed eventually, but such is the system we have now.

The thing that finally got businesses to finally get off IE wasn’t from the browser being worse than every other option. Heck, it wasn’t even because it was a decrepit piece of software that lost it’s former market dominance (and if anything businesses see that as a positive, not a negative).

What finally did that was microsoft saying there won’t be any security updates. That’s what finally got them off their ass; subtly threatening them with data breaches, exploits, etc. if they continue to use it. I don’t see google doing this anytime soon, at least not without a “sequel” like microsoft had with edge.

I don’t think this can really be answered until after the fact. Anything that I (and I suspect most) people could say about an artstyle are going to be particular to an instance of that artsyle. If I’d give advice as someone who is neither an artist nor a game designer, what attracts me more than anything is a unique artstyle, which, if I’m gonna give a brutal opinion, starting from a vague category like ‘pixel’, ‘hand drawn’ or ‘3D’ probably won’t get you there.

I feel like I even struggle to answer your question at face value because it doesn’t align well at all with how I conceptualize game art. For example, Cruelty Squad is a game that I don’t think I’d have gotten if not for it’s artsyle. Like, sure, it’s 3D, but it’s a lot more like a PilotRedSun animation than it is a game like TF2. Or take a game like Factorio: most of the assets of that game are pre-rendered 3D sprites, so despite being artisticly unique in a way that interests me it doesn’t fit into the categories you’ve asked about. The best I can say is “I dunno”, and I don’t think anyone else can answer it further than that.

There is the Anno series of games, which are technically RTS games but if I’m honest I find them the most fun when I go out of my way to avoid combat/micromanagement. I’ve only played 1404, 2070, and 2205, 2070 being the best in my opinion, but it has a bad history with DRM so I’d suggest 1404 (known as “Dawn of Discovery” in the US because us americans are afraid of numbers apparently).

Edit: looking at the steam page it looks like they decided to take 1404 down and made a new page where the game is (mostly) unchanged besides requiring you to jump through all the BS hoops that 2070 did, so I’d say if you’re gonna spend money get 1404 on GOG, or if you are willing to do unspeakable things go with 2070.

I started working on a similar project about a year ago, except I was doing it fully by hand in the vanilla game (journey mode in a blank world), custom 8-bit instruction set, all that. I took an extended break from the project and kept thinking “this idea is so obvious, someone else is gonna do it first and I’m gonna look like a copycat” but not getting around to finishing work on it anyways. I’ll post pictures if anyone is interested, maybe a world download if I can find somewhere to host it.

I’m not super familiar with the details of either (as I’ve gotten so used to the AUR having everything I might want), but I can say with some confidence that snap was rolled out in a way that doesn’t do it any favors.

I have an old laptop that I occasionally boot into to do some stuff, but not super often. After an update, it appeared as though Firefox had forgotten everything; I wasn’t logged in, default start page, all settings reset, etc. I was super confused and mildly annoyed, but I set everything back up anyways. Then a bit later I ran Firefox again and it opened to what it was before the update??? Then I realized there were two installs, one apt and the other snap, and the latter was installed without my permission (or knowledge, maybe apt said in one of its 10k lines it spits out that ‘btw here’s a snap package’ that I was somehow supposed to notice).

I find containerized packages really nice for things that are very dependant on how the system is setup but are unlikely to get updated if that system changes (either by me not updating it or it just going unmaintained). Firefox is not that though.

I often hear about the original “Elite” in this context. It managed to do real time 3d rendering on home computers (albeit wireframe) in a time when that was usually relegated to pre-renders or supercomputers. Came out a good decade before making 3d games was more generally viable.

If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn’t put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it’s reasonable to believe Apollo’s existence doesn’t cost them 20M$. In fact I’d be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit’s reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.