The notion does feel a little cynical. It’s not like this is necessarily always the case and, even if such projects will fundamentally always be an attempt at making money in the hands of large studios, they can be well executed regardless.

It’s an example of the other way around, but as someone who frankly was immune to the notion of nostalgia from it, I recently watched the first Alien movie for the first time and played Alien Isolation afterwards. That was an amazing example of a game that really represented the ambience, notion and feel of the originals without being a carbon copy of it (even if they did rely overmuch on parallels in some parts and the general structure is surely more than inspired).

Though I suppose I must also give the point that I can’t think of an example of the game to movie pipeline that ended well. I’m sure someone will be able to share some positive experience there.

AlphaFold does a couple of things. It’s capability in predicting how a single protein will be folded tends to be quite nice, but organisms often rely on complex interactions between proteins. It has a feature to calculate the folding of two or more proteins with each other, which is incredibly important to understand more complex interactions in various processes in the human body, as well as drug interactions.

It is also easier to create a database of folding for all normal proteins in the human body. Any change in your DNA, which is somewhat more common than people think, can modify your proteins to one that has not been seen before, since many proteins can have chunks that don’t do anything but act as filler. Except, when those changes affect a bit that doesn’t act as filler or make the filler suddenly interact with other proteins or structures, like making the protein fold entirely differently or become hydrophobic where it shouldn’t be, then you’re in trouble.

These modified proteins need to be analyzed as well and when their primary function in your body is to interact with other proteins, then this multimer functionality is critical. And that certainly needs much more research, as it is very, very far from perfect.

You hit on a point there I really missed out on in my comment. Sims 2 had that perfect unique character of being weird and endearing at every corner. I feel like Sims 3 frankly was losing it already and by the times of Sims 4 it had just felt entirely corporate already.

The games used to have a very delightful degree of strangeness that was only aided in by the eccentric but utterly iconic music it ran with. I was rather young when I played Sims 1, so Sims 2 is my nostalgia home turf, but I love both of their soundtracks. Mark Mothersbaugh’s music in particular just puts me into an entire space of it’s own when I hear it. Don’t think there is music that more embodies the lightness of existence than that.

I miss the times when somehow they juggled making me feel like my Sims achievements are somewhat hard won and meaningful with the silliness of having my Sim dream of nothing but grilled cheese and living next door to plant people and aliens. Incarnations of Strangerville after Sims 2 just never quite hit the note that that game managed to nail.

I can pitch in that for me at least, Sims 4 was a large improvement in terms of the UI and UX in regards to both CAS and Build Mode. It has a lot of small stuff that makes the experience much more accessible for me, personally.

It also comes with a visual style that I myself quite prefer, but this is controversial itself.

I still find myself getting bored of actual play in Sims 4 rather quickly, since things just don’t feel like they require much investment at all anymore. Being a perfect all-rounder of a Sim is utterly trivial in Sims 4 while Sims 3 and 2 back then made me feel like I had to work for it quite a bit. It may just be me being more capable, who knows.

I’ll say, I can’t say the business model of any of these games has appealed to me. I have purchased the base games for all the titles in the series, but have chosen to experience the DLC in a more budget friendly way. Yar har, et al.

It’s a pity we’ve lost a lot of things that were great that they just didn’t feel like building on. The neighbourhoods in Sims 4 feel terrible and I wish we’d have found some way to make Create a Style from Sims 3 work without bogging down the performance quite as much. At the time when Sims 4 rolled around, I was also happy to swap as my PC at the time just couldn’t handle the game running smoothly anymore, either.

Sims 4 is not really a development that will do the series good in the long run, but it can’t be denied that it has some really great changes that for me at least make building and decorating buildings feel much more fun.

Where is RTX being forced into? Haven’t seen a game where it’s not an option you have to toggle on first and it’s not like RTX is a lot of additional work for the developer, seeing how it in fact reduces the work necessary to make a scene look the way it should.

Yes, it’s stupidly expensive and not every game manages to benefit massively from it, but it can lead to some very pretty environments in games and it seems perfectly valid in those cases.

Also, some people do quite enjoy admiring the way the materials of various things end up looking. Maybe it’s not the majority of players, but some people quite like looking at details in the games they play.

Well, much of the world does live in areas where 34 degrees Celsius are genuinely problematic and where homes are not suited to providing decent living conditions.

The fact that you don’t immediately consider that temperature a problem given your personal circumstances doesn’t mean that you should assume that it’s not a problem for them. Your comment made it seem like you were trying to make light of it.

Where I live, 34 degrees is well past the point where we’d get major national emergency warnings from the government warning of the danger that the current heat poses. I’m curious how people in your area deal with 41 degrees though, that sounds brutal to me personally. I assume it’d at least be a low humidity heat?

Normality in some countries means little when it happens somewhere it’s unexpected and people aren’t used to it. Not only is acclimatization a thing, meaning that people who genuinely aren’t used to these temperatures suffer more from them, it’s also relevant how the local culture handles high temperatures.

Where it’s normally very hot or very cold, infrastructure, daily routine and other culturally influenced elements provide for relief in some form. Texas suffered immensely under a cold period that other places in the world would consider utterly unremarkable, simply because it is utterly beyond what had been anticipated.

Telling people in those situations that something isn’t that hot/cold is a bit callous.

Seems like it recognized the mod somehow being installed but, as it didn’t go through the normal process, it never set a proper date of installation. Instead it must have defaulted to 0, which in Unix time is the begin of the Epoch, in 1970.