pickassoreborn

I've been learing C# to help my role as a UX Designer/Developer and it's been pretty empowering to be able to affect code directly and have it play nice with Unity. Previously I've had experience coding with .css and ActionScript though the thing you'll find with coding is that the languages all share some kind of commonality - which is helpful if you have experience in one language which will aid in another. Last year I started dabbling in mobile phone app dev using an old Windows Phone and found that resources from Microsoft were pretty easy to come by - there were excellent video tutorials and - of course - Visual Studio Community. The interesting thing is that I used .xaml to help style a lot of projects on the device as well as some C# and as mentioned above, .xaml shared some commonality with .css.

Best thing to do with learning any language is to just get stuck into it and start looking for tutorials - I know there's a few tutorial samplers up on YouTube for courses which are worth looking at. Recently I got hold of a Udemy C# Absolute Beginners course - I'd consider myself intermediate, but still learnt from going back to basics. Even professionals refer to online resource like Stack Overflow to get help on issues and apps like Visual Studio have inline error checking and debugging resources to help with your coding even more. You should concentrate on a simple project like a minigame or app and go from there.

Good luck!

@herrheimlich said:

Also a big fan of these guys and their live streams - especially when Jay from RedLetterMedia comes visiting. Some of the recent Friday 13th streams have been very entertaining indeed.

I've spotted some interesting takes on AI rubber-banding in many races - especially when in first place and in the home stretch. Not much of a surprise to see the 2nd place car suddenly have a massive surge of acceleration. I guess it makes the last part of the race exciting but slightly unrealistic.

Still playing Zelda - I'm savouring it like a fine wine and taking my time with it. It's interesting that those earlier remarks from Jeff about climbing and weapon durability being a pain in the ass is now much less of an issue though progression; I'm acquring better weaponry and scaling walls is less of an issue with certain items and a full bunch of stamina rings. I'm still amazed at how goddamn great Zelda is for not only its systems, but also the incredible open world and the fact the game is pretty solid when it comes to stability. It feels like a labour of love from all involved and I'm truly thankful for it.

Grabbed a Switch today with Zelda as well as Snipperclips and Fast RMX.

Pros -

• Feels great - really weighty and confident bit of kit. Pro controller is pricey but superb - thinking this is my favourite controller I've used.
• Excellent screen display - still can't believe I'm playing something as fast and swish as Fast RMX on my lap.
• Joy Cons make the "click" sound when you dock them.
• Pairing devices is very straight-forward.
• The support pages are also great to read along with some excellent illustrations - conveys a sense of fun (remember when consoles were fun?)
• Nintendo eShop - best iteration yet. Great UX! Also goes without saying for the console UX in general. Clean, straight-forward and easy to navigate.

Cons -

• Those Joy Con wrist straps - definitely needs more instructions to avoid doing damage with those.
• Confusion in creating a Nintendo Account when I already had an NNID. The fact you can't create an account on the console itself is a major failing.
• This is probably happening to a few of us with Xboxes - the A/B button swap is hard to get used to. Keep on quitting out when I didn't mean to.
• Accidental screenshot capture - although might also be an Xbox controller thing I need to adapt for Switch.

One thing of note - I read up on the whole desync thing and perfect solution for me is to have the Pro controller for home and have the Joy Cons docked for portable hijinks. Extremely glad I managed to pick one up though.

I tried to watch the Nintendo Switch unboxing on the Nintendo Minute - as soon as they started describing the matte surface of the box, I had to switch (hoho!) off.

Hugely saddened for the departure of Drew but I'm sure he won't be a stranger and reappear on the Bombcast as a guest in the future. Good luck, Drew! Thank you for all of the joyous times!

This kind of thing is unavoidable given all the different video content Giant Bomb has put out over so many years - looking forward to seeing the new Show interface!

Looks rather nifty, that. Not surprised that this was canned probably due to the usual dopey reasons games get cancelled.

So finally I warped into a massive space battle which the new update hinted - and had a blast with it. First thing is that it took place around a vast battleship - much, much larger than your average freighter. Once you engage, new music (I think) drums up some atmosphere in the background as I weaved and tangled through ships and battleship super-structure and for the most part it was great to experience.

The downside? It's still pretty easy to target friendly ships without realising it and evoke the wrath of the sentinels. I ended up destroying all enemy ships and trying to get my damaged ass back to a nearby space station with sentinels attacking from the rear. Needless to say I didn't make it - which felt bitter sweet considering the epic space battle which I just experienced. Hopefully they can sort that stuff out further down the line. Anyone else get into a space scrap yet?

One new thing I also managed to experience is taking down a bounty enemy ship - although the unusual thing is that this whole thing took place while I was flying over the planet's surface.

Aaand I bought myself a freighter. Oh, man. You get more inventory space to play with and base building on the freighter itself. You have to talk to the general of the freighter to swap ship inventory to the freighter, though you can retrieve any items from the freighter at any time from the main menu. Sadly I've hit a bit of a brick wall with the base building as it requires a bunch of Rigogen and although I know it's found underwater, it's hard to work out which planets/systems have that particular element. Any help regarding that would be very lovely indeed.

Edit - found a reddit pic of that massive battleship!