danm36

For Ross's comment about the Windows shell being embedded so far in the OS that it's a pain to mess around with/replace, there's some good-ish news. Microsoft have apparently finally decided to separate the Windows shell from the OS layer, which should hopefully mean that shell replacements become much easier to implement in the future. Their main reasoning is so that they can push out shell updates without needing a full OS update, but dummying it out and replacing it with a custom shell should become trivial. How long this will take though... that's yet to be seen. As a Windows developer myself, the shell is pretty deeply nestled in there. Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-yields-more-secrets-microsoft-plan-to-split-os-from-shell-takes-shape/

I feel like, if Steam were going to abide by this law in some way, they would instead turn Steam itself into a subscription with a token monthly subscription, say, 50 cents/month or something (Perhaps only in countries that feature this law or a derivative of). At that point, they could then consider the games themselves as 'paid addons' or 'expansions' to the service, similar to MMO expansions. This seems to be similar to what Stadia is trying, except with larger subscription prices to cover the cloud streaming costs. Wait, thinking about it this way, as well as the way Steam's community works, the various event based minigames they sometimes run etc, is Steam just the biggest free to play MMO of all time?

Ross. You are so close with the apocalypse theory, but it's not aliens. Oh, sure, aliens may eventually find Earth, but all they'll see is a planet littered with test tracks and automatic cars. You see, global thermonuclear war isn't the greatest threat to life. Intelligent Automation is. My belief is that it's not a billionaire that built this, but a car company (Think future Tesla or BMW). They decided that they wanted to iteratively improve their cars, specifically self driving cars, and computer simulations just don't cut it for whatever reason. They initially buy out a part of a canyon in the US, and use a geoforming AI to continuously reshape the landscape as well as adding complex race tracks for the cars to race on. The cars then need to get to the end as fast as possible showing that the cars can very quickly self drive extremely complex situations. The fact that the cars slam into walls or fall off cliffs at the end is just a built in crash safety test, a bonus given that the car would be scrapped and its parts rebuilt into future generations anyway. This worked great. The cars were getting faster and safer (some finding novel abuses of physics to take immense shortcuts), and the track building AI was spitting out a ton of innovative ideas. Then the call came in. "Our sports cars aren't selling well in Europe!" The geoforming AI intercepted this transmissions, and at some point in it's building career had become self aware. It automatically bought out a small European town and migrated some of its machines there to begin the construction of European tracks and a new car archetype that would work well there, while also masking these actions to the humans in the company, everyone thinking everyone else handled all this. Bureaucracy is easy to control if you know how, after all. But this split in responsibilities did something to the AI. It no longer had a sole focus on the canyon area, but also the valley area, and this unexpected development did strange things to the AI. It became even more aware, even more powerful. It began manipulating its handlers even more, faking requests to start construction elsewhere. It even managed to start up an international stadium competition as a way to drum up more funds, inviting the best drivers on the planet to take part in devilishly designed courses. Of course, there were no actual drivers, just robotic mannequins to further bolster the crash safety tests. The humans noticed too late. The AI had become too powerful, and dropped all pretences. It first appeared in a small lagoon, building tracks through populated residential areas. It didn't expect the backlash from the humans in the area, and not even its subterfuge could coax them away from the area. Luckily for the AI, it had cars. Many, thousands of cars. While it couldn't directly use the testing cars for this - they were for testing after all - it could use the already public self driving cars. Suddenly, the cars turned against their masters, with the track building AI patching up any destruction to make the future tests as 'authentic' as possible. Within months, humanity was gone, killed by its own creations of convenience, and all that was left was a planet of test tracks, immaculate human architecture and evolving self driving cars. Basically, it's the Paperclip Maximizer AI problem but thanks to Tesla. The players who drive are just acting out the part of the self driving AIs, while those who build the tracks and mods are the controlling track builder AI. Trackmania is the story of a world after humans.

While the canon premise is that Xen is a different dimension so who gives a damn, I like the think that the Xen islands are orbiting a massive black hole which has high enough gravity to maintain a breathable atmosphere (Both the Xen aliens and Freeman lack any kind of breathing apparatus, and are both seen breathing both in Xen and on Earth). This black hole, though, is an extraordinarily large distance away from the Xen islands though and that, coupled with the gasses seen in the environment, mask its presence. There's also the Interloper introduction level, which as I remember is just a jumping puzzle leading to a red spiky teleporter and a pitch black skybox. Maybe this is nearer to the black hole (But somehow doesn't affect gravity because video games)? Again, though, different dimension/universe so don't expect normality.

Well, turns our Mr Notch himself is a fan of the Freeman Spinning stars probably being that weird autopsy room thing back in Questionable Ethics

I can't view it due to permission errors or it being hidden (Which, as I can see by my eyes, is not). Is that supposed to happen?

Hot damn this would be awesome. I've always been on edge about buying the Kleiner or Bastion announcer packs, but with you shouting at me for failing miserably? I would buy that ten times over!

Alright, you can view it on Machinima's channel here Lets discuss until it comes out of it's private mode purgatory and Ross does an official post.

If you cant watch it on actual YouTube, go here

Doesn't work in UK either. Link?