I live in San Francisco on an E3 visa (Australian), but got caught out by the Schengen/UK bans and am currently in the UK where I am fortunately also a citizen. I can't go home to SF right now, and my visa expires in June. It remains to be seen whether I'll be able to renew it before then, or if travel restrictions will be lifted.
Residents on non-immigrant visas are getting a raw deal. The world has got bigger problems but this really sucks.
this doesn't really solve the problem, its a little better, however, as it STILL accepts positional arguments you can still get in trouble if you don't use parameter names.
A compile time analyzer that says "always use named parameters when calling functions with similar type of consecuitve arguments" should be pretty easy to write.
It would be better to have a foolproof API, but obviously it can't change now.
I'm not sure it's the fact that it's walkable. London is very walkable but unless it's the last train home on a Thu/Fri/Sat night and everyone is very 'merry' then talking to strangers just does not go down well.
I'm relatively new to SF but find the random interactions here beneficial in much the same way with regards to personal growth, and they seem to happen all the time. In the UK it felt like you can't talk to strangers - here it feels like you can't _not_ talk to strangers.
So not sure if it's SF, California, or Americans in general, but it's refreshing for someone who is usually quite introverted.
I'm very much introvert and talking to strangers does not come easily to me, but at times I've experimented with engaging strangers in conversations, largely because while I don't feel a need to constantly talk to people I wanted to get over my hangups about it, and I largely have. I still mostly don't talk to strangers because I find it exhausting and it doesn't interest me that much.
But when I do, in London, I've never once had a negative experience.
On the contrary, as soon as people here realise you're not trying to sell them something, or get anything from them, they tend to fall over themselves to be nice, and I've had people start pouring out their life story after just a simple 'how are you today?' to a shop assistant I'd only seen once or twice ever, because I actually waited for an answer.
I think a lot of people in London go around so starved for any kind of contact that as long as you're not acting totally creepy most people will be very open to it.
The hard thing with London is that you need to actually actively push past an expectation of not talking to people.
I actually find California more frustrating because while it's easy to get into a conversation, it's impossible for me to tell what is just pleasantries from when people are actually invested in a conversation.
NQ (NetQuake, as the original Quake is sometimes known) 'feels off' on just 10ms. Movement becomes slightly just out of sync with your input.
10-30ms is a bit optimistic, depending on how large you define a geography. Many ADSL/VDSL connections, best case, start with 5ms of latency, and often higher (say 20ms) due to interleaving. Cable tends to be around 10ms IIRC but can suffer from significant jitter which makes things worse. So for a lot of players the servers would need to be in the same city to achieve that target.
NetQuake feels excellent at < 30ms. Even higher is easy to get used to with some practice because it's extremely predictable due to a lack of CSP. And yes, the solution is to have servers within ~500 miles of players so ~20ms avg ping is the norm. Most gamers have cable not DSL connections.
> 10-30ms is a bit optimistic, depending on how large you define a geography.
Just checked my fiber connection and it has 2ms of latency. google.com is 18ms away. I'm in Portugal and seem to be routed to a Google server 400+ km away in Spain. So my memory of playing on 10-20ms to local servers in Portugal is probably accurate. Covering the US or the EU with enough servers so everyone is never more than 30ms away seems feasible. Within easy reach of a startup with just ~50 VMs across different cloud provider locations and for popular games easy for users to setup regional servers themselves.
I think the effect on other players would be pretty jarring, especially if said projectiles / explosions jolted players in the air at high velocity.
IIRC QW's client side movement prediction didn't attempt to predict the effects of, for instance, shooting a rocket at your feet/rocket jumping, which meant on high latency connections there'd often be a bit of a delay before your view caught up with where the server thought you actually were. This also applies to rockets fired by other players. Lower latency had the effect of not only making it easier to fire rockets at enemy players, it also made everything seem smoother when people fired rockets at you.
Later versions of QW created from the GPL source release have introduced lag compensation for hitscan weapons, but I'm not aware of any attempts to do so for projectiles.
Residents on non-immigrant visas are getting a raw deal. The world has got bigger problems but this really sucks.