Game Maker’s Toolkit has a new video about how the Sims in The Sims make decisions. It’s a pretty fascinating set of systems that lets them take care of their needs (well, generally) but also make sometimes strange and hilarious decisions. I’m curious how the systems will evolve for the next Sims.
That’s the latest stat from Reddit in an updated version of its “Key Facts to Understanding Reddit’s Recent API Updates” website. While more than 2,000 communities remain dark, according to the Reddark tracker, many that had shut down have opened up.
Reddit said last Friday the features would arrive by July 1st, and today, the company said they’re now available in its iOS app and coming “shortly” to its Android app.
One commenter asked for updates on accessibility of the app in general. In response, a Reddit admin (employee) promised this:
I’ll be back in a few weeks with an update about the work we’re doing on the general app experience. We know these improvements are important, and this is a high priority for Reddit.
Screenshot below.
One neat thing: though the app won’t let you browse Reddit very soon, you’ll still be able to customize the app icon if you want to keep it around and looking good on your phone.
Based on a new trailer for Space Invaders: World Defense, it looks like you’ll wave around your phone to blast giant AR versions of the classic arcade game aliens. If you want to pre-register for the game on Android ahead of its expected summer release, you can do that now.
The timing for this news feels a bit weird; just yesterday, AR game maker Niantic, which has struggled to find its next Pokémon Go-sized hit, announced layoffs and game shutdowns.
The more than 2 million subscribers to the subreddit can now access it again. But the moderators of the community aren’t done protesting:
Given Reddit’s poor history of following through on promises to support moderators, we are following r/science’s lead, and intend to hold the Admins accountable to the mobile mod tools roadmap they published. Failure to deliver a promised feature on time will result in the subreddit being returned to ‘Restricted’ mode until the feature is delivered.
And that’s before the protests went down. As reported by TechCrunch:
Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its holdings in Reddit at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released Friday. That’s down 7.36% from $16.6 million mark at April’s closure and altogether a slide of 45.4% since its investment in August 2021. The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
I wonder what that valuation will look like next month.
The Reddit app-pocalypse is here, and the developer of Boost for Reddit, a Reddit client for Android, announced Thursday that the app will stop working after July 1st. Like others, the developer says that the price of the API is too high and is unhappy with other decisions by Reddit:
That price and the prohibition of ads makes it impossible to mantain free users. They want Boost and other third-party apps to move to a subscription model, where our users will have to pay a monthly subscription to use our apps to access reddit and get user generated content which is available for free on the website. In addition, the experience would be incomplete since the API will not return NSFW content anymore.
According to Undertale / Deltarune developer Toby Fox in his latest newsletter, he worked on sprites of everyone’s favorite skeleton, Sans, eating ice cream if you played the game fast enough. You can see what that might have looked like in the final game in this strange video. Honestly, I wish it had made the final cut.
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