I started my career as a plumber (exterior - digging up water mains), and currently I am a corporate IT security engineer.
While the plumbing part was absolutely harder physically, the work was overall more enjoyable and much less stressful. I was outside a lot of the time, I got to play with heavy equipment, and most of the time there wasn’t much urgency to the tasks. I never stared at the ceiling at 2 am worrying what tomorrow would bring.
In corporate IT security? There are days I don’t leave my desk for 6-8 hours straight. I feel a constant need to be connected, and I’m always planning, strategizing and worrying about the next project.
Everyone talks about the sitting at the desk thing, which is an issue, but corporate life is also much more mentally taxing. And that crap adds up over 10-20 years.
What I mean by this is that Freelancer incorporates the ring tunnel system to allow you to quickly travel between points of interest - you can easily go from one planet to another by traveling in these tunnels. What was amazing about this is that at any time you could "leave" the tunnel and go off on your own. It felt like it was something you shouldn't really do, but if you did it, and you went far enough out where there wasn't much civilization, you could encounter stuff like a wormhole by chance and suddenly end up in a completely different solar system.
That exploration is what is missing in Everspace 2 in my opinion. Everything in Everspace 2 boils down to these small areas that you fast travel in-between.
It's like if you took the original Legend of Zelda and just had fast travel between the underground dungeons without the over-world exploration. At least that's how I see it.
Not only does this apply to trade lanes but with regards to where you could go via jump gates or with jump holes.
You could think of jump gates like a space highway, often placed at the edges of systems connected to the rest of the important spots (or at least the important/civilized/non-criminal locations) in a system with trade lanes. Want to go to another system? You used the jump gates to do so.
This works fine for a good majority of accessing the systems in the game, but once you start getting to the more undeveloped, frontier systems, your ability to travel is also affected, like if you had to drive down a rough, dirt road as opposed to a tarmac highway.
You may have to forgo the use of trade lanes entirely in some places that don’t have them and some systems are not accessible via jump gates either, with you needing to find jump holes instead to reach them. In fact, to get some of the best ships in the game you’d have to access the Outcasts factions home planet which you can only do via said jump holes.
I thought it was really cool how they did that, was an effective little change in gameplay to show the development of a location and made exploring and going off the beaten track super rewarding!
Haha. I might have to move my command/alt/shift/ctrl keys down to the thumb clusters. I mostly like the miryoku layout with them on the home row, but sloppy rolls with A-T or S-T combinations (CMD-T) keep opening new tabs, and I’m getting grumpy. No violence yet. Maybe I can fix that by increasing the time before the hold activates.
And thanks to Suraj Kurapati’s own issues and config modifications (sunaku.github.io/home-row-mods.html) along with a lighter touch in my typing, typing is much cleaner now for me, with only very rare mods being inadvertently triggered. Very happy with how things are going. Now for a wireless version.
Nice work! It’s good to see a fellow Dvorak user. The Hillside keyboards have always looked interesting to me.
Have fun on your keymap journey! Don’t be afraid to experiment with different choices, especially for the thumb keys, mods, macros, combos, sticky keys, etc.
slrpnk.net
Active