I did not expect Duskmourn to play a part in this story at all. The thought of Valgavoth as a team principal with his followers as drivers/members is rather funny.

There are quite a few plot threads and possible endings for this story. Maybe the Aetherspark really is unstable and whoever uses it ends up at the Edge of Eternities. Or Valgavoth gets it in his wings and begins to domesticate other planes to really become the current big bad. Or something completely unexpected happens.

Whatever it is, I’m now even more interested in the setting than before.

As these precons are themed after the two returning planes (and IIRC Maro said in his blog that the “vanilla matters” of Muraganda is quite difficult to design for nowadays), it probably will be dependant on the set in question. I can see 5 precons for the Tarkir set, for example.

But yeah, 2 per set is much more feasible and hopefully the main way forward. The only downside I see is that you can’t play a full precon pod with one set.

Thanks, that could explain it. But if that’s really the cause, it’s a serious bummer. The premise of these starter decks sounds really good, but if they aren’t produced anymore and some of them get so pricy, they don’t help that well…

Have you read the story? It gives input to understand how this card could fit into Duskmourn.

Probably there are ability triggers like “when a door unlocks”. The reminder could be there to make clear that these effects also trigger when a room is cast and that it does not enter already unlocked.

They MUST capitalize as much as possible on any weekend where Max/RB are not strong, such as this one.

In a perfect world, Lando and Oscar would have worked together to defend from Ferrari and secure their 1-2 with Lando at the front. That would have been 17 points to relieve them a bit of this pressure of performing perfectly on all remaining weekends.

Of course we don’t know if Charles/Ferrari would have won either way with their strategy. But Oscar gifting Charles a Lap 1 overtake on Lando and both McLarens straining their tyres racing against each other probably didn’t hurt Ferrari.

Before today I seriously thought that Lando/McLaren had a chance at WDC, especially with Baku and Singapur still coming up. But as you said, they have shown again and again this season that they can’t execute the race weekends necessary for this to happen.

McLaren trying to win championships challenge (Impossible)

I think at this point it’s clear they don’t want to go for the WDC for whatever reason. And with Ferrari not that far behind and them blundering like this again and again, I would not be surprised if they don’t win the WCC as well.

And to be a bit sarcastic: I’m sure Lando is happy to have let Oscar pass in Hungary after they told him how important the team is for his chances.

Do you have any sources about this “unfitness” of Rust for gamedev? From my experience many people have problems with the borrow checker due to habits they obtained coding in other languages. Due to the strict enforcement of ownership rules some things can’t be done exactly like in e.g. C++, but the language offers the tools to design and implement the software in a way to work with (not around!) the borrow checker (an example would be the discussion in another comment thread).

So I’d be interested what special behavior occurs in gamedev that makes coding in Rust more difficult than for other software.

Also, I really like that you’re considering users with lower spec machines for your game. However, have you run a profiler over your software to see where there is optimization potential? In cases like this, I often use the (maybe over-used) quote from Donald Knuth:

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Many people think that with this quote, no optimization whatsoever should be considered. However, humans are often bad predictors on where the real bottlenecks are.

So yes, have some things in mind like e.g. algorithm performance for the expected input sizes. But in many cases, “optimization” done doesn’t impact the runtime at all but makes the code much more difficult to understand and often more “unsafe” due to potentially increasing UB or other issues.

For this, a profiler helps to detect where your “critical 3%” are. And when you know them, then you can start optimization work to get big improvements. This also helps to direct your most likely limited effort to spend to the important parts of your game.

Then I think RefCell is exactly what you want to defer the mutable borrow to runtime instead of compile time: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=3170c01849dc577a501ecb11dd44c5ba (source for this method on StackOverflow).

Maybe there could be syntactic sugar to use captures implicitely as RefCells inside a closure. But I would not be a fan of implicitely allowing multiple mutable borrows without any clue for that in the code.

I’m not sure how you intend to use this. When no variables are captured, the borrow checker will not have any issues with the closure method.

When you are still capturing, you could implement a macro like one answer suggests. However, IMO this highly depends on the complexity of the duplicated code and even then I don’t immediately see what the benefits compared to extracting it as a closure/function are.

This is entering subjective taste, but in my opinion this also is a feature of Rust. Especially when the closures are more complicated, it may be not as obvious if and where they are changing state (the fact that Rust implicitely mutably borrows the variables to the closures doesn’t help either).

So a solution of this issue for me would be to add the changed variables as parameters to the closures and explicitely mutably borrow them at the calls in the loop: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=78cc7947e2e0b07b54baf6e1a75a2632

I would agree with you that this increases code verbosity. However, this would be a price I’m willing to pay to help understand at quicker glances what happens inside this loop.

This seems like the most likely case. I could have sworn that I saw mentions to Arena elsewhere a few days ago, but now I can’t find anything else than this wiki page.

And as far as I understand all previous starter kits did have such codes (this is my first one, so I can’t speak from experience 😅), so a copy-paste error makes sense.

It is most likely a reference to Abigail from the game Stardew Valley. You can gift her items and, initially due to a programming quirk which was then kept as an ascended meme, she treats all her favorites as food and exclaims to eat them. This includes gemstones like amethysts.

Ich glaube, hier wäre im Zitat der Satz davor noch wichtig gewesen:

In Zukunft sollen aber Spenden eingeworben werden;

Die non-profit ruht dem Artikel und eigenen Angaben nach nicht aus dieser Umstellung her. Es wurden sogar seit 2021 keine Spendenquittungen mehr ausgestellt. Eher will sich generell für die US-Geldbeutel attraktiver machen.

Einen Zusammenhang zwischen den beiden sehe ich aus den aktuellen Informationen zumindest nicht.