The only thing different is the format... also a lot more.
Disclaimer: I own nothing of the links and ideas, even if some came from me. Me just compiler no @.
Blackkat FAQ. Seems too aged to work now.
DMesse FAQ. Still seems useful... maybe.

Newbie Guide

GFL Corner	Matsuda	GFC	Gamepress	GFWiki
G-Doc #1	G-Doc #2	G-Doc #3	"Official" Vid	Prio Guide
1st Ech

I've heard things about Newbie Career Quests. What is it and how do I get it?

Things that newbie commanders can use to boost their early game.
Available in Quests button>Career Quests tab.

I think I drove myself into a wall not doing things efficiently. Do I have to restart my account to progress better?

Nah. You'll be just fine continuing. Just do things better from now on.

How do I level my girls? And I heard about corpse dragging, What is it?

First is grinding them on leveling maps. Corpse dragging is a resource efficient way to grind XP. The where and how. Dragging 0-2.
Second is using Combat Reports. You can get them in the Forward Basecamp or through the Data Room. You can give them by going to the Dorm>Warehouse>Gift tab or going to your owned doll profile and tapping the + button by the EXP bar. Note that they are not affected by dummy link EXP multiplier. They give 3000 fixed EXP per report.
Last one is the EXP mode combat sim. Total EXP per run is divided equally between all dolls present.

Is GFL being phased out/abandoned?

NO.

Not anytime soon, at the very least.

When do I do night campaigns?

Best metric would be when career quests send you there. Unlock them by completing the next chapter's emergency map (i.e. 11-4e unlocks 10-1n). Remember to equip PEQs to negate the accuracy penalty and bring HGs for map vision.

Is it worth to reroll in this game?

Depends on what you value more. If you want a pretty easy time until endgame, no need. Game gives you free strong dolls. Endgame? Mostly not, since this is a game of accumulation instead of meta characters.

What teams should I build?

ARSMG first, then whichever second ARSMG or RFHG you need more, then the other one you haven't made yet, then MGSG if you want.

Technical Help

Resupply/Costumes/Furnitures

Field Map

My team says Ammo/Ration depleted.

Move them to helipad. Double-tap them. Resupply is yellow button.

I just had a skirmish and saw that my team isn't in proper formation. Can I fix it without quitting the map?

me not caring enough to paraphrase it

How do I get the gold medals in maps?

• Read the Gold Medal description in the combat summary.
  
• Never retreat your team from the field map either by losing skirmishes (losses) or manual retreating (withdrawing).
  
• Never repair fielded teams (red warning at the bottom left tells you this, don't miss it).
  
• Retreating a doll from the battle phase/skirmish is fine. Really, anything that you SHOULD DO/ SHOULD NOT DO are already listed.
  

*Retreating Support Echelons does not prevent you from gold medals, nor does support kills (shown in green +#) count towards.

Do I keep the drops if I terminate/restart?

"Recently acquired" option in the armory says yes.

Why do I get the lack of ammo/ration warning and sometimes not?

You'll get the warning when you lack either of them and when you can see the enemy.

Combat/Battle/Skirmish

Story

I missed a major event, will it come back?

6mos. after their release they get added to the Campaign tab. For collabs... hope for the best.

What's the sequence of the stories?

Just the overview.

How to read the story again? It's not available in the story playback in Index.

Settings>Game>Story Playback then play the stage again. Or just Youtube it.

Where can I read the MOD, costume, event stories etc?

Every story and details should be included here.
Cafe stories.
MOD stories.

I want to read the GFL lore. Is there any summary out there?

Video format.

Commander Wardrobe

How do I change my commander's gender so I can change their dirty clothes?

Change gender in the commander's wardrobe, which can be visited by tapping the arrow below then tapping WARDROBE, or tapping your commander name then tapping on the avatar.

What does Infinite Surprise Dyes do?

Changes the appearance of your commander's clothes, IF they can be changed, that is.

What commander costume sets do the older servers have right now?

So far, nothing that the EN version doesn't have.

I saw that commander costumes have skills. How do I level it up?

Get another costume set with the same skill.

Expedition/Forward Basecamp

What should I buy from the black market?

Consumables first.

Which dolls should I use for expedition?

Maybe not Everything related to Forward Basecamp included. GFC Guide. ATM says CLv. 20 required.

Can I deploy two or three of the same pets in expedition?

Actually, that is the method used by min-maxers regarding advantaged pets.

Can the basecamp not give expedition loots?

Only if you didn't do one. If you did and no visible loot, restart app.

Which pet corresponds to which exploration material?

Cat - Bricks/City; Dog - Buttstock/Snowfield; Bird - Acorn/Forest; Misc - Fluid/Wasteland
Then use the corresponding food that gives higher chance to visit a locale for a near 100% visit.

If advantaged dolls change mid-expedition, which one determined your rewards, the advantaged on the start of exploration or at the end?

The start of the expedition.

Heavy Ordnance Corps

How to HOC?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

How high should my Reload stat be to have an effect in attack speed?

CC guide.

Which HOC chips should I use?

Your local reddit guide. Another guide. Gampress guide.The Android version.
Found another one.

Which HOCs should I iterate first?

AGS>2B/M2>AT4>BGM. No quoting.

When do I get to unlock the whole HOC grid/matrix/board?

At full promotion. The yellow ★★★★★ one.

Which HOC can destroy buildings?

All of them. Building attack damage uses the Pierce stat.

How can I get Data Patches?

Either from the Code Refactoring menu in the Garage or getting a 5★'d HOC's Core Data.

What are Data Patches used for?

For Iterating FSTs beyond yellow 5★. They have to be level 100 and at 5★ for Iteration to be available.

Factory Production

Is there a voodoo recipe for *insert pennies here*?

Freedom of information, just add net connection.

When should I do T-Doll Heavy Production?

Preferrably during rate-ups. Low priority otherwise.

Resource Management

Theater

Theater tips?

Theater tips. Theater tips. Theater tips. Theater tips.

Do I have to save HOC charges and Fairy points for the boss?

Nope. Joins boss battle regardless of charges. Replenishes on next raid. Go ham.

What does "Settle Reward" do? It sounds ominous.

More like "Settlement Reward". Just shows you things you'll get once Theater ends.

How much CE do I need for a good score?

Just put your best stacks in your unused slots, especially in boss nodes.

I can't beat the current stage. Is this it for me?

Nope. Just fall back to the last boss node you can handle. These nodes can mitigate the "beaten stage" penalty so it's worth more than non-boss higher node.

I wasn't able to place high enough to 5★ the reward HOC. Is there another way to get their central data?

Wait for the next theater and they'll join the HOC gacha.

I'm thinking of using Landmine Fairy. Will they work?

Well yes... as a stat stick. Can't use a Strategy Fairy skill in theater mostly because you can't tap a node to activate it in the first place. Stick to Combat Fairies if you want to use skills.

Tactical Dolls

Neural Upgrade/MOD

How do Neural Upgrades work?

Gamepress. ATM. GFLCorner.

What's the Fire Control Core for?

Necessary for modding 5★ dolls.

What's the time frame for modding dolls?

From their release 'til forever.

Which dolls have a Mod in the older servers?

Unupdated as of now.

If I Mod my T-doll, is Level 100 still considered max level?

Thankfully, this is where common sense wins. In short, NO.

Where can I Mod my dolls?

Research>Neural Upgrade tab at the left.

Who should I MOD first?

Gamepress version.

Can I use duplicates to raise my doll's MOD level?

Yes, unless you're modding 2★ dolls. First, go to factory then dismantle all dupes. When you get enough cores, you can use them to raise MOD levels.

Events

Why didn't I complete "Consume 100 batteries" for the bingo mission when I EXP trained my HOCs?

Because you can get them back, that's what. It only counts when the training is finished, meaning there's no way to take it back.

Do auto-battles count for "Defeat Enemies"?

No.

What do I do with unused Keycards during the bingo event?

Keep them. You'll get 5 Calibration Tickets per 1 Unused Keycard. Points go to trash. Source: Game info tab.

Will the current event currency carry over to the next event?

No. Event currencies are for the current ones only.

When will my event medals expire?

One week after the end of said event.

Will the *insert ranking reward here* be available in the future?

Only if they rerun ranking maps.

Where can I see rankings?

Tap the bottom-right arrow at the main screen.

I wasn't able to clear the event. Will I still get the clear rewards when they get added to Campaign?

Nope. Gutted rewards compared to original. Free shit is free shit, and doll rewards gets cycled to Limited Dolls.

What's the optimal way of clearing Bingo Key Card Events?

Using the Targeted Draws to fully clear the board in one go.

Fairies

What are fairies?

ATM Guide.

How do fairies work?

GFC.

Does the Fervor talent give a 10% boost at the beginning of the battle?

0s, 8s, 16s. So yes.

Can fairies be recovered from Index?

No, unfortunately.

Third Party

I've heard of GFAlarm. Is it safe to use?

It's not modifying anything that can affect their income nor does it modify gameplay elements that would necessitate a ban. Should be fine.

Is it fine to use GFCalc?

Recommended more like.

Are keybinds bannable?

"Officially" recommended not to use keybinds. If you're willing to take the risk, go for it. Macros ARE a bannable offense, full stop.

Which emulators are good for GFL?

Mumu is the most recommended. There's also Nox, Memu, LDPlayer... Bluestacks seems to get shat though.

Any substitute for brainlets damage sim?

Github version and non-English version for starters. ATM has one too. Hycdes.

Auto-battles

Auto-battles?

Saves your sanity from painful-AF-to-grind-for-drops maps for starters.

Which map is best for auto-battles?

List of auto-battle statistics. Commentary.

What does total exp in the auto-battle completion mean?

...Not sure.

I can't do auto-battle even though I met the required CE. What happened?

Is it a night map? If it is, refer to night CE. If it still doesn't let you, increase CE, some required CE are listed wrong.

Can I get SPEQs/Limited dolls from auto-battles?

Yes, you can.

Support Echelons

Do support echelons use equipments?

Equipments, formation, and apparently costumes too are saved instances. Doll levels, equipment levels, skill levels, and chibi aren't.

I can't deploy a friend echelon. What do I do?

"Unable to deploy Support Echelon before the mission starts!". Maybe it's possible to set support echelon after starting the mission". If it's still a no, restart or check how many are allowed.

Dormitories

How do friend batteries work?

From QnA.

Why aren't my dorm batteries appearing?

Either it's because it's not their time yet or that you should check your surplus batteries.

Which dolls appear in which dorms?

Echelon position corresponds to dorm positione i.e. Echelon 1 in Dorm 1, Echelon 2 in Dorm 2, etc.

What are all the available pets right now?

If the pet you're looking for isn't here, it might be a Cafe Costume Story reward.

Others

I didn't get *insert reward here*. I checked my inventory but they're not there. How do I get them?

Have you checked the quests? What about the mail? If you did and they're still not there, either restart or wait for a few days.

How do I get a higher success rate for logistics?

Levels.

Would the equipment I'm enhancing get bonus points if I used an enhanced fodder?

Apparently no.

Which SF units are considered dolls/machines/armored/unarmored?

Note that Jupiter Cannons count as unarmored machine type.

Will there be problems with switching between two devices regularly?

Only if you think that manually logging in is a problem.

What's the Double Jupiter formation?

M4 MOD II + self-buff RF (usually IWS) + 3 HG (usually ROF buffers).

I can't access the new map even though I already cleared the prerequisite map.

Beat it again.

When will dorm battery, daily gift, friend battery reset?

Clock for your every need. And ranking updates one hour after Kalina's Daily Gift.

How can I play GFL if Apple Store doesn't have it?

Use Android, use emulator, use VPN, use jailbreak.

How does the rescue station work?

I claim no ownership.

What're the rewards for the Defense Drill?

Also includes the things you'll fight.

When is the anniversary?

May.

What does the Download Data button in the settings do?

Basically fairy and equipment texture, and dorm-related stuff.

How do I bind my account?

Settings>Manage Account>Bind to your preferred account.

How do I kite using an emulator?

Keybinds are favored.

Is it fine to use green equips?

Advised to use if lack gold ones. Do calibration only on gold ones for efficiency. Otherwise, fine to level them up.

How do I fill up the Enemy Index?

Just fight them. Win or lose, we get them.

Where can I get doll/fairy costume art?

Updated to CN servers.

How do I remove HOCs from Target Practice?

Tap on them again.

What does "Event" mean on the left side of the mission select screen?

Combat Missions: If there is a new night map, SPEQ rate up for X-4n.
Combat/Campaign: 1.5x EXP
Logistics: Great Success Rate Up
Combat sim: All simulations unlocked.

Which should I prioritizein the Data Room, Combat Reports or Special Combat Reports?

SCRs primarily because you can just EXP sim, corpse drag, and auto-battle the dolls, and also because basecamp sells far more CR than SCR. Note that you'd need 5000 SCRs to fully level a fresh HOC.

How do I maximize the efficiency of my RFHG echelon's ROF?

...I'll just leave it here.

What do advantaged dolls in combat map mean?

20% FP boost for AR, RF, MG. 20% EVA boost for SMG, HG, SG.

Limited-only Dolls

★★★★★

DSR-50	Five-Seven	TAC-50	OTs-14	CZ-75
AK-74u	AUG	Ballista	R93	JS 9
Lewis	HS2000	M82A1	Desert Eagle

★★★★

KLIN	UMP40	Honey Badger	Cx4 Storm	PP-19
KSVK	M1895 CB

★★★
Arctic Warfare

Type81R	RPD	Super SASS	MT-9	Ots-44
Type59

Operation Cube

Z-62	6P62	62 Shiki	ASh-12.7	ARX-160

Deep Dive

AR70	SSG 69	F1	EVO 3	HK45

For more info...

Nice Things To Have

Vertical Messages on Dorms and Chat.
CE Fromula.
Chibi Rips and Character Arts. And the how to's.
GFL Loading Screen Splash Arts.
Pre-mission flavor text.
tehcavy rips of Division CGs and art.

Unobtainable

Anything collab.
Some Kalina costumes.

• Gems and Fireworks

Some doll costumes.

• UMP45 Griffin jacket.
  
• M1895 KFC.
  

Season 12 Update: What’s New

· Updated mods section to reflect new mod structure
· A few updated thoughts on Stasis classes
· Significant update to Warmind Cell section, including information on Seventh Seraph weapons
· New recommendations for defensive and offensive mod loadouts
· Recommendations updated for Season 12 mods
· Weapons recommendations
Part 2 of this guide is here: https://www.reddit.com/DestinyTheGame/comments/k5fzne/moving_into_highlevel_pve_guide_for_beginners/

Before We Get Started

Why you should trust me

I’ve got a few hundred raid completions, including flawless completions of the post-year 1 raids, and I’ve soloed each of the dungeons flawlessly as well. But also: I’m not an amazing player; I’d say I’m above average but I am nowhere near as talented as some of the people whose videos you can watch online, or indeed who are in my clan. I am someone who has to work hard to get good and who makes up for a lack of talent with stubbornness and a willingness to learn from my mistakes.
So this advice is not for the amazing D2 player. It’s for someone who’s just starting to move into raiding or is thinking about working on raid triumphs, or soloing a dungeon for the first time, or maybe dreaming of earning the Conqueror title. My main goal is to help you become a better teammate—to know what weapons, mods, and armor you need in different situations, and to learn how to use them. Hopefully I’ll answer your basic questions and give you a starting point from which you can learn more.

What do I mean by high-level PvE content?

1. Raids: multi-encounter structures that require team coordination and adaptation to/knowledge of various raid-specific mechanics (ball throwing, buff swapping, tethering, cranium charging, etc.)
2. Sublight challenges: master and grandmaster nightfalls, master nightmare hunts, solo 1280 lost sectors, 1280 empire hunts, or any new content where players are likely to be 0-25 light levels below the enemies they face. This content includes raids and dungeons in their initial season of being offered.
3. Solo challenges: attempts to accomplish 1 and 2 by yourself or with a suboptimal team (like doing a raid with three people instead of six).

General Advice

As you begin to push into more challenging content, one lesson is key: dying is not good. That’s kind of a strange lesson to have to learn, but the reality is that Destiny does not punish you much for dying in ordinary content. That makes it easy to develop habits that will serve you poorly in raids and other situations, where dying can lead to a cascading series of mishaps that will cause a wipe or an extinguish mechanic. So one of your main goals as you start playing in these situations is to try to get better at not dying.
The other thing to begin to learn—and which the game does not really force you to learn—is how to make weapons, armor, and ability builds that synergize both internally, in relation to your own character, and externally, in relation to your teammates and the environment. Understanding, for instance, not only your role in a given raid encounter but the roles of your teammates, and knowing what classes or weapons they’re running so that you can communicate with them about what to do next, are both critical to becoming a stronger team player. And understanding how your armor and weapons, your mods and class abilities, all interact is critical to your being able to maximize your impact as a solo player.
All this advice is focused on building up the basic sets of gear that will help you through difficult PvE content. I have probably forgotten many things, and of course you can always do things with an off-meta or weird loadout, either because you’re a masochist or because you want to challenge yourself. What’s below focuses on the basics.

Part 1: Armor and Armor Mods

In general a good PvE build will be a fully masterworked set of armor with high recovery and discipline or intellect. (Resilience sounds good but has only a very small impact on PvE combat.) For raids you might end up using melee abilities, but for sublight content you will mostly be fighting at range, and meleeing only in a panic. Grenades have a wide variety of important uses (hence discipline), and supers (and super energy) are also always useful (hence intellect), so spec into one of those if you can. In general armor stats matter much less in PvE than PvP; your armor mods will almost certainly not be focused on other things, which we’ll discuss in a second.
For now it’s worth noting that high-end PvE content tends to feature a pretty limited set of class and subclass options, along with a certain number of key exotic armor pieces.
Hunters: (1) Top or bottom tree void, with Orpheus Rigs (especially top tree) or Sixth Coyote or Wormhusk Crown (the last two for solo especially). (2) Bottom tree solar with Celestial Nighthawk for one-shot boss damage, mainly in raids. (3) Middle tree solar with Assassin’s Cowl for heal on knife melee, for solo content. (4) Stasis, especially for solo content where the grenades and debuffs help with champions.
Titans: (1) Top tree void, for the bubble, along with the Helm of Saint-14 (in some circumstances), or (2) middle tree void, for the barrier, with Ursa Furiosas for orb generation. In some situations, particularly when using Xenophage, Titans will run with Actium War Rigs for the reload benefit.
Warlocks: (1) Top tree void with Contraverse Hold gauntlets for frequent charged grenade use, or (2) Bottom tree void with Nezarec’s Sin, for a devour-focused build especially useful for soloing content (in which case you would want to be running a void energy weapon). (3) Much more often, middle tree solar with either Phoenix Protocol for super regen or Lunafaction Boots for reload benefit, for almost any content involving groups. (4) Middle tree arc with Geomag Stabilizers for some high-end content like grandmaster nightfalls.
Season 12 has added stasis subclasses to all three groups. One of the huge advantages of all stasis supers is that they allow for significant crowd control—for slowing and stunning enemies to take them temporarily or permanently out of the fight. This is true for supers, melees, and grenades. Of the three stasis classes I find the Warlock and Titans supers a bit weak for high-end content, but the grenades and melees to be very strong (especially when paired with the correct seasonal mods).
Note that the most common subclasses for group content are the ones that boost the entire team (Titan bubble, Warlock well), protect the entire team (Titan barrier), make allies invisible (Hunter smoke grenade on bottom tree), or control/manage and debuff enemies (Hunter tether, the stasis classes). Solo players tend to focus intensely on survival abilities—the Warlock devour, the Hunter invis, or the healing melees of top tree void Titan, bottom tree arc Titan, or top tree Arc hunter.
The other thing to say is that roaming supers—arc Hunter, solar or arc Titan, top and bottom arc Warlock, middle void Warlock—are generally not good in high-end PvE, especially if you’re sublight. They simply don’t deal enough damage quickly enough to be viable. This kind of content emphasizes one-shot supers like Celestial/Golden Gun or Nova Bomb for damage, and supers like the well or Titan barriebubbles, for protection.
Must-have exotic armor: Hunter: Orpheus Rigs and Celestial Nighthawk (for group play), Sixth Coyote (solo). Titan: Helm of Saint-14, Ursa Furiosa, Actium War Rig (group), Synthoceps (solo). Warlock: Phoenix Protocol, Lunfaction Boots, and Contraverse Hold (group or solo), Nezarec’s Sin (solo). Of the new Season 12 armor exotics, three have some utility here: Icefall Mantle, which can allow a Titan to tank a single champion (at 10-15 light levels below, at 25 this becomes quite hard); Necrotic Grips, good for Warlocks doing low-level add clear in raids, and Precious Scars, the Titan helmet that gives an overshield when rezzing—very useful in grandmaster nightfalls where a rez can often be a deathtrap.
In season 12, changes to the seasonal artifact mean that only solar and stasis subclasses have the ability to stun Overload champions with their grenades; this means that those classes have suddenly become more viable (and void less dominant) for high-end PvE work. More on that later.

Armor Mods

The key difference between high-level PvE content and ordinary content or PvP content is the importance of armor mods. Where PvP builds tend to focus on statistics like Recovery or Mobility, PvE armor tends to focus on damage resistance.
The Destiny mod system is unfortunately pretty bewildering. There are many many choices and it’s not clear how much any of them matters. So let me cover a few things—all of these now updated for Season 12.

The first mod slot

This mod slot allows you to boost your character’s basic stats. For group PvE content, you’ll want to focus on Recovery (which affects how quickly your health begins to regen when you’re not being hit), Intellect (which increases super regen speed), and Discipline (for grenades). For solo content that relies heavily on a single ability to survive—like the Hunter’s dodge, which regens faster with high Mobility, or the Titan’s healing void melee, which regens faster with high Strength—you will want to focus on those things specifically.
In the previous seasons this mod slot could be used for resistance mods, which are central to many PvE builds. But that has all gone away with Season 12, which means that this slot is less interesting, and less important, than it used to be.

Legacy, Combat, and Raid mod slots

These should be focused on one or more of the following goals, in order of importance:

1. Resistance mods (on chest armor) that reduce incoming damage
2. Mods that stun or disrupt or otherwise affect champions (arms or class item)
3. Raid-specific mods (final mod slot only, and only on raid armor)
4. Charged with Light and Warmind Cell mods (fourth slot)
5. Ammo Finder (helmet) and Ammo Scavenger (boots) mods.
6. For grandmaster nightfalls in particular, finisher mods (mainly Special Finisher) that go on your class item and allow you to trade super energy for special ammo drops.

Resistance Mods

Resistance mods come in four types: energy, melee, sniper, and concussive dampener. They all go on your chest armor. Melee reduces any damage done within 5m (does not have to be melee damage) by 25%. Sniper does the same for damage done from 29m or farther. Concussive reduces splash damage from grenades/boomers. These mods stack, with the second mod getting you to 40% damage resistance. The same goes for the energy resist mods.
Since you only have two slots, you will probably want to change them depending on the activity. For Gambit or really any content where you’re at or above the appropriate power level, melee/concussive or melee/melee is quite strong, since you’ll probably be mixing it up with mobs on the regular. For grandmaster nightfalls and other sublight content, snipeconcussive is a good place to start.

Anti-Champion Mods

These mods come in two types: weapon-specific mods, which go on your arms, and grenade or melee mods, which go on your class item. These mods come from the seasonal artifact and therefore change each season (which is why I have to update this guide).
Most high-end content will have two kinds of champions, so you’ll want to go into encounters making sure that you or your fireteam can stun, disrupt, or stagger the appropriate champions with the appropriate weapons.
For season 12 these mods are: Unstoppable Schwarzschild Condenser (2-Cost, Class Item), which allows Void melees to stagger Unstoppables, and Thermal Overload (2-Cost, Class Item), which allows solar and stasis grenades to disrupt Overload champions.
Another very useful champion mod in season 12 is Surge Eater, which restores your grenade whenever you stagger or disrupt a champion. You can combine this with Thermal Overload to stun Overload champions and immediately get your grenade back, allowing you to stun them again as soon as that’s possible.
In general I would say that the most obvious/basic combo this season is Surge EateThermal Overload… the melee mods are going to be hard to use because it’s going to be hard to get close enough to champions (in sublight content) to actually land a melee hit. The same is true for the Unstoppable Shotgun mod, which is also very highly priced at 7 energy.

Raid and Other Activity-Specific Mods (5th slot)

These include mods that affect Last Wish, Garden of Salvation, and the Deep Stone Crypt, as well as Nightmare Hunts on the moon. For Last Wish Taken Barrier and Taken Armaments are both incredibly useful; for GoS you really only need Enhanced Relay Defender.
For Nightmare Hunts I find that only the Nightmare Breaker mods really come in handy; the others not so much. You can read more about them here: https://www.reddit.com/DestinyTheGame/comments/dkpssk/breakdown_of_the_nightmare_mods_banisher_breake.
In Year 2 and Year 3 armor, these mods go in the fourth slot. Year 4 (Beyond Light) armor has a fifth dedicated slot for these mods, which frees up the fourth slot for other things.
Early analysis of the DSC mods suggests that for most six-person content they are not really worthwhile. See here: https://www.reddit.com/DestinyTheGame/comments/k2mi9s/quick_look_at_the_dsc_raid_mods_minus_suppresso?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Charged with Light Mods

The CwL system works as follows: certain mods (colored in green) give you stacks of CwL, up to a maximum of two stacks. Other mods (yellow) spend those stacks. And a third set of mods (white) changes the number of stacks you get or can have (increases your stack maximum, up to five, or gives you two stacks instead of one each time you get a stack).
The basic system is this: (1) Get CwL (2) Spend CwL. The easiest way to get CwL is to use the Taking Charge mod, which gives you charges for picking up a light orb. Combined with a masterworked weapon that drops orbs on fast kills, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll spend most of the time CwL. You can also get charges from mods that give charges on weapon damage (kills with a certain weapon give you charges) or action triggers (breaking a shield, doing a finisher). For Season 12, Abyssal Charge, in the sixth row of the artifact, will give you CwL for void melee final blows.
So now you have charges. How should you spend them? One option is to look for damage resistance or damage buffs. The best damage resist mod is Protective Light, an absolutely crucial choice that gives you 50% damage resistance when an enemy breaks your shield. I use it almost all the time. Useful damage boost mods include High-Energy Fire (generic 20% damage buff till you kill an enemy), Lucent Blade (for swords), and Surprise Attack (for sidearms).
Other CwL mods will give you chances to drop special ammo, return grenade or melee energy, heal you on grenade kills, and more.
For lower-level PvE content I tend to use damage mods like Lucent Blade or Surprise Attack. For scarier content I’m almost always on Protective Light.
If you have room for mods that increase your stacks, Stacks on Stacks (gives two stacks for each one you earn), Charged Up (increases total stacks by one), and Superpowered (increases total stacks by two) are all useful here.
TL:DR: if you do nothing else use Taking Charge (green) and Protective Light (yellow), and get more fancy once you understand more.

Warmind Cell mods

Like Charged with Light, this system involves creating an opportunity to affect the gameworld (by making a Warmind Cell), and then using that opportunity (the Cell) in a certain way. You create a cell by getting a kill using a Seraph weapon (which now are world drops; Ikelos 1.2 weapons also count as Seraph Weapons). Once the cell exists you can either pick it up or shoot it. Shooting it causes it to explode, and a number of WC mods increase the range of that explosion or add effects to it. Picking up the cell will allow you to throw or, or will (with a Warmind’s Light mod) Charge you with Light, or have some other effect.
Here are the Seraph weapons currently available. Names include “Seventh Seraph” except where noted:
Kinetic: auto rifle, hand cannon
Energy: smg (Seraph and Ikelos), sniper (Ikelos), sidearm, shotgun (Seraph and Ikelos)
Heavy: machine gun
When I’m playing I’ll tend to run an auto/shotgun/Xenophage loadout for max solar explosion damage, unless I’m running a void Warlock, in which case I use the sidearm (void) with Nezarec’s sin. For some explosion-oriented content I’ll run the hand cannon, Jotunn, and the machine gun.
The most basic way to use these cells is to create them and then shoot them. A mod like Global Reach will then give your cell explosions far greater range and effect. But you can also combine numbers of mods to create some pretty cool synergistic builds, as you see here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2020/03/27/a-destiny-2-solar-inferno-warlock-warmind-cell-build-for-more-room-clearing-fun/#5ec7d0c01c30
You can find a guide to all the Warmind Cell mods here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kqaf2MdmUm1Ll6jCh-Rt0k6j2-nYCwf5lbbRLtXyr7M/edit#
But here are the basics: Solar mods generally affect cell explosion damage; Void mods create buff and debuff effects that do not rely on exploding the cells; and Arc mods create effects upon mod pickup.
The key to Warmind Cell is to understand that cells, once created, belong to everyone. Effects from shooting or picking up the cells are pegged to the person who picks them up or shoots them. So if Person A has Rage of the Warmind on and shoots a cell created by Person B, who does not have it on, then the explosion will be affected by Rage of the Warmind. And if Person B has Warmind’s Protection on, they will get 50% damage protection from mobs standing near a cell created by Person A—even if Person A does not have that mod on.
What this means that an entire fireteam of 6 people can coordinate Warmind Cell mods to create synergistic effects. I describe some of those below.

Recommended Builds

Add-clear Explosion Fun Build
Global Reach (1 neutral), Wrath of Rasputin (1 solar), Rage of the Warmind (5 solar), Incinerating Light (3 Solar), Reactive Pulse (CwL, 3 Arc). Ideally paired with a weapon that causes solar splash damage (Ace of Spaces, Sunshot, Jotunn, Xenophage, Martyr’s Retribution; the Warlock exotic chest Chromatic Fire also causes explosions on kinetic precision kills) and/or a solar subclass.
This build involves creating cells and then using the explosions from the cells to create more cells, killing everything within 30m (that’s the range of the explosion, Rage of the Warmind doubles that). Wrath of Rasputin creates more cells from solar splash so you’ll be making cells from your non-Seraph weapons and your class abilities (if you’re running a solar class).
Incinerating Light charges you with light when you kill three or more things with a cell explosion, and the Reactive Pulse mod creates a 30m Arc explosion when you take damage while surrounded—essentially destroying red-bar enemies all around you.
This is a build for content where you’re higher or even in power level with your enemies; it’s super fun. In a perfect world it turns your character into the walking center of a series of explosions, and feels awesome.
Defensive Build
Global Reach (1 neutral), Wrath of Rasputin (1 solar), Taking Charge (CwL, 3 neutral), Protective Light (CwL, 2 void), Warmind’s Protection (2 void).
This build has a number of variations depending on whether you’re running a solar class and/or coordinating with a team. A maximum defensive build swaps out Wrath of Rasputin for Cellular Suppression (2 void); you generate fewer cells but the cells you make help more, since shooting cells when you have CS on will send out a stunning pulse that will stun red-bar enemies for 10 seconds. Warmind’s Protection gives you a 50% damage buff against enemies near a cell.
If you have a full fireteam with multiple people using Warmind builds you can coordinate some of these buffs (making sure a couple people have Cellular Suppression on, for instance, or having someone else run Grasp of the Warmind (3 void), which allows you to pick cells up and move them to better places.
Here's a list of some fun builds for you:
Neutral, good for anything

1. Taking Charge, Protective Light, Global Reach, Wrath of Rasputin, Fireteam Medic
   
2. Taking Charge, Protective Light, Stacks on Stacks, Global Reach, Wrath of Rasputin
   
3. Taking Charge, Protective Light, Reactive Pulse, Supercharged, Stacks on Stacks
   
4. Global Reach, Wrath of Rasputin, Fireteam Medic, Warmind’s Protection, Cellular Suppression (this is the build I use most often in non-challenging content)
   

Aggressive

1. Global Reach, Wrath of Rasputin, Rage of the Warmind, Fireteam Medic, Power of Rasputin
   
2. Taking Charge, High-Energy Fire, Reactive Pulse, Supercharged, Lucent Blade (sword) or Argent Ordnance (Rockets) or Surprise Attack (sidearms)
   
3. Fusion Rifle or Shotgun-focused build: Supercharged, Quick Charge, Heavy Handed, High-Energy Fire, Charged Up
   
4. Grenade-focused build: Taking Charge, Firepower, Heal Thyself, Supercharged, Stacks on Stacks
   

Defensive

1. Taking Charge, Protective Light, Global Reach, Wrath of Rasputin, Warmind’s Protection
   
2. Taking Charge, Protective Light, Reactive Pulse, Global Reach, Warmind’s Protection
   

​
Part 2 of this guide, on weapons and the current metas, is here: https://www.reddit.com/DestinyTheGame/comments/k5fzne/moving_into_highlevel_pve_guide_for_beginners/

I spent the last weeks downloading every single app offer on Swagbucks UK to sort through the ones that are, and are not, worth doing. These are all available on Swagbucks 'Discover' page.
If this list helps, and you are not on swagbucks already please consider joining using my referral link here for an extra 300SB when you make your first earnings, worth £3ish, (non ref, no bonus ). If there's anything I've missed please comment!

• Board Kings Android lvl11 - took 1 week, add the max friends, check the Boardkings subreddit for help adding friends
• TikTok - SB for downloading tiktok, joining, and keeping on your phone for 2 days. Easy.
• Elvenar Academy, reach Magical Academy - took 3 days with active gameplay, however can be done 99% passively with very little gameplay whatsoever, as you just need to wait until you have enough books to upgrade the research tree to magical academy.
• Lords Mobile: Kingdom Wars - took about a week to upgrade to 14, active gameplay and regular checking in..
• Club Vegas: Online Slot Machines with Bonus - about 3 days, leave on minimum spins and leave your phone running. Semi-passive.
• Pop! Slots Level 26 - about 5 days, leave on minimum spins and leave your phone running. Semi-passive.
• King of Avalon - about 1 week, join a powerful guild.
• Harvest Land: Farm and City Building - About a week of active gameplay. I'd only advise this if you actually somewhat enjoy the game, as this one can be a slog if you're not enjoying it
• Star Slots - Lvl 110 - this one was long, required leaving phone running spins overnight, unsure if worth the time/effort.

For each of these games there are usually free coin link aggregate websites, or links on the apps official Facebook group - Just google '[Game Name] free credit/coins'. You will find this for many of these games, and it will level you up faster. It is also worth checking any subreddits dedicated to the games, as there are usually helpful redditors about.

• The Walking Dead: Road to Survival (requires 99p spend, but conversion is worth over £2 in Amazon vouchers). I used free Google Play credit I made from Google Opinions app for this. (these 'purchase required' offers are actually a good way to convert your unwanted Google Play credit into over double their value in Amazon vouchers).

Avoid: Trumps Empire (worst game ever, took too long), King's Throne Game of Lust (took too long, and was gross), Game of Kings: Blood Throne lvl22 (almost impossible without purchases, level 20-21 takes 6 months without power-ups apparently), War Games: Commander lvl21 (seems easy enough at the beginning, but then becomes almost impossible without purchases, you won't find out until it's too late)
Note: Make sure to compare between: ayeT, OfferToro, Revenue Universe etc. as some of Swagbucks Partners offer more SB than others for these apps and it changes constantly. Offers come and go, and fluctuate in value all the time. 130SB=£1 in Amazon vouchers at the best conversion rate (converting to £10 vouchers). So figure out if something is actually worth your time.
When you reach the required level: Take a screenshot as proof, close and reopen the game (I read this updates your progress on their servers), and wait 1 week for SB to credit, do not delete the app right away, wait until credited. If no credit after 1 week, contact SB support with the screenshot. Have never failed to be credited, but have had to chase up a couple of times.

Source | Previous table
Note: Some of the question-taker's answers were also removed along with corresponding questions, and they have not been recovered below.

Questions	Answers
What is a typical day in your life like?	I get up at 4:30. I watch some YouTube, do some email, work on my writing or similar. I head to the gym at 7, shower and start my day around 8. I work in my home office or shop/lab, code and work on stuff, throughout the day. I could be busy all the way through to 8-9PM if I'm wrapped up in something, but not usually that busy.
the below is a reply to the above
You get up at 4:30 AM? Wow. Have you always been a morning person? Are other people on your team morning people so you decided to start early? I’m asking this because it seems like a lot of successful people wake up very early and work out before starting their workday.	No, I never was until my neck injury. While recovering I couldn't sleep more than about 4-5 hours max and just got into the habit. Since it was so productive for me, I just kept it up!
the below is a reply to the above
Thanks for sharing. I wish you good health.	Thanks!
Did you create Robocopy, or know who did? I use that very regularly and much more efficient than using the GUI.	The secret dirt is that Robocopy was first written by MS colleague Kevin Allen, and he started sharing copies around in 1994ish. From there, and after many iterations and heavy-duty real-world feedback, robocopy ended up in the Windows Resource Kit, and then later merged into the core Windows package. In the beginning, Kevin was a very experienced programmer, but new to the Win32 API; so robocopy was one of his projects to educate himself about Windows programming. Later on, ITG used robocopy to routinely transfer many gigabytes of data around MS global offices, every night; it became very robust and battle-hardened. It is a long time now since Kevin was involved in the robocopy source code at all; it is maintained by the Windows team.
Did you create Microsoft Clippy? Will Clippy ever make a come back?	Noooo... but I was around at the time. We have Clippy now in the form of Siri and Google Assistant and Cortana, but there's no picture. That's all it was though, an early digital assistant.
I read on a Microsoft devblog that when windows got ported to 64bit pinball 3d was not ported because of bugs and the developers not being able to understand the code/not having enough time. It's a shame, because it was such an awesome game and I spent many hours playing it as a kid. Was the code messy due to being ported from Sam and do you think it could have been ported given enough time and expertise?	Basically what I did when I ported it was to maintain the central code "logic" loop of the game unchanged so that it would play just as it did on other platforms, and then "hooked" functionality coming out of it and going into it. So I rewrote the drawing code that did the actual drawing, but not he original code that wanted to do the drawing, if that makes sense. I changed the how, not why.
	That meant, though, that at the very core of the game was a big bunch of code that we didn't touch or monkey with, because it 'just worked'. Apparently sometime after Vista, in 64-bit, there was a collision detection bug in Pinball.
	From what I read, Raymond Chen looked at it and got the general idea of what was wrong but didn't want to touch the fragile old code. Raymond's one of the best debuggers I've met, so it wasn't a question of expertise but of time and resources.
	Anyone on the team could have trivially fixed it I'm sure, but it sounds like no one "owned" the game anymore after I left, and it was more than just a random little bug to fix, it would have required a dev to be assigned to it, and there likely was no one free.
What is your favourite colour please?	Well, I have four cars with blue interiors and I'm wearing a blue shirt and a blue watch and blue jeans. So probably blue.
If my son expresses interest in serious computer programming, where is a good place to start? C for Dummies? (I'm joking and I know terribly little about the topic, only enough to know backend is where it's at)	Python, then Javascript. Build a website!
Hi! Just wanted to say, I still use MS-DOS regularly, on many of my older machines in my collection. Also Win3.x, Win9x etc How do you feel about computers becoming extremely dependent on 'cloud' services? I can still set up an old machine, install an old OS, install old software and have it all up and running within an hour or so, while modern software essentially requires cloud services for literally everything. What happens to that software once some random person out there decides that they don't want to support it anymore? Those cloud services go away? Are you concerned that future generations will not be able to experience anything from this era of computing? Considering computers were designed to be able to continually run the same software over and over as necessary, how can that apply if the bulk of this is lost when the cloud disappears? Or maybe this isn't a concern at all, and I'm just crazy...?	I already have hardware that refused to work because the cloud service that backs it has been abandoned or the company has gone out of business.
	I worry that things become dependent on externals that aren't reliable long term, and I know what you mean... but fortunately Windows, once activated, runs perfectly well offline forever, really.
I'm a fresh graduate with some experience and reading the knowledge you all have in the comments has made me feel very inferior. I only started coding in my university and I don't do it in my past time. Am I doing something wrong? I do enjoy programming but I try to keep a work life balance. Is that a thing in software development? Also did you ever approve a pull request by Bill?	No, as long as you DO enjoy it when you're doing it, you're fine. There's an entire "spectrum" of people in the world and some of us have "special interests" with which we're a little obsessed, and tend to "hyperfocus". I'm one of those people but it's by no means the only way to do it!
	I knew many great programmers who (a) didn't program in their spare time at home and (b) didn't continue to program recreationally after leaving it as a job.
	If you can work regular 40 hours a week as a productive programmer, you'll be set!
the below is a reply to the above
Thank you so much for this! Are there any tips you'd like to give to fresh graduates like me?	If you get a job at a large company like Microsoft, and decide you're not happy, try moving INTERNALLY before looking for another job. You could work for 5 different companies over your career and they could all be Google, for example. Culture goes through and through, but every team has its own.
the following is a later reply	If you can put in a 35-40 hour week of solid work, you'll be fine. There are three buckets: the obsessives, like myself, who work as much as they can. Then the solid pros, who can turn out a ton of quality stuff in 40 hours. And then you have the slackers who surf Facebook at work and read reddit when they should be coding. As long as you're not in that group you're fine, and a balance is important. It is indeed a thing the successful people achieve it. It's not about how much code you write, it's about how much MORE time you spend coding than you want to, and that should be zero!
	Lots of people are in careers they don't practice in their free time, in fact most. So it's a bonus if you're that way, but most people are NOT, so don't despair! You're normal!
If you're still answering, how much of the original Task Manager still lives in the modern Task Manager? Anyway, thanks for the AMA! You're a legend!	I don't know for sure, but from looking at the app, and not the code, I'd expect about 60-70% of it?
Hopefully you’re still taking questions. I get a lot of crap by my peers about command line. Power shell is badass but I’m a cmd guy myself. I know we can do pretty much everything that cmd does in powershell and more, but idk. I like what I like, you know? Where do you stand on this?	Honestly I'd be a CMD guy as well, but I'm really starting to lean towards using bash under WSL.
	Have you ever looked the help for SET and FOR under CMD? It's where we put every piece of extra functionality, since you can't add keywords that might collide with people's script names, etc...
I didn’t use windows after windows 7 for about 5 years. Back in august 2019 I finally rebuilt and upgraded my old PC and installed windows 10. The task manager in windows 10 is so amazing and powerful. I would imagine it’s something you wanted to implement in the 90s but didn’t have the tools or time. Right?	Indeed, I'm a big fan of the current task manager and what they've done with it! I wish there was a Dark mode, I wish it handled file lock tracking, and I've always got wish lists, but they've done a great job with it!
CIA_grade_LSD: Why does the file transfer time remaining progress bar start at like 15 hours and then drop to two minutes and then stick at 99% for five minutes? (An exaggeration I admit. I know you and your colleagues do your best, but I am curious why this hasnt gotten much more accurate over the years.) androidethic: Yes, we need a justification as to why the windows file operation estimations are so random/inaccurate!	They're the worst estimate out there, except for all the others.
	Mac is just as bad. It's a hard problem. I worked on it briefly, and to help solve it I kept track of the average time it had taken for a whole range of operations, like creating, moving, deleting, renaming a file, or moving a block of N bytes, etc. Then multiply by the number of those operations that remain. But even that can be wildly off in degenerate cases.
Do you ever get laid?	Not since your Mom kicked me out.
Why has windows task manager never had a true force quit?	End Process is a true force quit.
What was your team's opinion on linux at the time? And what's yours opinion too?	I like it a lot, I was an early adopter back in 1993-1994 and tried to contribute some code for parsing IIDs, though I don't know if it's still in there. I hope it is, becaue then I'd have code in Windows, Mac Office, and Linux. I'd be everywhere :-)
	Now that we have WSL 2, though, I do most of my Linux work under Windows!
How much of the original DOS code is still in modern OSs?	None whatsoever. In fact, the only commonality at all would likely be the PGM header on disk still traces its original layout to MS-DOS.
	But rest assured there's NO code from MS-DOS inside NT, for example. It was a complete clean-slate design.
Was it you responsible for the atrocious naming conventions in WIN32?	Your username is dhbt12 :-)
What current developments in the world of operating systems are you watching with eager anticipation? File systems and LLVM seem to be the rage right now, at least from where I sit.	Containers are cool to me, like Docker! That's really the biggest development of recent years I think!
the below has been split into two
* What's your compensation?	- Zero, since I'm retired and there's no pension.
* Have you met Bill Gates?	- Yes, a number of times. When I was first hired he had me and a few other recent hires over to his house for burgers and beer and it was quite nice!
What's your opinion of free and open-source software? Broad, I know. I saw your response about WinRAR saying you like to license your software, but do you hold a similar sentiment in tossing a coin to the devs of foss software you might use?	I love it, I just don't have any illusions that making a piece of code open-source somehow leads to higher quality. It makes it more available to me, which is great, but in reality, on a typical project there are going to be 1-5 people who really look at the code and then a dozen the sort of know it to make changes, and then consumers of the code who just call it. I don't see that those 1-5 people are any brighter than the people who'd be responsible for a product in a proprietary environment.
	Now at a certain scale, like the Linux kernel maybe, you've got enough eyeballs looking at it that it makes a difference... that I could see!
What's the idea behind SYSKEY?	As I understand it, its function is to encrypt something called the SAM (Security Account Manager) database. This database stores hashes of user passwords, and is used to authenticate users when they supply their password.
Hey Dave, what do you think the future of the windows OS will be? Is a cloud-based OS possible, potentially limiting computer hardware?	As a total guess, I imagine our experience will eventually be just a UI device locally and everything else happens in the cloud on server hardware. So as you say, at some point your client hardware is "good enough" and then companies compete on the merits of their back-end services.
Do you know Mike Toutonghi? , he used to work at Microsoft, now he started a new blockchain project called The Verus project.	By name and email but not well enough to recognize him at the mall today, I'd say!
If you had to redo windows, what would you most like to change? What do you regret most? What do you like most?	The Format dialog needs to be redone! And Task Manager is likely my favorite...
Android or iPhone? Beer or wine? Ginger or Mary Ann?	iPhone. Beer. Can't it be both? It's an island, after all.
the below is a reply to the above
I figured the iPhone since you have Mac's in the lab. I figured beer also since you can't shift a 4 speed with a glass off wine between your legs. Nice garage BTW. However i wasnt ready for both, it's an island after all. Touche. I tired to compile my first bit of code from GitHub today. I failed miserably. It would install but wouldn't run. I'll keep at it.	Make sure you're in a clean empty folder. Try the code from Episode 11, I just used it so I know that works! Clone it and build it in PlatformIO with no changes, and that'll tell you if your dev environment is set up and working properly.
I cant connect to my cloud, can you download it for me?	I'd love to, but I'm out of paper. Can you fax me some?
What amazes you the most when you compare technology from the 90's to now?	GPUs!
Is it wrong of me to only ever end task manager with itself?	Software Seppuku.
Probably too many comments and very late to the game, but here it goes! I teach Comp Sci at an international school. Would you be willing to give a small webinar talk to my students? They would just be so happy to hear from you as would I! Anyway, regardless, thanks for the many, many hours of enjoyment!	Maybe after Covid, but I'm not a big fan of Zoom lectures! I just did one for the U of R, though, and if you check my channel there are two that I have done for the University of Regina that you might find useful for your students...
	You can email me at [email protected] with info about the school and what topic you would like, etc, and I can see if it's a good fit for schedule and topic!
What computers do you personally at home? Windows? Linux? Mac?	All three!
Why are processes able to hang to the point that task manager is unable to kill them?	At that point there must be kernel corruption or something going on in a driver or well below the surface, I guess. If TM can't kill it, no one can, and it's truly hung.
Did you ever meet the genius who wrote the Space Cadet Pinball theme song?	No, who wrote it? Matt Ridgeway?
Hi Dave, loved the videos on task manager Do you have any thoughts on modern C / C++ replacements like Zig and Rust (respectively)?	I think its cool if memory access is indeed provably safe but you get code nearly as optimal as C, but I've got to learn more about them!
Did you like the windows phone?	Never had one, started after I left, but I heard nice things about the very last one before it went away...
Hi Dave, Why doesn’t File Explorer automatically refresh to show new files in a folder, such as downloads? Seems such an obvious glitch! Also, how do I get the login screen on Windows 10? I push space, esc, mouse clicks, enters... and nothing happens. Then poof, it shows up. Why is this so unresponsive?	It does.
	In fact I know it does, because I have a patent on some of it!
	Not sure why yours wound't be working, your system might have a third party piece of software that has broken File System Change notifications.
Was the time on Microsoft fun?	It really was. I miss the people and the environment, and I especially miss lunch!
i’ve found 15+ 0-days in the shell32 API when doing a vuln analysis of explorer.exe. You can read my work at https://hyp3ri0n-ng.github.io! What’s it like to write really buggy code :P?	I sense that high school was hard for you socially.
I’m sure I remember owning the pinball game as a separate standalone title before it was in windows? Can you explain the deal with that? Or am I misremembering	Plus Pack!
You're a legend, can't believe I missed this. I'll post this here, if you don't answer it I'll have a good copy/paste for later. What are your thoughts on the sethc.exe / accessibility exploit? It's worked as far back as XP, and still works today in Windows 10, last time I checked. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well. Is checking the integrity of OS files before they're executed just not a priority?	https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/222193/description-of-the-windows-file-protection-feature
Why ctl+alt+delete?	An IBM engineer (David Bradley, I think) picked that combination to serve as a hardware reset. You can't fake it, you can't get around it. The PC knows it's really C_A_D when you do it.
	Why that particular combination, you'd have to ask him!
What's the furthest you've gotten into a project that ended up not panning out? Was it something you really wanted to get working or were you relieved to move on? I'm a student studying engineering right now and reading these answers is extremely motivational; your passion for computers is awesome! Thanks for doing this.	I spent about a year on an early prototype of Media Center that I was attached to but got killed. They did do a Media Center later, of course, but I had started 2-3 years ahead, but couldn't get funding.
Why has the Windows she'll been so bad for so long?	I don't know, but I'll see you in he'll.
Do you still work at Microsoft? Do you still use only Microsoft stuff?	No retired in 2003. I use a lot of MS stuff, but my main laptop is a MacBook and I use a Mac for video.
Do you own any Apple products or use them for work?	I own all the Apple products except the new headphones, pretty much! I'm retired now though!
Is the workculture of Microsoft at the time very different than now? How much does Bill Gates' leadership impact the company? What changes had his departure bring?	It is indeed very different under Satya than Bill, and the changes are widespread. But I left before Satya started, so I'm not really qualified to speak on them!
What are your thoughts on the age old trick of "Opening Task Manager to stop programs from freezing or being slow", is there some merit to doing that or is it just a simple coincidence?	Total coincidence, honest! Task Manager, at that level, is just a windows app with a message pump. It's existence doesn't do anything that solitaire or paint would not also!
	No, but there's a great meme with the Star Wars general about how apps work better with Task Manager open because "fear will keep them in line".
	It's purely psychological, though. TM doesn't do anything by running the calc or paint wouldn't also provide!
Did you work on Windows ME? If so.. What the hell happened to that OS that made it so terrible? I had kernal errors every week.	Nope! My work on the shell would have been backported to it, but I didn't work directly on 98 or M3, other than they used our NT version of the shell code by then I think.
Did you make any contingency for when Task Manager stops responding?	Yes, lots! Check the video the "Secret Life of Task Manager" for more dirt, but there are MANY things it does to help prevent you ever being stuck with no task manager:
	https://youtu.be/f8VBOiPV-_M
If not asked yet If this is correct, as posted in Regina awhile ago iirc I saw a post saying you’re from Regina, Canada Is that true? If so that’s awesome to hear that someone from my local area made one of my favourite no internet game and the basic fundamentals of the most used OS for computers	Yes indeed, that's me!
Why is the documentation for WPA so bad and scarce? I have to refer to Bruce Dawson's years old blog to decipher some of the columns names. Are there any plans to add a comprehensive manual for it?	Windows Product Activation? Columns? Sorry, are you using WPA for something else?
Can I intern for you?	If you know how to write a Material-themed admin-style Dashboard in React, can consume a REST api in doing so, and have some experience with iPhone apps an Unity, then maybe yes!
	I was actually looking for an intern this past summer to write a phone and web app...
how did you assured code quality and readability? did you use static analyzers/ unit tests or what?	Check out the "Secret History of Task Manager" video for a description of "NTStress" and how we nightly tested, but there were professional testers, every line of code was code-reviewed, and so on.
	My understanding is it's quite different now, though!
When you say you worked on Windows activation, was it for more than a day?	That's an odd question. Can I ask why you think it might have just been for a day? Clue me in to what you're hinting at and I'll fill you in on the rest!
Why do I need to press 3 buttons and 1 click to open task manager?	Because you choose to fail!
	You can do it with two clicks or one simultaneous multikey press!
Do you think WPA was a success?	I think so! It helped stem casual piracy, wasn't "cracked" for at least 18 months after we released it, and didn't unduly inconvenience users too often, I hope.
	We were really aiming for the 95% case. Trying to catch the 95% of piracy that is people sharing keys, reusing their own keys on too many machines, getting keys off the web, that sort of thing. I think it accomplished that.
How did you feel about windows 8?	Same way you do.
Who invented the blue screen of death?	John Vert. He said:
	"Back in 1991 I wrote the original code for Windows NT 3.1 that put the video screen back into text mode and the routines to put text on it (and a truly gnarly bit of code it was!). I used the white on blue colors for two reasons.
	* The MIPS workstations we were using for the MIPS port had firmware that presented a boot option screen in white on blue, so it made sense that the bugcheck screen would match.
	* I (and many others) were using SlickEdit as our text editor and at the time its default color scheme was also white on blue.
	I believe Mark Lucovsky wrote the original code that dumped a bunch of text to the screen. This was a bugcode and a stack dump, resulting in a bunch of useless hex numbers which product support would occasionally dutifully transcribe from the customers and include in the bug report.
	There was no "typesetting" as we used standard VGA text mode on PCs.
	I don't know the history of the Win3.1/Win9x blue screens, I think the fact they were the same color is just coincidence."
But can you make sick stick figure death match animations in QBASIC?	No, but I do a mean Bill the Cat ascii art!
How could you?	Sometimes you just gotta say WTF.
	https://youtu.be/a0p7rJsYisw
What are you working on these days?	Mostly on programming tutorials and nostalgic "Windows War Stories" on my youtube channel:
	http://www.youtube.com/c/davesgarage
[removed]	That's me! Went to Miller high, worked at ISM and SaskTel during college, etc!
Here is my question. Im a cuban teenager (17) and my dream is work is be a developer. What kind of mini works i can do for learn programation before University?	Do as many little program tasks as you can, and make sure you complete them, and SAVE them for the future so you can look back!
	Try writing a little program to convert back and forth between roman numbers and regular numbers. Or fund the next highest multiple of 32, or count the number of it bits set in a byte. Or the real difference in seconds between two dates, that sort of thing. Real problems that you have to solve will help a great deal as they act as sort of a "forcing function" to make you get to the very end.
Do you like macaroni & cheese?	Kraft Dinner all the way. And I eat with little packets of designer ketchup.
Wait...you didn't built paint? I'm out.	Nope, sorry. But I owned calc for a while, back when we were adding infinite precision math to it!
Hi, If Microsoft wanted to, they could make it impossible to activate a pirated copy of windows using 3rd party software. So why aren't they making it impossible?	Not sure what you meant by 3rd party software. Are you saying Windows can actually be activated even if pirated? That'd be news to me, but anything's possible.
What was the criteria for “tilt” on space cadet pinball? I played that game for hours as a kid.	Spacebar would add a little "action" to the table, if I recall, and you could strike a balance of adding so much so often... but too much (ie: smash space too much) and it'll tilt.
Did you ever have to interview anybody at Microsoft? If so, what types of questions would you ask back then? What was your interview like going into Microsoft?	Oh yeah, I've interviewed dozens or hundreds I'd bet. I'd like to ask "calibrating questons" like "Give me a funtion that takes a number and returns the next highest multiple of 32" or "count the number of bits that are set in it" to see how their basic coding skills were.
	Then I usually liked to give a problem I was working on to see what it'd be like to actually work with the person.
	I interviewed three times, once as an intern, once as full time, and then once to move to the Shell group. Each as an all-day affair, and very arduous. You have 2-3 hour long interviews in the AM, then a lunch interview, then 2-3 more hour long interviews in the PM, then a supper thing, etc... it's a long day!
ImRandyRU: What have you done for me lately? Edit: it was a joke... dabigchina: NT is the foundation that all modern windows OS's build on, so a lot. Zeusifer: I guarantee some of OP's code still exists in Windows 10.	Most of it, to be honest. As a guess I'd say 75% still there.
Hey man, I had a wicked dump this morning and now my toilet is blocked. Any idea's?	More roughage in your diet.
It was so satisfying to push the 3x5 disks into the slot and have the button pop out, and make a vroom vroom sound. Ah, the old days. What's your favorite MS-Dos game from the 90s?	I actually came to the PC after MS-DOS, so I wasn't a DOS gamer... I suppose in those days it was primarily C64 and Amiga games. I do remember being fond of Sim City, like everyone, but also of a game called "Seven Cities of Gold"...

Source
Note: Based on observing question-taker's profile, he is still taking answers, so two parts may or may not completely summarize the AMA.

Questions	Answers
Space Cadet Pinball, how does it feel to be the most played "bring your child to work day" game? I remember it fondly.	The best part is that I used to "teach" computer lab when my kids were in K through 6th grades, back when Pinball was still included and well known. The kids could care less about anything technically hard or interesting that I'd worked on, of course, but Pinball gave me instant street cred with them.
	Especially cool was being able to walk over and enter a secret code that only I knew that would turn on all the cheats, like infinite lives. They thought I was a wizard at that age!
	The code, by the way, is "hidden test" without the quotes! Then various keys do different things, you can click and drag the ball around, and so on. Google it for the gory details!
	I always like to point out that I was working with a full set of original IP from Maxis, so I had nothing to do with the design of the game, or it's art, etc... that was all done! My contribution was volunteering to port it, including a partial rewrite from asm to C, to work on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, IA64, ARM, and so on, which was actually a lot of work. But I got it into the Windows box, which is how and why everyone knows it today. But all credit for the gameplay and so on goes to Maxis, all I did was not screw it up in that case!
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To add a bit of detail re Space Cadet Pinball: we built Space Cadet originally at my company Cinematronics and did a deal with Microsoft to ship it with the Plus Pack that accompanied Win 95 and Win 98. While it technically didn't ship w/ Windows, the Plus Pack had something like a 25% attach rate and pinball wound up on most systems anyway. Microsoft actually had an option in our original contract from 1994 to ship it with the OS itself or the Plus Pack. Maxis was our publisher for the subsequent retail version, and later bought my company. More germane to this thread: I believe Dave's port entered the picture a few years later, after Win 98, and was likely critical to pinball continuing to ship on later iterations of the Windows OS (i.e. 32-bit). I definitely appreciate the time he put in to give the game extra years of life on the Windows platform. Kevin Gliner, game designer and producer for 3D Pinball, and co-founder of Cinematronics.	Pleased to FINALLY put a name to the game design! You should update the Wikipedia article for the game, as I think it lists Matt Ridgway, who might have been sound? I've been crediting Maxis for years, not knowing the role of Cinematronics who was who. One thing that confused me: wasn't there a company that did video games in the 80s called Cinematronics? Any relation? Star Castle, Armor Attack, etc...
	As for timing, this likely between the Win95 and Win98 Plus! packs. It was very early on at least, and shipped at least in NT4, and perhaps earlier in "SUR" release that ran atop NT 3.51, but I don't have access to any source files to check dates!
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I keep meaning to fix that wikipedia article, there's a significant number of people that worked on the game and for some reason only Matt (an independent sound guy who did some excellent part-time contract work for us) is listed. There's also a lot of confusion about the timing of various releases and the companies involved, and who owns it now (EA). I actually have all the original source, although no rights to any of it anymore. Hard to say on the timing of the port. I was working in Redmond in '99 when I got word someone had done an NT4 and Win2000 port (I'm assuming that was you), so that was the first time the port showed up on my radar. I have a more confident memory (and contracts, email, etc) of all the events related to how pinball came about and the first couple years after it was released. I like to think pinball was the very first Win95 game (it was fun to watch Gates and Leno pretend to play it on stage at the Win95 launch event), but of course there were other games that shipped with the launch too. You're correct, there was an 80s arcade game company called Cinematronics that went out of business long before we started in 1994, and someone had let the trademark lapse. How we came to be called Cinematronics is a long story for another time...	NT shipped in 96, so the version I did for it would have been done in 95. I remember working on it about the time Win9X was shipping or in late beta. I could be wrong on that part, but Nov 95 would be my guess.
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Damn dude, porting assembly? You are a legend!	Thanks - we actually did all of our debugging in assembler. We didn't have any source-level or line-level debugging at all (except as noted below). So you'd connect to a machine through an ssh-like tool and then, if the symbols were right, you could get a callstack and inspect memory, disassemble functions, and so on. But since we spent much of our day staring at assembly, I became reasonably adept at it.
	I say "reasonably" as I was lazy enough that I would compile the components of interest to me with Visual Studio PDB symbols so that, if I could repro on my own machine, I could then source-level debug it. That made me fast at some stuff that others were slow at, but I likely never got as proficient at asm debugging as someone who never had an alternative. I had a developer friend named Bob whom was an ntsd (our debugger) superstar, and he'd write expressions inside of breakpoints to fire conditionally, that kind of thing. So I did learn that trick, but I'm sure there were dozens I just never knew.
	That all said, we rarely if ever coded in assembly. All coding was in C/C++.
	In the Pinball case, parts of the original were written in hand-coded in asm by Maxis, like the sound engine, and wouldn't have had a hope of working on anything but an x86. Rather than be lame and not have sound on the RISC platforms, I opted to rewrite that stuff in C so that it was portable.
	The RISC platforms also bring their own set of problems like 32-bit alignment for data. And being on Windows NT (now just "Windows") meant being Unicode, but fortunately there isn't a TON of text in a pinball game!
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boytekka: damn, the only time that I did assembly language is when we tried moving a small machine through the printer port.. I miss those days LordApocalyptica: Only time I did assembly was when I wanted to make a game on my TI-84, and decided that I didn't want to. I miss those days too.	First game I wrote in assembly I did in a machine language monitor on my C64. You can't (easily) relocate 6502 so to add code you'd have to jump out, do stuff, and jump back... Crazy!
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If I can ask a question, how does it feels to go from coding with basically zero help to working with modern IDE and code editors that give you a lot of infos, tips, error notifications and so on? I've started programming like a year ago from zero, and I don't think I could be able to program like y'all did 20 years ago or more. Thanks for doing this AMA anyways!	You're very welcome! The progression in tools has been amazing, really. I remember HESMON and my first machine language monitors for the PET and C64, then really nice ROM dev environments, and CygnusEd for the Amiga... all the way up to PlatformIO and Visual Studio Code.
	My most recent "WOW" moment was adding a line to my lib_deps line in platformio, which magically included the library being developed at the URL on github. So you can link to online projects... cool.
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Just wanted to say thanks for the Alpha port!	Alpha AXP was by far the hardest to debug! "Branch later, maybe"
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I just want to thank you for my first experience with pinball. I am now a top 100 competitive pinball player and own 16 pinball machines.	That's cool, which do you collect primarily? I was always a fan of Williams, and am FB friends with a couple of their older devs like Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, and Eugene Jarvis (but I should be careful, Bill Gates warned me never to name drop :-) )
	I have a Black Knight 2000 as my own machine right now!
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I have a wide range. Some modern Sterns like Metallica, Jurassic Park, Tron and Iron Maiden. Older Bally’s like Frontier and Fathom. 2 classic Bally/Williams Dr Who and Attack From Mars. Plus a few EMs. I like them all! Attack From Mars was the game that got me into the physical world of pinball. Collecting has been more of a recent pandemic thing since I can’t go out and play. I miss traveling around the country playing in big tournaments. Oh yeah and Steve Ritchie is quite the character. You must meet him some day. I’ve met him a few times and each time has earned a place in my pinball stories I talk about with friends.	Congrats on the collection, that's a nice set! I've never met Steve - I did meet Larry DeMar in vegas. I was playing at a slot machine and he was next to me, and had a name tag, and I was like... "Excuse me sir, but does the word Robotron mean anything?" and it turned out to be him!
Asking as someone pretty new in software development, did you experience impostor syndrome? If so, how did you deal with it?	My first couple of years were very productive, so I wasn't insecure about my output, but even so I definitely experienced imposter syndrome. I think most people who achieve aspirational roles do... I have a friend who was in the NFL who describes the same feeling.
	Being as productive as your peers is sort of the pre-requisite, and if that's true, then remind yourself that when you were in fifth grade, the eighth graders on the playground seemed so old and mature! It's odd in that I started in 1993, but to me anyone who started in the 80s was a "true" Old Timer and remains so in my head to this day. And similarly I'm no doubt the grizzled veteran to people I hired a few years later.
	I know when I started I felt like the dumbest guy in the room, and by the end I felt like the smartest guy in the room, and I don't think I'd gotten any smarter along the way. So it's all relative and perception. Well, that and the stock caused some serious attrition of the "really smart"!
	I remember visiting Google a couple of years ago in the bathrooms they had posters that read "YOU ARE NOT AN IMPOSTER", and info about seminars and so on about it, so it's very common! I wish I had a concrete strategy for you, but I don't other than "It's commonplace, and I bet there are a ton of resources on the Web. Don't be surprised you're experiencing it!"
What would you encourage someone to start learning today related to your field?	I'm learning React at the moment. Let's face it, the web development experience is utter nonsense. So I kept hoping for something that would make it clean, and easy to make components, and to work with REST apis. So I went looking for a solution. Then I read about Angular, and it seemed like "too much" to learn for the sake of making a SPA.
	But React seems understandable enough and solves a ton of problems with web development, not the least of which is being able to intermingle HTML and Javascript (via JSX).
	As for languages, I'd probably start with Python. I prototyped a complicated LED system a couple of years ago and it was admirable what it could accomplish for an interpreted language. And you probably have to know modern Javascript as well.
Now, would you be rather interested in working for windows, macos or linux ?	I work in all three. For my own projects I write to the ASP.NET Core 3.1, and that's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I originally wrote my LED server to it under MacOS, then moved it to Windows with about 5 minutes of changes (related to the consoles being somewhat different). Then I moved it to Linux, where I made it work and then containerized it with Docker. I got it up and running on my Raspberry Pi and in a Windows HyperV and under WSL using Ubuntu. To me that kind of stuff is super cool.
	Once I had it working in a Docker container I deployed it to my Synology NAS, which is some variant of Linux. So my NAS runs my Christmas lights!
	I love stuff like that when it works!
	My main workstation is a Dell monitor that has an internal KVM. I have a 2013 Mac Pro connected to it, which is maxed out and then has an eGPU and eRAID setup via Thunderbolt. And then I have a 3970X Windows PC connected as well, and I can jump back and forth with a button.
	I spend most of my day in Windows now, unless it's video related, in which case I use Final Cut Pro.
Hi Dave, thanks for the AmA! In regards to task manager - often times I have to click the 'end task' button more than once to get the frozen program to actually close. Why is this? Thanks again.	Remember that, at least in my day, End Task is different than End Process. The former sends a "Please close yourself" message to the app, and if it's hung, it should then detect it and so on, but doesn't always. Imagine the app is in a weird state where it's still pumping messages, it's not hung, but it's broken. End Task likely won't work.
	That's when you need End Process, which tears everything down for you. The substantive difference is that the program gets no choice in the matter and no notification. End Task can be graceful. End Process is brutal.
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What about when the task manager stops responding? We need a task manager manager to manage the task manager. Lol	I've never seen that happen, ever, unless the system itself or the window manager is bunged in some way. Your puny Task Manager cannot save you now.
	Then again, nothing can, save a reboot.
What cool new tech are you excited about?	Right now I'm actually trying to productize something of my own, a system for doing hidden, permanently-installed LED holiday lighting. It receives the effect entirely over WiFi, or it can fall back to built-in effects and so on. Quick demo from 4th of July here:
	https://youtu.be/7QNtj2hZtaQ
	I'm done the software on the ESP32 and on the desktop, and working on the phone app now. So the next step is to find someone to manufacture the actual addressable LED strip fixtures. They'd be like under-counter LED strips that snap together end to end, but weatherproof, and with WS2813 LEDs internally.
	In terms of stuff that I'm just benefitting from, the latest CPUs from AMD are amazing. I have the 32-core 3970X and the raw computing power is hard to comprehend. That you can buy a 32-core chip for $2K (or 64-core for $4K) amazes me! Now I need to learn AI or something to make use of all of that hardware...
After the rise of WinRAR, did you continue to use the trial or did you pay?	From: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
	Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2006 3:14 PM
	To: Dave
	Subject: Your BuyRAR.com Order #: 122229610 License Key
	​
​	Attachments: rarkey.rar
	My WinRAR order number, from about 15 years ago, is above. And my WinZip license is much older than that. As someone who (a) made their real living in shareware and (b) worked on Product Activation, I'm the kind of guy who always licenses everything! You'll notice in my PlatformIO/"Arduino" video I even walk people through how to contribute to show how easy it is. I love good, cheap software.
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Would you download a car?	My wife's Tesla downloads update all the time. I'm sure they're just as complex as the mechanical components of the car, so in a sense, we already do!
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But... why did you keep the email?	I have a folder on my OneDrive called Registrations where I keep copies of license keys and registrations. So it was handy. Looks like Telix is my oldest registration from 1989 or so.
Also what was Microsoft really like back in the 90s? As a user of MS-Dos 3.30 forward till now. I’m assuming there has just been a whole tide of changes. Was double space really as funny on the dev side as it was on the user side with the slowness and the pufferfish as a logo :)	I worked on Doublespace in that I wrote a thunking layer that could live in low memory and then moved the rest of the code into the HMA. I didn't work on the compression, but odds are the guy who did is reading along right now, I bet!
	I don't really know if it was faster or slower than its contemporaries like Stacker. I wrote one for the Amiga, though didn't get it quite finished before starting at MS, and it's an interesting and hard problem to do well. At least on the AmigaDOS it was, FAT would be a tad easier.
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I mean for its time it was great. But back then floppy disks and 10M RLL-MFM drives were more the norm. It was actually awesome to have it included IN the OS instead of having to buy stacker. I think this is why I get so much of a kick out of every phishing AD that says download this to double your RAM. It just takes me back.	RAM Doublers are a whole 'nother ball of wax. Raymond Chen, in his blog "The Old New Thing", covers them well. If I understand it correctly, in the most famous case the code to do the actual memory compression was disabled, so it literally did nothing, but did it with overhead.
	On the other hand, I note that current Windows, the HyperV, and even my Synology NAS offer "Memory Compression" now so perhaps there's a time and a place on modern cpus and systems.
I'm an Engineer and regularly use MS Office to produce reports and calculations. Subscript and Superscript are something I use all the time. For at least the last 15 years, in MS Word I can hit "Ctrl +" & "Ctrl Shift +" to make the highlighted text Subscript or Superscript. But MS Word sucks for calculations, so I use MS Excel. But MS Excel it's about 8 clicks to make something super or subscript, and the hotkey technology hasn't made it in. So my question is, why was MS Office 2003 the best version of office that was ever produced?	I retired in 2003. Coincidence? I'll leave that one up to the scholars.
If you could go back and change anything about Windows without consequences or worrying about backwards compatibility, what would it be?	Format! I wrote that and since I was used to using the Visual Studio Resource Editor for dialogs, but couldn't in this case, I just laid out a stack of buttons and labels, content in the knowledge that a Program Manager or Designer would come up with a proper design for it that I would then code up. But somehow, no one did, and no one has for 25 years! So it's a big tall stack of buttons like a prairie grain elevator.
Ever met Bill Gates or have an interesting personal experience with him or another higher up you can share?	Yes, even when I was a new college hire he had the 30 of us or so over for beer and a burger in his back yard. It was a nice touch and quite informal. Obviously, at some scale, it wasn't 30 people anymore and they couldn't continue it!
	Ever play the video game Star Castle? It was like that. Concentric circles of people standing around BillG each armed with what they hope is a question or comment so clever they'll stand out in some way!
If every software you need would be available for both systems. Would you use a Linux distribution or Windows 10?	Right now I'd use Windows 10 because, if the same client software is available, I'd do it on Windows simply because I have a new 3970X w/ 128G of RAM and triple RAID0 SSDs plus an Optane stick. All for about 1/10th the price of a Mac Pro. Since the hardware is so cheap and powerful, it's really hard to resist.
	Even if all the client software were magically available, or Parallels for Linux were a thing, I'd stick with Windows because I haven't seen a Linux UI that I really like. I know everyone has a favorite... if there's an actually good and attractive one that works out of the box, let me know what distro, and maybe link a screenshot!
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Give Mint 20 with Cinnamon a fair shot! I have struggled for years trying to like a Linux distro but never found one that felt and looked right which I think had been the reason Linux hasn't been adopted mainstream but Mint20 with Cinnamon is possibly it..if not its very very close.. Has awesome multi-desltop winodws feature and you can make it basically just like Win10.. Would love to know what you think of it! 20.1 BETA just dropped and has a super interesting feature called Web Apps that needs to be checked out asap! Heres a link to the 20 long term support version.. some people do not like the Minto Logos/Backgrounds out of the box..keep in mind there are a ton of nice ones included and many more you can get quickly if that's something you don't like..what is really neat is that you can make Mint20 look like any OS.. there are themes that make it exactly like MacOS I just have not personally tried those out yet. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3928	Thanks, I'll check out Mint!
I am looking at my copy of Douglas Coupland's "microserfs". Although it's fiction, do you think it resembles the Microsoft Culture of the time?	Lord no, that book bugged me. On the one hand, they're a bunch of pretentious and precocious, annoying kids. I worked on a team (NT) where the tone was set by Dave Cutler and the guys he brought over from Digital, so it was rather different. On the other hand, it's such a big company that odds are those four main people DID exist somewhere in the company. Just not around me!
Why was (is) a monolithic registry preferred over distributing the settings in a number of files like Unix? Why did windows remain single-user focused for so long when Unix was multi-user since the 70s? In my understanding, if there is just one user, that user has to be admin which opened Windows up to security issues. (I don't even recall any sudo-like privilege escalation in pre-XP Windows.)	Windows NT was multiluser from birth. And there's nothing about the Windows architecture that requires users to be admin; the reality, I think, is that most apps started out in Win95 land and just didn't work if they were run as non-admin, so people ran as admin because the apps required it.
	We couldn't just break all those apps and say "Oh well, get better apps" so what you got was a convention of people running as admin. But again, there's no need to. Same as Unix.
	The one exception is that under Unix it's easy to sudo and so admin work briefly. I wish Windows had (or exposed) a simpler mechanism for letting me run as a non-admin credential and escalate when needed. I know UAC does the same thing, more or less, if used cautiously.
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Yeah NT did eventually get around to fixing it. My question was really about the earlier systems, because I think you said you worked on MS-DOS? Since there were existing systems with multi-user and privilege escalation even before the first Windows, somebody must have made a conscious decision to not include that functionality.	MS-DOS was only the second or third OS I can think of for a Microprocessor (CPM, SCP, then MS-DOS). What existed for mainframes and minis didn't matter much in the memory limits available on the desktop.
What was the inspiration for Space Cadet Pinball and what is your high score?	I don't know, I wasn't the designer, the inspiration part happened separate, I provided the perspiration part! I was actually pretty good at the game, since I was literally paid to play and test it... but I don't know the score, sorry! I do have the world high score on Tempest, though! But not Pinball :-)
1. What's something super useful within Task Manager you think even seasoned Windows users don't know they can do? 2. What do you think a future version of Task Manager should be able to do?	I think CTRL_SHIFT_ESC is a surprise to a lot of people!
	I think Task Manager needs Dark Mode, and a way to show who has locked what file or device so you can kill the offender when needed.
Why is it that I can still find dialogs in Windows 10 that were clearly built using 16 bit Visual Studio 97 version?	This should explain it. When you achieve perfection, you leave it alone:
	https://youtu.be/l75a8CvIHBQ
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Please for the love of God, use your Microsoft contacts to stop the snipping tool from going away. It's literally perfect but they keep trying to discontinue it.	One Compound Word: SnagIt. It's what you need to make your life complete.
	After my time, but I heard the new snipping and history that's being built in to replace it is pretty good. It better be if they kill snipping tool!
Thanks for task manager! I use it for so many things. How do you feel about newer versions of Windows de-emphasizing the control panel in favor of their new settings app?	I'm all for it if they made sure they had 100% coverage of all settings. It's sort of weird that in this day and age, with an R&D budget in the billions, we still have a mix of new control panel and old property pages. But I like the new stuff if it covered all cases!
Hello Dave! Why does Windows have such a rough time transferring a lot of small files? Is it a limitation of NTFS?	It's not Windows, it's all operating systems. Part of it is filesystem related:
	Imagine copying a file takes 200ms of overhead plus 10ms per MB. Coping 100M of large files will take 200ms + 1000ms = 1.2 seconds.
	Now imagine you have 100M of 1M files. Now you have 100*200ms + 1000ms = 20000ms or 20 seconds. 20 times as long for the same amount of data.
Did you ever get a chance to work in/on OS/2? I stuck with OS/2 until 2005/2006, before moving onto Linux, and would love to hear any opinions and stories you might have.	I didn't! I used OS/2 a bit but never had a chance to work on it. Many of the people I worked with did, though... but if OS/2 were Kevin Bacon, I'm one degree removed.
I had waited more than 20 years to ask this... What the fuck is Trumpet Winsock?	That's what you need to use TCP/IP on Windows before it was included in Windows. You're welcome.
What was the idea behind having "generic" activation keys starting in Windows XP that would activate any version, it was said they were for [educational purposes], did Microsoft provide them to 501c3/non-profit schools, or was there a different reasoning?	I'm not sure what you mean by "generic". I remember retail and oem, but what was a generic key?
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There was a set of keys that became public knowledge partway through XP life that appeared to activate unlimited machines as valid, though added a banner "For Educational Purposes Only". I remember trying it back in the day and always wondered what the intention was that was important enough the key activations were never blocked. [I did have multiple legal keys, but curiosity killed the cat and I had to swap one to the "educational" key to see for myself, lol]	I don't actually know! But I can surmise that if it was displaying a banner down in the bottom right corner of the screen, it knew it was not licensed and was likely limited or time-limited in some way. Unless you could actually ACTIVATE them with that key, which would surprise me.
How does OLE still work? I can't think of anything else that complex and old that still runs. We've got a legacy piece in our application that uses it and I can build against it using .net 4.0, in an Azure pipeline and deploy to windows 10 hosts and a piece of 90s technology still works perfectly. How and why?	It was complex, but pretty well written and very well tested. That's not to say there aren't a lot of bugs outside the common case codepaths, but I bet if Office used it, it's pretty solid, and will be forever.
Other than your personal phone number, did any Easter eggs make it to general availability?	There was one in the Win9X shell, but I think we removed it for Windows XP and later. So not that I'm aware of!
Have you ever wanted to make a "sequel" to Space Cadet?	There are actually two other tables available in the original Maxis game that should work, in theory, but I think Space Cadet was the best of the 3, so...
Were there ever any 3rd party edit/change to shell that made you think, "Why didn't we think of that?"	Not offhand, but "Stacks" on MacOS where it tries to rescue your mess by grouping things by filetype (Images, Docs, etc) is pretty clever. So that's something I wish we'd though of!
Have you worked at all with Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich?? Also, what was your initial response to Process Explorer /the Sysinternals stuff??	No, but the SysInternal guys are geniuses of the highest order, so far as I'm concerned (and I say that based on their products, no knowing them). They know their stuff.
What are your best/oddest purchases you were able to justify as a work expense (for example, were you able to get MS to buy pinball machines as an R&D cost)?	I had DirecTv in my office! I was working on the Media Center prototype and we couldn't get cable on campus, so I got the dish installed on the roof, etc....
	I had a Tempest machine in my Office but at my own expense. I started right around the days of the "shrimp vs weenies" memo, so they were pretty cost conscious.
Is it true that you and Dave Cutler got into a knife fight over a hand of poker gone bad?	A broken bottle is not a knife.
Was DoubleSpace stolen from Stacker?	No. As I understand it, DoubleSpace was licensed from an Israeli developer. Then I heard that Stacker had somehow been awarded a patent on using a hash table in compression, which sounds pretty ludicrous if true. There was a trial, and even though it revolved around hash tables and math and compression engines, and no one on the jury had been to college, as I heard it. So the big guy lost. That's the story I heard, your mileage may vary. I'm not a spokesman, etc.
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MS-DOS 6.21, the most useless version. I remember writing an extra "2" on my 6.2 OEM disks when the update came out (no point wasting disks).	You say "useless", I say "canonical".
	I think I actually worked on 6.22, not sure. It was 6.2 something. In terms of usefulness, the features I added to it personally were:
	- Moving Doublespace to HMA to free up a lot of low mem, as noted
	- Giving Diskcopy ability to do it in a single pass with no swaps
	- I wrote a new version of Smartdrv that added CD-ROM support
	- I wrote a special version of Setup that worked via deltas and put everything on a single floppy (no point wasting disks).
	Mind you, I was just a summer intern when I did that, and it took me about 3 months.
What are your favorite DOS command-line tricks that still work in Windows 10?	doskey!
What actually happens if someone deletes Win32?	Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. Do not attempt.
Did Bill ever swing by your cubicle and tell you'd he'd take your assignment home and finish it in a weekend if you didn't hurry up?	Cubicle? It was the 90s at Microsoft! I had a corner office with a table, chairs, a Tempest machine, and a sofabed.
What is the best project you worked on or had friends work on that was canceled, that you would revive if you had the resources?	Windows Media Center, I'd say! And I wish they'd done a great AutoPC that the OEMs could have licensed and made common to most cars.
There has been a lot of hate on Windows / Microsoft from the Unix / Linux advocates. What are some narratives that you disagree / don't think are true?	I used to love the Amiga, so I know what it's like to feel a sense of advocacy for a platform that you feel is superior but overlooked in the marketplace.
	I think the most untrue narrative I've heard about them is that they all have neckbeards. I think it's only "most", not all.
How do you introduce yourself at parties?	"Does anyone here know how to update my Groove subscription on my Zune?"
What OS are you using now? What's your favorite OS of all time? What's the worst OS of all time? What's the worst Microsoft OS (if different)?	The best OS of all time was Windows NT 4.0 with the Shell Update Release.
	The worst OS of all time was the TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 DOS that didn't have the keyboard debounce code in ROM yet so you couldn't even type on the thing.
[deleted]	No, I never put a true easter egg in anything. Especially in an operating system, I don't believe in them. You have to be able to trust the OS, and I think it goes against that.
How did you get started in this specific field?	I first wandered into a Radio Shack store in about 1979 when I was 11, where I saw my very first computer. It was not connected yet, as the staff had not figured out how to set it up yet. Being somewhat precocious, I asked if I might play with it if I could manage to set it up. On a lark they said, “Sure kid, have a shot”, and ten minutes or so later I had it up and running. This endeared me to the manager, Brian, enough that every Thursday night and Saturday morning I would ride my bike down to the store: I’d type in my crude BASIC programs and they were kind enough to indulge my incessant free tinkering on their expensive computer. So that's pretty much how I started!
Do you ever have moments where you’re like “they have it so easy nowadays” or do you think that because of the groundwork put in place 30 years ago that systems have become exponentially more complex?	Only when someone spools up an entire docker instance to pipe something to it on the command line... then it's like "Really? You're basically booting a virtual computer as a command?"
What's the best C++ expert tip you can share for fellow programmers?	If you make anything in your class virtual, make the destructor virtual, particularly if there's any chance that anyone might delete an instance of your derived class through a base class pointer. Otherwise, the behavior is undefined, I think, but even if it works, it's not what you want!
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Wow this is eerie. I literally fixed a bug a couple weeks ago that was this specific case.	They can be weird bugs to track down, too!
Tabs or spaces?	Spaces on an indent of 4, tabs set to 8.
How can I open an MS Binder file?	Push down on the metal tabs at the top and bottom of the central spine of the binder. That will release the 3-hole punch claws, and then you can remove your printed file.
"It's now safe to turn off your computer" Why was this splash removed?	I think most current BIOSes can do it on their own by now!
Do you have any insight as to why MS decided to build Windows 95 from the ground up instead of building off of an existing *nix system the way Apple did with OSX? Was it just for backwards compatibility or were there other reasons? Also, had you gone this way, how do you think Windows, and the industry in general, might be different? I'm asking as someone who thinks that WSL is the best thing to happen to Windows in years.	Windows 95 was not built from the ground up, but NT was. The most succinct reason (and just a guess, I'm not a spokesman) is that even though MS had Xenix on hand, there were fundamental problems in the way Unix handled SMP multiprocessor locks and so on at the time. I presume these have long since been solved in Linux, etc, but not without significant work.
	WSL is one of my favorite things too, but for the library of tools and software, it makes available to me, not because of some fundamental architectural superiority, I don't think!
What are your feelings about "Microsoft Bob"?	https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y
What did source control look like in the 90's? How did MS keep its code from leaking out to the public? How did you handle versioning and different developers working on the same feature?	We used a tool called SLM, or Source Library Manager. It was sort of available briefly as a product under the name Microsoft Delta.
	It was OK for smaller teams but did not support branching, so just before I left we moved to Source Depot.
Why was Ctrl + Alt + Delete changed to Ctrl + Shift + Escape?	It wasn't! Ctrl-Alt-Delete raises the "Secure Alert Sequence" which triggers the OS to switch to the secure desktop, where you have the ability to click a button which will start task manager upon return to your regular desktop.
	Ctrl-Shift-Esc is a feature built into Winlogon that launches a TaskManager on the current desktop without switching to the secure desktop.
	There are theoretically hacks and exploits that can only be caught by switching to the secure desktop, so if you're ever in doubt, ctrl-alt-del is the more secure way to go.
How did DOS ever get away with just pulling device names like "COM1" out of thin air when it came to output redirection etc..?	That's for compatibility with MS-DOS.
What are you currently working on?	Mostly on LED and Microcontroller projects that I detail on my YouTube channel, and the channel itself takes a fair bit of my time! If you're curious, you can check out my current successes and failure adventures at http://youtube.com/d/davesgarage
Did you work with Kris Hatleid on Super Hacker and the game Evolution?	I worked with Kris on an unreleased title called "Commander Video". That's largely where I learned assembly language, since he did the bulk of the coding, I watched and did level design, etc. 1982 or so I believe!
Got any dev back door mainframe access codes for pinball?	hidden test
Dave, how did you manage to do all that without being able to google everything?	That's one of the craziest things... I got a degree in computer science before you could even look anything up!
	The hardest part was OLE2. Coming form a different platform (the Amiga) it was a monster to wrap my head around, and the book (Inside OLE2) was not the best for introducing devs to OLE. It scared me, and I sure could have used a YouTube tutorial or two!
Hi Dave! So here's a bit of an odd one. I loved your Space Cadet Pinball! I must have spent countless hours on it as a kid, and even now I still occasionally try to find ways to boot it up. A legitimate classic. But lately, the version windows offers just... don't feel the same. They aren't as nice. Is there a game you can name that you would say feels like a worthy successor to Space Cadet Pinball? Or even any more general pinball games you would recommend?	I have a real Black Knight 2000 machine here in the house that I fully restored, so I'm a fan of physcial pinball as well!
	I think the two best video games are (a) arcade Tempest, and (b) XBox Geometry Wars 3.
	GW3 is a classic, or should be!
Woah woah woah, University of Regina?!? Are you from here? Cool to see a UofR grad had such a major impact!	Yup! Check out the regina sub for a recent article
When working on MS-DOS what did you think of alternatives such as 4DOS, NDOS or DR-DOS, were they source of inspiration for new features or not at all ?	No in general, but Norton had NCD. It was a change folder command that could jump around the disk, so if you typed "NCD drivers" from the root, it could go down to "C:\windows\system32\drives". Super handy.
	So I tried to write one for NT, but it meant changing the working directory of the PARENT process (cmd.exe) and I could never figure out a clean and elegant way to do it without modifying CMD itself!
Which is the best version of Windows? (Figuratively speaking).	Windows NT 4.0

"Some Simple tips for CD devs to make CP2077 feel more alive in upcoming DLCs (Please read)
First off, this game was an aesthetic treat and compared to GTAV, it is indeed much more "dense" with the core areas so much more beautiful in that regard... But no game is perfect, nor is it realistic in this decade to expect a full "city simulator" for any dev or in any game, so that's not what I'm expecting out of Night City not even under the most ideal of circumstances... That said, there are plenty of room for improvement, bug fixes sure, but also beyond that I'd like to see more in the upcoming DLC's that make NightCity more alive, not even necessarily newer and larger maps, but just practical added-elements and additional functional components that would go a long way towards making the city appear more 'alive', and immersive and dynamic and all that was illuded to but never fully manifested...
So in terms of most bang for buck and the low-hanging fruit (80/20 principle):

TRANSPORTATION

1) Bring back (or rather develope for the first time) the promised subway system... this shouldn't be that hard to do... it would add an element of connectivity of the different parts of the city... Leave fast travel as an option, for those that want to ride the train shouldn't be forced to use loading screens
2) Air taxi(s) -- in the age of Telsa self driving cars, hyperloops, drone taxis we should have plenty of automated air taxi options in the world of CP2077, basically like the taxi hailing component in GTAIV (Liberty City) except the player can hail an air taxi that lands close to where he is standing, he gets in, and then chooses any destination and it automatically flys him to the location, while allowing him to look out the windows and enjoy the night city from above / higher perspective... this is simplier than simply giving the player ability to fly hovercars/etc since an air taxi is just from point to point and its trivial to code a system that flys the player from any point in the city to any other point without crashing into any buildings... we've seen NightCity from the ground, now lets see it from the sky!
3) Rented transporation -- user pays to be able to rent jet packs, hoverboards, scooters at different locations in the city so he can use a public transportation but on a personal level... for the jet packs cap a max height so that its still basically hovering at or around slightly above ground level, giving the user the discretion of travel but not allowing him to fly or scale above buildings etc... this requires money to rent and if the equipment is damaged, lost, stolen or not returned properly the users bank account will be deducted for the amount ( see #ECONOMY)

INTERIORS

1) Skyscrapers with observation deck -- in every major city there is a theme like this, take Seattle for example you can visit the tallest building in Seattle downtown and go up on the obs deck and see the city view from high above, I would say incorporate some options like this where user can enter some of the taller buildings in NightCity, ride up the elevator to the higher decks and see the city from that view... maybe even add a floor with fine dinning where user can take a friend/date/group to the restuarant and eat while enjoying watching the scenery of the nightcity below etc...
2) All major buildings enter-able (is that a word? lol) with at least a ground lobby.... right now most of the buildings are just fake exteriors, nice to look at from the outside but completely fake and empty with no insides... Due to system restrains its not practical to simulate every room of every floor of every building in nightcity with furnished interiors and real windows and all that... but at least make the first floor /lobby area of every large and major building enter-able so that the character can walk in and out of them... for certain buildings you may want to make a working/functional lobby elevator that leads to an underground garage and/or allows the user to ride the elevator to above ground higher floors of the building... or have the elevator only allow certain floors to be accessed and furnish these floors with realistic settings/environment and this can tie in nicely with the job/work/career paths discussed in #ECONOMY section with gives you the office space to put a number of companies in which the user can find and switch jobs and work in corporate paths etc... for example allow the user to customize and decorate his own "office/desk", and if he has a window office, then that would provide another unique view/scenery of nightcity from above ground perspective, one that can only be gotten from working at that particular company/job, and gives him an incentive to work late to see the city from nighttime while burning the midnight oil
3) Multiple apartments, the user should be able to pick and choose from a vast selection and array of living arrangements and this necessities a lot of hotel/condo/apartment options which means these buildings need to have interiors and furnished and environments fully built out...

ECONOMY

1) Ability to find and work a job, with multiple career paths and with ability to move up in the corporate world... this provides the user with a stead stream of income for which he can use to buy fancier cars, to move into newer and better apartments /condos etc.. and to buy fancier items like designer cloths and the suches... not to mention to spend on fine dinning in high end restuarants which can tie in nicely with going on datings, impressing women with luxury cars and expensive meals and "date nights out" at elaborate events.... basically there has to be a purpose and meaning to making more money, and the process of making more money has to be derived from a job or work or career of some sort as the main component...
Have a real economy with unemployment, inflation, commodity prices, and all of that impact and influence and affect the user in his everyday life... for example if a major terror event or pandemic causes the Nightcity to suffer an economic depression for a few months then its possible the company that the user is working at has to lay off people and he gets canned and has to downsize to a smaller apartment, loses his girlfriend/wife, and then has to find another lower paying job and stuck in the downward cycle for a few years until he is able to win the lottery (#GAMBLING/SPECUTLATION/BETTING) or his luck somehow changes...
Everything should cost money, it costs money to rent an apartement and it should also cost money to eat and drink... basically he user has to spend money to eat otherwise he will starve to death... and the user has to keep paying rent every month for whatever apartment he resides otherwise he gets evicted and could even become homeless and have to live in one of those nasty tents in tenty city or under a highway bridge etc etc
Grocery stores, restuarants, movie theaters, hotels, and shopping malls... There should be at least a few convinennce stores, shopping malls, restuarants and other retail places spread throughout nightcity, this is a component and element of the economy as well as a means for the user to spend all the hard earned money he worked towards... for example if you give a homeless a few bucks he should be able to use it to spend at a store on the corner to get something to eat and then that makes him happy because he is no longer so hungry... there should be a tie in for economy, money, and the ability to exchange that for goods and services (barber, tatto artists cough cough) and associate these goods and services to emotional feelings of happiness and satisfication for both the user /player and the NPCs...

SEASONS

There should be a distinction between autumn/fall, spring, summer, winter etc... This gives a big cycle sense of passage of time that cannot be simulated with the current day/night cycles along... in the winter the sun should rise and set at different times/angles than the summer...
In addition, I'd like to see an accurate night sky map/ stars. NightCity takes place in SoCal, its trivial to map the nightsky for the year 2077 in the SoCal area... even in the latest Flight Simulator 2020 the stars are now accurate at night...
Ability to choose LIVE weather based on current user location (see Flight Simulator) so say its raining in Dallas Texas where a user is playing, then in NightCity it will match that and we raining in the game as well... also ability to customize weather on-the-fly in real-time (see Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020) and have that instantly change in the game without reloading...
Along with seasons I'd like to be able to see holiday celebrations for example Christmas time espeically... I want to hear holiday music and see buildings decorated with Christmas lights and the jolly spirits of it all... Think the ambiance and environment of say Polar Express, bring that alive to Night City for Xmas...

MINI GAMES and other Microcosm

There is a "Go" board in Chinatown... but its fake... and the players aren't even attempting to play Go... See what Google Deepmind did with AlphaGo, Facebook made an OpenGo that they open sourced... there is also LeelaZero and KataGo free AI engines that have already been trained using deeplearning/machineAI to be far better than the Go masters... the same applies to Chess by the way... but I didn't see a Chess board in Night City yet... in any case all these board games the computer AI can now master... make these games playable in NightCity, so the user can watch two NPC's play a round of Go/Chess/etc (Ai vs Ai) or can join and sit down and take a seat and play against an NPC a real game of Go/Chess, (or in the future if CP gets a multiplayer than humans can play against one another etc) basically a microcosms and games-within-a-game....
Spotify/Netflix/youTube integrations... I'd like to see the user have a portable/personal mp3 player or app on his virtual smartphone that allows him to link to his personal -reallife- spotify account to listen to music while in the game... also on the TV screens at home to be able to watch netflix movies while in this virtual apartment chilling with his date/friends... and things like YouTube integration would be nice... maybe even pornhub integration....
Other simple games like darts, bowling and even toys like RC cars or DJI drones... give the use the ability to fly drones (check out DJI Simulator) or operate rc model cars etc... basically toys that he can buy at electronic stores or corner outlets that he can then use these toys in real life for any variety of enjoyments... this also ties into #ECONOMY and why its important to have a good job /career that pays good money!

GAMBLING/SPECUTLATION/INVESTMENTS/BETTING

Have some form of virtual casinos in the game, NightCity reminds me of Vegas, yet not one slot machine and not one means to gamble or bet? How about the ability to play the stockmarket, bitcoins, and make bets and well as go gambling, cards, poker, etc this not only provides a form of entertainment but also gives the user a way to quickly win / lose a lot of money and for the risk takers they may wish to invest their money in high risk high reward speculative stocks in the stock market instead of immediately spending it on a new apartment, new car, new tech gadget etc etc... this would also tie back to #ECONOMY since the more the user earns the more income he has to spend on gambling/stocks and the better the economy does the higher his stocks return on investment...

ROMANCE/RELATIONSHIPS

Should be able to court any pretty woman on the streets, to walk up to her and say hi and have a path/chance to a dialogue that leads to setting up a first date... and following that if it goes well can progress to more dates and evetnually her moving in with the user and eventually even having a kid, getting married, and the works... each female NPC should have a male preference and a threshold of compatiblity... so that for example if on the first date the guy is cheap and takes her to low end resturant, doesn't have a nice car to pick her up with, and otherwise seems like a low life then she wouldn't process/continue with him... whereas if he is already established with a multimillion apartment, supercar, takes her to most expensive restuarant in NightCity, then I could see her going back to his place on the first date and maybe even getting pregnant right then and there that night etc..."