egregiousRac

Production quality is the death of high-choice RPGs. When a game has two artists pumping out dozens of assets a day and every choice just changes some text and objects around, you can afford to give the player a ton of choice. Even the early DA games were on the tail end of that, with all the dialogue voiced, requiring recording and implementation cost for every line.

These days, big games are expected to have not just voiced dialogue but to have choreographed cutscenes. Making your animators spend a week on a cutscene 5% of players will see is viewed as a waste of money, so you cut the decision branch that leads to it.

There was a period in the late 90s to early 2000s where you could make an RPG that was top-5 in every way. That will never happen again.

The closing line is the most impactful line for anyone that reads it.

They never dropped it. it is the conclusion of their ethics statement. A journalist didn’t bother to hit ctrl-f or scroll down, put out a false article, and everyone else has been parroting the lie ever since.

Emotion Engine

The marketing for the PS2 was so absurd…

This game is specifically an FPS set in the first C&C game, which is pretty cool. It uses the buildings from that game and a bunch of the units.

The 3D engine used for this game would go on to be used for the 3D rts games too (Generals, C&C3, Middle Earth, etc).

I had an intern this summer working on a project that involved mapping two data sets based on a description field. I showed him how to write a Python script using a fuzzy matching library to compare the two data sets and find matches. We then talked through the downsides of using a contextless string comparison and the situations that create false positives and false negatives.

We then tried to use a few of the AI tools to match them, hoping to demonstrate how a tool that understands context can do a better job at the expense of far more computation. All they would do was write and run a Python script using the same library, but every request would start with writing a new, slightly different script. Incredibly wasteful.

It turned into a great demo of how even if it returns a useful result, it’s rarely better than a person could do in a few minutes and is far less consistent.

Reminder that the “vaccines cause autism” lie was started because somebody had a measles vaccine that was never going to sell because the MMR vaccine existed.

Perez and Milton were outside talking with friends when another friend drove past them on a motorcycle, heading southbound in the appropriate traffic lane. At the same time, Capt. Navarro was driving northbound on the same street in a marked police sport-utility vehicle, travelling in the wrong lane. Navarro collided with Perez and Milton’s friend, who suffered serious injuries. Perez and Milton witnessed the collision. Numerous officers arrived and saw Perez and Milton using their cellphones to record the collision scene. The officers immediately took Perez’s cellphone, handcuffed him and put him in the back of a police car. They demanded that Perez show them how to delete the photographs he had just taken. Milton, who had also been using his cellphone to record the scene, was seated on his motorcycle when Officers Frahm and Hernandez threw him to the ground. He was handcuffed and placed in a police car. Perez and Milton were both taken to a police station. Officers demanded that Perez provide the password to his cellphone so they could delete the pictures from the scene. They told him that if he did not provide the password, he would be charged with a felony offense. Perez gave them the password, and the officers deleted the pictures. They strip-searched Perez to see if he had any additional cameras or recording devices. Officers also demanded that Milton give his password, but he refused. O Navarro charged Perez with assaulting him while Frahm charged Milton with battery and resisting arrest. They were both released the next day after spending several hours in custody. The charges were later dropped.

That was in 2011. Assault, covering up a crime, false arrest, sexual assault. No punishment.

Isn’t 5 about them interacting with the current generation and competing with tablets and phones?

It’s cooler than the headline implies. It’s not just hints at future support. It appears that it is a 360 emulator running the emulator that they built to run Xbox games on the 360.

They had the full interior and most of the exterior as sets, but half the time walls and ceilings are removed to give space for the camera, lights, puppeteers, etc. It is full of CGI, but it all blends together seamlessly.

LOTR has tons of green screen and CGI. The Hobbit didn’t have the prep time that LOTR did, which meant they were figuring out what things looked like after shooting instead of before.

Basically every great effect film had tons of pre-production. You can’t figure it out in post and have it land.

Hail Mary had a ton of CGI too. You can’t tell because enough is real that the actor behaves like it is, the camera moves as if it is, and the artists know what real looks like.

A major reason the first Transformers looks and feels as good as it does, even so long after it came out, is that the director has an incredible ability to imagine where something will be after the CGI pass. He could shoot entire action scenes with the camera behaving as if it was reacting to what actors did, not an empty street.

That strategy is very common. Canva gives students free access and focuses on being student-friendly so that they won’t bother to use any of the tools used in the real world. Now, those students tell their managers about how much easier it is (it just has less options and looks shinier) and how they can’t understand anything else and companies start paying for licenses.

They are a car reviewer. It’s relevant to the audience.

That doesn’t change if they are in a different state. It just removes the support they get from the city taxes.

What evaluation setup lets the thing being tested see the test results and gives access to the test source code?!

Slop evaluating slop.

Windows desktops are targeted because any place you have a user, you have a vulnerability. The vast majority of Linux installs are servers with extremely limited user activity, which narrows the attack vectors significantly.

The Nintendo controller has the same button names as the Xbox (defacto standard PC controller) but different placement. If buttons are mapped based on physical position but using Xbox glyphs, Nintendo buttons are called out incorrectly. If buttons are mapped based on name, Nintendo buttons are called out correctly but the controls are positioned weird and displayed wrong if displayed on screen in button layout. PS controllers have no chance of making sense when dealing with lazy devs.

It’s super easy to implement multiple sets of glyphs and mappings for the three main controller types. Pretty much anything else is a clone of those three. I have no clue why so many don’t bother.

Fire is a thermodynamics problem, so it relates to area and volume, not gravity.

Gravity does impact creature size, however. A lower-gravity environment supports larger creatures, higher forces creatures to go smaller. Thought is a chemical process though, so that would have a minimum size as well.