I mean that would lower the bar for the activity itself (+multitasking), though I am not gonna buy or use a service and I suspect audiobooks are likely a big chunk of data too (esp. if uncompressed).

Unless speech synthesis is something that could work well here (assuming decent voice, I don’t mind older tech like DECtalk or macintalk that sounds better than some newer offline TtS options). Even that seems like it’d need some community effort, though (like manual phoneme editing).

So I’m not sure on that one. Probably not going to look into it.

For world-building, I liked Farscape for the Leviathans. One stretch of hell aside, it is a much better interpretation of biomechanical life than the standard dreary tubes-and-brain-only of most media (that is if they can even properly tell the difference between a cyborg and a robot). So that has really shaped my view on it, I’d want more microbiomes (and connection with other types of living cells) not less.

I probably wouldn’t do copies though, original brain is my priority. I would really need to trust/respect the organization requesting it, it’d need a really good reason, and I’d need assurances.

Long known but never read that series though, I have aphantasia (on top of other things) so am not much of a reader.

Not sure if it exists, but there should be a way to find communities that have 0 local subscribers.

I mean sure.

It’s just escapism on my part. And if we’re honest, with whoever would do it with today’s technology it would probably turn out the same way. EDIT: Schrödinger’s brain

I’m just looking for a way to get my brain preserved and out of here 🧠 🤖

First thing that comes to my mind is Shrek. Fiona being partly a snow white parody (also the magic mirror and fairy-tale creatures drives the plot) and Donkey with buck teeth.

What a weak and misleading headline.

I like polygons.

No you don’t understand, JUST the polygons and in a countable amount too.

I don’t need the textures. It’s my aesthetic.

well yeah most people don’t have the hardware to play the pre-HD versions at their best

Maybe you mean an actual PS2, but IME using emu w/higher internal res on a non-stellar computer was a pretty good experience.

Meanwhile the HD version is data bloated (likely because everything is uncompressed for no reason, or multiple resolutions of FMVs including 4K) so the download would be painful for me. And really with Okami’s aesthetic especially, I don’t think HD is necessary (again, beyond just higher internal res and whatever other enhancements based on preference).

I think it would’ve been better to change the FMVs into in-engine if viable, I assume the ones that were pre-rendered was just a hardware limitation if not just some production thing.

After seeing the bird-flu cows story, I made this reference:

“There are things you must know. The village is dying; the signs are everywhere. Withering crops… dying brahmin… …sick children.”

Particularly because of the other headline about the outbreak of measles in Texas (children) and multiple possible interpretations with crops (not getting picked due to deportation/fears of workers, forced dam release onto fields, drought/heat/fires)

I don’t know why there is any stigma around it

The most common reason people don’t get therapy is probably that it’s expensive.

Well, that and there’s many reasons why it isn’t something most people can just “give it a shot” (transportation, waiting lists and time slots, and paperwork/other hassle for the appointment itself)

That was off the top of my head, but here’s a chart:

<Scientists holding their ears to the ground>

Earth

Dairy herds in Nevada

“There are things you must know. The village is dying; the signs are everywhere. Withering crops… dying brahmin… …sick children.”

What if aliens have no bones so they call humans bonies?

And they do an impression like “Oh look at human me… don’t think about biosphere collapse. Uhh, sure hope I don’t slip on solid water and break my bone legs in the tax-filing business parking-lot! (my body is not proficient at such recovery and I cannot afford access to medical machines)”

I mentioned Spyro’s skyboxes (also used for portals+seamless level transitions), but it also used VC for the textureless LoD models which allowed incredible draw distance for the era. Random effects mostly resulting from flame breath (soot, glow) but also some other small details (like the level boundary headbutt effect). Lighting too (more obvious in the worlds with bonfires).

Also Crash Bandicoot. Here’s a video on the character design (the vertex animation and spin model is interesting as well).

VC might not be obvious especially when it was just an optimization, though it might be more obvious if it used for a specific effect (like transparency), especially when viewed with modern resolution (+unfiltered textures).

Lots of games from this era have vertex lighting (and it certainly is a cool aesthetic* on its own) but I am much more interested when it’s actually used to significantly reduce texture usage (plus introducing other benefits). In-engine cutscenes and midi soundtracks (or stuff like sfxr) are also good for similar reasons.

* Will be nice to try it when 4.4 finally drops (it re-adds per-vertex shading) especially as it is an actual optimization. I say this as someone who turns pixelation filters off.

If you’re making your own models, another option to somewhat sidestep textures is vertex colors.

At the very simplest objects can be 1* color, though it’s still quite easy to color some details on low-poly models if you keep it in mind when you’re designing your mesh (which going for an aesthetic, is the goal anyway).

Note that per-face VC is an option (in Blender: color attribute>domain:face corner, and then use selection plus the paint mask option right next to where you switched to vertex paint mode). You can also use the Spyro skybox trick to fake hard edges using your mesh.

Lots of simple options with big look changes too (unshaded vs. shaded, matte vs. plastic vs. metal, manually-painted VC shadows).

Adding even multi-use textures onto this, I’m not quite sure on especially as it requires messing at very least fixing the UV map+re-exporting. After that, object scale may be an issue (unless something like triplanar works for you).

I even tried doing my own watercolor stuff, a failed matcap texture (which might be a fault of the shader) and a maybe-fine splatter texture. It seems like going this route is a step up in one (if not multiple) skills to be an improvement rather than reduction over just VC. A generated noise normal map for metal (maybe glass/wood) is a somewhat more viable exception.

* even if you’re using CSG (or say, textmesh) and not interested in VC, it might be a good idea to use a material that allows setting a color per-object via a shader parameter (this can be done via visual shader with ColorParameter plugged into albedo, blend mode can be used to allow grayscale texture like noise). A slight step up from graybox… unless your room is a cave, having color other than gray/white is an easy way to improve the representation enough for it to be playable.

EDIT: Alternatively, you could also just get the colors by using a set of materials like a color palette (stone, wood, grass, dirt, metal?).

I’ve been curious how this sort of editor would work for non-game code

I mean software is just a game that isn’t a game, and Godot does do a decent job of it. on [email protected] somebody recently posted* a note-taking app and someone in the comments linked to an article about Godot for GUI software development.

Bindings are nice too, and as a mostly-non-coder I’ve actually done a small sample program with Godot+Nim-lang. In a similar vein, there is Raylib (which has lots of bindings options) and paired with rGuiLayout you might get something going.

I tried a Qt editor once and it seemed a bit clunky to me, then some simple toolkits that I think have a better experience despite lacking an editor (though lack of dynamic text scaling is probably an issue here, at least it was for me as I wanted unicode symbols for a text-centric application).

TUI applications are a fun idea too, though viable ideas are chicken-and-egg for me so I’ll probably just stick to Godot if I make anything.

• 2 days ago, Post title Finished my first Godot project!, Github em-s-h/Nairu

like working in Godot and having nodes to organize behaviour but written scripts to implement it

That was the intent with Godot’s (3.X) implementation of VS (Visual Scripting) but I think most people didn’t like it (thus why it was gone in 4.X). The major flaw with that idea is that programmers probably don’t want to work on VS and… is it really better than just components with exported script variables and either way well-documented code (especially with gdscript)? Also communication on desired effects.

VS should be easy for beginners, if it fails at that a huge amount of people who aren’t in a team will find it to be useless. For comparison, UE’s Blueprints are usually what people point as better than Godot’s VS (which failed at discoverability due to lower-level workflow and IIRC wasn’t fleshed out with organization either), so this wasn’t strictly a problem with the idea of VS.

There are 3rd-party things now (Orchestrator, also Block Coding which generates gdscript) that might work better, though I don’t know.

I should probably live underground then, but one look at Whittier, Alaska tells me that even the most remote living situation still requires modern rent prices and/or highly educated/skilled employment.

I haven’t left the house in 4+ months though (and where I live trees block any view of the horizon) so there is that.

For me, I think it’s that most common-language things that I happen to look at are 500-line+ with non-obvious short names (initialisms? might be an issue with low-level). Some of it might be down to optimization or language features/requirements, or not using libraries. Though I also don’t hate whitespace so it may just be my brain.

The other side of the coin is that interpreted languages (being more readable) are slower(+single-threaded) and have other limitations/issues. I have some hope that Python’s update with JIT and no-GIL may change that, but integrating it into other tools is still an issue so I haven’t looked into it.

The one language that has clicked for me is Nim-lang (compiles-to-C, interop). I haven’t done enough real projects, but I like the syntactic sugar and UFCS. Not sure if that’s the best way to say it, but it’s like the options that exist can be used to make code more concise. Something that seems small like how you can write conditions or loops can make a big difference.