Emily

there is no enemy in my life more vile and contemptible than myself, a year ago, writing the code that I need to modify today

i want that for me

Yeah, Vintage Story is one of those games where it's like, the survival and combat require work and preparation and infrastructure to make not super-risky. As a result the cozy parts of the game are 1000x cozier than they would otherwise be, just because it's contrasted with how harsh the world gets

But also I def get that "i need to go out and build some shit" mood. I just installed the new RC build of Vintage Story since they added fishing and a bunch of immersive blacksmithing features, so I'm probably gonna pour some hours into making a little homestead in that next week

this is why I've never gotten deeper into Tower Unite than setting my avatar to the grandpa from rugrats and chain smoking while playing the slots

In theory it's this luscious social universe if anyone I knew was actually playing it more than an hour every few years

From the tone of some of the marketing, I was really surprised at how earnest and emotional that game actually was, when I came to it years after release.

Why do I know every word and note to a theme song of a TV show I have never seen and know nothing about?

Was I born with this knowledge? Was this information transmitted epigenetically?

Made some apple butter this weekend with 1/4 the sugar all of the recipes I saw called for and it came out perfectly. The 1/4 sugar version is more-tart, and still very sweet.

I wonder if every site just copies the same food wishes recipe or w/e, or if everyone does actually like it that sweet.

A trail leading away into the hills, a mountain lodge in the sun lies a little ahead.

A few shrubs growing out of the dirt in a cliffside rock.

A small green plant growing out of a split in the rock.

Small plants growing in the shattering rocks.

A few bonus little guys (for the purposes of this post, the lodge in the distance is a little guy)

A mountainside dotted with small shrubs and moss. The moon peaks out between the clouds above.

Sunset across the canyon we hiked around. Mountaintops down in the desert still lit by sun, the rest in shade.

A trail curving away into the chaparral.

Shadowed cliffs and ridges leading down into a desert valley.

went on a great hike yesterday

Their 90s nostalgia - cultural and consumer ephemera, web 1.0, foods that no longer exist

My 90s nostalgia - one time when I was 6 I slept so well I thought i'd just blinked and it was daytime

Astromitosis, by Silver Alicorn from the album Three Game Themes

Nice

silveralicorn.bandcamp.com/track/astrom...

I've taken to saying stuff like "NPC logic" and "NPC behavior trees" because I'm worried people will get the wrong idea. It's so much more of a mouthful I hate it!

i should hook my PS3 up to my CRT, i've got one of those late-model ones that takes component input

It's great for the MiSTer, but I do have fond memories of playing demon's souls on a CRT before I got my first HDTV in college. I love how PS3 games look, and CRTs are esp flattering for that gen

Yeah! I love shadow empire, and I've been digging into Terra Invicta recently and it is definitely scratching that itch.

It's a really satisfying method to use!

Yeah, and unreal does have some decent eye adaptation stuff, but the real problem is that when a scene looks dark, lumen starts bouncing light in strange ways, and a tiny little dim light in the corner will end up with light bounces that swim across the screen chaotically, flashing and shimmering.

And I think the end result is just straight-up much better and less-distracting than true GI which is still not capable of maintaining stability in low-light scenes.

You do have to do some tricks that aren't documented, like manually keying the skylight up and down, but that's easy enough to do.

It obviously won't be viable for every game, but dynamic non-shadow lights as fake GI works really well if you only need to light up a few full buildings and some scenery here and there this way, since it's very labor-intensive.

Overall tho, it produces much MUCH more stable night/dark scenes.

I built versions of my game with Lumen, SSGI (i know), and faked GI with manually-placed nonshadow lights to profile it all, and of the three methods the faked GI performed around 30% better than Lumen and around 20% better than SSGI!

Plus it's easy to toggle off in settings if you need to.

For my specific setup, it actually isn't much work to manually set up fake light bounces with non-shadow casting lights ala Talos 2. Since I'm on a full-nanite, large-landscape setup, baked lighting isn't viable, but dynamic non-shadow casting lights have very low performance overhead.

Ended up ditching global illumination entirely for my game. I think there's a lot of bad info out there about Lumen, but one thing that does hold true no matter how many project settings or mesh setups you use: it cannot produce stable, almost completely dark scenes

I've yet to see even AAA do this

girls only want one thing, and it's an improvised construction referred to by the media simply as "the device"

Aerial view low poly 3D model of a space center

It needs more roads, and hangars, and parking lots and etc

A rugged group of costumed men (cossacks?) sitting in the back of a wagon. Some real prime moustaches.

A pale woman standing next to an assortment of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. A terrified young man in a bowl cut clutches to a lectern.

I'm a big fan of Viy (1967) from Mosfilm. It's a great adaptation of an 1830s Russian horror story set roughly around the same time.

It's got guys that look like they fell straight out of an Ilya Repin painting and a pretty fantastic scene I can only describe as "goblin church."

I like that the old Pipe Dream box art is like, two main ideas:

-cute cartoon plumber fixing the leaky pipes
-Albert Brooks being stabbed in the gut

the holy trinity The Felt is not The Hand is not The Henson Spirit. But together...they are Muppet.

had a very respectful chat about theology tonight

that is an immaculate face