BC GAMING

Saved by @WebbDarrrel

foone
@Foone 5 years, 7 months ago 921 views

Save to PDF Share See On Twitter

I've only got one quest in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and it's always active.

wow, I think I just rolled a critical failure on my image capture.
I told my script to take a picture of Oblivion and instead got a badly cropped screenshot of Heroes of Might & Magic III, a game I don't even have installed

the endless questions of trying to capture fonts from modern 3D games:
1. what's the native resolution?
2. IS there a native resolution?

it looks cleaner at 1024x768 (earlier one was 640x480)
but not perfect.
maybe 800x600?

nope. I think it's 1024x768, for a simple reason:

this splash screen! it doesn't scale based on resolution, and it seems to be sized the same as 1024x768

actually, wait
why don't I just steal the font from this splash screen

ahh. I think it's just a picture. I can't edit it.

ahh, it's my favorite member of the army, General Subtitles!

dang it, look how the pipe characters look blurry at 1024x768!
so maybe 640x480 is more "native" after all?

or maybe the menu renderer is just BLURRY

and now I've somehow gotten my mouse to be stuck in a busy cursor
OS-wide. I can't click anywhere. I had to select the reply button using the keyboard

there we go. had to kill Oblivion from the task manager, but now I'm free

ok here's 640x480 vs 1024x768

as anti-aliased as it is, 1024x768 is probably the resolution I'm gonna go with.

it's a start. I don't know why X is missing or k or {

fixed X and k
{ is still missing

BTW I know I can extract the font from the datafiles. I'm intentionally not doing that.

FONT

More from foone

foone
@Foone

maybe it's just leftover urges from being a toddler putting round pegs in square holes but every time I see a video card like this on ebay I want to buy it and also some RAM chips to fill it with

when I win the lottery I'm gonna buy all of these and a bunch of RAM chips, put them together, and then relist them right back onto ebay

I have a dream that one day all the super VGA cards on ebay will have full ram expansion sockets

that's a nice VLB video card you have there
be a real shame if someone were to UPGRADE ITS RAM

huh, I don't think I've ever seen RAM in that package
QFP DRAMs?

foone
@Foone

So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much

So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.

Advertisement

foone
@Foone

argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?

but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...

it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.

and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"

there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(

foone
@Foone

love to see a youtube video that references a script that's linked in the comments and it's an obfuscated link to a one-click hoster.

THAT'S DEFINITELY STILL GONNA WORK IN FOUR YEARS

it does still work, but that's because it's only been 2 years.

also, wow, this is horrible.

the script is to generate random kanji/han characters and insert them into minecraft books.
but the video references there being two hotkeys to generate two distinct books, which seemed odd. so I thought I'd check.

it turns out by "random" they mean "pre-randomized and is hardcoded into the 45 kilobyte autohotkey scripot"

I mean, I get it. I don't want to write AutoHotKey scripts either. it's a horrible, horrible language.

BUT STILL

foone
@Foone

So someone on IRC mentioned the ending(s) to Zero Wing and I found out there's a cheat code to skip to it. I thought it might have some more "All your base" style dialogue I could put in the generator, but I really wasn't prepared for what ending #1 looked like

ending #2 is some very thin credits

ending #3 is reportedly the "true ending", at least on the European release. The Japanese version has 35 endings.

This one is... more serious? a little?

The other 32 endings are translated here, by

functionally all the japanese endings work like this. you get CONGRATULATIONS and then CATS says something to you.
usually something silly, or possibly the debug menu cheat code

More from Gaming

$\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8CANUCKxx\U0001f1e8\U0001f1e6 (Not \u2122)$

🇺🇸CANUCKxx🇨🇦 (Not ™)...
@GxE_CANUCK

It’s Friday and you’ve had the most difficult week of work! All you can think about is loading up @GhostRecon #Breakpoint and playing some PvP to tame the beast! You get in the PvP lobby and hit search.... 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes go by with no games found. (1/10)

Finally at 12 long minutes of searching you find a game and you’re excited to have a chance to release your pent up aggression on some other players. Lets go! You load into the match, btw it only took an additional 2 minutes to load after finding the match, (2/11)

and find out your teammates are 17/18 kilometers off map? Invisible! What? How!? You also find out this has been going on since June 2020 and it’s February 2021. You saw, on another forum, (3/11)

you need to take steps to go to the @Xbox home screen and return to the Game at the very beginning of the match to “fix” this issue but you didn't do it in time. Now you’re running the match and you get killed by someone right in front of you but you can’t see them! (4/11)

Where are they? On that’s right! They’re invisible because the opposite team was also 17 kilometers away making their players invisible too! All because you couldn’t take some awkward, unwarranted steps, to try and correct the buggy game, you’re just losing the matches. (5/11)

foone
@Foone

So someone on IRC mentioned the ending(s) to Zero Wing and I found out there's a cheat code to skip to it. I thought it might have some more "All your base" style dialogue I could put in the generator, but I really wasn't prepared for what ending #1 looked like

ending #2 is some very thin credits

ending #3 is reportedly the "true ending", at least on the European release. The Japanese version has 35 endings.

This one is... more serious? a little?

The other 32 endings are translated here, by

functionally all the japanese endings work like this. you get CONGRATULATIONS and then CATS says something to you.
usually something silly, or possibly the debug menu cheat code

Advertisement

Dr. Rachel Kowert
@DrKowert

Early this week I ranted about a @nytimes editorial misrepresenting the scientific literature around video game uses and effects.

It's one thing for an editorial piece to mishandle scientific information, but it is another when an “educational” organization does it.

A thread.

A new training from @childrenscreens was announced called BLOOD, SWEAT, and FEARS: Understanding the Psychological Effects of Graphic and Violent Media on Children and

What a title. One that is clearly meant to instill fear, shock, awe, pearl clutching… moral panic.

For a primer on the history of the moral panic see here:

There are many points to discuss in their advertising, but for the sake of time I’ll focus on a few. Starting with this gem of an anonymous quote.

First, games are not addicting in the way as cigarettes or any other chemical addiction

See:

$Rami Ismail (\u0631\u0627\u0645\u064a)$

Rami Ismail (رامي)...
@tha_rami

OK, we're going to go through this and explain why it sucks.

War *is* political machinations. That's the entire thing about war. It's politics that leads to people killing each other. The entire point is political gain or the diminishment of the other party's political power.

In the case of Iraq, it was neither: the US made up a reason.

Engender sympathy for US troops? Excuse the fuck me? When you look up the casualty statistics for the Iraq war you'll find US deaths, but you could barely *find* Iraqi victims, civilian or resistance or insurgent or terrorist. They're all defined "terrorist" or "collateral".

How about the experiences of that individual that was just living there & they & their kids and husband tried to flee but men of military age were refused escape from the besieged city by the US before the US went door to door & killed anyone that was looked at them wrong.

This is literally the least interesting part of the entire conflict: between kill and be killed, people tend to opt to kill. We can play that in DOOM. We can play that in Quake. If you leave out the context of knowing the war is wrong, you might as well not make this.

platonic solid snake
@joshmillard

New thread because new day + progress. My Fogleworm configuration search is now pretty darned working-ish. Here's three stages for N=3: finding unique candidates, generating valid configurations of candidates, and filtering that down to unique configs. N(3) = 2, as hoped!

The same output for N=4 looks like this. I'm expecting N(4) = 96. I got...97. Here's a fun game, find the two grids among the 97 in that last pair of images that are congruent under transformation. [screams in math] But this is CLOSE, which is GREAT.

N=5, targeting N(5) = 856. 1087 is...a great deal more than 856.

I don't dare run N=6 right now, but if I'm lucky and the proportion of search time is going up by "only" two orders of magnitude for each N, it'd probably get done overnight if I start it tonight in this current form.

gonna get colorful, testing out graphics stuff

You May Also Like

Pran Katariya
@KatariyaPran

The Straddle is my favorite trade these days. But more often than not, one needs to adjust to make a good return from it. There are many ways to do this depending on your view, psychology and imagination. Will discuss a few that I use

The Straddle is a delta neutral strategy and it is important to keep deltas in check during the course of the Trade and not let them run away from you. Of course Volatility is the elephant in the room- but not going there as that will require a separate discussion

The first and most common method is to go 'inverted.' That is to say to shift the untested side to generate additional Premium and increase the runway to Breakeven. So if you start with a Straddle at 700 and price goes to 740, you can move the PE up to say 720.

How much should you move the untested side? While again this is a matter of skill, experience and artistry, the rule of thumb is to cut deltas by half. Remember, prices will move and you have to allow sufficient room for them to fluctuate

The second method is to shift the entire Straddle in the direction of the move. So if you have a 700 Straddle and Price goes to 740, you can shift the Straddle to 720. If you time this right, it can generally be done at virtually no cost or minimal cost.

$Ferruccio Balestreri \U0001f308$

Ferruccio Balestreri 🌈...
@0xferruccio

🕵️‍♂️ How Google's PageRank algorithm works

The PageRank algorithm gives each page a rating of its
importance, which is a recursively defined measure of importance, based on if important pages link to it.
It's recursive because the importance of a page refers back to the importance of other pages that link to it

Here's how it works in practice:
1⃣ We start with some pages and crawl them for links

2⃣ Each page has 1/N points (where N as the total number of pages)

3⃣ Add points to each page for the amount of links to it, divided by the number
of links emanating from the sources of these links

Advertisement

meilong
@meilong15

一个北大毕业的殡葬工自述武汉封城期间的经历，凄惨。这应该才是武汉的真实情景，跟很多人的叙述是吻合的。

https://t.co/QYTO1SYedG

Shaun Russell
@_ShaunRussell

"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics – https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.

"I really want to break into comics"

make comics.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get an editor to notice me."

Make Comics.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE COMICS.
— Ed Brisson (@edbrisson) December 4, 2018

There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.

Enigma
@ainittomai

On December 25 Mr Pool retweeted August 16 message about the Phoenix and that the worst was still on the horizon to come. 1/*

Maybe now we can assume that November 3 message meant "FUD" nor "FUN". Putting the word in capital letters seems to indicate the aspect the word fud has in our space, FUD. 2/*

Brad started it on December 22 (1/3 posts (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 3/*

And immediately the SEC followed dropping the bomb (1.3 billions (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 4/*

FUD materializes, Bitstamp is one of the first that haltes XRP trading and so on. 5/*