I think so, but that’s also has massive tradeoffs on its own. If I did that, it was probably mostly Robot w/Ser Junkan runs.

I probably would prefer a mod that makes active items only show up in shops (or perhaps chosen selection/loot-table at the start or per-character). Also: have the RR leave junk when taking some items (not ammo).

I do see one mod (Justice) to alter spawning which would probably help a bit (depending on the character, still not perfect early on). Plus I have other games to be bad at, some of them free (and slightly less frustrating).

It’s not guaranteed to get anything of value before you hit the boss. There aren’t many chests, active items are often highly situational and you may be forced to abandon it. This may be expected/intended and I may even be able to beat the boss anyway, but it’s more tedious.

Very likely that keys and blanks (both multi-functional), more chests, or money don’t drop enough. This already means waiting on making some choices until after the floor is mostly cleared (despite this not being the best/easiest option for survival) especially when it comes to the alternate path.

Also @smeg@feddit.uk

I stopped playing it particularly because of the 1st-floor experience with items/loot (and active items in general).

Then again, these sort of problems for me seem to run through games (especially roguelikes) often.

Spyro’s skyboxes, too. (+vertex colors for LoD models)

I think vertex color can be used even more extensively for modern indie dev, though I haven’t done much more than tinker with the workflow itself.

I tried adding non-mapped textures (including a watercolor speckle image) but am not sure I like the effort/tradeoff-to-result ratio*. I’m leaning more towards textureless now especially with Godot 4.4 having per-vertex shading (though I already ran into an issue where it seems metallic per-vertex isn’t ready yet).

* aside from maybe generated noise for a metal material’s normal map

I wrote an elaborate alt-text for this when I uploaded it in a comment:

But there is no alt-text there now unless I:

![Write it all over again, or find the comment to copy+paste](https://lemmy.cafe/pictrs/image/402062ff-a147-4b9d-be1e-b7cb69076c40.webp?format=webp)

Yes, but It doesn’t look like the alt-text is ever actually saved to the image, I would guess instead just passed onto the comment editor after that initial upload. At least I don’t see it in the uploads tab (neither the preview nor in the viewed link itself, except on the original comment on page 9 of my comments).

That could be fine if there were a dedicated copy-markup-link button. It would also be nice for the alt-text to remain editable from there.

Also an annoyance with the standard Lemmy software (clients may fix it) is that alt-text is handled only in markup (not saved with the saved media) so if you want to post it in a comment later you need to copy the markup (from the post/comment where you first posted it) each time rather than from your uploads. Probably an issue for most files hosts (not offering alt-text) too.

Unless there is some file host that handles this?

EDIT: Posting in a community like this helps with this, though still will suffer when organization becomes an issue and also niche/comment-reply memes that don’t really make sense as a singular post.

I’ve been doing that with juice too (also adding iced tea powder, other stuff like almond extract (cherry taste) for more/different flavor) but I can’t imagine watering down soda unless using something that’s also carbonated. Which I never really tried the other carbonation options due to cost (not really drinking soda often though, tapwater is free).

Well, I did try watering something down with club soda once but that was gross particularly because the carbonation was already gone.

because every bloated 100gb game is a mix of a thousand different assets/executables/libraries

Also needlessly uncompressed audio or poorly compressed video (that likely could instead be in-engine) particularly when multiple resolutions are needed. Sometimes one of these might be the bigger issue, particularly with remasters.

@Gladaed I have less-than-stellar internet* (~6mb/s, shared with others), 20GB is definitely not a reasonable size for me. 100MiB is fine, but not negligible. Consider also storage space, particularly because users will run games from slower(->cheaper) drives when they deem games too big (which for me is already at 1GiB+, at least in terms of having a library because that adds up).

* and I live in the US, not even in the woods! The price isn’t even great, either.

As I see it, data size is an inverse multiplier for viability. The smaller a download is the more likely that users will be able to get and store it (long-term even) without issue. The difference between a day and an hour is huge, the difference between an hour and 5 minutes is still worthwhile (especially if this impacts household internet speed). Less than that (nearing instant download) is peak.

EDIT: Updates also make this difference larger.

Sees pill

I’m of the mind that modern hardware (w/emu) and higher internal res is enough. It lets the triangles be more triangly. Other enhancements too based on user preference or game.

Plus, most remasters seem to be bloat that strips away masterful technical features for likely needlessly-uncompressed audio/video anyway. Often glaring design issues aren’t fixed either.

Side note that there is a NFS:MW from 2005 (same box-art as meme)… I am not sure if that was intentional, or if they were unaware or if the meme was before the 2012 remaster entry.

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 !Godot@programming.dev 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.

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.

Why & where is the video demo? :D

Was going to say something like this, but even a screenshot would be nice. Also, some bullet points on what it does (specific features).

I skipped over some bits with the war and the mining/industry, but other than that it’s neat. I could tell it was H.G. Wells, at least I got that (OG) Time Machine vibe from the split societies.

I think the most interesting bit was the mention of space. Also a few ideas that I’m not sure if were intentional commentary or

EDIT: Also forgot to say it makes me wonder about colorizing a movie (though I probably would take a more stylized approach). Maybe with EBsynth, but even then I think I’d need some tool to pick out the foundation of needed keyframes. That, and the cart-and-horse of watching said movie, unless it’s such a good movie that it has high replay value.

You an’ me baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals so let’s do it like they do on the good cooking channels

Cannibal by Tally Hall type situation (though unlikely, as I am boring and my flesh is probably sub-par quality due to poor health), maybe with me listening to that* while zonked out my gourd sauteing a chunk of my own arm with mixed vegetables. I usually don’t cook meat though, so maybe they’d do that bit.

* Also relevant but more of an emo aesthetic, Misery Meat or People Eater by Sodikken

I lost interest enough to delete the models I had before and this headline made me look into deepseek.

EDIT: Not quite the Streisand Effect considering I already knew about it, but still an unintended source of pressure. Like someone stockpiling before a ban of something, even if they weren’t too avid about it before. I’ve had a similar thought when it comes to taking down free streaming sites.

Though this seems to have traded compute for data, so I don’t have the VRAM for it… even running through RAM, I don’t feel like downloading a lesser version with my slow-ish internet.