as someone who has hacked a ton of games: yes this is how they are.

Games that have shipped are full of terrible hacks. often they're marked as such! if you've got comments, you'll often see shit like "// fix this before we ship" and the game shipped 20 years ago, and the hack is still there.

It's gotten slightly better since the 90s? We used to have to hack around basic missing pieces of the game engine. Like, Duke Nukem 3D has a lie in the first screen you see:

You see the little shadow around that roof bit in the middle?

This engine doesn't support world shadows. There's engine support for shadows under enemies, yes, but not on the world. Duke3D came out in January 1996, and Quake was high anticipated and only a few months away, and guess what? it supported world shadows! It had a whole lighting engine!

See? World shadows! The torch on the way leaves a shadow under it, and that column casts a shadow, and Duke Nukem 3D's BUILD engine supports zero of that. So... why is there a shadow there?

If you open the level in the editor, you'll find that the shadow is defined as a sector. You see, the engine DOES allow you to manually set the brightness level for floors/ceilings.

So they just made the level designers manually put shadows in. For every bit of the world that should have a shadow, manually draw a sector the shape of the shadow, then darken it a few shades. There you go, shadows. Did this take a massive amount of work? Probably! but it meant they looked like they had a feature they didn't.

Railroad Tycoon saves games by taking a screenshot of the map. Commander Keen scrolls the screen by redrawing the edges of items and then actually redrawing it every 8 pixels. Wolfenstein 3D figures out when two columns of the screen next to each other have the same colors and draws them at the same time, because it was faster on these ancient video cards. 3D Movie Maker has "full 3D backgrounds" that are actually just a flat picture, but they appear 3D because they also do some trickery with a depth-buffer. Half-Life has a tram with a door that can open, something the Gold-Src engine can't do, by having two copies of the tram level (one with a door and one with a tram) and having a loading point after the tram stops moving.

Games are always hacks at some level. They always have been! They probably always will be.

We only know about these hacks because they're in games that shipped. The beautiful hack-free games that are architecturally pure in their design? They probably never got finished.

So yeah. Don't be afraid to fake what you can't do in your creative endeavors. Chances are, no one will ever notice, and the few weirdos who do (like me) will think you're a genius for doing it.

#i know i've reblogged this before#but i forget the punchline#and it floored me again

the end of this hit me like a truck

This porno didn’t fuck around

there’s… a lot to take in here…

I was so flummoxed by this I had to learn more, so I took to Google, where I found this blog post by Dan Cardone, who was a grip on this film. Some highlights:

All this talk and no one posts a link. God damn it, have to do everything myself around here! Here’s the promo page with previews and a purchase link from the actual Raging Stallions Studios website.

I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.

I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."

Feel free to repost, no need for credit

Wow.

You should really listen to the WHOLE thing because this woman does not mince words

I'd like to emphasize the cruelty. Being a worker right now is absolutely shit. Food costs, low wages, shitty work environments, childcare costs. A medical abortion can costs anywhere to $550-$700 in states that border ban states. You have to travel. You need a hotel after driving 8 hrs to a clinic. You need a baby sitter. You need a job that LETS you take time off. You need food! If you're barely making ends meet, this is nearly impossible. If you got the time and money, donate or share an abortion fund in a banned state. These funds and orgs not only pay part of the abortion, many of them are scaling up to support people with travel costs. You can find them or your local fund here: abortionfunds.org

6 hour workday maximum i’m not kidding, if it can’t be done in that timeframe it doesn’t need doing.

this doesn't apply to jobs like childcare

If i worked in childcare and my 6 hours were up i would start putting babies in ziploc bags and shipping them to Turkmenistan listed as endangered fruits and vegetables

This is my dream btw:

If you have shared it with someone else or didn't finish the whole thing, select a "yes" option. Select the option that best describes your experience with cigarettes.

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

Incredible power move to make one of the most beloved crpgs ever made using a modified dnd 5e system, make a ton of money and shit on most AAA game studios in the process, then say “cool. Anyway fuck dnd 5e and wizzards of the coast. We’re doing our own thing now.”

absolutely stellar

A girl at my school tried to seduce one of our (super straight-laced) math professors. She ACTUALLY sat on his desk and had a super low-cut shirt on and everything and actually leaned over to him and according to eye-witnesses:

Girl: “Oh professor, I’m really struggling but I would do ANYTHING to pass this class.”

The professor leans in until his face is just inches from hers and whispers in the same seductive tone:

Before promptly getting up and walking away just leaving her on the desk.

“Then study”

on the one hand, extremely funny to get told “get help” by a fortune cookie, on the other, i can’t believe betterhelp has breached influencers and podcasters and started getting fortune cookies to shill for them

reminds me of the time i kept getting manscaped fortune cookies

rule

#'imagine a bear calling you a good dog' is like 80% of sex on this website lmao (via @vergess)

a cougar calling you a good girl is the remaining percent

this is so funny I cannot believe this was posted

where do i fucking start with this graph

-the fact that the most likely scenario for both trendlines predicts US emissions will shrink (due in part to factors well outside the control of either candidate), and does not show a 4bn ton jump, meaning the claim is just straight up false

-the fact that the numbers in the title have nothing to do with the numbers on the graph (it does not depict what it says even a little bit)

-the fact that the graph predicts that a Biden victory would lead to an immediate drop in emissions 3x greater than the drop associated with the pandemic lockdowns (based on... what exactly? wishful thinking? magic?)

-the fact that either scenario depicted here would still leave the US as the world's top carbon polluter when you account for how much of global emissions directly serves the US economy

-the fact that both of these scenarios are so laughably out of touch with what you'd need to meaningfully avert runaway global warming that the difference between them is practically negligible (even if we got the Biden scenario we'd still be in for at least 3 degrees Celsius worth of warming, and a catastrophe with no precedent in human history, one that would render some southern portions of this continent uninhabitable by mammals for at least part of the year)

-the fact that the graph baseline is in negative numbers

Once Biden gets elected 30-45% of the US population will be immediately executed.