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Candescent Gaming Opinions and whatnot

@candescencearia / candescencearia.tumblr.com

This is the humble blog of one Joshua Braico, aspiring game designer and video game nerd who feels like chucking out his opinions on things. I'll be throwing here musings, rants and whatever game stuff I feel like sharing.
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Tumblr is apparently doing some crazy nonsense again, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pillowfort.io is a new social media platform that aims to give users control of their content and how it’s seen and shared, as well as provide better communication tools to promote conversation and creativity. If this sounds good to you, you can donate $5 to our PayPal and you will receive a registration link the Friday after your donation. And if you decide the site isn’t for you, you can request a refund for up to three weeks after you sign up. (All money we receive through this process is going towards paying our hosting expenses and compensating our programmers.)

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lilirulu

What’s wrong with Sony? Like, what the fuck?

what did they do ?

So, They’re banning all VNs from Playstations systems and any VNs going on there currently must be HEAVILY censored. They’re also forcing JP devs to translate them into english too. They forced Senran Kagura to censor. And apparently now all games even JP ones have to match the ESRBs standards instead of like CERO .

Meanwhile, Valve is letting devs sell actual porn games on Steam at least partly because they've decided there's no point policing the likes of VN makers.

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sleepyoshi

Game of the Year!

This is a fascinating demonstration of where not to use particular techniques in game development. This particular ‘glitch’ is actually just a bad handling of how the camera works. When Spock is ‘aiming’, his model is rendered by a completely different camera, which causes him to be rendered in front other things in the scene, even if they should be logically in front instead.

There is actually a legitimate use for this technique, however - it is commonly used in first person shooters. Notice how even when you run right up to a wall in FPS games, your arm or gun never sticks through the wall itself. That’s because the playermodel is always rendering at the front of the camera’s view no matter what. While this sometimes looks a bit weird with certain weapons when they should be sticking through something in the scene, this works well because in first-person view you are rarely looking at something that should be between your gun and the camera in the first place.

This same thing happens in Warframe when aiming down sights. That being said, the player is often so close to the camera that the problems with this approach aren’t quite so apparent most of the time, though I’d argue that using a separate camera in this scenario is completely unnecessary, so I’m not sure why Digital Extremes has fixed it yet.

Source: youtu.be
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lilirulu
I never understood why Overwatch even tries to have a story when it’s in one of the absolute worst genres in which to tell a story.

Eh, FPS can have a good story mode but it needs to have a STORY MODE. Which overwatch has not. Though, in somewhat defense, of Overwatch they were going for a multi-media story thing (even though they were doing that for lack of a proper story mode). But, they fucked that up too because a Lack of consistent updates that actually pushed some sort of story forward.  Seriously, they didn’t even need to do it like one big huge over arching story and could have done like a series of comics that focused on smaller arcs all leading to some sort of main plot. But for that to work they’d need to plan, but, they have no plan*. It’s really obvious that most of the OW cast are just a hodgepodge of different character tropes and themes slapped together around a hero/character-centric FPS so blizzard could make those E-sport bucks. *I guess to be fair it seems everything post-Reunion had no plan to it. Reunion feels like it’s actually the actual start of them moving towards some kind of story but who knows if they’ll fuck it up or not. Probably helps they hired an actual writer a couple months ago.

One of the worst parts of Overwatch’s lore is that it’s been 2 years and (from what I can tell) they STILL aren’t actually Overwatch yet (or at least Overwatch has yet to consist of anything more than just Tracer and Winston) and have yet to actually DO anything of value. Most of the shorts and comics either focus on what the characters are doing individually or what happened in the past when old Overwatch was still around, rather than the characters as a team coming together to take on a singular goal / threat . Actually, that’s a lie; Talon, the bad-guy team, has come together since the Doomfist comic and are planning some vaguely evil malarkey, which not only means the villains have achieved more than the heroes so far, it means the modern age Overwatch team’s ONLY notable victory, stopping Widowmaker and Reaper from stealing the Doomfist’s glove way back in the reveal trailer (which was back in 2014) was COMPLETELY UNDONE.  This is the most inept super-hero team ever.

When you put it that way; It’s pretty fucking hilarious. It’s even more hilarious when you consider that Widow & Reaper were only stopped because I little kid came in with an assist.

I should probably point out that friggn’ Team Fortress 2 has had more actual legit plot progression than Overwatch and actual stakes involved despite the lore basically being completely ridiculous. At first there was backstory stuff, but then suddenly Mann Vs. Machine came out with some comics that actually advanced the plot in a significant way (by quite literally killing off the very reason the two teams were fighting and introducing a brand new antagonist) and the more recent comic series starting with “Ring of Fired” is going to be the actual endgame to the TF2 storyline.

Granted, Valve has avoided inserting storyline stuff into the actual game aside from MvM being contextually taking place after the ‘main’ game, but at least Valve has the confidence to keep it around as a permanent game mode and provide a significant amount of longevity to it, rather than a limited-time event, unlike Blizzard’s handling of Overwatch’s story-based co-op modes so far.

I’d honestly say at least most of TF2′s cast has more character depth than, well, most of Overwatch’s, even if some of it is hilariously silly. I mean, I don’t think anyone expected the Sniper’s backstory to be a homage/parody of Superman’s origin story.

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lauralot89

Because I remember disinformation being spread around the last election and I’m sure Russia will bring it back:

  • YOU CAN’T VOTE ONLINE.
  • YOU CAN’T VOTE FROM YOUR PHONE.
  • IN MANY STATES THERE ARE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES FOR PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR BALLOT.
  • DO NOT WEAR CAMPAIGN GEAR TO THE POLLS.
  • DO NOT TRY TO PERSUADE PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR A CANDIDATE AT THE POLLS.
  • DO NOT ENGAGE IN ANY KIND OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE AT THE POLLS.
  • NO ELECTION IS EVER A SURE THING, EVEN IF YOU’RE IN THE BLUEST OR REDDEST OF STATES.  IF SOMEONE TRIES TO TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN SIT THIS ONE OUT, THEY ARE EITHER IGNORANT OR MALICIOUS.
  • VOTE.

IMPORTANT

Real talk, why the fuck do you yanks not have compulsory voting

Voting is a responsibility, not a fucking privilege that you can just opt out of. Oh, and if anyone wants to say “but muh free speech”, fuck off with that nonsense, and just fucking vote, the health of your democracy is worth more than your ‘right’ to bum around at home and not fulfil your constitutional responsibility.

Though if you sincerely want to vote but are unable to because of circumstances beyond your control, that’s a lot more understandable. You guys need to make voting days public holidays and make it illegal for employers to punish their employees for going out and voting instead of working.

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Don’t just take it from us– our users love Pillowfort.io, and Kotaku writer Gita Jackson also had great things to say about our site. Check out our Kickstarter for your opportunity to get in on Pillowfort.io while we’re still in private beta!

Yo there’s about 6k of 39k so this needs some reblogs and love. I have an account and it’s definitely going to be a fantastic site if it can get the support it needs. If you can’t contribute please just reblog.

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kat8porgs

Huh. So after checking out the beta site it’s like if LJ and Tumblr had a baby and gave that baby safety locks. Which is pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted?

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What’s the mood after seeing Infinity War

Goku would let Thanos collect all the stones to fight him at full power

Funny thing is, this is Vegeta’s bad habit, not Goku’s. The only time Goku has ever let an enemy power up was when Freeza went full power, and even then it was because Goku “did the math” in his head and knew Freeza going from 50% to 100% wouldn’t be enough for him to win. Vegeta, on the other hand, goaded Freeza into transforming when he actually was even with him and let Cell go Perfect when he had Cell on the ropes because he wanted a challenge, and he got humiliated both times. Goku actually told Gohan to stop messing around and kill Cell already because he knew if he didn’t, there was a good chance Cell would do something stupid and make the situation go to shit like Freeza did, and oh, yeah, he was right.

Though power levels with Marvel/DC and Dragon Ball aren’t exactly one-to-one, I have a feeling Thanos would have trouble with the likes of Beerus and Whis, the former being a literal god of destruction who might be resistant to the Infinity Gauntlet, while Whis is a literal reality warper. Oh, and the Omni-Kings, who can casually erase an entire multiverse on a whim.

Fun fact: In the original Infinity Gauntlet comic storyline, Thanos’ downfall was literally becoming one with the universe... While his mortal body was still around, unconscious and had the Gauntlet on. It was Nebula of all people who yanked the Gauntlet, because she was around as a horrific almost-dead zombie-like being (basically as present to Death, long story) and she had enough drive even in that form to steal the Gauntlet under Thanos’ nose and boot him off the villain role.

Also, Thanos used the gauntlet to make a female clone of himself to spite Death. Yeah. Comics are weird.

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lilirulu

I don’t get why people saying character poorly communicating with each other and that causing problems in the story is bad writing, like, by default.

"Poor Communication Kills" is a trope, and it works when it makes sense for the characters involved to not be able to communicate properly. Tropes are not bad, folks, and neither is having characters mess up, people are flawed, after all.

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Hi! I’m Matt Wilde, an old man from the North of England who has worked in visual effects, lighting, and rendering for games since the last century. Most recently, I worked on Variable State’s Virginia. Previously I was responsible for blood, magic, and urine in games as diverse as The Lord of The Rings Aragorn’s Quest (magic/blood), The House of the Dead: Overkill (blood/urine), and Dancing with the Stars: The Official Game (all of the above). Now I’m contributing VFX and rendering to In the Valley of Gods at Campo Santo.

Putting together our announcement trailer provided plenty of challenges, but one thing I spent a fair chunk of time on didn’t actually make the final cut: a scene where Zora and Rashida wade through an ancient flooded passageway.

The starting point was this thumbnail sketch from art director Claire Hummel:

To bring the scene to life, we’d need nice-looking water, which wouldn’t be convincing if it didn’t react to the motion of the characters and surrounding geometry. A game that does this well is Resident Evil 7 (especially if you’re a fan of floating corpses, like I am).

To this end, graphics programmer Pete Demoreuille (who apparently does exist even though he doesn’t have a Twitter profile) created a GPU-based simulation using a “shallow-water” approximation. It’s a little more accurate than traditional video game techniques, as it accounts for the water’s depth and computes its horizontal velocity along with height. For collision with the characters and the world, a “signed distance field” can be precomputed for the static environment, and characters are added in per-frame by attaching primitives (capsules, in this case) to bones in their rigs. Got it?

The end result is a number of dynamic textures which are fed into the shader for the water surface’s height, normal, velocity, and distance from a blocking object. Timo Kellomäki’s work on water simulation in games is a great reference.

With these at my disposal, I set about making an actual shader, starting with a simple flow mapping texture—the flowing determined by the simulation. The output is brightened depending on factors like surface normal and velocity. The below was captured right out of the Unity editor and was immediately fun to play with. Imagine the capsule is a rubber duck, like I did. For about a week.

I gradually built this into a more watery-looking shader with the addition of normal mapping, depth-based transparency, caustic lighting effects, and probably some other things.

By this time the passage scene contained some first pass environment modelling and character animation, so I could try the shader out in situ. But first, Claire produced this handy style guide broken down into layers.

Isolating each element of the material was really useful in getting the final combined effect to work as we hoped it would. This is how it looked with the breakdown recreated in the shader:

If you’ve worked with Unity shaders, you may appreciate that getting shadows to project onto a translucent surface is quite challenging. But I think it was worth the effort to enable the subtly visible geometry under the surface, fogged and blurred by depth.

With the characters and colliders added, the scene was as complete as it was ever going to get. The environment, character models and animation would all be updated in time, and I had plans to add particle splashes, water dripping from the ceiling, and a way to allow the characters to appear to get dynamically wet. But then, the devastating news.

The shot had been cut from the trailer.

Not one to take this kind of thing badly, I quickly brushed it off and it was really no more than a few months and a Balinese yoga retreat later and I was eagerly anticipating my next challenge. Dust motes? Oh no that’s great. Bring it on. I love dust.

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shoomlah

Matt is an FX magician, I swear to god

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mrsextet

Many people who see this page out of context assume it’s an edit and it’s not. The best part is that this is the final page of an entire chapter. Fukumoto actually had the gall to use Uno as a device for a teasing cliffhanger. 

Not only that but Kaiji is published in a weekly manga anthology called Young Magazine

The Japanese audience for Kaiji had to wait an entire week to see if Kaiji was going to play high-stakes Uno. 

I know this seems ridiculous to some, but Uno can be smeggin' crazy, man, especially when you've got extra rules added onto it. I've seen online videos of people playing the online version (mainly SeaNanners, GassyMexican and Minilad), it's both legitimately tense and, depending on the people involved, bloody hilarious. It's just one big game of people planning on how to screw each other over, and when someone is really close to winning, the other players generally team up to try and avoid giving them the card or color they need, it's surprisingly entertaining for such a simple game.

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An interesting thing to note about the FCC’s ability to repeal Net Neutrality

You’ve probably seen warnings about the FCC’s plan to remove its net neutrality rules all over Tumblr and elsewhere. And yes, it is certainly a big deal. A huge bloody deal.

However, there is a silver lining to all this - Wired has an excellent article on the subject. The problem that the telecom dick-sucking scumbags lead by Ajit Pai at the FCC (seriously, fuck those guys) will run into is that they can’t just change the net neutrality regulation just like that. You see, there’s a law dating back to 1946 called the Administrative Procedure Act, and its purpose is to ensure that regulations can’t simply yo-yo back and forth every time a new party takes control of the White House, by banning federal agencies making "arbitrary capricious" decisions. The FCC only just successfully argued for Title II reclassification for internet services mid-way last year in court.

Simply put, the FCC will immediately be sued, the regulation changes will be put on hold, and the GOP-controlled FCC will have the unenviable task of trying to justify repealing the regulations they relatively recently instated. The problem for them, is that there simply isn’t any credible data that justifies removing net neutrality - the bad things the telecoms complained would happen simply haven’t materialised, they’ve even admitted as much to investors. The FCC has a very steep uphill battle in court.

However, that is not any reason to be complacent. What the FCC is actually counting on is the hope that the GOP will introduce a “proper” net neutrality bill into congress that will “settle everything” and set net neutrality in stone - with the caveats that 1) it will be flagrantly and literally written by telecom lobbyists, and 2) it will basically have many holes big enough to drive a truck through, making it worthless.

That’s why contacting your representatives is important, because the main battleground for net neutrality is going to be in congress and the senate. Remember SOPA? If you want to keep net neutrality as it is, the community needs to fight tooth and nail to stop telecoms from getting more power, because the last thing anyone needs is the likes of Viacom and Comcast getting more power. The telecom industry in the United State is a dumpster fire, with much of the country basically being a duopoly. That’s something that will take far more effort to fix, but for now, the line needs to be held on this one issue, to keep things from getting worse.

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play6irl

Reblog in 40 seconds and you will be put on the path to achieve your dreams and find your fortune

WELP.

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xanadontit

Can’t hurt.

Bet

I’ve been rolling in the dough lately so it seems like these things are working 🙏🏻

No they literally work

lilyliqueur

I reblogged this the other day and literally got a settlement check from an old job. like LMAO ?????????????????????????? 

i’ve got nothing to lose lol

These never seem to work for me. Not that I believed they do in the first place, but still.

Don’t recognize which currencies are in the pic, though.

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Fullmetal Alchemist - A Sorta-Review/Summary

So I ended up rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood not long ago, and all of a sudden I feel like doing a semi-review summary of it, the original manga and the original anime series, and my thoughts on the differences between both anime, because they’re so different. In general, it’s a great series, and the whole thing is absolutely worth diving into, but it’s a bit more complicated than “just watch it”. There will be spoilers, but only after the jump.

If you don’t know the premise is, for whatever reason, the story of Fullmetal Alchemist takes place in a world similar to our world when it was roughly in the 1910s-1920s, but with a major difference - alchemy is a valid and useful art in and of itself, rather than it being merely the predecessor to modern chemistry, and is basically a form of magic, using the law of “Equivalent Exchange” as its core principle - whatever you create, you need something of equal value to exchange it with. It stars two teenage brothers, Edward and Alphose Elric, who tried to bring their dead mother back to life via the forbidden art of “Human Transmutation”, but they end up paying a huge price for it - Ed loses his arm and leg, and Al ends up losing his entire body, only staying alive through being bound to a suit of armor, though Ed gains the ability to perform alchemy without being able to draw a transmutation circle as a result. This incident causes one Colonel Mustang of the Amestrian military, a ‘State Alchemist’, to come knocking and decides to nominate Ed for the position of a State Alchemist as well, feeling pity for the boys, and giving them hope that they might be able to return to their original bodies. Ed, with the help of his childhood friend Winry, a mechanic, gets a pair of robotic limbs called ‘automail’, and the brothers set off to discover the hidden secrets of alchemy and figure out how to return to their original bodies, with Ed now a State Alchemist under the codename “Fullmetal”.

The original manga was written and drawn by Hiromu Arakawa, a female mangaka who has long finished the series and has gone on to work on Silver Spoon, a rather delightful slice of life series in its own right. It started in August 2001, and didn’t end until June 2010, but long-running series isn’t something manga fans are strangers to. This is also the reason why there are two seperate series - in 2003, the anime studio Bones (also known for Space Dandy, Soul Eater, Ouran High School Host Club and more recently My Hero Academia) started producing an anime adaptation. The problem was, it was a monthly manga, and both they and Arakawa knew they’d overtake the manga pretty quickly. So Arakawa asked them to take the premise and plot up to a point (aka, the start of the Fifth Laboratory arc), before taking the whole story in a completely different direction.

To its credit, Bones did a pretty decent job on the original series. Some characters from both adaptations are fleshed out a bit more, and it has its own original interesting ideas. That being said, the mood is a lot more depressing than the manga and Brotherhood did, and, frankly, towards the end it basically ended up going batshit insane. It was one hell of a trip, but the second half of the series is somewhat divisive, though not mediocre or even outright bad, in my opinion.

When the manga was getting close to finishing and Arakawa had a pretty damn good idea of when she’d finally finish, Bones started a second adaptation, Brotherhood, following the story much more closely. It’s a much more consistent and satisfying experience than the original series, in my opinion, and includes some great characters that were completely absent in the first adaptation, nevermind giving certain characters who basically disappeared from the plot in the first anime bigger roles. It doesn’t have the filler stuff that adds some extra character depth, but frankly, it seemed Bones assumed that most viewers would’ve watched the first anime anyway.

If you want me to tell you which to watch first? Read the manga first, then the first anime, then Brotherhood. I know a lot of anime fans would say this, but it works best in this instance, the manga is a fantastic piece of art in its own right, doesn’t skip over anything like Brotherhood does, and your experience won’t be colored by the completely different direction the first anime takes. And once you get to Brotherhood, reliving those cool moments from the manga will be all the sweeter.

Spoilers after the jump, you have been warned.

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