Chris Does Things

Fun fact: We know the size of the Pokémon world because Scarlet and Violet has framerate issues

Video games tend to do this thing called "culling," where they don't render things that aren't in use. In Breath of the Wild, there's no reason for Link to be able to see how many apples are on a tree in Hateno when he's all the way in Tarrey Town, or know how many Bokoblins are running around Hebra Mountain. Link has a radius around himself that spawns in people, enemies, items, etc, so that the player gets the full experience of a rendered world without the game having to keep track of 850 Hearty Radishes sparkling.

This is good.

Scarlet and Violet has really AGGRESSIVE culling. The devs knew the game was framey and did everything they could up until the last possible second to save on resources.

The player has a single square that's always rendered around them, which takes about 10 seconds to run across. Besides that, all that's visible is whatever the camera is facing; if the camera can't see it, it does not exist.

You might think that this would be good for performance, since the game isn't calling as many assets constantly. And you would be right, if the things culled were ALL that the game was trying to render.

We all know at this point about the memory leak problem the game has, where it won't toss garbage data it's not using. This is supposed to account for the framerate drop; however, if it was ONLY the memory leak, it should start out smoothly, then decay over time until it's unplayable.

So what gives?

This is the ocean.

It's pretty. It's got a tiny bit of reflection, some gentle waves, a nice gradient. A beautifully made ocean without repetitive textures is always nice.

THIS IS THE OCEAN.

IT IS NOT CULLED.

Look at the SIZE of this thing! Paldea is an ANT in the middle of this puddle. It's rendering ALL of this, ALL its sparkles and waves, ALL the time.

Now, this is usually the part of the post where I'm like "and because we know the size of the ocean, based on the coastlines and wind direction, we can figure out how big the rest of the planet is by comparison!" like I did with Breath of the Wild over a year ago.

No.

Another video game term you might not be familiar with is a "skybox." Basically, to give the illusion of faraway objects, clouds, mountains, etc, and to hide the black void most 3D games are built in, games will have a texture wrapped around either the level or where the player is standing. For example:

This is a level from Twilight Princess called Sacred Grove. You normally can't see the bottom parts of this, hence why it turns into a gray plane, but the parts you CAN theoretically see by looking through the trees are colored so you think you're looking at a sky. You can see the edge of the void down in the bottom right corner.

Here's another one from Twilight Princess. You can see the different textures that stack on top of each other, as well as the blue skybox that's centered around Link when he's in the area. You, as the player, FEEL like you're in a small part of a larger world, because the devs cleverly structured together elements you CAN see in other areas into the background.

More complicated versions of skyboxes, typically semi-circular, are called skydomes.

They tend to look kind of like snowglobes, because you do not need to render anything that can't be seen. There's no situation in which the player should be able to fall lower than the level, so there's no reason to render the dome into a sphere in the event that that happens.

In Scarlet and Violet, it would make sense for the skydome to end where the ocean does. There's no situation in which the player manages to go past or underneath the ocean, so even if you wanted a gigantic ocean size like they have, you don't need to use more sky to encompass that.

They did not get this memo.

You might be thinking to yourself "wow, that looks like the curvature of the Earth!"

AND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT!!!!!

Why is this here. Why is it so big. I can't even see Paldea anymore. What exactly was planned for this.

Clever readers might have noticed that I labeled this "Skysphere" and not "Skydome."

That's because it for some reason is a sphere. Paldea is sitting in the middle of a fully rendered gigantic sphere in space. For some reason.

Look at Earth. Look at the Iberian Peninsula (Spain + Portugal), which Paldea is supposed to mimic.

I overlaid the peninsula over Paldea and made them roughly the same size. Assuming the two to be 1:1, the OCEAN is bigger than Earth.

If I then take that size and apply it to the skysphere:

HI. WHY IS THIS A THING.

The skysphere is bigger than the PROPORTION OF THE SUN TO THE EARTH:

I will be taking this as canon sizing until the Pokémon Company comes out and either CULLS this monstrosity and stops forcing our Switches to render THE SUN, or until the Pokémon Company stops being a coward and gives us a canon planet size.

"Jumpy, have you ever heard the name, [Goncharov]?"

-Goncharov... Can't say it rings a bell. Is that some sort of scientist?

"It's a movie, actually. About the Italian mob. Goncharov is the eponymous protagonist."

-Hang on a second, Italian? I thought Goncharov was a Russian name.

"Well, yes. But the movie takes place in Italy. That's not important right now. What's strange about this movie is, although it was supposedly released in 1973, it only gained attention in 2022."

-Almost five decades later... marketing really flubbed that one, huh?

"That's not it. The movie doesn't exist."

-Wait, what? What do you mean it doesn't exist?

"It never did. There was never a movie called Goncharov. Only one day in 2022 the internet started talking about it as if it was real. As if everyone had already seen it."

-That... that has to be a prank, right? I mean it wouldn't be the first time the internet took a liking to spreading lies, would it?

"That's true. Especially on tumblr, where the phenomenon originated. But what if there's more to it? What if the knowledge of that movie was "plucked" from some alternative timeline where the movie was critically acclaimed, and "transmitted" to our timeline through fields invisible to the naked eye?"

-C'mon. That's insane. Isn't it way more likely that tumblr was, y'know, being tumblr?

"Maybe. But isn't it strange that the name of the movie, its director, its cast of characters, the actors playing them, and the year of its release was unanimously agreed upon by one of the most inconsistent and chaotic blogging websites out there?"

-Th... that's...

"I'm not done yet. Not only that, but the events of story, the relationships between the characters, interviews with the cast, audio recordings of the movie score, fandom discourse, and multiple gifsets of the movie footage started appearing on everyone's dashboards. And none of the information contradicted each other."

-!

-(Could that really be? A movie that was transmitted to the public consciousness from another timeline...?)

Reblog if you’d go to a TEDxTalk hosted by Seto Kaiba

seto kaiba: [unnecessary explosions and dragon holograms] if you losers are here because you want to become like me, forget it. no one can be like me. anyway here’s a powerpoint on why no one here is as good as me

Sitting here thinking about Kingdom Hearts before bed (you know, like you do) and it really sunk in how surreal it is that this franchise with so much content effectively has no spin-off games. Oh sure, it has games that seem like spinoffs, and arguably should be, but in reality every single one of them is plot-critical.

That 3DS port of a Japanese mobile phone game whose plot Nomura literally wrote while drunk? Its ending resolves the cliffhanger KH2 left off on for around half a decade. The DS game that seemingly only exists for additional Roxas angst? Hope you remembered that new girl we introduced, because otherwise a big chunk of KH3 won't make much sense! Want to know where Sora wound up after KH3? Play this rhythm game for about 20 hours and maybe we'll tell you! The goddamn smartphone-exclusive MMORPG set thousands of years before the main story? Fuck you, we hid like half the lore in there, enjoy not understanding KH4 at all you ignorant fool

Kingdom Hearts is one of those franchises that I've only ever experienced from the sidelines, and I don't think I'll ever comprehend it

Don't worry, neither will any of us who've actually played it

list of things that happened in kingdom hearts but more specifically regarding disney worlds that makes me lose my fucking mind (because i dont think we talk about the disney worlds enough)

feel free to add donald with zettaflare and goofy dying arent allowed

tags highlights

and my absolute favorite that left me laughing out loud for five minutes straight

- hades announces that he’s going to resurrect “the mother of all bad guys” to defeat hercules …. and its Auron from Final Fantasy X? and he i think just leaves with sora’s gang and then ends up just wandering off on his own

Sound fake, but I don’t know enough about kingdom heart to refutate.

actually here’s other stuff i forgot but specifically about maleficent

she forces a poor

guy to steal aurora’s heart

for, like, 10 minutes

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

EVERYBODY SHUT UP HAIKUBOT APPROVED THIS POST

thinking about how an anonymous group (WHO DOESN’T SEEM TO BE AFFILIATED W/ SESAME STREET!!!) found out where jon armond lived and made him swear he wouldn’t show anyone cracks before they gave it to him

oh i am SO glad you asked. gimme a sec

To clarify, he received it on a SUNDAY. These people, whoever they are, found out where he WORKED, and then went to the effort of delivering it PERSONALLY on a day where there was NO MAIL, just to send the message THAT THEY KNEW WHERE HE LIVED AS WELL.

FOR THAT SESAME STREET CARTOON.

so there’s an unofficial Sesame Street Forbidden Knowledge Guild out there i fuckin guess!!!!!!!!

(this isn’t comprehensive btw, and i may have gotten some stuff wrong. if you wanna know more here’s a good video on it)

this is the version of this post w/ the right links btw

The Magnus Archives is like the polar opposite of the shows and stories that are meant to be lighthearted but if you do any amount of thinking about the implications of their worldbuilding it quickly becomes utterly horrifying. 

A physical manifestation of fear let a guy live for like a solid week because he thought that hiding under a blanket would protect him and the fear entity decided to respect that as long as he was sufficiently worried about the situation. A group of things pretending to be human are forced to take an anatomy course, presumably because they were doing such a bad job at it.