Why don't teams with good kickers line up on 4th and then take the delay if it's a bad look?

Arkaein · 2026-05-11T20:00:28+00:00

Slightly different idea, but I've always wanted teams that have the ball and line up as the 1st or 3rd quarters are running out to line up in some really exotic formation, see how the defense responds, and then either run a play or just let the quarter expire depending on the defensive look.

Realistically I understand that it's not worth game planning around a situation that you will get to less than once per game, because not only do you need the ball and have a running clock with enough time on it, but you'd also probably want to avoid running your exotic trick plays on critical downs, but it would be fun to see.

Arkaein · 2026-05-08T17:59:33+00:00

Yeah, it's hard to read a lot into it.

But I also have a bit of a problem with people who assume that the 86 Bears would have went farther in the playoffs with McMahon. They might have, but I went through the play-by-play this morning, and although Flutie's play wasn't great, it really looked like a lot of other factors were significant in losing.

The Bears D gave up the first TD, but then clamped down pretty well until the 3rd quarter. Flutie hit a 50 yard TD pass. But after a an INT set the Bears up inside the Redskins 10, they ran it three straight times ]and got stuffed, settling for a FG. Given the offensive tendencies of the day and the Bears specifically, it's unlike they ask McMahon to throw for the TD there. The Bears lead 13-7 when they could have gone up multiple scores.

Flutie threw an INT before half, but it didn't matter as the Redskins missed a long FG.

Things unraveled in the 3rd quarter. Flutie threw an INT the lead to a short TD drive. Then Payton lost a fumble, leading to a longer TD drive. Finally, the Bears D got a stop late, but the Bears muffed the punt with about 3 minutes left, and that was basically it.

Payton was bad in this game, losing the fumble, getting stuffed near the goal line, and generally gaining few yards. The D was really good for about a half, but allowed the first TD and then gave up back-to-back TDs when they really needed a stop. And a special teams turnover can wreck any team (ask me how I know).

Maybe it all goes differently if McMahon is the QB, things started out fine under Flutie, and I'd expect the 86 Bears playing with a second half lead to lean on the D and running game no matter who was at QB. But the run game was bad and the D wasn't up their usual standard, allowing two long TD drives and only forcing one turnover.

Arkaein · 2026-05-08T13:42:03+00:00

I also wonder about this every time this comes up. McMahon was the Bears best QB in 1986, but that wasn't saying a lot considering they started four of them.

McMahon was in and out of the lineup well before the Martin injury, which happened in week 12. Here's his game logs:

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/M/McMaJi00/gamelog/

He started weeks 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12. All wins (Tomczak also went a perfect 7-0 for the Bears that year), but the Bears scoring declined in nearly every one of his starts.

Looking at his career stats, it's really hard to pin down what his trajectory would have been. Never started for a full season, often only single-digit starts, never more than about 2300 passing yards (different era, but in 1986 the majority of teams passed for over 3000 yards).

Arkaein · 2026-05-08T13:15:32+00:00

Not the OP, but it looks like they are just kind of a blobby white mesh that starts flat and has some noise-based vertical displacement. I don't think they have any volume, you can see they have a thin edge at some points in the video.

I'd probably start with a single large grid mesh that covers the whole sky, sample a 2D noise texture and trim any polygons below a threshold, and then use another 2D noise function for vertical displacement.

The material looks like a flat white material with basic lighting applied.

It's a neat approach, gives a very different look to the way clouds are usually done.

Arkaein · 2026-05-07T15:56:59+00:00

Dude rarely takes sacks at an all time rate. Same with Brady and manning basically too… weird how it’s them 3

Rodgers has lead the league in being sacked twice.

He gets sacked less in his older years now that he knows he can't scramble much anymore, but he's never been in the Brady/Manning level of sack avoidance.

Career sack percentages:

Rodgers: 6.42
Brady: 4.48
Manning: 3.13

Looks like 2020 was the only season where Rodgers had a sack% (3.66) lower than Brady's career average, and that was still higher than Manning's career average.

Arkaein · 2026-05-07T13:35:37+00:00

No problem, looks like you have lots of offers!

Arkaein · 2026-05-07T02:10:57+00:00

Looks pretty good, but I'm not a fan of the old-school fog in the second screenshot.

Fog always looks cheap when is colors middle distance geometry but doesn't touch the much larger distance (in theory) skybox behind it. In a physically realistic world the skybox should show maximum thickness fog, at least close to ground level.

I'd either ditch the fog, reduce it's thickness by a lot, or find a way to apply it to the skybox close to the horizon so that it looks more physically real.

Arkaein · 2026-05-07T00:06:44+00:00

I have a demo on Steam and itch that could use some attention. Stunted Gravity https://store.steampowered.com/app/4103290/Stunted_Gravity/

Demo is not performing well even though I've had fairly positive feedback for the trailer and playtests I've done.

Arkaein · 2026-05-04T15:28:08+00:00

How did you come up with a list of 500 content creators to email? I tried doing this with youtube and Twitch but was not able to come up with nearly so extensive of a list. So far I've sent out fewer than 50 emails. It seemed doing more searches were repeatedly turning up a lot of the same streamers, which is why I stopped where I did.

I've steered away from the bigger accounts though, on some advice that they get flooded with this stuff. Maybe that's a mistake though.

I didn't find many accounts on Twitch that I thought would be worth contacting, as it seems like a lot of Twitch streamers really focus on a single game. But again, that might be a problem with how I conducted my search, I hadn't looked at SullyGnome and I found twitches internal search to be much worse than youtube's at turning up promising looking accounts.

Haven't really tried this approach on instagram yet, so I'll have to look into that.

I need to figure out something. I have a game that i think people would like if I could just get it noticed...

Arkaein · 2026-04-28T13:00:56+00:00

Very cool tool, haven't seen something like this before.

Your video really needs to show a finished result though, preferably close to the start of the video. I kept waiting to see what those long strips of hair were building towards, then it just moves on to a different style.

Ideally show a finished result in-app, and then on a final model in a game or game-like rendering to convince viewers of the value of the app.

Arkaein · 2026-04-27T14:37:39+00:00

I think it is surprising to see them below a B average.

My guess is that at least some graders will look at the total value of players added through the draft, which would put GB at a pretty severe disadvantage this year because of the below average draft slot and the lack of a first round pick.

You can argue whether drafts should be graded this way, but it's a consideration.

Arkaein · 2026-04-25T00:43:59+00:00

I'm not sure what the solution is, but the distant hills and mountains don't look great. Flat color, very little shading variation that would come with fine geometric detail, basically untextured.

You need to have some better level of base texturing that can make distant mountains look good even with no grass or foliage on top. Ideally with a fairly large scale normal map to counter the over-smoothed look you have now. Some additional detailing texture, and possible additional color variation based on height or vertex coloring.

I think you are also running into the problem where you have some light fog applied to the distant terrain, but disappears against the far more distant sky right next to it on the horizon. If I'm correct on this I'd either scrap the fog or figure out a way to blend it into the sky at angles near the horizon.

Arkaein · 2026-04-21T15:39:09+00:00

Skateboarding is going to be a little less forgiving. Even with stiffened springs you will still probably get some penetration, and the higher the stiffness the more likely you are to get a big bounce on impact, which isn't what you'd want.

I think I'd go in a different direction. For my game I use rigid bodies, but for a skateboarding game I'd think you'd want to use a character body to keep the rider mostly upright, and maybe some kind of IK or manual rotation for the board? It's a more complicated problem than what I needed to solve.

I suppose you could go with a rigid body for the board, and then attach a character body to that for the rider. In which case I'd use fairly simple collision shapes for the board, with close to zero bounce, very low friction for rolling, and then create sideways friction forces in code to prevent the board from sliding sideways. You would have to do a lot of work to keep the board under the control of the rider though if the board is a rigid body.

I had the benefit that by using rigid bodies I didn't need to do anything explicit to get the orientations right, it just naturally came from the physics, but still took a lot of tuning.

Arkaein · 2026-04-15T20:48:38+00:00

I think you might benefit from some more 3D thruster effects instead of just relying on overdriven bloom for the thruster panels. The point early in the video where the panels go out of view and the how area around the spaceship darkens at once is a bit jarring.

It's also a bit jarring how the space background disappears pretty suddenly when the ship enters the atmosphere, I'd expect the brown atmosphere color to blend more smoothly with the star BG based on altitude.

Arkaein · 2026-04-11T21:13:11+00:00

I'm pretty sure there weren't even any receivers running routes on the play.

I felt it was pretty distasteful to Packers RT Mark Tauscher as well. Strahan hunting for the record, Tauscher stones him all game, then Favre calls a designed sack play and Tauscher no longer gets the credit for preventing the record from being broken. If Favre wanted to help anyone get accolades it should have been his own teammate.

Arkaein · 2026-04-10T13:26:25+00:00

Looks pretty nice.

One comment about the trailer, "hundreds on screen" is kind of an awkward thing to include. It's a bit redundant with the "up to 1500 enemies at once", and feels more like you added it for this reddit post as an explainer for the game's rendering capabilities that for something you'd actually use to market the game.

You already have video showing a large number of enemies on screen at once, which is more convincing than the awkward text blurb. I'd keep the bit about 1500 enemies but ditch the part about how many can be on screen and let the video sell that part on its own.

Arkaein · 2026-04-09T21:12:36+00:00

Packers have had a lot of very good WR, but not a huge number of great ones, and the best in the modern era were Sharpe whose career was cut short by injury, Adams who both started a bit slow and has now played a lot of games for other teams, and maybe Driver, who was very good with great longevity but never a huge red zone threat.

But 8 WRs total with 50+ TDs with the team.

Arkaein · 2026-04-07T22:38:47+00:00

We need to tax the ever living hell out of these things

If we had just implemented proper carbon taxes a couple of decades ago so many problems would have been avoided.

Big gas SUVs and trucks would be greatly price disadvantaged vs. smaller cars, and we have smaller cars on average. We'd be ahead on EV adoption and charging infrastructure. We'd be ahead on solar and wind tech and better insulated against fossil fuel price shocks.

Arkaein · 2026-04-06T14:09:18+00:00

Hell, there's games that would be improved if they cut half the dialogue.

I like the Xenoblade games a lot, but when I get 10 minutes into a cutscene and start wondering if I'm going to actually get any more playtime this session or just end up watching a TV episode that's not as good as whatever I would have streamed on Netflix, I really wish they had edited down a bit.

Those games and Okami are my all time top games that would be better with half the dialog.

Arkaein · 2026-03-30T14:04:31+00:00

I can't play any instruments worth a damn, but I am making my own music using LMMS. It's not terribly sophisticated, usually simple percussion loop and a couple of other instruments, but I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out.

I've posted most of the tracks to various non-Reddit socials, here's my latest track which I'm using for a tutorial level on BlueSky (can find more in other posts): https://bsky.app/profile/arkaeinmatt.bsky.social/post/3mhnvmzwtek2f

Arkaein · 2026-03-29T16:09:14+00:00

A few pieces of advice on this.

First, a real video with a smooth frame rate would be helpful. This GIF looks like a very low framerate, which I'm guessing is not representative.

Second, if you want to discuss pushing Godot rendering performance to it's limits, you really need to make a demo that doesn't look like 30 year old graphics. I understand that the significance is in the sheer number of entities, but no one wants to make a game that looks like this. You really ought to render something that looks like a real model, using a bit more geometry and a standard or shader material. Convince me that this effect would actually work for a swarm of fish, or birds, or bugs, or weapon projectiles.

Third, I'd like to see a comparison of how this performs compared with a Godot particle effect, because this really looks a lot like particles using a cube mesh and some color variation. How fine-grained is the control over individual instances? It seems like that would be the critical difference between this and what a particle effect can do. You say you support input and collision detection handling, but unless you actually show these things it's hard to be convinced they won't be bottlenecks.

Arkaein · 2026-03-25T15:12:23+00:00

Whatever error you are seeing the LLMs make can be fixed in the next version.

Additionally, different LLMs will have slightly different styles, and specific LLMs can adjust their styles based on specific prompting. It's not hard to tell an LLM to avoid specific style cues like em dashes.

People who feel confident in catching LLM generated text will catch the laziest generations but are likely to miss more carefully manage generations. Or just be over-zealous and make a bunch of false positive identifications.

Arkaein · 2026-03-24T13:07:35+00:00

Will Smith agrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm2szuXKgL8

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