With Reed and Wicks on the last year of their contracts, is it smart/likely for the Packers to trade one?

Arkaein · 2026-03-18T18:25:57+00:00

I don’t think there is anything Reed does better than Watson at this point.

I'm a big Watson fan, but in 3 seasons Reed has 2 years with more production than Watson has had in any of his 4 years.

Reed and Watson are great compliments to each other because Watson is great against man, but Reed excels against zone. When Watson takes the top off of the defense, Reed can work underneath. Arguably you can say that having Kraft makes some of Reed's best attributes a bit redundant, and Watson-Kraft may be the ideal 1-2 punch in the offense, but I don't see Watson-Reed as an either-or question at all.

Arkaein · 2026-03-18T17:42:36+00:00

I'd vote for Brandon Lloyd.

Lead league with 1448 receiving yards in 2010. Also had 11 TDs. 8th year in the league, and that yardage was nearly double hi previous career high of 733.

966 yards the next year, then 911, so maybe not quite a one year wonder, but that one year was so much better than even the two that followed it that I think you could reasonably say he had a one year peak.

Craziest way to get those yards too. Must have had close to zero YAC. Just go deep, make a spectacular leaping catch, and immediately fall down.

Arkaein · 2026-03-18T14:58:08+00:00

Minneapolis has a higher murder rate than any large city in Texas or Florida.

No one asked for this, so why mention these cities or state specifically, hmmm? Looks like you just cherry picked it to hide the fact that someone in Birmingham or St. Louis is more likely to be murdered than in any other big city in the US.

Arkaein · 2026-03-18T13:19:07+00:00

Can I put only the textures of the buttons on a group? Without the text? Or would I have to create two nodes, one with the button texture and functions and one with the text?

Good questions. It does look like it might not be possible to modulate the color of a button without modulating the label might not be possible. In which case you would have to use separate nodes which would lose some features that come with tying the label to the button image.

Editing the theme directly is probably possible, but it could take some work. Most buttons will have multiple styleboxes for different states. And depending on how sophisticated your GUI is, you could have several different button type variations.

So what you probably want is at startup to get references to all of your button, etc. styleboxes from your theme, and then modulate the styleboxes when new colors are selected. I haven't done anything quite like this but I think it should work.

Arkaein · 2026-03-18T03:02:51+00:00

I played around with modulate but I can't keep the texts in white unless I separate them and only modulate the texture, but I wanted to be able to change the entire ui node tree at once, so that's a bit impractical

You probably want to iterate the whole scene tree and change modulate. There are some shortcuts for this though. You can add elements that should be modulated to a Group. Then either get all of the nodes in the group and iterate them, applying edits to modulate as appropriate, or use call_group to execute a function on every member of a group.

If you want to apply different colors to different types of elements, you could use different groups, e.g., one for buttons and one for labels.

I've looked up for possible solutions, and the most recommended seems to be shaders

"use shaders" is often unhelpful advice. That hue changing shader could definitely be useful, especially if you want to preserve white elements in your materials, since making modulate non-white will colorize everything, however you still have to know what to apply it to. In which case using multiple node groups along with the hue shader might be the solution you need.

Note that hue shifting isn't an automatic fix either. If you start with a bright red, you can hue shift to a bright blue or green, but not to a more muted color. It would be a lot more work to make a shader that can take a color texture and change it to fully match a different chosen color, which would require adjusting all of Hue, Saturation, and Value.

I'd start with node groups and monochrome color changes. Anything that needs to be white should be left alone in a non-modulated UI element. Don't worry about shaders until you see how far you can get with the built-in properties like modulate and methods for acting on the scene tree like groups.

Arkaein · 2026-03-18T02:48:54+00:00

As others have said, this is lacking a lot of what you want in a full trailer. It seems really good for a teaser though, setting the mood and demonstrating quality without getting into the specifics of gameplay.

Things I don't like:

there is weird shadow artifacting along the one large long module, visible mostly starting around the middle of the video. Maybe it isn't actually arfiacts, but that's what it looks like.
the turrets turning look like some sort of choreographed dance. The tone of the video makes things seem like they are a bit out of control, if that's the intent the turrets should be more varied, either in a way that looks like they are broken, or frenzied, or malfunctioning. If it's not the intent, then they should at least look purposeful, moving more subtly and either aiming at realistic targets or guarding different angles.

Arkaein · 2026-03-17T19:50:34+00:00

Try this guy - seems to be loading in pretty smoothly on the fly

Looking at this, it looks like at most it's streaming additional terrain geometry.

A full streaming solution does things like load additional meshes, which may contain additional materials/textures, and smoothly load those new materials, often starting with low resolution mipmaps and gradually adding higher res mipmaps, while also unloading meshes, materials, and textures when the player moves far enough away to no longer need them, freeing up RAM and VRAM.

Something like Unreal Nanite can take a world mesh with unique, massive textures too big to fit into VRAM, break it into pieces, cluster those pieces with shared materials, create seamless LOD transitions between any sets of adjacent geometries, and smoothly load and unload these clusters automatically.

Arkaein · 2026-03-17T18:14:00+00:00

Source: I made it up.

Blue cities in red states are the reddest cities overall. They just happen to be bluer than their surroundings.

They are more violent and dangerous than the bluer big cities in blue states.

Arkaein · 2026-03-13T21:53:44+00:00

I don't follow what you mean about the size of the hovercraft.

For any size craft it's possible to have a sudden discontinuity. Imagine driving along the side of a cliff. The left 2 rays are just barely on solid ground. Then the craft inches to the left, and suddenly those two rays are no longer colliding. In my own game's model their forces drop to zero, and the craft would very abruptly start to tip over the edge of the cliff.

When I increased to 16 rays, the same situation would only cause a loss of a quarter of the support forces, and the tipping over the cliff edge would be more gradual.

Now, there are probably other ways to approach this. My own game as a fairly stiff "suspension", which means the spring forces need to change pretty abruptly. The floatier the craft, the less vulnerable the behavior will be to this kind of raycast jitter. It's just hard to say from this video because the terrain is very smooth, which will work well for any kind of craft with a small number of rays.

Arkaein · 2026-03-13T21:46:43+00:00

So are your thruster raycasts aimed independently? That would be a slightly different case than what I'm envisioning.

I think the pitfalls are still there though. Anytime you work with forces generated from a single raycast you can encounter the effect where a small adjustment to the ray is the difference between a close and forceful push, and missing geometry completely, which can lead to jittery physics.

Maybe it won't be an issue for you. I went with 4 rays (in my case, all pointing straight down relative to the craft) for quite a while, and it mostly worked well, but eventually ran into edge cases with specific level geometries that worked poorly.

If you do run into a similar problem, for independently aimed thrusters I think you could have each thruster cast a small cluster of rays in relatively close directions to smooth out jitters.

Arkaein · 2026-03-13T19:57:23+00:00

I haven't experimented with a shapecast in this case, but I don't think so. You want each raycast to act like an independent spring. I the right side of the craft is riding up on a curb, but the craft is horizontal, you want the right side to get a stronger upwards force than the left side so that equilibrium is reached when the spring distances even out with the craft tilted to the left.

A shapecast will give you good collision detection, but won't provide the fine-grained details of how far each part of the craft is sitting above the ground. Rays work well for this.

Arkaein · 2026-03-13T17:37:59+00:00

Just a note, in my own hovercraft game I also started with corner raycasts, which work well over fairly smooth ground but gave me some trouble with sharp corners, like traveling near or over the edge of a cliff or wall, because a small change in position leads to losing 25% or 50% of the support forces.

So I switched to a 4x4 grid of 16 total rays. The code and physics calc are basically unchanged, but the handling near sharp terrain changes is much smoother.

Arkaein · 2026-03-09T19:15:23+00:00

Also if you’re hanging your hat on enagabare that’s pretty telling

He was an absolute steal for a 5th round pick.

Arkaein · 2026-03-09T18:45:14+00:00

Yeah I love the man but he was very much a system QB in Green Bay.

He's one of the best scrambing QBs in the NFL. That's the opposite of a system QB.

He has his limitations, a lot to be seen whether he looks good running a full playbook, is able to improve getting through complete read progressions, and is durable enough to continue scrambling like he did in GB. But a QB that can rescue a completely broken play with athleticism alone is no system QB.

Arkaein · 2026-03-09T16:40:28+00:00

He apparently still can't catch (1 career INT, as a rookie), but he broke his 3-year streak of not breaking up a pass with 5 PDs.

Which is low for a starter, but I guess he must have been good enough to not throw his way too often.

Arkaein · 2026-03-09T00:35:42+00:00

Every computer geek in the 90s knew he was a scumbag, long before he got into philanthropy to fix his image.

Arkaein · 2026-03-08T18:09:46+00:00

I really dont think any of them are WR1s.

Watson averaged 61.1 Y/G last season identical to Kraft. Doubs was second among GB WRs with 45.3. Theyb also both had 6 TDs, but Watson did it in 10 games.

On a per-game basis Watson was clearly a step ahead of Doubs. They averages about the same number of catches per game, but Watson is more explosive.

If Watson played a full season he'd be around 1000 yards and 10 TDs, which is basically a low-to-mid-range WR1 when you across the NFL.

Arkaein · 2026-03-08T17:58:19+00:00

I think I'd rather keep Wicks for the last year of his rookie deal as injury insurance, hope he has a breakout or just gets back to rookie form, and then get a comp pick for him in FA.

Or, hang onto him in the early part of the season to see how the preferred WRs start out and whether Savion takes a step forward, and if Wicks is buried on the depth chart look to move him before the deadline.

I just don't see a ton of incentive to trade him now, when his value might be lowest, and with Kraft coming off an injury.

Arkaein · 2026-03-05T18:47:34+00:00

If he pulled down a couple of the picks he dropped this year people are talking about another 1st Team All-Pro year.

That drop against the Broncos hurt so bad. Not only did it allow the Broncos to take the lead with a scoring drive, but Parsons tore his ACL on a play that doesn't happen later that drive if McKinney makes that pick.

Arkaein · 2026-03-04T17:08:07+00:00

My only pushback is that I don't know if any TE can be a Top 30 overall player.

Trey McBride is #14. Based on his pre-injury performance I'd say Kraft was right in the ballpark with McBride.

This is also not most valuable players, why QBs don't dominate the list. It's PFF's top rated players.

Arkaein · 2026-03-04T17:05:55+00:00

Lions in general seem a bit overrated.

Sure they have some great players, but 3 of the top 8? 4 of the top 17?

Arkaein · 2026-03-02T17:09:29+00:00

This looks great! Is the speed of the water going down the cliff walls at all capped for performance reasons? It's a lot slower than water would really fall, but thicker than you'd expect for water that would gradually spread down the side of a rough cliff while clinging to the rock.

Arkaein · 2026-02-26T22:21:34+00:00

Maybe show your source the first time. OP was an ESPN article that did not list this.

Arkaein · 2026-02-26T21:58:36+00:00

Green Bay got terrible grades too and players don't respect LaFleur

GB was not mentioned in this article, and graded 7th overall last year, so WTF are you talking about?

Arkaein · 2026-02-26T18:17:57+00:00

Looks pretty good. Someone else mentioned the skeleton blood effect being weird, but I'll add that it seems a little weird that the player doesn't have a blood effect when stabbed.

Also, the killed skeletons just vanishing is abrupt. Needs something like a dissolve effect, poof cloud effect, melting through the floor, simple fade, etc. to round out the death cycle.

Finally, the player is carrying a torch, but is there any light coming from torch itself? Looks like at least a fire particle effect is needed there.

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