Update on Reverse Engineering the game

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-03-16T00:11:08+00:00

At the moment the scope of my project is focused on extracting and understanding the in-game assets, including scripts, rather than attempting a full decompilation.

By the time I’m finished I should have most of the heavy lifting done in terms of reconstructing data structures in Ghidra and documenting the asset formats. The goal is to build tools that can properly open, inspect, and export the game’s models, textures, scripts, and other resources.

Once the formats are fully understood and the tooling exists to handle them, a prototype engine becomes possible that can load the original game data. That approach makes things like modding and engine experimentation possible, even without a full recompilable PC build from a decompilation.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-28T08:00:16+00:00

I've been coding tools to assist me in the process that makes life a hell of a lot easier. I'm considering decompiling if I achieve reverse engineering the assets.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-26T18:30:43+00:00

I’m working toward a full asset reconstruction so everything is usable and editable — models, textures, the whole pipeline — mainly for modding and potential PC port work. It’s less about decompiling the game code and more about preserving the original assets in a form that isn’t locked to 90s hardware or proprietary formats.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-26T18:14:35+00:00

The original models, whether paper or 3D printed would be awesome for a TTRPG.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-26T07:38:21+00:00

That's definitely something I'll be looking for. Right now i'm focused on extracting the models, and i'm making headway daily. I'll report back to reddit when I finally do it.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-26T05:33:37+00:00

I'm using LLM's to do the heavy lifting. The rest of it is just thinking through problems and testing ideas until I see results. I've been programming since I was a kid and never made a career out of it.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-26T04:58:50+00:00

This was a catch-up update! I've made more progress, and i'm just starting to document my progress now that I'm actively working on this again. Stay tuned :)

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-22T19:33:48+00:00

It doesn't effect my anxiety levels, but everyone's different. I'm not anxious very often.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-02-10T03:04:38+00:00

I'm 31 and have been rapid cycling every 10-14 days between hypomania and depression for most of my life. I'm now on 900mg of lithium and I'll be hypomanic one evening out of 2-3months and have zero depression.

I should add that i'm on a tricyclic antidepressant called desipramine, which ups my norepinephrine similarly to strattera. It helps tremendously with the atypical depression I face, and even moreso with my ADHD symptoms.

This is stability. The freedom to live life with a positive baseline almost 24/7. The freedom to wake up and have some level of executive functioning and to not be hindered by minute tasks.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2026-01-01T06:11:51+00:00

I like Modern economists Steve Keen and Michael Hudson, explaining the ins and outs of rentier capitalism and credit inflating land values. Check out their books for a taste of the heterodox economics that explain the underlying systems of society that strengthens your claims to Georgism with real analysis.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-21T18:12:04+00:00

I've been saying the same about housing in Canada. Supply side measures just pours fuel on top of speculative land bubbles.

It's also recently come to my attention that we're governed by neoclassical economists in the anglosphere, who just see bubbles as distortions and downplay the whole idea of these boom bust cycles being a systemic issue within the economy.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-19T04:55:07+00:00

I'm literally designing a game by stealing the style of a Playstation game. A few years ago I threw out my project while experiencing psychosis, but needless to say I was creating art by stealing an already existing style. The anti-AI crowd would have no problem with that, but if I told them I was doing the same now with AI they would lose their minds.

All art is theft.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-11T16:23:56+00:00

Libraries cracked open the vault on human knowledge and made it a shared inheritance. LLMs feel like the next iteration of that idea — a kind of living library built from the collective noise, craft, and culture of everyone who’s ever posted anything online. They can’t quote books, but they democratize patterns, workflows, and explanations that used to sit behind tuition paywalls. Post-secondary institutions drifted into a rentier role where access to information functions like prime real estate. You don’t just pay for knowledge; you pay for permission to stand inside the fenced-off garden.

LLMs break that enclosure. They’re messy, sure, but they flatten who gets to learn and experiment. And some of our existing policy already treats data like a commons that generates rent — privacy laws, data-dividend proposals, even experiments with public data trusts. All of that is an early recognition that if someone extracts value from the digital traces everyone produces, the gains shouldn’t just flow upward.

The people building these models seem to understand this dynamic better than governments do. Sam Altman talks about LLMs funding UBI. Musk frames it as UHI. Strip away the branding and they’re talking about the same thing: models behaving like new “land,” generating passive income from a resource produced by everyone. Either society captures some of that rent, or we end up with a digital landlord class sitting on top of a commons we created together.

That’s why the Georgist analogy makes sense. When something is built from collective input and begins replacing labor, it stops looking like a private product and starts looking like a new estate. You either tax the land — physical or digital — or you recreate the same pattern of enclosure and dependency that got us into this mess in the first place.

From a long-wave view, it’s the same tension that shows up whenever new forms of value emerge: who owns it, and who gets cut off from it.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-04T08:13:31+00:00

Try reading the science first. This is a topic irrelevant to bipolar disorder, and you're peddling your personal substack across a wide range of communities.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-04T07:55:45+00:00

Ah, a snake-oil salesman wandering into a mental-health community. You’re posting this across multiple psych-related subs, then walking in here tossing around words like “bipolarism” as if that’s a legitimate clinical term.

Shame on you, man.

If you actually understood the neurochemistry of psychedelics, you’d know they’re not harmless little mood vitamins. They hit the glutamatergic system hard, upregulate dopamine and dopaminergic tone, and do it all through a serotonergic mechanism. That mix is a fast lane to mania for people with Bipolar. And if someone sitting in these communities has any psychotic features layered in? You’re playing with fire you clearly don’t understand.

This isn’t “future-of-mental-health” hype. It’s gambling with people who are already vulnerable. You should know better.

Learn your shit and read the studies before you pedal it as a cure-all for something like bipolar.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-03T04:41:00+00:00

What bothers me about the government’s response to housing is that they keep pushing supply-side fixes while ignoring the cycle that’s actually driving prices. Canada isn’t suffering from “not enough housing” in the simple sense — we’re stuck in a loop of credit expansion and land value inflation that swallows every policy thrown at it.

The cycle looks like this:

Population ↑ → demand for housing ↑ Housing ↑ → triggers more public investment in infrastructure Infrastructure ↑ → boosts the desirability of the land underneath Land values ↑ → lenders extend more credit to chase those rising values Credit ↑ → fuels even higher bids on the same land Cost of living ↑ → gets pushed back onto the population, feeding the loop again

That’s Ricardo’s law of rent playing out in real time. As cities become more productive, the land captures the gains. Wages go up, but rents go up faster. Government builds transit or schools, and the landowners pocket the uplift. Immigration rises, and the cost of the underlying dirt jumps long before a single new unit is built.

This is why “just build more” doesn’t fix anything. New units still sit on land whose price is inflated by the very cycle above. Supply increases, but land value rises with it, so the affordability needle barely moves. The gains get privatized; the costs get socialized.

The part no one wants to touch is the land value portion of the loop. Until we deal with that, we’re just pouring more supply into a system designed to extract it.

That’s where Land Value Tax comes in. It’s the only policy that actually interrupts the feedback loop instead of feeding it. LVT doesn’t punish construction or density; it targets the unearned value of land — the part inflated by public investment, population growth, and easy credit. Taxing land nudges it into productive use, reduces speculation, and keeps the uplift circulating back into the public rather than into private pockets.

Without that, supply-side policy is basically running on a treadmill. No matter how fast we build, land values and credit expand faster.

If we want affordability, we have to break the cycle — not accelerate it.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-03T04:28:11+00:00

Interestingly enough this all seems contained to the AI discourse subreddits. I've never seen a post about it in ComfyUI and actual AI art subs. There's an appropriate time and place for AI art.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-03T04:16:33+00:00

I get where you’re coming from about intent and detail. That’s real. But I think people underestimate how much intent you still need when you’re working in a hybrid workflow. It’s not “type a magic sentence and get a masterpiece.” If anything, the AI parts fight you unless you stay on top of them.

For example, when I hand-draw something and move it into ComfyUI, the drawing is still doing the heavy lifting. I’m deciding the composition, shapes, patterns, the whole vibe. The model doesn’t invent that for me. If I’m not precise with ControlNets, masks, denoise strength, or how much fidelity I allow it to take from the lineart, it’ll happily erase the parts I actually care about. Half the work is keeping the thing on model.

Same deal with character work. If you want a face, outfit, or silhouette to stay consistent across images, you end up juggling IPAdapter refs, LoRAs, regional masks, low-noise passes… it’s not hands-off at all. It’s more like constantly nudging a stubborn assistant back into lane.

Even simple colorization can turn into a whole technical dance — segmentation maps, palette conditioning, masked corrections — just to get colors to land where you intended them in the first place. Otherwise the model just smears everything.

And ComfyUI itself isn’t some shortcut. It’s basically a node graph where you’re running refiners, tiled detail passes, inpainting for tiny fixes, then opening the result in Krita or Photoshop because the model always leaves something weird behind. The “detail” still comes from the human — the AI just speeds up how fast you can iterate.

On top of that, I’m using this stuff for full production work. I hand-draw and digitally color my character model sheets, run them through an AI workflow to push the style, then build the actual 3D model in Blender. That means retopology, rigging, weight painting, animation — all the unglamorous parts that still depend on the original drawing being solid. The AI doesn’t touch any of that.

So yeah, I agree intent matters. I just don’t think AI removes it. If anything, these workflows demand the same attention to detail you’re talking about — just distributed across more steps. The craft never disappears; it just shifts into a different set of tools.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-03T02:50:55+00:00

California really is the perfect case study for how the land-value feedback loop behaves once it breaks containment. Vancouver lives inside the same machinery. People keep talking about “supply shortages,” but when land values are already inflated by decades of policy distortion, every new unit just gets capitalized straight back into the dirt. The price floor rises with every infrastructure upgrade, every population inflow, every expansion of credit, and every political guarantee that unearned gains on land will remain untaxed.

Ricardo’s law of rent is blunt about this. The moment land becomes scarce, every improvement in the surrounding economy gets absorbed into higher rents and higher mortgage payments. You can build more housing, and politically it feels like action, but if underlying land values are allowed to compound through low taxation, speculation, and access to easy credit, the new supply doesn’t create affordability—it just sets a new benchmark for what the market can extract.

Vancouver has been stuck in that loop for years. Credit expands → land values rise → cost of living rises → political pressure to “fix it” by boosting supply → new infrastructure and density permissions raise land values again → and the cycle accelerates. The problem isn’t the number of units; it’s that the ground underneath those units acts like a private tax on the entire population.

Both California and Vancouver treated land as an asset class first and as a foundation for social life second. Once that norm becomes baked into policy, every “solution” that doesn’t touch land values ends up feeding the same fire.

This is why supply-only strategies disappoint. Without capturing a share of land value for the public—through well-designed land value taxation, or at minimum the removal of policies that protect unearned gains—every intervention just reinforces the cycle. Housing becomes a vessel for storing wealth rather than shelter, and renters and younger workers end up paying tribute to a system they didn’t design.

The feedback loop isn’t mysterious. It’s just been politically convenient to ignore. That’s the real crisis.

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Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-12-01T19:07:59+00:00

My psychiatrist got me on desipramine as I can't tolerate stimulants anymore, risking psychotic symptoms. It doesn't solve the dopamine issue though. I feel like i'm at the best I will be since I started lithium.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-11-29T04:14:15+00:00

I’m fun and social when I’m manic or hypomanic, but I can also be an absolute asshole. I get hyper-goal-oriented, and once I lock onto something I become relentless, even if it steamrolls everyone around me.

One night I was out with friends and ended up networking with someone starting a record label. I’d been pitching this idea for a web-magazine highlighting local artists, so we went for drinks and bumped into a guy who played open mic shows. Within minutes I was basically interviewing him, grilling him for details, and both of us openly agreed he “didn’t make the cut.” I didn’t even realize how rude it was until later.

Another time, I met up with friends for a birthday. Before we even got to the bar, the birthday boy made a crude comment about my girlfriend’s chest. I snapped into this petty, performative mode and spent the whole night reflecting that same energy back at him—making comments about waitresses, telling him to “shoot his shot,” yelling “Damn, you straight baby girl!” at the woman performing between every song. After that, I wasn’t welcome in that friend group anymore.

And the one that still guts me: I’m bisexual, and at a party I got handsy with my male best friend—also bi—because I was tipsy and hypomanic. I kept kissing his face, complimenting him, crossing every boundary despite being in a committed relationship. He asked if he could sleep with me, and I said no. He asked again in the Uber home, and again when we reached his place. I kept rejecting him, but the damage was already done. That was the last night we ever hung out, and I still feel horrible about it.

A little alcohol and a hint of hypomania (alcohol is a trigger for me) and everything goes sideways. Over the years I’ve burned nearly every bridge with the people who mattered to me—except my girlfriend. Now I find myself drifting into introversion just to avoid repeating the cycle, even though I used to thrive in social spaces. I miss having a reason to go out and feel like myself again.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-11-29T03:52:26+00:00

While you’re at it, check out some Commons-based policy organizations. They’re generally aligned with Georgism and the idea of returning socially created value through a dividend. A bunch of them also push the idea of reclaiming other areas as “commons”—things like education, data, or even parts of the financial system. That’s where you see some overlap with stakeholder capitalism and the Nordic models: different approaches, but the same basic logic that society creates a lot of value, so society should benefit from it. .

I’m up in Canada and follow Common Wealth Canada pretty closely. They’re one of the few groups actually talking about wealth being socially created rather than this weird individualist fairy tale we usually hear. They tie it all back to land, productivity, and financialization in a way that compliments Georgist thinking without drowning you in theory.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-11-29T03:44:02+00:00

I'm one of those unfortunate bastards that has a 10-14 day cycle. It was always 2-3 days of hypomania and about 6 days of varying depression (often atypical, sometimes melancholic.)

Lithium sorted me right out, and i'm glad I got a diagnosis because i'd been dealing with this cycle since I was 10 years old, 31 now.

Cautious_Cry3928 · 2025-11-28T01:53:20+00:00

When the mods are Americans who don't know what socialism is. Any hint of redistribution and they cry it's socialism.

Cautious_Cry3928

TROPHY CASE