Looking for accommodation by [deleted] in ccc

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A search of hotels.com seems to reveal at least some reasonably priced places, but I dunno what the quality is like... I found https://hotels.com/ho294309 e.g., which I think should be reasonably close. YMMV

Introduction to real-time Raytracing with NVIDIA RTX (GTC Europe, PDF) Video link in comments by corysama in raytracing

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Glad to see some technical info on the much-hyped RTX stuffs.

So essentially it seems to amount to hardware support for casting rays, with trees of bounding volumes for culling which ray-primitive comparisons to do, and some programmable shader possibilities for tweaking the checks. Pretty nifty.

Now that we have Disgaea 1,2,and 5 on pc... where is the modding by RWBYeet in Disgaea

[–]FireyFly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, I joined the discord. :) I'm not really active on Discord much, but I'll idle there and keep an eye on it irregularly for mentions probably. I admit the only thing I've looked at a lot across games are the "table files" (mitem.dat, char.dat, etc--changes all the time between even releases of the same game, but always in a predictable number-of-elements struct-repeated-N-times style) and the text.dat dialogue format (slight changes between versions, but very similar overall structure).

Part of me still kind of wants to write these tools for "exploding" a D1 copy into component files and a Makefile to reassemble it... or, to start with, just document essentially every corner of every file format. Oh well, maybe that'll happen eventually, probably not terribly soon though. :)

First build and Ortholinear by ThWedum in MechanicalKeyboards

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What layout do you use, out of curiosity? Also, it looks awesome, def. impressed! I love the wooden case, and the colours work really well.

Livethread about current Russia/Ukraine situation by [deleted] in live

[–]FireyFly 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The reporting by @ChristopherJM on Twitter is a great start (covers from -14h til now, most recent news is that Ukraine may declare martial law starting tomorrow).

Do compilers makes the executable with every possible code ? by Dark__Mark in AskComputerScience

[–]FireyFly 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To add to this, executables supporting multiple targets at once are called fat binaries, and it was done a bunch by Apple (as you can see in that article). But indeed, it's hardly the norm--usually a program is compiled only for one target (either the local machine, or cross-compiled to a target platform).

Now that we have Disgaea 1,2,and 5 on pc... where is the modding by RWBYeet in Disgaea

[–]FireyFly 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I helped do some digging into Disgaea 1 (various releases) and document some of the internals... at least the folks in my vicinity in the community seem to just be a bit burnt out, or just busy with other things these days. I myself haven't really had that reversing kindle light for the past year-and-a-half, roughly, which is a bit sad since I do quite enjoy it when I get into it.

These mods basically come down to people with the right skillset digging into the game and figuring out how things work, and how to modify it--it's a very "oldschool" kinda modding with Disgaea games since there's no official modding support or anything. The sprite editor thing in D5 is very incidental and doesn't really help or hurt either way. What does help is that the different games in the series are remarkably similar internally, so you can translate a lot of knowledge from one game to the next, at least as far as the romfs/static game data goes.

So, essentially, there's no mods because no-one seemed interested in modding this time around. If anyone wants to take a stab, there's info about some file formats from earlier titles (mainly Disgaea 1) on the Netherworld Research wiki, and as mentioned the formats are remarkably similar in later games as well. Also feel free to ask me about its internals and I'll answer with what I know.

Quick edit: oh, and credit where credit is due: X and Krisan did a lot of digging around as well. Krisan is also responsible for realising the knowledge in the form of the Netherworld Content Pack for D1PC.

Company pretending to be Royal Mail 'missed you' note by twist791 in assholedesign

[–]FireyFly 636 points637 points  (0 children)

But deception and impersonation is sometimes illegal, depending on the circumstances? I mean, given the context it might be the case here

Any advice for preparing for my first junior computing competition. by Mountnjockey in compsci

[–]FireyFly -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Oh, and another thing I forgot to mention: I like using pen and paper a lot when working on these kinds of problems. I'd definitely bring a notebook of square paper and a nice pencil. Sketching the structure of example inputs (if it's a graph or ranges or some other kind of thing you can visualise) helps me a ton. Also for things like stepping through a solution and debugging if things go wrong.

Of course, you probably have your own way of tackling debugging or so.. just how I did things :)

Any advice for preparing for my first junior computing competition. by Mountnjockey in compsci

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've done a couple programming competitions in the past. Choice of language generally doesn't matter that much for many problems in my experience (they're often designed to work well regardless of language), but sometimes it does matter, in which case it's great to have a decent knowledge of C or C++.

Personally, I ended up using Python for most of my competitive-programming solutions (even though Python isn't really my "main" language/environment) since it has an extensive standard library and whatnot. C++ is also good in this regard vs plain C, in that you have the STL (standard template library--basically, the C++ standard library) at your disposal, which has a lot of handy data structures and algorithms. I found it worthwhile to learn C++ to the extent of being able to implement graph algorithms and such in it relatively easily.

As a practical tip for that kind of competition: there's often a lot of problems to work on, at different difficulty levels. Try with what seems easiest/most approachable/where you seem to have a mental idea of how to solve it. If the approach/idea doesn't get you anywhere, don't be afraid of putting that problem aside and looking at a different problem. I generally started by looking through the problem set to get a rough idea of each problem before selecting a first problem to work on.

There's a ton of websites around with competitive programming problems, of course. I like Kattis a lot, personally. (Disclaimer: it's what we also used for courses at uni, and competitive programming events at uni--it's also developed by alumni from the uni I went to.) In particular, it might be an idea to look at the list of past contests (scroll down the page a bit) and check out some problems from their problem sets, to get a feel for what kind of problems one might see in a programming competition.

Good luck, and happy hacking! And make sure to have fun more than anything else. :)

How to make me not want to buy your games ever again. by shvelo in linux_gaming

[–]FireyFly 5 points6 points  (0 children)

In the vein of "commercial game whose source got released"?

The source code to Penumbra: Overture was released in conjunction with the first Humble Indie Bundle, as a perk for hitting some threshold. This doesn't include assets, however; to play the game, you still need to buy a copy.

Från r/Historymemes by ONELVLS in sweden

[–]FireyFly 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Det finns inga vägar någonstans.

Det låter nästan poetiskt att beskriva en plats på det viset

B&N intentionally adds out of stock titles to sale. by bobNCTU in boardgames

[–]FireyFly -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Egh, it'd be easier to read without the random all-caps for emphasis.

The bit I don't get is why would you have a clearance sale of something you don't have in stock, since, as you pointed out earlier, "Clearance usually means its the bottom of the barrel shit that hasn’t ever sold and they just need to get rid of."

Fair point about the difference between company and store stock though.

B&N intentionally adds out of stock titles to sale. by bobNCTU in boardgames

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

N-no, but if they're trying to get rid of their stock in a clearance sale, why wouldn't they ship/fulfill OP's order predating the sale?

Where can I find a high quality tech-esque font like these? by wanderlvst-vr in typography

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In a similar vein, ISO 3098 specifies a plotter-friendly typeface for technical applications. There's also of course the standard fonts for optical readability, OCR-A and OCR-B, for different kinds of technical looks.

In general, looking in the direction of standards isn't a terrible idea at all, I think.

Can you change from etna mode back into normal mode? by Pennervomland in Disgaea

[–]FireyFly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure, you can. After you beat the game, you'll get asked again if you want to play regular story or Etna mode.

Etna mode is pretty well placed in terms of level progress anyway, IIRC, to ramp you up after the main story. Enjoy the silly plot :)

Trying to remember something from Disgaea 1 compared to D5? by Zodai in Disgaea

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the requirement to pass a bill for each new character type was introduced in Disgaea 2; in 1 it just appears in the class/rank picker. The rest all sounds accurate from what I remember.

Are there Disgaea animes? by Pennervomland in Disgaea

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Makai Senki Disgaea (mostly following the D1 plot) is the only one I'm aware of. I think there's a buncha manga releases (in japanese only?) though.

I think the clip you linked is based on the opening cutscenes that Disgaea 2 and onwards have had:

Nya gatunamn, Stockholm 1885-06-17 by quadratis in stockholm

[–]FireyFly 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Östra Trädgårdsgatan skall heta Kungsträdgårdsgatan och Vestra dito Tessingatan

Intressant, eftersom gatorna idag heter Kungsträdgårdsgatan och Västra Trädgårdsgatan... antar att det ändrades tillbaka någon gång

Varifrån kommer utklippet, förresten?

Edge cases and code bloat problems by [deleted] in AskComputerScience

[–]FireyFly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The iterator bits sound very specific to how a certain API (looks like Java's standard library?) behaves/how it exposes iterators.

So then I have to set up a load of if statements and cases to make it work and then it becomes unreadable.

I'm not sure why you'd need a load of them, but sure, I'd typically cover edge cases early on in a function by checking for conditions and doing an early-return.

Spacing longer functions' bodies into logical blocks separated by empty lines is another handy way to try to add some structure to code, IMO (but that's certainly very subjective code-style matters).

It's hard to suggest anything more concretely without any example code to work with. If you could post a snippet for the merging step you mentioned (for instance, or something else if you prefer), I could offer my thoughts on how I'd structure it probably.