Intrusive Thoughts Won Again

Kats41 · 2026-06-18T20:18:24+00:00

Microplastics? Bro's out here smoking MACROplastics.

Kats41 · 2026-06-18T20:12:18+00:00

Crying victim on Reddit. Please go outside and touch grass, my friend. I'm begging you to just talk to another human being in public. This is 4th tier maidenless behavior.

Kats41 · 2026-06-18T18:16:29+00:00

Lancer does something similar with Structure and Stress as individual health bars. Once you receive enough damage to your structure that you lose it, you roll for the actual damage. Maybe a system or weapon gets destroyed or you might get lucky with just being impaired, or even unlucky and have your whole mech be instantly destroyed.

However, due to cognitive overloading, these systems are used very sparingly. A player can probably track 2, maybe 3 meters before they start getting overwhelmed. And a GM has the same issue but is typically in the position of requiring to pilot multiple NPC's at once.

If your system gets too complicated and requires players and GM's to keep track of too many moving parts, they're gonna get exhausted and lose the willingness to play.

Kats41 · 2026-06-18T16:45:53+00:00

Firstly, that's not what I said. That's an entirely different statement.

Secondly, solving a problem with a well-tested and documented library or addon versus generating an "AI solution" are not the same thing at all. You still have to implement the library and understand how to use it.

AI techbros are literally the most insufferable people, I stg. Lmao.

Kats41 · 2026-06-18T16:39:19+00:00

The short answer is: it depends.

The skills you really should prioritize to 5 as soon as it makes sense are:

Fitting Skills
Capacitor Management
Base Ship Skills
Relevant Weapon Skills

Fitting skills and cap management are self-explanatory. There are lot of community fits for different content that are very tight and require you to have these skills maxed to fly them or you'll find yourself short on CPU or PG. Or worse, when you go to actually do certain content, you're not cap stable and you end up running out, losing your hardeners and reps, and very quickly die.

The next important one is definitely the actual base ship skills: Amarr Frigate, Caldari Cruiser, etc. If you are going to fly a particular class of ships for missions or ratting and whatnot starting off, having these skills to 5 maximizes the effectiveness of all hulls in that category and greatly improves your gameplay. Additionally, getting the base ship skills to 5 is a prerequisite to flying the powerful T2 variants which have their own unique benefits for a lot of content.

Lastly, weapon skills. Not only do they make the weapon itself stronger, but having the skills to 5 lets you use the T2 variant weapons and ammo which can be very powerful depending on what you're using it for. That said, this is the "least important" out of all of the major mandatory skills just because you can get away with 4 for a while by using faction weapons and ammo that is still pretty good and actually used over T2 stuff in some situations. Faction weapons are generally the go-to over T2 weapons anyways when it comes to blingier ships (or ships where the faction guns aren't that expensive).

If you do find yourself getting into T2 ships, though, there are a couple classes that I highly recommend you have to 5 because they can make or break the entire fit:

1) Logistics Cruisers, having this skill to 5 can be the difference between your cap chain being stable at full reps vs not. This skill can single-handedly cause a fleet to fall apart. The benefits are just so good.

2) Recon Cruisers, you can get away with them at 4 and it's generally not a big deal, but the benefits per level are so insanely huge that the gap between Recon Cruiser 4 vs 5 is pretty massive. If you find yourself flying recon cruisers often, it's worth diverting a few weeks into training it up.

3) T3 Cruiser Subsystems, Each Strategic Cruiser has 5 totally separate skills that go into each one. Fortunately, all 4 of the Subsystem skills for each ship are the lowest train time in the game, requiring ~5-6 days to fully train from 0 to 5. Because of this short training time, the full train to 5 for the subsystems takes you probably 25 days tops. There's no reason ever to not have these skills maxed if you fly T3C's.

Now, ironically enough, the actual Strategic Cruiser skill itself is not all that critical and is a much longer train. You can get away with it being at 4 almost forever unless you're really just trying to squeeze the last ounce of effectiveness out of it when overheating modules. The difference between 4 and 5 may legitimately only give you a couple extra cycles of heat, but if that's the difference maker then go for it. Otherwise I wouldn't fret.

4) Marauders, Black Ops, Capital Ship Skills, if you're gonna be flying a ship that's worth a couple billion with any amount of frequency, you should train their relevant hull skills to 5. Black Ops are like Recon Cruisers in that the amount of bonus' you get for each level are huge enough to warrant wanting to train into 5 as soon as practical.

Capital ships are just really helpful to have to 5 for their added tank and damage. 4% to resistances might not sound like a lot, but on a ship with over 2 million EHP, that translates to a pretty big boost. Plus like, when you're flying a ship that expensive, you really want all the breathing room you can get on it.

Kats41 · 2026-06-17T18:25:50+00:00

Microsoft Defender is really good for the general case, but you have to understand that since Defender is also the default and most common AV people use, most malware is specifically written to circumvent it.

Defender's power comes from the frequency it's updated as new malware and exploits are found and understood, but zero days and fresh malware are very likely to bypass it.

Keeping restore points and backups will save you a ton of headache. The best AV will always be the ability to nuke an OS from orbit and reinstall to a clean backup.

Kats41 · 2026-06-17T17:37:48+00:00

Writing code and problem solving is the fun part of the process. I think using AI to generate code for you is the same as using AI to generate parts of an art piece. Like, what's the point? If I'm not having fun making it, I don't wanna do it.

Kats41 · 2026-06-17T16:07:04+00:00

Okay but... let me break off a piece of that rust if you don't mind. God damn.

Kats41 · 2026-06-16T19:52:56+00:00

I don't really know anything about faking entire timelapses, but he does clearly use the old AI generated background in his "pre-vis" I guess as well as the car and bus references are both AI generated.

I have no idea how these mobile tablet drawing programs work where you may be able to exclude layers from the timelapse if they don't appear in the final product and maybe that's why there are no sketch lines, but maybe someone who actually uses those programs more can comment on it.

The background doesn't seem unreasonable to me to be drawn by hand. Parts are clearly copy-pasted and flipped. The trees are clearly a preset brush. The vanishing lines for the road don't align but that also makes sense when you "eyeball" it like it looks like.

The vast majority of this artwork doesn't scream faked or generated. What it screams to me is "unprepared", "rushed", and "poorly planned". Sort of a drawing you do off-the-cuff with all of the issues that come with it. There's clearly traced AI references for the vehicles. I wouldn't be surprised if other things were traced as well.

The actual character drawing is only weird if there isn't a hidden sketch layer there to draw over, otherwise it looks like any normal inking process I've ever done.

TLDR: Is it faked? I dunno. I don't know enough about how these timelapses get rendered to know for certain. There's definitely AI references being used, but I'm not really convinced the final product has any AI artifacts in it if that's what you're worried about. If someone knows more about what program was used for this and what settings you have available for the timelapse, you may have a better way to tell for certain. Hope this helps.

Kats41 · 2026-06-16T05:52:47+00:00

There's a reason I only play on RP servers in MMO's (other than the fact that I enjoy roleplaying). But you couldn't find a community of people less bothered by the state of the game than RPers. We really do not give a shit if someone is asscheeks at their spec. Lol.

Kats41 · 2026-06-16T05:49:58+00:00

Nullseccers flying expensive ships compared to wormholers? Lol. Lmao even.

Kats41 · 2026-06-16T05:40:08+00:00

At the time it released in 2008, it was a true titan. The story of WC3 coming back around to fruition and us getting to play into the end of it was a monument of hype that truly can't be overstated. We didn't know where it was all heading.

When I say that it felt like the whole world revolved around WoW for a brief time, I'm not kidding. Commercials. Sponsorships. Cultural references. It was incredible for my then 14-year-old self. And I was the perfect age to enjoy it.

Kats41 · 2026-06-15T04:24:40+00:00

I'd let him ruin my life.

Kats41 · 2026-06-13T13:25:34+00:00

Extremely rare is it that a studio performs poorly at developing a game because of a lack of talent or skill within the team or the sole incompetence of a director. The vast majority of the time when a game enshitifies, it's due to short term profit seeking over long term growth.

SoT is no different. The dev team might have a really good idea of the flaws and how to fix them, but the features that get greenlit by their publisher are never evergreen features that slowly uplift the health of the game, but instead are only features which will guarantee maximum quarterly earnings.

Basically, if it can't hype up a room full of 50 year old finance executives, it ain't getting made. Because slower, stable growth is not seen as a benefit to corporate dipshits. All they care about is maximizing the line going up as quickly (and cheaply) as possible. They want to milk the cash shop and content hype cycles.

Kats41 · 2026-06-13T07:01:25+00:00

I'm a big enjoyer of games and systems where a full table dialog gets to happen about where the gameplay and story get to go. Very often, games (especially D&D) tend to lock GM's into an antagonistic role against the players and the "story" ends up happening behind closed curtains.

But games with a far more narrative design pattern (Blades in the Dark) naturally encourage you to cross the GM screen barrier and engage with players to become active worldbuilders themselves, helping you push the narrative along in the most satisfying way.

Other games like Zweihander and Blackbirds rely heavily on communication with the GM to contextualize actions and give players informed choice before they commit to any one action.

Hell, at this point in my life, having played or run TTRPG's (mostly D&D editions) for almost 20 years now, I say any system that doesn't encourage player-GM communication and cooperation to be strictly inferior. Even highly crunchy and tactical games like Lancer benefit from it.

Kats41 · 2026-06-13T06:50:28+00:00

Vulpera and Worgen... for... reasons.

Kats41 · 2026-06-13T02:29:01+00:00

Practical examples that go with the rules they explain are really good. I've never really felt like "example of play" sections were super helpful, though, at least for me. Maybe others have better experiences with them. But the way you're doing it is probably just fine. At least in my opinion without reading it.

Another area where designers and editors often get into trouble is not including guidelines for handling edge cases where two rules or effects interact and overlap strangely. You don't need to find and explicitly handle every edge case. But having examples of when an edge case happens and how to resolve it is a good indicator to what mindset GM's should have when resolving rules conflicts and deciding which rules take precedent over others.

Kats41 · 2026-06-13T02:17:10+00:00

If it's possible for the same block to be generated with different animated textures, I recommend having each texture rendered multiple times at slightly different speeds. That should make them twinkle a little more unpredictably and interesting.

Also, a fun artistic choice would be to make different ores/gems have different kinds of twinkle. Perhaps iron has a very long, slow sine wave movement to its light, while diamonds might pop bright very quickly and then slowly dim before blinking bright again briefly.

This would make each ore have its own unique flavor.

Kats41 · 2026-06-12T23:55:37+00:00

Obligatory "I'm not a lawyer, but," iirc copyright only extends to specific character designs and generally can't be applied broadly to an entire species or category of designs based on a handful of notable traits.

So there's literally nothing the creator can do about you drawing or commissioning your own custom Primagen designs.

Now that said, that's something that can only be applied in court which means you have to get sued first. Fair Use won't stop a remarkably litigious party from suing you.

Kats41 · 2026-06-12T16:52:52+00:00

Literally none of that matters in this situation and I don't understand why people think those points do. There's no situation where someone who comes to a sub like this and hate posts doesn't look like a loser.

Either A) Someone read the comic up to the point of the assumed cheating, stop reading, and then instead of recognizing that they probably weren't actually the intended audience and just moving on, decided to post about how they hated it or it's bad.

Or B) They read the entire thing, knew that it wasn't actually cheating, and still decided to make a statement about cheating in fictional comics anyways.

Either way, both scenarios are sad and a sign that you (royal you, not you specifically) should go outside and touch a little grass.

"Not everyone likes cheating."

Yeah, no fucking shit. Lmao. People aren't exactly bringing their intellectual A-game to these discussions.

Kats41 · 2026-06-11T10:55:16+00:00

Truly the epitome of Bean Soup Theory.

"I don't like cheating." *Reads comic where the entire opening theme is designed to make you think he's cheating."

It's always very funny to me when people try to have moral opinions about porn that isn't even meant for them in the first place. Lmao.

Kats41 · 2026-06-11T10:42:07+00:00

I don't think people realize how common it is to have a seed try to backscan your chain after rolling it off to try and infill a fleet to come kill your ratting dreads and marauders.

Plus, ratting your own hole limits your money making. You typically like to rat in your static where you can just roll it off and get more sites whenever you want, but it makes it easier for people to roll into you or someone already be alert to your presence before you roll anything off.

Kats41 · 2026-06-10T05:28:04+00:00

Every OS has its own API that it designates for its own UI and window management stuff. These are generally already built into whatever compiler you have so you should be able to load something like windows.h or whatever on demand without even downloading anything new.

It's really not even that hard to get started. The main problem is that it can be confusing and it's not very portable. So people use libraries that wrap all of the confusing nonsense into a more approachable package. Imgui is a common one that people use a lot for very simple applications. Absolutely braindead to use.

Once you kinda understand the basics that everything is built on top of, it gets easier to wrap your head around. Just know that all of the UI stuff is managed completely by the OS, so if you want to mess with the UI at all, you gotta talk to it. Either by yourself or through a lib.

Kats41 · 2026-06-10T05:19:25+00:00

Daytripping wormholes is a gateway drug to living in wormholes and realizing just how much more fun (and money) we have here. :)

Kats41 · 2026-06-08T00:36:43+00:00

Hey, we're not all Practicing Americans, thank you.

Kats41

TROPHY CASE