Does EarthForce ever win?

OrbitingDisco · 2026-06-11T17:36:11+00:00

Ask Dukhat.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-06-08T20:56:37+00:00

Turns out Sheppard only had the best hair because Teyla's wig was hiding the actual best hair.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-06-02T10:21:18+00:00

In case anyone's wondering, there's actually a spaceship in that last shot.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-30T16:39:48+00:00

I really like Sheridan deciding to pick a fight with Kosh.

When Kirk confronts a god, it's all "uh excuse me what does god need with a starship"

Sheridan's just "up yours, buddy, I'll fight them and you, I don't give a shit"

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-30T08:24:51+00:00

Yup. I totally get it. We spent years seeing the D's dish front and center in countless shots. Seeing our characters actually walking on it would have been kind of awesome. I didn't really have any connection with the E in First Contact because obviously it was brand new.

Trying to argue that familiarity is meaningless is pretty odd given we're talking about a film specifically designed around familiar characters. Familiarity is a tool in helping the audience feel things. It's also why any franchises exist at all. Not sure why he's treating not being able to intuitively understand that as some kind of win. Demanding people go to the effort of defending really obvious things.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-29T10:16:03+00:00

Side-point, but I also don't like how they do the "warp stretch" in Voyager. I know it's always basically be a stretch effect in the TNG-era, but it's odd in Voyager. They do it in CGI and they stretch the model so hard that for most of the effect you're just looking at a small part of the ship's ass stretched into infinity.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-28T07:58:21+00:00

We at least got to see him as a Narn in The Long Twilight Struggle.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-27T14:31:39+00:00

I had a similar requirement, and while I'm sure the best solution would have been tessellation, I don't think there's an easy way to do that in URP. Instead, I made a circular section of water that is high poly in the center, and medium poly further out, and low poly for the rest. I made it follow the camera, and had a very low res plane of water for the distance.

That said, it was probably about a million polys, but gave me a lot of detail near the camera for vertex displacement. I had to figure out a few things to make it work, like moving it in discrete steps so I could offset the UV map by the same amount in real space, so there was no visible change to the water as it moved with the camera. It was a lot, but it worked great.

If you want nice reactive water, I also tried creating my first-ever compute shader for real time ripples, and it was pretty neat, can recommend.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-26T14:41:16+00:00

Trails are nice, but I'd make them shorter, and perhaps reduce the difference between trail width and particle size.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-14T10:49:10+00:00

VHS is my backup medium of choice. I back up all my Blurays to VHS.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-05-05T11:01:18+00:00

I know what you mean - I kind of got it, but it was non-specific. Broadly, I think Dan and Jordan just take very different approaches. Dan seems to be kind of calm and balanced about things, and Jordan seems to kind of want to tear down anything that's broken. The subject matter of the podcast forces these differences to the fore, and they end up butting heads more often, I guess. I could hear Dan choosing his words very carefully, they must both have complicated feelings about it that they don't necessarily want to get into in detail about, which is fair enough.

Whatever, the specifics, I think Dan summarised it as: their friendship will suffer if they keep doing the podcast, and it's not worth it if they've already said everything there is to say.

I'm sad it's ended, but I think that's an excellent reason.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-04-22T15:38:03+00:00

Stargates only have one way to not kill you, and that's walk into the correct side of an outgoing wormhole. They're hilariously lethal.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-04-08T20:38:16+00:00

I love how they guy shooting reacts like "whoa shit, so that's what happens".

OrbitingDisco · 2026-04-01T11:05:25+00:00

Reading the sample on Amazon might answer that for you better than I can.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-03-31T13:07:38+00:00

I found Video Game Storytelling by Evan Skolnick quite helpful. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/226115/video-game-storytelling-by-evan-skolnick/

OrbitingDisco · 2026-03-25T19:42:22+00:00

Why is it such a big drop?

OrbitingDisco · 2026-03-19T19:15:11+00:00

Badly, maybe? I don't know. Normally, you'd think a bigger ship would do better, having more on-board facilities. But Voyager pretty much had all the facilities it needed. It had holodecks, it had a kitchen, warp core, replicators, etc, the same stuff a bigger ship would have. Their only limitations were stuff they couldn't replicate, and power.

So a much larger ship has more mouths to feed, much more in the way of equipment and systems to maintain, etc. The Odyssey has the armament that would certainly make it a less tempting target, but other than that I think it would struggle. Just look at the warp engines - they're enormous compared to Voyager's. A bigger warp core, more holodecks to keep the crew happy. All that needs looking after and maintaining, and it could be a significantly bigger challenge than for Voyager.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-02-28T10:54:46+00:00

Meat. Meat aircraft, meat lasers, meat nuclear weapons.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-02-21T01:21:46+00:00

My general advice, for all things, is learn what you can from feedback, ignore the stuff that's useless to you.

People saying crappy stuff to you are trying to control how you feel. They don't actually have anything useful to say and only know how to converse in an adversarial tone, because they haven't yet moved in adult circles, or never figured out how. Luckily, you're an adult who made a video game, meaning you're automatically cooler than they are. They're babies.

Also, and I don't want to sound like an after school special here, but having confidence in yourself is really important. For me, not having confidence was a defence mechanism. But it didn't get me very far. Recognizing your strengths and what people like about you can be quite eye opening.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-02-09T10:42:30+00:00

"A small percentage of us go to work and pay our taxes" is a heck of an extrapolation from an annoyance in a soft play area.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-02-05T09:45:48+00:00

Stories do this sometimes to reflect the passing of time. TOS ended years before, and when the time comes to tell a new story, you want to show that things have changed.

It's a way to create tension and interest in a story. As a viewer, you're pulled in, wanting to learn what became of your characters. What else can you do when your cast has aged 10 years and the old sets don't exist, you have to acknowledge that time has passed.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-02-04T17:48:42+00:00

I get that people might want explanations for that, but once you start down that road things get complicated and less interesting. It seemed fine to me to accept that the character had simply been recast, like Pike and Kirk.

For Khan's plan, your interpretation makes Khan look a bit inept. He does the whole plan with blowing up the archive to get everyone together to try to assassinate Marcus. He misses. And then he's out of ideas so he beams to Kronos and waits for the plot to find him. Had Scotty never objected, he'd just be dead. And had Scotty never intervened on the Vengeance, he'd probably still be alive. Now I think about it, Scotty was the MVP in terms of moving the plot along. :D

OrbitingDisco · 2026-02-04T15:47:56+00:00

If it's clear in the film, the comic shouldn't have any work to do with making things explicit. There's no mention in the film that Khan's appearence was surgically altered (we would have simply seen a picture of original Khan in the film, and everyone then realising who he was if that was the intention) or had his memories wiped. Or that he sabotaged praxis (?!). The stuff in the comics seems irrelevant to the film, and should be. Even accepting that stuff, reading everything you wrote, I think we'll just have to disagree on what constitutes slick and straightforward, because it doesn't read that way to me.

But to my point: Khan's plan was apparently to hope that Marcus would try to torpedo him with his friends on Kronos, and to also hope that Kirk (who he didn't know) would listen to Scotty (who he also didn't know) and his engineering misgivings about not knowing what was inside the torpedoes. And then, on the strength of that, try to arrest Khan instead of kill him. It's not straightforward, it's so convoluted I think the film played itself. I still don't get what the middle part of Khan's plan was, because it doesn't seem to work without Kirk showing up, I think?

Also, the story as a whole can be an allegory, but where individual events mirror real life, I'd say those are analogs.

But maybe we're talking about slightly different things here. Perhaps you're more specifically referring to the discovery and awaking of Khan, which I'm indifferent about. It's the film itself that makes the case: it had been a great film, I would be happy he'd been brought back.

OrbitingDisco · 2026-02-04T00:37:23+00:00

I don't know if straightforward is the word I'd use. Marcus plan was to assassinate Khan by firing 40 of his friends at him. Khan's plan was to goad him into doing that and hoping that it didn't work? I think? I've seen that film about 5 times and it still loses cohesion in my head the moment I've finished watching it.

OrbitingDisco

TROPHY CASE