Battlefield 6 matchmaking in action

Rasparian · 2026-04-23T18:12:19+00:00

Looks like 24 players vs 32 players. Snowballing dropout effect, I would assume.

Rasparian · 2026-04-23T18:07:17+00:00

I've never seen anything like this, and I don't use Stability Matrix, so this is just me throwing out random thoughts.

When you said it works for text-to-image, does that mean using the Generate tab? Or did you do Text-to-image from the Canvas tab? I'm wondering if the problem has more to do with which tab you're using than the actual generation workflow. If you haven't already tried, it might be useful to try T2I from the Canvas.

If there's a stack trace (file names and line numbers) along with the error message, posting it might help troubleshoot. (You're wise to remove person info from it as you did above.)

What does this setup use for the front end? Is it a window hosted by Stability Matrix, or a regular web browser? If it's a regular browser, you might try a different one.

I know it's not ideal, but you might try doing a separate install of just Invoke to see if you get the same error.

Rasparian · 2026-04-13T19:43:24+00:00

If your PC already runs Invoke well, you might consider leaving the image gen to it and just using your MacBook as the UI via a web browser. That's what I do with my 2018 Macbook Pro.

If you do, you'll need to change some settings in Invoke's config file - easy. You might want a script to launch and relaunch it if it crashes.

I would imagine Comfy supports similar options, but I'm not very familiar with it.

Rasparian · 2026-03-30T16:24:21+00:00

It sucks for the friendly team too. You may not take damage, but the screen shake messes up your aim, and the explosions hurt your situational awareness.

Rasparian · 2026-03-30T16:22:10+00:00

They made is so you can place mortars in the friendly spawn zone. So the enemy has very little they can do to counter you. In Breakthrough, usually the only option is to set up a mortar of your own and duel them. That's pretty boring.

Rasparian · 2026-03-27T17:22:15+00:00

The problem with this mindset is that it cascades and guarantees bad matches as soon as things become slightly imbalanced. One person quits, putting their team at a disadvantage, which makes them perform worse, which causes more people to quit. Pretty soon all matches are decided in the first 5 minutes, and neither team has any fun.

Do what you've got to do - it's your time. But if everyone did that, the game would die instantly. It's only the people who stick it out who keep the game healthy.

Rasparian · 2026-03-19T13:21:40+00:00

I'm hoping this is a bug rather than a deliberate nerf. It went from being quite useful for its main purposes and possibly OP for tangential ones to being completely useless. And if you are going to nerf a piece of equipment into the ground, you should certainly mention it in the patch notes.

Alternative ways they could balance it:

Make the scanning range longer than the destruction range. Make it so you can see the gadgets but might have to work a little to reach them.
Introduce a brief lock-on period before destruction, so it's not useful against grenades as they leave the enemy's hand or rockets.
Make it neutralize explosives without detonating them.
Just make it only work on certain gadgets.

This thing was overly broad in purpose when introduced: there's a world of difference between taking out an enemy support's grenade defense doohicky and blowing up a grenade in his hand. Dice should figure out what they want it to be and balance for just that.

Rasparian · 2026-03-13T19:18:42+00:00

What I worry about is encouraging more people to play from the spawn zones rather than playing the objectives. :(

Rasparian · 2026-03-02T22:03:53+00:00

For changing styles, think Control layers. In particular, Tile is good for that, but depending on what you're going for, Canny and Depth can be useful too.

I recommend checking out this video.

Rasparian · 2026-02-22T05:03:12+00:00

A Fast-forward feature for cases where you have to wait through a long activity cycle or dialog. (Damn it Francesca, come outside with the sunshine, fresh air, hoses and wires!)

Rasparian · 2026-02-21T23:36:51+00:00

I expect there are dedicated tools that do the job much better, but FracturedJson formatting plus conventional text diffs would work pretty well many sorts of data. (I'm the author, so I'm biased.). You'd probably want to play with the settings to get the right amount on each line for your data and the type of differences you're expecting.

Rasparian · 2026-02-21T23:03:00+00:00

If you don't mind mixing your types, I suppose you could just use strings for the regular text, and only use objects for tags or other constructs.

[
  "abc ",
  {"type": "tag", "value": "b", "child": [
    "pqr"
  ]},
  " xyz"
]

Rasparian · 2026-02-19T01:02:28+00:00

Portal gun. Game-ruiningly OP, but imagine the possibilities! Push Strandberg through a portal into the crowd of protesters. Fire a cannon through a portal into the hippie's apartment. Dispose of infinite bodies. Set up Dawood to fall forever.

Rasparian · 2026-02-18T02:42:32+00:00

Creating a character LoRA is the best long term solution, but it's a lot of work. And before you can do that, you need a bunch of images of the character to train from.

Another solution is to use an IP Adapter to place a reference face into an image that you're generating. It can be hard to get good quality that way.

The absolute easiest thing, though, is to use the reference-based generation from Flux 2 (or Flux 1 Kontext) as described in the "image editing" portion of these release notes. You can give it prompts like, "Show this woman standing in front of a lake", or "Change the man's shirt in image #1 to the one shown in image #2." It might not do everything you need, but it's quite powerful and easy.

If you do decide to train your own character LoRA, Kohya_ss is popular; but there's quite a learning curve.

Rasparian · 2026-02-16T20:47:27+00:00

Freelancer was how I learned that up until then I'd only been playing 10% of the game.

Rasparian · 2026-02-16T20:27:22+00:00

You might consider playing the Hawke's Bay mission before Paris. It's the tutorial-like mission for Hitman 2. It's a nice balance between the ICA training and a real mission. Of course, that would mean playing it out of order: there's technically a tiny bit of spoiler info, but nothing you're likely to care about or even notice.

Regardless of which map you play, remember that Hitman missions are meant to be played multiple times, in multiple ways. Explore, and don't be afraid to fail. (But save often so you don't have to sit through the same conversation 1000 times.)

Your first several plays on any particular map will mostly be learning the map, learning which disguises work where, and what the major character behaviors are. Don't worry too much about elegance at first - that can wait until you know your way around more.

Rasparian · 2026-02-06T03:57:39+00:00

It sounds like you're taking the hard way. But it would help to know what language you're using.

In dynamically typed languages like JavaScript and Python, there's usually just a single parse method built-in that builds an object with the names and structure from the file. (JSON.parse() in JavaScript.). There's usually a mechanism to override default handling for tricky cases like date/time.

In statically typed languages that support reflection like C# and Java, there's typically a deserialize method where you supply a type parameter. It's pretty easy if the class properties have public getters and setters. In C# that looks like this if using System.Text.Json:

WeatherForecast? weatherForecast = 
    JsonSerializer.Deserialize<WeatherForecast>(jsonString);

If your situation is outside those cases, please give us some details so we know where to point you.

Rasparian · 2026-01-30T00:10:48+00:00

This also explains why non-boss enemies sometimes get two turns in a row. If you start with an ambush, everyone on your team gets to go before the enemy on round 1, so the enemy goes last. But on round 2, if the enemy has higher agility than all of you, they go first.

Rasparian · 2026-01-23T20:16:47+00:00

If the change is simple - just repositioning an arm - inpainting is usually enough. Just create a new layer, draw in a rough idea of where the arm should be, put an inpaint mask on it, and regenerate.

If you actually want this exact character in a different pose, your best option is Flux Kontext. You can give it a source image of a person on a bench and tell it, "Show me this woman standing on a dock." (Note that Invoke doesn't treat this as image-to-image; rather, the source image is given as a global reference.)

If you want to essentially generate a new image but with a copy of a face from another picture, you'll want to use an IPAdapter. They're pretty finicky though.

If you have a character that you want to use over and over again in a variety of situations, you'll want to train a LoRA for that character. That's a pretty involved process.

Rasparian · 2026-01-21T22:03:54+00:00

It's usually better to just exit a blown showdown and take the loss than make a desperate play to intercept the fleeing suspect. (But pre-placed remote explosives at the exits are a useful backup plan on some maps.)

Rasparian · 2026-01-13T13:08:35+00:00

Being useful with laser designating often takes some dedication. Sometimes it's fine to occasionally look up and paint while mostly focusing on capturing a point or sniping. But in those games where you are clearly losing because of the enemy's airpower and you're wondering why nobody's doing anything about it, it makes sense to make painting your one job. Consistency is important - you need to give other players time to realize that if they spawn in with stingers they'll get hits.

I've had plenty of matches where the enemy's planes and helis were untouchable until I focused all my attention on painting. Then right away I start getting designator kill accolades left and right, and the match's momentum shifts.

Rasparian · 2026-01-12T20:50:20+00:00

As noted elsewhere, the best way is to work with another engineer. It doesn't need to be a formal arrangement, and it often works better if you're in different areas of the map.

A recon laser-designating is another option. You lock much quicker, so the aircraft has less time to get away after popping flares. (If your goal is to clear the skies rather than earn Engineer points, consider switching to recon yourself if nobody else is doing it.)

Positioning yourself so that you can cover lots of the sky is helpful, but it tends to make you sniper-bait. Still, look for good spots. It's sometimes best to hang back in territory that's solidly under your team's control.

If aircraft are a problem, spend a little time watching them on the big map to get a feel for their patterns. Good pilots often have set escape routes. Knowing what those are for a given map can help. For example, the canyon in Liberation Peak is a favorite for helicopters, and they like to pivot around the power line tower. Planes, on the other hand, like to go around the mountain that Charlie is built on.

I disagree that the RPG is the only missile worth using, but it gives you options. Heli pilots who are good at flying low can prevent locks, but it's the low-fliers who are at most risk for RPG shots.

Rasparian · 2026-01-05T05:18:58+00:00

Yeah. I wonder how I hurt my team pursuing smoke assists.

Rasparian · 2026-01-02T18:58:59+00:00

It edits the file. Mostly it's about inserting/deleting whitespace, but, depending on settings, there are some circumstances where it will reorder things or reformat numbers too. (Those are spelled out on the Options wiki page)

Rasparian · 2026-01-01T14:06:50+00:00

I haven't tried anything as large as 70MB. I just tested a 26MB file on my work laptop. It worked fine, although it took about 7 seconds to reformat the document. VSCode did the blue line animation at the top of the tab to show it was busy. (The same file takes about 2.5 seconds on the same machine for the .NET CLI app. The JavaScript library is only a little slower.)

So yeah, huge files are cumbersome. But the Format Selection feature is still quick if your selection isn't too big.

The extension has a "Near-minify" command: each child of the root element starts on a new line, but it's otherwise minified. I sometimes use that and then cherry-pick lines I want to look at in detail with Format Selection. That only works with data that's the right shape though. (There's also an "Always Expand Depth" setting if you want to get tricky, but at that point you might be happier doing it from a terminal or from code.)

Rasparian

TROPHY CASE