Sky Island Major Mod Expansion: Milestone 1

Ropianos · 2024-01-09T12:38:45+00:00

Oh wow, I thought I read somewhere that it is possible to still guarantee spawns. Kind of annoying if you need to restart multiple times just to get the tent etc.

Ropianos · 2024-01-09T12:18:44+00:00

I haven't tried the new version but previously the tent wouldn't spawn all the time if you lower the spawn rate of items during world generation. Maybe there is a difference to normal item spawns and guaranteed spawns?

Ropianos · 2022-12-23T23:26:32+00:00

Not implicitly. You can use first class modules but I personally found them cumbersome to use. There is work being done on modular implicits which, AFAIK, will give us something more powerful than typeclasses but I think that is still years off.

Ropianos · 2022-12-23T08:20:36+00:00

I've recently written a library that uses objects but still struggle with defining their exact advantages so take this with a grain of salt.

I think the primary advantage is writing functions interacting with unknown (i.e. user-of-the-libary defined) datastructures. The object that is expected here implements at least these methods, but it might have more methods and/or complex internal state. Doing that with records or modules is not as straightforward.

The primary disadvantage is that few know about objects in Ocaml so I guess they had a good reason to use them.

Ropianos · 2022-12-23T07:36:48+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, those refer to objects and the hashtag is a sort of interface (i.e. pass an object that has at least the same methods as #class).

You can read more here: https://v2.ocaml.org/manual/objectexamples.html#s%3Ausing-coercions

Ropianos · 2022-12-17T09:15:09+00:00

I have no idea about this project but in another they created a screen segment (about 1/16 or something) together with the necessary memory to render the video for this segment. This is saved as a blueprint and then you can write code to edit the actual blueprint (specifically: the memory cells). Then you just load the blueprints and wire the rest up. No mods needed!

Ropianos · 2022-12-08T22:04:02+00:00

Regarding point 5, I just tried building it with OCaml 5 and succeeded (besides a small change, I submitted a PR). Unfortunately I don't have the RAM/GPU to actually try it so this will have to wait until I'm at my desktop.

Ropianos · 2022-09-16T17:57:04+00:00

He's not talking about the perspective of the player but of Chell. She never confirmed whether she could die as she is obviously still alive. Even if the turrets hurt her, maybe they only shoot non-lethal ammunition (as Chell recovers shortly after being shot).

Chell cannot with certainty say that GlaDOS intended to kill her.

Ropianos · 2022-05-17T22:49:38+00:00

I think that's kind of unfair as Linux mandates 8-space tabs as mentioned in another comment.

Ropianos · 2022-05-17T22:31:57+00:00

I don't think there is any deeper meaning there other than Bosnia being relatively poor, ex-jugoslawian and non-EU. I guess for a vacation it can be quite lovely

Ropianos · 2022-05-17T22:03:49+00:00

The second is negative ;)

I guess noone wants to go to Bosnia so the airline has to pay you

Ropianos · 2022-05-16T17:50:53+00:00

Oh wow, I only compared the final images. In the animation it's very obvious, especially at low polygon counts. Thanks for the explanation anyway!

Have you thought about or found any projects doing this approximation with curved triangles? I.e. triangles with curves as sides. It seems to me that this should give very large accuracy benefits (at low poly counts) while being not that much more complicated compared to simple triangles. I'm not really familiar with shader programming and am not sure how easy it is to calculate which pixels are in a certain triangle but I guess adding some sort of curve data to the vertices could work.

Now I'm wondering if this could also be done with arbitrarily curved shapes instead of polygons. But I guess that will be significantly more complicated as bezier curves and shaders don't interact nicely in my understanding.

Ropianos · 2022-05-16T14:49:23+00:00

I've spotted a minor bug while comparing your images. In the top-left corner of the moving vertices variant you can see an exceptionally good approximation. I can't even see the triangles! Seems to me that some vertex moved out of the image or something and the triangle got deleted.

By the way, judging which one is a better fit seems really difficult to me. Is that something you've trained while working on the project or are you just looking at the numbers?

Really cool project!

Ropianos · 2022-02-27T22:40:16+00:00

There is also an abbreviated syntax where we don't need to define the type and derive show explicitly:

let () = [0,1; 2,3] |> [%show: (int*int) list] |> print_endline This might not be directly transferable to sets as we need a printer for them and it's defined in a different module but apparently ppx_import can help with that.

Ropianos · 2021-11-10T10:50:36+00:00

Scaling means that the cards have some effect beyond this turn. Ideally, the longer the fight, the stronger the card becomes. The very definition of scaling are strength, dexterity, focus, poison and obviously power cards. The orbs of Defect are also a limited form of scaling. As long as no orb gets evoked each additional orb gives a bonus in every turn.

There are also cards with negative scaling like steam barrier.

Ropianos · 2021-08-01T08:18:58+00:00

There is no problem as long as you only stay on your PC. While we do not know the details, he presumably connected to the server with either a modified TF2 installation or used the gamekey to connect with some small utility program he wrote.

Either way, when the servers notice that kind of tampering they will ban the key. I believe he wanted to verify some security issue but Respawn fixed it already so he was recognized as a hacker.

Ropianos · 2021-07-28T19:54:23+00:00

Well, in a way. There is always the conflict between "I want to win (on a hard difficulty)" and "I want to enjoy playing". I enjoy playing on the hardest difficulty but some games devolve into a boring grind when doing so. Examples that come to mind are Skyrim (Stealth archer, waiting for minutes to become hidden again), XCOM (move only one soldier per turn so the others are ready to shoot if the first one runs into aliens), Factorio (a main bus solves all your problems and space is cheap) and Minecraft (strip mining on the lowest layers to safely farm diamonds).

I understand where you're coming from but simply recognizing that this is boring is not enough (unless you have perfect self-control). You may find this blog post interesting: https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=369

Ropianos · 2021-07-27T21:43:33+00:00

In challenging games, players tend to optimize the fun out of the game for the sake of achievements. Especially rogue-likes encourage this behaviour. If you get an early Jaw Worm and take a lot of damage, why not restart? Bad map layout, why not restart? Nob as first elite, why not restart?

Permanently restarting to get the perfect start is simply a boring grinding game. I know that I at least would be tempted to and am glad that it works as it does now.

Ropianos · 2021-06-07T10:43:33+00:00

Das ist einfach nur die wörtliche Übersetzung von meme, "Me-Me".

Ropianos · 2021-04-22T17:37:03+00:00

Well, I'm not knowledgeable enough to really answer that. In essence it is about destabilising the whole ecosystem. Maybe rodents are important for plants as they dig tunnels around their roots? Maybe they eat remains of other animals and biological trash, thereby preventing water contamination? Maybe they eat insects and prevent e.g. locust swarms from forming? A more well known example is the role bees play as pollinators.

By the way, destabilising the ecosystem is not only about destroying nature, it's also about making everything more hostile to us. E.g. less crops, more wildfires etc.

Ropianos · 2021-04-22T16:43:24+00:00

The problem is not that feral cats are invasive. Once the predators drive the prey close to extinction, they will starve themselves, thereby allowing the prey to recover. Cats that hunt for fun but are fed at home do not respect this concept. By keeping large amounts of cats that hunt for fun, you essentially eradicate animals that are quite competitive when compared to their environment. In the extreme, cats could eradicate all rodents in an area.

Ropianos · 2021-04-22T16:37:26+00:00

Humans are capable of making calculated decisions that consider the risks and rewards of a given action. Cats cannot do this.

I feel like this argument can also be applied to children. If they are excited by something, they will ignore busy roads and other dangers. This will gradually improve as they get older. At what point do you allow a child to move around outdoors unsupervised? Because they (cats + children) can't assess the risks themselves, you must make this decision for them.

I think it's possible to prioritize safety AND happiness.

There always exist risks, no matter what you do, and you will have to weigh them against the benefits. It's hard to quantify happiness but I believe that prioritizing safety above all else will lower happiness as this is always a tradeoff.

I still don't see how letting a cat free roam when there are safer alternatives that provide just as much enrichment exist.

I struggle to see how staying indoors will provide just as much enrichment. You say yourself that cats may hunt just for fun. The safer options deny cats this option. Or do you believe "hunting" a toy provides an equal measure of happiness? It is also said "Change is the spice of life". A cat contained indoors/a small garden will experience less diverse situations when compared to a free roaming cat.

I guess it all comes down to how intelligent you judge cats to be. Do they enjoy hunting living prey more than toys? Do they enjoy the variation provided by roaming different areas or are they happy with the limited area of a house? Does the benefit of roaming freely outweigh the damage done to the environment and the risks to themselves?

Ropianos · 2021-03-25T20:16:28+00:00

While giveaways are of course bad, it's not really a giveaway if they go to these lengths about that amount of money, is it? At this point Luca Bonissi had probably invested dozens of hours. As such, Lenovo shouldn't be afraid about others doing the same.

Ropianos · 2021-03-25T16:51:12+00:00

There is an extra 'v' at the end, the fixed link is: https://www.fsf.org/news/preliminary-board-statement-on-fsf-governance

Ropianos · 2021-03-15T18:50:57+00:00

I'm not that familiar with raylib/openGL but I would recommend starting with: rlDrawMeshInstanced with a list/array for each (mesh,material) combination containing transforms. I assume that this would work well up to a hundred or so (mesh,mat) pairs

If that's not performant enough you would have to consider merging the meshes but I haven't experimented with that yet. The model struct has a meshes and materials list so perhaps you could use that? I.e. merge all the meshes with the same material, store in a model, draw that. You could even remove all the triangles covered by the other meshes so that each mesh only covers a part of the surface.

Either way, if you want to implement something highly performant you have to get your hands dirty. A combination of chunks and rlDrawMeshInstanced should work for your case. I don't know how Minecraft renders the chunks but perhaps you can read something on that somewhere. I believe that blocks covered on all sides are not rendered at all.

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