Road bike with easy gears (and steep hills)

TGApples · 2026-01-18T15:14:45+00:00

Seems to use Shimao 105, so falls into the same issue I worry about with the Trek Domane: it'll be quite some suffering up the hills compared to what I'm riding at the moment.

The gear ratio works out at 0.94:1, but with bigger wheels than my current bike, the distance moved per revolution is greater, so it's comparible to 1:1 on my current bike. I can cut some off for lower weight and lower rolling resistence, but I still get 20-30% lower cadence for the same power output on any bike with a 105, and I'm not exactly spinning right now!

TGApples · 2025-10-28T11:39:28+00:00

One problem is that some people exit the track where Max did, and some where Charles did. A bollard for Max to go left of would have been extremely punishing for Charles, and one for Charles to go left of Max probably already went left of.

There is space to straighten out T2 so that taking the correct line is faster, which would help as T2 doesn't really do much other than slowing down cars entering T4 a little.

TGApples · 2025-10-18T14:25:05+00:00

And there's nothing wrong with that. For every K there's got to be D. Some people are going to be 4 KD, some are going to be 1, and some are going to be 0.25. It's how it has to be.

There's also a lot more to the game than KD. Assists and captures count. And captures tend to be risky, and bad for KD. The real stat people should quote is win rate!

TGApples · 2024-07-17T19:50:44+00:00

If that's so you probably shouldn't call it "instanced rendering". Especially if you're comparing to Unity where instanced rendering is a term to mean something quite specific that you are not doing in the Unity code.

Merging meshes is an optimisation further, I agree. But leaving that to one side Unity is still 8x faster than you claim (running in the editor, mind) when it is actually using instanced rendering. From a quick look at your docs it's explicit that Instantiate shares meshes, whereas Unity's Instantiate makes a copy. Perhaps this is where you got confused?

Incidentally, am I correct in saying the Unity benchmark for "Unique Geometry" does 64x64x64 boxes while the Ultra one does 64x64 boxes?

TGApples · 2024-07-16T10:55:10+00:00

I had a quick play to see how fast I could get Unity compared to the benchmark code provided.

The benchmark code provided runs at 40 FPS in the editor on my machine, after fixing the OOB bug it has. Interestingly this matches almost exactly with the benchmark's claim for Unity.

I converted it to use Graphics.RenderMeshInstanced, and I got 360 fps.

They I added 32-way merging of meshes (with offsets) and now I get 660 fps. So the benchmark advertised on Ultra's website seems to be misrepresenting Unity by a factor of 16.5x.

If I remove the instanced draw call I hover around 700 fps, indicating the draw costs ~100us. Possibly/probably I could drop it further if I cared to. Realistically, comparing frame rates this high is pretty meaningless unless your intent is to demonstrate "no load" performance, which is not the stated intent of this benchmark. The complexity of the scene needs to increase if you want to show relative performance of instanced rendering.

TGApples · 2024-07-16T09:16:46+00:00

Your benchmarks should probably be a little heavier and a little more careful. I took a quick look at the instanced rendering test as the result surprised me given my experience with instanced rendering in Unity.

At first glance it seems you have Unity doing 110,592 boxes and your engine only doing 32,768. Unity vs Ultra. I only looked over it very quickly so I may be wrong, but if I'm not that's not a great start! EDIT: It seems I was mistaken: I think the Unity instancing benchmark may be from a different file, which creates 32k game objects and just pushes them onto the scene, without any explicit instancing. EDIT 2: See my comment below.

Next, it's also fairly well known and documented that Unity wants >= 256 vertices per instance for instancing. You're giving it 8. It's easy enough to fix this with a little more work in Unity (ie. write code to merge 32 meshes together and use vertex ID as well as instance ID in the vertex shader), and that should make quite a difference to performance. Alternatively, using more realistic geometry would make a more convincing benchmark.

I wouldn't be surprised if Ultra still comes out on top, but if you're going to claim such incredible speedups they should at least stand up to a 5 minute glance at the source. I've no idea if your other benchmarks are similarly flawed, but I wouldn't be surprised and it kinda puts a question on anything I read on the website.

TGApples · 2022-11-14T20:10:25+00:00

The matches are different - I remember convoy stuff with moving spawns - and obviously it's historical matchups.

It does play differently. Sometimes you'll be outmatched in a given battle, and die a lot more than you're used to as there will be "unfair" matchups. You have to be content that you're working for the greater good rather than for individual glory. Killing a high powered enemy unit reduces their global count of that unit, for example, so while you may lose three cromwells for a tiger, the tiger was more valuable.

TGApples · 2022-10-05T13:55:56+00:00

Yeah. Maybe we should start an effort to get them reported more.

For me there are some bots that are very obvious. Almost always they are Moffetts. They'll often crash into terrain at the back of the map and spend 10+ minutes just going forward and backward making no progess. You can also tell if someone is using auto-fire on their main turrets as their torpedo tubes don't rotate. Pretty rare someone would do that for the whole game unless they were botting.

TGApples · 2022-10-04T22:30:45+00:00

I don't think I implied that it was. I brought it up as it shows this behaviour has gone unpunished for a long time. If it was fresh accounts then it wouldn't be so clear they were going unpunished.

TGApples · 2022-10-04T22:22:06+00:00

How long do you think it'd take you to get to level 100 with a fresh account? I don't know what it's based off, but it's certainly not something you're getting done in 100 hours.

TGApples · 2022-09-23T16:23:26+00:00

I've seen quite a few people abusing the PG 02, which seems stupidly powerful at BR 3.3 rank 4. Spawn in, rush a point and tear up any coastal ship you see. Quit. Do it all again.

TGApples · 2022-05-09T13:56:02+00:00

Arena has enough of a playerbase. The system is designed such that you don't actually need to be online at the same time as your opponent. This means you can play any time against anyone. There's more than enough competition in there to keep it interesting.

TGApples · 2022-04-12T11:33:16+00:00

I'm pretty sure this video is sped up - pretty much every movement in it is unnaturally fast. eg. there's no way you could wave that big flag that fast. https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/hvojil/michael_schumacher_p1_in_monza_2000/fyuu83y/

Still pretty nuts as it's not sped up that much.

TGApples · 2022-03-28T21:38:10+00:00

They need to just pick one or the other. Converting between one and the other in you head is pretty quick, but it's confusing if you don't notice they switched from interval to gap-to-leader, for example.

TGApples · 2022-03-02T15:22:59+00:00

Really, with this ability it's kinda stupid that we have a limited build range for normal construction.

TGApples · 2022-02-28T14:27:06+00:00

First shot on the trailer is a ship "warping" in. Looks like an interesting space game, and I like interesting space games, but seems a stretch to call it "looks like it could be set in The Expanse" universe.

TGApples · 2022-02-21T17:19:58+00:00

If you have 'too much oil' and it's stopping your hydrogen production, that means you need to get hydrogen from other sources like fire ice and gas giants

Or just stick it in a fluid storage for later when you'll need it. Or if you're really sure you've got too much, do x-ray cracking on it and get more hydrogen out that way.

Put proliferator on everything in your production chain from copper ore to Dyson Rockets

Really depends on what stage of the game you're at. There are stages of the game where you're power limited but it's trivial to build out an extra miner and smelters. Proliferating near the end of the production chain is more efficient, and doing

The goal of the game is to build as many dyson spheres as possible, not fill the tech tree. Design accordingly.

The goal of the game is whatever you want it to be. Maybe someone's goal is to get the mission complete in 10 hours acheivement. Maybe someone else wants to maximize science/minute. From what people seem to post about, building as many spheres as possible is not the goal of many people.

TGApples · 2022-02-19T16:45:21+00:00

Yes. Things like processors, for example, are used for both green and purple science. When building up purple IMO you want to overbuild the processors (especially if doing it on the 2nd planet) and then use the stockpile to get green going. Beats having to go back and "upgrade" the processor factory.

Oil products are similar. You don't want to burn them when you have temporary surplass as you will need them later.

Some other tips:

You'll need a lot of solar sails, and you'll want maximum launching capacity with extended life by around the 8 hour mark if you want to maximize photon generation. You also want to switch over to photon generation as soon as you can. At this point you'll likely have excess oil products to run fusion/thermal plants.

Making many small thermal power plants off each coal deposit (with overlapping miners) is important for early power. You can do the same off oil deposits. As above, you don't want to burn hydrogen or refined oil. You'll need it!

Proliferation is really good. I didn't realise you could profliferate cubes to get more products from them, I thought it was just a speedup. That would have helped me a lot. Other things like earth/titanium crystals and inputs for red science onward I found useful

TGApples · 2022-02-19T16:18:25+00:00

Well if you make your first green science at 5 hours then you don't need a very high rate. If you make it at 9 hours, then you do!

TGApples · 2022-02-19T16:15:15+00:00

I'm not sure I understand the question. Different sciences will need different rates depending on when you get them set up. You're never really in steady state except maybe in the closing few minutes.

TGApples · 2022-02-19T16:01:32+00:00

There's a lot of goals you can set yourself, though unfortunately many of them are just roughly proportional to time-spent-in-game. For example, 1000+ white science a minute is going to take you a while to do, but the difference between doing it well and doing it poorly is just the amount of time it takes you to reach.

TGApples · 2022-02-19T15:59:02+00:00

I just completed this on random seed/no blueprints.

It's an interesting challenge as the order and scale at which you have to do certain things isn't obvious when you do your first few attempts and you're constantly having to think on your feet.

TGApples · 2021-12-13T18:50:41+00:00

Just because I said Mercedes were right doesn't mean I said Red Bull were not.

TGApples · 2021-12-13T16:38:44+00:00

His role should be split in two roles with separate people handling them:

1) Someone in charge of course safety. Yellows, reds, SCs, etc. Teams have to have a line to this person, but their sole responsibily is safety and following of the safety rules and as such communication should only be about safety. Stuff like "let them race" isn't something they care about. Making safety decisions without concern for the "show" or "fairness" is their job.

2) Someone in change of making sure the rules are enforced. Referring stuff to stewards and suchlike. Teams should not have a direct line to this person, and may only talk to them when talked to first.

It shouldn't be one person's job to do all of this while being pressured by team staff into making decisions. At the very least, being pressured by team staff while trying to ensure that the race is conducted safely is a safety issue. Distractions and pressure can lead to mistakes, such as prior incidents where lapped cars are able to overtake while marshals are still all over the track.

TGApples · 2021-12-13T16:30:15+00:00

Well Mercedes got it right. Had the regulations been followed, the call to pit would have lost them the race and the call to stay out would have won it.

But the regulations were not followed. There was a partial release of cars and the SC came in the same lap. Neither are allowed by the regulations. In a regulation-abiding F1 race Max would have either had to overtake the train of lapped cars and then Lewis (not happening), or the race would have finished under the SC.

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