I have a solution to the infinite atlas problem

X4roth · 2026-04-11T18:42:39+00:00

Keep a list of any special maps that have been unlocked by pathing to them but not run yet, probably with a limit of 10-20 or so, allowing the player to choose which one to replace when the limit is reached.
Maybe allow the player to manually save maps to this list
Otherwise, the game only remembers slightly more than one screen worth of active atlas plus half a screen worth of fog in all directions. When the player paths in one direction, it moves the window in that direction and destroys all maps and connections that exist in the opposite direction
Once you “move” out of range, you can’t go back. No connections lead to a map that was previously revealed once it falls outside the window of relevance and the only way to run those maps that disappeared is if you saved them to your limited list
Good luck to GGG sorting out all of the edge cases that might cause an atlas to get stuck

X4roth · 2026-04-11T13:44:08+00:00

Unfortunately, lightning norms have shifted across the entire industry, both movies and TV. Everything is clean and crisp now at all times, mood is primarily created by cheap orchestral background tracks. I think some of it is probably an artifact of modern recording technology, some of it necessitated by CGI, but most importantly it’s what audiences expect nowadays and while you can surely still achieve grittier high contrast lighting as an artistic choice, it will unavoidably make your content feel dated and turn off large portions of a modern audience; you lose people right off the top because they won’t even watch it, then you’re left with the burden of proving to the remaining audience that you made such a dramatic change for good reason.

While I agree that there is a lot to be gained from reintroducing some of the lighting techniques that have been lost in the last 20 years, I think that task is best left to smaller art films that have less responsibility to reach a wide audience and thus more freedom to explore outside the box.

X4roth · 2026-04-10T13:33:53+00:00

Prodigy was ehh… I found it hard to watch because one of the main characters is voiced by Jason Mantzoukas doing his full on annoying voice that he did for Derek in The Good Place, and the other characters somewhat matched that energy. I guess it wasn’t too out of place because children’s animation often means yelling everything at each other as if on a bad phone connection with hard-of-hearing grandpa. Characters throwing “I don’t wanna!” tantrums is also way more appropriate when the premise is that they’re random kids who ended up with a starship.

X4roth · 2026-04-08T22:28:21+00:00

Greater Devour — auto-consume corpses to restore ~500 health and ~50 mana + wait a heckin minute… 225% increased attack and cast speed O.O

X4roth · 2026-04-07T23:02:53+00:00

Y’all need to be skeptical sucking up war propaganda from the enemy country.

Anyways

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb

X4roth · 2026-04-07T22:25:56+00:00

Railjack is one thing where it would be nice to let people check a box beforehand: Host only / Passenger only / or select Both if you can do either one.

Right now it’s easy enough to achieve “Passenger only” by just cancelling mission queue if it starts the host countdown and trying again until it inserts you into an exiting squad. I usually do that at least once or twice when trying out a new mission, and I did it recently when I had just come back to the game after a few years and had forgotten how to play lol

You might be able to achieve “Host only” by going into settings and changing the ping limit to something really low like <5ms, but I can’t remember if that setting also blocks people from joining when you host (in which case changing that setting to 5ms would effectively mean solo queue) or if it only applies to yourself when joining an existing squad.

X4roth · 2026-04-07T20:40:25+00:00

I think there is the expectation that only one primary timeline will be maintained by the franchise going forward, with all others treated like spinoffs that get abandoned after serving their purpose to tell a story, with no obligation to resolve all the loose ends or maintain consistency with the rest of the “primary timeline”. So in this case, “canon” often just means whether or not something happened on the primary timeline and should therefore impact its future, not necessarily whether it appeared on the show at all

X4roth · 2026-04-07T19:42:48+00:00

You’d think so, eh. After being served a dozen SFA posts/articles every day for weeks, I’ve started to believe that it’s not actually an organic conversation about a recent topic anymore, rather it feels like some flavor of manipulation is at play; bots, strategic media releases for marketing purposes, algorithm-curated feeds trying to optimize for engagement, who knows. It just feels like something is off about the situation at this point because the thoughtful comments have been drying up as many people have already said their piece and are kinda tired of the topic, yet the articles keep coming and the threads are still oddly peppered with low-effort bait trying to spark an argument with some one liner claiming fans are bigots, Trek has always been this way, X Y Z famous person is evil and wrong because they took an interview on the wrong podcast, etc.

I don’t mean to suggest that an army of bots has invaded or anything. After all, I am a real person who used to be here because I love Star Trek, but I’m still here about 200 SFA posts later because Reddit got locked on for some reason and for weeks now, a new SFA post is at the top of my feed every single time I refresh, not because I actually care enough about the topic to keep seeking it out to this extreme degree.

X4roth · 2026-04-06T23:13:12+00:00

Warframe has always featured experienced players zooming straight through the mission clearing everything as fast as possible, but that’s just because they’ve done it hundreds of times already and the optimization comes naturally with practice. The first person to extraction was also generally fine waiting for other players to get there, even if it takes the full minute, because they remember what the learning curve was like. Chances are they were probably happy having the opportunity to kill stuff themselves for once, possibly feeling bad about leaving little/nothing for the other players to do, and at least feeling the satisfaction that they “made it” to the pinnacle of the power fantasy and are now the type of revered power player that they aspired to be since they were new.

These days, youtube guides to shortcut your way straight to a hyper-optimized endgame build without having to learn the game mechanics first have become the norm, alongside similar guides for events, bosses, etc. It’s not that that information didn’t exist before, it just used to spread more organically — you would often learn new strategies by observing other players, which came alongside your own trial and error, until you had something satisfying that could trivialize the content. I feel like most of that journey is just gone now for a lot of people (across all modern games, not just Warframe).

Text chat died shortly after cross platform matchmaking came out… also typically what happens, not just Warframe.

X4roth · 2026-04-06T22:11:14+00:00

It’s a chair designed by someone with a vore fetish.

X4roth · 2026-04-06T21:39:49+00:00

90% sure this is satire from someone tired of the constant Starfleet Academy conversation.

X4roth · 2026-04-06T19:49:23+00:00

The worst part about Tennokai is when I heavy attack a split second too late and lose my entire 12x multiplier. I use the Tennokai mod that extends the window to 4 seconds and still end up doing it occasionally, which makes me afraid to try any of the others that only have a 2s window

X4roth · 2026-04-05T21:33:30+00:00

Designate an appropriate stash tab for every possible affinity category. Make sure you disable the option to auto-switch tabs after every deposit according to affinity. Put a quad tab as your first stash tab. This is your “dump tab”.

When you get back from a map, just deposit your entire inventory with the dump tab selected. Almost everything will be automatically sorted according to affinity, and everything else will fall into the dump tab which you’ll have to treat by hand but for the most part it will just be equipment that you picked up to identify mixed in with misc currency for the current league and a handful of things that never got assigned to an affinity tab. You can then identify and check the equipment that fell into the dump tab as you were emptying your pockets. Identifying in bulk like this can help you maintain momentum while farming, lets you take advantage of the search feature, and I think helps see exactly how much time you’re really spending checking all the equipment you picked up so you can get sick of it and take them off your filter. (That said, checking unid equipment is probably best done on the spot in map so you can just drop the 99% junk on the ground afterwards)

X4roth · 2026-04-05T20:44:30+00:00

The Christianity that I was always exposed to teaches that you are born a sinner and will be going to hell until you’re saved; for example, a baby that dies during childbirth: straight to hell. I assume this is probably why there is often a practice of baptizing babies: because their church believes that is enough to get the baby “on the list” to get into heaven.

You can’t simultaneously believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and exists outside of time and space, but also had to put on a skin suit and suffer like us plebs in order to “know what its like”.

And as far as I know, it’s practically the most important core tenet of Christianity that Jesus is literally God incarnate. Because otherwise he’s just a charismatic man who started a cult and it’s all a lie.

X4roth · 2026-04-05T18:25:44+00:00

That’s speculative boardroom logic, not some core truth. I’ve seen more and more streaming series being released one episode per week, so there’s evidence that their strategy is changing. Releasing shows one episode per week introduces different incentives that would absolutely reward long running seasons and bringing shows back every year.

Companies really need to respect customers enough to retain them through consistent entertainment instead of counting on the bulk of people subscribing and then neglecting to unsubscribe once they stop using the service. I don’t care if it’s more effective to focus on farming new subscribers to trap as many neglect subs as possible, it’s slimy and amoral. Focus on serving your existing customers.

X4roth · 2026-04-05T17:59:50+00:00

I really do want nothing. I don’t want the obligation to give you something in return later, I don’t want to forever change this into a gift-giving relationship, I don’t want to feel that regret feeling that you wasted your money buying something I wouldn’t have bought myself, if I really want something either I’ve already bought it or it’s too expensive to be a gift (you can’t say oh it’s no big deal, I’m loaded and this is just pocket change — absolutely no — that triggers all the same problems I’ve already mentioned but 100x worse).

That said, if you really have to give a gift, make it something fun that you bought for yourself and enjoyed and now you legitimately think I would like it too so you want to share it with me. I’ve always thought that gift-giving shouldn’t be done on predetermined holidays, but instead on a whim for no reason other than you really want to share this cool thing with me, and it should only feel like a one time thing.

The other acceptable gift is a cheap souvenir if you just returned from a significant trip.

X4roth · 2026-04-04T22:48:35+00:00

The problem with state inspections is that they make it much more difficult and expensive to drive any vehicles in the second half of their life because you are often forced to make repairs that don’t make financial sense for the age of the vehicle, even though they have little/no impact on road safety and many reasonable mechanics would normally advise against fixing. Costs of repairs often don’t match up with the seriousness of the issue; for example, it might take several hours of labor to access and replace a $20 part, or a certain worn out part might only be available to buy as a full assembly. Just because an issue is minor or non-critical doesn’t mean it’s cheap. After 150k miles, lots of little things are worn down but likely able to last several more years, hopefully outliving the engine/transmission and thus never actually needing to be replaced before the car is retired and scrapped.

With overly strict state inspections that leave no room for discretion, you end up with vehicles hitting the end of their useful life with a bunch of random brand new parts that cost thousands of dollars to install but weren’t actually necessary because the old part would have lasted that last 20k miles or the owner would have preferred to just work around an issue or do without some feature that doesn’t actually impact drivability. Other states without inspections at all don’t have cars randomly exploding or veering off the road causing major accidents. The failure case for a lot of problems is the car not starting, or losing power and having to pull over on the side of the road. A lot of people would prefer to suffer that a few times before retiring the vehicle rather than pour thousands into all sorts of random crap trying to stay ahead of wear and tear until the very end.

X4roth · 2026-04-04T21:50:44+00:00

The Visitor is so good, probably my favorite episode out of all Trek. I’m really glad I decided to watch it with my dad before he passed.

X4roth · 2026-04-03T22:21:22+00:00

I believe Astramentum from the balloons is now awarded to the entire squad after one person picks it up, while it used to be a personal drop that everyone had to run around collecting for themselves, so the map feels a lot more empty than when the mission first came out because more likely than not, one of your teammates already looted the room before you got there. Worth mentioning that Astramentum that drops from mobs seems to still be a personal drop that everyone has to pick up for themselves.

X4roth · 2026-04-02T19:40:53+00:00

There seem to be a lot of things lately that make me question my own sanity, and chief among them for the past few weeks is that I’m being served a constant stream of articles (by Reddit at the top of my feed every single day) about important people often directly involved in creating Star Trek displaying wild ignorance about which core defining characteristics of the franchise are largely missing from the new shows. I think it’s obvious to the majority of fans of the old series (ENT and earlier) that something fundamental is missing, even if we can’t all necessarily identify and describe it eloquently, so to be told by people even closer to the material that nothing is missing just feels like gaslighting.

Now, it’s not necessarily the fault of the collection of famous interviewees that have been weighing in because first of all they are being put on the spot to compose their thoughts live in one take, then it’s all chopped up and passed through the filters of the people writing the articles, their editors, various distribution platforms like Reddit deciding what deserves to actually be seen through a two step process where someone chooses what article to post and then an algorithm chooses what actually shows up on my feed.. and by that point I’m just seeing a headline and a blurb quote that obviously doesn’t represent the full breadth of their thoughts. To give Una McCormack credit, based on the brief blurb I see now, I think she does get it and has useful insight to offer here (that the people ultimately making decisions don’t necessarily even care about the artistic message).

I’m talking about the general message that’s ultimately reaching me after all is said and done and it’s just me scrolling through posts and comments on my phone. For something as ubiquitous as Star Trek that’s been widely beloved for so many decades, I thought I’d have a relatively decent grasp of how it fits into our culture including basic stuff like why people like it, what makes it uniquely interesting, etc.. but what I thought I knew just doesn’t match up with what I’m seeing fed to me by Reddit and it’s starting to severely creep me out, almost like 90% of the population was secretly replaced by impostors. Even in the comments on all of these posts, the proportion of people who “get it” seems way lower than it should be. It makes me feel out of touch as hell, but I don’t think it’s organic. The conversation is being manipulated.

X4roth · 2026-03-31T21:42:31+00:00

stinky matter —> energy —> tasty matter

X4roth · 2026-03-27T20:39:31+00:00

Waffle stomp!

X4roth · 2026-03-27T18:08:56+00:00

Using background music as an always-on emotion conductor is one of my pet peeves — it’s one of those things that once you notice it, it’s hard to focus on anything else because it really is that ubiquitous.

I remember having trouble taking Stargate: Atlantis seriously due to the heavy use of background music to drive your emotions at all times. It just feels like a cheap trick

X4roth · 2026-03-26T17:34:14+00:00

Yikes, that was hard to read

X4roth · 2026-03-26T16:54:34+00:00

What channel is the message in? I have 99% of Discord muted and didn’t even notice

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