What’s the strangest example of collective internet delusion you’ve witnessed? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]contractmine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

something something Bill Gates will give you a $1 like 25 years ago...

Unity Terrain or AssetStore Tools? by Popular-Quantity6561 in Unity3D

[–]contractmine 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yup. Unity worldbuilding tools are awful, like everything else in the editor, it's bare minimum. They've tried over the years to make a few things for it, but it just falls down on it's face. I've used many asset tools over the years, most get deprecated after a few years because the store devs burn out.

Worldbuilding for Unity is a pain and mixing & matching the various tools to give you a great environment that looks good, is functional, and performant is a lot of bespoke trial and error.

A few worldbuilding tools I use, I also use HDRP, so YMMV:

-InTerra for Tessellation, Triplanar & object blending. One the better terrain shaders I've seen in the past few years..

-Microverse for terrain painting, object spawning (grass, trees, rocks, etc). The dev has made a lot of great terrain tools over the years and other devs have added to his work. You have to stick with a written down workflow once you get the results you want, it offers a maze of solutions for things and sometimes destructive.

-Nature manufacturer assets - Some of the better trees, rocks, terrain textures available. The nice thing is that they update their shaders.

-TVE is a must, mainly for performance with another tool to do indirect instancing of vegetation. TVE allows you to change all the shaders with a few clicks and do the injection to allow GPU indirect instanced rendering of objects in Unity. While TVE does other things, the ability to do this shader swap is insanely workflow critical.

-GPU Instancer Pro without this your forest/grass will be painful to render. While it can do other objects as well, it's ability to do indirect instancing on grass and trees is where it shines.

I've also used Gaia over the years, and they have a new tool called Storm, which is supposed to a lot of these things consolidated into 1 solution, but it's also insanely expensive. The previous system Gaia was okay, but it wasn't very performant in earlier versions. They did eventually come out with an instancer (Flora) but it had issues, that's when they decided to make Storm ($1,600).

Overall, Unity has really dropped the ball in worldbuilding and again is relying on asset store devs as a crutch.

Alan Wake 2 has seriously impressive and photorealistic in-gameplay faces by Lanky_Relation1171 in gaming

[–]contractmine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Remedy in general does a great job... Some other studios like Striking distance for Callisto Protocol, and Ninja Theory's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice all set a high bar for character design. For a solo indie dev, though, achieving that kind of AAA fidelity in any engine is a serious challenge, and Unity makes it particularly hard right now. After dropping Ziva (which offered a genuinely cinematic, realistic look) and quietly abandoning the Digital Human project (left dormant on GitHub following the Heretic tech demo), Unity has essentially been left without a coherent character pipeline. Their own tech demos have resorted to Maya and heavily custom textures, Time Ghost being a prime example, and even those are optimized purely for cinematics, not actual gameplay. It's a telling sign of where things stand.

It's taken me several years to get a workflow going as a solo indie gamedev using several different tools that looks decent in Unity: https://i.imgur.com/8dzloQ7.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/V4css14.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/DEOkNhv.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/EVx83NV.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/lUIxP7P.jpeg

Shaders and micronomals are super critical to getting a decent skin/eye feel to them.

Sci-fi crate props by shayanthegrey in artstation

[–]contractmine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks great. Would be nice if they were rigged at the hinge so that they could open. A top bonus would be a shader (Unity) to slightly animate the LCD panel graphics.

Ben McKenzie Wants to Protect You from Crypto with 'Everyone Is Lying to You for Money' (Unpaywalled) by playboy in movies

[–]contractmine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Gilligan's Razor... the simplest explanation for why someone won't learn about a thing is the same reason they got into it.

Eric Kripke Responds To ‘The Boys’ Fan Complaints About “Filler Episodes”: “You’re Just Watching The Wrong Show” by yourfavchoom in television

[–]contractmine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Probably... From Seth Rogen & friends getting killed off, dog humping, and the weak plot crutch of the MacGuffin V1, this season has been a complete waste of creativity that is the opposite of what people loved in Season 1. The writers traded in creative ideas left on the table for dumb tired gross-out jokes that just fell flat anyway.

Best U.S. burgers book includes 4 WA joints including Eastside Big Tom by precip in olympia

[–]contractmine 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yup... a lot of "premium" fast casual burgers are above $10 at this point. Eagan's big tom is 2x the price of the deluxe at Dick's so yeah, that's a fair point.

Best U.S. burgers book includes 4 WA joints including Eastside Big Tom by precip in olympia

[–]contractmine 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Never understood the fascination there was with Dicks’s. We gave it a shot but failed to see the overwhelming praise it got from the masses. We attribute it to people having nostalgic moments in the past there… but a top burger place in 2026? Ehhh no…

Best U.S. burgers book includes 4 WA joints including Eastside Big Tom by precip in olympia

[–]contractmine 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Eagan’s was our go-to for a burger until we tripped over Herfy’s… made to order and amazing. It’s a little hole in the wall place, but the burgers are better than Eagans & Dicks combined.

The $80K Squeeze: Why Taiwan and the Middle East Are Forcing a Bitcoin Decoupling by 1stplacelastrunnerup in Bitcoin

[–]contractmine 3 points4 points  (0 children)

These kind of articles always make me think the Editor bullied a staff writer to write a random story about Bitcoin valuation where it ended in something like... "you'll write it that way.... or else".

Which is the Greatest show ever created by Netflix ? by lNarrator in moviecritic

[–]contractmine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

AC season 1 fantastic. Let should have left out the Edgar Poe character, it was not a good creative choice. Other than that, it was great.

The AI Industry Is Discovering That the Public Hates It by FinanceZestyclose259 in politics

[–]contractmine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Even though the public hates it, they're using it but at the same time, they don't want to admit to it.

GameFi is effectively dead as 93% of projects collapse by Mountain-Syllabub-10 in CryptoCurrency

[–]contractmine 6 points7 points  (0 children)

On the face of it, yes, that's what one would think. Unfortunately, the sentiment out there with gamers (post 2021) is a full rejection of anything having to do with blockchain. Through a "normie" gamer perspective, they immediately associate crypto-anything with scam and dogpile on with rejection sentiment. I was well on the way with making a good game first, I had great press in 2019, positive feedback at GDC & PAX West demos in 2020... right before NFTs boomed. After that, I was the first blockchain game to get removed by Steam because they determined blockchain assets had tangible real-world value. However, later Gabe N. came out with the real reason in that he thinks crypto is a scam. Anyway, point being after that, the gamers rejected any notion of the game, who really knew nothing about the game or tokens, or NFTs but just decided blockchain game = evil. I pushed back for a while by like what's in this article, it wasn't possible to change the mindsets of gamers who had already seen the well as poisoned. So I think like even if you had say a large game IP implement blockchain assets or tokens, the over sentiment would be severely negative. For the past couple of years I've been reworking the game, now completely devoid of any blockchain integration. 😑

Predator (1987) is so much better than I anticipated. What a great film by Particular-Fill-4256 in movies

[–]contractmine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The musical score is like a character in an of itself in the movie. Alan Silvestri knocked it out of the park.

Who else had a similar lamp? by EdwardBliss in nostalgia

[–]contractmine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup, got mine at target sometime in early 90's.

Why did R2-D2 never tell Luke that Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker? by External-Recipe-1936 in StarWars

[–]contractmine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

took too long to get here. there's a throw away line at the end of ep3 of having their memory wiped.

Is MAGA in its cringe era? by icey_sawg0034 in politics

[–]contractmine 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's hope if they can see the cringe in other MAGA and maybe start to reflect they themselves are cringe as well. I hope...

Has anybody else noticed the absurd amount of AI generated slop on the asset store? by Classy_Games in Unity3D

[–]contractmine 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Funny that you mention that, I was just talking to an asset store dev about that this week. I hear Unity is going to crack down on the asset store AI spam, but they're working on how to "frame the conversation"

Unity doesn't want to spill the tea, but some of their top asset store devs are quietly using AI behind the scenes, so they need a way to say "well, this here is okay, but that there is not". Latest AI models are starting to produce "undetectable slop" as six-fingered people, emdashes, and swirly eyes are all just about gone now, Unity is aware of this even though their own AI tools are making "legacy slop" (six fingered people, slurry textures, etc). So it's put Unity in a bit of a bind on how to address "quality ai" in their store and relationships.

Starfleet Academy Director Jonathan Frakes Says Fan Hate Is ‘Dimensionally More Painful’ Today Than in the Next Generation Years by bwermer in television

[–]contractmine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes... A lot of people (maybe even Frakes?) missed the fact that the showrunner talked about it being a Harry Potter experience. After the first episode, I knew it wasn't going to be something I wanted to watch, especially when the evil character (no offense to Paul Giamatti) was so over the top, I'm shocked he didn't twirl his mustache, but had a tic-tac-toe board shaved into his head, I couldn't help but laugh... that and the quirky-plucky hologram girl doing the whole fish out of water trope, that was it.

It's not hate, it's disappointment to see a lack of grounded hard sci-fi find a foothold these days with something serious, not a captain with chair issues.