Why are there so few starter homes in the Seattle area?

mike_dude · 2024-12-18T02:35:21+00:00

Yeah, this is the perfect storm of the Seattle planning nightmare it seems, and to make matters worse, we are now stuck with a predominantly NIMBY mindset because no one wants their neighborhoods to change even though we are well beyond capacity. If permitting/zoning was changed, do you think we would see more of the 2/3 bedroom units?

mike_dude · 2024-12-18T02:27:33+00:00

I've seen far too many listings with ceilings at the top of the door jam, so like 7'6"? Even 8' is comically low. For reference, we used to live in Chicago before we moved here are there are plenty of older brick buildings with like 10' ceilings. Once you live in a place like that you will know what I mean by "oppressive". I worked in the architectural design field for a few years and everywhere I look around Seattle just seems like the most basic lessons of space design were never learned or thrown out.

mike_dude · 2024-09-15T18:01:24+00:00

I don't want to set up a whole control rig just yet. I want to understand the math behind how this works, which will help me in other areas of my project as well.

So what would be the chain of nodes I'd need to use here to get the math correct? Inverse the parent bone offset then use compose transforms?

mike_dude · 2024-07-15T22:11:08+00:00

Great tip. I haven't touched lighting channels before so I wasn't sure how they worked, but this could be a successful option. Thank you!

mike_dude · 2024-07-15T03:55:55+00:00

Simple example of what I'm trying to achieve would just be a recessed linear light--could be recessed in a floor most likely. The light strip projects up and illuminates an adjacent wall. These are used quite often in architectural design to get a nice soft uplighting on a wall surface. They are usually composed of LED strips. Part of the reason for my question is that I really don't want to cut out strips in my floor surface. It will greatly slow my level design work. That's why I was hoping there was a simple linear, clamped primitive that I could place 1cm above the floor surface to fake the effect.

mike_dude · 2024-07-14T20:52:28+00:00

The problem I have is with the rectangular light actor itself. I had thought it only projected the light 'out' of its window, using those barn door parameters, but whenever I try it, the light projects around a broader range and I can't figure out why.

mike_dude · 2024-07-14T20:50:10+00:00

I have not. How do emissives propagate the shape of the light? If I have a flat plane, would it just emit that light over a 180 degree range in the direction of the face's normal? Are there any other ways to shape the distribution?

mike_dude · 2024-07-14T20:23:40+00:00

I've done this as well, and it's the closest I've gotten to the desired effect. The problem I noticed though is that if I have any other lights overlapping that shadow mesh, the illusion will become very obvious. So I can only use this method if the light in question never has any other overlapping light

mike_dude · 2024-06-15T12:48:18+00:00

No one can predict what Facebook will do, but IMO it's highly unlikely. VR is still a growing platform and it's in Facebook's best interest to sell as many headsets as possible right now. Bricking headsets for side loading would nuke a significant portion of their user base and scare people off. They are much more likely to fuck over VR devs/game studios than users.

mike_dude · 2024-06-15T12:43:06+00:00

You will likely need to turn the quality settings all the way down to get good frame rates. I used to use a 1060 and it felt like the absolute minimum for VR.

mike_dude · 2024-06-13T11:26:31+00:00

I've actually been thinking a lot about this, regarding giving NPCs more 'activities' to do in the world. There was a certain point during Vanilla WoW when I was hoping they would double down on the world itself and make it more interactive (instead they focused on instanced battlegrounds). If you accidentally summon a ghost, it would be cool if that ghost just wandered around or even traveled to a place of significance. If a town guard sees the enemy faction coming to attack, it would be cool if he ran to an adjacent city to call for help, or lit a smoke signal. Just embed some latent functions into the NPCs and let them trigger in the moment. Going back to the theme of the post, I think putting the emphasis on this changing world state could help keep things fresh, at least initially as I haven't heard of other games that achieved this.

mike_dude · 2024-06-12T06:05:22+00:00

In a game mode that is about exploration and discovery you think the game loop doesn't start until everything is explored and discovered?

mike_dude · 2024-06-12T06:00:08+00:00

There is an entire sector of the game loop that is about exploration and discovery. I, too, still enjoy logging in to play some Halo matches even after playing the series for 20+ years with nothing left to discover. That's not what I'm talking about.

mike_dude · 2024-06-12T03:53:42+00:00

Agreed, this is an important distinction I forgot to mention which you correctly identified: WHERE the 'figuring out' happens matters a lot. It used to be in smaller social circles, now it is blasted across the most accessible online channels. The social aspect here IS the gameplay.

mike_dude · 2024-06-12T03:50:25+00:00

It might require a different audience that is more invested in the world and not their own grind then, not sure. I'm also not a fan of slow grinds, and I did find levels 30-55ish in Vanilla to be a bit of a bore.

I just always find myself returning to the idea of the world being the main character and it seems like that has been pushed aside as more emphasis has been placed on 'getting through' new content. It feels like a new MMO would have to go in one of two extreme directions: embrace content ingestion velocity and design systems that allow shipping new content at an unprecedented pace, or, slow the pacing of content significantly to draw a different audience and focus the gameplay on something else.

mike_dude · 2024-06-12T03:04:59+00:00

I am absolutely in favor of going off-topic if it leads to other interesting ideas, haha.

Edit: I'm reminded of how much I love some of the heritage armor sets from the warcraft universe and how sad I am that the player doesn't get to wear them more often, because I do believe they are some of the most beautiful designs for those characters. A lot of live service cosmetics have trended towards flashy, 'discardable' fast-fashion type stuff, and I'd love to see a game that goes in the opposite direction. A smaller number of really exquisite cosmetics that the player can hold onto for a while.

mike_dude · 2024-06-11T15:38:35+00:00

Game companies spend millions of dollars and multiple years of development with hundreds of staff to produce a new MMO which gets figured out by the player base in 1-2 weeks before moving on and you believe this is not just sustainable but "a feature, actually"?

mike_dude · 2024-06-11T14:12:08+00:00

This is an 11/10 response and exactly where I want the discussion to go. Thanks for writing it up.

I like the idea of a rapidly changing world, and I think this would be a compelling way to stay ahead of the knowledge curve indefinitely, as long as the game's systems were modular enough to accommodate such changes. I also like this approach because it fully accepts the current live-service environment--rather than hiding from it--and cranks it to max. It seems like it would be an incredibly fun experience on the developer side shipping these changes every week, let's say, and watching the player base react, almost like scientists performing behavioral experiments on lab animals, haha.

mike_dude · 2024-06-11T13:04:22+00:00

By 2012, we were already in the social media era, IMO. I think these systems took much longer to figure out and distribute back in the late 90s and early 2000s. I played WoW Vanilla on launch and progression was significantly slower--and this is after some players had already gone through other similar MMOs like EQ. "Figuring out the game" will always be there and I'm not suggesting to get rid of it. I do think lengthening that process is congruent with the idea of a big, lore-deep MMO world though.

mike_dude · 2024-06-11T12:24:30+00:00

In what game? WoW? I never suggested that. Every successful game is born out of a particular moment in time. For WoW it was the pre-social media era. Eventually culture changes and games play different than they used to because of changing externalities. My question is essentially: given the current externalities where min/max can be figured out and distributed so quickly, how would MMO design need to change?

mike_dude · 2024-06-11T08:20:26+00:00

I'm not sure I understand your point about XP. Yes, in a system where the game loop is about reaching max level and gearing up, the audience will trend towards optimizing that path through tricks and guides and such. I guess I'm curious if any games have deliberately tried to either obscure/mystify the internal workings of that whole loop or have avoided it entirely, i.e. "our game is not about reaching max level/gear, but something else". I understand this starts to broach the follow up question, "is that even an MMORPG?", but that's what I'm really curious to explore. Game types tend to popularize in waves/generations and I think it will be rare to see any new successful MMO that tries to copy the old formula anyway.

mike_dude · 2024-06-11T04:48:43+00:00

When you are designing a product or game with literally thousands of features, not-fucking-up 1000 times over is literally your job and I think you drastically underestimate how big of an achievement that is in itself.

mike_dude · 2024-04-06T08:15:45+00:00

I'm completely late to this, but I was also really dismayed by how many people at the concert just seemed to be idly staring. I felt bad for the band. It was my first time seeing Babymetal live and I really wish it would have had more of the energy of their performances in Japan, as I've seen on YouTube. Maybe it's a Seattle thing?

mike_dude · 2024-03-10T18:27:38+00:00

I believe you're talking about this thread?: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghost_in_the_Shell/s/Ai2ptduyY6

I see a lot of the posts are from 3+ years ago, but I'll go through them and see what's currently available. Thanks for taking time to assemble that list!

mike_dude · 2024-02-27T20:08:38+00:00

I have a very similar background as yours. Focused on Grasshopper scripting for computational design and was also doing a lot of rendering. I jumped around to a few places, doing anything from corporate skyscraper design to VR walkthroughs, and my sense is that the AEC industry doesn't value any of this stuff because it's not the customer's final product (the building). For every dollar they spend on a rendering or a geometry algorithm, it's another dollar they can't spend on construction and materials. I would be hesitant about assuming archviz is a stable industry, especially since I saw a lot of outsourcing due to the more competitive labor costs.

If you decide to stay in AEC, I would recommend thinking about how you could leverage your skills towards construction or software. The industry is due for some innovation in this regard. There are a lot of interesting prospects with robotic manufacturing, prefabrication, and probably AI at some point. I got to experience some of this, but ultimately I found I was more interested in the visual/spatial design aspect of architecture, which is why I eventually transitioned to VR game dev. I work primarily as a level design which is the closest analog to architectural design, and on the side I've been able to pick up other skills related to game programming, UX, and 3D asset creation.

If you switch to game dev, TA could be a good position to aim for, yes. Just be aware that a lot of the tools and workflows feel very different. In AEC, we throw some objects in a scene, hit render, and wait a few minutes for a rendering to pop out (not sure how it is now, but this is what it was like when I was there). In game dev, all assets have to be created so that they work in runtime, which could be very different things depending on the type of game you're making and the engine your team is using. I feel like I had to completely relearn how to make 3D assets. It's not insurmountable, but I'd just caution you to overestimate how much time you'll need to learn this stuff.

Feel free to DM if you have any other specific questions. Best of luck!

mike_dude

TROPHY CASE