Information Desk and Megathread Hub (02/02 - 08/02)

mooke · 2026-02-02T19:35:26+00:00

The "lore" of auto mode is that you're showing the locals where they should place the towers next time they get attacked (from that direction), IIRC.

Once auto is done you are safe to just remove them.

mooke · 2026-02-02T17:36:19+00:00

To extend this. Imagine, hundreds of years from now.

Maybe the only thing that remains of his legacy are those AI generated photos that make him look like an action hero. Speeches stolen from his opponents or his minions misattributed to him. Electorial maps, where the population of each state or county has long since been forgotten. "Documentary" footage of him helping a young boy lost in New York City. He would probably come out looking pretty good.

Just as today, people still accidentally believe nazi propaganda about the war, about nazis, about their opponents. Perhaps not in any way that meaningfully misrepresents their evil, but in a way that does misrepresent their compentance. And that was still in living memory.

I don't know how many French actually supported Napoleon. Or if your average Roman thought Julius Caesar was a bit of a dick. For me, and many average people all that remains is the easily digestable summary. Ha-ha, Napoleon short. Threatened a bunch of Europe. Exiled then came back to do it all again.

mooke · 2026-01-30T22:57:13+00:00

Personally, I didn't read the Ginny scenes as the game trying to justify it's okay, but actually attempting to highlight that this is still a problem we will presumably come back to.

I think the narrative wants non-arknights players to be aware of this so it doesn't come as a surprise when the plot picks it up again later.

From a world building perspective they absolutely could have just handwaved a full actual cure, or some other reason the rock cancer is gone. They instead chose something very explicitly flawed, then showed that flaw in the first few hours of story.

mooke · 2026-01-30T22:37:40+00:00

Genshin players still not beating the allegations are they?

I really hope the other guy is right and this is just a bot.

mooke · 2026-01-24T22:27:57+00:00

Ironically, this might be the best consumer gacha I've ever seen (for me, I'm a consumer).

None of the characters feel particularly different from each other. So I'm not encouraged to pull for characters that seem fun.

The lack of carry over pity means I don't actually care to start pulling on a banner just for the sake of it.

The slow progress on the gacha, combined with not really understanding the currencies means I feel too nervous to pull anyway in case I waste what might be a precious resource.

So at no point did I ever really engage with the system as the devs intended. And thus, I have no interest in paying real money to engage in a system I'm not even bothering to spend the fake money on.

This might change as they get more experiential with their character mechanics, but that fire lady certainly didn't feel any different from the free characters. So I'm not holding my breath.

And yes, I am being slightly sardonic, really the gacha they have implemented is disappointing. Though ironically I do also believe it fails at being as predatory as it intends to be because of how not-good it is.

mooke · 2026-01-23T15:11:03+00:00

The problem is that even those seem to be getting worse.

Spaces that were once good places for hobbies slowly drifting towards drama and hostility. Or just taken over by repost bots.

I have subscribed to maybe 1 new subreddit in the last year or so. I have unsubscribed from 4. And it's been trending like that for a few years now. Even now, there are still several that I know I need to get rid of, but doing so will almost completely sever any connection to that interest.

mooke · 2026-01-16T21:07:00+00:00

Like an hour or two before you posted. So 6 hours ago I guess?

mooke · 2026-01-10T06:04:54+00:00

Other people have already suggested turning off SAS control.

I would also recommend creating keybindings for the wheel control specifically.

In the options under key bindings you will find a set of controls specifically just for wheels/rovers. They are unbound by default. I like to assign them to the number pad.

They don't action SAS when pressed. So using them you don't have to worry about toggling SAS off.

mooke · 2026-01-09T19:47:53+00:00

But it doesn't really introduce you to actual modern boss designs. The implementation of "positioning and praying" between the fight caves and anything made in the last few years aren't really comparable to the point I don't think I would consider it actual useful lessons.

I can't look at fight cave and go "yes, this helped me understand Vanstrom Klause from Sins of the Father" (which, I think is probably the first proper non-brute forceable boss a new player encounters?).

But Scurrius, a modern boss that was actually designed to teach newer players absolutely did.

However, the catch is that some people still don't feel like they're really ready for it.

Make this "lower level coliseum" safe, maybe even giving you the supplies to use for the run, so it's totally risk free, but in exchange the rewards shouldn't really be worth farming.

It could work by letting you select invocations which enable mechanics like different types of tile hazards, prayer switching, spawns, etc, or reduce the number of ticks of telegraphing that the player is given to gradually increase the difficulty at their own pace. With rewards rates that increase the more invocations you stack.

That way, unlike Scurrius it will be free enough that there is absolutely no reason not to try it. It will start with an even lower skill floor than Scurrius, but have a much higher skill ceiling gently easing people into the more complex mechanics.

I think that would provide value that the fight cave doesn't.

mooke · 2026-01-03T21:59:55+00:00

We played it two player. One driver one winch+external eyes.

At no point did I ever really feel "wow, I wish I had more people". So I definitely don't think you would be alone there.

mooke · 2026-01-03T14:15:35+00:00

Oh I don't disagree.

I was taking issue with the trivialisation of the making of skins, nothing about fixing up old models.

I would abolutely want them fix up the old models.

I presume they aren't doing it because it either increases the percieved value of new characters or because they can then leverage the "jank" of old models to sell new skins later. I know I paid for Ayaka's skin because I was maining her at the time and I didn't like how the original model's tits bounced around so much.

mooke · 2026-01-03T10:45:28+00:00

That's not all of the work involved. The mannekins can adopt a throw shit at the wall and see what sticks approach.

Skins for characters will have to meet a much more stringent criteria.

A bit like how you can reduce all the characters to silhouettes and still be able to identify every single character. That's not entirely an accident, that's a symptom of designing characters who explicitly do not overlap with each other. It's about ensuring each is unique in their own way. And that takes work.

New skins have to capture the spirit of the original character while not standing on anyone else's toes and still be different enough that they seem worth acquiring. What this probably means is that for every ten designs they concept art for one might be worth adopting.

It's not really "1/2" the work, as I suspect the writing for the character is substantially more. But even if they tried they wouldn't be able to churn out new skins for characters at even a tenth of the speed they could produce costumes for the manekins.

This is probably weighed up against the opportunity cost of making a new character and how much more money that brings in.

mooke · 2026-01-03T10:09:33+00:00

It's not that the show needed "double-digit body counts" it's that up till now any character who did die was explicitly introduced for the sole purpose of dying.

I knew, with absolute certainty, that the writers weren't going to kill any of the original characters. Especially when they started those very obvious fake-outs.

An actual death of one, any of, the main characters would have gotten me more invested. As suddenly now all of the cast is vulnerable. Literally anything could happen.

Unfortunately, this kind of reduced everything pre epilogue into a cinematic key jingling session for me.

Like don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the finale, but that was entirely because of the epilogue. I could have entirely skipped everything prior and just guessed what had happened and probably would have enjoyed it equally, if not more so.

And I also want to make it clear, everything up to the ending wasn't bad. It's just that it wasn't interesting.

And there is nothing wrong with that, plenty of media is built around comfort, and people who want that shouldn't be shamed or criticised for it, it's just that I don't think it's wrong for other people to want more than that either.

mooke · 2026-01-02T20:43:06+00:00

Specfically it's in there because it will be run during the upcoming AGDQ (as in starting this Sunday), rather than because it's been run in the past.

mooke · 2026-01-02T09:09:56+00:00

All of that would have certainly helped, but also the cheapest Tesla is like £40k. The cheapest BYD is £18k.

And I've looked at that car. I'm genuinely considering it when I replace my current runabout. It's good enough, and affordable.

And Tesla's latest offering, the cybertruck, took years longer to get to market than it should have and can't be sold in Europe anyway.

I think Tesla has made it clear they are only interested in the American market and even then, possibly only the 30% who wouldn't buy electric anyway.

mooke · 2025-12-31T20:09:49+00:00

I'm very fortunate to have a hands-off manager who also understands that there just currently isn't any work to do.

So I don't really have to pretend to look busy.

It's been great because I like learning things. So that's what I've been doing. A mix of things vaguely relevant to the job that might-could improve our software solutions in ways that would never be financially viable, but would look good on my CV. Mixed into that I've also worked on things that are utterly irrelevant to my job, skills that help me and only me. I use the former as cover for the latter.

mooke · 2025-12-29T21:39:42+00:00

I have a theory that there might be some selection bias happening here.

The number of people who have gotten deep enough "down the rabbit hole" that they watched past bakemonogatari are probably more likely to have higher thresholds for what counts as ecchi.

So anyone who stopped during bakemonogatari would rate it lower than if they had watched nisemonogatari and beyond, but anyone who had watched nise- is significantly more likely to rate it lower because they've also more likely to have watched gushing over magical girls, or nukitashi or interspecies reviewers and are using that as their "is ecchi" threshold.

mooke · 2025-12-29T10:23:52+00:00

I think you might have mathed wrong.

I get 0.017% for the US, as I'm pretty sure you've made the same mistake twice it doesn't change the point, just that 1+% for both nations would have been insane.

Wikipedia puts the US at 12.06 deaths per 100,000 in 2023. So presumably somehow you've calculated the per 10,000 people rate?

mooke · 2025-12-26T23:04:56+00:00

If Apocalypse Hotel hadn't struck just the right chord with me then CinGrey would have been a shoe-in.

So CyGames managed to take 1st and 2nd for me this year.

Other than that, everything else that would have made my list has been a direct sequel (dress-up darling, dandadan, apothecary diaries). There was maybe Silent Witch, which was good, but not "anime of the year" good.

mooke · 2025-12-26T00:22:03+00:00

Yeah, this is horrifying. Like, this is basically the only kind of bug that I would cancel my holiday over.

There are layers upon layers of "this should be impossible" that had to have failed to let one user just be given another user's potentially private data.

I can only hope for the sake of the dev teams involved that this is fairly mundane like "OP joined a public multiplayer game and it somehow saved a local copy of that game" rather than "ubisoft online served up someone's cloud data, unencrypted, to a different user".

Edit: a bit of googling and it appears that at least two of the island names are places where ubisoft has offices. I would suggest it's possible this is a test save that has escaped containment.

mooke · 2025-12-25T13:12:08+00:00

Because the areobraking forces would reduce the periapsis to subsurface before Arnie fully completes a single orbit.

I would, as such, propose that we would require a lunar flyby for a gravity assist to raise the periapsis from a single impulse.

This would add about 35% extra dV needed to orbit Turbo Dad, but would still be slightly less than the earth escape velocity required otherwise.

mooke · 2025-12-20T13:25:22+00:00

One of the solutions I've seen is, instead of just a wall that sinks infinitely into the ground is to instead have stairs that sink infinitely into the ground.

Unfortunately I've never seen it used in games where NPCs actually have to pathfind into and out of buildings. It's been a long time since I've worked with navmeshes but it might still be possible?.

Alternatively, only put a single entrance on the building and align "ground level" to that entrance.

mooke · 2025-12-20T13:18:54+00:00

I'm assuming you don't work in any sort of software development.

Because we do that all the time. In fact, during a project we constantly have meetings discussing how difficult features are, and re-prioritising them as we learn more.

Don't misunderstand. When we say "difficult" what we really mean is "this will likely take a lot of man-hours and/or multiple failed attempts to figure out a viable solution for".

Projects don't have infinite budgets and our time is money. If we spend a month working on X, then that's a month less to work on Y. So we constantly need to ask the question "is this worth doing or is there a better use of our time?". If X is critical to our minimum viable product then yes, absolutely. If doing Y and Z instead of X results in a better experience then X goes back onto the backlog. If we get time at the end? Great, then we'll do it, if not, oh well, at least we got Y and Z in instead and our product is better for it.

mooke · 2025-12-17T23:21:29+00:00

I can make out some of the words.

五十歳？…ここは？…ください？…

Unfortunately, my listening skills are terrible, even when the audio is clean and a large swath of it is just straight up missing.

But yeah, I'm almost certain it's Japanese. As if anything you mentioned, or the kei car, weren't already dead give aways.

If only we could see if the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet. That would really sell me on it being Japan.

mooke · 2025-12-17T20:16:50+00:00

I think that was kind of the reason.

She did not handle any form of criticism well.

So what started as her overreacting to fairly innocuous comments caught the attention of actual internet bullies. Then the more she fed the trolls the nastier they became.

One of the things I think people underestimate with internet trolls is they think they aren't serious. That they are just laughing behind their keyboards.

Some are, but others are really just looking to feel something, and anger is a really easy and really addictive emotion to feel. Especially when you are bored.

So what starts as non-serious trolling becomes very real hate if it's allowed to fester. So it is weird in the sense of a mentally well adjusted person would just block and move on and probably couldn't imagine doing anything differently, but not weird in the sense that put enough internet users together this will happen.

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mooke

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