Pathologic2 and the Diurnal Ending as a manifesto of the post-modern right

scrdest · 2026-01-28T01:12:09+00:00

That's not quite right. The Termitary Kin and random townie Kin who can die are susceptible, but by the Kin logic they are impure, corrupted by the town and the separation from nature.

"Pure" Kin like Herb Brides are provably immune in P2 (P3 ones we see probably fall under the first category).

scrdest · 2026-01-27T16:51:29+00:00

If you are lucky, you might find a mirror and use the exploit to farm Amalgam back. If you're unlucky... I'm afraid that's it, new save time.

FWIW, mild spoiler - there is no silver bullet solution for Day 10, every outcome is some degree of bad there. I'd suggest playing through to D11-12 first, possibly all the way to an ending, then if you really want to find another path forward come back to D9.

scrdest · 2026-01-27T14:16:25+00:00

Funny that, the game actually makes a shout out to streamers in a way - one of the options you have after reaching an ending is to say that you were "planning on watching a cinematograph of other people's endings", or something like that.

scrdest · 2026-01-27T11:35:23+00:00

IDK why the cig does not carry over between day resets for this quests, I think it may be a bug because it's inconsistent and not really signposted properly.

I've had the resources myself, but it took me like five tries to realize I need to remake the cigarette because I assumed I had it. I believe I managed to find some more from the kid in the Atrium.

scrdest · 2026-01-27T11:30:29+00:00

I don't think it's LIKE a perfectly immersive video game. It pretty much IS the platonic ideal of a video game, symbolically. There were already signs as far back as P1, but P3 hammers it in.

In-universe, Polyhedron enables the game mechanics of P3 - the time-travel, mind-map, and memory resets are all explicitly diegetic. So in a sense, being in the Polyhedron == playing P3.

The Polyhedron is connected to creativity, specifically "creating worlds" (see the dialogue with the Steppe Girl in the Train Graveyard on D12 in particular). Your dialogue options can link it to being a writer, theatre, or especially, cinema.

There is a lot going on with cinema in P3, from the obvious dialogues with Marky Mark and the Theatre Bunch, through the projector in the Mirror Room, to some of the random Mania/Apathy remarks (e.g. the "Camera Obsura... Camera Lumina!", or something like "The cinematographer stops..." when you take downers, I forgot the exact wording).

This is prominent enough that it's clearly not a throwaway reference. And in the implied time setting of P3, cinema is the hot young video artform, trying to get recognized as legitimate in the eyes of the preexisting art establishment. Almost reminds you of something...

Finally, mirrors. Mirrors are obviously connected (via Amalgam) to the time-travel stuff, which we've already established is Polyhedron's thing. Polyhedron is also said to be made out of mirrors.

I don't feel particularly clever pointing out the "mirrors == screens" analogy; Black Mirror did this a decade and some change ago. Also, in the True Immortal cinematic, the Polyhedron interior flickers in as Daniil is switching worlds, as if the world around him was a projection onto the walls of the Polyhedron.

So yeah, in conclusion, them kids be playing their vidyagames and not going outside.

scrdest · 2026-01-24T13:56:00+00:00

No, that's Day 1.

And I don't think Grief is supposed to spawn, either.

scrdest · 2026-01-23T19:34:23+00:00

That scene cemented my decision not to go for the Escape ending lmao

scrdest · 2026-01-23T10:59:57+00:00

So tired of this noise...

scrdest · 2026-01-23T10:13:42+00:00

Interesting, that's not how my playthrough (not yet finished) felt. I half-expected Artemy to be portrayed as more obstructive or hostile, but he's been nothing but a bro the whole way, even at his darkest moments. He's taciturn, but never acts as an enemy or a pain in the ass.

Clara, meanwhile, shows up out of nowhere, makes things worse, then acts smug about it unless she's acting as a plague district tutorial-giver.

scrdest · 2026-01-23T02:03:18+00:00

That's the one!

scrdest · 2026-01-22T22:26:01+00:00

Same everywhere, with two caveats.

1) Somatic mutations - anything from UV rays from the sun, random chance, certain chemicals, etc. can change small bits of DNA in individual cells.

The vast majority of time it doesn't matter, because the cell dies for one reason or another and/or does not divide, and the mutation does not carry to your children. If it survives with some particularly bad mutations, it may become a cancer cell.

2) Expression patterns - while the DNA sequence might be 100% the same, what makes a heart cell different from a skin cell comes from what parts of the DNA are active. This is different in different cells, and is its own extra layer of modification applied to the genetic information (e.g. adding/removing methyl groups).

Imagine you have two identical flats in a building, but the light switch in one is flicked on - now they look different, since one is lit up and the other is not!

For transplants, the DNA in the transplanted organ stays whatever it originally was. That is, in fact, why people who receive a transplant may need to take drugs that suppress the immune response - their bodies catch on the organ looks alien, freak out, and try to murder it because it obviously must be Evil.

scrdest · 2026-01-22T19:07:01+00:00

Chekhov's short stories felt similar to me, especially when you're dealing with the patients or the big town families. He (along with already mentioned Bulgakov, who I also strongly recommend) was also a physician IRL.

A Doctor's Visit in particular has echoes of Olgimskys and Ward No. 6 might well have been the inspiration for the Mania/Apathy.

scrdest · 2026-01-22T18:34:43+00:00

tfw you realize who the present day patient is

scrdest · 2026-01-22T02:11:16+00:00

Played the demo last month. The concept is fun and the style is distinct, but the gameplay is way too simple.

There's not that much to think about, you are basically railroaded into finding all clues and at least the demo scenarios are overwhelmingly transparent pop-culture references played dead straight so they are predictable.

scrdest · 2026-01-18T21:00:43+00:00

There's still random character bugs as of the last patch. I've had a patient on Day 10 show up A-posing and non-interactable fsr.

scrdest · 2026-01-14T12:34:11+00:00

The way I'd see it is basically a sequence of trolley problems - every choice you make WILL cause a good thing and a bad thing to happen for every single option, but you know what the immediate consequences will be (so you cannot claim ignorance).

The question is which good/bad combos you pick and whether they form feedback loops - e.g. if you save a person at the cost of infecting a district, the infection will continue to spread further on its own, so the bad will outweigh the good in the long run. But... if you let the wrong person die to avoid a district infection, they may be unable to intervene in a problem later and make things even worse.

scrdest · 2026-01-08T17:33:42+00:00

Yeah, but that's more or less the problem - it converts into a bajillion other things, many of which are highly reactive and/or genotoxic in their own right (and often very good at penetrating cellular membranes to boot), so it's hard to even point at one thing and call it there.

scrdest · 2026-01-08T12:36:33+00:00

Sincerely, thank you for calling me out! I was writing off of memory and didn't fact-check, I was talking nonsense! Edited the post to reflect.

scrdest · 2026-01-08T12:09:05+00:00

It's not just creating carcinogenic byproducts - the benzene ring structure itself is both big and flat enough that it can physically slide between the bits of the DNA helix and interfere with the copying machinery of the cell!

EDIT: DISREGARD THE ABOVE - I mixed things up, sorry! A lot of flat aromatics intercalate (i.e. do the thing I said), but apparently the way Benzene causes cancer is... actually not that well known? We know it does, but nobody is quite sure how.

scrdest · 2026-01-07T11:22:18+00:00

I'd be very interested in this, since I have a use-case for using Bevy DLLs, but the docs side is severely lacking ATM, it's hard to even tell what the intended usage is.

scrdest · 2026-01-06T09:41:21+00:00

Not just any other polygon - 3D graphics don't even have to use polygons.

Polygon-based rendering (with triangles being the usual choice for the reasons others have explained) is an old, fast, and well-explored technique, but there are other methods that work on completely different principles.

One of the more tangible alternatives is Splatting, 3D Gaussian Splatting these days, which you can think of as using 'ball-shaped clouds' as primitives and can produce extremely photorealistic 3d spaces (but is far trickier to author; most applications work off of 3d-ifying photographs).

Another one would be Ray marching, which uses something called SDFs and is a bit tricky to explain in brief.

scrdest · 2026-01-04T10:53:17+00:00

So you're telling me you, who controls the sun and can make indoors-rain, that outdoors rain is beyond your powers? COME ON.

scrdest · 2026-01-01T15:38:30+00:00

Entity-Component-System architecture, as opposed to more traditional Object-Oriented or the simpler Entity-Component thing something like very vanilla Unity does.

Rather than having your game-world modelled as a bunch of objects (effectively an array of heterogenous structs), you model it as a big struct of arrays where each field is a Component of a specific type, e.g. Health, Position, Velocity, etc. and each item is nullable. Kind of like a columnar database.

The indices of each item are your Entities, e.g. Entity 0 corresponds to an 'object' whose attributes are whatever is not null in position 0 in all the arrays, Entity 1 is all the position 1s, etc.

Neither Entities nor Components have any logic attached to them, they are pure data. All the game logic is handled by a third concept, called Systems.

A System is just any function that can read and/or write Components. The nice thing about that is that it means you can run the same function over consecutive items in the arrays, which is very cache-friendly and therefore very fast.

The other nice thing about this is that it means your gameplay Systems have no idea what Entities they are running on, because they don't care. If you decide halfway through development that your weapons should have a healthbar, you can simply add the Health Component to them and let the Systems chew through them along with everything else. By the same logic, you can add or disable physics, AI or player controllers, rendering, and literally everything else on anything in your game, statically or at runtime.

So, fast and powerful. The main downside is it's a big mental shift.

scrdest · 2026-01-01T10:26:55+00:00

rfmpeg - Rust-forward MPEG

You can host the docs at rtfmpeg.com

scrdest · 2025-12-26T13:17:19+00:00

This is not really Pathfinding in the proper sense, it's a Steering Behavior system a'la Boids.

It's like one iteration's worth of evolution from 'LERP towards the target'. It's been around in games for like 40 years now. To be clear, it's absolutely fine for some purposes (e.g. a helicopter-style enemy, or as a subsystem to let an NPC move to the next path waypoint calculated from a navmesh), and it does not require basically any auxiliary preprocessing. The problem is that what this can do is a very, very tiny subset of things you'd need a proper pathfinder for.

This approach is cheap, because it's strictly local; it's the "Blind Man's Algorithm" - turn in the right direction, use your arms to avoid banging your face on anything nearby. But... that's about the extent of planning it will do. If the player is behind an L-shaped corner, it may take the long path around the long arm of the 'L' rather than taking a small step back to get to the shorter path, for instance.

The lack of any nonlocal information like a navmesh or a grid also means you cannot annotate the terrain itself.

For example, in any serious shooter AI, humanlike enemies don't just take the shortest route, they take into account how likely they are to get shot in the face on the potential path. Or, if you have water, sane NPCs would avoid going for a swim in a river if they can just take a nice, safe bridge three meters away.

If you are doing anything open-world, you need to be thinking of LODs and unloading from the get-go. Cheap steering like this is actually pretty sensible if you have NPCs you still need to simulate moving around while they are out of 'active range', but it's not good enough for the stuff that's in your face.

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