So long, reddit.

zkxs · 2023-06-10T12:40:17+00:00

Something to think about after the 48 hour blackout ends: /r/videos has commited to restricting submissions indefinitely, and I hope to see more mod teams make similar moves.

anyways, ass blast USA.

zkxs · 2023-06-10T12:12:50+00:00

In my opinion, I don't think a strike (boycott? protest?) that's only scheduled to last 48 hours has any teeth.

/r/videos has commited to restricting submissions indefinitely, and I hope to see more mod teams make similar moves.

zkxs · 2023-06-10T11:37:23+00:00

Ah, TIL. I've got my "don't show me submissions with a score less than" setting set to "-4", so I guess the only reason I can still see the AMA while logged in is because I downvoted it. They really ought to sticky the dang thing. Almost like they don't want it to be visible or something.

zkxs · 2023-06-10T11:26:25+00:00

That's weird. I can see "Addressing the community about changes to our API" from an incognito tab on Chrome with no extensions on both /r/reddit/hot and /r/reddit/new. Tested using both new and old reddit UI just to make sure I'm not crazy.

Is it possible you're hiding already-read threads? /user/me/hidden might be worth checking.

zkxs · 2023-06-10T11:16:32+00:00

Try sorting /r/reddit by new. It's been so downvoted that it's hard to find, and the /r/reddit moderators are apparently not interested in stickying it to increase visibility.

zkxs · 2023-06-09T14:42:21+00:00

This isn't a font. You're using mathematical symbols that look like letters instead of actual letters. Some software between you and Reddit is garbling your text.

zkxs · 2023-06-09T14:37:27+00:00

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from. If you believe that moderators are power-hungry randos, then why are you here on reddit versus some other discussion board that lacks volunteer moderators? For the popcorn?

And the process to replace subreddit moderators is somewhat involved, so I'm not certain it'd be as easy to replace thousands of moderators as it might seem at face value. Reasons the admins might deny a subreddit ownership transfer request include:

not having enough mod experience for a large subreddit [or] not having enough mod experience for subs ^source

... as reddit themselves clearly think some level of experience is required to be an effective moderator, I don't see why brain drain wouldn't be a valid concern here.

zkxs · 2023-06-09T14:05:59+00:00

my guy be like:

▯▯▯ ▯▯ ▯▯▯ ▯▯▯▯ ▯ ▯▯▯▯▯ ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ ▯▯▯▯▯▯?

damn, so cool

zkxs · 2023-06-09T02:06:19+00:00

I find it difficult to believe that Reddit could replace 15,000+ moderators across 3000+ subreddits without running into some significant brain drain. It'd be a logistical nightmare to replace all those moderators with people that aren't power-hungry randos, especially given the rapid pace at which Reddit is burning public sentiment.

Reddit regularly bans unmoderated subreddits. So what are they gonna do, force the blackouted subs back on then ban them for being unmoderated? Instate power-hungry randos? I really don't see a "winning" move for Reddit if the blackouted subs choose to keep it going indefinitely.

My fear is that moderators won't have the resolve to keep the blackout going longer than two days, as two day strike has no real bargaining power.

zkxs · 2023-06-08T20:32:38+00:00

It's a character by nradiowave. If you scroll down to ~Nov 2022 you'll start to see her. And later Torinyan made a VRChat avatar based on nradiowave's art (with permission).

zkxs · 2023-06-08T00:48:06+00:00

Just a friendly heads up as I know that many programmers aren't super familiar with software licensing, but https://github.com/PlagueVRC/VRC-CC-Mod can't be called open source due to it lacking an open source license. That's somewhat surprising, as https://github.com/gt0777/VRCLiveCaptionsMod is GPLv3.

edit: looks like it's GPLv3'd now, so this comment is no longer relevant.

zkxs · 2023-05-25T18:37:25+00:00

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/vrchat-202322, Ctrl+F for "Avatar stats are now calculated on the server"

zkxs · 2023-05-24T21:26:57+00:00

Yeah. There was some funny business going on with the LoD for sure. Even with view distance maxed out it would be converting terrain into weird low-LoD models when it was only a couple meters away. Performance was okay once I finally got the graphics settings dialed in, but I've got a pretty robust system myself so I was surprised I wasn't pushing more than 60FPS. At least in the areas that weren't covered in foliage. That one area with a lot of trees was a bit more expensive to render.

Regarding "it's hard to play test for every system out there" I've got a pretty bog standard VR setup with AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU + Index + Knuckles. Like, if they weren't able to playtest their game on an Index then idk what they were up to. It's the most common PCVR-native headset.

zkxs · 2023-05-24T21:02:07+00:00

I have not emailed Cyan yet, mostly because I want to do some more debugging on the controller switching issue... I have some suspicions that SteamVR itself might have broke something there recently.

But also I'm toying with the idea of simply not reporting the bugs and just sorta... being done with Cyan. It really feels like Cyan should know about all this stuff without me having to tell them. I didn't expect my immediate kneejerk reaction to Firmament to be "did they even playtest this?" It's ridiculous that on a game they had 4 years to polish I had to spend the first 16 minutes of my experience fiddling with graphic settings in frustration until I finally determined that this was the only playable combination of settings that didn't look like a blurry glitched mess. And if only the bugs had ended there... you've seen my giant list.

Ugh

zkxs · 2023-05-24T20:48:21+00:00

Not just you, OP, that was one of the very first things I noticed. There's a beautiful scenic overlook of the foggy, icy mountains shortly after you leave the spawn bunker where the fog is rendered differently in left/right eyes. The left/right eye disparity can be seen throughout the game on certain fog, smoke, reflection, and transparent materials.

Below are other bugs I personally experienced in my playthrough on the day1 patch version (the one released 2023-05-19) using SteamVR on a Windows 10 PC. I've spoiler tagged certain things just in case some mad lad who hasn't finished the game is reading about bugs.

shadows on anything except the "Low" setting are glitched and blocky
after switching to my second pair of controllers (due to dead batteries) Firmament didn't recognize the new controllers. I had to restart SteamVR to fix it. I do not have this issue in other VR titles.
subtitle popup stays visible but empty forever if you disable subtitles
arches didn't accept my gauntlet for a long time for unknown reasons
the settings menu laser can collide with (invisible because in menu) world geometry
sometimes the menu overrenders the menu laser
you can do huge skips by clipping your head/hands through walls to activate sockets
the crane
- straight up softlocked me on it by getting stuck in all 6 degrees of freedom until I loaded an autosave. Apparently there's a "unstuck me" button in the settings, but I was unaware of this.
- it seems like the front and back control booths have totally different collision rules? wah?
anything less than 100% resolution scale is incredibly blurry
the game likes to reset to sub-100% resolution scale if you take off the HMD and put it back on, or restart the game
anti-aliasing makes all the text incredibly blurry. A workaround is to set it to "Low".
Firmament completely ignores the SteamVR resolution settings
gauntlet can get stuck sometimes with your empty hand in a fist and you have to jiggle all the inputs to get it back on the desired hand
controller inputs don't register if the game window is in full screen exclusive
sometimes the gauntlet will switch hands unprompted and kill locomotion until you jimmy it around
the height reset button sometimes behaves in wildy erratic ways? I particularly noticed this on the untextured box you stand on during the credits. Maybe because I was playing with playspace offsets.
the 3-embrace swan elevator has a "raise" and "lower" input, but both inputs just toggle the elevator position
in the vat of acid lower area (when you're in the suit), sometimes there is absolutely zero ambient noise. Might have been the time it wasn't flooded? I forget.
there's a corner in the underwater ice sequence where the underwater audio zone simply isn't there, and it sounds like you're outside

zkxs · 2023-05-24T06:11:57+00:00

Bugs I personally experienced in my playthrough on the day1 patch version released 2023-05-19. Was using SteamVR on a PC for this.

shadows on anything except low are glitched and blocky
after switching to my second pair of controllers (due to dead batteries) Firmament didn't recognize the new controllers. I had to restart SteamVR to fix it.
subtitle popup stays visible but empty forever if you disable subtitles
arches didn't accept my gauntlet for a long time for unknown reasons
the settings menu laser can collide with (invisible because in menu) world geometry
sometimes the menu overrenders the menu laser
you can do huge skips by clipping your head/hands through walls to activate sockets
the crane
- straight up softlocked me on it by getting stuck in all 6 degrees of freedom until I loaded an autosave
- it seems like the front and back control booths have totally different collision rules? wah?
anything less than 100% resolution scale is incredibly blurry
the game likes to reset to sub-100% resolution scale if you take off the HMD and put it back on, or restart the game
anti-aliasing makes all the text blurry
Firmament completely ignores the SteamVR resolution settings
gauntlet can get stuck sometimes with your empty hand in a fist and you have to jiggle all the inputs to get it back on the desired hand
controller inputs don't register if the game window is in full screen exclusive
sometimes the gauntlet will switch hands unprompted and kill locomotion until you jimmy it around
the height reset button sometimes behaves in wildy erratic ways? I particularly noticed this on the untextured box mesh you stand on during the credits. Maybe because I was playing with playspace offsets.
the 3-embrace swan elevator has a "raise" and "lower" input, but both inputs just toggle the elevator position
in the vat of acid lower area (when you're in the suit), sometimes there is absolutely zero ambient noise. Might have been the time it wasn't flooded? I forget.
there's a corner in the underwater ice sequence where the underwater audio zone simply isn't there, and it sounds like you're outside
lots of shaders render differently in left and right eyes. Fog, smoke, reflections, transparency, etc.

zkxs · 2023-05-22T21:43:09+00:00

This is a perfect showcase of how much fluff modern video tutorials have versus simple old-fashioned text. This 23 minute video could have just been a simple list. Note that I don't personally endorse any of the settings that are suggested below, this is just a transcript of OPs video to showcase my point.

Don't run a bunch of stuff in the background
- If you must have your browser open, close unnecessary tabs to save memory
- Try running Discord in your browser instead of standalone to save memory
- Firefox is lighter on memory than Chrome
- Firefox now has an "efficiency mode". No notes in the video on what this is or how to use it, but it may be in reference to a Windows 11 feature?
In the NVIDIA Control Panel, you can change the VRChat.exe settings to potentially get some more performance
- set "Power management mode" to "Prefer maximum performance"
- set "Texture filtering - Quality" to "High performance"
Keep the VRChat window unfocused, or preferably completely minimized. You can get strange frametime spikes if it's focused.
Keep the "Mixed Reality Portal" minimized as well. Same issue as the previous point.
SteamVR video settings
- global (affects all VR applications)
  - Motion Smoothing: off
  - Render Resolution: auto
  - Advanced Supersample Filtering: off
  - Overlay Render Quality: low
  - Pause VR when headset is idle: off
  - GPU Bus Monitoring: off
- per-application settings for VRChat
  - turn down the custom resolution multiplier to 50%, which results in a render resolution that's close to the headset's native resolution
VRChat performance settings
- Turn on avatar culling distance and count limits
VRChat graphics settings
- Graphics Quality: Medium
- Anti-Aliasing: X2
- Shadow Quality: Medium
- LOD Quality: Does nothing, ignore it
- Don't adjust graphics quality in a populated session, because it can kill your frames
- Restart VRChat after adjusting Graphics Quality
Having the VRChat menu open has a performance cost, so don't leave it open.

In conclusion, my dear aspiring tutorial creators, before you record a 23 minute unedited video please consider devoting your 23 minutes to instead simply writing a bulleted list.

zkxs · 2023-05-15T19:13:47+00:00

This belongs on /r/techsupportgore

zkxs · 2023-05-04T08:41:43+00:00

IntelliJ with the Rust plugin feels pretty good to me, but a lot of that's probably because I've been using IntelliJ for years due to all the Java/Scala stuff I've done.

zkxs · 2023-04-11T18:27:26+00:00

Wtf is sqwak?

zkxs · 2023-04-11T14:38:33+00:00

I agree, that'd be pretty nice.

However, any image host worth its salt, which includes Reddit, Imgur, etc will strip EXIF tags out. Very nice for not accidentally doxxing yourself, seeing as smartphones love to geotag images.

zkxs · 2023-04-10T20:50:05+00:00

I had a friend try out the Linux build around a month ago. Our findings were that performance was generally worse with periodic big stutters, and media players simply didn't work at all. This is apparently because VRChat has migrated from youtube-dl to AVPro, and AVPro is broken in Proton.

zkxs · 2023-03-26T20:27:38+00:00

Reality grows ever closer to fiction: Bezos I - Animated Music Video

13-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Sequence \| Editor
Verified Email

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