#god the new UI is so bad | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cruelfeline · 1 year

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So, for all of y'all who aren't familiar with Dwarf Fortress, I'm going to explain why it's such a phenomenal game.

Dwarf Fortress is a colony simulator that's been developed by two brothers since 2003. A few weeks ago, it finally released on Steam with a UI that even i can understand. It is the grandfather of things like Rimworld and Minecraft.

So what makes it different from all of the other games in the genre? What makes it different is that it simulates a world beyond your colony. A world with gods, monsters, civilizations... a whole history outside of your colony. A real, living world for you to play in.

I can better explain this by showing y'all what happened to my latest fortress. The one that experienced Wereanteater Armageddon.

My dwarves were having a nice time. I'd just figured out how to build instruments and was outfitting the new tavern properly when-

Surprise! Wereanteater.

Said wereanteater eventually turned back into a goblin and ran off-map, but not before infecting some of my dwarves. Which led to... well...

Absolute massacres every month. With more wereanteaters each time. Which eventually led to...

One lone dwarf, haunted by the ghost of one of the many slain, sitting next to the werecorpse of his last companion. They'd fought to the death the moment they'd last transformed, and he was the survivor. But, of course, he couldn't move.

So! That was that. Fortress destroyed, time to move on. I abandoned the fortress and decided to start anew.

But! Where did our wereanteater come from? What was his story?

In Dwarf Fortress, everything has a story.

So before starting a new fortress, I went ahead and checked the Legends mode: the mode that has the whole history of everyone and everything written out for the player to read.

First, I found my fortress' record, and I scanned down to where the deaths began.

There we go... the attack started with a goblin named Azstrog Terrorhymed. Who is that? Why does he turn into a monstrous anteater?

Here he is, in his entry, biting my dwarf. And... actually beating her to death with Sensedterror Explained, which another entry says is a book he wrote. About some sort of horror-pit he had a nightmare about. Huh.

And looking further back, we can see that, about twenty five years before he came to my fortress, he profaned the Abbey of Shafts in a settlement called Gearedopened. Possibly due to having some bad experiences with gambling and false friendships. This resulted in someone called Ngalak cursing him to become a wereanteater every full moon. And who is Ngalak?

Ngalak is apparently a dwarven god associated with caverns and mountains. And also:

Azstrog wasn't the only creature he's cursed with wereform for profanity! There are at least two others potentially running around. So that's... comforting.

And as for Azstrog? His entry says that he settled in the Fair Mines after dooming my fortress. Checking that entry, we find it to be a lair. A lair that now contains a wereanteater. A wereanteater who was once a goblin who seemed down on his luck and, in a moment of forgetting himself, ended up the object of divine wrath. Which in turn led to the violent deaths of about fifty dwarves in the fortress of Knowring twenty five years later!

This is why Dwarf Fortress is so amazing! There are plenty of games that will introduce an obstacle for your characters to face, but how many will ensure that that obstacle had a whole life of his own prior to ever meeting you?

On second thought, I think I'll reclaim Knowring, rather than starting a new fortress. And I'll bury its many dead, take over its workshops, and see if I can find the Fair Mines.

See if I can find Azstrog Terrorhymed again. See if he's still alive, or if he's met his end one way or another.

But first: time to build dozens of tombs!

#dwarf fortress #cf plays df

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neon-zipperooni · 5 months

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who let discord cook on this new ui i want the old one back this one messes with my muscle memory so bad and it is actively less convenient like

the member list is way out of the way instead of being a simple swipe to the right, now swiping to the right triggers a reply on the message you swiped over instead

search tool is missing several results and no longer lets you go through pages you have to scroll down which makes finding stuff harder especially if it’s not recent

why is the invite members button right below the search that makes me anxious abt accidentally inviting someone to a server that’s supposed to be private or something

something something DM list and server list didn’t need to be in separate tabs

okay two good things uhh I like how voice calls look and being able to search for members is handy

but oh my god everything else is so much less convenient and it wasn’t needed

#discord #discord ui #why is it like this #discord mobile

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kerubimcrepin · 2 months

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What do we know about Joris le Sans-Pouvoir (Joris the Powerless)?

Aka, addressing the "cancelled Nintendo DS game"-shaped elephant in the room.

While this blog has gone deep into the show and character dissections, I think it would be remiss to proceed without addressing the elephant in the room — the game, the myth, the legend, the 2007-2009ish cancelled game Joris le Sans-Pouvoir.

There isn't a lot that is known about it, and all the data in this post comes from two developers.

The only videos of it we have available are uhhh......,

...Please say "Thanks Ronik!" for this video in particular.

I spent hours trying to convert these two SWF animation video files, — which demonstrate how the game was supposed to look, — to something actually viewable. There were many issues, with at least seven different programs.

I suffered for crepinjurgenology studies, but I did it.

Instead of recounting the story in my own words and omitting anything on accident, I will simply present to you, what the portfolios of two different developers say (these two pages are the source of all the images, gifs, and gameplay):

Joris Le sans-Pouvoir is the main character from a feature film Ankama due in 2013. It’s a new character IP situated in the DOFUS universe. I had the chance to work on a platform game prototype that was all about delving into of the character’s backstory. We wrote a lot of background and had a lot of fun designing and developping a cute and quirky platformer with a hint of metroidvania elements and a dash of Grow gameplay elements in-between levels. It also was a great opportunity to work with Jono Takeshi-san of Radiata Stories fame who worked with me on the art direction. (SOURCE)

Joris was the first Nintendo DS project developed at Ankama (in partnership with Magic Pockets). I began working on the project as narrative game designer, then took on the role of Lead Designer and Project Manager. Game design on this project involved boss fight, level design, minigame design, UI… I also designed an original collecting system where collectible items were used in a minigame inspired by the “Grow” series. The developpement has been put on hold to match the release of the animated movie with the same character (scheduled in 2013). (SOURCE)

Neither the movie nor the game, survived their development, due to circumstances. (shorthand for: I have no idea what happened, man. Maybe one day I'll write a post about the history of the movie, and truly open that can of worms, but god, not right now. I don't want to spend more time on this.)

Eventually, The Wakfu film turned into three OVAs instead, and the Dofus film changed its plot a bunch of times, and became Livre 1 : Julith.

...For some reason, in some version of it, Joris had a tail. Yeah, I don't know what that's about either. Cool clothes, though!

We don't know anything about its plot, and unlike cancelled projects Dofus Donjons and Welsh et Shedar (which was cancelled for years, until its recent resurrection), the lore of this game carries no relevancy in modern canon.

The name, Joris the Powerless, as well as the log-centric gameplay, both seem to reference the early concept that Joris had log-based powers, — and that without his "magic wand," he couldn't do much.

(Joris and his weird fucking "magic wand" were, in turn, borne out of the idea of a warrior who had a woman's voice. Which makes me chuckle.)

(The following quotes are machine-translated and may contain errors)

(SOURCE)

This is, by the way, the reason why I personally headcanon Joris to be really bad at huppermagic. So bad that he dropped out of the Huppermage Academy, and almost never uses magic in combat. It's a homage to his original idea.

(Yes, there is an actual reason why I headcanon Joris to be godawful at magic, besides just projecting my neurodivergencies onto him.)

I suppose that, even at this time, Joris was meant to be a store owner:

The gameplay loop involves going from boutique, to missions, and so on, while those two pieces of concept art involve the said boutique section, and show a female character saying «Pas mal, boss !».

In my opinion, it might be this character. Proto-Simone, perhaps?

Since the store seems to be the centerpiece, and the Grow-style minigames involved collectibles, I would assume that the plot involved Joris going around and finding artifacts for the store. That would also explain the concept art gifs of him adventuring.

(Though, the adventuring would probably just be the inciting incident/a vehicle for plot development. Nintendo DS games loved using the jobs characters did for that purpose.)

This is the extent of what I can surmise about the plot.

The developer portfolios also included these example documents, but the image quality is too bad for me to make sense of or upscale. I am including them here solely for some French people who are very good at reading blurry text. (If you learn anything, let me know, okay?)

Overall, my verdict is that this game's cancellation was both a blessing (Joris without Kerubim and Atcham is like tea without water and a cup. How am I meant to drink leaves? Are you stupid? Why are you giving me leaves with nothing?) and a curse (THEY CANCELLED A GAME ABOUT MY BLUE-COLORED YOINKY SPLOINKY (who has a THIN, GRABBABLE WAIST)????? FUCK!)

Hope this was a fun read!

#ro liveblogs dofus #joris jurgen #wakfu #dofus #dsgame #<this one is for my pinned organization post's sake #anyway this post has fucked me. and my wife. and i don't even have a wife. my spine hurts my eyes hurt my hands hurt.#i want to do unspeakable things to that blue little man for what he put me through during the writing of this post.#please dont ask me to write about the other nintendo ds games ankama cancelled. they don't have joris so i don't care

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gender-trash · 10 months

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dunno how much i've blogged abt my eye problems here but they've been getting worse lately -- the most life-impacting effect is that i can't safely drive, like, at all, because i am seeing double so bad i cannot see the god damned lane markings or tell how far away from me other cars are, but the most *irritating* is that i can barely read light-text-on-dark-background. because it makes the double vision worse. i can strain to read it briefly, but it gives me a headache to do it for too long. and i don't know if you've been on the internet in the past -- oh, i don't know -- fourish years? but at some point everyone decided dark themes were GREAT and """reduce eyestrain""" (LOL. LMAO EVEN) and if you don't use a dark theme you're some kind of n00b scrub.

which, like, i have enough self-confidence at this point that i don't actually care much if someone thinks i'm a n00b, but it gets more irritating when designers of ux interface stuff just fucking decide that, well, THEY like dark themes and goddamn it so will everyone else. at work we have a custom CLI for starting/stopping/reconfiguring deployments of code onto robots, and it's a wrapper around docker-compose, except the docker-compose ui colors presuppose a dark theme and there's this fucking light gray that's almost invisible in my beloved solarized light terminal colorscheme, and there's some, like. environment variable that you in theory can set to modify the colors but it doesn't work (possibly because of the custom CLI wrapper?) so i've resigned myself to just not being able to read the light gray docker compose output. i slacked someone in infra abt this and he MORALIZED AT ME ABOUT HOW DARK THEMES ARE BETTER and then just pointed me back at the environment variable and i was like "thanks! ^_^" because what else am i going to fucking do

or, more recently, the UI team updated our [thing] editor tool to use a new code editor that supports autocomplete! yay! except that for whatever reason they decided to make the default theme light-blue-on-dark-blue with like a 9pt font. in lieu of ripping out chris's throat with my teeth (which would have been difficult because he lives in canada) i just thought about it really hard and then, grumpily, made myself a custom build of the [thing] editor that uses solarized light + 14pt font size. but i swear to fuck the NEXT time i am forced by my employer to use some kind of tool that i need to hack or work around to be able TO FUCKING SEE IT i am going to start biting

:) (<- vibrating with barely-suppressed rage)

#disabilityblogging #jorb #the trashcan speaks

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twilightknight17 · 2 months

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Today on P3R

LOOK AT HIM

LOOK AT HIS BOXING GLOVES, OMG, I DIDN’T REALIZE THEY’D BE LITERAL JACKS.

Also we take exams I guess.

Turns out Ikutsuki is not going to help me study alone, he’s going to wrangle everyone into one big study group. Dunno how effective the studying is when he and Junpei get into a pun-off, but whatever. It’s nice to have everyone together and not fighting.

...This is on my exam? For real? This school, man…

Once exams are over, we make plans to go do something fun. While Yukari leaves to get Fuuka, Junpei and I have a little chat.

I love that you can play Minato as a completely oblivious airhead. But I do not.

On our way outside, Ikutsuki introduces us to our new dorm-mate, Ken, who will be staying with us over the summer. He has potential, so he might be a good candidate for joining SEES!

...Ikutsuki, recruiting teenagers with attitude is one thing, but you’re crossing the line towards “child soldiers”, my guy. I know Wild Cards have awakened at age 7, but they didn’t actually have to do stuff til they were 16 or 17!

He’s gonna be staying in the dorm, so we’re not allowed to mention shadows or fighting or whatever in front of him. Even though Ikutsuki just mentioned “the potential” in front of him. Akihiko also looked really uncomfortable around him, and it’s clear he knows Ken somehow, so… Yeah.

Ikutsuki sends me off to the antique shop that’s now open, because the antique shop can help me. The same way the police officer helps, apparently.

This lady runs the weapon fusion menu, and also where I can exchange all my gemstones I’ve been getting. She knows Officer Kurosawa, and ALSO explicitly knows about shadows?? What has Ikutsuki told you, ma’am? Were you involved ten years ago? Do you know about Tarta--

Oh I want that megidolaon skill card so bad. God. Don’t show me that when I know I won’t be able to afford it for ages.

Anyway, we are off to Yakushima, and Mitsuru’s vacation home is enormous. I wish we got to actually run around in it, but what we do see is pretty nice.

(Wait, wasn’t Ken moving in? Did we just leave him at the dorm alone??)

Mitsuru I didn’t realize your dad was Big Bos-- *shot*

Junpei wants to go to the beach right away, so we put our stuff in our rooms and book it down there. It’s gorgeous.

...

...Akihiko, uh…

Thank you, Junpei.

Akihiko doesn’t get it. He just wore them because they’re “better” for swimming. Because of course he’s gonna train on vacation. *sigh*

Why is Mitsuru so pretty I’m gonna die

Yakushima really is beautiful and I’m kinda sad I couldn’t cut off the UI for a minute.

Elizabeth asked me to bring her back something from the beach. I found a pretty shell, some driftwood, a piece of weird seaweed, and…

...she will LOVE this crab. I have to.

Mitsuru talks to her dad, and I have made an exciting discovery: A living, onscreen parent who does not suck!

He wants her to open up to others more and work together, because…

That’s a pretty good motto, actually. It would help if people playing this game knew what the Nanjo Group was. And despite being in green, meaning it has a definition in the glossary, the glossary just explains the motto again. X’D

The Nanjo Group is where the Kirijo Group got all it’s psience tech from, because they bought out SEBEC after Kandori tried to become god back in 1996. SEBEC had the original prototypes for anti-shadow suppression weapons, and PROBABLY also the teleporter technology from the DEVA System. I think I mentioned before that I think that’s what the teleporters in Tartarus are based on.

Plus, the Nanjo family is all about being Number One, so “two in harmony” is a pretty good shot at them. And that’s definitely lost if you don’t know anything about them. X’’’D

Mr. Kirijo gathers everyone together, because he’s going to tell us the truth. And the truth is, his father was trying to create a time manipulation machine. So it makes sense that their research fucked up time so badly that there’s an extra hour of the day now. But apparently, that attempt to create time manipulation warped into something worse over the course of the project, and Yukari’s dad caused the explosion to stop him.

Yukari is completely freaked out by this realization, because she’d always maintained that the accident wasn’t her dad’s fault. So hearing that he caused it on purpose sends her reeling, and she runs off. Minato follows her to the beach to talk, and it’s a good conversation, actually.

Thanks, it’s the trauma. ^_^

Thank you, P3R, for actually letting me hug people when they’re upset. Looking at you, P5, as Futaba and Sumi just cry in front of me and I can’t do anything.

The next day, the girls are on an awkward nature hike (because Mitsuru and Yukari aren’t speaking), when they get a call from Ikutsuki.

“Vehicle”????

There’s a lab on this island?

Sir you have one job how are you so bad at it??

The boys, meanwhile, are once again at the beach for Operation Ba--

Oh. Are we not calling it Operation Babe Watch? Okay.

It’s playing the Tartarus music. I’m trying to lead my team into the ocean and it’s not working.

We manage nothing but failure all the way across the beach. We’ve got girls who aren’t interested, girls who are pissy that high-schoolers are at the island resort (who then get even more pissy when they find out we’re at a friend’s summer home, because THEY had to save up to come here), girls who humor us for like ten minutes before revealing they have boyfriends…

And then one last lady, who has been observing, and reads us all to absolute filth about how our tactics are all wrong.

She might be interested, though. And she wants us to help put on sunscreen!

...300K yen-a-bottle sunscreen.

To protect from artificial sun rays…

Because…

Time for a tactical retreat. Thank god the last girl on the beach is so pretty.

She doesn’t want to talk to anyone, though. Except Minato. And runs off when the others approach. They seem to think she ran away because I said something to her, and want me to follow her and apologize. Which, guys, I don’t think chasing girls you don’t know into the woods is the right answer here, but okay. Here we go.

There’s a waterfall up here and I can’t go near it. :(

...believe me, Yukari, I have no idea what’s happening either.

Apparently this is the “vehicle” Ikutsuki lost.

I’m okay with bringing her home with us. XD

Speaking of home, back at home, Shinji is trading information with those three weirdo assassins in exchange for some kind of pills, which can’t be a good sign because he looks like he’s in actual pain. Weirdo Squad is angry that we want to destroy the Dark Hour because they like having special powers.

They also call Tartarus the “Tower of Demise”, though, so like obviously they realize this is a bad thing.

After we get back from Yakushima, Aigis tries to stay in my room, including waking me up five minutes before my alarm. Which. No. You cannot stay in here. Oh god. My new robot has separation anxiety.

My social links may not be deals for things that can help in battle, but they do make me feel warm and fuzzy.

I go out with Akihiko again because he still owes me food for last time, and we get accosted by the punks from before, who have returned with an even bigger group, because apparently the best way to win is by fighting a guy eight-on-one. Are you proud of yourself, dude? Does that make you feel cool?

We didn’t actually fight because we distracted them long enough to get out of there, so no police this time. But I did learn that Akihiko does have parents! He has foster parents that love him and send him enough expensive snacks to share with the whole dorm. It’s nice. ^_^

My online friend in my MMO is definitely a teacher at my school, based on her complaining about "Mr. E". Which, you and me both lady. Dude thinks he's a wizard or something.

Speaking of Mr. Edogawa, he mentioned Carl Jung in class! While talking about alchemists, because school is still insane. Literally we’re going on summer break tomorrow, give it a rest.

Which I guess is why Ken hadn’t moved in yet, but… Did we miss like a week of school while we were in Yakushima? Hot damn.

Ken is officially moved in now, though, and despite not being able to discuss shadows or the Dark Hour around him, he apparently knows Aigis is a robot. So… Uh… How secretive are we supposed to be being?

And it FINALLY let me go back to Tartarus and check out the new area, which is very industrial. It’s cool. Very different vibe from the big faces. I actually like it.

New portal doors that lead to Grand Clocks now have a chance to show up, so I can boost teammates’ levels to match Minato’s? Which is interesting. And more importantly, new “Monad” doors are appearing that lead to stronger fights.

Calling it Monad makes me a little weirded out, but hey, it's not a mandala and there’s good treasure in here. So we’re probably going in headfirst every time they show up. XDD

Saved back at the Tartarus entrance, so next time is probably just going to be some more fighting. We’ll see. ^_^

#Li plays P3Re

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fox-flux · 10 months

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the item-to-UI spiral

i just recently touched up this animation (sorry for the dropped frames):

[EDIT OH MY GOD LOL NO ONE TOLD ME IT WASN'T ANIMATING, IT'S THE WHOLE POINT!! OF THE POST!!]

and i wrote about how it works on cohost so i'm crossposting here and hoping tumblr doesn't chew my markdown up too badly!

now, i admit upfront: i did zero research on this. maybe there is a cool clever way to do a parametric spiral that isn't this. my suspicion is that any "simpler" alternative would be a trip through the polar plane and involve a bunch of trig, and we're game developers here, so we do everything with vectors god dammit

the problem

here is what i decided i want from the beginning:

when you pick up the key (or a handful of other items, but mainly the key), it animates moving smoothly into the UI.

the motion should not be a straight line, because that's boring.

the ideal seems to be a sort of spiral around and outwards from the player, which ⓐ feels like a congratulatory motion of "sparkly thing swirling around you" and ⓑ would still roughly end in a straight shot towards the final position in the UI, which is good as a dramatic finish to a motion.

(i'm pretty sure i did not know that i wanted a spiral from the beginning; it sort of emerged as an obvious thing to try. i first added this ages ago though so i'm not completely sure)

so how do we do a spiral if we don't want to use trig? my answer was to make this bad boy parametric. you know, that thing where you have x(t) and y(t) separately, and t is a hidden time variable. but i don't want to control x and y here; that would make everything radically different depending on where the key starts. so i went for a different coordinate system:

the original position of the key is the origin, and the final resting place in the UI is the point (0, 1). (note that as part of the UI, the animation happens in screen space, not world space; i immediately subtract the key's position from the camera offset and only work in screen coordinates from then on.)

to avoid confusion with screen or world coordinates, let's call these new axes u and v, where u is the perpendicular axis and v is the orthogonal axis (the one pointing towards the destination). though it doesn't really matter which is which since i'm about to treat them separately.

converting from uv back to screen coordinates is easy; one unit of v is the original delta vector, dest - source. one unit of u is a vector perpendicular to that, which is trivial to compute (swap the coordinates and negate one of them). so screen coordinates are

u * delta:perpendicular() + v * delta

[seriously? there's no, just, regular monospace text styling? —ed]

which is like no effort at all. so now i can think in terms of u and v and not even worry about the screen, or the distance, or anything except the shape of the animation! that's great. and now i'm in a good place to split this messy 2D problem into two 1D problems.

the orthogonal axis

first i want to think about the key's movement directly towards the UI. as an Artist™, i have a tenuous grasp of a few wisps of animation basics, so my instinct is to make this feel real good by adding a little anticipation. that means a "wind-up", where the key actually starts out moving away from the UI. i think this adds emphasis because ⓐ "backwards to forwards" is a more dramatic change than "still to forwards" and ⓑ backing up first means the important part of the motion now covers a greater distance. (the forwards motion also now has to be faster to cover the distance in the same amount of time, which feels more dramatic.)

so how do i do that? i am but a simple fox, and this is a platformer, so there can only be one answer for me: a parabola. essentially it's like the key is doing a jump off of a cliff and landing on the ground below. except, you know, upwards.

i don't need to model this like physics, though; i already know a lot about the parabola i want, so i can jump directly to expressing it as a function, v(t) = at² + bt + c.

i know that at time t = 0, the key is at its starting position, i.e., 0. so v(0) = 0, which swiftly implies that c = 0.

i don't know how long the animation should be yet, but i might want to change that later anyway. so i'll just say the key reaches its endpoint at t = 1 and scale it later if i want to. that means v(1) = 1 (remember, the destination is 1 unit away, because i decided it is), so a + b = 1. i don't want to plug that in quite yet because it makes the function slightly messier, but i'll keep it in mind; as soon as i know what either a or b actually is, i can find the other very easily.

that's already taken care of two of my coefficients. what about the third? i don't have a third constraint, so it can be whatever i want. but a and b don't directly correspond to any obvious property of the behavior here. i'd like something intuitive that i can adjust.

i think a natural question is to ask how far back the key winds up. i'll call that h, since it's the maximum height of the arc. or, uh, maximum... un... height. remember, it should be a negative fraction of the total distance, since it's a movement away from the target, 1.

how does h actually fit into my parabola, though? well, it's the v-value of the parabola's local minimum. there's an expression for that, but i always forget what it is. i do know (and can readily derive) that the t-value of that point is −b/2a, so i can just plug that in:

v(t) = at² + bt v(−b/2a) = a(−b/2a)² + b(−b/2a) = a(b²/4a²) − b²/2a = b²/4a − b²/2a = −b²/4a

ah, so h = −b²/4a. but i know h, and i want to find a and b. luckily i know how to express a in terms of b, which turns this into a quadratic:

h = −b²/4a h = −b²/4(1 - b) 4h − 4hb = −b² b² − 4hb + 4h = 0 b = (4h ± √(16h² − 16h)) / 2 b = (4h ± 4√(h² − h)) / 2 b = 2 · (h ± √(h² − h))

hmm. do i want the + or − there? if you graph an example, you'll find that the difference is that one solution has the peak happen before t = 0, which is... not helpful here.

i can distinguish them by noticing that i want the slope to be negative at t = 0, since the key should start out moving backwards. that's given by v'(t) = 2at + b, which at t = 0 is just b. how convenient! so b should be negative, which forces using the − solution. note that this is guaranteed to be negative as long as h is; h² is less than h² − h for negative h, so h will be less than √(h² − h).

now i have b, and that gives me a. and i have a parabola, as well as an extra parameter h that i can play with, even dynamically if i want.

the perpendicular axis

this has some nice oomph to it, but it's still fairly obvious that this is movement along a straight line. so now i can think about how to move perpendicularly, at the same time. it's nice to have this separate, because no matter what i do here, it will not affect the impact of the original parabola.

spirals are appealing, and this animation just feels like it wants a spiral. i'll give it a try, why not.

i don't care about any formal definition of what a spiral is. i just want to go roughly around the player. i'm already doing that in one dimension: the key moves to one side of the player, then the other. to get something spiral-like, i just have to do that a second time.

already i have several constraints falling into place:

u(0) = 0, because the key starts out with no perpendicular displacement

u(1) = 0, because the key also ends with no perpendicular displacement

between 0 and 1, u(t) takes on positive values for a while, and also negative values for a while

...which implies that there is a third zero somewhere in there

now, this sort of sounds like a wave, right? it goes up, then down. (or maybe down, then up; it doesn't seem to matter.) and originally, i used a sine wave here. but that always looked a bit wonky to me, and one of the big things i changed in this recent touch-up was to not do that. here's why.

a very good question to ask is, when should u be zero? that is, when should it cross back through the path of the player? and i think for maximum impact and maximum spirality, there is only one possible answer: at the peak of the wind-up. otherwise the animation has different kinds of extremes happening at different times for the same movement, and that's probably why the sine approach looked wonky.

when is the peak of the wind-up, though? i already know that — it's −b/2a. i don't know what that is, exactly, since those coefficients are based on some other thing... but i can figure it out, which is good enough, so i don't actually care about its value. just call the whole thing s, where s is mathematics shorthand for "it's a number but i don't have a good name for it and t is already something else".

and this is what prompted me to realize that a sine wave is not such a great idea. sine waves like to repeat, which means each wave is the same length. but i have two waves here: one from 0 to s, and one from s to 1. it seems unlikely that they are exactly the same size. i could fuss with the sine wave to make it work, but surely there's a simpler approach here.

and there is! remember, i don't care whether the function repeats. i only care what it does between 0 and 1. outside of that range, it can do whatever the hell it wants. so what do i need sine for? after coming up with that quadratic function, i can immediately think of one type of curve that has both a peak and a valley: a cubic.

which, at last, brings me back to my original question [upthread on cohost]: just how do i find a cubic that's zero at three specific points? i can plug them in but then i have three equations and four variables, which sounds annoying—

and then i remembered how algebra works, so

u(t) = t · (t - s) · (t - 1)

and that's it.

well, almost. there is also one free parameter here, because i can multiply the whole thing by a constant without changing the zeroes.

u(t) = ct · (t - s) · (t - 1)

the question is, what should that constant be? it controls how high the peaks are, i.e. the "width" of the spiral. but i can't get a good sense of it without figuring out what the heights of the peaks are.

unfortunately it turns out the heights of those peaks are fucking nightmarish hellscapes of square roots. so at this point i finally take off my mathematician hat and put my game developer hat back on.

i don't actually care about the heights of the peaks. i just want the animation to look good.

the maximum heights seem to happen when s = ½. i don't have a mathematical basis for this (though there are interesting properties of cubics that could probably help); i just tried it on wolfram alpha and noticed that the peaks are both shallower than this maximum value if s is anything else.

that maximum height is 4/27 (thank u again wolfram alpha), which is roughly 0.15. of course as already mentioned, s is very unlikely to be ½ (in fact it's impossible, which you can convince yourself of if you think about v in terms of projectile motion), so the height in practice will be even smaller than this.

a good spiral is kinda circle-y, so the range should probably be closer to, like, 1

i guess i'll multiply it by 6 or something. hmm, maybe 8. yeah 8 looks better. 12 is too much

and that gets me my spiral. the only other detail i skipped is that i reverse the direction of the spiral (just by negating the perpendicular part) depending on which side of the screen the key starts on.

the final result

trimmed down to minimize the syntax cruft and leave just the math part:

h = -1 b = 2 * (h - sqrt(h*h - h)) a = 1 - b s = -1/2 * b / a t = time / ttl ortho = t * (a * t + b) perp = 8 * t * (t - 1) * (t - s) delta = dest - source sprite:draw_at(source + delta * ortho + perp_sign * perp * delta:perpendicular())

also sorry

this is the kind of post that is just begging for some graphs and diagrams and stuff, but i am tired and there is just slightly too much friction on putting images inline on cohost [for now... —ed]

#fox flux #floraverse #gamedev #indiedev

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lockefanfic · 1 year

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I'm back, and:

I'll get to all the asks in my inbox soon!

I'll get back to writing soon (tm)

I have finished Persona 5, and I have (spoiler warning) 10 thoughts after the break.

So for context, I played and finished Persona 5 Royal on PC. I ended up putting 95 hours into it, beating the main storyline and doing a good amount of the Mementos quests/confidant storylines, but I didn't do the third semester (more on that later). Thoughts:

What a game. I'm a pretty big JRPG guy, and this ranks up there in my top 5 of all time. Easily. Great characters, great storyline (albeit with what I thought was some filler towards the end of the game), really fun (if basic) battle system. And it's easily the most stylish JRPG I've ever played, and a lot of that has to do with the comic-style UI and god-tier soundtrack. Loved the game, loved the characters. After I finished it, I felt like I was saying goodbye to legit friends I'd come to know pretty well over the past couple of weeks.

Makoto best girl, don't @ me. Sorry Kasumi/Sumire. Makoto was the real Phantom Thief, cuz she infiltrated my palace and stole my heart. I legit awwww-ed at a couple of points in her romance. Hifumi close third place behind Makoto and Kasumi/Sumire.

I didn't do the third semester because how the fuck was I supposed to know you had to max out Maruki's confidant level just to unlock it? I went into this playthrough blind, and Maruki was always kind of sus (I kind of assumed he and Akechi he'd end up being a big bad and I guess I was half-right), but I had no idea that a whole 20+ hours of the game was locked behind his confidant level. By the time I realized it, I was already long past the date he left the school, and there was no way I was going to re-play 80+ hours just to unlock the third semester. Bah. I think it's crazy that they would lock most of the new content behind a pretty random confidant that you can easily pay zero attention to. Shame, because Kasumi/Sumire and Akechi are locked to the third semester and Kasumi/Sumire might've had a better chance of becoming best girl if, y'know, she could actually join my party permanently.

Was Haru even a character? I'm pretty sure some of the lesser non-party confidants got more screentime and background than she did. I didn't use her much either, because Makoto, Ann, and even Futaba were more interesting characters. How adorable (and relatable) is Futaba lol. When she called Mishima an NPC I legit laughed out loud. She destroyed him.

And on the topic of Okumuras, fuck you Okumura boss battle. It was the one part of the game where I had to turn the difficulty down.

WHY COULDN'T I ROMANCE SAE edit: for god's sake I could romance my homeroom teacher but not her? c'mon.

I watched a video about how the characters are much more comfortable in the Metaverse instead of the real world, and damn, it really resonated with me. This game had a lot to say about masks and social/societal pressure and hierarchy and things like that, and I found myself saying damn, that's so true more times than I could count. A large part of why I grew so attached to the characters and their struggles was because in a lot of ways, I saw myself in them.

Loved how real and accurate Tokyo (and the in-game world) was. Loved the references to popular chains, specific streets, and small things like brand names. I giggled irl at the nerds walking around in Akihabara with their bags of merch until I realized I've been those nerds a few times and then I got semi-offended, lol.

Akechi was sus from the start. I mean, was anyone actually surprised when he did the heel turn? At least he had his anime last stand, even if the team went from "you betrayed us you asshole" to "omg akechi nooooo what a noble sacrifice sadface" pretty quickly.

This was my first Persona game and the entire calendar/time cycles were really interesting. The other games have a similar system, right? Should I bother playing Persona 4 or just wait for Persona 6? Is Persona 5 Strikers any good?

Anyway, that concludes my little hiatus from Tumblr. I have a few things on the go irl so I probably won't be as active on here as I was previously, but I'll always be around, even if I'm not posting every day like I used to.

I'm going to be hopefully finishing up a couple of fics I've started, and I've come up with a few ideas for some sequels/new fics (Gaeul sequel because I'm an IVE fan now), so stay tuned.

Love you all, and hope you're all being excellent to yourselves and to each other. <3

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a-mess-of-a-crow · 5 months

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The discord update is a hot mess and here is why=

New Ui. You had everything in one scroll bar, a bit annoying sometimes you but you didn't need an extra tap. Now if you want to talk between server and dms, you need 2 extra taps, if you go to dms. Because it doesn't keep you in the same dm. Btw, it also doesn't autoscroll down in dms and servers. It keeps you where you were (more tapping by the arrow on the side) I get the idea behind it, but that is the same unnecessary scrolling as you had before in the server list, less even. Also= when you are in the server and get pinged, it showed a little @ thing in red that you could click and it transported you where you got pinged. Still there! But it doesn't transport you anymore = more scrolling. And then technically unnecessary.

Also bad reception. When you had bad reception before, in the servers that had roles that restricted messaging, you couldn't message for a hot second but then you were fine. NOW IT TAKES FOREVER AND YOU CANT WRITE ANYWHERE. Thanks discord, I'm sitting there, takes 10 full seconds. They tried to make things simpler by making it more complicated. I hate this new update and want to get rid of it, but apparently they patched it so people can't undo the update. Fml.

This has to be my first vent post, and I'm sorry for it. I'm so sleep deprived that I'm very emotional right now.

Edit= THE LAGS! IT LAGS SO MUCH! YOU THINK YOU ARE WRITING IN THE SAME CHAT AS BEFORE BUT ITS A DIFFERENT ONE WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE TOP! YOU TRY TO SEND A MESSAGE BUT IT DOESN'T LET YOU. I SWEAR TO GOD, IF BY THE END OF NEXT WEEK THERE ISN'T A WAY TO UNDO THE NEW UPDATE I'LL DELETE IT. IT ROBS ME OF EVERY SINGLE BRAIN CELL MY SHITTY BRAIN HAS LEFT

#Vent #Discord update #Discord #discord messages #discord chat #i hate it so much #Lag #Discord lag #Buggy #Discord bug

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factorialsotherfandoms · 6 months

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hi hello this is user a_Saga_in_progress from ao3 and I uh. am new here. idk if this is how this is meant to be used but I wanted to say hi! do you have advice on how tumblr works for new users?

Hello its lovely to see you! And yeah if someone's ask box is open putting 'hi' is perfectly acceptable <3

Advice on tumblr... Err... Okay first off I've been here for over 10 years and /still/ don't really know how it works. But! I shall do my best.

If you're on browser, take the time to install xkit rewritten (or whichever form of xkit is most up to date). This has so many quality of life features like auto-tagging your reblogs and making tag bundles

I can't remember if tumblr by recommended is still a thing, but go into your settings and tell it to display dash in chronological anyway. I'd also recommend turning ON custom theme (biggest bonus - a version of your blog that links can be made to without tumblr demanding viewers log in on mobile - but also enables a month by month fast archive), OFF share following, and have an explore about other options. Things like turning your ask box on and off and also submissions are super helpful if you ever have problems with people sending you hate. I've been lucky enough not to, but its a social media platform, it can happen. Also you never have to have asks or submissions on ever if you don't want to. I'd also recommend snoozing tumblr live every month because otherwise you will be shown pictures of half naked women on your dash trying to get you to use it. God only knows why.

the site runs mostly on reblogs. This puts a copy of your post onto your blog, where people who follow you can then see it in turn! You can add comments to these - which again is always acceptable so long as you're being polite - which unlike twitter quote retweets will not 'steal' stats from the OP. You'll get notifications for likes and reblogs with that addition, the OP will still get those ones as well. Same goes for writing things in tags.

There's 3 ways to add comment on a post - reblog with comment, tags, and replies. Comment is just you add more stuff to the post, and anyone who reblogs it from you will share those too - an addition to the content. Replies are like quiet chatter - anyone can see them and reply if they click the button to view, but they're not in their face. There's often a lot of crap there, but welcome to any platform. Tags are, theoretically, for filing, but because people can see them they're often used to add bits of commentry - in the past they were only visible to your followers and visitors to your blog without extensions, though now they're visible to the OP, whomever you reblogged from, and anyone looking in the notes. However tags have no direct way to reply - sometimes people will reblog from the person whose tags they are responding to, or screenshot them and add them to the post, but there's no built in feature for it unlike replies. Whichever way you choose, comments are how community is built.

Tags! The first five tags are searchable, the rest aren't. Put most important stuff there. The system also breaks constantly.

Learn where the 'report for spam' buttons are for IMs and new followers. You will get some, sooner or later. Even my unlisted side blogs manage it.

You have a limit of 250 posts per day over your blog and any side blogs! I only started hitting this when I started liveblogging qsmp, tho, so don't worry /too/ much.

For sideblogs, the UI for deleting them is /really bad/. If you go to a sideblog, then its specific blog settings, then scroll down to the button which says 'delete [name of sideblog]', this button will delete your entire account, not just the sideblog. And getting it back isn't possible in most cases

Your block list is private, make use of it. Block specific tags for your triggers ("fandom neg" is a good start tbh), spam accounts, block anyone being an ass, block people because you see them a lot and you don't like their artstyle but people you follow do and you just want it off your blog - there is no morality involved in blocking, just do it to make your tumblr a happier place.

Unless someone says not to in their description, just scrolling through their entire blog and liking/reblogging things is fair game.

Likes do not share things to other people (and so artists will get sad if they get many likes and not many reblogs) but are super useful to mark when you've already seen something, or if you're (like me) sometimes on mobile and sometimes on computer and want to save them for the computer where tagging is a bit easier. I'd personally recommend turning them to private in settings, but each to their own.

The queue! Beloved queue. If you add things to your queue they will auto-post later. I use it for when I hit post count, and also to store up reblogged art for later.

Concerning side blogs - you can only follow, like and send asks from your main account, but you can post on, reblog to, recieve messages to, and reply from any (replying from side accounts is very new and very exciting). (So my case is obvious but if you see @factorialrabbits about in your notifications, that's my main, this is a side <3 )

Tagging/atting people! If you want someone's attention on a post, you use "@", then type their name. This doesn't always work, and should be used sparingly as it's basically like showing up to their front door and yelling for them lol. I mostly see it used for reblog games, and if someone's asked for say specific clips or timestamps for a VoD alerting them to a post which has them.

Search is fucky, but its a good way to find art. I tend not to search by tags, just keywords, then swap to most recent. Trying to find a specific post after its gone, though? good luck you'll need it.

Not a modern tumblr, but trivia - historically you used to be able to get an email address for your blog, and any email you sent to that address would be posted to it, and of all tumblr features I miss it the most.

Hopefully that helps? I need to go get some groceries but am happy to answer specific questions if you have them <3 I'm just never sure where to start lol

#ask and answer

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chaotic-average-child · 9 months

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ngl i usually dont have problems with dash updates etc, i get used to it. but for the love of god the new one is just physically painful to use.

I already made a shitty edit of what i meant, but i wanted to improve now that im not fucking exhausted lmao

I am going to be critiquing the new UI, and comparing it to twt, and how poorly they pulled it off dont keep reading if u dont care/think im overreacting

and im not gonna sugar coat my opinion on it. please understand when u read.

Honestly its just bad, its a copy of twt, and I use twitter??? you'd think id have no trouble adjusting since ive used both since 2020. (tumblr first but ykno)

but it just feels totally wrong. the buttons are too small, compared to twitter's much larger ones, the change between the top bar with the post types vs the new +create button is just???

If it was about icons, you could make a form of hover to see what they do. but now it feels so much more painful to use. like i physically struggle to find shit on the new dash because tumblr decided to put shit in weird ass locations.

all the improvements supporters are talking about could have been done without messing with the whole site alignment.

(blogs censored cuz im digging into tumblr here like im not holding back and i dont want randoms being brought into smth)

This would have accomplished the exact same thing

(not perfect but i need to get my idea across.)

Id probably spread out the icons too, to get room for text. especially since theres room over there

AGAIN I DONT WANT IT TO LOOK EXACTLY LIKE THIS!! THIS IS JUST DEMONSTRATING WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT

Or like this so that its even with the tumblr logo

Or hell, just make the upper ui look similar to the post ui where it extended the bar to add the text in.

like this.

(again i dont think this exact layout would be best but Im trying to show what i mean.)

Like I LIKED the explore update

I liked getting recommended blogs!

I even like radar n shit

But the new layout is objectively worse.

this was messing w muscle memory for no reason. and just making the whole site look bizzare

and its not even a GOOD twitter rip off.

Here is my biggest issues with the new ui

(not written but i have a problem with the fyp and shit being so high up, like it s at the same level as the logo)

Here's a direct overlay

The tiny icons is what really confuses me + the placement of the create button? like why????

the misaligned tumblr logo too. like really??? would that be copying too much??? they already had a pretty good ui??? just add the text to that????

Tumblr really wasnt that hard to use? most confusion could be fixed with text under.

anyways if tumblr REAALLLYY wanted to do this like desperately

everything on the right makes slightly more sense, given the fact tumblr has always had right side ui.

(please ignore the shitty parts, im just trying to get a point across not actually make a new ui lol)

Anyways,,, I may be overreacting but its really not the change that bothers me.

its how they changed it

also recent stuff i heard about tumblr recently is making me really not wanna be nice about this, at all.

Its just weird that in their path of adding the text they have removed other accessibility features they used to have.

and the fact that tagging a post with "epilepsy warning" puts it in the epilepsy tag is abysmal.

I kinda dont buy that this was for accessibility given tumblr's other actions.

Anyway i dont blame individual members of staff but cmon yall...

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