paragraft (u/paragraft)

paragraft commented on Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024) keithburgun.net/outside-d... · Posted by u/vector_spaces

owyn · a month ago

Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did.

Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently it's "patented".

Here's a decent video overview. I hate that everything is video now but this is the world we live in I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fh5qc-ZnaM

paragraft · a month ago

Yes here's the patent. The independent claims are frustratingly broad if you're trying to think through practical NPC world sim systems.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160279522A1/en

paragraft commented on Logging sucks loggingsucks.com/... · Posted by u/FlorinSays

paragraft · 2 months ago

I've recently come off a team that was racking up a huge Splunk bill with ~70 log events for each request on a high traffic service, and this is all very resonant (except the bit about sampling, I never gave that much thought - reducing our Splunk bill 70x was ambitious enough for me!).

Hadn't heard the "wide event" name, but I had settled on the same idea myself in that time (called them "top-level events" - i.e. we would gather information from the duration of the request and only log it at the "top" of the stack at the end), and evangelised them internally mostly on the basis it gave you fantastic correlation ability.

In theory if you've got a trace id in Splunk you can do correlated queries anyway, but we were working in Spring and forever having issues with losing our MDC after doing cross-thread dispatch and forgetting to copy the MDC thread global across. This wasn't obvious from the top-level, and usually only during an incident would you realise you weren't seeing all the loglines you expected for a given trace. So absent a better solution there, tracking debug info more explicitly was appealing.

Also used these top-level events to store sub-durations (e.g. for calling downstream services, invoking a model etc), and with Splunk if you record not just the length of a sub-process but its absolute start, you can reconstruct a hacky waterfall chart of where time was spent in your query.

paragraft commented on C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg... · Posted by u/Twirrim

josephg · a year ago

Yep. Pity about getting chars / string encoding wrong though. (Java chars are 16 bits).

But it’s not alone in that mistake. All the languages invented in that era made the same mistake. (C#, JavaScript, etc).

paragraft · a year ago

What's the right way?

paragraft commented on Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment? · Posted by u/jack_riminton

paragraft · a year ago

I've used it in anger on a project with an unreasonable start time in its test suite. Put an alert sound on VS when breakpoints were reached let me start a test with debugger attached, and then go do something else for the time it would take to start, but not forget what I had been originally doing.

paragraft commented on Map of Pontypandy in Fireman Sam two-wrongs.com/map-of-pon... · Posted by u/kqr

Pixelbrick · 2 years ago

You've clearly given as much effort to thinking about this as I've wasted worrying about political economy on the Isle of Sodor.

paragraft · 2 years ago

I still haven't settled the nature of free will and determinism, aka who's actually controlling the trains, them or their drivers?

paragraft commented on Films that made people emigrate theguardian.com/film/2023... · Posted by u/f_allwein

paragraft · 2 years ago

I know the article was about movies that persuaded viewers to _go_ to a certain country, but I am reminded of a former colleague who explained to me that it was actually a TV show ("The Mechanism", a drama about political corruption in Brazil) that finally convinced him he needed to take his young family and _leave_ Brazil for a better future.

Of course I had to give it a watch after a review like that. Good show.

paragraft commented on Low current around roots boosts plant growth nature.com/articles/d4415... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

klysm · 2 years ago

I’d be fascinated to read more about that second part

paragraft · 2 years ago

This was the best I could find https://www.invasive.org/gist/products/handbook/20.triclopyr... (see Mode of Action)

paragraft commented on Facebook is blocking Canadians’ posts on the assassination of a BC Sikh leader pressprogress.ca/facebook... · Posted by u/toomanyrichies

ta8645 · 2 years ago

Even that article you cite stops short of saying that RAW was definitely the perpetrator.

There are occasionally people who opportunistically claim credit for crimes they didn't commit, when it suits their politics. And even if it was someone in RAW, being "close to the government", does not necessarily mean it was ordered by that government.

None of us have enough information to say for sure at this point. Yet people carry on like we know the truth without equivocation.

The Prime Minister of Canada just did a state visit to India, where he was not warmly received, and made to look foolish on the world stage. So, he has his own political calculations in this affair, and is far from an objective arbiter of truth.

paragraft · 2 years ago

> The Prime Minister of Canada just did a state visit to India, where he was not warmly received, and made to look foolish on the world stage.

Have you considered the possibility that the reason he got a cold reception was he brought the accusation he just made publicly? Would put the issue with the plane in a whole new light too...

paragraft commented on Microsoft Works en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mic... · Posted by u/tosh

growingkittens · 2 years ago

Microsoft Works 2.0 also had the tutorial! I don't remember the ascii graphics - maybe my IBM PS/2 didn't show them, or maybe I have brain damage. (edit: was there a mountain picture?)

It ruined my expectations for help documents forevermore: nothing was as cool.

paragraft · 2 years ago

The graphics weren't elaborate, I just remember things like the illustration of a storefront before you worked on an inventory spreadsheet, or the ascii picture of a telephone and modem before the "Communications" tool (i.e. telnet) section.

paragraft commented on Microsoft Works en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mic... · Posted by u/tosh

paragraft · 2 years ago

I have fond memories of the early DOS version (1.something). Its tutorial was a masterclass (included full screen ascii graphics illustrating the scenarios) and as a kid playing on my father's laptop I went through it several times. I particularly enjoyed the database tutorial where you worked on WHODUNIT.WDB to solve the mystery of a murder at a ski slope by narrowing down the customers against clues...