dgently7

i just started playing this last year, and tbh ive seen way more patience in "noob" lobbies than i would have expected for an online game. the bar (pun intended) to having a good experience as a noob is not hard but also not obvious. my observations are:

1. have at least played some pve, the "scenerios" are good for forcing you to learn a lot of the basics. if you literally dont know how to do basic interacting with the game there is nothing that the other players in the "noob" lobby can help you with. you will struggle they will struggle no one will have fun. pvp is just an objectively bad way to learn the game. don't even try to play pvp until you are at 2 or even 3 "chev". its a complex game with lots of mechanics, its going to take time to get the basics down. 2. watching replays/specing is helpful. so are some of the yt basics guides. find someone elses build and strategy and try to copy it. you can get to a pretty high os just by doing that. if you get beat bad in a round go watch your own replay. see what the other guy did. copy it next time. 3. remember that its an apm taxed kinda game, players will spend their apm trying to help you, but they wont have time to say things nicely. its not them trying to be mad or rude usually, they just dont have time to write you a novel. use the inbetween matches chat to ask for details. assume good intent on in game chat most of the time. 4. remember that os is literally just a number, it really doesn't mean anything. but finding lobbies with similar os to you helps. like even though there are lots of lobbies with like 30+os who will allow your 10-15 os noob self in its not the right match for you. find lobbies with like 25ish os cap. or no more than 10-15 os higher than your current rank. even better ones that are "unranked" but they seem more rare. 5. the rotato suggestion i saw on another thread is good but also the glitters/supreme with the consistent roles is also kinda nice. its much easier to find lobbies and follow replays and stuff, pick the same lane and watch how a few different people play it and copy what looks like it works as best you can.

hmm yeah, take that one step farther and you have your get on the ocean fast tutorial level.. go from point a to point b. fight one ship. capture a small island. then the map opens up an you are just in the first level. ready to take on the rest. it also solves the beginner problem where if you cant kill three ships in one health bar you cant capture the island to heal and you can get stuck roaming the seas looking for places to heal. with a small (but a little far away) starter island you could retreat to heal and try again.

while i have you... what does the bounty hunters thing do? i see it pop up but then nothing really happens. i keep expecting like 5 ships to try and hunt me down but nada.

a middle approach could be a trainer mode where you can say your desired direction of travel and the game gives you a suggestion of heading + trim. think like the driving line in racing sims, it doesn't brake for you but it helps you develop intuition of what to do when. a oldtimey map line drawn on the ocean to show where when to tack at what angle would be so nice. especially for the longer hops between islands.

the control layout is a bit awkward on mobile. i find myself wanting to adjust both heading and trim continuously, but both controls are on the right so i cant use both thumbs. then the buttons to fire/ board are fiddly. tbh almost gave up then tried with keyboard and saw how it was supposed to go.

sure of course nothing is perfect and oiio has a lot of surface area / is still oss. thats good advice.

ive just seen a lot of "ai researchers" who are getting into professional image processing and are both beginners and want things quickly and so could do much worse than just starting from what they get out of oiio. especially for a lot of the non-obvious stuff (more of that in color handling than just the io stuff though)

"Let’s say you’re writing an image processing program. The program takes in an image, converts it to floating point, does some processing and finally saves the modified pixels to disk as 8-bit colors. "

excuse to argue about the best way aside, if this is the goal you should not be rolling your own image file reading. you should use openimageio. idk what approach it takes in its internal conversion to float, but that library is more likely to have the right answer than you trying to roll it yourself given its the library used internally by tons of professional image manipulation software...

pull up any moderately busy picture with more than a trivial amount of objects. pictures of "traffic" or with other similar repetition are great for this demo. pick one specific object (like a specific tire on one car) in the image and write (or say) out all the words youd need to specify that exact object. now take the same image and point at the object with your mouse or circle it with an annotation tool. its often very very hard to describe accurately which object you are talking about, you will often resort to vague "location" words anyway like "on the upper left" that try to define the position in a corse way that requires careful parsing to understand. pointing/annotating is massively superior both in brevity, clarity, and speed.

wasnt that magenta highlights thing a pretty well known deficiency of the reds for a long time? (unsure if they resolved it in recent ones)

also let me rearrange the tiles on the board not just my rack. its very frustrating if you need to swap two letters you have to move the first one out of the way then put the second then move the first again.

unrailed meets scrabble.

what dictionary does this use, i tried a few words that i was pretty sure are in the scrabble set but didnt work here. (could be wrong)

for me the train is a little bit too fast for the letter input method. like even if i have a word by the time i get all the tiles down the train has made more progress than my word added. some kind of way to get a bonus for longer words that gives you more time feels like it would be a nice balance tweak. like risky, take more time to find a longer word but more payoff for doing it. basically makes me look at the rack and say... do i have a long word here... do i have time to find it...

evil ... yet.

if op is really serious about fixing social networking he needs to figure out a way to operate it that wont enshittify.

ie, public good, not for profit, something like that.

as is hes already signaled he intends to enshittify it eventually ("premium features"..?) which to me is a non-starter.

the problem is that a successful network beyond a certain size like this needs funding. its unfortunate but this needs legal /compliance, moderation, even marketing...

those things aren't free, but you could imagine ways to pay for them. Id totally accept a small subscription fee for a network like this if paying that fee could guarantee privacy, and that the person hosting all my data would not be looking to squeeze every dime of value out of me as a user.

anything less than solving the funding problem and you are just saying you will become facebook (or get bought by them). no thanks.

double agree on the classic pro.

disagree on pid kit only.

the full on duino mod is way better for one primary reason. power steam or whatever they call the thing they do with the steamer. it takes the sputtery slow and weak steam wand and makes it actually functional.

also the "adaptive" settings you can do on there let you basically never have to "dial in" a shot. throw any random (still decent q and paired with a good grinder) beans on there and you get a shot thats very drinkable. For lattes and stuff where you are hiding the coffee in milk anyway this is like still better than 90% of what you can get from the coffee shop with the 20k$ big iron and 0 effort. and when you do have that special bag that wants the extra attention and straight espresso you've got all the controls and presets and shot tracking.

if you are gonna try and do home espresso you already have an involved hobby, if you are gonna mod your machine you are already pretty hardcore about your hobby... you might as well go all in at that point

the most interesting thing here is actually maybe that this is cad targeted for easy 3dp modeling. while you wont ever unseat the big guys there is a lot more you could do to make this sub space better by targeting it.

like could you make it aware of the fdm limits and help me avoid them while im building instead of needing the build-slice-refine flow across multiple software?

didnt dune win a vfx oscar and their screens werent even green at all? they were tan like sand.

this is the approach that stop motion uses, except they get to keep the camera in the same place. its still not perfect because of spill from the background onto the foreground and requires additional masking and cleanup.

im familiar with this work and specifically they tried replicating the sodium vapor style approach but what worked for poppins level isnt actually good enough for today. Specifically you still end up with light spill that contaminates the foreground, especially for things like the fresnel reflections on the side of a face. the magenta idea was to still do what is basically a color difference key, but increase the color separation between fg and bg by lighting the two with different opposite colored lights. then using a ml model to recover the original fg color.

youd have to train it to also generate and st map of the distortions but creating the ground truth version of that from the synthetic data would add a lot more to render. also its very easy to plausibly fake, its not something humans are good at seeing and knowing its wrong. you can tell its completely missing but accurate vs just distorted in a plausible way is not something most brains are tuned to notice.

per pixel depth does not solve for semi-transparency.

the general problem with any technique that isnt just throw some vaugely green thing behind our actors is that setting up complicated tech like this on an actual film set is extremely expensive. both the time it would take and the risk of it not working. so you end up with a dedicated permanent stage install but now you need to get the actors and crew to that place. better keys isnt a bad enough problem to justify that effort/cost. even the highly touted "virtual production" mandalorian stuff where you just put a big led wall behind the actors has shown to be more expensive than traditional vfx unless you tightly control the creative or approach.

awesome glad you liked it. id love to try it out again if you implement any of them. idk what else to call the black squares so "enemy" felt right for the board fights back vibe.

another nice thing i thought of with enemy block types idea is that you don't need to look anywhere but the board if you get rid of powerups that you just have so your whole interface gets simpler. if you still needed powerups you could have them show up as normal pieces in the chain of pieces.

it def starts to veer into more of a classic tetris how far can you go vibe than maybe the puzzle thing you are going for, but maybe its actually two games. puzzle mode is as now but starts with a fixed set or fixed progression of enemys. you finish the puzzle when you defeat them all. winning then is time or rows cleared or minimum number of pieces even. infinite mode is more like the current. or classic tetris, how far can you go while new enemies spawn in of increasing number and difficulty. winning is how many enemies you clear + lines + time

Also enjoyed this, similar frustration at not being able to use powerups in a loss condition. Never got to the state where it felt like the "board fights back".

This comment above about difficulty made me wonder if there are more interesting things to do with the unclear-able blocks that would both let you ramp the difficulty and achieve more of your vision. A few off the cuff ideas:

* enemy blocks that are clearable if you make a row and a column through them * enemy blocks that require to be surrounded by n deep blocks to resolve * enemy blocks that automatically pop into single cell holes * enemy blocks that grow by infecting neighboring blocks over time or the more other rows you clear * enemy blocks that require multiple row clears to resolve

the thought is having a few types with each enemy block needing a different strategy to resolve would give you more levers on how to control difficulty and give you more variation to the strategy and more agency to defeat them. powerups is kinda a deus-ex-machina currently. you dont feel earned satisfaction when you clear an enemy block.

I think you are right, it's more fast food, or maybe to extend the metaphor its like processed or ultra-processed food. Systematically prepared with lots of ingredients to give you something that is "food" but has been modified to amp up the sugar and salt to levels that make it basically impossible to stop eating. It also loses almost all of its nutritional value and is often cheaper than real food. Just like social media is cheap because its been infused with ads and data tracking sales. A "free range organic" social network would have to cost more.

We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)

still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.

id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?

I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?

i have that rule and the same exception for the 0. it feels like its "cyber" look done actually right with proper design (i dont let other inferior designs steal the word cyber). i would also add any decently good* ev minivan that is actually available to buy in the us.

*vw buzz fails the good test for no one pedal driving and the price for what you get is outta wack. though lots of the 1st gen ones are still sitting on car lots so maybe that could cross the exception barrier if they go for cheaper.

espresso machines are maybe in a different class of "coffee maker" but it seems like even the cheapest of those is pretty easy to service/repair/source parts.

or in some cases even upgrade to improve capabilities...

I did the gaggiauino mod to my gaggia classic and basically everything in there is just pipes and wires... the most complicated single part on the original is the vibratory pump. I'm pretty sure i could keep that same machine going indefinitely with access to parts.

do you know about the slate truck? give it a search. it doesn't even come with speakers. or electric windows. or paint. it does have a backup camera afaik.

real question, how much would you be willing to pay a month for access to a healthy social network? (borrowing another comments clarification on the term vs social media)

healthy as in: has real people that you really know. Has no ads or bots or ai slop. Isn't full of dark patterns that are designed to turn you into a doom scrolling zombie? and maybe even has features that actually help you to stay connected in a real way to other people? oh and you are actually the customer and not the product so won't just be a service to gather bulk data on your "consumer preferences" so other places can target ads...

because while the thing you want isn't a technology or a business model I think if you actually wanted it to exist you need both, and we all mostly agree the old model where the social internet is just ad/data supported is not a path to something good. so the very real question is how much would you be willing pay in dues for that social network? how much would your friends pay? if it existed would you push for them to go there?

its hard to imagine a paid service that is basically the web version of kale being popular enough to get to network effects scale vs tiktok's double fudge oreos, but it would need to start somewhere... and some people do choose kale over oreos.

or the the similar but unrelated... "there are only 10 kinds of programmers, ones who can read binary and ones who can't"

my personal distinction I use is about measurements. while you may model to a specific scale for use in 3d gfx (game by engine/animation/vfx) you cross over from "modeling" to "cad" as soon as you are creating geometry with specific real world measurements. (probably for manufacturing or engineering reasons bc thats when it matters most)

like I can model a table that is the right size and looks like it will not tip over for my game, but I am going to cad that table to run a stress sim and make the plans for building it for real.

though id still call the action of doing the building in the cad software "modeling"... so idk.. language is weird.

so software that lets you work accurately with measurements and real units == cad. (fusion360) software that just makes geometry == modeling. (blender)

but if you wanna go get real confused look at "plasticity" an app targeted at "modeling" but uses a cad engine and sells itself as "cad for artists" it has real scale measurements and everything too.

if we dont want it we need to vote with your wallet then, buy a slate truck when they come out. if you dont want a pickup thing buy it anyway so they eventually make a car in the shape you like when they learn there is a huge market for simple cars.

(yes i know its not as dumb a 90s toyota or whatever, but its the dumbest you can probaby get that is ev* and complies with modern regulations)

*not from some ecovangalist pov but because by almost every measure of what a car needs to do for most people ev is better at that, but thats an argument for another thread.