📅November 7th, 2018
For a side project creating a shader that added VHS degradation effect (for the end result of that-- shader posted here).
I was looking around for reference material. For some reason I was having trouble finding good stuff in the form of other shaders. I was put off by how common it was to mix tape degredation effect with CRT monitor style distortion and scanline artifacts (scanlines which cannot be chalked up to tape banding). I guess it's not cool to have one without the other? I wanted to reproduce a degraded tape. But, not the experience of someone pointing a camera at a monitor.
Since I couldn't readily (in the like ~15s of searching) find the type of video comparison I was looking for I quickly made one using a rip of one of my old anime tapes (I used like this $20 USB-composite dongle attached to my VCR) and the DVD re-release of the same thing.
Left: DVD
Right: VHS
Blown-out colors, blurriness. The real money areas were the band of distortion at the bottom and left... The tape, despite being nearly 30 years old, didn't look as 'bad' as I was hoping. It didn't look s***ty enough to be directly taken as reference. I used it as a starting point, and hammed it up a lot for the shader.
If you were to attack this problem a different way you could do an ML style transfer. I did this in a non-ML way because I wanted some control over the warping and noise, some debuggability, rather than just "throwing more and more data at the problem until it looks right".
The resulting shader is here: https://github.com/clandrew/vapor/blob/master/VaporPlus/PostprocessPS.hlsl
📅October 22nd, 2018
One track of the music from Primal Rage sounds a LOT like Secret of Evermore
SoE "Boss theme 2": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwyXdGPYOWw
Primal Rage "Stalagtite Cave" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPwTDlgR0x0
They have different composers so maybe a coincidence.
📅October 16th, 2018
Uncommon real-life problems are solved by Tintin++ scripts
📅October 13th, 2018
Art project: Advertisement
To attract possibly some new players to Deathwish, a text RPG I play sometimes, and to increase visibility I had an idea to purchase an ad. The MUD community has two big portals for indexing MUDs: MUD Connector, and TopMudSites. TopMudSites already advertises 4-5 MUDs on rotation in the form of 728x90 banner ads which are not too intrusive. We could put an ad for DW into that set.
I wanted the ad to be pixel arted and look a bit like DW's home page- skulls and fire! And be animated.
After drafting up most of it I went through iterations with the MUD administrator until getting the final version which was sent to TMS.
I was worried it would not be accepted, if they thought the skull was too much or having a mild curse be in the hostname would be an issue. But I'm happy to say they accepted the ad and it's up there now! The site administrators were kind enough in letting me sign up for extra time so it will be up for a while- about 2 years.
Final result:
As of right now you can see the ad at TopMudSites, if you just refresh the page a few times and ensure your ad blocker isn't running.
📅October 1st, 2018
Whenever there are no mirrors around, I’m a pair of disembodied hands, to save on rendering costs. Everyone is always very polite in not pointing it out.
📅August 12th, 2018
Finished Gundam Wing: Endless Duel (SNES)
Story Mode with Vayeate
This is a Gundam-inspired fighting game released in Japan only. You can play as several of the Gundams from the show. Gosh this game has so much graphical polish and the soundtrack is A++++. For this I played through the story mode and recorded it on my capture card.
I got this replica cart to play it
From playthrough (recorded with my awesome new capture card)--
Deathscythe and Epyon if unlocked are very over-powered in this game. In general the mechs are not very balanced. Still, my regular tends to be Vayeate because it is my favorite from the show. Life would be boring if everyone playing Street Fighter was Zangief, right?? Vayeate has a couple good features- this huge space rifle-like thing that can be used as a bludgeoning weapon, plus a few attacks that go diagonally.
📅July 29th, 2018
"Ghost characters" introduced in JIS encoding can be found in Unicode today
📅July 12th, 2018
📅July 9th, 2018
Sun Ce's sounds like a sophisticated machine-learning algorithm
Dong Bai's officer offers reassurance in the English dub
Li Jue helps determine a strategy
Sun Ce comes through with an observation
Side thing: What a nice vantage point!
Maple didn't think so
Normal, natural conversation
📅June 27th, 2018
Finished Birds of Steel (PS3)
Genre: WWII Pacific Aerial combat simulator.
I picked up this game after watching Dunkirk looking to get more immersion in that same context with the historical planes, and sense of action and urgency. Although I hate flying in real life I love flight simulators. This game feels a lot more realistic in its controlling of the planes than the other ones I've played. It turns out, the dogfighting strategies which work in Star Fox are not realistic.
Having positive memories of the predecessor of this game, IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey, I picked this one up and it holds up pretty well despite being last-gen. The graphics for the water and details on the planes themselves are good.
Each part in the campaign has an explanation of the context of the battle, narrated by Stephen Fry. Good for them, they got someone high-profile to narrate. Unfortunately, the scene descriptions are written horribly. Everything is so tedious and roundabout. Who writes a paragraph and starts 2 or 3 sentences in a row with "However"?
And there is one really persistent visual gripe I have with this and at least 1 other modern flight sim (Eagle's Flight). The dark edges. A vignette filter. You see it, right? This is as cheap a trick as jacking up the contrast. Why would anyone invest in a large TV, when the outer edges of it are useless?
I had positive impressions of how many planes were included, different types of environments, and sound. They capture sound clips of both Allied and Japanese pilots. For voice, I was suspecting they would get non-Japanese actors to impersonate Japanese people for the voice-over. But, nope. Japanese voice actors play Japanese pilots.
It's surprisingly hard to find good flight simulators for console. Most high-budget, non-indie flight simulators made now are not marketed in the mainstream, but to a very specific audience- a very hardcore audience who typically have a pilot's license IRL and some extremely fancy actual cockpit-like setup. Microsoft Flight Simulator still has a lot of loyal fans in this category.
Controls were a good compromise between video game-y and airplane-y. Knowing their target demographic, Birds of Steel has a control mode for simulator fans. I am glad it also has an arcade-style control mode. I am a video game player without a pilot's license. The arcade style mode still felt airplane-y because you can't just move the analog stick in the direction you want to go. You adjust the roll and rudder separately. It was fun and easy enough to get the hang of.
Since the game came out 6 years ago the online scene is no longer a thing but it was worthwhile going through the campaign of it. The main highlights were Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal.
