• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Each game is meant to playable as a standalone thing, any direct storyline continuation from previous titles is covered in the game itself. Technically Ocarina of Time and Majora’s mask are a pair with MM as the sequel, but either can be played alone with no real loss of context. MM does build on gameplay of OoT though.

    It’s not a spoiler to say that across the game series it’s generally a plot about some reincarnation of the three central figures of Link, Zelda, and Ganon. There’s often implied reincarnations of other characters too across multiple games, but that’s mostly just callback fluff for fans. There’s one game set first in the in universe timeline that sets up the impetus for the reincarnation cycle, and one game that splits the timeline into a few branches based off three different interpretations of the ending of that specific game.

    The two main newest ones, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, are a two-fer as well, and are a new timeline or convergence of the split timelines depending on who you ask.

    For a first time player, don’t worry about it. Whichever game you play will give you what you need to know. Any understanding of the “grand series plot” just adds some extra oomph to scenes in later released games than OoT and MM.


  • For anyone lamenting they don’t have a Switch 2, or looking for OoT with QoL improvements for cheaper than whatever Nintendo’s asking price is, there is a free PC port of OoT that will run as fast as your hardware can handle it without messing up gameplay speed etc, has a ton of switchable QoL features, and has mod support for using 3DS (and better) graphics/models. You can even use Master Quest’s edited dungeons with all the benefits of the 3DS version.

    It’s called Ship of Harkinian. All you have to do is provide a copy of the game ROM.


  • At this point we already have the ridiculously extensible PC ports. There’s no shot that there won’t be mods to bring over whatever QoL this remake adds (assuming it’s anything not already in the port) within weeks of release. I’ll give it maybe a year or two for homebrew graphics mods to catch up or for someone to extract the new assets into a mod.

    And there’s no debate regarding the 3DS remaster anymore. You can just shove its graphics into the port if you prefer them and flip a few settings to toggle the changed behavior.

    Plus everyone knows the best way to play is with the Beatles in OOT mods (seriously go search up the stupid fucking fever dream that is the remixed OST).



  • I think it’s pretty obvious that you haven’t used any AI tools in a while. They have gotten considerably better at not spewing complete nonsense, and at being very convincing to people who don’t know better. We’re well past the obvious days of glue pizza and telling people to eat rocks, and entirely fabricated garbage.

    My job is doing a full court push of AI to make sure we “don’t get left behind” by nebulous competitors’ hypothetical productivity gains. So I’ve started picking it up. It’s useful for searching for information using normal language terminology, and on rare occasions can call out edge cases and additional considerations early, rather than when I come to those conclusions after reading 10 different documentation sites and mentally mapping everything out.

    I still think the bleeding edge early adopters were/are insane, AGI/ASI isn’t going to coalesce out of the current approaches if ever, and it’s a net negative for humanity. That all said, I see the benefits and use cases more clearly now too.

    Unfortunately, not checking anything and pushing to prod now can result in things that work well enough to become relied on before it hits the wall. You end up with a project five layers past the initial slop code (that the initial slopper claims is rock solid and good to go) when the problems start showing up, then you realize that you’ve been building off slop foundation and have to tear everything back down to the frame.

    Makes the whole thing worse tbh.



  • I think you’ve skipped a bunch of troubleshooting steps into the realm of paranoia.

    You need to take a step back, take some deep breaths. As another commenter said, ensure that you are taking care of your own health, because you’re not wrong, this sounds batshit.


    After that, you can start troubleshooting one thing at a time, starting with the most basic, ignoring any assumptions and focusing on only what you know as fact. Your description is so flooded with extraneous detail that it’s hard to follow, but what I got out of it is this:

    • You’re incredibly concerned about privacy, but not particularly knowledgeable (using TOR for all web browsing, using random VPN without actually looking into it, instead of taking some time to study before you jump in feet first).
    • This means you are likely to be using some combinations of software and settings that are non-standard, that you may not fully understand. I don’t mean this as an insult, we’ve all been there, but we need to stop focusing on what you assume. The type of people asking for help on asklemmy of all places are not the same people being targeted by state actors or “super hackers”, unless there’s a lot of shit you left out.
    • This is on top of your admittance of doing vibe-coding with all the supply chain risks that you are thankfully somewhat aware of.
    • You recently changed VPN providers. This is not placed at any point in the overall timeline, so we cannot begin to guess at any relation to further events, such as shady VPN software installs before or after certain listed issues.
    • You recently torrented some FLAC files and used VLC to play them, which is the last thing you recall doing before you started having your most recent issues, which appear to be your router requiring a firmware reflash, and the keyboard input issues.
    • “Around that time” of the FLAC album download, but not specifically before or after, your router stopped working and required a full firmware reflash. You do not say where you obtained this firmware, if it is the official manufacturer firmware or something custom/third party like OpenWRT. This was a few days ago.
    • After fixing the router and cleaning, you begin having keyboard input issues. No word on of the cleaning involved any spraying or wiping of the keyboard before you noticed issues, so no idea on hardware damage or accidentally triggered keyboard shortcuts.
    • Keyboard issues noted: One row non functional, some keys entering multiple times on single press, issues with capslock/shift
    • You moved the HDD to another machine, played the FLAC(s) again, and the keyboard issue started again.

    I’ll be real, your immediate jump to thinking this is some sort of targeted active attack is silly. You need to isolate if the problem is with the keyboard, settings on the installed OS (specific to the drive), or after you play the FLAC file. Test one thing at a time, offline. Don’t introduce additional variables. You’ll also want to ensure VLC is fully updated, as a number of updates to it are security related. Embedding malware in media files isn’t common, but it’s much more likely than being the target of an intentional attack, or of picking up malware capable of jumping across multiple firmwares.




  • I really don’t get how people with this take… exist long enough to express it (it’s an awkward idea to word). At that point it would seem to me that the next “logical” goal would be to take yourself and as many others out as you could. Unless you count yourself securely among the monsters and don’t care about your own monstrosity, which begs the question why you would feel strongly enough about it to label yourself this way or care that others are monstrous.

    It just feels from the outside like a circular logic trap with only two “outs”: either everybody sucks except for you (elitist as all hell), or what I said earlier.


  • I’m still frustrated by that shit. There were actual instances of bad shit happening in gaming news media that got drowned the fuck out by all the culture war grifters and rampant fucking incels.

    • Random “ok but not GOTY” indie games getting GOTY level reviews, then people finding that the dev and the journalist(s) had a history of bar crawl pictures on twitter together.
    • Leaked industry email lists where journalists openly were asking other journalists to take it easy on their dev roommate’s first release.
    • A few big names in games journalism getting shit canned for writing honest reviews about how mediocre some AAA game was, when that game bought an ad on their site to the tune of a full site retheming around the game.
    • Undisclosed referral links.
    • Undisclosed sponsorship of good reviews.
    • Some games trying to use the fact they had LGBTQIA+ representation to paint valid critiques as the same thing as bigoted harassment, when some of the critique was even coming from LGBTQIA+ folx.
    • A few no name indie devs caught faking harassment and hate DMs.

    It was a few big issues, a scatter of medium issues, a few minor things only noticable to obsessives, and then a massive clusterfuck of actual stalker/*phobe bullshit slopped on top.

    I’m happy that shit like responsible disclosure started happening in the end, but what a fucking mess.


  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoGames@lemmy.worldSource Skin Rendering
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    8 days ago

    Not sure about skin rendering in L4D, but way back when Half Life 2 was new, one of the ways it pushed things forward was with the facial rigs and animations.

    At least as far as I remember from gaming news at the time.

    I remember reading that it was a big leap in terms of matching real facial muscles to the 3D rig face “muscles”, and in using those little dot things to capture actual facial movement of some of the line reads. I think Valve’s discovery and/or usage of the fact that real eye iris angles are offset by about 2 degrees was also something that was noted as a big move forward past the uncanny valley.