Craigp

Craigp, 11 hours ago to random

Discovered a glut of videos about cool villains for D&D games.

One thing people don't seem to realize is that if your villain goes past a certain pretty low power level, they ARE the setting.

People talk about "making a good villain", but in a game revolving around tactical combat, any significant villain will distort the setting to the point where it drives the setting.

Which means your villain design IS world design.

Craigp, 21 hours ago to random

I was thinking more about the discussion about different kinds of TTRPG players. You know, a lot of GMs complain about minmaxers and such.

I think the discussion on this, both for and against, is generally pretty shallow.

A big point of a TTRPG is that each player engages in their own way. Some players focus more on mechanics than others.

This becomes a problem only if you get blindsided by it. It's extremely useful if you know it's coming.

Craigp, 1 day ago to random

I'm really not a fan of how you search for a very specific string of nonsense and instead of returning hits for it, it returns hits for vaguely similar and much more common strings.

This is an AI-driven thing that is just the dumbest shit.

"Clearly they meant to search for this more common thing, and there will be no option to find what they are looking for. In fact, we won't even bring up that we're returning the wrong thing."

Craigp, 1 day ago to random

I watched a few tabletop RPG videos - none of the super popular ones - and I'm really struck at how most of them are populated by actors there to act, rather than players there to play.

There's nothing wrong with this. But it's interesting how the structure of these games is often one that would drive normal players up the wall.

They frequently have lonnnnng scenes with less than half of their players, and of course the other actors are calmly, patiently waiting. Because they're actors.

Craigp, 1 day ago to random

Apparently it's the summer of crop tops.

I wonder how this gets started. I'm absolutely sure this isn't a bunch of women going "oh, yes, let's all buy crop tops".

Presumably the big clothing stores just flood the shelves with crop tops to try and convince people to buy new clothes, since obviously they won't have any crop tops in their closet. None newer than fifteen fucking years old, anyway.

It's fascinating to watch largely harmless fads like these.

Craigp, 1 day ago to random

Me: "What's the Unreal material node for getting the depth buffer? I need a quick fog effect."

Google: "10,000 video tutorials await!"

Me: "FUCK"

Video: "Fog is < skip skip skip > set to postprocessing < skip skip skip > now all we need is to get the distance to the pixel we're rendering-"

Me: "YEAAAAH WHAT IS IT?!"

Video: "Getting the distance to the pixel we're rendering will allow us to tell how far away the pixel we're rendering is which will allow us to get the proper amount of distan

Craigp, 2 days ago to random

Randomly wandering the back alleys of animated shorts on YouTube.

GOBELINS is an interesting group. Half their shit I hate, half their shit I love. Here's one I loved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKh-DP89FPY

Craigp, 2 days ago to random

Every few weeks I think about a setting where the writers introduced a fascinating piece of lore late in the story that completely invalidates everything about the story and then just... never acknowledge it.

"Whoops, accidentally made our entire story the worst possible story we could have told in this setting. Lol. Lmao. Nobody will notice."

Or - and here's an idea.

Or you could tell A GOOD STORY. One your setting amplifies and supports.

Craigp, 2 days ago to Unreal

Ugh, I finally decided to grab some #unreal assets from the shop (free ones) and I can't figure out how to put them in a project.

The only way it seems I can is to "create a project" based on those assets in the Epic Games Store Shopfront (unrealenginetab), then manually export every fuckin' asset to a format I can import somewhere else.

Craigp, 2 days ago to random

Yesterday, I talked about the idea that player crafted goods in an MMORPG could give visual shows depending on how players created them. For example, eating a sandwich would have a kaleidoscopic particle effect representing the ingredients and prep.

It'd be something the players could control, not just a few canned options. So even if the stats are the same, you get different experiences.

Especially if you can see other people's, and if you do course-based meals, drinks, whatever.

SO...

Craigp, 3 days ago to random

I was thinking about player-created experiences in MMORPGs, and I was thinking about food.

Obviously you can't really make players taste what you're cooking, and you don't particularly want to have highly variable statistical effects...

But what if when you ate, you got a lightshow "representing" the taste of the food?

Depending on how the player crafted the food out of what, you get a different show. And it's algorithmic: the players can shape it purposefully.

Craigp, 3 days ago to random

Forget INTJ or scorpio or whatever personality test nonsense you've been told. The real test is how you interact when you need to talk to someone but there's a language barrier.

Craigp, 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago) to blender

Edit: nevermind

#blender question: is there any way to have two identical skeletons with identical bone names in one file?

This shit where Blender automatically renames every bone and every vertex group in the duplicate breaks every game engine on the planet.

Craigp, 3 days ago to random

Ohhhhhhhhh. He stole Scarlett's voice because he saw a movie where she voiced a hot AI assistant.

Nearly all this nonsense is like that. That's the level of genius we're dealing with. The whole thing is driven by an absurd obsession with fiction.

Craigp, 3 days ago to random

It's fun when someone is good enough at animation that you know a character's awkwardness is a characteristic instead of artistic limitation.

Craigp, 4 days ago to random

The stove guy is fixing the leaky stove he installed and it sounds like a very rough surgery.

Dunno if you've ever had the joy of a gas leak, but they have a tool that sounds exactly like a movie heart monitor. Beep beep beep beeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Craigp, 5 days ago to random

I was thinking a bit more about mass LARPs, like in Jenny Nicholson's new extended Wagnerian longplay of the Star Wars Hotel.

One thing that sticks out to me is how trashy the gameplay is on the apps. Which is to be expected - obviously you can't have play which requires too much thought or precision, because guests HAVE to be able to complete it eventually no matter how drunk, feeble, or confused they are.

But how can you make that interesting?

Well, I think this is a missed opportunity.

Craigp, 6 days ago to random

Watching the new Jenny Nicholson movie, and it's a million hours long, so I'll have to split it between days.

But it's really got me thinking about how you design a mass LARP for visitors that takes several days.

A visitor isn't a dedicated LARPer. So how much can they be trusted to get into a role? How much activity can they do?

Obviously they can't be allowed to change the progression of the wider story - there's simply too many visitors so it needs to be mass produced. So what play?

Craigp, 6 days ago to random

Listen, I don't think it's clear, but now that the 400 straight days of rain and clouds are over, I'm having a great time working on shit.

I've made so many prototypes you would not believe it.

... I just am fundamentally not good at social media.

Well, I'm enjoying myself and that's what matters when it comes to hobbies.

Craigp, 6 days ago to random

Bands popping up randomly. Their sound is awful because it's quite wet out, but they're energetic!

Craigp, 9 days ago to random

After making fun of Pops Generic-Ass Pinball Parlour as a doomed trend-chasing little place, today someone got lost and asked me for directions to it, specifically.

Craigp, 11 days ago to random

Whenever I see a game where a character is jammed airtightly into a specific audience range, I can't help but imagine them in other stories, at other times in their life.

Like imagine an adventure game featuring a tween Putt Putt that's obsessed with Hot Topic and trying to start a YouTube channel.

Or you can go the other way. Imagine Kratos Teaches Typing.

Craigp, 11 days ago to random

Ohhhh. I just understood a paticularly incoherent song lyric. I thought I'd never understand the lyrics!

Now to do it ten million more times.

Craigp, 11 days ago to random

I was confused about all the construction equipment pulling in and out of my next door neighbor's place. They block my window completely most days, but I never hear them, you know, USING the stuff.

There's no signs they ever tore anything up with the 90 backhoes, for example.

Today I finally tracked down what's going on: the local street construction crews are using it for staging.

I dunno if they have a deal with the owners or what, but this is where they put shit so they don't block traffic

Craigp, 12 days ago to random

I figured out how to fix one of the two Unreal-Blender plugins. For reasons unknown to me, it now defaults its export directories to C:\ExportedFbx instead of (file location)\ExportedFbx.

It does this because, for some reason, there's an extra "" in the default target directories.

How did that... get introduced? Like... how do you create that bug?

Maybe a change on the Blender backend now interprets that extra slash less forgivingly or something?