Why does the moon change size when you snipe it in GTA?
insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com
insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com
One of my favourites is Sonic 3D's secret level select screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA
Like another poster said: brilliant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...
And where do they look? Game data? Obscure forum comments?
I think it got removed from last year's remake.. probably because the new guys didn't know what the hell it meant. Like the people that paint over Banksy art.
https://www.tumblr.com/sunspotpony/712834929488216064/so-i-d...
I logged in
document.querySelector("#glass-container").style.display = "none";
Then since scrolling was disabled, I just used the window.scroll() function to scroll down and see the small parts of the article that I wasn't able to read before the popup appeared.
This works because Tumblr doesn't actually remove the parts of the article it doesn't want you to see from the HTML output, so it's still perfectly viewable if you can get past the popup. This is not generally the case though, for example most news sites actually remove the text you're not supposed to see if you don't log in.
If I could figure out how to re-enable scrolling, I'd have a recipe for a pretty delicious Greasemonkey script.
Dear tumblr -- Sincerely fuck off with this bullshit, thanks.
www.tumblr.com###glass-container
www.tumblr.com##body:style(overflow:auto !important)It's not like it's a massive effort to support those mons - they haven't been doing significant 3D model updates since the 3DS era already.
>They all need a moveset evolution
Neither of these have to shift a substantial amount between generations. The current stats & moves structure solidified by gen 4 already.
>They all need a habitat
No they don't. Trade them in and out of Home/Bank/whatever to move across generations, trade with other players, etc. This was standard flow up until the latest few generations.
There is not much extra game design consideration needed until you're talking about new features. But a good percentage of mons are still in the new games, so is it really that much extra effort to balance when you have new features in play? It can be as simple as just not giving older mons the same new abilities. Not every one got mega evolutions, for example.
Gamefreak are just lazy. Employee reviews seem to confirm this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFWjhfhJJqE
Or actually, maybe they should be given a promotion because despite all the bugs and poor performance the game still sold incredibly well, so why spend any more money and time on development if it clearly doesn't matter.
I can't decide.
There are no feedback for the developers once the game is out, they don't know if these bugs are triggered or how frequent, so they could be sending out defective games and the process that would have caught this has been circumvented. It's kinda of a dick move by a developers who feel like they know better.
It is almost 2024 and there's production software out there with "catch all and do nothing" exception handlers. Software that assumes memory allocation never fails.
I remember playing through the first F.E.A.R. and noticing a coffee machine in an office kitchen. It had an unknown brand name on it so I checked it against the game's credits and it matched up with one of the game's artists.
My favourite, though, was playing through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and finding three sea shells on the wall next to a toilet.
Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation.
But that's still alive in indie games today. Check out the games developed by "New Blood Interactive" for example Dusk, it's full of throwbacks and memes to classic games from the '90's. You can find them on Steam or at https://waste.money/
Only committee-approved and/or mandated easter eggs permitted. Don't forget to catalogue them all so the social media team have more content.
(And yes, I've worked in games myself so I 100% see the reason why they left it in disabled, iirc there is 2 or 3 levels with geometries but broken scripts included on disc in the largest game I worked on)
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)
(2) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get...
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protectio...
It's a loss for sure, but at least they still appear in some indie games.
A cop gets "frozen" as a punishment and when he gets reawoken the world has changed. Including the toilets. They now use 3 seashells instead of paper.
As a result, if you get too close to it with cheats or glitches, the whole windmill will turn and fire at you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00LITqBDEg
Also Fallout 3's train mechanics, which were implemented as a piece of wearable armour:
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout...
And the Ascend ability from Tears of the Kingdom was a developer tool that got repurpose into an in game ability when they realised it'd make the caves much more convenient/enjoyable to navigate.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom...
Even PS2 games that had the option for widescreen sometimes left out things like menus and the HUD. It was pretty hacky, but I played PS2 on a 4:3 screen for years before I had anything else. Never seemed like a big deal.
http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234?lang=nl
Even references the moon!
-Old Russian Proverb
Though it seems he wasn't the first to use the phrase: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50691/did-milto...
It was highly amusing to read.
In web dev people struggle to put text to screen. The struggle is real. Everybody has opinions on what the code should look like, how it should work, and will scrutinize each word to death. All of that internal pain is on top of megabytes of giant layers of abstractions that likely went through the same ass pain. Ironically, almost nobody in web dev (maybe about 4% of the people doing this work) actually has any idea what they are doing. Its almost as though people are posturing to justify their existence.
'whats this?'
Now given it was like a 16x16 texture, he could have said anything..
'its <name> as a stick man with his ** out!'.
Handed them the ammo.
However, related to the moon, we did a demo / prototype one time, and put it into a soft QA cycle before sending to publishers. One of our QA (rightly, but sigh) raised a bug saying the moon was upside down, and given the location of the game, it would be rotated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736
"Just remove the duck."
if(time() > 10_years_in_future)
duck.enable();God mode for example, that allows to fly through the map, is the OG of fast travel.
Nowadays computers are so powerful you can have full blown editor doing essentially all the cheat codes, but back in the day, you'd want to be testing the construction of X, something you don't have money for, so you'd press a few keys to change hex values and you'd have (maxvalue - current cash) instantly, so you could test more effectively.
Cheat codes would be hidden enough that regular players wouldn't find them but not impossible that players could use them.
I think the logic is, you've paid for the game, you should be able to access all the content.
Nowadays, since games are such big business, it's all too serious.
It was a TSR (terminate and stay resident, esentially a background process) that you'd load before firing up the game.
Once in the game, at any time you could press a hot key (F12, I think) and it would freeze the game and open a TUI with a hex editor where you could search for values (money, number of lives, whatever else you could think of), change them and go back to the game.
Fun days!
That kind of fiddling was such a big part of my developing an interest in computers and building a solid understanding of how all the magic works internally, it's a bit of a shame that kids nowadays can't really jump into fiddling around like that since the devices they'd play games on are much better locked down (or on PC, require you to already know what you're doing to be able to snoop around in another program's memory).
But for stuff where exact matching wasn't practical like say a more or less continous health-bar, you could instead filter by searching for values that decreased / increased / didn't change.
Of course you would also have to guess at the data type but there weren't that many likely choices.
Either that, or you'd just go about trying one by one until you found it, then tried to figure out a pattern of what was around it and make notes on a paper for next time.
These days multiplayer is always roped into it like with GTA V just so they can milk those sweet microtransactions.
Interesting enough, you can often find the equivalent of cheat codes in the accessibility settings. Celeste is a good example.
Another reason for cheat codes: you can give them to reviewers, so they can look at all the content, without having to beat the game the normal, slow way.
- shoot. loot.
- fast travel, dump loot, fast travel return.
- shoot. loot.
...
Also, BL guns have lots of hidden parameters which may or may not correspond to (or be enhanced by) your build. Playing by green arrows alone is pretty… casual.
I like borderlands but good god is it a slog for me to play because I have to pick up ALL the loot and kill ALL the things and do ALL the side quests so now I'm 40 hours in on my first play through and haven't even beaten the game yet while all the normal people are talking about the new mechanics in super ultra extra hardcore vault hunter mode newgame++++
I downloaded a mod for Fallout 4 to make most things weightless so I could actually play the game instead of picking up every single 10mm round when I don't even use pistols.
> The collision in a game is usually different from the visual polygons. This is because collision detection is relatively slow. A building with 10,000 visual polygons may have only 1,000 collision polygons. As a consequence, the map may have holes that you cannot see. This is what's going on when you fall through the map.
> This makes it very hard for the testers to test the collision on the map. During gta4, the testers found it particularly hard as characters could fall through the map depending on their animations and there was no way they could touch every bit on the map.
> This is why they asked for a rag doll gun. Alexander Roger created a special gun that instead of bullets would fire rag doll characters. The testers could go round the map and fire rag dolls at every building and hill side. --https://insiderockstarnorth.blogspot.com/2023/11/bugs-bugs-b...
Only later did I realize that stuff like model viewer, events viewer, stage select, etc. was all stuff developed for/by the QA team.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Calculator_Const...
Leave some glaringly misplaced or ugly in the UX, the boss/client will ask you to change that and won't nitpick other things that aren't worth the time. A kind of bait if you will for nitpick feedback.
:)
It's come to my attention some of my former colleagues don't enjoy it as much as I thought they would.
No pressure from R*. My own choice."
Wow, what bunch of fuddy duddies.
You can still read it here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231120213502/https://insideroc...
Like the Calculator Construction Set on the original Mac: <https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...>
Usually you would do that by just adding a console variable they can tweak
The 3 ways to go about it:
1. give them something real to play with, like this
2. overrule them and tell them it's done
3. tell them it's baked into a 3rd party library you're using and will take a month to change