The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024.
The 2D tiles were rendered out of 3D Studio Max, and the characters were meshes exported from Max.
> The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024.
This is unfortunately becoming increasingly untrue, as the forums where stuff like that was posted are rotting away, and Google’s advertisement optimized result ranking neglects the long tail.
And to the extent it is still true, it’s because pioneers like you figured it out and shared their results!
I guess I'm becoming the old, grumpy "back in my days, we used Google!" type of guy.
sadly your best "free" alteratives is going back to the days of smaller, specific communities, and searching through there. If the forum has a bad search, you go back to google but can then use Site:[website.com] as a filter to fine tune your results. .
I still don't use it - I can't trust it not to misrepresent what its citations say, and if I have to check the cited pages I might as well just use regular search.
It seems to be responsive to which sites you want ranked higher/lower. For instance I have wikipedia pinned which resolves a longstanding issue google has had where seo is prioritized over relevancy.
it's kinda weird how the web has increasingly become optimized for bots - and filled with content created by bots... to the point where as a human you now need a bot to cut through all the bloated SEO bullshit and filter out what you actually want to know...
I think in the default windows setup, your bing searches are "integrated" with your user account in some way.
Look, I don't mind the top 2 search results being ads (if you make them visually distinct from the rest), but I don't want all the other crap.
Bing's engine through duckduckgo is better. The ads don't get in your way once you've learned to start reading at the third entry on the page.
But it has become very bad at _discovering_ valuable information.
I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past:
- There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before.
- The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller.
- Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.)
It's extremely hard to find good content, even though _i know_ it is out there. Sometimes it's even hard to find sites I visited before, but I only remembered vague keywords.
And this is true especially for content that is of educational nature or interesting punditry. You know, the stuff that comes directly from people who have expertise and have earned a grounded opinion.
This is why I'm hoarding links to all sorts of interesting things. It's not an efficient way to do it and I don't know if there's a more general solution here. Very unfortunate.
On the other hand like the sibling comment mentions, perplexity is great at digging out obscure stuff sometimes. Provide enough details and use the pro type search and you may be surprised.
The problem is keeping the SEO bots out.
So the challenge becomes how to scale a collaborative platform while keeping out the bad actors.
I don’t think it supports auto-archiving, though you could probably use it in conjunction with pinboard for that.
QR codes got a second lease on life. Although they remained common in industrial use, they fell out of popular use almost a decade ago. Their resurgence is one of the few persistent, positive social changes to come out of the pandemic.
It took me a while to get the transform figured out, but once you do you are basically done for an entire tile set. This is also robust to vertical/horizontal overflow of tile art. The browser gives you reasonable ways to get at the various coordinate systems. You can either take the screen space coords directly or inverse transform them to get the orthographic (i.e. purely top-down) tile coords.
Modern web browser tech is really something to behold. It's maybe the best game engine if you hold it right. There are some crazy things you can do in the browser in 5 minutes that are completely infeasible everywhere else. For example, what if some of the tiles are x264 video files and not just static PNGs? What if we also mix in tiles that are drawn using webgl/canvas at each frame update? We could have the client itself handle rendering of tiles using scene descriptions received from the server.
I had a pet project for a while where I was extracting all the assets from Lineage 1 so I could try to recreate it.
My first solution (before the buildings in my game had multiple floors) was to take the ISO mouse position, grab a list of items within a cone spreading towards the screen, then:
1.) Loop through each item
2.) Create a sprite of the item (so I have direct access to RGBA info)
3.) Convert mouse coords to sprite coords
4.) Check if I'm hitting a pixel (i.e. alpha > 0)
5.) Keep track of this item
6.) Update if an item closer to the bottom of the screen (i.e. closer to camera) gets a hit
Once I added building height, this became impractical (too many items to loop through, sprite creation is CPU intensive).
New solution is to assign a 24 byte UUID to each item, convert that to RGB, draw it to the screen (invisible to the user), and then return a tiny texture every frame from the GPU at the mouse position. If the color in the texture is not black, then convert RGB back into the UUID.
PS: If you know how to draw so that alpha replaces existing alpha (instead of blending), please let me know so I can have 32 byte UUIDs!
[1] Source: I'm developing Metropolis 1998 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
I also remember being quite chuffed about coming up with a "novel" approach using dithered planar masks to offset colours into palette ranges for not-too-blocky lighting. Then Quake came out. You forget just how siloed we all were before the Internet took off; every wheel imaginable must have been reinvented so many times...
Figuring it out without google was immensely satisfying, though. Reminded me what I love about programming.
I’ve implemented this in my own games and I remember that the solution was basically raycasting. But it was NOT some 30 seconds thing. It was a major effort anyway.
(There are of course other options, like rendering a picture with a different color for each object, and sampling the color to figure out what you clicked on. And “color” may just be a 1-channel integer object ID.)
Absolutely loved it as a teen!
It was supposed to be a fully 2D game, and several months in we realized we'd run out of RAM for all the sprites with all their rotations. So somehow I managed to convert it into a 2D+3D game in two weeks.
edit: thats assuming you cant select anything that's been occluded. If you need to select things that've been occluded, lmao i dunno