jan_Inkepa

our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?

> From a human perspective, it's not apparent why, as a large part of the solution is very repetitive. It feels as if there should be a more condensed representation for iterating over problems like that one.

I'm not sure how 'in' you are, you might know this already, but for sokoban IIRC the recommended way is to treat things is topologically - you always do a flood-fill empty space from the player so that the decision isn't whether to go up/down/left/right on this turn but which accessible side of which crate to push. It decomposes quite well, and maybe makes the complexity a bit more obvious? Hmm...

I haven't looked into mazebench, but yes this is very related stuff.

There's computational complexity, then there's human complexity. I've thought a lot about this over the years (I've made a bunch of puzzle games, and puzzlescript, an engine/language for making grid-based puzzle games), and the only paper I've read that's made me think 'huh' was "Difficulty Rating of Sokoban Puzzle" by Jarušek and Pelánek ( https://www.fi.muni.cz/~xpelanek/publications/stairs2010-fin... ).

While I have a feeling that subject 'difficulty' is necessarily a slippery concept, they focus on 'context switching' as a key element of difficulty. In sokoban terms - how often you have to alternate between pushing one box and pushing another. This too can be gamed/trivialized, but, when I used it as a heuristic is was very good at generating the most horrifically difficult levels, much moreso than just going for 'solution length'.

On more general notions of complexity. In sokoban terms, the number of crates trumps everything else - for solvers I've written you quickly get exponential explosions with the number of crates. Nothing else really is significant.

I've also been working on solvers for more general classes of these games (puzzlescript games) and it's surprising how powerful generic solvers still are. PuzzleScript+MIS https://dekeyser.ch/puzzlescriptmis/ (not by me) is one powerful tool that uses PuzzleScript as a basis. I've worked on speeding up the solver a bunch (not currently integrated), figuring out good general heuristics for different kinds of games ( https://github.com/increpare/puzzlescript-labs has various experiments in this direction, including a modded version of PS+MIS). It's a nice optimizaiton problem for focusing on making numbers go down - there are lots of games to test on.

i see pablodraw up top - you know your stuff and have good taste!

I was on a forum that had one member who is very knowledable on the subject of the forum. But now he...only ever responds with "I asked gemini your question, here's the answer:", and it's a real shame. His online person has become totally hollowed out. (These aren't like newb question threads, these are conversational topic threads). I think he doesn't know or care how valuable his point of view was. -_- Some communities aren't affected by this AI stuff negatively at all, but I suspect some communities (and people) are getting gutted.

( When he starts his own threads, they're now of the form "I asked gemini question X and this several-page-long attached markdown file is how it answered" )

a tricolon crescens ^^ https://latinaadvitam.blogspot.com/2007/02/poetry-device-of-...

Here's an editorialized title in the other direction: On Roblox everyone can make games and play them with their friends.

Here's my suggestion for an amendement:

"Roblox devs will need plus membership to publish to young users"

(Yes, I would recommend a change of title.)

The step is a significant one, and Roblox has taken one other measure recently, restricting chat a lot for minors (https://x.com/Roblox_RTC/status/2043723470899437623) . I think this is a move to satisfy people concerned with child safety, not a cash grab. I think RB hq probably know they're making tradeoffs of keeping parents happy, while devs will be annoyed/fewer. But everyone can still make games and play them with trusted friends. Likely damages the network effect (Roblox's multiplayer aspect being one of its best parts), but oh well.

>Hence you gain nothing

You're saying you get nothing, but you perhaps underestimate how time-consuming and expensive even the easiest company shut down in the Germany is. (I had a very smooth process winding down my company in the UK - you have my very sincere sympathies that things are a bit rockier for you).

>if your main shareholders and directors are physically in Germany and you reseat the company to where-ever, Germany is going to see and act like this is a de-facto German company. Hence you gain nothing, you get more paper work.

Looking online, here's a german tax-advisor who talks about the strategy of liquidating your company by first merging it with a uk company, saying you can close a company in 4-6 weeks by this process (though they recommend against it after brexit for liability reasons, but mention Ireland and malta as options). In germany you have a year of waiting, and lots of additional notary/accounts work. (OTOH, I don't know how you get it down to 4-6 weeks and avoid the uk's company house gazette notification period - they must pick a different kind of company - if your fees for closing down a company in germany are going into the thousands (or tens of thousands) for notaries, liquidators fees, and the like).

https://www.stmatthew.de/brexit-gmbh-sitzverlegung

Once again, not my specialty area, I just...wanted you to know that it does happen, is a specialty area of work for some companies, and it's presumably not irrational behaviour.

I've been told by a lawyer that a common sensible step in closing companies in Germany is to first...reseat the company in the UK ... (at least pre-brexit - not sure if things have changed). Think of how bad and expensive the process has to be for this extra step to be worthwhile.

I'm actually a fan of his game/prototype Painter from 2006 - was just talking about it today.

http://number-none.com/blow/prototypes/index.html

It's very different from his more recent stuff, but charming.

(I'm a fan of Kwirk. I had it as a kid on Gameboy, and thought it would have aged badly, but no it's still good!)

interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..

Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)

>Trying to optimize to some kind of perfect pixel alignment shouldn't be a goal anymore.

If you're trying to display pixel art (or make games with pixel art), being able to have integral upsizing is very useful. Antialiasing doesn't cut it, and the eye notices when you do non-integral nearest-neighbour upscaling and some pixels are the wrong size.

Huh (having scanned but not read in detail the post), interesting approach. I'm not that well-versed in this area (as a game developer, I tend to jump straight to nearest-neighbour), but hadn't come across this before. I love the pathological example of a checkerboard pattern - very pleasing worst-case scenario, where I suspect it would just be a grey blur. However, the developer doesn't show us the equivalent for the suggested filter - systemically showing side-by-side comparisons of different filters would be useful. I suspect the resulting artefacts would be randomly blurry lines, which could also stand out. But nice to see people thinking about these things...

Here's a related disucssion on what 'pixelated' should mean from the css working group

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5837

(every so often browsers break/rename how nearest-neighbouring filtering works. I hope at some point it stabilizes lol - I note in the discussion linked nobody else cares about backwards compatibility ...).

> It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character

More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?

I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!

(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)

Yeah, I remember a friend getting a call during coworking and her face just went white, and after the call she told us that was the tax people calling about irregularities (she had moved countries and was slow in sorting out her tax situation), and we all bought it - there was no sober "oh yeah it's a scam" advice from us - it was really perfectly timed, and took a day or to for her to reason through that it must be a scam. (No money lost though!)

>Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).

Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?

In the painting there's a delicate interrelation between colours - you have browns/greens/blues in the dark parts, and more whites/yellows/blues/pinks in the light parts. I wouldn't describe it as bland, though it is in a sense washed-out. BotW doesn't, and probably can't have that level of handling of shades colour in the enviroment graphics if nothign else because of the technical constraints of the Switch hardware.

Compare, if you will the sunset shown here from BotW: https://imgur.com/a/TvS2iHa with the 'hand'-drawn art from the switch store page: https://imgur.com/5clZZjg

Looking at the screenshot, what can you say - you can say that it's nice that the green/yellow of the sky is mirrored in the green landcape with yellow rivers. And the back-lighting of the sun is helping give definition to some of the mountains/hills, which is nice. But I don't see very much subtle going on with the landscape.

Looking at the art, you can see a lot more dynamic range, clearer silhouetting of mountain ranges at various distances, whereas the actual game is more monotone-green. You can also see the fog doing a lot more work of making the shape of the land clear. There are some bits of fog/mist in the screenshot as well, but they're not doing as much heavy lifting in terms of giving shape to the landscape.

The Switch is really limited on the hardware front, and I can't imagine what kind of trade-offs the art team had to make to get to where they are - it's a very difficult balancing act that I only understand a small part of. Nintendo also tend to be very conservative/restrained in their 3d style (I remember being somewhat unnerved by Ubisoft's "Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle" Mario game, because it went super high-production-quality).

It feels a bit cheap to give as an example, but the 3D MMO Love by eskil steenberg tried to emulate the impressionist style, and did a striking job: https://imgur.com/9U18eRZ The bloom effect is doing a lot of heavy lifting to make the bright colours pop, but even in the less glowy areas there is quite subtle layering of colours going on and one does have the feeling that the colours are playing with eachother. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc02ijaw-Tg a video of it in action, if you are curious ).

As another comparison, looking at elden ring you can see they've gotten 'using fog to make landscape silhouettes pop' down to a fine-art (maybe they're even over-reliant on it) https://imgur.com/a/5GEePwL And looking at the landscape you have really nice looking brown/oranges in the fields in the foreground, black/greys/browns in the mid-ground, rocky cliffs, fog is actually glowing, and you have some green forests in the top-left. That's a lot of nuance for what's essentially a brown landscape. BoTW doesn't have that - would it have it if the team had the hardware capabilities and time and budget? Who knows...

The problem I personally have with the Zelda example given is that it looks really bland to me - the landscape looks really washed out - the author says "Somebody would paint this. It’s artistic.", but I don't think anyone would paint with such bleached-out colours.

The editor is really cool, how it highlights what parts of the file are active as the song plays.

A most charming and very 90s translation of 'irrumabo' in this poem bequeathed to us the following result:

"I'll sodomize and clintonize you,"

in 2d, but not in 3d though (like in the video on top of the article)!

I had to reload a few times - eventually it loaded everything.

"Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible."

I'm really stuck at the start here - moving a pen so that it pointing in all directions is basically impossible - the space of directions is two-dimensional and you can only trace out a one-dimensional curve (or pair of curves).

Ok, wikipedia makes it clearer:

"In mathematics, a Kakeya set, or Besicovitch set, is a set of points in Euclidean space which contains a unit line segment in every direction."

Quanta writers are generally very good at explaining things, but wikipedia wins hands down in this case...

Yeah - if there was just a risk of having one I'd probably get mine removed, but yeah - I think I remember looking into it once and coming away thinking it's probably best to leave it as is. (I can't remember the details).

Is there any way to zoom out of the graphs once you've zoomed in by clicking and dragging?

A friend related to me that at a maths seminar recently, the speaker "accidentally reused the letter z. and saved himself by erasing the crossbar from one set of z, and naming them zed vs. zee"

It just has, uh, diarroeha...yeah I can't spell it either