root

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Everything posted by root

  1. ketchup on pizza

    I love this thread
  2. Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill and Rusted Root's Send Me On My Way are two songs that will make me emotionally check out of a trailer like, immediately, because by this point it just feels like low-hanging fruit.
  3. ketchup on pizza

    when is the idle thumbs livestream going to do a live taste-testing session of ketchup and other condiments on pizzas
  4. ketchup on pizza

    Where does this forum stand on the question of ketchup on pizza's children: the calzone, the pizza pocket, the pizza bagel, and 'pizza' lunchables?
  5. No Man's Sky

    I have completely disengaged from the plot as prescribed and am instead pursuing ship upgrades so that I can jump to any class of star that I like. I still keep running into Nada and Polo as I jump around, though, and their story seems to advance regardless of whether or not I'm visiting the Atlas stations.
  6. Plug your shit

    Has any consideration been given to expanding this thread into its own subforum? I think that the Thumb who doesn't have a few personal projects in rotation that they like to talk about is the exception, rather than the rule, and I'd find it really convenient to sift through a Plug Your Shit (or whatever it winds up being called) forum where each project had its own thread, the way they do in the Game Development forum.
  7. Life

    If you wanna get focused critique and move your 3d stuff forward, start posting it to Polycount. Also spend some time looking through their wiki - lots of useful starting points there.
  8. ketchup on pizza

    Paris Baguette also serves cronuts and I've never been to one that wasn't slammed with people any hour it was open. I miss living near one.
  9. ketchup on pizza

    I'm prepared to be mistaken regarding kewpie mayo!
  10. Organising Yourself

    A time management tool that has become invaluable to me, both for keeping myself accountable and for tracking billable hours spent on projects, is Neil Cicierega's work timer. You tell it which applications are your 'work' applications and the timer tracks the total time you spend actually being active in those applications, and the moment you tab out or idle out it turns red and judges you.
  11. ketchup on pizza

    I think salad cream's nearest US analogue is miracle whip (which I prefer to mayonnaise on sandwiches, to my wife's utter revulsion). If you want to try Japanese mayonnaise, Kewpie mayo can be found in most asian grocery stores, it's made with like rice vinegar and it's usually what you get on top of some kinds of sushi. Also it's the most viscerally unpleasant condiment packaging to use, owing to the very soft plastic bottle that it comes in. I would not put kewpie mayo on pizza because that is food crime for food criminals who belong in food jail (food gaol in the uk).
  12. No Man's Sky

    I think my least favorite thing in NMS right now is having to rebuild all of my multi-tool tech upgrades every time I get a new multi-tool. I've at least gotten smart enough to uninstall everything from my old multi-tool before switching, so that I have the materials on hand to port some of the upgrades over, but for the higher-level upgrades that require stuff like aquaspheres and radnox or whatever, it's still a drag.
  13. TITANFLAPS 2

    So I played two matches on the tech test so far and in both of them I just spent the whole time getting killed by people I didn't see until they'd shot me, which is basically the opposite of fun. I know it's a stress test of their servers but it's pretty obvious this is a game for hypercompetitive twitch gamers and not filthy casuals like me.
  14. Facerig avatars

    Hey thumbs, I'm not sure this is strictly 100% game development, but it is game adjacent, so I'ma put it here. I went to school with the hopes of learning 3d art for game development, but I didn't really do an adequate amount of homework in the schools I was looking at before applying - the extent of my investigation was oh cool, this school is in a lovely beachside town and they have a Maya class, and it turned out that the maya class was.. really rudimentary. So as a consequence of that, I didn't have a great portfolio when I wound up graduating in 2007ish, and after that, I spent a lot of time treading water in tech support jobs that didn't especially interest me. I've been fortunate enough to have built up an audience online that's supported me with a lot of commissioned 2d illustration in the last few years (and more recently, being willing to back my webcomic's patreon), and I've built some good working relationships with regular clients, but I've always regretted not bringing my 3d skills up to scratch. Last year, though, after the Facerig beta was released on Steam, a regular client of mine said they and a few of their friends were really interested in having custom avatars made, and I told them I was interested learning how to build avatars for the platform, and so we've worked out an arrangement where they're underwriting my learning process with the workflow - they get their avatars and I get to figure out how to use Zbrush and Substance Painter and how to rig stuff in Maya without having to stress too hard about how bills are gonna get paid. So I'm pretty stoked to have a second opportunity at possibly making my 3d skills Marketable again. Here's where I'm at now. I started with Zbrush sculpts, and was pretty pleased with what I was able to come up with, for never having touched the software before: The reason that I sculpted them as head-and-shoulders only is because all of the Facerig demo videos at the time only showed the avatars extending that far - it uses realtime facial motion capture to map the animations, and so I thought I only needed to model to the camera. Turns out that the official avatars have arms and hands and most of them go down to the waist, whoops. Retopo/unwrap progress, using Silo: And I started rigging the bear avatar in Maya - I skipped ahead to the rigging stage after unwrapping it (rather than texturing it right away) because I wanted to try to get a functioning prototype in the Facerig software as quickly as possible, even if it just has placeholder maps for materials. I figure I can go back and iterate over the materials as much as I want once I have the thing in-engine, but because the hardest and scariest part of the whole pipeline is rigging and skin weighting, I should get a handle on that first and save the texturing dessert for last. Rigging (and specifically skin weighting) is always the thing that gave me anxiety nightmares in college. I'm using this tutorial from eat3d about facial rigging to guide my progress, since the methodology it teaches lines up with the requirements for Facerig just about perfectly. I'm hoping that if I do this enough times it will become rote, rather than a weird terrifying sort of witchcraft that never seemed to work for me the way it's supposed to.
  15. Facerig avatars

    More progress. Got the wings and the hindlegs done, need to add claws, tailspade, and belly scales before moving on to retopo.
  16. No Man's Sky

    I'm really annoyed that there doesn't seem to be any way to temporarily turn off all UI elements because Fungus Photography Safari on Planet X is like a solid 60% of the fun for me right now.
  17. No Man's Sky

    While I was pillaging my treasure-cube planet, I learned that the Big Dog-style quad walker sentinels buckle when you give them a firm tap on the nose with a plasma grenade, and that became my strategy when they sent them after me, rather than running back to my ship every time. However: it turns out if you do this enough times, the sentinels lose their patience with you, bump your warrant level up another notch, and send one of those bigass AT-AT looking assholes your way instead. So I ran from this one for a little bit, but I had gotten pretty cocky once I learned that the quad walkers weren't a significant threat to me, and I had wandered far enough from my ship that the biped sentinel had spawned between me and my escape. I was careful to use the landscape as cover and found a position where I could pelt the big sentinel with plasma grenades while also avoiding its hate-cannon, and with this method, eventually dismantle it. Success! Sort of?? Killing it resulted in maxing out my warrant level and now there were three more. No big deal, there's a cave right here, when they can't see you they eventually forget that they're supposed to be trying to detain you with lasers. So I hide out and wait for the fuzz to buzz off. And wait. And wait. Huh, this is weird, normally all you have to do is break line-of-sight for about thirty seconds and your warrant level drops to zero. But these clowns don't seem to be going away? I'm still getting the screenshake from their stomping nearby and hearing beeping that I'm assuming are robot cusswords? So eventually I get tired of waiting and decide to try to book it back to my ship - they zap me a few times but my shields hold, and they can't move as fast as I can, so I'm able to get clear. However - the remainder of the time I spend on this planet, my warrant level is stuck at maximum and the 'danger' music continues to play. I fly a ways out from where I left the walkers, so I assume they're still pursuing me, which means that the game must have decided not to spawn more. So I can continue my completely legitimate business operation without intervention from local law enforcement. Over the space of about 90 minutes I'm able to accrue four million interstellar space dollars, and decide that it's now appropriate to look for franchise opportunities elsewhere. When I break atmosphere, though, my warrant level appears to have followed me into orbit. (Sort of: warrant level 5 on a planet appears to translate to warrant level 1 in space.) My computer tells me that sentinel ships are inbound. Like: this guys aren't nearly as excited as I am about how wealthy this planet's resources have made me? Do they just fundamentally not understand the value of free market enterprise in a healthy economy, or? Whatever, I engage my hyperdrive before they can get close enough to prevent me from jumping to warp. A few star systems down the road, I discover a planet that has gravitino balls littered all over the place. And a sentinel alertness rating of: aggressive. I hate cops.
  18. No Man's Sky

    Not really a spoiler, but here's a useful thing to know about upgrades that some folks might prefer to discover on their own -
  19. No Man's Sky

    I very much doubt requiring you to have an inventory slot free is a bug - alien interactions usually have a few different possible outcomes, and often at least one of those outcomes is them giving you a trade good of some kind (like a convergence cube or geknip or a vykeen dagger or whatever), so the game probably wants to make sure you have room to recieve it before allowing you to proceed. Also yeah not being able to set planetside waypoints or some kind of location bookmarking system is a huge drag. I'm always running into places I wanna return to - usually trading posts, so I don't have to blast off to the star system's space station whenever I wanna sell off my cargo - but not being able to keep them in some kind of options menu rolodex is kind of inconvenient. It is possible, from the universe map, to locate places you've already been, provided that you've transmitted your discoveries to the server. You hit the r1/l1 buttons to toggle between your waypoint/freelook options and then use the d-pad to select nearest discoveries, which will hop the cursor from discovered star to discovered star. It's kind of clunky, but I was able to return to my treasure cube planet using this method (and then make enough bank to beef my suit out to 36 inventory slots).
  20. No Man's Sky

    I got the ship with the upgraded hyperdrive and did not encounter that bug. Or maybe I did, I don't remember crafting a hyperdrive, but every ship I've bought since then has had a hyperdrive in it.
  21. No Man's Sky

    I occasionally peek at the no man's sky reddit and it's the same. People are so, so mad about multiplayer, and immediately spin up the steam teen outrage because they feel like they've been misled about the significance of multiplayer in the game. While it would be cool to for the game to have some interesting multiplayer mechanics - like base building or ship trading or asynchronous tradewars 2002 mechanics or whatever - it's really not necessary.
  22. No Man's Sky

    A thing that would be huge for me in this game is some kind of waypointing or bookmarking or note-taking system included in the atlas log. If I discover a space station that's buying at 95% higher than the galactic average, I want to be able to find and get back to that station quickly. Or my money-cube planet. Right now I expect I'll need to have a wirebound notebook to log my journey like some kind of savage.
  23. No Man's Sky

    I've noticed that some planets will have these pepperings of high-value harvestable items that don't have any apparent crafting use, they're just worth a lot of money and they really piss off the sentinels when you pick one up. I found this clutch of alien egg-looking plants that just said 'unknown' when I approached one and offered the press-square-to-interact prompt. I did, and it fell open with a gross noise, and there was a bigass pearl inside. So I then picked it up, and suddenly there was a Big Dog-style robot chasing after me, tearing up my shields with a laser. A few planets later I found something similar - these naturally-occuring pedestals with big red floating cubes hovering above them. Just everywhere! on this planet! I took one and sure enough it's worth like 20k units and it summons a hateful robot who wants me to take only screenshots and leave only footprints. So I spend some time on this planet, landing in random locations, locating a trajectory of cubes to collect, starting with the furthest from my ship, so I can keep grabbing them and stuffing them into my exosuits loot sack, giggling and shouting FUCK THE POLICE YOU ROBOT DICKS as I do this supermarket sweep routine toward my ship.
  24. No Man's Sky

    Today I was on a toxic planet and a storm was blowing in, so I ran to my ship to leave the surface, only to discover that I was completely out of plutonium, which I need to power the launch thrusters. So I had to get out of my ship and trudge out in this horrible storm and run my scanner and try to chase down some plutonium, repairing my environmental suit every few minutes as the storm kept fraying it down, and trying not to get lost or killed in my quest to refuel my ship so I could leave the atmosphere. This game is hella scifi.