There’s an XKCD comic for that.
This comic is so old, that both should be rather easy now
She did get her research team after all :)
Now try to identify if it’s a fish
🐬
There’s no such thing called fish.
- Stephen Jay Gould (Biologist)
Or there’s fish and we are one, or there’s fish but hagfish, dogfish and lungfish are something else.
I guess we could return to medieval and say it’s based on shape not taxonomy, too, so whales would be fish.
It’s why taxonomy uses latin for this… the definition of english words are based on common usage which isn’t going to line up to any kind of scientific categorization. English is always changing and scientific categorization is also always changing when there’s more empirical data. These changes are independent of each other so it was wisely decided long ago to not even try to make english words consistent with scientific taxonomy.
So in common usage, yeah it’s based around the general shape but it isn’t a whale (big mammal) a dolphin (a relatively smaller mammal). A shark might be called a fish but more likely someone will just call it a shark instead of just using just “fish”. This is fine for communication among laypeople, if marine biologists are having a conversation about those same animals, they break out the latin and there’s no confusion.
Also my understanding is that in medieval times, the word whale actually refereed to a specific species of whale… what we know call the Right Whale, which is nearly extinct. So a word for a species became a word for a group of species and then it was awkward how to refer to that original species. What kind of whale is that? “It’s a whale whale… you know the original whale… the proper whale… the right whale.” There’s actually a paragraph in Moby Dick about this.
English is weird and changes in weird ways. Just use latin if you want to be scientifically precise.
I mean, some of the taxanomic divisions do have common names as well - jawed fish and ray-finned fish might come up in that conversation. And don’t forget some of the formal names and roots are Greek as well.
What kind of whale is that? “It’s a whale whale… you know the original whale… the proper whale… the right whale.” There’s actually a paragraph in Moby Dick about this.
Was that the weird chapter that was just a biology lesson, but was also completely wrong?
Oof
Fish? You mean a water bird?
Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I’m sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it’s still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn’t changed over the years.
Ebird/ Merlin bird id does this wonderfully.
Having taken an ML class, with some of my college notes I could do this and “understand” it… but the weights would still be a black box. AI training is black (box) magic.
Oh, yeah, the specific example listed was solved within roughly a month of the comic being posted. But the idea still applies, as seen with the twitter post above.
Can’t wait for the Disney live action movie remake of XKDC comics!
Plot twist: it will be written and created by AI:-(.
It will feature all sorts of jokes about using qwerty and windows
And Linux, if the Fediverse had any say about the matter! (Or xkcd either:-D)
It took almost exactly 5 years from publication for that to be commonplace.
TBF it had been a long standing problem for roughly a half century before this. Specifically birds were the thing researchers tried to identify first, which is probably the reference here.
only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.
Alt text: In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they’d have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we’re still working on it.
Edit: seems I’m the third person to comment this! :')
I love how this is actually an example of progress. These days, ML can be used for this kinda thing and it’s not too bad at it even.
https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
This page about it still exists, but I guess the identification site died with Flickr.
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I want dresses, and I don’t care if they clip through literally everything!
My bg3 character is female. She was in slacks until act 3 where she could finally have a dress
We looted everything. I feel like there are two dresses in the game: the robe Gale wears and a white dress you find in a Balders Gate house near the end of the game
Only in 3D. In 2D, you slap some pixels on top and there’s your scarf:
and add a couple of frames to the sprite sheet in order to animate the scarf if that’s required.
Do you have the Orb yet?
I actually do, yes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of hours played and I made it down there and back out exactly once. 🙃
Lol, I still died half way up my one orb run, so you’re further than me. I save scummed right before Zot:5 and did get it on my second try, but that doesn’t count.
It was a gnoll abyssal knight IIRC. What about you?
According to the screenshot I took, it was a gargoyle berserker with an axe. I had some ridiculous luck with armor drops, so basically every resistance was either maxxed or close to it. I only really got into trouble down in Zot:5…
And hmm, I should do more with Lugonu. I never really have a reason to pick him, but that means I also don’t experiment with him, so I won’t really learn what reasons there are to pick the guy…
Lugonu actually started as a goddess, before being turned into a genderless abomination. I think I’ve seen the devs use it/it’s pronouns.
Yup. The panic buttons are nice, the easier rune is nice, and back when there was Ak there was a cheap blink+blink other ability. That character used a distortion-branded demon whip to great effect as well, IIRC. Happy playing!
I tend to find it’s the other way around. Once you’ve got a scarf modelled and rigged, it’ll work* for all animations, but for animated 2D sprites you have a lot more things to do.
* May have visual artifacts like clipping
Tbf, you can make the characters wear anything, but it won’t look good. Lol
Welcome to second life
The logical answer is that too many Computer Science majors loved Silver Age comic books.
The Martian Manhunter was stronger than superman, but couldn’t handle fire. Green Lantern was similarly godlike, but was unable to control anything colored yellow.
There’s already a codebase for bursting from the ground in an explosion of lava. Everyone wants that.
You’re the first person asking for a scarf, and our system doesn’t even know what a neck is.
Time for the old NPC-with-a-train-for-a-hat trick.
I worked at a company that made IoT stuff (which is an increasingly archaic term). The web team was pitching using a third party tool called ThingSpace to view and manage the things. The web dev said ThingSpace could do all these amazing things automatically. The manager said “can we change the color of the background?” The web dev said “…. no.”
body { background-color: pink!important; }I didn’t say they were very good web devs.
It doesn’t really matter how good of a web dev you are, you really shouldn’t be changing any part of someone else’s website… They tend to do things like call the police on you for “hacking” and other such frivolities /s
Well yeah, we have a character model for the giant demon and the giant demon has a huge use case.
A scarf? That’s a model extension. Either you’re asking me to create a whole new character with a scarf baked into the mesh that will deform weirdly as the character moves, or you’re asking me to implement an accessory-anchor system all for the sake of a scarf (albeit other accessories might use this new framework) which will then need a physics/cloth sim to even look half good.
my thoughts. system has to be made for costuming from the get go and you bring in a wierd new character race and everything breaks for them.
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A character model is made up of “slots”. The head slot, the chest slot, the legs slot and so on. When you equip a piece of gear, it replaced the body mesh in that slot. So a helmet model replaces the head, a cuirass replaces the chest, I think you follow. If you want a piece of gear to only partially cover the character, you need to create a new slot. But gear is easy to implement, since it conforms to the character’s “body” and uses the same animations.
Now add a scarf. First, you need to create a new slot, so that equipping the scarf doesn’t replace the head or chest. And then comes the question of animations. Are you going to have the scarf just lay flat against the character? That’s the easiest approach, but it’ll be completely static, look like ass and probably clip through at least some of your armors. You could use a cloth sim. If your scarf mesh has enough polygons, it’ll look the best. But it’s also computationally expensive, especially if you go with mesh-based collisions for maximum eye candy. And what types of objects can the scarf collide with? Just the character, or world objects as well? Every object the scarf collides with will create a whole new slew of physics calculations, all the time, dropping your performance in the gutter like a mob snitch. Or you could create a bespoke rig for the scarf. It’ll look better than a static object and won’t have a notable performance hit, but won’t look as good as the cloth sim, especially since it won’t collide properly with whatever else your character is wearing. And you’d need to create matching animations for literally every animation the character can possibly do. Every. Single. One. Your animators would want to murder you. And they will, when you come back to them a little later and say “Okay, real impressed with the scarf, now let’s make 5 different ones. And I want capes.”
TL;DR: It’s not just another piece of gear.
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I didn’t think I’d have to point out that adding a cape is a similar pain in the ass. Dynamic objects like scarves and capes are not the same as a shirt. If your character framework isn’t set up for them from the start, implementing them is not as simple as “just plop it in there bruh”.
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Right. Go add capes that aren’t just rigged to the existing skeleton to Jedi Outcast or Morrowind, then come back and tell me how easy it was.
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You’re assuming the game in question already had character customization in place.
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You could import fabric physics and just have it lie there, but that’s going to be a bigger hit on performance than you possibly can imagine and it will move weirdly (in large part becomes we’re not modeling wind, just fabric in a vacuum) and the model features it will lie on top of won’t deform accurately from the simulated weight, etc…
Feature requests never account for the performance hit.
There is only one rule. It’s much easier to add new things than to change existing things
Well, does the giant demon also have to be able to equip the scarf?
I just want a game that lets my avatar be left handed.
Counterstrike did that over 25 years ago. Yikes I’m old
They just mirror the viewmodel
Counter strike
Hahah
No.
Could I at least get some left handed emoji?
We’ll see with the investors
minecraft allows left-handedness ever since they added the off-hand mechanic
I think before that even
As a gameplay programmer, I got anxiety from reading this (and I think the animators are already in a fetal position on the floor)
Would it be possible to just mirror what the player is seeing so literally everything is backwards? Like a visual effect ‘in-post’? Obviously that would mess with any printed text but other than I cant think of big issue?
The Zelda tactic
You could even do that on the player’s model specifically. But it’s still a maybe, you’re almost guaranteed to get some cursed bugs due to every preexisting code having been made with right handedness in mind.
I’m sure animators are internally screaming at the reasons why this will make some originally right handed animations look off but that’s not my area of expertise.
In reality it’s probably not the hardest thing to do gameplay-wise, especially if you’re doing it from the very beginning of the project, but I don’t think you can simply mirror animations (and some animations-related logic) and have it look natural, so you’d have to make dedicated animations and possibly logic for left hand strikes, right hand blocks etc. which would obviously be much more expensive. But yeah that’s probably what Minecraft does now for example, and since they have a very low level of detail on player characters and their animations it looks alright.
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Can’t you just swap x for -x. Run some unit tests just in case. We’ll push to prod next Wednesday. Sound good? Got to dash, strategy meeting started 5 minutes ago. Seeyoubye.
As a programmer, I’ve learned to cringe at any suggestion from someone that starts with “can’t you just”. Cause I guarantee you, I can’t “just” do that. It’s way more complicated than just.
😬 I am familiar with the PTSD trigger words.
You little shit xD
dies
Ok, but all your dialogue will be spoken backwards.
Noted. I’ll talk to Jeff in FX and get all the .wav files reversed. Shouldn’t add too much to storage. I wonder if lip sync will be affected? I’ll mention it to Sue when she gets back next week.
That makes sense. All left handed people are witches anyways, they’ll feel right at home
The location that the player is visually interacting with would be different, but the world wouldn’t know that. Eg. in a cutscene, the player reaches out and touches a button on a control panel. If the player’s X is flipped, their left hand will be further left than their right hand, and will miss the button visually as they go to press it. Asymmetrical animations might also be fucked, ie. sidestep/jump right normally extends the left leg for leverage, but now their right leg would push off visually and they would still move right.
I don’t want you to come to me with problems. I want you to come with solutions. I’m going to schedule some action orientated soft skills training for you next month. There is a push to increase our education KPIs so budget is available.
Not sure whether to upvote because this is so accurate it’s funny or to downvote because it’s infuriating 😂
Ow that one hits me right in the briefcase
changes all weapons to be two-handed
This way, no one will complain and there’s only one thing to maintain!
You can hold a two handed weapon favoring the left, or the right.
😵
You’ll just hold it right at the center of your screen. You’ll not see anything, but it’ll work!
You’ll just hold it
rightleft at the centerFTFY
hahaha
Always have to remind myself of this when managers ask me if something could be done. If it’s easy, I naturally get a little annoyed that they’re even asking. But knowing that is my job, not theirs, and it’s good that they ask. There’s lots of places where they assume and things go badly.
It’s always nice of them to ask
Remember the phrase “it’s not in-pattern”. Another one is “it’s possible, but expensive”
It’s not natural lol
That’s cute 😅
