Hats off to my man MrEdders. Yes, I’ll absolutely watch your three hour video on some obscure 90’s FMV noir game!

Since you were so insistent that it’s simple, I told you to go and implement non-rigid capes to two old games that never had more than a rudimentary physics engine, and report back just how easy it was. And seeing how your reply, three minutes later, started with the words “Already done,” I can only assume that you did it. So do tell, how easy was it?

Cause that was the task. Add soft body physics to Jedi Outcast, which is running on a modified Quake 3 Arena engine. Or create a new animation rig and redo all of the character animations. And you did it in three minutes. So show your work.

Took you three minutes to implement soft body physics in the Quake 3 engine, huh? Show your work.

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.

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”.

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.

I lose Virtual Desktop for my wireless VR, 3ds Max and Solidworks for CAM. If all I did was gaming, media and browsing, I’d switch. Which is why my HTPC, only used for couch gaming and media, is running Bazzite.

Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven’t touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.

Definitely interested to read your take on why colonizing Mars is never happening. Far as I’m aware, there’s no laws of physics stopping it, it’s rather a number of complex engineering problems.

If Supes is doing it to stop some dickwad from destroying the Earth, enslaving humanity, or erasing the concept of pizzas, I’ll be yelling at him to do it again. Fuck the car, I can walk!

It’s apparently not okay when someone you don’t like says something you’d otherwise agree with. Can’t have complexity like that these days.

If the interesting thing about your character is that they’re not human, you don’t have an interesting character. Fite me.

Nope. Not until they’re going for a Ship catch. It has to come down somewhere and the only places it can safely come down are either the ocean or the catch tower. So until they get the catch hardware to a state where they believe it would work out, every Ship is going to fly a trajectory that ends in the ocean.

Suppose we’ll see. Not unusual to have a long gap between the early launches, lots of data to analyze for the first time. Was 8 months between the first and second launch of Ariane 6, for example.

Their first orbital rocket, New Glenn, had its inaugural flight earlier this year. IIRC, it performed rather well in the “launch to orbit” aspect, but they lost the booster as it was coming back to land on a drone ship. It’ll take them time to iron out the kinks, but as long as they don’t scrap the project, I don’t see why it couldn’t become a contender in heavy lift.

The basics (getting the OS installed, some initial settings to your liking etc) is quick. Managed to go from “completely untouched build” to “we gaming on Linux now boys” in a couple hours and most of that was waiting for BG3 to download on my 100Mbit connection. Pretty much everything I needed worked right on the first boot. Then again, I didn’t have much data to transfer over.

I found a reddit post from a year or so ago, reportedly Bazzite has drivers for the dongle out of the box. I’m a little more concerned about the keyboard+touchpad combo, since I’d imagine that’s not quite a standard device. Fortunately, I give negative fucks about any RGB, so I really don’t care if any RGB the components happen to have don’t even light up.

Sure, buddy.

Planning for the future has nothing to do with whether or not one fears death. And it’s perfectly okay to live more in the moment, because the moment is all we have. The past is gone, the future is yet to come, you exist in the now. So go ahead, procrastinate a little! The vast majority of our problems are not so time-critical that an hour long walk is going to ruin your future. Treating yourself to a coffee and a donut every now and then doesn’t leave you fated to be destitute in 5 years.