I’m not very familiar with TotK and I’m not sure how familiar you are with game development, but just in case you’re not very:

When making something like a shadow puzzle it is very unlikely they’re actually checking shadow conditions, and if they are it’s probably very sparse/only a couple of pixels.

For instance, if you know the position of the light source, the position of the shadow catcher and the position of the shadow receiver you could approximate the shadow casting with much simpler geometry. If Link is just treated as a box then you only need to check where each corner would cast a shadow and see if that overlaps the area you care about.

When done correctly the player would think it’s link’s shadow that’s being tested but in reality it’s nothing to do with the shadow, it’s just a much simpler estimation of a shadow that works well enough to trick players.

Game development is all smoke and mirrors. Tell the players one thing such as “This NPC is always at this location” then unload them when the player isn’t looking. It’s all sweet lies and I love it.

Balders Gate 2 was developed by Bioware and published by Interplay. That’s not to say Larian couldn’t have learned from it anyway, but it’s not a lesson they would have learned from experience.

Question: how do you compose such a long post (as above) with speech to text? Do you just have a masterful ability to dictate a point eloquently, first time, or do you have to go back and make edits manually afterwards?

I noticed verbal fillers in your (presumably lower effort, as its shorter) response, but none so noticeable in your longer initial post- which surprises me if both were only dictated

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I agree wholeheartedly. My point was more that if you’re making execution into a pseudo-medical event (For example with lethal injections) then you’re going to have more botched executions since the people performing them aren’t medical personnel.

While I don’t believe we should have executions a gun is designed to be used with little training, but syringes and medical gas supply masks (Don’t know the actual name for them) are meant to be used with training. If executions are going to happen surely we should consider the aptitude of those administering them?

At least it was painless /s

I do agree the death penalty should be abolished, by the way

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/alabama-execution-nitrogen-kenneth-smith-updates-b2485208.html

There’s a great Jacob Geller video about how methods of execution have evolved and why they’ve evolved.

I wouldn’t do it justice but it points out how every time we make a ‘more humane’ way of killing it often just reduces the person’s ability to show suffering, rather than reducing the suffering itself. In many cases the suffering is increased as we say the method is less barbaric; a firing squad has the highest success rate and likely the fastest death.

I can’t recommend this enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eirR4FHY2YY Piped bot do your thing

I don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘vise’ written down before, I always just assumed it was spelled ‘vice’! You learn something new every day

I’m not the intended recipient but thanks for a considered response. Even if I can’t fully agree, it was a much better approach

Boo! Stop being a douche and attack their arguments. Attacking them personally just makes you look petty.

Also no here :(

This sounds like how you get a resonance cascade… Experiments so powerful they make the sky glow as only our star can!

Oh no :( Now the game is even more emotionally charged, I suppose.

One I’ve not seen mentioned but made me bawl my eyes out is ‘Presentable Liberty’ Im not sure about the remake, but the original was pretty short and was gripping, despite the low level of action.

Just noticed this, fair play to you! Sorry for the misunderstanding :)

If you’re talking about FaceTime and iMessage… They might technically not cost any money, but if I wanted to use them I’d first have to pay for an overpriced badly designed phone, which means they’re debatably free. They’re used to enrich the iPhone- just look at the whole blue/green text bubble thing. ‘If you don’t also have an iPhone you get treated differently’ hardly sounds like something a totally ‘free’ software would include. It just feeds into their ‘exclusivity’ bubble.

I recently learned that one method for companies to get around data selling laws is to give the data away for free in order to attract certain types of advertisers, then, they sell ad slots for people with specific demographics or interests.

They don’t sell the data because that is harder to do with laws restricting it, so they just use it as advertiser bait in ways that bypass the law.

Further reading: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and

As a female tech lead, its comforting to know I don’t exist!

Which nation, out of interest?