thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
No bio...
User ID: 1081
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
I'm mostly interested in possibly using this as an excuse to finally learn how to work with 3d graphics on the programming side. I already have some modding experience, though more with the earlier games than with Skyrim.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
Do these flaws reveal spoilers or ruin the immersion or surprise?
I suppose they could in theory though I don't think I've ever found one that does. Usually just a mesh isn't quite aligned with the one next to it leaving a few pixel gap where the void is visible, or one of the rocks on a mountain is shifted enough that you can see its insides.
Which mods are you running.
Currently the Tempus Maledictum Wabbajack list.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
Should I save a drowning child in such a situation? Is it better for a child to die than to develop a strong social bond to a pedophile with all the risks that entails? Or should I save them and stoically endure the eventual "Stay away from my kid, creep!" or just plain "Thanks, now gtfo.", content in the knowledge that I did "the right thing" even while everyone thinks I just did it to get in the kid's pants? Why shouldn't I just say "not my problem" and keep walking?
Sure, and once the euphoria of realizing your kid isn't going to die wears off, you'll be a good parent and start worrying about the next set of risks facing them--namely me. Hence the "Thanks, now gtfo." Helping kids almost always ends up being a net negative for my mental health, to which your response would almost certainly be "not my problem".
EDIT: Also, on a more humorous note, is it even physically possible to give CPR to a person "while slapping them in the face with a flaccid cock"? The flexibility required seems inhuman to me...
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
This lines up with my feelings quite well. Yet another feminist who can't get over her perspective as a woman. Particularly egregious in my mind is her paragraph on the domestic sphere:
Then there’s the domestic sphere. Last summer, a Psychology Today article caused a stir online by pointing out that “dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.” No longer dependent on marriage as a means to financial security or even motherhood (a growing number of women are choosing to create families by themselves, with the help of reproductive technology), women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner. Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.
She spares no thought for the fact that while women are no longer dependent on marriage as a means to having a family, men are still very dependent on women and thus increasingly at their mercy.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
I agree that almost every parent on the planet would prefer to have their child saved than not. I don't know that that preference implies I should try to save them though. I've never saved a kid's life before, but I have been an important figure in one's life and have seen first-hand how quickly people go from thankful to "never contact us again" when they find out, no matter how innocent your intentions or how careful you were to avoid even the hint of sexual behavior. That hurts, a lot, and I now find it hard to feel motivated to risk going through that again for the benefit of people who in all likelihood have nothing but disgust for me. The younger, less bitter me had the will to be somewhat altruistic, but that seems to be fading as I get older.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
No, her thinking is that women are finally equal to men and therefore that men are suffering because they find having gone from dominating women to merely being on par with them intolerable. She (charitably) doesn't understand that leveling the playing field between men and women only where men previously held the advantage doesn't actually create equality in relationships, which is actually driving this suffering.
To preface this, it sounds like you look for very different things in your games than I do (eg. I could never get into Elden Ring), so I'm not sure this will be much help. That said...
I'm endlessly drawn to Elder Scrolls games. They're near to what I would call "perfect" games for myself.
That's me, between these and (modded) minecraft. I occasionally branch out (eg, Factorio or various RPGs), but I always find myself being drawn back to the TES games or minecraft.
Unfortunately, I have "gaming OCD" and just can't install any mods, except for bugfix or graphics mods. I want the vanilla experience in games, the way they're "meant" to be played.
As far as I'm concerned, the fact that the Creation Kit is included with the games means customization through mods are the way they are "meant" to played. Bethesda provides a curated vanilla experience for those who want it, but have done more than any other developer I can think of in providing and supporting the ability for players to adapt the games to their desired playstyle. The games' modding community has built amazing things on the canvas Bethesda provided. Eg, in Morrowind there was a mod I used that added the ability to raise skeletal minions through a ritual involving manually placing items (bones, candles, etc) in the correct layout in the world rather than simply casting a spell, though you still needed a spell to trigger the ritual once all the preparations were made.
Not to mention the technical difficulties of installing mods. I've recompiled my kernel and have been an Arch user, but that shit is just too much for me.
Allow me to introduce you to Wabbajack, the "I just want to click install" option for playing modded Skyrim, albeit a bit annoying without a premium nexus account since you have to manually initiate the download of each mod/resource. Nexus has a somewhat controversial similar feature in its collections.
In Morrowind and (maybe) Oblivion I don't mind it, because the magic system is so open. You can craft your own spells,
In Morrowind you can create custom spells in-game that combine multiple (IIRC, up to 8?) spell effects from a preset list, varying the magnitude and targeting of the effect. If you wanted to do anything more complex (eg, a Mark and Recall-like pair that allows you to set multiple destinations and choose from them dynamically, or the previously mentioned necromancy ritual) or even just include preset spell effects that they didn't want you to have access to (eg, restore magika), you needed to resort to modding. As the series progressed, Bethesda pushed spell customization out of the game and into mods, a choice that never really bothered me since I was already used to doing things via mods anyway. And modders have done amazing things with spells in all the games.
launch yourself all across the world map,
Still technically possible in Skyrim with mods (eg, using the buffs from the wind element from Phenderix's Elements) and even the base game with glitches, but this is more a technical restriction to avoid game crashes and performance issues than a real gameplay decision. When Morrowind first came out, it was very easy to crash your game by boosting your Acrobatics and Atheletics skills sufficiently high that you could jump across the island and have the game choke trying to load in all the resources as you flew across the world. If you got them high enough, you'd also start to run into compounding errors in the position calculations leading to all kinds of "fun". Oblivion and Skyrim are much more resource intensive, and this drives a lot of performance tradeoffs to manage that (eg, forbidding Levitation so you can assume players won't be positioned to notice that some objects don't have renderable surfaces from all angles).
nothing is restricted.
This is definitely the primary attraction I've had to the series, but I think it is only through modding that you truly get there.
In Skyrim however, the restrictions are there, and I can't give it a pass on the combat system.
I'm not sure what you are looking for in terms of combat, but the modding community has a lot of options for various playstyles. Even vanilla Skyrim I'd rate higher than Morrowind though, as I found the tedium of missing/fizzling constantly at the start of the game extremely annoying. This is related to the primary reason I tend to play Skyrim more than Oblivion or Morrowind these days. I tend to keep all my skills at a similar level so I can swap between them as my mood changes rather than specializing as the game expects. This doesn't play very nice with the earlier games balance or levelling system though.
Not to mention that the quests are notoriously shallow.
Again, mods. There is a questing mod available that won a Writer's Guild award for its script. Another with one of my favorite game trailers of all time. If you are looking for something more akin to Elden Ring and similar games, see VIGILANT and the others in the series or Darkend (less lore friendly). If you are looking for something that explores the weirder aspects of the games' lore (eg, you want that "I can't believe these mods are lore-friendly" feeling), see Trainwiz's series of mods, notably The Wheels of Lull. And I'd probably be lynched if I didn't at least mention Legacy of the Dragonborn.
In short, I love open-world games that I can easily tweak to my liking and change up my playstyle regularly without too much hassle (eg, starting a new character/playthrough), and Skyrim fits that bill very nicely. Its base game isn't all that great by itself, but the modding community surrounding it has lots of options for nearly everyone.
EDIT: Grammar.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
Since no-one has commented on the technical question, @ZorbaTHut do you have thoughts here? Is this a reasonable first step into 3d graphics programming?
Does Skyrim scripting let you do some vector/matrix math (other than you implementing it by hand that is)?
I don't know, but I was planning to do this as a separate (probably C++) program that just loaded all the resources and analyzed it rather than doing it in Skyrim itself. The idea was to start off learning how the assets are stored, how the data structures for the models work together, etc and build up to being able to run a "simple/naive" analysis on them.
How would you decide which surface is supposed to be hidden, or a hole is not meant to be there?
It wouldn't, it would just try to identify all of them and leave it to someone/something else to decide if it is meant to be there or not.
What does "visible" mean?
I don't know much about 3d graphics at the moment, but I believe a naive algorithm for detecting what I'm looking for would be to cast a ray from a spawn location straight down until it intersects a surface, then do a breadth-first search of all adjacent surfaces recording any that are adjacent to (roughly, share an edge with) one without a renderable texture.
You'd run a sweep through the entire room?
Ideally it'd sweep over every worldspace in the game.
Yeah, you can do that (and in fact I distinctly remember Morrowind having a scripting function for it), the issue is that you can cast an infinite amount of rays from any point.
I don't think I communicated the intended algorithm well. This is just intended to be a batch program that you point your load order at and it spits out a file listing all the "holes" it found. I would only cast a single ray per worldspace, straight down from the (first, if more than one) spawn location to identify a surface to start the breadth-first search. My assumption is that this initial surface would almost certainly be part of the composite surface surrounding the playable volume of that worldspace rather than something floating within it, and thus "flooding" over it with a breadth-first search would suffice to identify holes.
EDIT:
Well, even then you need some criteria to try identify them. Otherwise you'd be showing people the entirety of the game map.
I do have a criteria to identify them: a surface with a texture adjacent to one without a texture. It is classification of them that I defer on. The definition of "adjacent to" is a bit complicated, but basically shares an edge with and if you rotated them around that edge they'd come together without intersecting another surface.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
Yes, though I expect for interior worldspaces it'd wrap around to cover the walls and ceilings as well.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
This is true, but static objects (eg, boulders on mountains) intersect that heightmap and thus would be traversed by my search, and if they don't intersect it properly a surface without a texture on that object would be found.
I'm probably not using the right terminology here. Consider the real-world example of a bowl turned upside down and lowered into water. The inside of the bowl is painted red and the outside blue. My goal is to identify whether any red is directly accessible from the outside. Because the bowl is upside down and in the water, the (EDIT:) directly accessible surface of the water only intersects the blue surface of the bowl, and thus the red is not accessible from the outside. If the bowl were on its side instead, the red surface would be accessible. Most static objects in Skyrim (and probably the other games as well) are topologically similar to bowls in this sense, where they are only partially textured with the intent that the non-textured stuff (corresponding to the red part of the bowl) is hidden behind other textured surfaces.
This is entirely for fun, as I'm pretty happy with my current job in a very different area of programming. I'm mostly interested in being competent enough to write code to scratch itches like this one for the games I play, so I guess I'd say the tool-creation side of things.
EDIT: Particularly tools for automating detection of "problems" or other kinds of batched analysis. I'll also note that my current job regularly involves numerical analysis in Fortran, so I'm not unfamiliar with floating-point accuracy issues.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
8mo ago
Kids are undeniably capable of “wanting” sex with adults. Parents, caregivers, and (to a lesser extent) members of society at large have a responsibility for recognizing when kids shouldn't get what they want and preventing them from doing so.
and then the age of consent is pushed downward
The age of consent for sex has been consistently rising over time and was much lower in the centuries before either NAMBLA or the "trans-activity at present", so I think you'll need a bit of evidence for this claim.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
8mo ago
Obviously the m/f dynamic changes that a bit, but how much? Feminism/#MeToo have brought with them a deep intuition that that what happened here is very wrong, as opposed to just 'somewhat wrong', and others who don't hold that intuition are objecting to the apparently disproportionate response - so one should ask, which intuition is accurate?
In my eyes, it's not just or even mainly the disproportionate response that needs to be opposed, but the gendered nature of it. Feminism has severely inflamed people's existing bias towards disproportionately punishing men for behaviors that they refuse to similarly permit society to punish women for.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
8mo ago
Feminism is nothing more than women taking on the role of the partner expecting to eat her cake and have it, while denying men the ability to. That similarly builds up resentment, leading to a never-ending cycle of hate.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
7mo ago
That may be true once you have experience with alcohol, but I think you overestimate the ability of people with less experience to notice. Also, with strong enough alcohol it can easily be too late by the time you've actually tasted it if you don't handle liquor well. I'm quite a bit bigger than the size of the median twelve year old and a single sip of 190-proof Everclear from a flask a friend handed me with no more explanation than "Try this." was more than enough to knock me out within ten minutes. Fortunately it was in company that proved trustworthy (at least, I have no reason to suspect anything untoward happened after I passed out on the couch), but that experience was a bit of a wakeup call for the risks involved.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
7mo ago
I did notice those symptoms but as it was my second drink of alcohol ever, I didn't recognize what those symptoms meant.
somehow it was enough to knock you out
We are probably using "knock out" differently in this case. It's not that I fell unconscious due to alcohol poisoning, but just that alcohol (and other depressants) makes me very sleepy and in this case I sipped it, then started feeling extremely tired, laid down and fell asleep.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
6mo ago
people tend to assume on some level that if a woman approaches a man, she must be 1) joking 2) desperate or 3) looking for something casual. I found those were difficult assumptions to overcome.
You're forgetting in my opinion the most important one (that also often applies to men approaching women): she must be somehow trying to exploit me.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
6mo ago
Sorry, I think you misunderstood me. I mentioned it because there is usually an expectation that women don't have to face that particular issue and I thought you were underselling what women faced in this situation for not bringing it up. Women may be much less likely to be tarred as creeps, but that's only because we tar them as whores instead.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
6mo ago
Ah, the limitations of our text-only medium strike again. It can be so hard to judge such things without the indirect cues of in-person communication. I'm glad it was just my misunderstanding then.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
6mo ago
If I create a simulation of a human society on a computer, am I an omniscient God relative to the simulated humans? In some sense I am--I could instrument the simulation as much as I like, inspect every aspect of it in a debugger, etc. In another sense, the amount of data involved likely overwhelms my ability to focus on every little detail. There'd almost certainly be things about the simulation that I was completely unaware of not because I was incapable of knowing but because I had no reason to put in the effort to do so. Do you think there an analog to this with omnipotence? Does a rock that God is "incapable" of lifting because the mere existence of that specific rock is so beneath Him that He can't be bothered to distinguish it fit?
I've been playing a lot of modded Skyrim recently and finding lots of instances of objects placed incorrectly causing holes or hidden surfaces to be visible. For those with 3d programming experience, does writing a program to detect and report these seem like a reasonable project as an excuse to learn how to work with 3d graphics for an experienced programmer who is completely unfamiliar with 3d graphics or would this be biting off a bit too much?
More options
Context Copy link