u/zackarhino

A bit of an unsettling story ahead here. 

I recently just woke up from a dream that shocked me to my core. It wasn't so much a nightmare as it was an experience that I wish I didn't have. 

In this dream, which I dubbed the "Family-go-round", you sit in place on a semi-circular ride as it goes around. It's sort of like an on-rails shooter, you don't choose where you're going, you simply go around and around, looking at different things that happen to you.

Each time you go around, people or things will interact with you. The setting seems to be a sort of family hangout, in sort of a back yard. The rail you are on is like a train that goes from one side of the yard to the other. Every time you leave, it fades to black. Every time you return, you see... well...

What you end up seeing is the same experiences over and over, but blended together like they were put in a paper shredder. A member of a the family looks at you and says something. You look over the fence and hear a snippet of audio, a voice line, over the neighbors doing something. You look over the fence again and their very strange looking dog is looking you dead in the eyes. This time around I saw a creature with multiple eyes. Not hostile, just there. Sometimes it's just your family relaxing, but something simply doesn't feel right.

Where it gets strange is that it's possible to start to take these slices of experience and piece them together. You start to realize, that voice clip doesn't belong here, it belongs here. You recognize that toy was in a different place, and said something else. Once you see the same "portions" over and over, they start to feel familiar, just jumbled.

Where I got truly unsettled is the fact that I have the ability to have the same dreams multiple times, and each time I do I'm able to pick up on subtle differences between the last time it happened. This can even include returning to the same place in my dreams, but having a different experience. Some of them almost 10 times now. I keep a log of these sorts of experiences, including how many times I've been to these places, and whether I'm alone or with others. I've also had recurring dreams that are simply the same dream again, but I'm able to notice that I've been through it before, so I pick up on things I never noticed before, as like this one. People only ever seem to talk about having the same dream repeatedly, not having different experiences in the same dreamscape.

Anyway, because of the uncanny nature of this dream, it's starting to turn more from a surreal experience into a nightmare. I have had this same dream maybe 3 or 4 times, each time slightly different, and I believe this is the second time that I became lucid (ish) and realized that the pieces can be put together. I don't want to put together these pieces, and I'm scared of what happens when I actually "solve" it. It feels like it's hiding a dark secret and I don't know why it feels so uncomfortable and hostile for what should be an otherwise happy situation.

Anyways, that's all I have. Sorry I can't be more detailed, it's hard to remember it all on account of the style of dream. I'm curious yet cautious to know what will happen the next time I have this dream, since it feels like it was no coincidence, and I'm a little terrified to learn the secrets that lie behind this dreadful yet slightly comforting scene.

Quick question:

I'm building an action game, so I think it could benefit from running above 60fps. I know that there is the IsFixedTimeStep property, which to my knowledge locks the Update() and Draw() methods to the specified TargetElapsedTime when true. There is also SynchronizeWithVerticalRetrace, which disables VSync on the graphics device. I'm not exactly sure how it work internally, other than the fact that it caps the frame rate to the monitor.

Anyway, let's say I want to my game to play at a high or variable refresh rate. If I disable IsFixedTimeStep, wouldn't this now mean that game logic is tied to frame rate? In other words, if I want to do something at a fixed interval, it will now run faster if your computer is running the game at a higher frame rate.

What is the best way to manage game logic if you want to run the game at a higher frame rate? Of course, there is delta time logic, but that's more for the space between each frame, not the number of frames themselves, please correct me if I'm wrong. So far, my best idea is to create a fixed update from within update using time elapsed and using that for logic, but I didn't really think it through that much, maybe this is a haphazard approach.

Is this even worth trying to do, or is it easier to simply target 60fps and call it good enough?

Interested to hear your input, thanks.

I'm trying to pack my textures into atlases for the obvious performance boost. I understand the basics; I can pick a texture and then draw a sourceRect to minimize texture swapping. However, I'm struggling to understand how to keep things organized on the code side.

The way I currently see it... which is probably fallacious, is that we have two ways to reference individual sprites- we can either create some kind of a string based ID/dictionary system, or, assuming the sprites are all the same size, we can reference them by column and row.

In my eyes, if you have a game with many sprites, both of these methods have some serious flaws when it comes to manual overhead. With strings, there is the chance you could mistype things, etc. and when referencing by numbers, you have to manually input every position to be able to have some sort of a variable name associated with it, and even worse, if you change positions in the sprite sheet, you may have to update hundreds of numbers!

Pardon my ignorance, is there something obvious I'm missing here? Is adding sprites into code always going to involve a ton of manual work (which I don't even mind, to be honest...) and magic strings/integers? The closest I've come to a solution so far is organizing the sprites by name using TexturePacker and then programmatically getting the rows/columns, but even then I can envision some problems, unless maybe you manually added an ID to the beginning of each file name or something. Would really appreciate some help here, I'm finding it hard to find resources about how something like this is typically built scalably.

For clarification, anytime somebody asks for premium mobile games, people just usually recommend ports of desktop games. I don't want to play games that I already have on steam but using touch controls. I just want to play a game that feels like it was built for mobile, but not one where the primary mechanic is spending money.

It could be paid or free, or a game where you pay a big IAP to unlock. It can have some level of IAP, but progression shouldn't be mostly locked behind paying egregious amounts of money or spending hundreds of hours grinding. Maybe something:

* Portrait mode, ideally

* Gameplay built around simple touch controls

* Some level of depth to the gameplay. Skill-based.

* Progression not locked behind spending tons of money or extreme amounts of time

Out of all the mobile games I've played, only a few fit these criteria:

* Magic survival is a vampire survivors clone with great gameplay, and spending only unlocks new characters with small bonuses or gives other small bonuses to the classes. Everything can be unlocked for free.

* Idle skilling is a game where the main way you progress is by grinding the game, not so much spending money.

* NEO mushroom is an old school android game where you farm by checking in pretty often. Not by paying tons of money.

* There are a lot of board and puzzle games that fit this criteria, like chess.com or the NYT games.

* Void tyrant really doesn't lock much of anything behind a paywall.

* Candies and Curses is a great example of this. You have the whole game unlocked from the beginning, and you only watch ads to double bonuses or little things like that. It's quite similar to Slayin', another great game of this type.

Anyway, I have a few more examples. But anything else that fits this theme? There are far too many p2w slop games and simple desktop ports out there. I want some good quality mobile-first games.

Thanks!

Hey all,

I'm a pretty rookie game developer, admittedly, and I'm running into a relatively simple problem.

I'm trying to build a grid-based game where my grids do not necessarily span the entire field- for instance, you can have multiple grids, such as a 3x3 grid in the middle, meaning that the grids have sides and corners. My tiles are powers of two, AKA evenly-sized (specifically 32x32px with a single pixel border).

I've been through a few iterations already. The problem I keep encountering over and over again is that the grids end up with duplicate sides or uneven centering. At first I tried a simple 32x32px texture with a border, but then you end up with double thick lines in the middle and thin lines on the edge. I then tried drawing only the top and left sides on the sprite, but the problem then is that now the sprites are not evenly centered, and in addition to that, you are limited to the types of designs that your border can have, since you can only draw on one side... unless i'm simply thinking about it incorrectly. Either way, I would really like to have it perfectly centered even if it's not that visually different.

So far the best solution I can think of is to double the side of the border to two pixels (because logically speaking a single pixel would have to land on a single side), and then manually use a 1x1 texture to draw the edges and corners double wide, but I'm concerned about making a mistake and having far too many Draw() calls, being a beginner and all, though I don't want to get too concerned with optimizing in advance. I just don't know much about how GPUs or rendering work yet. If this is my best approach, what are some good ways to draw single pixels and lines in MonoGame, and is there anything I should be concerned about?

Thank you.

Edit: I was able to get somewhat satisfactory results by strategically creating different tiles for each direction (udlr, corners). I will also have to create unique tiles for 1 tile long/wide grids. This is definitely inefficient but may work for my use case. If anybody has any serious objections (i.e., massive performance hit for swapping textures so often), please let me know.

https://preview.redd.it/txz46c7je8gh1.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=30c76e54526b831b84a1af23d7f4e38293d3e75c

I recently upgraded my motherboard (asus rog strix x870e e gaming wifi), CPU, RAM, and PSU (PCCOOLER KN850 850W) several months ago.

I've been having troubles with blue screens the past couple months. I think it was mostly caused by my Backblaze configuration, so I mostly fixed it, but I was still having random issues like shutdowns occasionally. I also have relatively frequent power surges that cause issues around my house.

A few minutes ago I came back home to find my PC completely dead. I'm talking, not even the LEDs light up or the fans spin for even a second. Disconnecting the power for a minute does nothing, nor does clearing the CMOS. I haven't tried reseating components but I don't really think that's the issue here.

My initial thoughts are that the PSU is dead, but it could also be the motherboard since my PC has been so unstable for the past couple months. Any idea where to start looking? Should I warranty the motherboard and/or PSU? Both are past the return window.

I like to keep a collection of ROMs. Since Myrient shut down, I tried downloading WiiU apps from Wii U Downloader installer. Many of them seem to be okay, but for a LOT of them, WUP installer GX2 tells me that my SD card might be corrupted and fails to install.

However, this error has spanned across multiple SD cards, and more specifically, it seems to be per-title. In other words, there seems to be a lot of titles that were corrupted when I downloaded them. I'm pretty sure my hard drive didn't corrupt them, and since I used multiple SD cards and the behavior seems to be consistent across cards, it seems like a lot of the downloads from the app seem to be corrupted. For clarity, I downloaded a bunch of random titles, anything that seemed interesting, including things like the Nintendo student games.

Any ideas? I would like to keep a copy of the games backed up on my PC if possible, so I would prefer to to use NUSspli if possible, unless there's a way to extract the game files.

I looked around but didn't find much information. Is this possible, and if so, does it have to be burned using the PS3?

Also, does this burn out the disc drive faster than normal discs?

After getting a little bored of seeing playlists with the same songs over and over again, I decided to try a different approach.

I decided to create a playlist that encompasses a variety of songs that give me liminal, empty vibes coming from a diverse selection of genres (classical, electronic, hip-hop, pop), as well as games and media. Please let me know what you think.

hint: listen to

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VzEjlOOYFrBp7DGkycEcu?si=gi47uvqZQV-\_e1GZS6-FhA&pi=MV3VbD\_hSkmp1

the songs

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6QQiEPS4SM4dVN4O73kjUR?si=ZklGGhbdQc2tloxiwYu4GQ&pt=34b2485e3b077a8095d754a4b0cca366&pi=ucOL7-c5TB2eJ

in order

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5gA8oYjxEMmjzaNtQRivAA?si=GdsJ2IgDTMWavpyFtNuDKg&pt=b11eb286df60757ecf75bb951d934863&pi=Vouh6TpuRZG2c

This poster has a very similar issue to me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ps3hacks/comments/1tgtzxk/bought_a_used_ps3_chech2501a_ps3xploit_flash/

I bought a holy grail (CECHA) PS3 and I'm trying to put CFW on it. However, I can't dump the NAND from FlashWriter because I get the following error:

>You cannot use this tool because you have already installed CFW!

This is after inserting my FAT32 MBR flash drive into the rightmost port and trying to write to USB 0. I'm on 4.93.

Any ideas? I'm a noob. I really want to have a NAND backup before I make any further modifications.

Edit: To clarify, I don't think the console has CFW on it, unless I'm mistaken. I can not find anything that would indicate the presence of CFW.

I'm not sure what I changed about my PC. I'm on Windows 11. I recently changed motherboard to increase USB bandwidth (along with new CPU and RAM). I also have a relatively new DAS which connects over USB-C, but the connection has been flaky at times.

Basically, now every single time I try to eject any USB device, including the DAS, I get the old Windows error about not being able to eject because the device is in use. I can think of a few culprits- I use the Everything app for quick searching. I believe I removed indexing for new removable drives, and it's never been a problem before. One time, File Locksmith (which actually crashes all the time for me...), told me it was OneCommander, a file explorer, which also was never a problem and I uninstalled. I don't know what else it could be.

This is driving me nuts. It's to the point where I can't even format a flash drive with guiformat even after manually formatting it with Windows. Please help.

https://preview.redd.it/l4g8rnuwqd1h1.png?width=1042&format=png&auto=webp&s=9eb11f366550db5c117d6e6b14096f04188bde09

I have correctly installed the beep module, and my PC speaker is correctly connected since it beeps on boot. However, it only clicks instead of beeps on Ubuntu.

This thread seems to indicate that the problem is with my (ASUS?) B660M motherboard, but it's locked now. Does anybody know if there was a fix for this? My BIOS is updated, am I just out of luck?