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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Well written.

    I think an important concept to introduce is Pulse Width Modulation, or PWM for short.

    Normal AC Power coming out of wall looks like a sine wave, in that it smoothly cycles between +110/240V and -110/240V. This means that 50% of the time the voltage is positive and 50% of the time the voltage is negative.

    PWM usually deals with signals which are either entirely on or off, with no transiton between them. This way, you can vary the amount of “power” delivered by varying how much of the time the signal is on and how much of the time it’s off.

    Dimmers usually modify the sine way in a way that tries to accomplish the same thing, by chopping up the signal to make the effective “on” time be shorter than 50%.

    With non-dimmable LEDs, this messes with the AC to DC circuitry in the lamp in the way slazer2au says, because the lamp doesn’t retain enough power between two on-cycles to stay on.


  • The verticality is absolutely the best part. My biggest gripe with Elden Rings world is that it’s an “open world” game in kind of the same way Ubi games are. Traversal is largely trivial, so you stop paying attention to the map after you’ve reached major areas.

    In my opinion, Dark Souls I is also an open world game, but instead of a 2D map all the zones are tangled up together in a confusing but interesting web.

    Shadow of the Erdtree brought some of that back by having zones stacked on top of each other to a much heavier degree than the base game, while also segmenting off geographically close regions.

    I wanted to be a level designer for a lot of years, so this is admittedly a bit of a soft spot for me, but I absolutely loved having the game world come at you as as a challenge, almost a character to be fought and bested, outside the legacy dungeons.







  • No plot needed.

    To me the essence of 2016 is the scene in the beginning where an info screen tries to dump exposition on you and you chuck it into a wall.

    There is plot, but you don’t need to pay attention to it. Doomguy is angry and needs to kill demons.

    To me a big fumble in Eternal was trying to explain why doomguy is angry and so good at killing. He’s like an inverse Cthulhu, terrifying, unknowable and mysterious. Trying to explain or understand him breaks the basis for the character.

    On gameplay, I didn’t mind the changes, but I thought the embellishments were a little on the nose. The technicolor rainbow explosion of ammo when you chainsaw someone, and the increased focus on using abilities to replenish resources scream “This is a video game!” in a over the top way that I felt took away from the immersion and grit that I associate with Doom.