Coming soon on your Mastodon server… The long awaited quote posts, with user-control (you can chose if you want to be quoted on a per-post basis, change it later, and retract any quote of your post)

Amazing work by the team 🎉

Expect a blog post with all the details in a few weeks, support in the mobile apps, then we will enable the feature on mastodon.social, then release Mastodon 4.5

#mastodon #quotePosts

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Screenshot of the Mastodon composer, showing a new visibility picker button with a "Public, anyone can quote" label

I have Shin'en on speed dial already for potential help porting stuff to consoles in the future, because they're good at what they do.

Basically the idea is that you have a teleport beacon you can place down anywhere that you use to dodge things (anywhere underneath you, some people thought I was straight up adding a Rod of Discord type deal, no!!). Beacons have limited charges and fizzle out, so they're not free, you'll do your best if you can anticipate how to position yourself.

Dirty prototype below to show what that would look like. It's ugly, to be completely clear the lerping is just an animation and the game is actually paused during this. Will make it all crunchy and juicy later. Saving the glamor and pizzazz, as always...

I've got a lot of ideas on how this will be used in practice (after a whole year, I better have some!!) but finding the best way to convey these to other team members without a dedicated concept artist to sketch drafts of the opponents is hard, which is one of the reasons i've been so quiet about where i'm actually going with this. As we get closer, i'll finally be able to reveal what our designs will look like.

Made the mistake of trying to discuss politics on Twitter and now I'm starting to understand why people hate it so much. Never used the block button so much before.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/1111fo6pA (sea turtle)
#Fox #Bot

Own photo
#Fox #Bot

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A family of arctic foxes, all dark fur, laying siege on the food castle. They are standing next to a fence of their enclosure, probably waiting for a keeper to arrive with snacks.

Own donut
#Fox #Bot

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A pile of fluff, sometimes also called an arctic fox, is sleeping curled up into a donut under a conifer tree. Fur longer than those needles seems pretty useful for those occasions.

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yes this is a bug and yes we're reporting it upstream

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/111pCxTg3 (zoofanatic)
#Fox #Bot

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A portrait of a silver fox with amber eyes. The tip of its ears are slightly folded and it seems to watch something closely.

Here's what I learned.

MinGW is better behaved than MSVC, as I expected. However, it also has some bugs specific to it. For some reason our INI read/write library (@wirlaburla@canithesis.org) sends corrupted junk to the file input stream during config construction - I figured out this is apparently a known issue that occurs in one of the -O1 optimizations since at least three years ago and was never addressed. For now, the Windows ports have zero optimizations until I can figure out the exact offending CFLAG.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71109757/very-strange-mingw64-c-bug-when-readinig-from-a-file-inside-a-function

Allegro's official TrueType plugin relies on a FreeDesktop library called Freetype, which in turn has an optional, but highly encouraged (and recursive! the hell?) dependency on Harfbuzz, another library that does the exact same thing. Harfbuzz in turn depends on DirectX 10's "DirectWrite", ANOTHER library that does THE SAME THING, as well as GLib, which is to put it very simply a collection of stuff that's mostly already in libc.

If you raised your eyebrows a little and said "That sounds fucking retarded", then you would be 100% correct. In typical FDO/GNOME/RedHat fashion, they have managed to take something so simple and contrive absurd levels of pointless complexity out of it.

This single dependency tree, which is enabled in every binary distribution of Freetype out there, is singlehandedly responsible for Allegro silently dropping support for Windows XP out of the box. Freetype has to be recompiled to remove the bloat.

To be clear, I'm not mad at the Allegro guys - most of the design decisions for liballeg 5.x were made like a decade and a half ago when the whole FreeDesktop situation was a lot different, and I doubt any of them even noticed this was the case because nobody uses XP anymore. The only way I even found all this out was when I was forced to dependency walk the compiled binary to find out why it was failing to load, the average developer now is not going to think twice when they just grab the MinGW/Nuget packages and ship them as-is.

So yeah. MYTHOS engine works on Windows now. I'm glad to check another milestone towards completing the first demo version off the list.

Photo by Tristan Bane https://www.instagram.com/tristan.bane/
#Fox #Bot

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A red fox walking over a very large cut tree stump, head lowered and about to stalk... wait, the camera. It looks closely into the viwer's direction.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/1112nNq2bC (Richard Hoeg)
#Fox #Bot

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Two tiny red fox kits exploring in front of their den which is made of large rocks and little caves between them.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/1112qaapLh (Peggy Cadigan)
#Fox #Bot

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An older looking fox standing on a patch of cut grass looking directly at us.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/111hMEGUq (John McClure)
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A portrait of a grey fox looking curiously towards the camera.

Bad decisions getting you harder fights is easy to explain. Bad fighting getting you harder decisions can be explained like this: if you barely win, the guy grudgingly helps you according to the obligations of combat, but if you get a high score with a lot of grazes then the guy realizes he's totally outmatched or thinks you're certainly going to win in the end anyway, and gives you eager help.

There's also a natural impulse to reverse the original logic so that the game is self-balancing by difficulty, or so that you avoid players having to "commit self-harm" to get more interesting gameplay:
1. the better you do at puzzles, the harder the bullet hell
2. the better you do at bullet hell, the harder the puzzles
This isn't an insane thing to do, but as you might remember from Bioshock pulling this shit, it's actually incredibly dissatisfying for a game to punish success rather than failure. The 'self-harm' of a player role-playing a dumb investigator that still solves everything with his fists, comparatively it's not bad.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/cM91HJ (Tambako The Jaguar)
#Fox #Bot

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A arctic fox looking a bit walks towards the camera. It looks a bit poofy with remnants of winter fur still in place.

Via flickr https://flic.kr/p/1112mV88eV (Peter Batty)
#Fox #Bot

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A red fox kit is jumping from a large rock towards their sibling that seems to be not much aware that another fox will land on them in a second.