EMBRACE THE BRACH

So I found this CD on the street today on my way to work, right? So I decided I’d bring it home and listen to it.

Congratulations!

This is good.

Scarlet and Violet has really AGGRESSIVE culling. The devs knew the game was framey and did everything they could up until the last possible second to save on resources.

The player has a single square that's always rendered around them, which takes about 10 seconds to run across. Besides that, all that's visible is whatever the camera is facing; if the camera can't see it, it does not exist.

You might think that this would be good for performance, since the game isn't calling as many assets constantly. And you would be right, if the things culled were ALL that the game was trying to render.

We all know at this point about the memory leak problem the game has, where it won't toss garbage data it's not using. This is supposed to account for the framerate drop; however, if it was ONLY the memory leak, it should start out smoothly, then decay over time until it's unplayable.

So what gives?

This is the ocean.

It's pretty. It's got a tiny bit of reflection, some gentle waves, a nice gradient. A beautifully made ocean without repetitive textures is always nice.

THIS IS THE OCEAN.

IT IS NOT CULLED.

Look at the SIZE of this thing! Paldea is an ANT in the middle of this puddle. It's rendering ALL of this, ALL its sparkles and waves, ALL the time.

Now, this is usually the part of the post where I'm like "and because we know the size of the ocean, based on the coastlines and wind direction, we can figure out how big the rest of the planet is by comparison!" like I did with Breath of the Wild over a year ago.

No.

Another video game term you might not be familiar with is a "skybox." Basically, to give the illusion of faraway objects, clouds, mountains, etc, and to hide the black void most 3D games are built in, games will have a texture wrapped around either the level or where the player is standing. For example:

This is a level from Twilight Princess called Sacred Grove. You normally can't see the bottom parts of this, hence why it turns into a gray plane, but the parts you CAN theoretically see by looking through the trees are colored so you think you're looking at a sky. You can see the edge of the void down in the bottom right corner.

Here's another one from Twilight Princess. You can see the different textures that stack on top of each other, as well as the blue skybox that's centered around Link when he's in the area. You, as the player, FEEL like you're in a small part of a larger world, because the devs cleverly structured together elements you CAN see in other areas into the background.

More complicated versions of skyboxes, typically semi-circular, are called skydomes.

They tend to look kind of like snowglobes, because you do not need to render anything that can't be seen. There's no situation in which the player should be able to fall lower than the level, so there's no reason to render the dome into a sphere in the event that that happens.

In Scarlet and Violet, it would make sense for the skydome to end where the ocean does. There's no situation in which the player manages to go past or underneath the ocean, so even if you wanted a gigantic ocean size like they have, you don't need to use more sky to encompass that.

They did not get this memo.

You might be thinking to yourself "wow, that looks like the curvature of the Earth!"

AND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT!!!!!

Why is this here. Why is it so big. I can't even see Paldea anymore. What exactly was planned for this.

Clever readers might have noticed that I labeled this "Skysphere" and not "Skydome."

That's because it for some reason is a sphere. Paldea is sitting in the middle of a fully rendered gigantic sphere in space. For some reason.

Look at Earth. Look at Spain, which Paldea is supposed to mimic.

I overlaid Spain over Paldea and made them roughly the same size. Assuming the two to be 1:1, the OCEAN is bigger than Earth.

If I then take that size and apply it to the skysphere:

HI. WHY IS THIS A THING.

The skysphere is bigger than the PROPORTION OF THE SUN TO THE EARTH:

Someone posted a picture of a piece of chicken between two hamburger buns titled “Chicken Burger” to /r/food. Another user commented “Chicken Sandwich” on the post, and was slapped with a 30 day ban by the mods. When they responded to ask why, the mod said

“Correcting someone in public is public shaming, on top of being incorrect, it’s a pretty shitty comment to leave.”

So now /r/food is on lockdown after being spammed with posts titled “Chicken Sandwich” and other variations. The mod that handed the ban down pinned a post doubling down, comparing the situation to “Pride posts that always fill up with bigots” and “removing racists from posts featuring POC”, and including a link on “how to correctly, correct someone.”

This is a story of numbers, but it’s still beautiful.

We were fighting a dragon.

The dragon is hopping around while the Barbarian is just racing around trying to catch up to her

Dragon finally decides, no, really, fuck specifically THAT ranger and goes hog fucking wild on me (I LIVED!) but holds still long enough for the Barbarian to finally rage and LEAP ONTO HER BACK and go STAB

Dragon sees this and goes, “Oh. Sick.” 

and just goes VERT

Pro: I am not tanking anymore

Con: She instantly moves FOUR HUNDRED FEET STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR…. with our  raging Barbarian holding on for dear gottdamn life

One round later, she’s another 160 feet up, still getting stabbed by a Barbarian who has somehow held on, now getting attacked by ballistae and we’re all starting to get CONCERNED

Because if they take that dragon down, that is 560 feet our Barbarian is also falling out of the sky, and he is not attuned to the ONLY THING WE HAVE that can save his fucking life from that height

I’m sitting there doing math, trying to determine if 560′ is enough to kill him outright, silently being very grateful we still have exactly ONE diamond to rez his ass

and the dragon just goes VERT again, ANOTHER four hundred feet in the air

The Barbarian, now finally free from any potential collateral, cackles, as he is at long last, unshackled by the restraints of his conscience.

He has a tattoo, you see, which allows him to cast Fireball once per day

centered on himself

with a save which he autofails

But he is a tiefling.

And this fucker still has 160 hit points by the time it’s done exploding. But the explosion sends him backward as he fails the Athletics check to continue holding on and he begins to fall.

He falls for 3 fucking rounds and we can only watch our friend fall to his certain death.

The DM… has to roll ninety six d6s

let that number sink in for you

NINETY. SIX. D6s. They normally roll with real dice, you can hear the clickety clack through the discord, but  they had to get out a fucking app for this because they do not OWN ninety. fucking. six. d6s.

It comes out to 402 fucking bludgeoning damage he takes on impact as he leaves a Barbarian shaped crater in the center of the forum, 10 feet wide, 5 feet deep, a cloud of dust and broken brick shooting out as he lands.

And do you know what happens next?

Do you know what the fuck we see as the dust settles?

We hear a cough, and a see a thumbs up come out of the crater. 1 hit point left.

402 damage. Raging as he landed, halved to 201. He had 160HP left, it only brought him down to -41, not enough to kill him outright (you have to get equal to negative your max HP), AND HE’S LEVEL 12, which means he has access to Relentless Rage: the first time you’d drop below 0 HP, if it doesn’t outright kill you, you have to roll a Con save of 10 or higher to instead drop to 1 HP. He rolled an 11.

He fell almost a THOUSAND feet from the air off the back of a fucking dragon, took NINETY SIX D6 FALL DAMAGE, AND LIVED.