Magic, Unicorns, and Kitties! ^_^

ACT II: UNREST IN PIECES

Prologue (here) -> Next (soon)

|| Start ACT I here or explore Pinned Masterpost ||

Oh, and my love for basically scrap booking my drawings to make a new effect lol

Eldritch

Concept: Danny explores space and runs into a giant ghost eel

[Keyframes under cut:]

Hihi! Yesss omg it's hard to keep track of all the ones I've read, but I'll list a wide range including some I've read just in the last day! Heads up that most of these are one-shots or are ongoing.

Do you like my drawing. One of my best ones yet

They're calling it the most timely pride art ever

Some self-indulgent pride art that I made instead of prepping for DnD

Me: here’s my Danny phantom splitting images fan art but the characters are all dragons because whatever

tumblr: wow sawyer that’s so cool

drops this at your feet and scurries away, is shot offscreen

As a game dev I had to rewind this moment multiple times, because they've used actual Unreal Engine style graph-coding for the shield's wiring layout, and made sure it actually MAKES SENSE! The shields aren't working because someone made an actually believable wiring mistake, and the way we see Kaboodle rewire everything is accurate, too! Someone over on Reddit was kind enough to label the specific nodes being used:

But what REALLY delighted me was how Kaboodle's technobabble here isn't babble! He's accurately describing a REAL rendering problem that goes on to have ACTUAL impacts! Allow me to break down the terminology, then explain what exactly he's saying:

"Texels" are a texturing technique used to render surface details on textures, and are generally used when you need to overlay an effect on top of a texture, like making something look wet/dirty, or in this case making the shield's texture display impact/damage effects when it gets hit. It's important texel density matches the underlying texture's "scale topography," because otherwise the visuals won't line up or scale properly. "Pre-baking" meanwhile refers to the technique of having the game engine run all the necessary calculations for an effect BEFORE the game runs, so you don't slow down the game by trying to calculate that stuff during gameplay. The trade-off of this technique is that every time the developer modifies an effect (like fixing the shield's faulty wiring) they have to take the time to re-bake it. "LOD" means "Level of Detail," and it's a technique where you create multiple versions of a texture/model with different levels of quality and swap between them depending on how close the camera is. This ensures you don't waste resources rendering fancy details the player is too far away to even see, but the trade-off is that they increase baking time, since instead of calculating one model/texture for each asset, the engine needs to calculate several models/textures of varying quality.

SO! What Kaboodle's saying here is that after he's done rewiring the shield's code, they'll either need to re-bake all its visual effects, OR figure out how to make all those effects cheap enough to run in real time without heavily impacting how they look. Both options take time which they currently don't have, and Kaboodle's concerns are immediately proven right when the ship gets shot down before the shields can finish rendering.