#technical stuff

one question i occasionally get but i'm reluctant to add it to the pinned FAQ (its SO long already) is how do i deal with smudging the ink when I'm really far into a piece, and there are one of two ways to go (third if you count a water rinsing spill in which case the whole thing has to be remade over but in my whole career its only happened like 3 times)

leave it completely alone. Sometimes the smudges are quite small, and many of folks who seek me out to commission value the human made-ness of a piece, especially a physical piece of art. They see it as like, fingerprints on a hand-thrown pot and would be disappointed if I chose to get rid of them. This is always why I ask patrons of custom art if they want me to do something about it, which leads to option 2 -

invisible underpatch! this is a thing that I learned back when I was a teenager and obsessed with drawing my own manga and learning manga making techniques, although it comes in clutch all the time now

First, get a cutting mat out and slide a blank page of the paper you were working on underneath the art you've made a mistake on.

Then using a sharp craft/xacto knife, cut out the mistake so that you cut both the error and the bottom blank paper in the same size

Flip the art around, take the blank chip of paper and fit it into the hole. Then you're gonna roll on some whiteout along the edges to help close up any gaps. Secure the patch and whiteout with some clear tape

Flip it back around and you're good to go!

I'm really curious about the early stages of development before you actually do the main page itself!

Script. I script the whole chapter before getting into drawing. My scripts are 90% dialogue with a little pointers to setting/gestures/action/focus. I have colors for each characters.

2. Thumbnailing. I thumbnail the whole chapter. Page layout is built depending on how much text I can or want to fit in the page, so the first thing is adding the text, and after that, doodling.

managed to mod Rhys into Hi-Fi Rush as a playable character and the way the animations break his model is the funniest thing

I need to fix his stun baton but I'll try to upload this onto Nexus for y'all to download soon-ish :3

This kind of hypothetical situation isn't really feasible. There really isn't a "fully optimized with no possibility of improvement" state, that's like saying "a perfectly written paragraph" - that's not something that actually makes sense to any writer. Instead, let's go over how we actually do performance optimization and how the process works.

We begin by adding profiling code into our various features. This means that we have opening and closing markers when specific code begins and ends execution, similar to markup language tags in HTML or XML. By storing off how long execution takes for each code path, we can see how much of the frame time was taken up by which code - pathfinding, VFX processing, AI aiming and shooting, rendering shadows, lighting calculations, and so on. This profiling is generally only kept in non-final builds, writing this much data to logs can eat up a lot of disk space and memory, so profiling will affect performance itself.

After we've gotten our profiling code added, we store and analyze the reports after playtesting the game. We especially pay attention whenever playtesters report hitching or frame drops. Usually, the profiler can show us which particular systems are misbehaving during the frame drops and why. It might be that there are hundreds of weapon shoot attempts happening on the same frame. It might be that there's just too many VFX all playing at once. It might be packet loss from the server. It might be too many AI spawning and despawning across the world. It might be a combination of some or all of these at once.

No matter what the issue is, the engineering team (often the senior engine programmers or the tech director) will call in the relevant stakeholders, present the information, and demand fixes be made. The performance engineers often don't care exactly how the optimizations are made, they just want the resource usage to go back to within acceptable parameters during the frame. It is up to the stakeholders to look at what's happening and figure out a way to achieve the desired player experience without breaking the performance requirements. Maybe that means reducing the overall number of VFX, spreading out the AI spawning and despawning over several frames instead of all at once, fixing a bug that tries to fire all of the turrets every frame, or even all of these. Regardless, it is mostly up to the team to figure out what the best things to change are for the experience they wish the players to have. As you may guess, that can vary significantly based on the context - the type of game, the type of level, the story, the characters, the resources available, and so on and so forth.

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What does a ferrari fan and stem major do after not getting what she wanted (a Charles Leclerc win)? Go through technical documents to try and figure out when Mercedes will get their first grid penalty, of course. So I thought might as well track it for all the teams:

Why do I think the 10 place grid penalty is inevitable? This regulation places a lot strain and emphasis on the Battery (or Energy Storage in FIA terms). The fastest / most efficient way to drive these cars is to constantly charge up to full and then drain to empty. Coincidentally, this is also a great way to reduce the life span of the lithium batteries (deep charging aka. depleting a battery to under 20% of its' capacity reduces the amount of cycles a battery can run at full power). They are only allowed to take 2 additional batteries after their starting one this year (Edit: i went a bit back and forth because these regulations are worded like ass. Main thing: they have 3 total availlable including the one in the car they ship to Australia) which I forsee to be.... not enough. If a driver gets new restricted components outside their allocation they get a 10 place penalty for that weekend and a 5 place penalty every time they need to take even more of that same part. This will happen. Maybe often.

Okay let's get into why i even made a spreadsheet lol. For clarity: the numbers are parts used from the additional allocation. So if they are allowed three total of something with the starting part and they take a new one, I will write 1/2 to track the leftover:

Australia (AUS GP):

(Car 63) George Russel: George took several new parts even before Qualifying which surprised me given he had (to my knowledge) no major shunts or things that would reasonably damage components during practice:

1/2 (ES) "Energy storage"

1/2 (PU-CE) "control electronics unit"

1/5 (PU-ANC) "power unit ancillary component"

Seeing him take a full new battery along with the control unit for it (the ES and PU-CE are listed together in the FIA restricted parts list) had me surprised, because we haven't really heard anything about it? Disclaimer: it could be the case that they can repair whatever was wrong with the starting battery in the factory and then bring it back at a later date (like everyone sometimes did with power units in past years). I don't know the state of it currently. How would I know that? otherwise ... bleak stuff for those poor lithium batteries that will each have to do so many weekends?

(Car 55) Carlos Sainz: Carlos was not able to leave the garage during Qualifying and over night took new parts to be able to participate in the race. Noticably also a new battery (rip) (Edit: some parts removed because the FIA cannot format their own documents and i because their victim) Idk why or how it says it differently here. I don't make the rules. I just run the spreadsheet. He also somehow with the others gets 6 of the PU-ANC while George has 5 availlable. (See above)

1/2 (ES) "Energy Storage"

1/2 (PU-CE) "control electronics unit"

1/5 (PU-ANC) "power unit ancillary component"

(Car 18) Lance Stroll: Only one new part and it's not the battery! probably because Newey has already said that they do not have any more spares after they broke all during testing.

1/5 (PU-ANC) "power unit ancillary component"

(Car 05) Gabriel Bortoletto:

1/5 (PU-ANC) "power unit ancillary component"

(Car 12) Kimi Antonelli: You get a new PU-ANC! And YOU get a new PU-ANC! Everyone gets one! This is the only new restricted part he took and it was after Qualifying, so at least his battery is safe... for now

1/5 (PU-ANC) "power unit ancillary component"

That's it! Or at least it was before the grand prix. Given the number of cars retired or sent into the wall (sorry Oscar) i expect there to be quite a few more before the chinese grand prix, but i won't have that info until that race weekend.