@artemist omg thank you! this helped so much. this was actually the last piece of the puzzle that I needed. I was able to figure out exactly what’s going on, and I added the details to the savefile section of the PCGW article for Teleglitch if anyone is interested

@OwlValkyrieQuinn @eclairwolf you know what I’m not even going to question that he said this. Brennan Lee Mulligan is capable of anything

I keep thinking about how much of the liberatory power of the internet came pretty early on in terms of technical capacity. That's not to say nothing new has been worth it, far from, but rather that a lot of good comes right up from with "able to plug a box in somewhere in your house and make hypertext available to others."

It's part of why I find smolweb experiments so interesting, or why I format the microsites that I make using as little fancy stuff as possible. That fancy stuff is extremely worthwhile! But also, there's a lot to be explored at the smaller end, and a lot of advantages to not needing a lot off resources to make relatively simple hypertext available.

Want to do more than delete your Disney account? Delete the tracking profile they have on you.

By phone (877) 466-6669 or online.

Go ask Disney for copies of the data it has about you.

Then ask how Disney shared it.

And then tell Disney to delete it.

(You can’t do this all in one online request - that’d be too easy).

YMMV depending on where you live, but it doesn’t take much time:

https://privacy.thewaltdisneycompany.com/en/current-privacy-policy/data-subject-rights-portal/

#FireBobIger
#JimmyKimmel

hey if any Fedi beings know about Windows #ReverseEngineering I’d love some advice or help!

I’m trying to figure out how the anti-save-scumming system for a game called Teleglitch works. here’s what I’ve figured out so far:

• when you make a save, the game also secretly hides information about the save somewhere (the information seems to only consist of “the next save that the user loads should be for level XYZ” or “there should be no savefile. if there’s a savefile, it’s invalid”. all other edits to the savefile are accepted by the game as correct - including edits that instantly freeze the game)
• when you try to load the save, the game compares the secret information with the information in the savefile. if the information doesn’t match, the savefile is considered invalid and the game refuses to load it
• the savefile is stored in a Steam Cloud directory called C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\«some numbers»\«more numbers»\remote
• the secret information is definitely not stored in this directory (I made the whole thing into a git repo and used that to “rewind time” to make 100% sure)
• the secret information is also not stored in the game’s directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TeleglitchDME) (same thing - I made it into a git repo)
• I’ve checked every registry operation and every file I/O operation using Process Monitor but I’m 90% sure that Process Monitor is missing certain important things that Teleglitch is doing - maybe because it’s delegating tasks to {another process / a subprocess}? but Process Monitor can’t even see Teleglitch write to the Steam Cloud save directory mentioned above
• I tried looking through the executable in Ghidra and the savefile code is definitely in there somewhere, and I’ve been able to kinda make sense of some of it, but I’m not very good with disassembly / decompilation. I’d love some help with this if anyone is interested. it looks like it was probably written in C++ and I’ve found some very good places in the executable to start looking for savefile behavior but I’m baffled by a lot of what I’m seeing - I think a lot of it was automatically added by the C++ compiler

anyway I would love some advice on what to try next. I’ve tried to summarize just the most important parts of what I know about Teleglitch’s behavior, but I can explain more if anyone is interested!

@kasdeya i think visual clarity is becoming increasingly devalued as indie/AA studios try to make their game stand out in the sea of saturation. on one hand, i appreciate that developers are valuing the impact of player action but i think there are other ways to do it that don’t sacrifice visual clarity. techniques like hitstop, exaggerated animations, and good audio design go a really long way in this department without flooding the screen with 76 simultaneous particle emitters.

i wonder if some of it isn’t also in line with the high-adrenaline gameplay that a lot of them are going for – i find that a game can sell a really impactful action if its given time to do so. i know it’s possible to do in a fast game though – for example, the ko effect in smash ultimate: sidechaining or lowering the game volume in combination with an animation with heavy anticipation and time slow/stop on impact with a pronounced sound effect. this same technique is used for the entire match but it’s much, much subtler until the (usually) very last hit.

@tempest to be honest I’m not sure how people are able to make sense of this, but games like this are very popular so I guess people are able to

I’m wondering if it might be a neurotype thing because I have difficulty processing novel information quickly as it is, and get easily overstimulated. so maybe others whose neurotypes let them process information quickly and handle more visual information at once would find this easy to play and understand what they’re seeing. maybe that’s what the difference is between me and those who like this kind of game

it definitely makes sense, too, that familiarity would help a lot. I’m not sure if {these games are especially unreadable to me, so I don’t play them} or if {these games are especially unreadable to me because I don’t play them}. it’s probably a mix of the two

but yeah I would love if games started adding the ability to tone down the visual effects. I haven’t seen that in a game yet AFAIK but it would definitely help me try a wider range of games than what I currently play

I think a really good rule of thumb for too much juice is: pause the video at any frame and measure how long it takes for you to identify:

• where the player is
• whether or not the player is attacking
• whether or not the player is taking damage
• which threatening things (enemies, hazards, attack hitboxes, etc.) are near the player

if you can’t tell all of these things almost instantaneously then the game is too juiced

when I call a game “over-juiced” this is the type of shit that I’m talking about

no other MMO I’ve tried has even come close to capturing everything that WoW did right. I took WoW for granted for a long time but trying other MMOs like Guild Wars 2 has shown me how incredibly well-designed so many different parts of WoW are by comparison (especially the combat system and the theming of every individual ability and how they all combine together in a way that’s mechanically and thematically satisfying)

someone should force Blizzard to make WoW free for everyone so that I can play it without supporting Blizzard

(I know private servers exist and I like Tauri but it’s not the same idk)

Big Hitters that aren't Square! Pick one

If you are in the US and have a post-2010 laptop that works* but which you're not using, please DM me with some info about it. There's a trans person in my network who needs a laptop and can do their own linux install.

* Short battery life or some broken USB ports are ok. Major dead components (or no USB at all) are too complicated to sort.

Fedi bots at night